Good Life Cuisine

• Think about the weight when you first started dieting (in my case as a teenager). The increasing weight that you may have experienced is the consequence of dieting. A lot of us would be happy with the weight we initially tried to reduce.
• It may be paradoxical, but the only chance you have at reaching and maintain your healthy weight is to give up the fight
• You may need to grieve. Give yourself the time you need. Write a good-bye letter.

2. Challenge the body police. It’s not only the food police putting us down. Learning how to respect our bodies is very much about challenging our habitual distorted thinking patterns.

• Stop body bashing. Negative self-talk about your body or body parts is not helpful – it may actually be the thing standing between you and your health and happiness. Try to identify the negative statements about your body you believe and tell yourself. Write them down. Develop respectful alternatives. Put them on post-its and hang them around your house.
• Identify and counter your triggers. What are the typical situations, thoughts, memories, experiences which trigger your negative self-talk? These may be chances to practice your prepared respectful responses.
• Stop the “body check game” – do you compare your body with the bodies of others? Not helpful – and not fair. You may be envying a person suffering through a fight with an eating disorder. Or a person who is lean with no effort (I have a friend who has been unsuccessfully trying to gain weight all his life).

3. Reject body discrimination. “Weightism" seems to be one of the last forms of socially accepted discrimination. Examine your own thoughts and attitudes. Do you make unfounded assumptions about overweight people in your environment? Develop an open mind and empathy towards others who are being discriminated against. It will help you have compassion for yourself.

4. Challenge the culture. There is a tremendous social pressure to lose weight. Probably most people around you think overweight people should lose weight. And that “it’s only matter of discipline – eat less and move more, how difficult can it be?” Lean body is idolized by our culture. It’s very hard to reject diet mentality and respect our bodies in such environment. I think it’s important we recognize this (and give ourselves the time to overcome these detrimental messages). Here is a great quote from the Health at Every Size Book. An idea for a reply on someone’s comments on your weight: “Why would I want to lose weight when I'm so damn gorgeous??” She offers other great replies, but this one really spoke to me. Don’t we come in all shapes and sizes? Aren’t we unique? Aren’t we simply damn gorgeous? The book offers a ton of dogma-busting insights into the culturally accepted myths.

5. Live a full life now. Don’t wait to lose those last couple of pounds. Start living the life you today. Get active, dress nicely, go out, be with people, do nice things for your body: massage, sauna, bubble baths…

6. Change the body assessment tools. Kick out the scales and clothes that don’t fit. Marilyn Wann developed a “Yay Scale” that gives you a different compliment each time you step on it - instead of numbers.

7. Take care of your body. Keep it fed (honor your hunger), rested, clean, warm, healthy. We may be used to misuse our bodies that serve us with such dedication our whole lives. Think about the times when you deprived your body of something it needs. Think of your body as a child, your inner child. Imagine that child deprived. What do you want to tell him? Do comfort her

8. Respect your fullness and feel the satisfaction. When we stop eating when our body tells us it had enough, it will be thankful. Feed it with foods it craves and it will reward you with intense feelings of satisfaction. Respect your body by taking the undistracted time to eat. You will start winning its trust back. It will make you feel good. Next time, it will speak up slightly louder and clearer. It will make you feel satisfied. Our body will start relaxing, and converging to its natural state. As it starts trusting you, over time it will even shed some of the unnecessary weight. It's also about stopping the misuse - misusing our bodies by overfeeding it to distract ourselves from emotions. Which brings me to my next point:

9. Cope with feelings without food. To cope with our feelings without using food is to respect both our body and our soul. Bothersome emotions are symptoms. They are the signal that our soul uses to tell us something is wrong, that some of our needs are unmet and that we need to take care of ourselves. We may be hurting. Maybe someone is hurting us, or we are hurting our selves (maybe our inner food police or body police is beating us up). Let’s forgive ourselves for not knowing better – we coped by using food and we survived. But let’s also pledge to nourish our bodies respectfully and take care of our real needs

10. Find support. Search for non-judgmental people in your environment you can talk to. Maybe you need to educate them. There is a lot of support on the Internet – this and many other blogs being one of the forms. Read books – I warmly recommend both the Intuitive Eating and the Health at Every Size books.

Take good care of yourselves.