Body Image Blogs
Overcoming Negative Body Thoughts
When I first set out in search of non-diet interventions that could change the course of my relationship to food and overcoming negative body thoughts, I came across a study about the impact of body satisfaction on healthy behaviors, including food & exercise. That blew my mind.
I will share that with you in this blog post that focuses on body image and how it impacts your relationship to food. I will also tackle the concept called body neutrality and how it is different from body positivity; as well as intuitive eating. I’ll also share with you a free tool that I created to get you started with body neutrality and intuitive eating so you can enjoy your full life now… regardless of your body size. Here’s what you’re going to learn from this article:
Overcoming negative body thoughts
Body neutrality versus body positivity
Body neutrality and intuitive eating
Overcoming negative body thoughts
A 2013 study published by the Journal of Obesity study found no link between body weight and the way women feel about themselves.
Yet, the findings show a link between how women feel about themselves and the healthy activities they engage in. Meaning, the better they felt about their bodies, the more likely they were to take care of themselves by eating well and being active. This allows them to create a positive cycle.
Likewise, dissatisfaction with their bodies discouraged the women from taking part in certain activities, eating properly to fuel their bodies, and could eventually lead to weight gain.
“Body satisfaction or dissatisfaction isn’t correlated with body weight,” the research concluded.
That blew my mind. That meant overcoming negative body thoughts and making peace with my body size could actually improve my health behaviors, eat better and ultimately be healthier now… unconditional of my body size.
That’s how body neutrality was born.
What is Body Neutrality and how it helps in overcoming negative body thoughts
Body Neutrality empowers you to embrace yourself as you are, including the parts you don’t like about yourself.
Its focus is to avoid self-hate while simultaneously relieving you from the pressure of having to love your body.
The goal is to respect and accept your body for what it is – and that’s it.
Body Neutrality recognizes that not everyone is going to love every part of themselves all the time because that’s an unrealistic expectation, to say the least.
The reality is that some days you’re going to look in the mirror like, “Damn it, yeah, thank you, legs for letting me travel. Thank you, arms, for allowing me to type this inspirational post and thank you, belly, for creating life!”
And then, there’ll be those days where you stand in front of the very same mirror, focusing on that cellulite you hate or the wrinkle that suddenly seems so obvious.
Body neutrality versus body positivity
Embracing Body Neutrality over Body Positivity allows you to experience negative feelings about yourself, but without the pressure that comes with having to be positive all the time.
In other words, it’s a middle ground between positivity and negativity (shaming) – that’s neutrality.
Body Neutrality is the safe bridge between body shaming and body positivity. It’s about being grateful for your body and everything it does for you because it does a lot. You are alive right now.
So, Body Neutrality is centric on the process of accepting your body.
Body Neutrality & Intuitive Eating
For many of us, we’ve had years of suffering through body shaming. Along the way, we’ve picked up coping behaviors to neutralize the pain associated with body image struggles.
Being the victim of body shaming, most of it from our own mind, is difficult, to say the least. So, no wonder that many of us have become, along the way, emotional eaters or binge eaters.
Combine the suffering that comes along with body shaming with the notion that food is the gateway to “loving our life and body,” food has become this enemy that we need to control in order to end the suffering.
Healing our relationship to food is necessary in order to make peace with our body. Intuitive eating is the way in which you can achieve both: body neutrality and peace with food.
Moreover, intuitive eating teaches you to respect your body.
Intuitive eating teaches you to respect your innate body messages. This includes hunger and fullness to have a healthy and respectful relationship with your body. This is what we teach the women inside our Conquer & Thrive community so they can live and enjoy their full life right now… unconditionally!
The bottom line
You can’t hate yourself to health or peace. Love always wins. Always.
Acceptance doesn’t mean giving up. It means seeing what is and adopting a non-judgmental perspective. Accepting allows you to improve and grow instead of obsessing about why it’s wrong and stress over the results.
Need help to get started with Body Neutrality and Intuitive Eating?
I have created a free audio guide for you to get started with body neutrality and intuitive eating and finally overcome negative body thoughts so you too can be on your way to freedom!
How to overcome negative body thoughts?
