Category: grief

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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!

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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

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Taking Up Space: How to honour and connect with our bodies in a fatphobic world

Written by: Dustin LindenSmith

Time to read: 12 minutes

Please allow me to introduce myself: I go by Dustin, my pronouns are he/him, and I’m grateful to live with my wife and three children on a lake situated on the unceded ancestral territory of Mi’kmaqi and the Mi’kmaq people, at Punamu’kwati’jk (”Boonamagwaddy”), known in modern times by its colonialist name of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia (across the harbour from Kjipuktuk (Chebucto), now known as Halifax). I am a White, cisgender man, a stay-at-home dad, a jazz musician, a recovering IT professional, and a peer supporter for people in recovery from eating disorders. I am also currently studying for my Master’s in Counselling Psychology to become a psychotherapist.

I come to this work by way of my own lived experience and my ongoing recovery from childhood trauma and an eating disorder.1 I first started eating for emotional comfort and stress relief at age 7, and I was always known as a “husky” child. I went on my first weight-loss diet in my pre-teens, and by the time I reached high school, I had “dieted my way up to” a very high weight. After another couple of weight-loss cycles followed by longer periods of weight gain, I became very fat by the halfway point of my undergraduate degree. I would go through about eight large swings of weight-cycling from that point until I entered recovery some 30 years later.

What I needed to recover from was an eating disorder. When I entered recovery, I estimated that I had gained and lost the equivalent of four times my adult body weight throughout my life—truly an epic, lifelong cycle of yo-yo dieting. Once I really connected the dots between my childhood trauma and my decades-long, food-based emotional coping habits, I was finally able to stop my weight-cycling behaviours by never starting another weight-loss diet again. However, in the fatphobic, diet-obsessed culture we live in, refusing to go on a diet is itself a quasi-revolutionary, countercultural act.

SOTU (State of the Union) for Fat People Today

First, a word about the word “fat”. People “of size” are reclaiming the word fat as a simple descriptor for our bodies that is stripped of its usual negative and pathologizing connotations. I will use the word as a non-judgmental reference term for people like me who live in larger bodies, and whenever I use the word, I do not imply that there is anything inherently wrong or unhealthy about merely being fat.

Second, our status: our numbers seem to be increasing every year, with the causes being multifactorial, complex, and interrelated with one’s socio-economic, cultural, and intersectional positioning within their community. In healthcare, the medical community certainly treats obesity as inherently pathological, but there is no consensus on how to “solve the problem of obesity” or even how to clearly define what “the problem” is in the first place (recent pharmaceutical developments with GLP-1 inhibitors such as Ozempic notwithstanding).

Third, how fat people might present today is multifaceted, but many of us share similar backgrounds and experiences. For years—likely dating back to our childhoods—many of us have had a dysregulated relationship with food, movement, and our bodies. Many of us have experienced chronic and severe weight cycling throughout our lives as a result of chronic weight-loss dieting, and many of us have experienced adverse childhood experiences that involved trauma, neglect, or abuse. Once more for the people in the back: Fat people are themselves often survivors of trauma and abuse.

A Primer on Anti-Fat Bias and Toxic Diet Culture

Anti-fat bias is rampant in our culture, and it is a force which is colonialist, misogynist, and racist in origin. It arises from holdover imperialist ideas about man’s apparent dominion over our mind and our bodies, and of mind over matter. It clings to the ill-conceived notion that we should all be capable of keeping the body “in line” through the rigours of our own mind and willpower, and this has cultivated a learned distrust within ourselves about our bodies. Many of us have lost faith in our own judgment about what is “the right thing” to do for our bodies.

Fat stigma is shot through our families, popular culture, our society, and in our physical spaces (e.g. restaurants, airplanes, and public seating areas which cannot comfortably accommodate fat people). In healthcare settings, it shows itself through the relentless pursuit of thinness for its own sake (+ the inanity of considering one’s BMI on its own as a diagnostic indicator for anything clinically useful on its own merits). We are also all involved (willingly or not) in a multi-billion-dollar dieting and weight loss industry that is deeply pervasive in our popular culture, news and social media, and within many of our friends and family groups.

Why Are We Fat, Anyway?

With apologies to any medical folks in the crowd, I’d like to start with a disavowal of our collective and cultural drive to be thin in the first place. It is simply not necessary to be thin in order to be happy or healthy, and just like anyone else, fat people deserve to be loved and to feel joy.

There are also well-established links between trauma, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and disordered eating behaviours 2. Some of us have that history + a personality type or an entrenched pattern of behaviour that derives emotional comfort or stress relief from eating or overeating, and this has led to weight gain over time.

Dieting for weight loss also contains a painful, intrinsic paradox: people can easily become fat by dieting for weight loss. Dieting has a 95+% failure rate for long-term, sustainable weight loss because of how our biology thwarts long-term weight-loss due to its protective metabolic functions against famine and starvation2. There is almost always an unhealthy rebound effect with dieting and weight-cycling, which can best be described as the result of a restrict*-then*-binge cycle (and not a binge-then-restrict cycle—i.e., the restricting comes first).

