Hello love,
Today I wanted to share more about feeling at ease in your body. Like me, I’m sure you have tried controlling your body with food. Feeling that you need to diet to control and force your body into a certain size or shape. I find this is a pattern that’s typical among emotional eaters and dieters because we’re constantly trying to control food or our body. We feel really out of control around food and in our body.
That was my experience for many years. I yo-yo dieted thinking something was wrong with me because I was constantly hungry. I was trying everything to get a handle on my eating. I had these rigid rules in my head. I thought that if I finally got to the right size or shape, then I would finally feel OK in my body. I would finally feel at ease in my body.
Maybe this is what you’re thinking, too?
If we think about this, controlling ourselves or controlling something won’t make us feel at ease. It’ll actually create more control in that area of our life, more restriction and more contraction. That’s what happened to me in my journey. I was restricting and controlling and that made me so mentally exhausted.
A bit more about my journey…
I remember having this rock bottom moment slouched on my knees on the floor just crying. My brain wanted to explode because there was so much going on. The pressure created this breaking point and I couldn’t even sustain my thoughts. A space opened up. And what emerged from that place was that I just wanted to be my healthy.
I was just so sick of restricting myself and feeling so uncomfortable. If my healthy meant I had to gain weight, I was willing to do that. I just wanted to feel good in my body. I just wanted to feel healthy. A seed that was planted in that moment. I made a commitment to myself moving forward, I would do what felt good to my body, what was healthy. I wouldn’t punish myself or restrict or try to be in this rigid box.
As I went through that journey, I did everything that I could and I started to learn more and more about just how to be healthy and how to feel good. I realized that the truth was I wanted to feel good. I didn’t need to look a certain way. The funny thing about that is that over the years, my body went back to that size that I was striving for but in a way that I cared, nourished and accepted my body.
I did things that showed my body love. I realized in our society we’re taught the opposite. We have to restrict and contract and be rigid and punish ourselves. The biggest word is punishment. We are all about punishment, rules and rigidity.
I’m going to share with you what I did to start feeling more at ease in my body. The breaking point was my catalyst. What emerged was my desire to be my healthy.
1. Letting the diet mentality go…
From that moment forward, I stopped restricting my food. I stopped punishing myself around food. I didn’t count calories. I didn’t weigh myself any more. I ate foods that nourished my body, but I was open to all foods.
There was no more restriction on foods, which was so huge because when I did that, what happened was I didn’t eat everything in front of me. I didn’t have all the cookies or all the cake. That was one step in that direction.
2. Accept your body
The second thing I did was I learned to accept my body instead of looking at it and criticizing every part and wanting it to be a certain size. I started to just accept where I was. I was being as neutral as possible. I focused on the utility of my body, the strength, and the ability of my body.
That focus helped me transform the way I looked and talked to my body, which was so key and so amazing. (Here is an article you can get started with).
3. Process your emotions
The third thing that I did was I started to process my emotions. At first it was through journaling and being with my emotions as I was emotionally eating. The thing is, and I didn’t know that then, is that our unprocessed emotions live in our body.
They create stress in our body. When we have stress in our body, we don’t feel comfortable. You can check in with yourself when you have pain. You don’t physically feel at ease in your body. You don’t mentally feel at ease. So as I processed and moved through those emotions over time, I found modalities that went deeper.
One of those modalities is the somatic meditations I do with clients. They get into the body to process out all of those unprocessed, unresolved emotions and get to the root of them. That actually lets the body relax on a deep level and be at ease at a deep level. This creates an ease in your body. You’re no longer tight and contracted. That was so huge for me to feel good in my body.
4. Additional Fun Things!
Of course, I started treating my body with so much care and doing things like Epsom salt baths which relaxes the system, facemarks + great products to show my care physically. But what came before that were these deeper steps above. Sometimes we think we love our body with the surface stuff but we have to do the deeper work to let our body know that we care and we accept it.
I hope this video helps you see that feeling at ease in your body has nothing to do with a size or a weight. This doesn’t mean you can’t get to your ideal size or weight or anything like that. But there are deeper things at play creating that unease in your body.
It’s really how you think about yourself, how you’ve been restricting and keeping emotions in that creates this contraction in the body, this unease. Body Acceptance is one phase we cover in The Emotional Eating Evolution Program.
Body acceptance is so key. There are different levels to this. I’ve shared with you one exercise that we do in the program above. The better we are at putting all the pieces together, the easier it is for us to move through our emotional eating and to ditch dieting. If this resonates with you and you want to dive in deeper, then I invite you to book in a complimentary call to see if the program is a fit HERE.
If you have any questions, leave them below. I look forward to connecting with you in the next video and I hope you have a great day.
To ease,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert.
