Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.
The dictionary definition for respect includes words like honor, regard, admiration, reverence, esteem, politeness, courtesy, civility, deference, and dignity. Sadly, we rarely hear people describe their bodies in this manner. We live in a culture of body bashing and body shame, thanks to the proliferation of crash-diet programs, social media, and abusive television shows bullying people under the guise of health. As if the human body can be sculpted at will and into a different shape or size!
It’s all too common for the chronic dieter to have disdain for his or her current body. But it is important to remember that this body is your home for the rest of your life; it can move you from place to place, can comfort a loved one with a hug, and can give pleasure. Often, it can birth a child and can carry and care for that child.
Respecting your body means treating it with dignity and kindness, as well as meeting its basic needs. In this chapter, you will do exercises that will help you learn to
Each of us is born with a genetic blueprint that determines our potential height, weight, and health, as well as a myriad of other details, from foot length to eye color. When you are attuned to your hunger and fullness signals and maintain regular movement and activity, you will be able to maintain and preserve the greater potential of your body. We know, however, that environmental factors can influence our ability to reach this potential or can actually destroy it. Starvation in early childhood can permanently affect bone and tooth growth; malnutrition can damage all organs and increase the risk of infection, communicable disease, and even death.
Most cases of starvation and malnutrition are caused by poverty, war, and abuse, but their damaging results can also be brought on by one’s attempt to fool Mother Nature. The power of culture can also wreak havoc on logic. In Chinese history, we know that the cultural ideal of women having small feet caused many to allow their daughters’ feet to be bound at a young age in order to force the feet to develop into a deformed—but very small—shape, essentially crippling them. In that era, people believed that a woman needed to have small feet in order to have status and marry into the right family. In our modern world, we live with a culturally thin ideal. Whether it comes from images in the media, the fashion and beauty industry, or family pressure, we see the relentless drive to lose weight, to change how the body looks, and to create an image that is impossible to attain or maintain. Combine these cultural issues with the purported health implications of obesity, and you get a perfect storm for body dissatisfaction.
One can lose weight rapidly (and dangerously) through an eating disorder like anorexia, which, if not treated, will cause health consequences similar to those of outright starvation. One can temporarily lose weight through dieting. But as has been described a number of times through this workbook, diets simply don’t work. Even worse, dieting promotes weight gain beyond pre-diet weight; this has been demonstrated in children, teens, and adults. And, yet, people continually try to fool Mother Nature, believing that they can achieve and keep their fantasy body.
The first step in respecting your body is to accept that your body is destined to maintain its genetic blueprint. The few who give up on dieting fairly soon after they begin this futile behavior may be fortunate enough to have a resilient body that returns to its initial blueprint. The majority of dieters, however, attempt one diet after another throughout life, risking a slowed metabolism, an increased fat-to-muscle ratio, and a weight that doesn’t resemble that which was originally programmed for their body. How often do we hear people say, “I just looked at a picture of myself in my teens [or twenties or even fifties], when I hated my body! I would give anything to have that body back now!”
Stop the madness; stop trying to fool Mother Nature! Surrender to the body you were meant to have. Treat it with love, respect, self-care, healthful living, and joy. The freedom you will achieve as a result will allow you to place your focus on life goals that are truly achievable and maintainable.
Unfortunately, many worthy, interesting, kind, and beautiful people hold such negative views about their bodies that they fail to see everything else about them that is positive.
What negative views do you hold about your body?
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Imagine what your life would be like if you gave up negative views about your body and the notion of attempting to change it. What would the freedom from worries about your body feel like? What new changes could take place in your life?
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What feelings emerge as you work toward dropping your negative body image and accepting Mother Nature’s blueprint for your body?
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Even if you are not fully ready to accept your body’s genetic blueprint, and even if you don’t like your body, you can still cultivate habits that are kind and respectful toward it.
A study on the effects of gratitude on physical and psychological well-being concluded that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits, especially positive mood (Emmons and McCullough 2003). In another study (Wood et al. 2008), researchers found that gratitude protected people from stress and depression.
For those who have shown little respect for their bodies for many years, the idea of showing gratitude for a body that they deem to be inferior may sound ludicrous. Yet, if gratitude can be approached with an open mind, most people can find something about their body that they appreciate:
What can your body accomplish? Do you feel gratitude for these abilities?
