Your Body Is Not The Problem

Imagine telling a 4 year old she is a weak, immoral, failure for enjoying her chocolate birthday cake. Really imagine doing that to her. Does it make you cringe? Want to cry? Want to protect her fiercely from this absurdity? I hope so because this scenario really happens. Sometimes directly, sometimes inadvertently. Maybe it happened to you in one way or another. Maybe it continues to happen to you when you are shamed by internalized and external diet culture and fat phobia.

 Can you see that you’re not very different from this 4 year old girl? Nourishing, delighting in, and respecting our body is our birthright.  Yet, our culture has managed to convince us that we only deserve to do so if we look a certain way. Probably not even then.

 Diet culture sets genetically and biologically  impossible standards for us and then gaslights us into believing we are failures when we can’t sustain them. 

As blogger Isabel Foxen Duke says: “ The only time a person EVER “falls off a wagon” is when there is a wagon to fall off of; a set of rules, ideals, or beliefs around  food that we let determine how we feel about ourselves.” 

In other words, you can’t fail if there is no disordered standard by which you are judging yourself.  Have you, our fatphobic culture or people in your life been putting you on “wagons” only to shame you when you inevitably fall off? 

It’s an exhausting and heart-breaking cycle, isn’t it? And you keep blaming yourself for being stuck in it. 

What if there was a way out? What if you stopped getting on the “wagon” and reclaimed that birthright you were shamed into giving up? I know, it sounds nice, but impossible, right?

I get it. I really do. And I believe it is possible. 

You deserve to respect, enjoy, and nourish yourself  no matter what kind of body you are in. 

What if the problem isn’t your body? What if the problem is a disordered, diet culture? 

That 4 year old in you needs you to consider that possibility.