I Was Fed Up With Hating My Body. How I Ended My War.

Many years ago, while getting dressed to go on a hike, I caught my reflection in the mirror and, once again, was unhappy with what I saw.

Immediately, my inner critic swung into full gear. My mind was overtaken by negative body talk as I filled my backpack and drove off to one of my favorite trails.

My plan to enjoy a lovely day of hiking along the coast was spoiled by the relentless voice in my head telling me that my body was a problem that needed to be fixed.

Completely Fed Up
While I had struggled with negative thoughts about my body for decades, this time I had finally hit a tipping point.

I couldn’t go on any longer.

I was completely fed up with hating my body. 

I was done wasting so much of my life at war with my body and decided, once and for all, to do something about it. 

And for the first time ever, doing something didn’t mean changing my body. It meant changing my relationship with it.

No More Body Bashing
One of the first steps I took was changing my internal body talk.

When I stepped out of the shower, instead of dodging my reflection in the bathroom mirror and running for cover under a towel to avoid a distressing body-bashing session, I opened the shower curtain and faced my reflection head-on. 

I practiced gazing at my body without ruthlessly picking it apart, without zooming in on my perceived flaws, without judging and agonizing over what I had been conditioned to believe was wrong.

Instead of thinking “My stomach is disgusting” or “I hate my thighs,” I simply thought “This is my body.”

I didn’t try to make the leap from body loathing to body love, from body negativity to body positivity. Nor did I force myself to say positive affirmations. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things; they just felt very inaccessible and insincere for where I was at. 

Instead, I focused on what felt attainable. I aimed for a neutral place to land.

“This is my body” felt about as neutral as I could get.

I still often didn’t like what I saw in the mirror, but unconditional body acceptance wasn’t my initial goal. Ending my negative body talk—and the downward shame spiral it triggered—was.

By swapping negativity with neutrality, I no longer got swept away by my critical thoughts. I was able to stop focusing and fixating on my body and just move on with my day. 

One of Many Steps
Of course, changing my body talk didn’t come quickly or easily. And it was just one of many challenging and necessary steps I needed to take to make peace with my constantly changing body. 

Certainly, divesting from diet culture and uprooting my anti-fat bias were absolutely essential, major steps. 

And while I refer to all these actions as steps, they are really ongoing practices that enable me to be as resilient as possible in a world that’s constantly lying to us about what our bodies are supposed to look like to be considered acceptable, healthy, worthy, valuable and lovable.

Neutralizing my internal body talk was a starting place for me. Perhaps it can be for you, too.

My Summer Reading List

I’m an avid reader and love losing myself in a good book. 

My reading list is long, and I usually have three different books going at any given moment so I can easily turn to whichever one I’m in the mood for.

Following are a few books regarding diet and wellness cultures, disordered eating, anti-fat bias, body liberation and more that I’m excited to dive into this summer. Perhaps you will be, too.

Please note, I’ve provided links to Amazon but also encourage folks to buy from their favorite independent bookseller or to check out books from their local library.

Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture
Virginia Sole-Smith
This New York Times best seller "exposes the daily onslaught of fatphobia and body shaming that kids face" and offers strategies for navigating our harmful diet culture and weight-stigmatizing world.

Whether or not you have kids, if you’re desiring anti-diet, fat-positive content, I recommend checking out this book as well as Sole-Smith's Burnt Toast newsletter, podcast and online community.

The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation and Dubious Diagnosis and Find Your True Well-Being
Christy Harrison
When I had an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating, I rarely questioned anything I heard and read. If I had been taught, by resources such as this book, to view diet and wellness content through a more critical lens (e.g., Is this fad evidence-based? How solid is the research behind this claim?), I would have saved myself a lot of time, money and unnecessary suffering.

I'm also a big fan of Harrison's first book, Anti-Diet, and recommend it as a great place to start if you're new to this world. 

The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom
Chrissy King
Through a combination of memoir, cultural analysis, exercises and prompts, King guides her readers on an exploration of how racism intersects with the diet, wellness and fitness industries and urges us to aim for body liberation instead of body positivity.

What’s Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety
Cole Kazdin 
Weaving together her personal story with investigative reporting, Kazdin examines how disordered eating has become both normalized and encouraged in our appearance-obsessed, weight-stigmatizing culture and how our flawed treatment systems can hinder recovery.

Recent Reads
I want to also mention two books I’ve recently read that I also recommend: Weightless and Reclaiming Body Trust.

Virtual Book Club, Anyone?
I relish talking to others about the books we’re reading and am considering starting a virtual book club to discuss important works like these. If this sounds like something you'd like to participate in, I’d love to hear from you.

Note: In alliance with the fat-acceptance community, I use fat as a neutral descriptor.

I Don’t Want to Pass My Food Issues on to My Kids

Can you relate to Sandra's story?

For as long as she can remember, Sandra's mom has meticulously counted calories and carefully weighed almost everything she eats. 

When her aunts visit her parent's house, the conversation is often centered on who is doing what diet and how it’s going, together celebrating their wins and commiserating over their struggles. 

Their own mother, Sandra's grandma, is a very restrictive eater who frequently comments on family members’ weight and polices everyone's eating.

Sandra's dad also has a fraught relationship with food. Over the years, he’s swung numerous times from eating everything to restricting something, whether it’s fat, carbs or the hours he’s allowed to eat.

In Sandra’s childhood home, food was feared, moralized and demonized. Almost every eating decision was based on how it would impact one's weight.   

At the pubescent age of 11, when it's normal for kids to gain a lot of weight, Sandra's mom took her to her first weight-loss meeting.

Although she felt a little weird being the only kid in the room, she also felt inspired by the success stories the women in the circle shared, especially when everyone cheered and clapped. 

It felt good to be a part of their club and to be doing something to fix her apparently problematic body.

Ending the Legacy
Stepping into that weight-loss clinic as a young girl launched Sandra on the dieting rollercoaster. Since then, she’s tried every diet under the sun. After more than 20 years of yo-yo dieting, she’s hit rock bottom. 

Even though she doesn’t like her body, she can’t stand the thought of going on one more diet. More than anything, she can’t stand the thought of passing her family’s legacy of body shame and dieting on to her kids.

She doesn’t want them to view food as good or bad, feel guilty about their eating, hate their bodies or obsess over their weight.

Many of my clients who are thinking about starting a family or already have kids express their desire to protect their children from our harmful diet culture. 

They don’t want them to suffer the way they and their family members have and thus are deeply motivated by the idea of not handing down their food and body challenges.

This is also true for many of my clients who don’t have children but have kids in their life, whether it’s their nieces, nephews, friends’ kids, students or team players.

I get really excited when my clients share this desire with me because I know the positive ripple effect that can occur when just one person heals their relationship with food and their body and how doing so can help put an end to a family history of disordered eating and anti-fat bias.

What Kind of Role Model?
For my clients with this goal, we spend time exploring what type of role model they want to be when it comes to food and bodies.

We talk about how they can reclaim their ability to eat intuitively while helping the kids in their life maintain their ability to do so.

Then we do the challenging yet rewarding work that’s required to divest from diet culture and build a peaceful relationship with food and their body, one that they’re excited to pass along.