By Nadia Popova
Negative thoughts about your body are simply just thoughts. Your thoughts are what create feelings and emotions. Your negative thoughts about your body may trigger uncomfortable emotions of shame, frustration or guilt. These feelings may seem so intense that the action you want to take is to start restricting your food, in order to change your body. I hate to breakout to you, but this NEVER works!
Negative Thoughts About Your Body
Negative thoughts about your body and desires to restrict food are simply a web of thoughts that are all conditioned to come up together when you are working on learning to eat adequately and heal. Restricting your food—not giving yourself enough to eat when you are hungry—will reawaken and intensify the urges to binge.
Let’s Talk Urges
Urges to restrict are habitual, just like the urges to binge. Urges to restrict may come automatically when you are thinking about your body in a negative way. For example: You’re not happy with what you see in the mirror or what you weigh, so you decide to eat less than you need, and soon you may find your binge urges intensifies and you binge eating more, and therefore you start eating more than if you never restricted in the first place.
Start at the beginning of this cycle to dismiss it as a whole: start with the negative thoughts about your body. Your negative thoughts are not fact; they are simply well practiced stories about your body. Thinking this way keeps you stuck, and gets in the way of your learning to eat adequately and heal.
Try thinking about your body in a compassionate way—a way that feels better and more importantly believable. An example of thoughts like these might be:
I am healing my body right now.
I am working on learning to eat adequately and stop bingeing, and my body will eventually normalize.
I am doing the best I can and my priority is to be peaceful about my body in the process.
Hating your body or any part of you doesn’t create change. And, accepting your body in a compassionate way right now doesn’t mean you won’t change. Try to take that negative focus on your body and bring it to neutral. This will allow you to avoid being tempted by any desire to restrict, so that you can eat adequately and support your efforts to dismiss urges. If you need help with staying accountable and focused my Coaching Program is for you.
Nadia Popova
(760) 880-9904