A 2013 study published by the Journal of Obesity study found no link between body weight and the way women feel about themselves. Yet, the findings show a link between how women feel about themselves and the healthy activities they engage in. Meaning, the better they felt about their bodies, the more likely they were to take care of themselves by eating well and being active, allowing them to create a positive cycle.
That meant overcoming negative body thoughts and making peace with my body size could actually improve my health behaviors, eat better and ultimately be healthier now… unconditional of my body size.
What is Body Neutrality?
Body Neutrality empowers you to embrace yourself as you are, including the parts you don’t like about yourself. Its focus is to avoid self-hate while simultaneously relieving you from the pressure of having to love your body. The goal is to respect and accept your body for what it is – and that’s it.
Body neutrality versus body positivity
Embracing Body Neutrality over Body Positivity allows you to experience negative feelings about yourself, but without the pressure that comes with having to be positive all the time. Body Neutrality is the safe bridge between body shaming and body positivity. It’s about being grateful for your body and everything it does for you because it does a lot. You are alive right now.
Body Neutrality & Intuitive Eating
Healing our relationship to food is necessary in order to make peace with our body. Intuitive eating is the way in which you can achieve both: body neutrality and peace with food. Intuitive eating teaches you to respect your innate body messages such as hunger and fullness to have a healthy and respectful relationship with your body.
What is Diet Culture and 4 Steps to Navigate It
If you’ve been following me on social media or reading my blog, you certainly have come across the term “diet culture.” I’ve mentioned it many times before. But what is diet culture? How does it impact your life? And what should you do about it?
This article tackles this topic and teaches you how to opt-out of it. Also, I offer some resources that will help you start a new life outside of this oppressive belief system. Here’s what you’re going to learn from this blog post:
How to navigate the diet culture
Diet culture educational resources
Now, let’s begin exploring the diet culture so you can take your first steps to freedom!
What is diet culture?
From the sound of it, you might think the term “diet culture” refers to a group of people who are on a diet. But it actually has a different meaning.
Christy Harrison, a colleague of mine, has the best diet culture definition. She defines it as a system of belief that worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue. It’s now prevalent in our society and oppresses women from all over the world!
How does this impact your life?
This means you may have spent your entire life thinking that you’re broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin ideal.
That’s just one angle. You can also look at the diet culture from three other angles:
The second angle is that it promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status. It makes you feel compelled, almost obligated, to spend massive amounts of time, energy, and resources, trying to shrink your body so you can fit into this thin ideal. Now, research is very clear that the dieting model has a 95 percent failure rate, so it might as well be an exercise in futility.
The next angle is it demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others. It forces you to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, shames you for making certain food choices, and distracts you from the pleasure of eating as well as from your purpose and power.
Last but not least, it oppresses people who don’t match the supposed picture of health or the thin ideal. This affects us most particularly as women, although it’s starting to affect men.
My 25-year journey inside diet culture
As you probably know, I used to have a love-hate relationship with food and my body. A 25-year career in dieting left me obsessed, frustrated and confused about food. I was also at a loss on how to take care of my body.
Dieting was stealing my life and at 39. Then I decided that I had enough… I finally chose to take my power back and free myself from dieting and body shaming. The Going Beyond The Food Method™️ was born out of my personal journey.
Now, as a health professional, I’ve helped hundreds of women work their way out of this oppressive culture and develop a healthier relationship with food using intuitive eating and body neutrality.
Is diet culture affecting you, too? I invite you to consider its impact on your life. Take our quick self-assessment tool we created to help women determine if intuitive eating is the right solution for them.
How to navigate the diet culture
I invite you, and honestly all women, to become diet culture dropouts! Below are the four steps you need to take in your journey towards freedom:
Understand that you have a choice.
Now is the best time to be a woman. Unlike the generations before us, we’re liberated and empowered! You have to understand that diet culture is a tool that the patriarchy uses to keep us from being in our power. It keeps us busy minding our calories and macros. It induces guilt and so we feel inclined to punish ourselves when we fail.
Whether you want to stay in the diet culture and be oppressed or to break away from it and change your life, it’s totally up to you. But you should know that you have the power to make that choice.
