I tried sticking my fingers down my throat a few times in high school in efforts to control my weight.
Turned out it wasn’t for me…
It also wasn’t for my parents who proceeded to take their then 15-year old daughter to get some help.
But the binging…
That was for me.
That was the part that my food-addicted self was really going after.
I wanted the comfort, the drug itself, and the predictable high.
But whatever I feared it would do to my waistline, I thought that would keep me from ‘using’, but it didn’t.
You see even after I realized that the ‘method’ wasn’t for me, I still had this definition around food that remained (loudly) in my brain:
Food in your stomach = BAD (for your weight)
Empty stomach = GOOD (for your weight)
That thought-process got fired and wired in my brain for years.
So how do you go from having this very love/hate black/white relationship with food… to all of a sudden loving it and feeling ‘strong’ around it?
Well you don’t– at least not in my opinion.
You probably hear all the things I heard about ‘changing your mindset’ around food and learning to “embrace it” or “love it”.
But it’s not that easy.
The switch doesn’t just happen like that, and truthfully, the brain doesn’t work that way.
If you’ve been thinking food = bad, naughty, guilty, etc.…
And you’ve been been thinking, feeling, and acting like it was ‘bad’ for a long time, you don’t just all of a sudden fall in love and live happily ever after.
Same thing with your fat.
If you grew up hearing, thinking, and worrying that fat = bad/unattractive…
How do you suddenly go change your relationship with it and see it as something good?
I’m here to tell you NOT to go try and do that.
In fact I would bet my money that this tactic would indeed eventually fail you.
What if instead you DIDN’T skip straight to love, but you just let it be neutral?
What if you just focused on NOT making food, your body, or your extra ‘squishy parts’ a stress, worry, burden…and just let all it be neutral and benign?
What is food was just… food… and THEN you learned to be its friend?
And what if your fat was just… fat?
THAT is acceptance.
To me, THAT is stating the Capital-T Truth without shame, blame, guilt, or comparison.
And then after you can do that, THEN you can learn to go work with it (not just live with it or deal with it.)
