Befriending Your Body Part 1: The Gift of Giving Up

Written by: Lee Thomas
Time to read: 9 minutes

What’s your body image like?

If you’re like most people, that question makes you think about how your body looks. We tend to boil it down to good body image = I think I look good, and bad body image = I think I look bad. But our body image is about so much more than how our body looks, or even how we feel about how our body looks.

When we use the term body image, we’re talking about the entire relationship that you have with your body. So that can include things like how you look, how you feel about how you look, health issues, the way that you take care of your body, your experiences of pleasure or discomfort, the way other people treat your body, experiences of oppression, your personal and family histories… it’s a lot.

We’ve had a relationship with our body our entire life, but we’re not really taught to think about it as a relationship. And for a lot of us, that’s where the troubles begin. 

Relationships are learned in the same way that we learn pretty much everything else: from other people. We learn about what makes a good family relationship, a good work relationship, a good romantic relationship, a good friendship. But most of the time, this learning is not direct. People don’t necessarily sit you down and say “a good romantic partner should always be interested in sex” or “a good friendship should never have any boundaries” or “a good employee should never call in sick.” I suspect that’s because if we said these rules out loud, we might be able to notice that they seem…. Not great. So instead of saying them out loud, we learn these rules indirectly and implicitly, where they get to operate from the shadowy corners of our psyche. 

And in this same way that we’ve learned other relationships, we’ve learned criteria for what makes a good body. A good body is thin, able-bodied, usually white, cisgender, has no acne, has hair in all the right places and none of the wrong places, etc. This sort of learning happens explicitly and implicitly, and it happens everywhere: in classrooms, in conversations with our parents, in the grocery store checkout line, on the playground, in the lunchroom at work, at the doctor’s office.

And usually, through these many different avenues, we’ve learned all the ways in which our body is bad. It’s not the right shape, or not the right colour. It has acne. It has hair in the wrong places, or doesn’t have enough of it in the right places. It wants sex too much, or not enough. It needs to pee even though the teacher says no. It needs sleep, even when it doesn’t fit into our busy schedules. It feels anxious at inconvenient times. It wants delicious food, even though we’re taught that that delicious food is bad (or even sinful — check out Raquel’s webinar on this later this month!).

So we learn to distrust our body. We learn that our body is sneaky and undisciplined and needs to be kept quiet. When we’re tired, our first question is usually not “how can I get more rest?” but instead “how can I stop feeling tired?” When our body refuses to lose weight our question is not “how can I accept and celebrate my body’s size” but instead “how can I force it to change?”. We learn that our body signals are not supposed to be honoured, they are supposed to be overruled.

And of course, along the way, we learn a ton of shame. How could we not? We learn that our body is gross and shameful and bad, and that that must mean that deep down, we are also gross and shameful and bad. And so because our body is so awful, we criticize it and punish it and hide it and mistreat it.

You can see how it becomes a vicious cycle very quickly. We feel shame about our bodies, so we criticize and mistreat ourselves in order to fix our bodies so we can feel less shame. Instead, we feel more shame, because someone (us) is criticizing and mistreating us all the time. And we try to fix that shame by (you guessed it!) heaping on some more criticism and mistreatment.

We shame ourselves to try to stop feeling shame, like a desperate person alone in the ocean drinking salt water to relieve their thirst. Our solution to the problem makes things worse.

An essential element of changing your relationship with your body is something that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) calls “creative hopelessness.”  Which is basically a fancy way of saying “giving up.” Not giving up on everything, but specifically giving up on the stuff that we do that doesn’t actually work for us. Because let’s be real: if shaming ourselves was going to fix things, it would have by now.

So… now what? If we accept that shaming ourself isn’t the solution, then what?

The “creative” part of creative hopelessness is the idea that when we become hopeless about our current approach and give up on it, we open up the door to creativity about what else might be possible. When we accept that what we’re doing right now doesn’t actually work, we can commit to trying something different. 

Imagine for a moment that you have a coworker who you’d like to become friends with. What you probably wouldn’t do is go “I’m going to be really critical of this person until they’re perfect, and then we will be best friends.” What most of us would (hopefully) do is start by treating them kindly. There’s no guarantee that treating someone kindly is going to result in a friendship, but it is a prerequisite for a friendship to develop. If you’re waiting until you’re already friends with someone before you start treating them well, you’re going to be waiting a long time.

