A Kinder Relationship With Food And Your Body

We've had experiences of being shamed in our body,

Around our body,

About our body,

About our food and eating.

And one of the things that I've been noticing is the history that I carry.

So my own personal history,

Myself as a child,

Myself as an adult,

I was what you would call a normal weight until I was in my early 20s.

And then I was having a lot of disturbance,

Things that were happening that were upsetting.

I didn't have any help with it.

That was the early 70s.

There was no self-help section in a bookstore.

Did the best I could,

I had a lot of trauma in my teen years that I hadn't ever dealt with,

Didn't even think about really as trauma.

I started to gain weight and then I started to have the experience being shamed for my body weight and did a lot of work in the 80s around being friends with my body.

I was in a workshop,

A fat is a feminist issue workshop in the 80s and realized,

I think I was probably around 200 pounds at that point,

That I had a much friendlier relationship with my body than the people who were there who were what we would call a normal weight.

And that was something that was really helpful to work with.

And then over time,

Started exercising and eating better.

And I came down to what I would call,

Again,

A more regular weight in my body.

So that was about 10,

15 years.

And then I started working a lot.

And working 60 hours a week is not conducive to keeping your body healthy.

I had the difficulties of being in an unhealthy relationship and then leaving that relationship and adjusting to it.

And then when I moved out here,

I was living on my own for the first time in 30 years.

That was a real adjustment too.

And I was just starting to kind of ease into a more regular relationship with food again.

And then when COVID happened,

Like so many of us,

I started eating because I was scared.

So I gained a bit more weight and I noticed that my old patterns with food,

I'm looking to food for comfort because there was no people here.

I live alone.

Luckily I have my dog Shanti.

So I'm just saying this because so many people have common elements of that.

No matter what our body size is,

It's our relationship with our body that really causes so much joy or so much suffering or probably accommodation.

How can we live in the body that we have,

In the culture of shame and control that we live in?

And some of us had pretty intense experiences of that as a child,

And some of us had perhaps a little bit more ease in that.

Some people were large-bodied as a child.

I wasn't,

So I didn't have that experience of being bullied.

But what is our experience,

And how can we hold all of that with kindness?

So let's sit with that for a moment,

See what comes up for you.

Take a few breaths.

Notice what's in your heart,

What's in your body,

What's in the sensations and energy body.

What are your thoughts?

And notice what images come up.

Sometimes there's an image of us feeling cornered or feeling shamed or doing something that we are ashamed of perhaps.

There's a lot of different experiences that we've had.

We've probably all felt awkward in our body.

Some people were too skinny,

As they would say.

Some people were too fat,

As they would say.

I don't like those words,

In a way,

Because the words themselves can be quite activating.

But if you had less muscle and fat on your body,

If you were thin,

Especially if you're a male,

Males are shamed more for that than women are.

If you have an eating disorder or if you have dysregulated eating,

We know that inside.

It doesn't always show on the outside,

But we know that.

Of all of the components of who you are and how you're moving through life.

Could you hold space for all of that right now?

As an adult,

As someone who is probably much kinder to ourselves than we used to be,

The inner critic is still active in many people.

I don't tend to have it anymore.

I've done a lot of work on that and I've brought a lot of awareness to why is that shaming voice here?

So if you have a lot of endocrinic activity,

Let's pause and maybe work with that as well.

What does your inner critic say?

What are the words?

Is one thing to look at.

But what is its goal?

So we live in a culture where people who are so-called normal weight are approved of,

People who are too slender,

Too fat are disapproved of,

Judged and shamed.

So sometimes the inner critic is trying to get us to play small or to follow the rules.

To control ourselves.

There's a lot of approval in our culture for controlling ourselves.

Not as much approval for people who are free and who are practicing being free to be who they are.

So that's the culture we live in,

We know that.

So if you have an inner critic,

Especially an inner critic that's in somebody else's voice,

Maybe an internalized voice from childhood,

An internalized voice from peers,

It's natural that we would want to avoid being shamed.

And sometimes the inner critic takes that on as a way to try to prevent that from the outside world.

And it sets us up for this really toxic internal environment where we can be very aggressive with ourselves.

So if you could bring your inner critic in,

Just say,

You know,

I know my senses,

You're trying to help,

But this is really debilitating being shamed.

It's really hard for me to have any kindness for myself when I have this voice inside that's so mean.

The one thing about shame that we know,

It used to be until 10,

15 years ago,

Shaming around food and body size was considered the gold standard.

That's how you got people to change.

And they've done a bunch of research on that and it's exactly the opposite.

Shaming and control cause more dysregulated eating.

It causes more comfort-seeking behaviors because our nervous system is activated.

It's a threat.

Being shamed,

Being told that we're out of control,

Being looked at with contempt shuts us down.

We lose contact with our stronger self.

And so this inner critic,

Especially since we might have had that for 50 years,

It didn't get the message about the research.

So one of the things that we could perhaps do,

We could offer that to our inner critic.

We could say,

You know,

Don't shame me for this.

This isn't gonna help.

It makes it worse.

I get it that you're concerned,

That you're wanting to help.

And maybe what we could do in a situation where we have an inner critic,

We could invite them in and say,

Okay,

From now on,

When I hear that inner critic voice,

I'm going to pause.