Take responsibility.
With great power comes great responsibility. Now, that sounds like a quote from a Spiderman movie, but as an empowered woman, you are responsible for your life. No one else is!
Now, you can be the victim of diet culture and drown yourself in self-pity and helplessness. Or you can say, “Screw this! I’m going to take responsibility, and I’m going to work myself out of it and change my life.”
It’s your call.
Educate yourself.
Read books and blogs. Listen to podcasts. Consume content that supports the choice that you’ve made for yourself. Be on guard against the content that might suck you right back into the diet culture. As I’ve said before, beware of diet culture programs disguised as wellness practices.
I’ve made it my personal mission to empower women by educating them so they don’t allow themselves to be oppressed. And so, I have put together some resources for you.
We have anti-diet culture podcast episodes on the Going Beyond the Food Show, where I interview health professionals. I invite you to listen as they share their expert insights and opinions on our relationship with our bodies and with food.
You can also read our anti-diet culture blog posts on this website. Here, we go deep into the research and the studies around diet culture as well as dieting and its impact on health.
If you’re looking for an anti-diet culture book, I recommend Health At Every Size by Linda Bacon, PhD. Dr. Bacon does research around health and dieting. It’s a book that gave me a lot of “aha moments” and subsequently changed my life.
Find a framework to help you reconstruct your relationship with food and with your body.
You’re going to shift from the way of life that diet culture has taught you to a more empowering way of thinking and doing things. This means there’s a lot for you to unlearn and relearn, so you’re going to need all the support you can get.
The Going Beyond The Food Method™️ is a 5-step strategic process to help women move out of diet mentality and into self-care. Our 5 pillars are: mindset, emotional wellness, mindfulness, body neutrality and intuitive eating.
Diet culture educational resources
As a clinical nutritionist, I’ve found that intuitive eating is the most effective tool for developing a healthy relationship with food and your body. Intuitive eating teaches you to tap into your innate hunger and fullness cues. It requires you to relearn how to engage with food without restriction and without labeling food as “good” or “bad.”
The trauma around body image is more powerful than the one around food. What I have found over the years is that when we work through our relationship with food, it’s a lot easier and faster to heal body image issues.
We offer a variety of programs that will help you should you decide to opt-out of diet culture:
You can access all of our services on our work with us page. We have a number of programs and service levels enabling us to serve most women:
Free Resources and Masterclasses: Get started and get to know us better!
Private coaching with Stephanie and her team Stephanie and her team of Certified Non-Diet Coaches are waiting to support you in a one-to-one setting with an individualized plan.
Undiet Your Life group coaching program is for women to learn how to eat intuitively, become body neutral, and learn self-coaching at their own pace while being supported in a group setting by Stephanie and her team of Certified Non-Diet Coaches.
Non-Diet Coaching Certification for professionals ready to integrate the Going Beyond The Food Method™️ in their practice and for women wanting to become Certified Coach and build a business coaching other women beyond the food.
“… But I need to lose weight”
Me: “… but I need to lose weight”.
Her: “Ok… I can see how you can think that.”
Me: “Everything you are sharing with me makes so much sense and I can feel it inside of me, that it’s what I need [pause & sigh]… but I need to lose weight”.
The tears started to roll off my cheeks. Uncontrollably crying. The tears were coming from the depth of my gut. It was one of those moments when you want to stop crying because you really don’t want to cry in front of strangers but you can’t… it’s not in your control.
Her: “Stephanie, your desires to lose weight are valid. It’s normal that you want to lose weight. The society in which we live, an environment that is full of weight stigma, body size discrimination, and fatphobia encourages these desires every day. It makes perfect sense that you want to lose weight.”
I was deeply confused.
But I need to lose weight…
I was 38 years old and the last 25 years of my personal life had been a series of pressing “pause” and “play”. I only allowed myself to “play” my personal life when I was at a weight that others recognized to be ok. If I was gaining weight or not working hard to lose the “abnormal excess weight”, my personal life was on “pause”.
Her: “So, let’s work through this, Stephanie. Why do you want to lose weight? What do you feel will happen when you lose weight?”