The same is true in our relationship with our body. If we want to start having a caring, respectful, trusting relationship with our body, we need to be caring, respectful, and trusting toward it. And we have to start with actions, not emotions. We can’t wait until we feel positively toward our body before we start treating it kindly — instead, we have to treat our body kindly as a prerequisite to feeling positively toward it.

This is where we might notice our brain protesting. If I stop counting calories, then I’ll hate my body even more! If I stop criticizing myself, who knows how awful things will get! If I start trusting my emotions, my whole life will fall apart!!!

If you notice your brain doing that, I’ll encourage you to come back to our creative hopelessness — you’ve tried to make yourself feel better by counting calories and criticizing yourself and distrusting your emotions. Has it worked? Has it brought you long-term fulfillment? Is that why you’re reading this blog post, because your relationship with your body is so great?

This is often where grief gets involved. Most of us have spent huge amount of our precious time on this earth at war with our bodies. We’ve missed out on culturally important foods, joyful social occasions, potential romantic relationships, maybe even job opportunities because we disliked our bodies. We’ve spent countless dollars on trying to make ourselves feel better about our bodies with special foods, slimming clothing, or exercise equipment. We’ve done things that have significantly deteriorated our physical health, like smoking cigarettes, taking shady supplements, or drinking too much to try to ease our insecurity.

The biggest grief for me, when I started this befriending process many years ago, was realizing the mental energy I’d wasted. I used to spend my days entirely consumed by thoughts about my body and food — I didn’t even realize it was a problem, at the time. In fact, I thought it was a good and virtuous thing that I was doing, trying to tame my unruly body.

They say it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert at something. Without even being aware of it, I’d become an expert at hating myself. I suspect, if you’ve read this far, you might also be an expert at this.

It’s an immense thing to grieve the time and energy lost to body hatred. And so lots of people don’t. I think of the Carl Sagan quote, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”

Giving up means acknowledging that we have been bamboozled. We have spent our precious lives at war with someone who was never our enemy in the first place. And when we can really recognize that, we can finally stop fighting.

The good news here, one reassurance that I would like to offer, is that our bodies are remarkably gracious. They’re apprehensive sometimes, understandably, but they don’t hold grudges. Like the Nayyirah Waheed poem says: 

and i said to my body. softly. ‘i want to be your friend.’ it took a long breath. and replied ‘i have been waiting my whole life for this.’

Give yourself the gift of giving up. You might find that your whole life is waiting for you.

If you are ready to start changing your relationship with your body, registration for our Befriending Your Body group closes Tuesday. It is a professionally-facilitated six week group based in the principles of Acceptance and Commitment therapy. If you’re interested in registering for this group, or would like to be kept in the loop about future group offerings, send us an email!

Beyond Self-Acceptance

Written by: Dustin LindenSmith

Time to read: 9 minutes


Trigger warning: In this article, there are references to abuse and trauma (with no details described or disclosed). There are also sensitive emotional topics discussed which could trigger an emotional reaction in you if they resonate strongly or if they make you recall painful events from your own life. Please be mindful of your own state of mind right now, and exercise healthy boundaries around engaging with this article if you don’t feel emotionally safe, secure, and stable at this time.


My first blog post was tied to my first Aleo webinar about what it’s like for fat people to live in a fatphobic world. I suggested four specific actions we can take to find some peace of mind within that reality: (1) changing the way we think (and act) about fatness and our bodies; (2) cleaning up our social media feeds; (3) working on our boundaries; and (4) seeking professional support to work with any or all of the above. My second webinar was focused on how I started doing real work on that first step through the illuminating and inspiring work of the American Black fat activist Sonya Renee Taylor through her book, The Body Is Not An Apology. In this blog post, I will share some of the insights I learned from her powerful writing.

On developing the mental and emotional skills to enter recovery in the first place

Like any fat person, I have experienced various forms of discrimination and negative judgments from others—even from within my own family. But my suffering in that regard has also been strongly mitigated by the fact that being an affluent, cisgender White man affords me many privileges that help me overcome that bias in the external world. Even so, that privilege hasn’t insulated me from developing my own internal shame and self-loathing about the size and shape of my body, and for how poorly it has always fit into our culture’s apparent standards for attractiveness.

