How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 8: Respect Your Body

The eighth principle of Intuitive Eating is: Respect Your Body. If you have been following along with this Integrating Intuitive and Mindful Eating series on my blog, then you might have noticed how principle 7 and now principle 8 are not directly related to food. (Principle 9 isn’t either—stay tuned!) These principles address how to be with yourself in a more mindful and compassionate way both internally and externally which naturally impacts how to be with your food.

With this principle I will explore and address how to be with your body in a respectful manner, which most people struggle with at some point in their lives. If you notice the chatter in your mind or out loud about your body, what is it usually about? Is it usually positive or negative in nature? The truth is that all bodies deserve respect, yours, hers, his, theirs and mine. There are no exceptions.

When you notice any internal bias you have in relation to what is a “good” or “healthy” body and alternatively what is a “not as good” or “unhealthy” body, where did these biases come from. Let’s be clear, it’d be rare not to have some internal bias seeing as how much emphasis is placed on body image, weight loss and standards of beauty in our culture and naturally we are always concerned about how we are measuring up in relation to these standards.

How you think about, speak about and interact with your own body is what this principle is about. However, it is helpful to consider any body shaming, judging or otherwise you notice that you do internally, or say out loud, towards others and practice shifting these thoughts and words to body neutrality, positivity and kindness. This will support your own process in offering these same concepts to yourself.

Mindfulness offers a significant amount of support to this concept of respecting your body, especially as it relates to the aspect of being nonjudgmental. One of the most effective ways to begin to respect your body is to practice body neutrality through nonjudgment. This is a very useful practice and just like is was applied to food in the fourth principle of intuitive eating: Challenge the Food Police it’s tremendously powerful to apply the concept on nonjudgment to how you relate to your body.

Learning to understand body neutrality is simple but not necessarily easy. To practice body neutrality, find a time when you can just be. Close your eyes and scan your body in your mind’s eye from head to toe moving intentionally through each part of your body. With each body part, first name it and then find the facts about it, for example: ears-used for hearing located on the sides of my head. Notice how there are no judgments, just facts, just what is true about this body part in this moment. Maintain neutrality and nonjudgment throughout. Notice how this feels with body parts you may not have any positive or negative associations about and parts that you do.

The body parts you find it most difficult to be nonjudgmental about with yourself, you will need to practice more regularly. For many this simple and yet not easy body neutrality practice is very helpful and eye opening. Get really curious about why you have the judgments you have about your body. With each judgment consider:

• Where did each judgment come from?

• What messages did you hear/receive about your body or body judgments from your family growing up?

• What messages did you hear/receive about your body or body judgments from your peers?

• What messages did you hear/receive about your body or body judgments from society?

• Who set the standards for “beauty” and body shape that you adhere to?

• What messages do you wish you’d heard or would like to live by?

• Can you begin to offer these messages to yourself now?

Once you practice body neutrality until it feels more natural, acceptable and your mind does not attempt to pull you towards the negative, you can begin to practice body positivity and body gratitude. Within this practice, you go through the same exercise, resting comfortably and work your way from head to toe in your mind’s eye and name each body part and something you like about it and something you can be grateful for about it. If you find it difficult that’s ok! Stay with the practice and continue a few times per week until it becomes a more and more comfortable practice.

Try taking this attitude with you wherever you go. As you begin to shift your own internal judgments about your body and allow that to impact how you judge the bodies of others, begin to notice and reflect on the following:

• How much mental space is taken up by body judgment?

• How often do you judge the bodies of others?

• How often do you compare your body to the bodies of others?

• How does this make you feel?

• Why do you think you do this?

• Are you ready to shift this internal experience?

If so, begin practicing body neutrality of others. Even if your thought begins with a judgment, can you create a neutral thought such as it’s just another person in the body that they have today, it’s not good or bad, it just is. As this becomes more comfortable, begin to shift into body positivity of others. What compliment can you offer either internally to recognize it for yourself or out loud if it’s possible to do so.

These simple but not easy practices can transform your relationship to your body, to yourself and to food. When you can just be with your body without the negativity and noise you will create a less stressful internal environment for yourself. When you begin to shift from body shaming, judging and comparing you open yourself to feel a great deal of respect for your own amazing body as well as respecting the bodies of others.

Inner Strength Focus: Giving and Receiving Love to Heal Emotional Eating

The ability to give and receive love is an inner strength possessed by those who are happy and content within their lives. Growing this as an inner strength—the ability to give and receive love in relation to making peace with food—relates to the way you treat food as a metaphor for how you treat yourself and possibly others. Do you control your food? Do you over do it with food? Do you obsess about food? How does this play out with your relationship with others and with yourself? How would you define your relationship with food? If it is a struggle it may point to deeper struggles you are experiencing within, which inevitably may impact how lovable you feel.