Me: “ Uhhh….. “
No one ever asked me this question. I never asked myself this question either. My brain was stumped… blank.
Her: “It’s normal that you don’t know how to answer this question. You likely never thought of the desire to lose weight as optional therefore never considered why you desired it.”
She was right. At that point, it had been 27 years. Since my teens, I had lived on and off diets always chasing “another body”. My happiness was conditional to the way my body looked. Even when my body looked “ok”, it was such a battle to keep it up that I didn’t have the mental space or time to fully enjoy my now “allowed happy life”.
Me: “I guess you’re right...”
Her: “Until we see each other again, I want you to ask yourself these questions: Where is the desire to lose weight coming from? What do you feel will happen if you lose weight? Will you be treated differently? Will you feel beautiful? Worthy? Healthy? “
As a good perfectionist, I did my homework.
I had so many Ah Ah moments… so many realizations. It took me a while to fully accept what these questions forced me to see: As a strong, independent & feminist woman, I had given away my power.
The last time I lost weight: 2008 Stephanie and 2010 Stephanie
My power was in my body size
The way others view my body affected my capacity to be myself. My power was in my body… size. Over time, I had acquired a deep sense that “I wasn’t good enough” so nearly everything I did was serving the purpose of proving to the world that I was enough even though my body wasn’t.
It was hard to prove my worth all the time. I had to strive for perfection, be sure to make choices that would appease and please others around me not to give them another reason to reject me beyond my body.
I was working so hard that my health had collapsed 2 years earlier. It was the time that I was trying to feel better, be healthier but nothing was working, not even… weight loss. I had spent a lot of $$$$ with many health professionals trying to “find and fix” my weight loss resistance without success. My body didn’t want to collaborate anymore… no matter how hard I worked: nothing.
Love versus fear
“Maybe it’s time for another approach…” That’s what my very expensive functional medicine doctor told me after doing all the tests and protocols possible. She said to me, “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with your body… what if you try to love it?”.
To be honest, I was pissed when she said this. I invested a lot on her. “Loving my body? WTF… that’s not a solution.” It took me time to accept these words and gave it a try. But I did.
By now, you might have guessed HER was a professional I was seeing to teach me how to “love my body”. When I sat and reflected on the questions, she had left me with after our first appointment, I realized that I was living in fear.
Fear of not being good enough, being rejected, not being loved, not being promoted at work, not being healthy and live a long life, …. I was powerless in the face of my body.
The journey back to my power
The hard truth was that patriarchal social conditioning had kept me very busy dieting and chasing after the false currency of beauty instead of chasing my dreams. Diet Culture taught me how being consumed by the fear of my body not being “thin’ enough was the way to be a woman… and that indoctrination kept me quiet, and most importantly, conform to patriarchy.
For 27 years, I had fully embraced the lie that my power as a woman was in the looks of my physical body. That lie was the real reason why I was struggling, anxious, and secretly depressed.
Her: “So now you are ready to do the work, sister?”
Me: “ F*ck yesss… let’s do this!”.
The journey to Undiet My Life
The first layover was to unlearn diet culture and patriarchal thoughts & beliefs that had lead me to dieting for 25 years! All that societal conditioning was showing up in my negative self-talk. What I now call Diet Brain had to be reprogrammed.
From there, I was able to conquer my beliefs around food and let my innate power guide my food choices instead of some “weight loss guru” tell me what my body needed. My body and I are smart enough to know what to eat.
The most powerful part of the journey was becoming emotionally intelligent. I had to shift from being the victim of my emotions to using my emotions as a source of information to make the best possible choice for ME. That’s how anxiety and depression left and confidence and compassion came into my life.
That led me to thrive in my relationship with my body. What I sought in my life was no longer the outcome of my body’s look… that gave me freedom. I could care for myself unconditionally and beyond dieting which is the key to bringing back my health.
I now have a relationship of trust and respect with my body. My female body wisdom is my power. I love myself, care for myself, and I thrive in my relationship with myself.
I found my power. The power to live my life now. I gave myself the permission to be enough unconditionally to what my body looks like or weight.
