Here we are at Principle # 8 – Respect Your Body. This is a big one! For me, this is the grand prize – what all the work in having a positive relationship with food is all about….nurturing a more positive relationship with my body. Our relationship with food is tangled up with how we feel about our body, and each has a great influence on the other. Let’s see how Tribole and Resch, the authors of Intuitive Eating describe this principle:
“Respect Your Body Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.”
I think this principle, as Tribole and Resch indicate, is the cornerstone of not only intuitive eating, but also in finding peace with body image challenges. And despite their good intentions and best efforts I think in this area the authors often fall short of clearly guiding us in this direction. They do try and throughout the book, we read messages about accepting/respecting our body as it is. Unfortunately this good work is often undone as there are also many subtle messages that if we eat intuitively we most likely will lose weight Which is unfortunate, as many folks have taken the messaging of Intuitive Eating and have, to greater and lesser degrees, turned it into another diet plan. Although there is a lot of great advice of information in this chapter, about embracing body diversity and meeting your body’s basic needs, I feel Tribole and Resch veer off the rails in their exploration of what they call natural healthy weight. In exploring this concept of natural weight, we are not only shown a chart of “Suggested Weight for Adults” which is highly problematic, but we are led through some questions about the different weights we’ve been in our life, to help us determine if our current weight goal is a reasonable one. This highlights the underlying problematic premise that weight loss automatically is and should be a goal for most people, and unconsciously contributes to that default approach to eating – that we want to make changes in order to shift our weight.
As much as I like the Intuitive Eating approach and have been helped by the book by Tribole and Resch, awareness of this unconscious underlying messaging is needed to help us navigate the contradiction that despite the work the authors do to promote body diversity, the promise of a change in body as a result of Intuitive Eating peaks creeps in.
However, once we are aware of the issues and can be careful not to fall into the trap for weight loss as a goal, there is a lot of great advice in this chapter on Principle #8. Especially the notion that we should treat our bodies with dignity and step up to make sure we are providing comfort and meeting our bodies basic needs. Consider:
My body deserves to be fed
My body deserves to be treated with dignity
My body deserves to be dressed comfortably and in a manner I’m accustomed to
My body deserves to be touched affectionately and with respect
My body deserves to move comfortably.
Yes, yes and yes! And I think Tribole and Resch were wise to talk about respect and dignity for the body, because for many people coming to the place of loving their body, or even acceptance is a barrier because they cannot even imagine themselves at that place yet. Dignity and respect seems more within our grasp and can be a great foundation for body love and acceptance. And, I love the great first step the proposed in assessing our underwear situation…the comfort and care we afford ourselves in the underwear we put on our body says a lot about the respect we are showing for our body. No more pinching bras….. no more sad, saggy panties!
As for the issue of what is our healthy/natural weight, to me it is quite simple…and unique to each individual person. I believe our natural weight is the weight we are at when we have these three things going on:
- we are eating a variety healthy foods to the best of our abilities, resources and awareness
- we are paying attention and responding to our body’s signals of hunger and fullness. If we habitually overeat for emotional or other reasons, we are paying attention to this and working to engage in healing our hurts and/or expanding our tool box of coping mechanisms
- we are finding ways that we enjoy to move our body on a regular basis
When you have those three things going on to the best of you ability, presto…you are at your natural/healthy weight! No charts, no tracking your weight over your lifetime needed.
I like the challenge that Tribole and Resch offer in this chapter for each of us to examine our own weight/size bias and the encouragement to embrace size diversity. There is a great online weight stigma test that you can take for free (see link below) to do a bit of a self-assessment at where you might be in terms of associating negative characteristics with people based on the size of their body. If you do, this quiz please remember to be kind to yourself. A higher score doesn’t imply you are a mean person, or even sizist, it just means you have some work to do in remembering that we really cannot tell anything about a person because of their size. And perhaps it is a good idea to do some reading on weight stigma and read some body postive blogs. A good start is :
- Dances with Fat: Ragen Chastain
- The Militant Baker: Jess Baker
For some further reading, feel free to check out a post I wrote on this topic Releasing the Possible Future Body.
And here is the link to the Weight Stigma online assessment tool, Project Implicit:
- First click on “Social Attitudes”
- Then “take a Test”
- Then (once you click “I agree”) you can choose “Weight IAT”
Thanks for reading! See you next week when we look at principle 9 – “Exercise – Feel the Difference”.