In order for me to enter recovery from my binge-eating disorder, I first needed to overcome that shame and self-loathing, develop accurate self-awareness and attunement to my own body’s internal states, and then adopt a more intuitive approach to food and movement that was driven by my body’s in-the-moment needs, as opposed to that of my emotions alone. I had to start that by changing my mind.

A reminder about how and why we arrived here

News articles abound on “the obesity epidemic” and how much our numbers are increasing year over year throughout the entire world. The traditional medical model for “treating obesity” has failed in almost every respect, and most of us have also experienced some form of fat-shaming at a doctor’s office at some point. The medical field has also been convinced by recent pharmacological innovations in satiety hormone re-regulation (i.e., GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic) that pathologizing the mere state of being fat and taking a drug to fix it will save all of us fat folks from our certain morbid fate.

Many fat people have also had a love-hate relationship with food and movement (i.e., diet and exercise) for much of our lives—not to mention our bodies themselves. We have often developed a distrust in our own judgment about what our body actually needs or wants at any given time. This is a natural result of having successfully lost weight so many times on a calorie-restricted diet, only to gain it all back—with interest—months later. Many of us also have trauma histories, relational issues, and self-image and body-image problems which all increase those feelings of disconnection, dissociation, disavowal, shame, and mistrust towards ourselves. Shame and trauma work together to convince us that our bodies are not good enough, not small enough, not strong enough, or not attractive enough. Dr. Becky Kennedy has also written about how common unresolved ruptures can be in parent-child relationships, but that many of us in larger bodies are likely to have experienced more of them by virtue of our family often trying to get us to diet or address our fatness.

Developing a new way to look at ourselves and our fatness

It was Sonya Renee Taylor’s writing that first truly awakened me to these five essential truths:

  • at our basic, human essence, we are all perfectly good, and normal —no matter what size we are, or whatever number comes up when we step on a scale;
  • for perfectly valid reasons (often arising from childhood trauma or adverse events), many of us have used food for emotional self-regulation since childhood—and this may have resulted in our eventually becoming fat;
  • given those valid underlying reasons and our dysregulated eating habits and relationships with our bodies that resulted from them, many of us who now live in fat bodies are faced with inexorable pressure from all directions to lose weight, and we’re encouraged to think of ourselves as failures if we can’t manage to follow a weight-loss diet to get smaller;
  • this process develops within us an adversarial relationship with our bodies; and
  • no matter what size you are, you deserve to have a peaceful relationship with food and your body. You also deserve to eat full, delicious, nutrient-filled meals that will nourish your body and mind to accomplish all of the important things you do in your life each day. You also deserve to each those meals without feeling the crushing weight of internalized shame, blame, or negative judgment that makes you feel like a bad person inside.

Inquiry # 7, 9, and 12: Body shame origin story

Sonya Renee Taylor’s book is peppered with thoughtful journal and meditation prompts to propel you along this path to self-discovery. Three of those inquiries focus on the body shame origin story. She explains that this developed in our youth in response to rapid or unexpected change—often arising from puberty. It occurred when we became aware of difference, and it made us assume there was some “should” about our body which then became attached to our feelings of value and worth. If we happen to have experienced abuse, that complicates our body shame even further because of how we may erroneously perceive our bodies to have incited that abuse.

Here are some of her prompts for you to consider about your own body shame origin story:

  • When did you first become aware of difference, and when did you first start to feel different from others?
  • When did you first become aware of something your body should do/have/look like?
  • Who in your life is most affected by your body shame, and how is it impacting them?

Sonya Renee Taylor also encourages us to make peace with not understanding all of these differences we notice. She asks us to make peace with those differences, and then to make peace with our bodies.

Inquiry #19: The fog of living in body shame

Sonya Renee Taylor asks: In what ways has the fog of living in body shame hindered your most amazing life? What is incomplete, unexplored, ignored inside you because of your belief that something about you and your body is wrong?

