I’m struggling with the program and loving the big body I’m in. I don’t want to love my big body because it’s the cause of my low-self esteem. My questions are, can I succeed with this program if I don’t want to love the big body I’m in? What if I still believe in diet culture and losing weight?
ANSWER
Hello!
This is such a great question. I have a lot of good news for you.
Here’s the first good news for you, sister: You don’t have to love yourself or love your body. That’s not what we do here at Beyond The Food. We do not teach self-love or body love. We teach women how to be neutral about their bodies and how to respect themselves.
Body love or self-love is BS… On this, please go listen to private podcast #21. It will help you tremendously to understand this concept and why it’s essential for you.
I would suggest listening to the Beyond The Food podcast #255 Body neutrality it will help you understand the difference.
What you need to aim for is body respect.
Next good news for you: Self-esteem is not the product of any external feature, including body size. Self-esteem is the outcome of the way you think about yourself. Self-esteem is produced by the thoughts you entertain in your mind about yourself. This is why some large-bodied women have high self-esteem, and some thin women have poor self-esteem.
The belief you have that your self-esteem is related to your body size is completely normal. This is what diet culture is telling us every day. It’s likely what you have been socialized to from a very young age (like the rest of us).
Patriarchy created diet culture in order to indoctrinate women into the belief that thinner is better, and the solution is shrinking their body (aka dieting). So it’s no surprise that you think like this now… that’s what unlearning diet culture is all about.
To your comment: “What if I still believe diet culture?”. Recognizing diet culture exists is recognizing that the thin ideal is not true, meaning that to feel worthy as a woman, you do not have to fit a certain beauty ideal.
Every human is born worthy, including women. Self-worth aka self-esteem, is not something to be earned. It’s not something you have to work hard at. Self-worth and self-esteem is your birthright. This is why women who lose weight do not feel better about themselves. Once they temporarily check the box of body size, they move on to the next issue- they need to fix about themselves so they can earn their self-esteem. This leads to the relentless chase for self-worth that never ends….
This is the work you have to do… reprogram your belief system that you are worthy. This reprogramming is done using the self-coaching model and taught to you inside the CONFIDENT course (first month inside Conquer and Thrive). I would suggest you do a model on C: Self-worth and submit it to Coach corner, and we will help you.
Next: “What if I want to lose weight??. We live in a free world, my sister and as a woman you are totally empowered to make decisions about your body. Your body, your choice. That’s the premise of Beyond The Food. We don’t teach you how to do this here. There’s an $82 billion weight loss industry awaiting to offer you solutions.
The only coaching I will give you is this one: Before embarking on the next diet, take time to do it fully conscious of the outcome: 91-95% of chances you will lose some weight and gaining it back within 1-5 years.
Lastly, leave you with this: Go back to CONFIDENT course lesson 1 and use the love versus fear decision matrix to analyze your decision. Make sure that your decision is from a place of love and not fear. That’s the only way to create happiness, health, and peace in one’s life.
Hope this helps and will be waiting on your self-coaching model on self-worth!