That’s my true power.
Are you ready to do YOUR work? If so I’d love to be your guide and support
Stephanie
What is Body Neutrality?
What is Body Neutrality and how is body neutrality going to help me ? That one of the most frequent question from client inquiring to work with us. before I answer this let’s consider the following statistics…
In Glamour Magazine study found that 97% of women are “cruel to their bodies” every day.
Research released by Dove, for their ‘Self-Esteem Project’, found that 96% of women in the UK reported feeling anxious about the way they look, compared with 86% in China, 72% in Brazil and 61% in the US. Only 4% of the women in all the countries surveyed would consider themselves ‘beautiful’, and by the time girls reach 17, 78% will be ‘unhappy with their bodies’.
In fact, current media ideals are achievable by less than 5% of the population – and that’s only if we’re thinking about weight and size. When we add shape, face, muscle tone etc into the messed-up mix, it’s probably going to be around 1%. 1 percent
Are you a statistic?
I was for years until I discover Body Neutrality.
That’s a question I receive very frequently… we are somewhat used to term body positivity but body neutrality not so much.
What is body neutrality?
What is body neutrality?
Body Neutrality empowers you to embrace yourself as you are, including the parts you don’t like about yourself.
Its focus is to avoid self-hate while simultaneously reliving you from the pressure of having to love your body.
The goal is to respect and accept your body for what it is – and that’s it.
Body Neutrality recognizes that not everyone is going to love every part of themselves all the time because that’s an unrealistic expectation to say the least.
The reality is that some days you’re going to look in the mirror like ‘Dam it, yeah, thank you legs for letting me travel, thank you arms for allowing me to type this inspirational post and thank you belly for creating life!
And then there’ll be those days where you stand in front of the very same mirror, focusing on that cellulite you hate or the wrinkle that suddenly seems so obvious.
Body neutrality versus body positivity
Embracing Body Neutrality over Body Positivity allows you to experience negative feelings about yourself, but without the pressure that comes with having to be positive all the time.
In other words, it’s a middle ground between positivity and negativity (shaming) – that’s neutrality.
Body Neutrality is the safe bridge between body shaming and body positivity. It’s about being grateful for your body and everything that it does for you because it does a lot. You are alive right now right!
So Body Neutrality is centric to the process of accepting your body.
Body neutrality & intuitive Eating
For many of us we’ve have years of suffering thru body shaming and along the way we’ve picked up coping behaviours to neutralize the pain the pain associated with body image struggles.
Being the victim of body shaming, most of it from our own mind, is difficult to say the list so now wonder that many of us have become along the way emotional eater or binge eater.
Combine the suffering that comes along with body shaming with the notion that food is the gateway to “loving our life and body” food has become this enemy that we need to control in order to end the suffering.
Healing our relationship to food is necessary in order to make peace with our body. Intuitive eating is the way in which you can achieve both: body neutrality and peace with food.
Intuitive eating teaches to respect your body.
Intuitive eating teaches to respect your innate body messages such as hunger and fullness so you can have a healthy and respectful relationship with your body.
What is intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is proven and well-researched self-care eating framework that makes YOU the boss of YOU.
Intuitive eating teaches us to have a healthy relationship to food empowering you to trust your ability to meet your needs, distinguish between physical and emotional hunger and ultimately develop body wisdom.
Get started with intuitive eating
If you’d like to explore intuitive eating and discover how it can help you make peace with food download our Get Started with Intuitive Eating Guide.
This free (and highly detailed) cheat sheet will give you a 3 easy to follow step process to help you get started with intuitive eating right away (and give you a shot of confidence to stop dieting … perhaps ).
Body Neutrality
Body Neutrality empowers you to embrace yourself as you are, including the parts you don’t like about yourself.
The focus of body neutrality focus is to avoid self-hate whilst simultaneously alleviating the pressure of having to love your body. The goal is to respect and accept your body for what it is – and that’s it.