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The concept of self-care is a thread that runs through many of the Intuitive Eating principles. You can show respect by routinely caring for your body in simple and straightforward ways:
If you don’t practice some of those basic elements of self-care consistently—or at all—choose one of those that you need to improve on and practice it for a week. After you consistently improve in one area, add another one, until you’ve adopted or improved on most of them.
How often are you willing to commit to it?
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One of the most immediate ways to show respect to your body is to stop weighing yourself. Stepping on the scale has the power to ruin your day—or give you a temporary high, which is quickly deflated. The scale is a meaningless measure of what is truly important—eating foods that are satisfying, honoring your hunger, and consistently stopping when you’re comfortably full. The number that appears on the scale may bring you back to the worship of thinness and the delusion that you can actually permanently change your size, with all the fantasies of the life that will magically arrive with a lowered weight. It completely disconnects you from the important and real and meaningful aspects of your life. The following practice can help to release you from the tyranny of weighing yourself.
Begin by visualizing the last time you got on the scale.
If you feel an urge to get on the scale this week after completing this exercise, continue to go through the steps above in order to become aware of the negative impact that weighing yourself creates. Remember to check in with your thoughts and feelings as you continue this practice. If you do weigh yourself, try answering the following questions afterward.
Many people experience both exhilaration and dread when they contemplate and ultimately follow through with the task of throwing out the scale. This proactive act asserts your commitment to taking your focus off weight and putting it on attunement to the signals from your inner body wisdom. It may feel scary at first, but it will ultimately feel liberating.
Another assertive action you can take is to decline to be weighed at your doctor’s office. Unfortunately, many people avoid doctor visits, even when sick, because of their anxiety about being weighed. They fear their doctor’s judgment, as well as their own. You have a right to speak up and refuse to get on the scale. There are very few circumstances in which your actual weight can make a difference in a health assessment. Those might include pregnancy, the calculation for certain medications, and congestive heart failure. In those instances, it is helpful to speak with your doctor about your feelings in order to elicit support. Under those circumstances, you can request not to be shown the number on the scale.
Congratulations, if you have made peace with removing the scale from your life! This is the first step in changing negative self-assessment habits. Remember, respecting your body means treating it with loving care, independent of your size or weight. Unfortunately, people often continue checking their bodies in other ways in order to measure if they’re “good enough”:
Some people, for example, keep a pair of pants in the closet that are pulled out to “measure” if weight has changed. If the pants are tighter, it can engender the same negative feelings that they would experience if they saw the number on the scale go up. You can combat this kind of measuring by wearing different clothes each day, so that you don’t create a muscle memory of how any particular pair of pants feels.
Some people check out mirrors in elevators, dressing rooms, and gyms, and just about anywhere else a mirror can be found. This mirror checking only perpetuates the judgment people hold about how they measure up to the illusion of a perfect ideal body. Remember the fun-house mirrors you laughed at when you were a kid? Most mirrors aren’t quite that distorted, but they certainly don’t give you an accurate view of yourself. Putting that much attention on your appearance only skews your broader sense of your self and the whole spectrum of your attributes.
Another healing experience is to box up the clothes that are associated with dieting and that no longer fit. If you’re not ready to throw them out or give them away (especially if they have sentimental value), you can put the box in the back of your closet or in the garage. Later, when you feel ready, you can get rid of them. Since you bought the clothes when you were trying to lose weight, they will likely not fit your normal body size, which is maintained through eating intuitively and healthy activity. Remember, part of your commitment to this process is to rid yourself of the diet mentality. Holding on to these clothes keeps you stuck in the fantasy that comes with every new diet. Letting go of these clothes will be liberating. When you open your closet door, you won’t feel that pang of despair that you feel when you see clothes there that you know don’t fit.
The flip side of throwing out your old diet-tainted clothes is to keep, wear, and occasionally buy only clothes that fit well and are flattering. Wearing clothes that are too tight only makes you uncomfortable and doesn’t show respect to your body. This goes for underwear as well. Tight underwear may feel as if you’re wearing a straightjacket. Tight clothing makes you feel closed in and trapped, and sometimes you can’t even take a deep breath.
Evaluate your wardrobe. Are there clothes that need to go? Are there clothes that don’t feel flattering? Respect your body by taking this inventory of your closet and taking the actions you need to restore joy in your clothing.
The following exercise you may want to do while standing in front of or in your closet. Write about the clothes in your closet and what actions you need to take.
Begin by packing away any clothing
After cleaning out your closet, how do you feel?
