The Holidays can be tough to navigate if we are trapped in body shame. This is in no small part because food is often a central focus of our gatherings and celebrations (even in these COVID times!), and how we feel about our body is deeply entrenched with our feelings about food. If we are unhappy with our body, it can be really hard to enjoy the Holiday Season when we feel how we eat must be wrong or ‘out of control’. Now, the New Year arrives with its promise of a fresh start, and it can be hard to resist the pull of New Year’s resolutions and diet plans calling us to control our eating with the promise of changing our body. But it is a mirage, a false promise. We do not build a healthy and positive relationship with our body by trying to shape or mold it into a pre-determined ideal.
A healthy and positive relationship with our body is one that is built on unconditional respect, when we fostering mindful awareness and offer consistent kindness to the body we live in. This work of building peace, trust and respect for our bodies is the work of Reclaiming Body Sovereignty and foundational for consistent and healthy self care. You see, when we reclaim our Body Sovereignty, the goal isn’t to change our bodies, rather we are transforming how we relate to our body, how we live in it, day to day. And this is powerful! Because when we have a relationship with our body based on trust, kindness and respect, we are able to heal our relationship with food. We can eat in ways that are both healthy and pleasurable, based on our body’s cues and cravings. We engage in movement we enjoy. And most importantly, we are able to more fully engage in life. Not when we lose x number of pounds. Right. Now. When we work to reclaim our Body Sovereignty, our body will find it’s natural healthy weight, which cannot be found on a chart and may or may not be different from the weight we are now. Radical and transformative!
Recently I have been reading The Women’s Wheel of Life: Thirteen Archetypes of Woman at Her Fullest Power by Carol Leonard and Elizabeth Davis. In this book, the authors explore the role transformation in women’s healing and growth, and they make an interesting distinction between transformation and change:
“At the heart of transformation is the paradox of surrender and control. To control means to order, structure, force, or mold to certain expectations. One can dictate change, but not transformation. Transformation is beyond our control, and is best met with an attitude of surrender. Control-based change is isolating and fragmenting, but transformation integrates and moves us to a state of awareness that is universal, timeless, and potentially ecstatic.”
This passage jumped out at me and I thought “yes, that’s it!!” I saw an immediate correlation between dieting and “isolating control-based change”. Dieting and diet culture disconnect and isolate us from our bodies. We are encouraged to look outside of ourselves to decide what, when and how to eat. We are put in competition with ourselves and with others around us by the belief that we must change our bodies to be acceptable. Reclaiming Body Sovereignty instead invite us to transformation…to surrender into our bodies, to connect again to our inner wisdom to guide us into a truly empowering and transformational experience. Body hatred is transformed to body peace, body anxiety is transformed to body trust and body shame is transformed to body respect.
This is my New Year’s Wish for you! This year, may your relationship with your body be transformed by surrendering to peace, building trust, and nurturing respect for your body and for yourself.
Sydney is a body image therapist providing online counselling grounded in Health at Every Size® principles. Heal body shame by reclaiming Body Sovereignty and once again experience peace, trust and respect in your body. Learn more about Sydney’s approach here.