Treat Yourself
Don't delay good things for yourself, waiting until you have a body that is "more deserving." (For example, "I'll start going out with my friends when I just get some of this weight off" or "I'll buy that new dress when I lose ten pounds.") You don't need to lose weight first in order to take care of yourself! Your private body war may only serve to keep you from the activities you enjoy.

Respect Yourself
You don't have to like every part of your body to respect it. In fact, you don't have to immediately accept where your body is now to respect it. Respecting your body means treating it with dignity, making it comfortable, and meeting its basic needs. Avoid being critical of your body parts and instead appreciate their worth and function. Rather than thinking "I hate my fat thighs," tell yourself how much you value your legs for taking you where you want and need to go.

Wear What You Want
How you dress can be a step toward a newfound respect for your body. Wear the styles you like and in which you feel comfortable instead of feeling that you have to dress like everyone else or avoid certain fashions. If you'd like to dress in a tailored suit, why should you stop just because your body is not where you currently want it to be? Weight-loss programs often urge you to "get rid of your fat clothes." By following this dictum, you are setting yourself up to feel uncomfortable and more body-phobic. Instead, dress for your here-and-now body.

Cope With Your Emotions
Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.

Respect Your Body
Accept your generic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect realistically to squeeze into a size six, it is futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. Respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body shape.

Forget militant exercise.Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If your only goal is to lose weight, it's usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.

Honor Your Health-Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don't have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.

Reject the Numbers
The scale is the tool of a chronic-dieter--they get too worried about the numbers. Hanging on to a small piece of clothing and trying it on daily or weekly can equally undermine how you feel about yourself and your body. Even a slender person will feel fat in a pair of pants that fit too tightly. Don't obsess about reaching some magic number. Instead, pay attention to how your body feels when you eat and exercise for health.

Quit the Body-Check Game
The game of body-checking revolves around the theme, "How does my body compare to the rest of the crowd?" Perhaps you've played this game (and maybe are not even quite aware of it): Am I the fattest one here? Who's got the best body? How does my body rate compared to the others? This can be a dangerous game that undermines self-esteem and reduces your self-worth and the value of others.

Don't Diet for the Big Event
It's all too easy to cross over into the dieting mentality if you rationalize that the specialness of an event makes it okay to diet. The more pressure on yourself to be a certain body size, the more you are bound to create problems. How much time and energy have you spent getting your body ready for the big event? What if that energy was directed on recognizing your inner qualities, such as wit, intelligence, or listening ability?

Stop Body-Bashing
You may be surprised at how often you degrade your body in one day. Or how often you spend bonding time with your friends bashing your bodies. Try keeping count for a day or even a few hours. Instead of focusing on what you don't like about your body, find parts of your body that you like or at least tolerate. Every time you catch a maligning body thought, disarm it. Replace it with a kind body statement that you believe.

"CALL A TRUCE!" Respect Body Diversity
It's ironic that we are celebrating cultural diversity, but as a culture we still have trouble with the idea of body diversity. We come in all shapes and sizes, yet we somehow expect that we should all be one size fits all, as long as it's thin. As long as we fall into this cultural stigma, it will be a long time before societal norms will change into a healthy acceptance of body diversity.

Be Realistic
If maintaining or obtaining your weight requires living on rice cakes and water while exercising for hours, that's a glaring clue that your goal is not realistic. If your parents are heavy, chances are you will never be model-thin. Remember genetics is a strong determinant of body size.

Follow the Lead
The makers of the 1990 U.S. Dietary Goals got rid of an important word when recommending body weights for Americans: ideal. No one knows exactly what that number is! Strive for your natural healthy weight.

Make Peace With Food
Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to overwhelming guilt, intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, binging.