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Now that you have removed your uncomfortable clothing from your closet, it may be time to buy some new clothes. There are some steps that will help make this experience a success:
The point is to buy clothes based on how they feel. If they fit well, you won’t go around tugging at yourself and feeling uncomfortable with something you think looks good but doesn’t feel good.
A powerful sign of self-esteem is the ability to maintain an autonomous sense of one’s self-worth. Appreciate the myriad of values that are truly yours—the gifts with which you were born. Practicing and refining your talents, and acknowledging the work you have already done to learn and grow, all show a sense of self-respect. Comparing yourself to others leads to unnecessary suffering, which engenders feelings of superiority or envy. Rather than comparing, start appreciating your unique qualities that have nothing to do with appearance!
List some aspects about yourself that you particularly appreciate. Reflect on traits, characteristics, and values that you possess that have nothing to do with your body or appearance. They could include personal gifts, such as your intelligence or ability to sing or dance; things that you’ve worked hard to achieve, like your academic or professional career; or other things, like your friendships and family life:
Without rushing, write down as many qualities as come to you:
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Many people shy away from appreciating the personal gifts that are truly theirs—the many qualities and attributes that make them unique—and yet they tend to regularly compare themselves with others to see how they measure up. Did Sarah get a better score on the test or the term paper than I did? At the office, will I get a raise or a promotion before Michael does? Am I being asked out on as many dates as my best friends are? Am I publishing as many research studies or books as my peers? It goes on and on.
The problem of comparing yourself to your friends and peers extends to the focus on the body. Who has the best hair, the smoothest skin, the strongest muscles, the longest legs, or the smallest waist? We make these judgments about our bodies by regularly checking out friends, relatives, actors, models, and just about anyone you see on the street. This attention on others is the surest way to remove you from your own special qualities. It also keeps the focus on the external, and pulls you away from your true meaning in life.
Observing another’s body also makes an assumption about how that person achieved that body. If one is looking at thinness, there’s no way to know if that person has a physical disease that causes weight loss, has an eating disorder, or simply has a hyper-fast metabolism. Concluding that you could achieve that same body precludes these unknowns, as well as the science of your genetic blueprint. All in all, comparing yourself to others is the surest way of making you feel bad about yourself!
The following is designed to help you become aware of your habit of comparison.
This practice acknowledges that you might be feeling truly uncomfortable in your physical body. But rather than staying stuck in this sensation or identity, it’s important to remind yourself of some of your other qualities that you value that have nothing to do with appearance.
Now it’s your turn. Create a statement that you could say to yourself when you are having a rough time in your body.
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Envy is a normal human emotion. It arises when you see someone who has something that you perceive you don’t have. You believe that if you had it, your life would be much better. It’s likely one of the most difficult emotions to bear. Often when people choose to compare themselves with others, they do this in the hope of finding something they can criticize in the other person. This gives them a temporary sense of superiority as they put the other person down, while elevating themselves in comparison. Thus, the feeling of envy is momentarily avoided. Paradoxically, a switch quickly happens, and they begin to focus on some quality that the other person has that they covet. Envy immediately emerges, and it’s likely that they feel even worse despair when they conclude that the other person is actually “better” than they are or has more than they do.
For this practice, first focus on your feelings of envy. How often do you feel envy of aspects of others’ lives or their bodies? Frequently? Sometimes? Rarely?
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When you feel that envy, are you able to sit with it? Or do you try to find a way in which you believe you are better than the other person? Notice how this makes you feel.
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How quickly does this sense of being better than the other person shift back to a feeling of not being good enough? Do you then feel a desire to perfect yourself?
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Regardless of how you feel, remind yourself that envy is a normal emotion. When you become comfortable accepting this feeling, your desire to act out against it—by putting someone else down in order to bring yourself up—will diminish. You won’t get the immediate rush of superior feelings that emerge, but you’ll avoid the potential to crash afterward. Again, direct yourself to feelings of gratitude for your own personal gifts and values.
One of the most disrespectful behaviors in which you can engage is negative body talk or body bashing. It is painful and sad to hear someone tearing down her or his looks, physique, weight, size, or height. People who would never say anything nasty to a child or a friend or acquaintance—even someone who is not close to you—will say horrific things to themselves. (Side note—we have heard some frightening tales of clients who been degraded, criticized, and judged by their parents, siblings, or partners. These are instances of emotional abuse and need to be addressed with a trauma therapist.)
This practice will help you to recognize, acknowledge, and put a stop to your self-abusive, body-bashing comments.
In the lines below, practice narrating your surroundings in this manner, and if negative thoughts creep in, acknowledge them and move on.