Body neutrality recognizes that not everyone is going to love every part of themselves all the time. The reality is that some days you’re going to look in the mirror like ‘yess, thank you legs for taking me places, thank you arms for allowing me to reach for the biscuit tin, and thank you stomach for keeping my organs where they should be’, but then there’ll be those days where you stand in front of the very same mirror, focusing on that cellulite you hate, or the belly rolls that suddenly seem so obvious
Body Respect
My physical body is a vehicle for me to experience my life.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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The moment I realize that I had my self-worth all tangled up with the appearance of my body is the day that my new life began.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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The notion of body respect came into my life. Respecting my body was essential for me to feel better about myself. To increase my self-worth.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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Body Neutrality is the safe bridge between body shaming and body positivity. It’s about being grateful for your body and everything that it does for you because it does a lot. You are alive right??.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
My body neutrality journey
To say that accepting my body was easy is a wild understatement…
The act of accepting my body required of me to be courageous. To be vulnerable and lots of tears.
Choosing to make peace with my body was scary. Scary as shit to be honest!
Frightening to be a health professional in a larger body. In a fat body. In an “overweight body” as my colleagues like to categorize my body.
Nerve-racking to stand up in front of my audience and say that I no longer recommended to chase weight loss. That the most efficient path to health was thru acceptance.
Body neutrality and intuitive eating
Going Beyond The Food has taught me that courage is not the absence of fear rather the ability to act in the presence of fear. That’s what accepting your body requires in a society controlled by diet culture and the concept of thinness=happiness & health.
Intuitive eating teaches to respect your body. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Intuitive eating switches our perspective from wanting to control our body to need to respect our body. We can’t respect what we hate right?!?
No matter, where you are now sister on your path of body acceptance, know that I feel you.
I hear you. I see you. I know how you feel and the fear of what could happen…. You aren’t alone.
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Be reminded of one universal law: Love always win in the end. Not hate, shame or fear.💞
“Show up, be seen, answer the call to courage… ’cause you’re worth it. You’re worth being brave.”
Brene Brown
What is intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is proven and well-researched self-care eating framework that make YOU the boss of YOU.
Intuitive eating teaches us to have a healthy relationship to food empowering you to trust your ability to meet your needs, distinguish between physical and emotional hunger and ultimately develop body wisdom.
Get started with intuitive eating
If you’d like to explore intuitive eating and discover how it can help you make peace with food download our Get Started with Intuitive Eating Guide.
This free (and highly detailed) cheat sheet will give you a 3 easy to follow step process to help you get started with intuitive eating right away (and give you a shot of confidence to stop dieting … perhaps ).
Increase Body Confidence: The Journey to You
The mind is the most powerful aspect of health. It’s more powerful than your stomach which digests the food, or your hands which prepare it, or your legs that carry you through exercise. As I teach to the ladies in my free and private community : truly your mind is the thing that determines you, and how you view yourself will mold the way that your body actually looks and feels, not to mention how long it lasts. If you want to increase body confidence, you need to start with your mind.A Never Ending Cycle
We are completely overtaken with images from the media and fitness industries that bombard us with ideas about what we should look like. Women literally can’t get away without seeing them. All you have to do it to walk into the grocery store and you’ll find dozens of images that tell you what you should look like. You don’t even have to leave the house – flip on the television or open your mailbox and you’ll see even more.
These images have a huge impact on our ideas of self, creating an inner dialogue and goals that we might not even be aware of. They’re presented as truth, as beauty and as the ideal of self worth. If we don’t look like these standards of beauty, then how can you be worth anything? Unfortunately we find that the language of modern culture is one that places emphasis on outward images of self rather than of inner strength of spirit.
The cycle comes when we see these unrealistic images and try to attain to them in an attempt to help us to feel good about ourselves, again most often without even thinking. Then when we do attempt to make changes in life to create that image that we see in our own lives we of course fail, because again they are unrealistic, which makes us feel bad about ourselves and cycles us into negative self image. The cycle goes on and on.
Breaking the Body Image Cycle to Increase Body Confidence
If this is a negative cycle, then how can you possibly go about freeing yourself from it? The answer is with a dramatic shift of understanding. Smart women like you know that the pictures that you see on the covers of magazines aren’t any more real than the images on Saturday morning cartoons, airbrushed and painted over as they are. And yet when you see them they tap into your subconscious, which doesn’t know that they aren’t real. Your natural inclination for self improvement kicks in and pushes you try to meet that goal, or you get a kick in the pants that tells you that you’re not worth much because you have already failed to look like that.
