9 Ways to Improve Your Relationship with Food and Your Body
Ahh body image. I know very few women who have a healthy one. It is an act of rebellion to fully love and embrace yourself in our society. We have made a lot of progress in expanding our ideals of beauty, but most of us grew up during a time when we were aspiring to look like a Victoria's Secret model. Our parents also weren't as conscious about how their comments could negatively impact us long-term and often made comments about our weight that made us feel like we weren't enough. My negative body image and unhealthy relationship with food is actually what propelled me to discover my passion for nutrition, so as hard as it has been I'm grateful to be on this journey.
Our negative body image has been programmed into us from a young age and often times by the people we trusted the most in the world. Since we didn't start hating our bodies overnight, we can't expect to start loving them overnight either. I have been on a journey of learning to love and accept myself for almost two decades and I'm still learning. Here are some of the things that have helped me learn to love, accept, and appreciate my body more:
1. Don't restrict yourself. Take it from someone who did that for almost 15 years - it doesn't work. You cannot diet yourself into a healthy relationship with your body. Going keto or paleo or vegan isn't going to fix your relationship with your body. Cleaning up your diet is certainly a tool to help you have a better relationship with food because it can get you off the blood sugar roller coaster, but becoming militant about a way of eating is just another way to control yourself. In order to have a healthy relationship with food and your body, you have to release control and learn to trust yourself.
2. Let go of perfection. This goes along with not restricting yourself. If you are health-conscious it can be easy to get caught up in good vs. bad foods and feel like we've ruined our day if we've eaten a "bad"' food. I choose not to eat gluten, dairy, or processed sugar regularly because it doesn't make me feel good, but I know my body can handle an occasional piece of bread or dessert and it doesn’t mean my day is ruined. All or nothing thinking around food is a surefire way to feel bad about yourself.
3. Focus on all the other things you love about yourself. For me, it was helpful to spend time deprioritizing my physical appearance and focusing on my gifts. Feeling accomplished at work or feeling strong because you are fighting for causes you believe in can actually be a powerful tool in overcoming your negative body image. As women, it is easy to get trapped in the false narrative that our greatest value is in our physical appearance. When we focus on all of the other, more meaningful ways we contribute to the world, we automatically place less value in how we look and have an easier time accepting ourselves as we are.
4. Make a practice of tuning into your body and asking what it wants and listen. This is a hard one to master, but it is the most important one. Every morning, I ask myself am I hungry? I wait a few moments and I listen for an answer. If not, I wait until I feel the physical signs of hunger. When I am hungry, I ask myself what do I really want to eat right now? I think about the options I have in the fridge, I picture what it would be like eating each of those things, and then I choose the one that sounds best to me. I repeat this with every meal. Sometimes this means I'm eating 2 meals a day. Sometimes this means I'm eating 6 snacks a day. 90% of the time, the meal I want is something healthy. 10% of the time it's not, and I honor that too. If you start this practice, and your body keeps answering ice cream then you probably need to clean up your diet and cut out sugar for a week to balance your blood sugar and reset your taste buds. Trust that your body is wise enough to know what it needs. You just need to listen.
5. Fall in love with food. When my relationship with my body was the worst, I was not eating food I loved or even real food at all. I was trying to subsist on protein bars, shakes, and sugar-free jello. Food is beautiful bounty provided to us from the earth, and it is actually good for your body image and relationship with food to fall in love with it. Learn more about where you get your food from, have fun finding recipes that sound amazing to you and are made with real, whole foods. Enjoy the process of selecting food, preparing it, and especially tasting it.
6. Find movement that you love. I was doing a ton of HIIT and other intense workouts. I enjoy working out, but I was working out to burn calories and get skinnier. Pushing myself this hard actually didn't help me lose weight at all - I would just end up tired and hungrier. Lately, my body has been loving long walks, body weight strength training and yoga. My workouts don't spike my cortisol, and my appetite feels much more regulated. I look forward to my movement everyday rather than feeling like it's something I need to check off my to-do list.
7. Start a spiritual practice. This has been another big one for my body image. Sometimes people overeat as a way to fill a void in their lives. I think as human beings we crave a connection to something bigger than ourselves. For me, this looks like reading a few minutes of a spiritual book daily (I love "A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson), meditation, praying (to the Universe, my higher self, God - whatever I feel like that day), and continually surrendering whenever I feel myself getting caught up in the need to control. This doesn't mean you have to become religious. It can be as simple as sitting in silence for 5 minutes every day or beginning a gratitude practice.
8. Some events and days call for overeating - don't beat yourself up, don't obsess over it - enjoy and move on. If you're struggling to do so, it can help to get outside and move your body. Go for a walk, go for a hike. Don't punish yourself for what you ate, just do something that will get you in touch with your healthy body again. If you have the tendency to get obsessive and over do it with exercise, then try journaling or put on some music and have a solo dance party.
9. Become aware of your negative thoughts and replace them. Start paying attention to your thoughts and notice if you have negative thoughts looping on repeat. For example, notice you are telling yourself “I ate too much today and now I’m going to get fat unless I don’t eat much tomorrow.” Replace that thought with something more loving and true like, “I’m grateful for having access to an abundance of food to nourish myself with. Feeling full is normal and healthy.” Keep repeating the positive thought until the negative one dissipates.
I will leave you with this quote from Ram Dass, "Instead of the term, how can we love ourselves more? I'd like to ask, how can we accept ourselves more?... The word I'm finding most comfortable to work with is appreciation. Appreciation of what is. You go out into the forest and you look at trees and you appreciate the trees. You don't say that tree is good and that tree is bad because one tree is fat and one is thin or one is tall and one is short or one is bent and one is straight. Unless you're in the lumber business. For the most part, you just look at the trees and you appreciate them the way they are. They are what they are."