Personal Note: I noticed real grief arise within me when I did this inquiry. I experienced grief for the years I had spent harming myself with food, and for all the opportunities I had missed out on being mindful and happy with my family and friends because I had spent so many years living in a chronically dissociated state from being in that fog of body shame. I encourage anyone who does this work to be gentle, loving, and graceful with yourselves as you contemplate what you may have lost as a result of this way of living. Take solace in the fact that you are recognizing where you are now, and that you are ready to inhabit your body and your life in a much more open and embodied way than you ever have before.

You are not your thoughts

As we continue to reflect on these prompts, Sonya Renee Taylor encourages us to reflect on the differences between thinking, doing, and being. She reminds us that:

  • we are not our thoughts;
  • not every thought we have is true; and
  • many of us are caught in negative thought patterns about ourselves and our bodies that are simply not true.

She asks us to notice the next time our actions are not in alignment with our thoughts or our beliefs, and to ask ourselves: what is our body trying to tell us? And how can we listen to what our body has to say if we’re not used to doing that or don’t have the first clue of how to start?

On the challenges of becoming embodied

Many of us are unskilled at listening to what our bodies have to tell us. Not coincidentally, if we have engaged in chronic weight-loss dieting, we have trained ourselves to ignore our body’s calls for food that arise from being in a state of caloric deficit so often. Listening to our body and noticing what comes up simply does not come naturally to those of us who can’t even stand the sight of themselves in a mirror or who feel like they will never find love because they’re fat. We are simply too accustomed to living in a disconnected state from our bodies during most of our waking hours. Extend some forgiveness and grace towards yourself, and see if you can gently extend a helping hand to your own self to guide yourself out of the fog.

As I bring this article to a close, I would like to invite you to experience the gift of your own body right now through this short mindfulness exercise:

take a few moments to let your body settle gently into a relaxed and comfortable position

observe yourself take three… deep… breaths…

bring your attention to your body, starting with the feeling of your feet in contact with the ground

let your attention flow naturally up through the tops of your feet, your ankles, your calves, your knees, your thighs, and your hips

let your attention keep flowing naturally up through your belly, your chest, your back, and your shoulders

let your attention flow down your arms, all the way to the tips of your fingers, and then back up to your shoulders

as your attention moves up from your shoulders to your neck, let all of the tension in those muscles release…

and as your attention continues to flow upwards through to the top of your head, let the tension in your head, face, neck and shoulders release

now

let your attention rest on your breathing

and let yourself sit in silence for as long as you are comfortable

February Is A Hard Month

Posted by: Lee Thomas

Time to read: 4 minutes


People say that the internet is forever, but try finding a Tumblr post from circa 2012.

I don’t remember it exactly, and it’s quite possible that I’ve sort of mentally Frankensteined it from a few different posts, but I remember it going something like this:

Of course you have seasonal depression. Look outside. Nothing in nature blooms all year round. Human beings are meant to spend the winter months curled up by a fire telling stories with our loved ones, not trying to perform the same amount of work in December as we do in July.

I’m sure it was phrased better by the original author, but you get the gist.

It impacted me a lot when I first read it. Not enough to change my behaviour at the time, of course. But enough to remember it over a decade later.

“February is a hard month for me” is a phrase I have been hearing a lot recently. And every time I hear it, I think about that post, and I feel the unsettling feeling creep over me that what we’re doing is deeply unnatural.

I’ve become really interested in birds over the last couple of years. Extremely millennial of me, I know. And in one of the bird books I read, they talked about how when migrating songbirds are kept in a cage and not allowed to migrate, the birds get distressed. This is true even if the bird was born in a lab, even if it was separated from other birds its whole life, even if it was kept in a location where it couldn’t see the outdoors to get any seasonal cues from nature. All of its other needs were met. It was warm, safe from predators, and had plenty of food. But it could not migrate, and so it did not thrive. 

It didn’t learn migration from its peers. It didn’t see the weather changing. It didn’t need to leave to find food. 

And yet, its body was clearly telling it: something isn’t right.

I think it’s easy for us non-birds to look at this situation and be like “yeah, no shit, that’s what this type of bird does, so of course it’s going to be stressed when it can’t do it.” We see a tiger in a cage with plain concrete walls and think “no wonder it’s not thriving”. It’s not rocket science.

