This photo was taken Dec. 29, 2008. I’m smiling through the delusion that wearing all black will make me look smaller. Some people think I posed here as an intentional ‘before’ shot. I did not. Jan. 1 may have been hours away, but I had no plans to jump on the resolution bandwagon. I gave that up decades ago after regaining, for the second time, 100 pounds that had been shed through dieting. I finally realized that sheer white-knuckle willpower can only take me so far. Instead, I embarked on a 20-year radical course of self-acceptance. It was exactly what I needed to do and I would not trade it for anything. Because all the skinny in the world won’t help if you don’t feel good about yourself from the inside out. You may think dropping weight or changing your hair color or getting a few lines lifted is the door you need to walk through to feel on top of the world once and for all but it’s not. I was battered physically and emotionally from losing and regaining weight, so I stopped. And besides, I loved food too much. So I ate what I wanted and began the process of accepting myself no matter what I looked like.

Your course of self-acceptance doesn’t have to take 20 years, but you do have to start where you are. The important thing is that you begin, with whatever amount of willingness or ability you have. And it doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. I faked it at first. So cliché, but I had to fake feeling OK with myself until one day I actually did. It really is that simple. Period. What’s the alternative? To buy into society’s message that I’ll never be worthy until I reach a certain single-digit size at Victoria’s Secret? Becoming OK with yourself no matter what the scale says is both empowering and healing, and will lay the silent foundation of making better food choices naturally, not from stern and rigid discipline.

What I’m saying is…the turnaround came on Jan. 5, 2009, but seeing Carnie Wilson on Oprah in and of itself wasn’t enough to cause a cataclysmic shift. I had unwittingly made myself ready for the potential that lay ahead, paved the way with lots of inner work and soul-searching.