Tomorrow is the one year publication date of Ravenous. It’s been quite a year.

I spoke at bookstores and conferences about my own struggle to make sense of my relationship with food and my body. I received emails from people near and far who shared their own food stories and thanked me for sharing mine. And what I learned is this: there is almost no part of our lives that food doesn’t touch. We eat to survive, of course, and it’s troubling and sad that many people don’t have enough to do that. But for the lucky that do, our food contains stories– of who we are, who we wish we were, and who we hope to become. What we eat tells us where we came from, where we are, and where we hope to go. These stories connect us to ourselves, to our family, to our friends, to our community and the world.

I had hoped that by writing Ravenous, I would figure out a way to eat that keeps my weight sane and offers me more ease in my body. Lord be praised I have! But I did not expect that by writing Ravenous, I would become less hungry in other areas of my life. I don’t need as much stuff as I use to, or as much praise as I once sought. Things I thought I wanted (oh you know, you can never be too rich, too famous, or too thin), turns out I don’t. Not really anyway. Not where it counts.

Through writing my story, through creating something which for me is valuable, real and true, I have finally been able to shake the quiet desperation that ran through much of my life. Maybe I don’t need to endlessly strive for the next big thing, because life is good, here and now. I will continue to do my work, at home and in the world. And life will continue to unfold, I bet, in unexpected ways. And for that, and so much more, I am grateful.

Here’s my most recent blog post for Sparkpeople.

If you had asked me a few years ago if I could ever manage to eat a few almonds or a few olives or a few pieces of chocolate and not attack the whole can/jar/bar, I would have said, “unlikely.” I now know, after a lot of practice, it’s possible. Know thyself, and know that thyself can change over time.

And speaking of Spark People, they have a fine new cookbook out, Sparkpeople Cookbook (full disclosure, Hay House, who is also my publisher, sent me a copy). The recipes are simple, and offer a healthy approach to cooking — up the vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins, while lowering the sugar and saturated fat. It’s smart about substitutions without sacrificing flavor. And for those who calculate such things, every recipe ends with a nutritional analysis.

Every week for the past 15 plus years, I get a box of beautiful, buoyant produce from Full Belly Farm. And every week I read their newsletter, The Full Belly Beet.

The other week contained a missive from Ingrid, one of their interns. She talks about how she decided to become a farmer when she realized that she wanted to spend every possible moment of her life outdoors, “…to be physically connected to the ground, to not miss a moment of the shifting moods of the sky…” What she has found at Full Belly was the deep contentment that comes from another productive day, working the land. “I do not need to understand or possess the things that I love about life, only to stop and appreciate them.”

Amen to that. I realize I want to possess thing that I buy, but I cannot posses the things that I need — fresh air, clean water, good earth to grow good food. This Thanksgiving, I will be serving my family foods from the farm, including my favorite dark orange sweet potatoes. May your bellies be filled with good food this Thanksgiving, and your hearts filled with gratitude for the bounty of our world.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, here’s my latest Huffington Post blog:

Gratitude can’t be overrated. For whatever we can honestly bitch about in our lives, most of us have it pretty good. That turkey or tofu you’re eating this Thanksgiving? Check. That warm bed you sleep in at night? Double check.

In a week, I’ll be sitting around our dining room table with my extended family, each of whom I’ve bitched about on more than one occasion. But I’m also grateful to all of them, because they have taught me more than they will ever know. Though I may never have said some of these things to them directly, this year, what I’m really grateful for is that my mother and I have both lived long enough to forgive each other; that my husband’s first instinct, after 21 years, is to treat me with kindness; that my in-laws generosity has changed our lives; and that my sons are almost taller than me.

This year, maybe I’ll say some of these things out loud.

Halloween is my favorite holiday — the time when the veils between the worlds thin. Or maybe it’s the crisp air, fallen leaves, pumpkins, and the quieting of nature as it prepares to rest.

Halloween in Berkeley is its own thing. For example:

…or…

Here’s my dog Nico ready for trick or treat….

…and here’s my favorite pumpkin of the night…

I’ll be reading from “Ravenous” on Sunday, November 13th, 2:00 pm at Congregation Beth El in Berkeley, CA as a fundraiser for the local Hadassah chapter. I think I’ll read from my chapter on Jewish food (and skip the chapter on sausage).

My first blog for the Huffington Post was posted today!

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We all know how to lose weight, right? A million roads lead to Oz, so just take your pick: the gluten-free diet; the sugar-free diet; the no-processed food diet; the high-protein/low-carb diet; the vegan diet and so on. I tried a few, lost weight, then gained it back plus a few, until one day, despite doing a lot of yoga and being a food writer who thought she knew better, I found myself closing in on 200 pounds.

I felt awful. No only did I not like what I saw in the mirror, but I was finding it hard to move through my life. My joints hurt, my cholesterol and blood pressure were high, and I found myself out of breath when I exercised. I even started to slack off my yoga practice because it was becoming too hard. But I still dragged myself to my yoga mat, because yoga is what I do. And no matter how I felt when I started my practice, I always felt better at the end.