I'm going to take a breath.

And I'm gonna notice there's something here that feels threatening,

Otherwise that inner critic voice wouldn't be here.

We could bring ourselves into our own heart.

Even if I've eaten a whole pizza,

Even if all of those things are true,

I could bring that understanding and compassion like I would for someone else I loved.

It's harder to do this for ourselves,

I understand that.

I could bring myself into my own heart and say,

Oh man,

Look at the suffering that I was in at that time.

And the only way that I could figure out how to make myself feel better.

Was to turn to an old comfort.

So for some people it's binge eating,

For some people it's control of eating.

For some people,

It's a lot of food rules and feeling safer when you're more controlling.

There's a lot of things that go on underground that have the same root.

I'm in an experience of feeling threatened.

How do we work with that?

How do we bring ourselves into our own heart?

Even if the rest of the world looks at us in a certain way.

We don't have to do that to ourselves.

I think that's one of the really powerful messages that I know from working with my own self.

And the reason I'm comfortable enough to share it is because I've resolved a lot of that.

I don't shame myself anymore.

I don't feel disconnected from my body.

I notice I still have some habits.

Sometimes now for me,

It's more that I live alone,

I cook all my own food,

And when I go to the city,

I want something exciting to eat.

So that's not quite the same as the urgency of a trauma response,

Though.

That's a habit that's a little easier to work with.

It's kindness,

It's awareness.

I'm going to just give us a few minutes of quiet here so you can absorb what it is that's coming up in you,

In your heart,

In your body.

What are the thoughts in your mind?

What are some of the threads of this for you?

Might be around food,

It might be around being shamed for something else.

Take a few breaths.

Often when we feel under threat or we feel shamed,

We hold our breath.

Letting your breath be continuous,

Relaxing your body can help.

What is the bigger picture here?

What are some of the threads that weave into your experience around this?

And what is the most helpful thing that you could do right now?

And it might be,

I can see that there's some issues here that are surfacing that it might be good for me to work with some of those.

If you're a parent,

Which I am,

I've had a certain amount of activation over this last few weeks around things that happened with my son when he was at home when he was younger and the kinds of food issues that were going on with his stepmother in particular.

I've had some emotion around that,

Some compulsive thinking around that.

I've had to work with that.

So that's one of the things that was really helpful is just to notice,

Oh,

There's still some energy in that.

Maybe I could spend a little bit of time in my heart and see what's here.

We need to be able to work with what's here.

And to do it in a way that leaves us more whole and not ashamed and kind of hiding out.

So it might be something like that for you.

Might be your body size,

It might be something more internal.

Many people had environments at home where they just wanted to gulp down their food and get out of there because mealtimes were so uncomfortable.

Or where you just kind of zoned out because you couldn't stand to be there.

So we might have carried that habit through to our life now as well.

It's not a simple thing to say,

Oh,

I'm going to eat more mindfully.

And once a day,

I'm going to put away the screens.

I'm going to go outside and sit at a table.

I'm going to be more mindful of my food.

That's a natural thing that we would do.

If we didn't have trauma around food,

We would be doing that all the time.

We would enjoy our food.

We would enjoy the colors,

The textures,

The smells.

We would eat food that's nourishing in our emotions,

Our heart,

As well as in our body.

So that would be the healthy way to eat.

And if we're not eating that way,

Then why not?

Part of it's cultural.

We're very busy.

But even if you're not that busy.

There's reasons why we avoid being in our body and being here.

So we could offer ourselves,

When I say offer ourselves respect,

That's part of why.

These are circumstances that are difficult.

A lot of them happened and started to happen when we were a child.

Some of the trauma came from within the family,

Some came at school.

If you're in a female body,

There's a lot of body shaming around all kinds of things,

Around sexuality,

Around weight.

What could you open into now?

Is there anything about this that's inspiring you?

Well,

You know,

I could try that and see.

Maybe this is more of an issue than I thought it was,

Or maybe it's just something that I could revisit.

I find that we work with ourselves and it gets deeper and deeper and maybe we're able to be kind with ourselves on one level,

But then we come back to it and it's like,

I was still kind of shaming myself there.

I could open up a little bit more into kindness.

Sometimes it helps to have a picture of ourselves at a certain age,

Kind of just look at that once in a while,

Like,

Oh,

That's right.

Or if we have someone in our life who we love,

A child,

A grandchild,

A sister,

A friend,

And if this is someone who's suffering because of this kind of shame and control issues,

We would probably have a lot of compassion for them,

More likely that than shaming.

So if we could bring some understanding to someone else we care about,

Then perhaps we could offer that to ourselves as well.

If you're inspired,

If you're saying,

You know,

I don't feel like I have a lot of dysregulation anymore,

But I don't feel like I enjoy my food very much.

Why is that?

And maybe I could work with that a little.

There's so many different ways that we could open up into more freedom around this.

And reducing shame is one of those ways.

And exploring it is one of those ways and bringing ourselves into our own heart is another way.

Whatever it is that you eat for the rest of the day and the rest of the week,

I hope you bring some joy into that if we can enjoy our food.

It means that we've let go of some of the good,

Bad food rules.

It means that we've probably silenced the inner critic to some extent and that we're able to support ourselves in a kinder way.