About Laura Fenamore

How Laura Came to Create OnePinky

Laura Fenamore walked the path that may have brought you yourself to this Web site.

Laura was 100 pounds overweight. Laura drank too much. She was bulimic. She smoked. She tried different diets without success. Laura ate out of garbage cans. She believed that she would live her life addicted to food and unhappy until she died.

After years of pain, unhappiness and therapy, the unconditional love of a guardian angel brought her to a realization: All those dysfunctional behaviors sprang from a feeling that she was unloved. Most importantly, she realized she didn’t love herself. Laura flipped an internal switch. She began down the path to love of self. Her heart opened. She let go of the self-destructive forces that made her hate what she saw in the mirror. She changed her behaviors and attained a healthy weight. She has maintained that healthy weight — and a healthy body image — for 24 years.

Laura had to let go and release in order to become whole again. No longer fragmented, she now shares the knowledge she gained with the OnePinky community. Laura helps women attain healthy weight through healthy body image.

Laura’s Story

I became a leader in the transformational movement because I believe that anything is possible. I believe that no matter how trapped or powerless people might feel, it is the things that they do that will set them free. I believe that each of us can have a radical life shift every single day.

My own radical shift began when I came to understand that the only person who could truly love me was me. Although I was neglected and abused as a child, I saw clearly that I could use the rest of my life to love and take care of myself and to inspire others to do the same.

I am not saying that other people cannot love us; they often do. I am simply observing that a person without self-love is like a hidden treasure. You cannot see or feel the miracle that you are, even when others adore you and want the best for you. Without self-love, who you are is locked away in some tower or buried under years of pain and self-loathing.

Many of us know the anguish of being overweight, trapped by eating disorders or yo-yo dieting — feeling powerless over the body we live inside and even hating ourselves. I totally understand this pain. When I was in the fourth grade, my mother took me to an obesity clinic at a local hospital. Imagine being nine years old and led into a hospital (pretty scary under any circumstances) because something is very wrong with you.

I am the youngest of eight children. It is clear to me today that I felt unsafe from the moment I was born. My childhood was wrought with abuse and fear.

I started overeating right out of the womb, and I ate because I was afraid to be alive. I felt that no one loved me and that I was not worthy of love. At age 11, when I finally started to get help, I would beg my therapist to help me control my overeating. I can still hear myself, pleading with various professionals, ‘Please help me turn off the switch in my brain that causes me to binge’. Little did I know that what I needed was something to be turned ON, not off. I needed to turn on the self-love switch. It would ‘turn off’ the myriad of voices chorusing every day that I was unlovable.

The radical shift I experienced is available to anyone. When I tell my story to others, I share it with one goal in mind: that people will hear it and use it to start their own radical shift, that they will start to repair some wounded part of themselves. To this day, when people ask me how I lost all those pounds and kept them off forever, my answer is simple. I tell them that I learned to love myself, and self-love goes a long way.