It was on my yoga mat early one morning thatI had my epiphany. As I was sitting in lotus pose, I remembered that when I began my yoga practice 20 years ago, I didn’t just plop down into it — I had to work my way up to it I had to practice it. Why would my relationship with food be any different? And if food could be my practice, what would it look like?

My problem has always been portion control. I had no clue how much I really ate. So I began a food practice of measuring my portions and writing them down. This was my first step towards what I call clear seeing — of taking food out of the realm of wishful thinking or wish fulfillment or any of the other emotional sleights of hand I do around food and seeing exactly how much I was eating.

Measuring food and keeping a log is not a new concept — except I never called it a diet; I called it a practice. Words have power, and that change in words changed my life. If I wasn’t on a diet, then I couldn’t fall off my diet. If I wasn’t on a diet, there was no right way and wrong way of doing things. And I wasn’t “bad” if I didn’t perfectly follow some protocol.

I became a kind of mind/body detective, sniffing out clues to what helped me walk my path and what threw me off. I learned through trial and error, for example, that I need to eat protein for breakfast. If I don’t, I eat again mid-morning — and it’s usually something with sugar that throws me off for the rest of the day. I learned that leafy greens make my body insanely happy, and that I binge on milk chocolate but not on dark chocolate. I discovered this through exploration, not because an expert told me something was true. In yoga, a teacher can tell you all she wants, but until you experience it in your own body, it’s not your own truth. Food as practice gave me the space to discover my own truths. That insight started me on my road to losing 30 pounds, 3 sizes, and keeping it off for now almost two years.

Here are a few more truths I discovered that I describe in more detail in my book “Ravenous: A Food Lover’s Journey from Obsession to Freedom.”

Awareness is different from vigilance. Food is not the enemy. Some foods (whole and non-processed) are healthier and more vital than others, and I feel better eating them, but I learned this from experience which in turn led to a deeper awareness of what foods and quantities work for me. Awareness is a softer and more forgiving state than vigilance, and it opens up a greater space for lasting change.

Kindness trumps contempt. My body, no matter what I weighed throughout my life, has taken me through my life. It birthed my children, it cooks the food we eat, and it has walked up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and down the Champs Elysee. My body has been a good and true companion to my journey. All our bodies are miracles and they deserve gratitude and respect.

Take the long view. During the course of losing three sizes, I overate on more than one, or two, or ten occasions. The thing is, I didn’t let these occasional forays derail me. I didn’t create a story around them, and tell myself I was a bad person because I ate more than was good for me. Instead, I told myself to keep calm and carry on. This commitment to the long view keeps me on my path.

Let go of pictures of perfection. Who are you comparing your attractiveness to? Actresses with eating disorders whose job it is to work out five hours a day because they have to be skinny to get work? I lost three sizes and I wear a size 12. I look good, definitely not perfect, and good is good enough.

Weight loss is a journey, not a battle. It’s hard to wake up everyday and fight. Life is hard enough. Letting go of the battle does not mean you are giving up. Letting go of the battle means you are an explorer, not a soldier — and what you are exploring is who you are in relationship with food. That includes the what, when, how much, and why of food. What is good for me to eat? How much is good? Why am I eating this now? As an explorer of food, you are giving yourself the opportunity to know yourself better and to create a roadmap to greater health, happiness, and self-knowledge. It’s worth it – because after all, life is not a dress rehearsal.

Dayna Macy is the managing editor of international editions at Yoga Journal, and the author of Ravenous: A Food Lover’s Journey from Obsession to Freedom. www.daynamacy.com

“Remembering That You Are Going To Die Is The Best Way I Know To Avoid The Trap Of Thinking You Have Something To Lose” — Steve Jobs

I was speaking with a friend who is a behavioral therapist about stuff. “I think I hoard bags and shoes,” I told him. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Let me tell you a story.”

He tells me that he was treating a patient for hoarding, which is on the OCD spectrum, and, which sometimes is also paired with with agoraphobia. He had to climb over boxes and bags filled floor to ceiling to get into the house. There was literally no room anywhere. No place to sit. No place to really live.

I had this image of a person living in a stale, stagnant room with stuck energy. A life frozen in time. A fearful life.

Stuff can own us. Not only having it, but continuing to devote immense hard work it takes to keep acquiring it. One thing I’m learning from shopping in my closet is to enjoy what I have, and by doing so, I’m also respecting the time, energy, and hard work it took to buy it. Time is precious. And, in this lifetime, finite.

So at the end of week #1 of the clothes challenge, here’s what I realize. With clothes, as with life, there’s no end to wanting more until you realize just how much you already have. The value of going through my closet, recombining things, playing with color, texture, and proportion feeds my sense of creativity and play. Very important! But mostly, I realize just how much I have and what a lucky girl I am. And when I realize this, I am, for a moment anyway, satisfied.

For those of us who actually do have enough, if we took the time to see it and recognize it, and lived our lives knowing it, if we weren’t always scrambling on to the next new thing, we’d be able to take a deep breath. And so would the planet.