Being fat in this culture also brings with it body shame, self-loathing, a lack of self-trust, and pervasive feelings of failure and worthlessness resulting from years of “failing” at weight-loss diets. Shame is a physical manifestation of the existential fear that we might become excluded from our group, and this can often lead to dysfunctional and maladaptive behaviours and relational patterns3.

Many of us also deprive ourselves of food (and/or we have an adversarial relationship with it), and this can result in caloric restriction which then incites binge-eating behaviours. The truth is, *we all deserve to eat—*but not all of us believe that we deserve to eat (and/or not all of us believe that we deserve to eat what we want to eat and when we want to eat it).

In my observation, there are also certain factors that do not usually contribute to our fatness: these are a lack of self-insight, a lack of awareness, a lack of motivation, a lack of information, or a lack of knowledge. What we are missing is something much different than those things.

So What Do We Do Now?

So far, I’ve set some of the context for what it’s really like for fat people to live in a fatphobic world. But what can really do about all of that? I have four concrete things to suggest: (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.

Let’s get into each one in some detail.

1. Changing the way we think (and act) about fatness and our bodies

Here are some ways we can start to adjust our mindset and self-view about our own fatness and how we deserve to show up in the world.

  • cultivating accurate empathy and self-acceptance towards ourselves by working with our shame and forgiving ourselves for our past behaviour with food and movement
  • acknowledging our inherent sense of goodness and self-worth: acknowledging that we are all perfectly good, worthy people and we deserve to exist, to eat, and to take up space in this world—no matter what size we are or what number comes up when we step on a scale or whether we think “society” finds us attractive or whether we’ll find a partner or have a family
  • personal self-development and embodiment work: practicing personal self-development work that gets us into our bodies and cultivates mindfulness and self-acceptance (e.g. journaling, art, writing, crafting, singing, dancing, playing, music, acting, movement, or other embodiment exercises such as sports, yoga, tai chi, swimming, strength training, martial arts, walking, working out, golfing, racquet sports, sports in the water, hiking, camping, bouldering, landscaping, and more)
  • radical self-love: learning how to transform our adversarial relationship with our bodies into what Sonya Renee Taylor calls radical self-love

2. Cleaning up our social media feeds

Extensive research has confirmed that the use of social media has been linked to various poor mental health outcomes (e.g., Gioia et al., 2020; Keles et al., 2020). Here are some suggestions for how to mitigate those harms for yourself:

  • acknowledge SM’s real potential harms to our self-image, body image, and self-worth when we drench ourselves in comparisons with the beauty and health content online
  • initiate some accurate (but compassionate!) self-inquiry about your usage habits and about what you really want to “get” from your social media (e.g., if it’s for entertainment but the end result is that the images you’re exposing yourself to are harming you and making you feel terrible about yourself, is it really giving you what you’re looking for?)
  • revisiting privacy settings, posting/reading frequency, screen time settings
  • unfollowing accounts focused on weight loss, dieting, “clean” eating, excessive exercise, and anything that otherwise appears to promote toxic diet culture or misogynistic beauty standards
  • adding new accounts that pass your new fat-positive vibe check (e.g., the beautiful Black yogini Jessamyn Stanley (@mynameisjessamyn) (and don’t miss this guest reel by @funkingafter50); the ineffably happy Toronto gay bear Lukas (@bearlyfriendly); and the photographer and artist Sugar McD (@shooglet), who has taken some of the most beautiful pictures of fat people experiencing joy that I have ever seen)

3. Working on boundaries

This is the one I have personally found the most difficult; throughout my entire life, I have pre-emptively made self-deprecating fat jokes about myself in social settings in a misguided attempt to make everyone comfortable. I now understand that this habit was causing me more harm than I knew, and it was also giving everyone in my life implicit license to speak disrespectfully about my own weight.

It takes real courage (along with possibly a previously-unknown self-respect) to build up the confidence to start the challenging but worthwhile work of informing the people in your life that you’re no longer willing to put up with a certain type of discussion or judgment about your body weight, your diet, your food choices, or your health.

The best introduction to the topic I can suggest is Aleo’s own Lee Thomas’s 2-part blog post on this topic. When you’re ready to go deeper, I recommend looking at Black psychotherapist Nedra Glover Tawwab’s excellent work (e.g., her website, her Instagram, her book, and her workbook are all excellent resources).

4. Professional support

One of the sweetest gifts you can give yourself is the gift of professional support for what you’re struggling with. If you want to take a fresh new approach to your recovery, working with anti-diet, anti-oppressive practitioners such as the ones you will find at The Aleo Collective would be a great start. Lee and Raquel are MSWs; Courtenay is a Registered Dietitian, and I am a Peer Supporter who works with people in recovery from disordered eating and self-image issues.

