Ep. 23 How to Love Your Body (even when you're resistant)
Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast, Im Paula Parker. I am so, so glad to have you here and to be back to the podcast after a few months away. In that time I had a little boy and it’s been a really remarkable time in my life. Today my mother in law has our little guy and my husband is working upstairs and so I’m hoping that I won’t be interrupted but we will see. We bought a new house in Nov. and I don’t have a proper office space but rather a desk in our open concept living space downstairs. So I’ve been thinking about what to talk about on the podcast for awhile now and I thought I’d be remiss if I didn’t speak to what’s been going on for me in the postpartum period - now 4 months in.
Both during the pregnancy and now in the postpartum I have a lot of insights and learnings I’d love to share with you in hopes that they offer a new way of thinking about your own journey - and maybe that involves a pregnancy, but this will still be relevant to you if you don’t plan on ever being pregnant or if you’ve been there done that and it was decades ago. Because what I want to focus on today is something that is so key to releasing the weight and it’s something that you may be reluctant to hear. I know for me, it ALWAYS was. As soon as I heard about this I dismissed it right away. So I bet you’re probably wondering what the heck I’m talking about.
It is body love my friends. Did you cringe? I know. For years I did too. It actually used to piss me off when people would say you have to love your body as it is. I always felt like, yeah well easy for you to say - you’re skinny!
So if this is you and you are as cynical as I was, I totally understand and I want to invite you to simply listen in to this episode knowing that I hear you ok? And I’ll share with you how I’ve changed my tune on this (only took 20 years) and do my best to convince you on why you should too. And if you’re thinking right now that it’s literally impossible to love your body the way it is because you’re uncomfortable in your clothes, you have cellulite everywhere and you can literally grab your excess flesh in your palms, I’m telling you, even with all of that it is still possible and it’s essential to releasing weight and keeping it off forever. Here we go.
So as I’ve mentioned before I grew up wanting to look exactly like Kate Moss and unless I looked like her I thought I didn’t deserve to love my body. I can now see clearly that this was a program in my brain - simply a thought error that did NOT serve me. Because when we don’t love our bodies, we don’t treat them well do we?
I made a list of all the ways I could think of that were the result of not loving my body. As I read them, make a mental checklist if you relate to any of them.
We disrespect our bodies by not listening to them. We overstuff them with food to the point of discomfort, then we deprive them of food until we feel starving.
We eat unhealthy food that makes our body lethargic and overweight.
We squish them into clothing that doesn’t fit properly because we can’t bear to go out and buy the next size up.
We wear underwear that gives us wedgies and bras that pinch or simply don’t fit properly so we’re constantly adjusting ourselves. You know this is you, if you get home and the first thing you do is rip off your bra.
We hunch to make our body smaller and take up less space.
We wear clothing not as an expression of our own personal style, but as camouflage.
When we don’t love or even like our bodies, we hide them, dismiss them and despise them. But our bodies are completely neutral. We choose to think terrible thoughts about them, like they aren’t good enough because they’re not like Kate Moss’s body. Some of these thoughts were implanted when you were a teenager or younger. And it didn’t come from you. It came from a dysfunctional society and or it was role modeled to you from someone else who hadn’t learned how to love their bodies. A good question to ask is, who’s bullshit is this? I don’t normally swear, but it’s just the perfect question here. Who’s bullshit IS this?
And then we feel terrible about ourselves and we think it’s because of our body. It’s not. It’s our thoughts about our bodies. And look at the outcomes I just listed for when we withhold love for our bodies. There is NO upside. It doesn’t not help you release weight long term.
Here’s what really helped me see this. When I was pregnant I didn’t have any self consciousness about my body - like at all. I wasn’t worried about what people thought because my thoughts were that it is natural and normal to gain additional weight during a pregnancy. This is probably what you think too. Most people do. So when you’re gaining weight - baby weight - that’s not just from the baby, but when all your other parts are going up a size, it doesn’t matter when you have the thought, this is totally okay.