…And then we feel exhausted and we shrug our shoulders and we say “February is a hard month for me.” And we go back to work.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways we’re taught to distrust and dismiss the things that our body communicates to us. When we’re exhausted, we don’t look at our agenda and see where we can do less. Instead, we berate ourselves for not doing as much as we think we should be able to. When we’re “overeating” we look up strategies for eating less, rather than noticing how our body is communicating that we need to stop restricting. We exercise before we’re fully recovered from injuries or sickness. Instead of getting more sleep, we drink more coffee.

We feel shame about our hunger — for food, for rest, for companionship — and we try desperately not to need these things. The worst thing we can be is needy. We call babies “good” when they don’t inconvenience us too much with their needs, and we keep telling them that for their entire lives.

I am still haunted by Brandy Jensen’s observation from her 2020 advice column Ask A Fuck-Up: American culture has always been allergic to need. We despise it in ourselves and recoil from it in others. So, it’s not particularly surprising that your question is not “how do I find this vital thing my life is currently lacking” but “how do I learn to stop needing it?”

I wonder about how differently we might react to our February exhaustion if we saw our bodies as legitimate sources of information. When we say “why am I feeling this way?” it’s so often a condemnation — usually what we’re really saying is “I shouldn’t feel this way.” But what if that question was from a place of genuine curiosity? What if we we saw our bodies as an equal partner, with their own wisdom and insights? As a friend worth listening to?

Lately I’ve been referring to my relationship with my body as an “ecosystem.” In an ecosystem, it’s okay to need. Trees need to shed their leaves. Bears need to hibernate. Birds need to migrate. I no longer believe that my human body is the exception to these natural rules.

And if we can accept that, and meet those needs? Maybe February won’t be such a hard month for us.

Body Image Group: Befriending Your Body

Do you feel like your body is the enemy? Do you believe that “all bodies are good bodies”… except yours? When you look in the mirror, do you criticize yourself – and then you criticize yourself for criticizing yourself? 


Our relationship with our body is one of the longest-term relationships we’ll ever have. But, like all relationships, sometimes it takes work. If criticizing your body hasn’t gotten you the results you’re looking for, maybe it’s time to try something new.


Befriending your Body is a six-week, professionally-facilitated group where you will learn how to rewrite your body relationship story.


As a group we’ll explore what body image is, learn about where our body stories come from, and develop new techniques to help bring peace to your relationship with your body. 

If you are interested, just CLICK HERE or email Raquel@BirchStand.ca and a member of our team will connect with you for more information!

Facilitators: Lee Thomas (they/them) MSW RSW and Raquel Griffin (she/her) MSW RSW

Location: Video sessions through secure online platform

Cost: $90 per session (may be covered through insurance – check with your provider!)

Time: Tuesdays 7:00pm-8:30pm Atlantic time, Feb 27th until April 2nd

This group is open to participants aged 19+ and living in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, or Ontario. All participants must agree to the Group Participation Agreement. Registration deadline is February 20th. 


CLICK HERE to let us know you’re interested!

Webinar: Befriending Your Body

Do you struggle with body image? Do you believe that “all bodies are good bodies”… except yours? Are you hard on yourself, and then hard on yourself for being hard on yourself?

Our relationship with our body is one of the longest-term relationships we’ll ever have. But, like all relationships, sometimes it takes work. If criticizing your body hasn’t gotten you the results you’re looking for, maybe it’s time to try something new.

Befriending your Body is a free one-hour webinar hosted by The Aleo Collective. It is open to members of the general public, health professionals, and anyone who has a body.

Time: Feb 15, 2024 12:00 PM Atlantic time

Location: Zoom

Cost: Free

Registration Link: Here!

About the presenter: Lee Thomas (they/them) is a social worker and therapist based in Edmonton, Alberta. Their main areas of expertise are eating disorders and body image concerns, with a special focus on how these issues impact queer and/or neurodivergent individuals. Lee is licensed to work with clients in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Alberta. You can learn more at leethomas.ca or connect with Lee via email at leethomasmsw@outlook.com.

About Aleo: The Aleo Collective is a group of interdisciplinary mental health practitioners who share similar values and approaches to sustainable recovery from eating disorders or disordered eating behaviours. To learn more, visit aleocollective.ca

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