Coming to peace with body image, weight, and healing your relationship with food rests on ONE important Foundation.
This Foundation is not a habit, practice, or action you must take.
As tempting as it is to think that your current situation is a result of your actions and habits, it isn’t. If solving your problem was simply a matter of changing your actions and stopping the behaviours you don’t want, then you would have done it by now.
(Just like if losing weight was simply about changing the actions of overeating and not exercising then nobody would be struggling with weight, right?)
Actions and behaviours are symptoms, not the cause of your current experience in life.
What is the cause of your reality and your experience? Now that’s getting to the Foundation: Your belief system.
The reason why people don’t suddenly change their behaviours and patterns, is because people don’t just suddenly change their belief systems.
Beliefs are the Foundation to everything you experience in life, so to solve your problems at the level of cause, you must first: examine your beliefs.
In order to come to peace with your body, with yourself, and to grow out of using food (or other addictions) as an emotional crutch, here’s a belief system or a habitual pattern of thinking you need to become aware of.
The story goes:
- I’m not happy with my weight/appearance, or, I’m unhappy with some aspect of my life.
- There MUST be something wrong. This weight (or relationship) is the problem.
- Once I overcome this problem, I’ll be happy again.
This pattern of thinking, or belief system, is so familiar and so automatic that perhaps you don’t even recognize it.
I’m gonna let you in on a secret…
This is essentially a belief system based on the fairy tales you were told as a child:
- Something’s wrong
- Therefore there must be a “bad guy” that caused this (eg. witch, evil stepmother)
- Find the bad guys and defeat them
- After that, you’ll live happily ever after
Yep, it’s those childhood stories that run your entire adult life… Unless you slow down, and examine them.
Look at how this belief system has played out in women’s lives: she’s unhappy with her body, she thinks her body is the reason why she’s feeling down (her body is the “bad guy”), and in order to live happily ever after, she needs to lose weight and “overcome” her body – usually by controlling, managing, suppressing and forcing it into submission.
The consequences of adhering to this belief system has been absolutely catastrophic on so many women’s self-esteem and self-worth, and it’s led to so much guilt and shame.
Let’s get straight to the point.
The cataclysmic error in this belief system is that you’ve decided that there’s a “bad guy” to defeat, and that “bad guy” is yourself.
In absolutely 100% of the time, fighting against yourself is not going to lead you to peace. In fact, it will guarantee the opposite.
When you believe that there’s something “wrong” with your body, this psychology puts you into a level of fear. This will trigger the physiology of stress, where the body will go into a ‘Survival Response’ and produce more cortisol, leading to more insulin secretion, which sends the signal to store fat and conserve energy, and over time you’ll likely gain weight, or find it hard to release weight.
Cue the food cravings, the inability to regulate appetite, and the tendency to binge late at night.
Fighting against yourself is a battle where nobody wins. So maybe it’s time to update those childhood fairy tales for a more mature perspective of the world.
Consider this radically different belief system for building a new Foundation
- Your body is not the enemy
- Your unwanted behaviours are how your body communicates with you
- Listen to them
Instead of seeing your challenges with food and body as something to “get rid of” or to “overcome” like an enemy, how about trying to relax, drop the fear, and seek to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so we may fear less. – Marie Curie
When you stop fighting yourself and recognize that there are no “bad guys” to defeat, and when you no longer believe that there’s something “wrong” with you, that changes everything. It seems trivial, but a small adjustment in perception, from fear to acceptance, changes the trajectory of your entire relationship with food and yourself.
As you adopt this new belief system, something also shifts in your body.
Instead of going into the physiology of stress, your body is relaxed and in the Rest and Digest state – because when there’s no “enemy” to fight, you feel safe and calm. This is the optimal state for healing, growth, receiving insight, releasing excess weight, and feeling relaxed around food.
It’s simple. Your Foundation matters. Your belief system determines your actions and behaviours. So if you want to change your habits and (unwanted) behaviours, you must change your beliefs first.
As you change the story from wrongness and needing to “defeat the enemy” that is your own body, and move towards the possibility of openness, understanding, and being friends with your body, you will transform in a way you never imagined possible.