Attention around your body and your weight is a double-edged sword. You love it when you lose weight and people tell you how fabulous you look.
Oh, come on, it does feel good.
Especially when you have felt invisible for so long.
I craved external validation when I lost weight. When friends didn’t comment, I felt annoyed and even a little suspicious of their motives (they are jealous I would tell my husband).
But if you gain the weight, you want to be invisible again.
Will the people who commented on every pound you lost; also notice the weight you have gained?
As a Dieter in Recovery, I found two things kept me in the dieting mind set and had to change.
1. The need for external validation.
The measure of my worth cannot be based on the opinions of others.
Some people will think you have lost enough, others not enough.
I want a consistent body weight that I can stay at, without the diet mentality.
I am no longer in a war with my body or with food.
To keep a peaceful relationship with my body, I have a strong relationship with myself around my body.
The only approval I need now is from me.
As my son at 7, used to say, “I am the boss of me.”
2. The endless conversations about my body and weight.
In my dieting life I could talk about diets, bodies forever. It is a conversation that could absorb me for hours. With magazines books and social media, we are bombarded with body images and information.
When I started on this new journey, I stopped sharing details. If people commented on my weight loss, I thanked them, but did not continue the conversation.
To change my obsession about my body I had to stop talking and thinking about it.
As I talked less about my body, I talked less around other peoples’ bodies.
It shifts your prospective in every way.
Freeing up all that diet talk, gives you a chance to shift the attention to other things and making better connections.
Are you ready for a new conversation?
Thanks for reading,
Christina
This week notice how many times you read about dieting, listen to diet information, and talk about it?
How many times did you seek validation around your appearance?