Diet Roller Coaster or Joyfully Nourished?
In my work with women who are perfectly exhausted from trying to be perfect, I often end up teaching that it is a crazy notion that we have to feel bad about ourselves in order to do better.
Diets don’t work because they are based on the idea that we are bad, morally bad, because of the food we eat. With this underlying belief, we then go about trying to ignore our bodies’ signals of hunger in order to follow someone else’s guidelines about what we should eat.
Aside from the fact that these guidelines are often contradictory, they are also always changing. Think about the innocent egg, a villain one year, then good, but in limited quantity, then “the perfect protein package”.
Meanwhile we have learned to completely cut off our connection with our own body’s signals to us. Food becomes a preoccupation and an enemy.
October 7, 2008
Love That Magnificent Body
Is your body an instrument or an ornament? Research shows that women think of their bodies in terms of beauty, like an ornament or decoration. Men, on the other hand, think about their bodies in terms of function, as an instrument for accomplishing things.
As a result, women make choices about what to wear, what to eat, what to love and what to hate about themselves all based on what they will look like. You don’t see many men squeezing themselves into tight undergarments to make themselves look smaller and smoother. And women reject and criticize the very parts of themselves that support them in being strong and capable in the world. The other day, I heard two young women discussing how they had stopped hiking or using the treadmill, uphill because it made their legs look too muscular! So, what’s the decision here? Good cardio? Forget about it. I’d rather have a weak heart and thin legs.
Our culture has always had strong views about what makes a woman beautiful. The prized look changes from time to time, but it is always narrow and limiting. Women come in all shapes and sizes. Most of us can never look like the models in the clothing ads. Some of those who can, only do so by compromising their health and their enjoyment of a normal life.