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By using this practice, you are training your mind to focus on things other than your negative thoughts. With time, you will be able to simply stop your critical thoughts, without narrating your surroundings. At this point in your struggle with self-criticism, the narration serves as training wheels, helping your mind refocus. Eventually, you won’t need it.
This week, practice this technique for a few minutes a day when you don’t need it. It will help give you a good foundation, and you will notice that even when there is no emotional charge, the mind tends to wander. You can narrate while you are driving, riding a bus, waiting for an appointment—anything. When you discover that you have become distracted, acknowledge the distraction and gently continue to narrate. The key here is to practice. It doesn’t matter how often your mind wanders—the main point of the exercise is learning to notice your wandering thoughts and then refocusing the mind.
Write about this experience with this exercise this week. How often did you need to redirect your thoughts? Did you have any body-bashing thoughts? If you did, how did you feel each time you had one of those negative thoughts? How did you feel when you redirected your thoughts away from that self-criticism and returned to simply narrating the environment?
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How often do you find yourself at a party or with a group of friends and the conversation turns to dieting and fat talk? We live in a society that seems obsessed with these discussions, regardless of age, education, or profession. It is pervasive. Unlike polite banter about the weather, these conversations are harmful, because they reinforce weight stigma and body shame. Speaking up in these situations requires bravery. It suggests that you are someone who knows that a person’s worth is attached to purpose, kindness to others, and deep values—rather than the size or shape of the person’s body. There are many ways to navigate these conversations, depending on your comfort level, ranging from simply not engaging in the talk to asserting yourself or changing the conversation.
For the following practice, pick a time when you’re going to be with several people. Review the possible responses and have some ideas in mind of what you might say if someone starts talking about the latest diet or says something derisive about her body or judgmental about someone else’s body. If such a conversation did come up, how did you handle this situation? What did you say to divert the talk or to address it directly? How did you feel during the conversation and afterward?
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If others weren’t receptive to what you said, how can you strategize to make your point the next time this happens? (This may include accepting that some people might not see your point of view and deciding how you want to invest your emotional energy).
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By taking action to stop fat talk and diet talk, you are raising the consciousness of those who don’t realize the damage that is being done by their conversation. One person can begin to change the world. Be proud that you are part of that effort!
Research on body image has historically focused on its negative aspects, such as body shame and dissatisfaction. Fortunately, new studies are exploring the benefits of appreciating your body. Tylka and Wood-Barcalow (2015) developed the Body Appreciation Scale, which defines and validates three key traits of body appreciation:
Here is a simplified version of their updated Body Appreciation Scale. It provides a valid measure of one’s body appreciation and positive body image. Write yes or a no next to each statement to see how far you have come in respecting your body.
After assessing these statements, reflect on how many yes responses you made. The more yeses indicate you are making good progress with body appreciation.
If you score only a 1 or 2, remember not to judge yourself. You’re on a journey that will help you to have positive thoughts about your body. If you’re in a middle range, a 6 or a 7, you’ve done quite a bit of work. As in other areas of achievement, strive not to look for perfection, simply increased appreciation for your body.
What do you need in order to respect, accept, and love the body you have?
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Are you ready to give up the fantasy that you can alter your body to match some unrealistic image? If you are, list the ways that you plan to show yourself that you are sincere in your commitment. There are many ways to do this:
If you do not feel ready to let go of the fantasy, contemplate what you might need in order to do so.
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Please list as many positive behaviors (including positive self-talk about your body) that you are willing to implement:
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It would be helpful to use the statements in the Body Appreciation Scale weekly over the next few months to assess how you are doing. (You can download a handout of the Body Appreciation Scale from the website for this book.) Note how your body appreciation increases over time. Notice whether practicing other exercises in this workbook influences your appreciation of your body.
We all come in different sizes and shapes. Our culture accepts foot size and doesn’t try to alter it. The same attitude should apply to our bodies. Your path involves acceptance of your size and respect of your body. When you can truly surrender to the reality that no diet, no food restrictions, and no exercise regimen will permanently change your genetically determined size (other than, of course, in a damaging way), you are on your way to truly being kind to your body, treating it with dignity, and, yes, even loving your body. Love it for what it can do for you. Love it by taking good care of it—it has done so much for you. Love it by presenting yourself in ways that appreciate your own personal aesthetic.
The next chapter will examine your relationship with movement and physical activity, while addressing any resistance you may hold toward exercise.