Making peace with your body changes as you find food freedom

Hellooooo and welcome to a very vulnerable blog post all about body image. Body image comes up during every single session with my group and 1:1 clients. 

Healing your relationship with food goes hand-in-hand with healing your relationship with your body. Without one you really can’t have the other. 

The tough part is that most people want food freedom and all the benefits that come from it but don’t want to give up the pursuit of weight loss. They believe their confidence, health, and state of mind depend on the status of their weight, so they can’t possibly give that up to find food freedom.

The catch? You can’t heal your relationship with food without making peace with your body. 

I wish I could tell you that you can have both. That you can simultaneously pursue weight loss while also stopping the binge eating cycle, but that simply isn’t true. I hate to be the one to tell you, but I’m not going to sugar coat it.

If you’re sitting here thinking “I don’t want to make peace with the way my body looks right now, I want to change it;” I want to challenge that thinking. 

• Why do you fear making peace with your body?
• What does your belief system tell you when you think of accepting your body, as it is, right now?

My guess is that you believe that by accepting your body, you are accepting failure. Because that is what diet culture teaches us to believe. If we are not thin, we are not good enough. AND if we are not thin, we have the power to change that with a little willpower and protein powder.

Let me tell you, it’s just not true. Sure, we CAN change our bodies, but at what cost?

For me, and many of my clients, the cost is food obsession, binge eating, AND weight gain. YEP weight gain. Pursuing intentional weight loss diets are one of the biggest predictors of weight gain. 

Society loves to make us believe that weight is all within our control, but it just isn’t.

Genetics, socioeconomic status, access to food, environment, etc all play a role in our body size. It is NOT just calories in, calories out.

So if making peace with food sounds too scary, but doing another weight loss diet makes you want to cry, what are your options? I want you to mull over those two options, and think about the cost versus the benefit of each choice. 

I see two options here: Make peace with your body or go on another weight loss diet. Let’s explore the costs and benefits of these two options

Making peace with your body:

The cost: 

Having to battle a fatphobic society

Losing thin privileges

Letting go of control, and finding that it’s okay not to always be in control of everything (this may actually be a benefit) 

Facing weight stigma

The benefit:

No longer fighting your body

No more binge eating

No more dieting

Finding other values in life to focus your energy on

Happiness

Peace

Finding confidence in your here-and-now body

Freedom

Weight loss diet:

The cost:

Food obsession

Binge eating

Missing out on certain events to avoid off-limit foods

Constantly tracking/weighing/counting calories

Decreased energy (from eating little and from constantly thinking about food)

Disappointment in your body image

Decreased self-esteem

Weight cycling long-term

The benefit:

Instant gratification

Approval from others 

Confidence built on something fleeting (is this really a benefit??)

Control

Fitting into societal standards

These are my lists, and yours may look different.

I encourage you to make your own cost and benefit list between these two options. This is helpful if you are having trouble deciding if pursuing food freedom and body acceptance is what you want

Now that I’ve made these lists, it is clear to me that weight loss dieting is a temporary quick-fix to a deeper-rooted problem.

When you look at the potential cost of doing a weight loss diet you see that it just causes other problems.

So in the long term, is this really a solution? If there is a cost and a benefit to both options, YOU are in control of deciding which route is worth it. 

For me, after struggling with weight loss and body image for years, and now being 6 years free from it, food/body freedom is and always will be more worth it. The freedom I feel from no longer having food and body obsession is empowering. I have more energy, more life to live, and more purpose.

I say this though with a lot of privilege. I live in a straight-sized body and don’t have to face the stigma the world creates for people in larger bodies. I get that. But I’ve learned from those with more of a lived experience of being in a bigger body size that it’s worth it to make peace with your body.

Making peace with your body does not mean letting go of your health. In actuality, it means the opposite.

By changing the way you view health, transitioning from it being all about your body size to being more about what you do (behaviorally), you’ll be more motivated to make healthful behavior changes that you enjoy and can sustain.

That’s the beauty of making peace with your body! You’re not “letting yourself go” you’re actually taking your life/health back and into your own hands. 

Once I realized this, I dove head first into Intuitive Eating I challenged my belief systems around body image, and am now free from the torments of diet culture.

This is not easy, but it’s so worth it.

Reviewed and Edited by Kaitlyn Allen MS, MEd, MS, RD