Finally--the last two 'myths' about having a good body relationship. Here are two more to let go of as you give yourself permission to create a great connection with your body now, regardless of your weight. See if these make sense to you, and that let yourself release what's no longer working for you. One thing you do have is the power to create your own state of mind!
Why not? If you’ve been treated poorly in the past or told you and your body weren’t enough, that cycle needs to stop somewhere. Why not with you, and why not right now?
You may have bought into the belief that you won’t be enough until you please someone else’s version of you. You may even have taken on those beliefs so deeply that they’ve now become your own. Maybe you’ve tried your whole life to accomplish what you think will make someone else happy with you. And you can spend your whole life continuing to do that.
When you decide to be loving to yourself and your body, simply because you know it’s a better way of being in your life, you take back your power. It’s like you’re saying that you’re sick of waiting until ‘some day’ to give yourself what can belong to you now. You’re debunking the myth that there’s some other version of how you’re supposed to be that would allow you to deserve love.
Why do you have to keep waiting to be loving to yourself? Have you begun to get the feeling over time that maybe that day is never going to come? There’s nothing you should have to do to earn that feeling of peace or love inside. It’s given to all of us as a possibility, and something we can choose to create and cultivate. When you choose to create a better relationship with your body, you’re taking a powerful step of self-care, moving toward a way of being that will make you happier and healthier right now rather than waiting to prove to yourself that you deserve it. When you do that you are, of course, not just relating to your body differently; you’re giving yourself the possibility of being loved and accepted just for being who you are in every aspect of your life.
MYTH #5: If this doesn’t help me lose weight, it’s not worth it; that’s all I want.
You may have believed for a long time that losing weight is the one thing that will make you happy. Sometimes it’s more convenient to put all of our beliefs about our self-worth into one place; it’s less messy and less complicated. Of course, when you actually do lose the weight, everything else that you hoped would change as a result will still be there. There’s a good chance it won’t have miraculously changed just because you’re now a size 2.
That’s why it’s so important to think less about what you want to look like and more about how you want to feel. If you can find ways to cultivate how you want to feel, you get to keep the benefits forever. You’re feeling good is in your hands. What happens or doesn’t happen with your weight can never be the only thing that gives you your happiness.
It’s the same thing with any relationship. We can fight so hard for a goal we think we want: to be married, to have our partner say they love us. But if we don’t actually feel connected to them or feel good with them, the milestones have no meaning. We may fool ourselves into thinking they do, that we’ve arrived. But what we have on our hands is a hollow representation of what we want and not a living, breathing thing that we’re glad to be in every day.
If you make weight your only goal, you hold both your body and yourself hostage, as if you don’t exist and your relationship can’t exist until you’re thinner. It’s not fair to either of you. More importantly, it robs you of knowing that your happiness is so much more infinite than what size your waist is.
The irony is, that like so many things in life, when you let go of pursuing them so hard and concentrate on being who you want to be, miracles can begin to happen. By choosing to be in the kind of relationship you want instead of always focusing on the result, results have a chance to come to you without feeling like your life depends on them. When you know your worth is more than your weight you’ll be less attached to it as a representation of who you are, and more likely to be free of the negative cycles of guilt, blame and judgment that may have contributed to acting out with food or numbing out to yourself and your body’s needs. There is another way.
It can be scary to give up the external goal and just look at what’s here right now. But it’s also the only place change really happens: by facing what already is. What is it that you imagine being that perfect weight will somehow make you feel about yourself and your life? And if you can imagine it, why not try to create it in your relationship to your body right now?
You may understand all of this intellectually, and yet there still may be fears and blocks standing in the way of a more positive body relationship. When you try on a great relationship with your body, there might be voices that whisper to you things like, “You can’t have that…” or “The last time you felt good in your body look what happened…” or “You’re not allowed to feel good and not get shot down.” Whatever those voices are, now is the time to take a look at them and see if they might be willing to go away... See if you can stay with those voices until they grow silent; or silence them yourself by looking at how you no longer believe them or believe that they help you.
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