I suggest they skip the middle-man and just feel better. When you believe your emotional happiness is depend- ent on how others act, you will constantly try to control how they act and what they say and what kind of grade they get and how often they praise you. As many of you know, this can be quite exhausting. IT NEVER WORKS. No one can make you feel anything. You can have the best looking life in the world and still feel awful. You can be at your goal weight and still feel fat. It is not the circumstance or the person that you need to control. It is what you believe about yourself and what you believe about the events that you need to control. Everything you need for your own happiness is within you now at this very moment. You don’t have to do anything but control your own belief systems to feel good right this minute. In fact, if you truly believed you were happy, you would be. Even if your husband didn’t tell you how fabulous you are. The truth is that neediness is not fun. If you “need” your husband to tell you how attractive you are, it makes you less so. If I tell my husband I need him to call twice a day it makes him less likely to do it out of love. If I tell my husband he has to buy me a romantic gift so I can feel good, he feels resentful not romantic. We can actually deter the exact thing we most desire. When people genuinely love themselves, they do not 134 • If IAm So Smart, Why Can’t I Lose Weight?