119. Back To Basics - Principle 8, Respect your body

Today in my back to basics series I’m talking about intuitive eating principle 8, respect your body.

People often talk about body positivity, and loving your body, but that’s tough when you’re in a place where to even like your body feels like a stretch.

In this episode I’ll help you start that process. Let’s talk about body respect instead, and body appreciation. Let’s just start there.

I’ll give you some crazy stats about women wanting to change their bodies, and what they’d give for that. I’ll ask some questions of you so that you can evaluate where you are with your body respect now. 

And we’ll talk about the things that are within our control, and outside of our control, when it comes to what affects our body confidence.

Transcript

A quick heads up before you start reading..... My transcriptions are automatically generated. I do not type them manually. For this reason there may be errors, incorrect words, bad spelling, bad grammar, and other things that just seem a little 'off'. You'll still be able to understand what is being said though, so please just ignore that and enjoy the episode.


Hi, welcome back. Welcome back to the Back to Basics series. In each of these episodes, I'm walking you through one of the 10 principles of intuitive eating. I'm going to help you understand it a little bit, give you a couple of questions or thoughts or things you can do to take away and, and start applying the principles for yourself. 

If you don't know that this is part of a series, where have you been?  This is part of a series. So if you've just found it, You can, of course, stay here. That's absolutely perfectly fine. Enjoy the episode, but to get the most out of it, I would suggest you go back and then you start at the beginning and you watch  the series from the start.

So  today I am going to talk about principle eight, respect your body.  Um, you can't make peace with food when you are at war with your body. Your body image, your eating habits, they're so intrinsically linked.  One really does affect the other. So,  when you don't feel the need to change your body shape and size, you are more relaxed around food. 

And you don't feel the need to eat solely for the purpose of changing your body. So they go hand in hand.  Loving your body doesn't come easy, though.  What if you don't feel like you can love your body? To start with. You know, we hear body positivity,  body this, body that. You've got to love your body. What if you don't think you can love your body right now?

What if even to like it feels like a bit of a stretch?  That's fine.  Let's start with appreciating it. Let's start with just being respectful of your body.  Did you know, in a study of 320 women of varying ages, it was found that 30 percent of those women would trade a year of their life  to be their ideal body shape and weight,  just one in every three women. 

10 percent of that group  would trade two to five years of their life to be their ideal body weight and size.  Would trade six to 10 years of their life. And 1 percent would trade 21 or more years of their life  to be a different weight and shape and size  to achieve that as well as if those numbers weren't scary enough  to achieve that.

Those women were willing to sacrifice some big, big stuff.  13 percent would sacrifice 5, 000 pounds  of their annual salary to have that.  8 percent would go without a promotion at work.  6 percent would,  uh, decide not to achieve a first class honors degree.  9 percent would sacrifice time with their partner, their friends, their family, to get that. 

7 percent would be willing to sacrifice their health  for that different body shape, size, weight.  Scary, right?  39 percent of that group of women would be happy to have cosmetic surgery to change their appearance. And 76  percent of those  Would want multiple  surgical procedures.  A whopping 93 percent  had negative thoughts about their appearance in the past week.

And 31 percent had negative thoughts about their body several times a day.  And it wouldn't surprise me to hear that you probably fit into one of those brackets.  This is not me being judgmental.  It's not something you should feel bad about,  but they are very scary figures, aren't they?  And this goes back to diet culture and beauty standards, the way we're expected to look a certain way,  the belief that we should look a certain way. 

So how do we start to like ourselves with all of that? How do we start to respect our bodies?  We have to start from within ourselves.  That's why my membership's called Eat From Within.  Good, huh? Um,  you have to start from within.  I get it. Negative thoughts about your body when you're not happy with what you look like.

I get it. I understand getting up in the morning, seeing yourself in the mirror. I understand the awful experience that clothes shopping can be.  I understand when it feels like there's things you can't do because your body is  getting in the way. So I'm thinking about things like doing your shoelaces up, that sort of thing. 

I understand feeling like you can't take part in anything. Because your body's too big or that it just won't let you.  I understand having a long term loving relationship, but still,  even years later, feeling like you have to hide your body away. Because how can somebody possibly find me attractive like this?

How can somebody possibly find me sexy like this?  I get it. I really understand.  And while all that is swirling around inside your head, it can be so Difficult to feel positive about your body, but I promise you, you can change that mindset. You can change it and it will give you a completely different outlook on life. 

It will change your outlook on the day. It will change your mood. It will change what you choose to wear.  It will change the activities that you take part in and the events that you go to.  It will change your confidence in your intimate relationships.  It will change your relationship with food. It will. 

But in order to have those changes, you don't have to love yourself.  It is not some kind of switch, right? You can't just go from really disliking yourself to absolutely loving yourself overnight. It takes time. This takes time. You have to unpick  all the beliefs  around food in your body and you have to replace them with new ones.

You have to find new ways of looking at yourself,  probably in more detail than you've ever done before.  You are going to start scrutinizing yourself, but in a nice way so that you can change your old thoughts that were just so automatic.  So wherever you're starting from here, we're going to strive for a place that is full of respect and appreciation.

That's what we're going for.  This is different to loving yourself. Maybe one day you will go on to love yourself. And I think you are the most incredible person on the planet.  I hope that you do.  But I also think that you can love yourself without being particularly respectful to your body or appreciating it properly. 

So let's start there, okay? Let's  start with appreciation and respect. This is what Intuitive Eating Principle 8 Respect For Your Body is helping you to do, okay?  Let's get to a place where you respect yourself, appreciate yourself, a place of neutrality, maybe, where you don't love, but you don't hate yourself anymore,  but you do see the good in it and you want to care for it.

