What’s nutrition got to do with body image?
Hey there,
Have you ever thought to yourself:
“I’ll work on my body image once I’m in a body I like or once I lose the weight?”
How have those weight loss interventions worked for you in the long term? Did they work the first time or did you end up trying a few as I have?
The problem with waiting until your body changes to start working on body image is that if you’re like most people, dieting has only become an endless cycle of unintentional abuse perpetrated by that self-proclaimed ‘bad’ body that we keep putting off feeling better about.
I’ve been helping people to have a healthier relationship with food for years now through The Empowered Eating Course and coaching. Almost everyone who does the course experiences a sense of radical compassion for the first time in their lives and because of this, they begin to feel in charge of their eating. For many of them, the simple tips and ideas in the course are enough to set them on a path of healthy eating and living without diets.
Occasionally they may get tempted back into diet culture, perhaps the cycle starts to rev up again from the sidelines. In each and every one of these cases, it’s fair to say the reason they get lured back in starts with feeling bad about their body. Every single diet you’ve likely done has also began with some negative thoughts about your body. Am I wrong?
We look in the mirror, or compare ourselves to someone else, or pass by a particularly precise store window or maybe we can pinch a little bit more of our body than we used to. Or, maybe some cellulite is starting to smile at us or someone makes an unsolicited comment about our body… the list goes on.
THIS IS SO INCREDIBLY TRIGGERING, SO INCREDIBLY TRAUMATIC for anyone who has experienced it over and over again for their entire lives.
It’s no wonder that those empty promises that diets are shouting at us start to lure us back in.
My courses give you the tips to see this for what it is, and supports you when your thoughts turn against you but I realised that some of us need to go back to the beginning. Back to our bodies.
That’s why I’ve decided the work needs to start by turning a perceived ‘bad body’ into a ‘good body’. Because if we can keep working on that (it will always be fluid) we can begin to flip the bird to health compromising diet plans that only bring us back to where we started in the first place.
· It’s negative thoughts about your body that are causing the binge-restrict -repeat cycle to happen over and over again.
· It’s negative thoughts about your body that cause you to crave certain foods and feel addicted to them.
· It’s negative thoughts about your body that causes you to ‘give up’ on healthy habits especially when scale doesn’t tell you what you want it to.
· It’s negative beliefs about our body that cause us to remain in a perpetual cycle of dieting and body shame.
And so body image and nutrition are not separate from each other. If you want to improve our health you need to at the least acknowledge this and better yet, begin to put some work into appreciating your body as it is today not as you dream it will be.
It’s really hard to take care of a body long term when we don’t even like that body to begin with.
What if we could begin to look at our bodies as our friends, family and children in our lives do?
At the Empowered Eating Centre, we’re trying to help each other feel a little less awful about our bodies so we can be a little more kind to them.
I’d love to offer you this free journal I’ve created to get you started. This journal will help you to begin to reflect on your thoughts about your body and plant some new thoughts that will begin to grow.
I’m also going to be launching my newest course Brave Bodies in just a few months. In the meantime, I’m looking for Beta Testers to do the programme and provide feedback. To say thank you – you can do the course for 50% off the regular price, but there are a limited number of spots available.
Learn more by clicking on the image below.
xx Michelle