And the same is true for postpartum. I gained 20lbs or so with my pregnancy and I also lost a lot of muscle mass. But for the very first time in my life - essentially since I was 14 years old, I didn’t have harmful thoughts about having extra fat on my body. Why? Because I gave myself permission to have that extra weight on. When I got on the scale, when I was still wearing my pregnancy clothes 2 months postpartum, I didn’t make it mean something bad about me. My thoughts were that it was all part of the process. And I’ve been able to lose 16lbs effortlessly because of this mindset. Remember, weight loss is a mindset and a skillset. This time for me there is no shaming, there is no resistance. Instead there is love and acceptance.
So you may be thinking, well that’s all well and good for you but I have 60lbs to lose and it’s not baby weight. Here is the good news - it doesn’t matter, because if you’ve listened closely you will have picked up that it has nothing to do with the weight and everything to do with the thinking about the weight. I know this is true because even though my body is objectively bigger than it was before the pregnancy, I have MORE love and MORE acceptance for it than before. Because love does NOT come from the circumstance - your shape. It comes from your brain. It’s generated from having loving thoughts which YOU can create.
Now I don’t expect you to start loving your body this minute, and that’s not what I’m suggesting, but I want to offer that you CAN start shifting your thinking so that it serves your body-love, your peace of mind and ultimately your weight loss goals.
Because here’s what it looks like to love your body. You don’t cringe or criticize yourself or your body when you look in the mirror. I know some of you even say mean things to yourself about how much weight you’ve gained. You need to stop doing that. Instead, you’re either neutral and don’t pay attention to what you see, or if you notice your body in the mirror you don’t have harmful thoughts - in fact overtime you may even be able to cultivate loving thoughts EVEN when it hasn’t yet changed on the outside.
Maybe it’s your collarbone, or the curve of your hip. Start looking for small things about your body that are entry points to love.
Loving your body means listening to it’s cues on responsible eating. It means buying clothing that fits and knowing that the size on the tag is only a number and is completely neutral. It only indicates a measurement in this exact moment in time. Nothing more.
Loving your body means allowing urges to binge or overeat to come and go without complying with them. It means growing the capacity to feel temporarily uncomfortable in service of your body feeling comfortable in the longer term.
It means fueling your body with healthy food that energizes and nourishes.
Loving your body means practicing neutral and increasingly loving thoughts on a regular basis. In your daily 15 practice and by that I mean your 15 min of daily journaling thought work, include the question, how can I show love for my body today? And by neutral, it can simply be replacing “I hate my body” with “I have a body”. For some of us with years of self-harming thoughts about our bodies, we need to start slowly, with neutral thoughts that are easy for our brains to believe.
Here are some other questions you can consider in your thought work:
Is it possible to accept my body today just as it is?
Is it possible that someone else would love my shape if they had it?
What are ALL the reasons I can think of for loving my body right now?
Can I release the shame and be okay with the extra weight on my body, knowing it was my mind, not my body that put it there?
If you do the thought work it takes to strip away the shame and lean into acceptance, it will make it so, so much easier to release the weight. Trust me on this. And here’s the thing. If you are hating your body the entire time you lose weight, you won’t magically love it when you reach your goal. I promise you - because you haven’t developed the skill for loving your body. Instead you’ll detest your loose skin, or your cellulite that just won’t go away or you’ll start seeing other defects that only you can see.
Your body wants to be healthy. Your body wants to function optimally. It’s your mind that has put the excess weight on. It’s a deficiency in your weight loss mindset and skillset, not a deficiency in your body. What if your body is EXACTLY the perfect size for you in this moment? I know it sounds crazy, but look for how that may be true. It may be that your body is this size so that your mind would be compelled enough to do this personal growth work. Just a thought.
Take care of yourselves. I’ll talk to you next time.