Understanding the connection between your body and your emotional self is how you break free and increase body confidence. Remember that your mind is the most powerful tool that you have when it comes to transforming your physical self, and you’re in control of it! Learning to harness the power of your mind to create a positive perception of your body will bring you into the reality of your beautiful self. For many women, it’s hard for them to comprehend the wonder and beauty of their own bodies.
“Stephanie has helped me make the connection between my emotional body and physical body, which has helped me heal and also lose weight.” -Shelley Langlois
Finding support is your first step in the process of creating a healthy body image. Realize that you are not alone in your struggle, and that there are people who have been there and who can help you increase body confidence. It’s possible for you to love your body and also to recognize that it needs to change so that you can feel better and live longer. That doesn’t mean that your goal is to look like some person who you’ve never met and who is for the most part a creation of a marketing company, but it does mean that you goal is to be the best that you can be. Emotionally and physically. You have the power to make it happen!
This is the first article in the series ” Journey to YOU”. You can find the next article of the series on Empowerment right here. Hope you enjoy!
Body Messages: A Personal Story
What are body messages?
As I teach the ladies in my tribe, think of it as a knock on the door. It is a way your physical body talks to you.
Let me give you an example from my own life…
Body Messages: My Personal Story
My latest project of taking my nutrition practices and my business in the stratosphere in the online world is so scary, yet so exciting all at once. I have fears just like all of you. Fear is an absolute normal emotion. Fear means that we are working outside of our comfort zone which also means that we are growing.
My comfort zone didn’t include being in front of a camera because of my body image. I had huge issues looking at myself in the mirror – let alone having someone take a picture of me.
I have conquered this fear by working on my body image during the past three years. Am I now super comfortable to be in front of a camera? No, I’m not but it is much better than it was. I can now see beauty when I look at pictures of myself… I can see now what others see…because we are all beautiful. Yes, we are.
This weekend was another one of these moments in my life – professional photo shoot with a designer, makeup artists, and the best photographer in town.
Body messages
I felt nervous for 3-4 days leading up to the shoot.
I was anxious and craving carbs.
My body was tense which, for me, equals pain in my lower back.
I had poor sleep quality the night before.
I listened and observed my body messages with interest. I realized through my body that this experience was a huge and significant step for me in my life journey because of the intensity of the messages. I didn’t worry about the “symptoms” (body messages) or take a sleeping pill or supplement to help me sleep. Rather, I enjoyed the process. I felt the sensation in my body of each body message and was grateful for the growth that was happening within myself.
How to listen to your body messages
What are your body messages when you are working outside your comfort zone?
Do you listen to your body messages or simply ignore them?
Do you find that your body messages are just an annoyance?
You just can’t wait to shut them down with food or another drug of choices?
Guess what happened the day of the shoot? I had the best time of my life with the best team…. I shared with my team of three brand new people that I had never meet before, my life journey and my anxiousness about the day.
I was vulnerable and shared in a positive manner so they resounded with nothing but love for me on my journey. Without their support, I couldn’t have put my true self out there and the pictures wouldn’t have been nearly as gorgeous and powerful as they are. I’m so grateful that I have crossed paths with these three professional and loving human beings – Nikki, Luis and Onna = xoxox. I will forever be grateful to have met you.
Listen and Feel
Listen to your body messages aka symptoms, disease, discomfort and imbalances with care, patience and love.
Feel your body messages – the intensity, the location, when, where and how it happens.
Learn from your body messages.
Make decisions in your life based on your body messages and on the communication between you and your body.
Everything happens for a reason for the best outcome possible.
Welcome!
I’m Stephanie Dodier
Non-Diet Nutritionist & Coach
I teach and coach women how to break free from the socialized thinking of diet culture and liberate yourself from unrelenting pressure to be thinner so that you can eat in a way that truly supports your well-being and start living the life you’ll look back on with no regrets.
Join me in leading the feminist health coaching revolution!
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