Relationships can be complicated while also being deeply life enhancing. When you work on a relationship and allow yourself to fully engage without attempting to control the relationship (and therefore control the love you give OR receive), the relationship will naturally improve with effort and focus. If your relationship with food is challenging where you control it at times and you feel powerless to it at times, it may be useful to, first, take a look at your relationship with yourself and then the relationships with those closest to you.

The first place to build awareness relating to your ability to receive love is to check in with how you receive love from yourself and others. Do you feel loved by others? Do you willingly receive love from others? Do you put conditions on how lovable you feel and therefore conditions on the love you are willing to receive? Does receiving pleasure from food in any way equate to where you receive love in your life? Do you use food to feel love?

You can begin to take inventory as to how you receive love—and then consider where food fits in—as the first step. The second step is to determine where you could let love into your life more completely without attempting to control it. The third step is to determine if you feel truly worthy of receiving love. This can be a tough one, however at our core many of us at times can feel unlovable (and then unconsciously reject or feel suspicious of any love that does come our way). If this is you, then you may be attempting to fill that void in other—possibly unhealthy ways. This is usually the sign of being deeply hurt and not getting your needs met in some way or another in your primary relationships in life. There is no need to place blame here, just know that once you can identify the struggle and origination of these feelings, you can begin to heal. One of the biggest tasks in life is to learn how to love ourselves in a healthy way and essentially meet our own needs so we do not look to others to feel loved out of desperation and fear that we aren’t lovable, but rather to enhance life through the meaningful connections we create.

The fact is that each and every one of us is lovable and capable of rebuilding the ability to feel that way. Once you can build self-awareness you can open yourself to receiving love—first and foremost from yourself. Self-love is a softening towards yourself, being kind with how you dialogue with yourself. Often when we overeat or attempt to control food we might think, “what’s wrong with me that I can’t stick to a plan, diet or exercise regimen?” Try softening this to, “what happened to me today, triggered me, or what emotions am I struggling to feel today?” See the difference? Your inner dialogue can make a tremendous difference in how you feel.

The second place is to accept love where it is freely given rather than attempting to chase it. If it’s just from yourself to begin with, practice accepting that and see how that expands with time. When it comes to giving love, do you attempt to love others through how you are with them or through what you physically give, such as food? There are many ways to offer love to others and show people that you love them, however, if you feel you are giving out love with the hopes of receiving it—that may not be authentic, unconditional love. Rather, that may be the feeling of being unlovable and desperate to feel something. When you authentically give love, it comes without condition or expectation and this may be one of the most challenging tasks of our lifetime—to understand, give, and receive unconditional love.

This week, focus on building awareness with how you interact with food. Do you look to food to fill a void, potentially with an attempt to feel or receive love? Do you give out food to attempt to receive love that you may not feel you deserve without something attached? This can be quite complicated to sort out and a bit overwhelming. Remember, awareness is always where to begin. Without awareness you keep moving yet without change and continue to repeat cycles that are potentially damaging—or at least uncomfortable and certainly not useful. When you become aware you have the opportunity to make a choice. You can choose to give and receive love from a place of authenticity. You can choose to recognize your patterns with food and build awareness that food is not love and that you deserve to love yourself.

5 Practices to Upgrade Your Self-Image

If you are ready to ditch the negative internal talk and bring on a greater sense of confidence, well-being and elevate your view of yourself, I recommend you keep on reading. Whether you struggle with emotional eating or not, so many people struggle with a negative or unfavorable view of themselves. Do you do this: Do you hide your value, question your worth and feel less important than others? If you do, today is the day to take back ownership of you. Today is the day to reclaim your confidence, your self-compassion and step into your personal power. Are you ready?

The five following practices will allow you to upgrade your self-image. They will help you create a new, more favorable self-image. They will support a new way of being with, talking to and portraying yourself to both yourself—and to those around you. I love this quote by Marianne Williamson, she says: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be?” I love that quote because it offers such a powerful shift in our typical patterns of thinking. So, why do you shirk away from your light, your greatness, your true potential? Most likely because it is pretty scary to even imagine! Maybe because it is not so easy to maintain. Maybe because you’ve never been allowed to feel your greatness, however I imagine, deep down, you know that it’s there.

To be great, to show our light to the world and to step into our personal power is often not how we are taught to be. I just recently listened to a book that emphasized that is actually each of our moral and ethical duty to be our best, to live up to our potential and to share our gifts with the world. If you have something great to offer but don’t because of fear, that’s a disservice to the world. That feels very empowering, motivating and even liberating. 

So here are the five practices you can implement today to begin to elevate yourself, upgrade your self-image and step into your personal power. No matter what you do, who you are, or what fears may be holding you back, take time to integrate these practices and you will start your up-leveling process right away!

