“If diets work for you, why do you keep going on them?”
If you are considering making 2019 diet free, let’s gather important intel to help you get through January aka The National Dieting Holiday.
When was your first diet?
Do you remember how you got the idea to start eating less, focus on weight loss, and exercise more?
Did someone say your thighs were getting too big?
Were you teased on the playground as the fat classmate?
Did the pediatrician tell your parents to stop giving you seconds?
When were you taught how to hate your body?
How long have you considered your body unacceptable?
Appreciating how body hate and rigid dieting started will help you begin your journey toward Food Peace. This first part of your healing will feel emotional and challenging yet I encourage you to stick with it. I see how the diet industry and health care providers have pushed you to lose weight and with each diet ending you felt (and feel) like a failure. This cycle is not your fault because you were given faulty tools. And these tools hurt your body and the way you relate to it.
In order to heal, take a step back and acknowledge these faulty tools. Consider how they were not respecting your body. Instead of dieting in 2019, I encourage you turn your focus to body respect.
What is body respect?
Popular social media memes tell you to love and accept your body. Most people I work with say they cannot love their body because it is unacceptable. Caring health care providers, parents, and friends have ingrained the idea that fat is unhealthy. Schoolyard bullies taught you your body deserves to be mocked and ugly. Insurance companies and employers blame you for increasing health care costs.
Every aspect of your existence has taught you your body needs to be fixed. The message has been clear: the only way to be acceptable is to eat less and exercise more. And you have spent your whole life trying and failing and trying and failing.
Body respect challenges these messages.
Your body is not unacceptable, ugly, or unworthy. Your body does not need to be fixed.
The messages are wrong not your body. It is time for you to know the truth about how you’ve learned to take care of your body and how cultural messages have harmed your relationship with food. Learning this key tool of Respect sets the foundation for your journey toward Food Peace. It provides the reasons why diets don’t work, how they contribute to your diet rock bottom, and how to start healing.
The Food Peace journey begins with its first steps: deciding to stop pursuing weight loss.
Because weight loss is a seductive fantasy.
I will share more on this seduction next week.
Warmly,
Julie
