Accepting the changes in your body throughout your life and especially when you are ready to escape diet prison usually takes some work.
There are so many conditions attached to the way we see our bodies, there is so much “stuff” related to our weight, our shape, our beauty ideal that it’s often painful to see your body change in ways that go against what diet culture teaches us right and worthy.
And when we are finally able to understand, to let it sink in, that diets don’t work, we are faced with the decision to accept our bodies as they are or to continue fighting ourselves.
For some, myself included, this is one of the most painful steps to take.
After all, it seems like being thin is everything.
It’s definitely everything we dream of when we’re on a lifelong weight loss diet that has taken us to places we don’t even want to think about.
Accepting a body that isn’t what we have in mind for ourselves can bring us to our knees.
And that is OK.
In fact, it’s often necessary to mourn the changes your body is going through.
It’s necessary for your own healing to go through the five stages of grief as a part of you definitely is dying.
You’re basically killing the part of you that’s been holding on to the belief that having a different body will make your life just right, or better than it is right now.
That part of you that’s been on a lifelong quest for more and more diets is definitely experiencing a sort of death that needs to be worked through by the part of you that wants to live in freedom and be at peace.
Denial
At first, you may be in denial about the fact that you cannot and will never successfully shape your body into something she is not meant to be (if you don’t want to live in pain for the rest of your life that is).
You may still hold on to the hope that if you get the intuitive eating process just right (meaning ONLY eating when you’re physically super hungry and stopping when you’re just slightly satisfied), you’ll lose the weight that you’ve been rejecting for so many years.
You may truly want to stop dieting but still be caught up in the twilight of Dietland.
Anger
Then, the anger may bubble up from deep inside.
You may get angry at yourself, at your body, life, the universe, at diet culture. Why do YOU have that kind of a body and why can’t you be one of the “lucky ones” who are blessed with a super tiny skinny shape?
Why is the world so freaking unfair and why can’t the beauty ideal be different?
Why does diet culture make it so hard on people in larger bodies to move around in this world?
You may get angry at all the people who’ve told you you needed to lose weight from an early age on and blame them for your current weight (and you’re not wrong). You may be pissed at yourself for eating the way you eat.
Release the anger, feel the anger, let it all out.
The worst thing you can do for yourself is to push your anger back down and never deal with it. Instead, find a safe space to rid yourself of your rage.
Bargaining
Then, there’s the bargaining.
Oh, how you can bargain.
What if you ate juuuust a little bit less? What if you exercised juuuust a little bit more? What if the no diet diet can be worked around ever so slightly?
What if you changed your body just a bit here and just a bit there or tried this latest diet just to see?
What if you could live in a perpetual state of hunger until the your last day on earth? Maybe you could make it work after all?
What if and if only…
Indulge in those thoughts but always come back to reality and ask yourself if that would truly make you happy and serve your highest good. Would your life be better if your body were thinner – with all the consequences that can’t be wiped away?
Depression
Another phase of healing your relationship with your body can be a slight bout of depression. The knowing that this is it can feel too much and not enough at the same time.
Realizing that letting go of actively and forcefully trying to change your body can hurt so much that you don’t want to feel it at all. Allow this pain, this emptiness, this concoction of feeling and non-feeling to happen.
This is the part where you’re beginning to see that all of your life you’ve been fighting a fruitless fight and now’s the time to truly leave that behind, to instead live in the present and to embody the body you were given.
This phase will pass, even if you feel like it’ll never end. You’re creating a new reality, moving through some darkness is part of it.
Acceptance
And then, and then you’ll arrive at acceptance.
THIS is your body.
THIS is your glorious, wonderful, ever-changing, hard-working body.
SHE is what YOU were given with all her quirks and imperfections.
You don’t have to change a thing about her in order to be a worthy human being. You don’t have to lose a part of her in order to be “good”. You can own her just like this, right now.
Acceptance enables you to live your life in the best way you can imagine. Acceptance enables you to focus on what is good and what works instead of holding on to what can’t be. Acceptance is the state that makes you open up for new resources and better approaches to handle your the obstacles diet culture presents you every day.
Isn’t that breathtakingly wonderful?
So yeah, grieve your body for as long as you need to in order to rise as a stronger, more fierce and resourceful person knowing that changing her body is not going to give her what she truly wants. Accepting that body, however, will give her everything and beyond.
Sort of… 😉
Are you ready to make peace with food, your body and yourself? Like truly, really, no doubts about your self-worth and wholeness?
Visit meetme.so/Anne-SophieReinhardt and choose a time for us to talk.
Don’t wait until the New Year, don’t wait until it “feels” right, don’t wait until the stars align. They never will.
Take a leap and let’s chat. Your life is waiting for you.