1.    Use the Affirmation: “In This Moment, I Have Enough, I am Enough.”

Affirmations are so incredibly valuable because they help to create a new way of speaking to yourself within your conscious mind. Affirmations invite a place to be kind, compassionate and loving towards yourself. This particular affirmation is valuable because it releases and shifts any feelings that you are lacking something. When you operate from a place of lack and scarcity mindset, you create an internal sense that you are not safe and secure. A lacking mentality implies that something needs to change before you can be enough or before you can share yourself and your gifts with others and with the world. This affirmation dispels that self-created myth. Even better, record yourself repeating this affirmation for 1-3 minutes and listen to it daily.

I encourage you to practice saying this affirmation at least three times daily for forty days in a row (you can keep going beyond 40 days, but commit to that at least to begin!) Offer yourself time to journal about how it feels when you say it to yourself and any shifts in your ability to accept it over time and your perceptions of being enough.

2.    Look in the Mirror and Smile at Yourself 3 Times a Day

Smiling is a simple and yet incredibly powerful facial gesture to share with yourself and with others. It can improve how you feel instantly. Try this practice of looking at yourself in the mirror, offering a kind, full-faced smile (don’t ½ ass it here!) and gaze into your own eyes in a kind and compassionate way for about 15-20 seconds.

Practice this three times daily for the next forty days and notice the impact. Again, use a journal to track how you feel when you do this practice. Sometimes it may feel awkward, other times it may be quite touching. No matter what you experience, track it in this way and notice the impact. 

3.    Tell Yourself, “I GOT THIS” with Each Struggle You Endure

I actually have “I Got This” come up as a reminder on my phone every day at 1 pm. Every single day, it brings me a sense of relief and makes me relax and smile. Because really, not matter what, I do. Life is good, life is hard, life is demanding, life is uncertain, life is all the things. Knowing that YOU know that “I GOT THIS” can be extremely reassuring. This awareness builds confidence and improves your self-image instantly. You shift from a space of stress to one of empowerment and the ability to say in that moment, “oh yeah I do!” With each struggle, remind yourself that you’ve experienced other struggles and so far you’ve survived them all. So with this one, no matter how large or small, you’ve totally got this!

4.    Reflect on Your Goals and Success Daily

If you’ve been reading here for a little while, then you know I’m a big fan of setting goals. Planning your action steps and reviewing your progress regularly is a form of self-accountability. I know for myself, if I plan it, it is WAY more likely to actually happen. If I don’t, there’s a good chance I will get busy with…pretty much nothing, at least nothing important. The next step is actually reflecting on your goals and the success you are creating through taking action towards your goals daily. When you do this, you are creating a sense of self-discipline by being accountable to your own daily check in. Begin this daily practice and notice the impact on your progress towards your goals. As you see yourself making progress and creating the change in your life that you desire you will experience an upgrade in your self-image.

5.    Practice Confidence

Confidence can be learned, practiced and developed over time as it is essentially a memory of success. When you act in a way that reflects internal strength and confidence, it is inevitable that you will upgrade your self-image. When you stand up for yourself, even in a small, simple way that may not seem like much to someone else but feels like a big deal to you, you will elevate your own view of yourself. This naturally will elevate how others experience you as well. Begin this practice by noticing your posture. Stand up tall, relax your shoulders and breathe deeply and completely. This simple shift in posture can make a big shift in how you feel as well as how you are perceived by others. Body language makes a big impact. Once you change your posture, begin to practice the “putting yourself out there” confidence piece. Do you struggle with speaking up for what you want? Do this at least one time this week—no matter what! Do you struggle to speak up in your school or work setting in order to share your knowledge and expertise? Do this at least one time this week—no matter what! Do you struggle to pay attention to your own needs because you want everyone else to be happy all of the time? Spend time in self-reflection becoming familiar with your own personal likes and dislikes, wants and needs. Then, tell at least one person about one thing you discovered about yourself and let your needs be known. Afraid to share your creative gifts? Try singing, playing your instrument, showing your art work or written work to at least one person who you trust this week—no matter what! 

The most important element to building confidence and upgrading your self-image is to make it about you and your own view of yourself. Do these practices to express who you are. You are not doing them in an effort to gain anything in return from others, such as attention or reinforcement. Now you may receive those things, but that will only satisfy your pesky ego, and will not last (the ego is never satisfied). When you feel good inside because you created a spark of joy through believing in yourself, acting with confidence, smiling to yourself, repeating an affirmation or making progress towards your goals—that will be the lasting positive experience that you can continue grow with.

The last thing I’ll say is that upgrading your self-image is all about exiting your comfort zone and entering a place that may create your fears to take over. I’ll quote the great Elizabeth Gilbert to address these scary feelings: “Your fear is the most boring thing about you.” Today, commit to one or more of these five strategies to upgrade your self-image, and maybe, let it be the one that scares you the most. Feel the fear and do it anyway!