And then that also in turn sets the tone for what  everyone else should do  in respect of you, how everyone else should treat you.  In intuitive eating, we can use a tool called the body appreciation scale.  And basically this is a set of statements  and for each statement you would consider whether it's a yes or a no or a maybe. 

So these are statements such as,  I respect my body.  I feel good about my body.  I feel that my body has some at least good qualities.  I'm attentive to my body's needs.  I appreciate different or unique aspects of my body.  My behavior reveals my positive attitude to my body.  For example, I walk with my head held high.

Gosh, that was hard to say. I walk with my head held high, um, smiling.  So are those a yes or a no or a maybe for you? What do you think? There are more. That's just an example from the list.  And there's no right or wrong answers to those questions. It is just an observation  at a point in time. Your answers  may well change from one day to the next based on a lot of different factors.

But the aim is to take away a snapshot of how you feel about your body. And then over time, as you work on your body respect, you'll be able to take more yeses  and less nos and maybes.  That would be good, right? And it helps you to see the progress that you're making too.  There is so much. That affects how you feel about your body.

Body image is not just an inside job.  There will be plenty of aspects of life that will affect how you feel about your body, both negatively and positively.  Some you'll have control over,  others you will not.  You can't change, for example, whether it's a bright and sunny day.  Or whether it's raining and miserable, because that makes a difference, right?

It makes a difference to your mood, how you approach the day, how you feel about yourself, the clothes you're going to put on, that sort of thing.  You can't change the stock in a clothes shop.  So whether you can shop there or not, it's totally out of your control.  And that can affect how you feel about your body. 

However, if you can recognize some of the things that are going to affect you, you will have a better awareness. Of why some days you don't feel as good as others.  Regardless of how those thoughts come about,  we do place a lot of blame on our bodies, don't we?  When we feel low, we put the blame on our body.

We blame it for the number on the scales. We blame it for how you can't go clothes shopping easily. Um, we blame the body for whether we can exercise or move as much or as well as we would like to.  We blame the body for how easy or difficult traveling might be.  Aeroplane seatbelts, I'm looking at you.  We blame the body for how we feel when we go to social events.

We blame the body for how we feel when we are eating out. We blame our body when we hear others criticize or comment or see them look at us, don't we?  And we distra we, we do it,  get your words out, Terri.  We direct our frustrations at our body.  We say to ourselves that it's our fault.  That we can't buy clothes.

It's our fault we can't go to these events comfortably. It's our fault that people are criticizing and making jokes about us. Maybe those are right  and that maybe we have let ourselves go and we should do something about that.  Have you felt any of those things?  Then you dwell on it, don't you? And the more you focus on it, the worse you feel, the more you become kind of disgusted at your body and you continue to tell yourself that you should lose weight  and you should be better somehow. 

But this is personal gaslighting. It is not true. You do not need to think those things of yourself.  The problem is fatphobia.  It is diet culture. It is everywhere.  Think about the messaging that you read and you hear in so many different places.  We read and hear things in schools,  at work, at the gym,  um, by healthcare providers, at the theater or the cinema, in the media, on social media, from friends and family,  um, by the beauty industry, by the fashion industry, torture.

If you are not in a straight size body,  but actually the onus is on everyone else, but you,  it is the responsibility of the venues and the transport companies, of the employers, of,  you know, other people to provide facilities that are suitable for all.  It is the responsibility  of the beauty industry and the media to start representing all.

It is the responsibility of healthcare providers to be better educated. It is the responsibility of your friends and family to have a better understanding of  the world we live in and be more accepting of people in all bodies.  And that can start with you,  helping them to understand it, helping them to know where the comments are not acceptable.

You can play a part in that.  But you do have to stop blaming your body. And body respect is not blaming yourself for those things.  You have to remember your body really is amazing. We constantly think about how we look and the shape and the size that we are.  But we don't often go much deeper than that, do we?

And that is why I'm going to encourage you to start doing that now. Start looking at how amazing your body is.  Find the parts of your body that you can appreciate,  that are not,  not aesthetic,  not visual,  things like,  um,  your eyes.  Can you be grateful for your sight,  your ears? Can you hear the voices of your children?

Can you hear your partner saying nice things to you? Can you hear the birds in the trees? Can you hear the  wind blowing an absolute gale outside my window?  Your brain,  your brain just does stuff. Keeps your body functioning, it holds wisdom, it holds knowledge.  Your arms, your hands. Do they allow you to hug someone, carry your shopping, allow you to do your job? 

Does your torso, your belly, your hips, does it all hold you strong?  Maybe you carried a baby.  Maybe your belly is a soft, squidgy, comforting cushion for your child or your partner to lay their head on.  That area of your body houses your digestive system too.  Your legs, your feet, do they carry you around? 

Are your muscles supporting you?  Are, are they allowing different types of exercise, movement,  dance,  fun?  When you have  found some parts of your body that you can appreciate  in that way,  then maybe you can move on to liking  some of the way that they look too.  The color of your eyes, your  perfectly shaped and polished nails,  the shape of your shoulder, your curvaceous  hips. 

You know, pick some parts that you could really get to like.  Giving yourself this appreciation is body respect. And when you can appreciate. And respect these body parts more, you will naturally want to be kinder to them.  You will naturally want to care for them more.  As a body image trained coach, I have got a wealth of tools to help you improve how you feel about yourself. 

And I've got a whole mini course on body respect in my Eat From Within membership. So if you would like to know more about that, or about having personal coaching with me, I'd really love to hear from you. Just drop me a line.