  1. i.e., Binge-Eating Disorder (BED); see APA, 2022, p. 392 ↩︎
  2. Bakalar et al., 2018; Brewerton, 2022; Hemmingsson et al., 2014; Schiff et al., 2021 ↩︎
  3. Freire, 2020; Spreckley et al., 2021 ↩︎
  4. Doran & Lewis, 2012; Noll & Fredrickson, 1998 ↩︎

References

American Psychiatric Association [APA]. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., text rev. (DSM-5-TR). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787

Bakalar, J. L., Barmine, M., Druskin, L., Olsen, C. H., Quinlan, J., Sbrocco, T., & Tanofsky‐Kraff, M. (2018). Childhood adverse life events, disordered eating, and body mass index in US Military service members. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 51(5), 465–469. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.22851

Brewerton, T. D. (2022). Mechanisms by which adverse childhood experiences, other traumas and PTSD influence the health and well-being of individuals with eating disorders throughout the life span. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-022-00696-6

Doran, J., & Lewis, C. A. (2012). Components of Shame and Eating Disturbance Among Clinical and Non-clinical Populations: Shame and Eating Disturbance. European Eating Disorders Review, 20(4), 265–270. https://doi.org/10.1002/erv.1142

Freire, R. (2020). Scientific evidence of diets for weight loss: Different macronutrient composition, intermittent fasting, and popular diets. Nutrition, 69, 110549. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nut.2019.07.001

Gioia, F., Griffiths, M. D., & Boursier, V. (2020). Adolescents’ Body Shame and Social Networking Sites: The Mediating Effect of Body Image Control in Photos. Sex Roles, 83(11–12), 773–785. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01142-0

Hemmingsson, E., Johansson, K., & Reynisdottir, S. (2014). Effects of childhood abuse on adult obesity: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Obesity Reviews: An Official Journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, 15(11), 882–893. https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.12216

Keles, B., McCrae, N., & Grealish, A. (2020). A systematic review: The influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1), 79–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2019.1590851

Noll, S. M., & Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). A Mediational Model Linking Self-Objectification, Body Shame, and Disordered Eating. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 22(4), 623–636. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1998.tb00181.x

Schiff, M., Helton, J., & Fu, J. (2021). Adverse childhood experiences and obesity over time. Public Health Nutrition, 24(11), 3205–3209. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980021001804

Spreckley, M., Seidell, J., & Halberstadt, J. (2021). Perspectives into the experience of successful, substantial long-term weight-loss maintenance: A systematic review. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 16(1), 1862481. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482631.2020.1862481

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All in the family: Learning diet culture

Posted by: Raquel Griffin

Time to read: 4.5 minutes

One of the most devastating things I hear as an eating disorder therapist is how many people have been put on diets as children. 

Diet culture can be so insidious that what a parent thinks is just trying to do the “right thing” or promote a “healthy lifestyle” for their littles, can really be the tee up of an eating disorder. These often well-intentioned parents can be predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating eating disorders in their kids. Not always, but often times, eating disorders begin in the home and in the family, normalizing the harmful all-or-nothing beliefs of “good” bodies and foods and “bad” bodies and foods. Research shows that kids begin equating “fat” with “bad” between the ages of three and five and one of the strongest precipitating factors in the development of eating disorders is dieting. Dieting is normalized disordered eating and the more this is modelled or expected in families, the more potential for harm.

Here are just a few examples of what I call “family food harms”, adapted from the book Intuitive Eating: 

  • Needing to clean your plate at mealtimes
  • Rules related to snacks, sweets, desserts
  • Food used as a conditioning tool (reward & punishment)
  • Encouraged/told to lose weight, put on a diet
  • Rules related to activity/exercise
  • Parent/caregiver engaged in dieting behaviours or disordered eating
  • Parent/caregiver criticized own body/weight, negative self-talk

    • Taking diet culture harms to the next level in families involves children being encouraged or instructed to limit their food intake for the purpose of losing weight or “preventing” fatness. To be told as a child that there is something wrong with your body and these are the measures you need to take in order to “fix” it is deeply disturbing. And yet, this is a common trauma experienced by many. And, yes I purposefully am referring to this as a traumatic experience for folks. To inflict the deprivation of an essential need such as food onto a child and encouragement of that child to disconnect from their body’s cues and needs is deeply traumatic. 

    It’s completely understandable to have anger toward the people that normalized diet culture to you as a child and taught you to dislike and distrust your body. Honouring those feelings is part of the grieving process. Remember, those who have done harm to us as it relates to food, eating, and our body relationship are also victims of diet culture themselves. Finding compassion for those individuals can be helpful in healing and helping us navigate what to do next, exploring how to provide ourselves the care we needed but didn’t receive. Virgie Tovar, fat activist and author, describes the challenge of this: “I can look back and intellectually understand that my family is made up of real, live, squishy people who are very hurt. […]  I can understand that they need compassion […] I can recognize that […] they actually did their version of their very best. But the body is not a creature of intellect.  It doesn’t care how damaged or hurt my family is because all my body knows is the very thing that has been beating like a drum in the pit of my stomach for as long as I can remember: I am not safe here.” 

    What I appreciate about what Virgie describes here is that we can’t always intellectualize ourselves out of a trauma response. We can intellectually have compassion for and validate the pain and suffering of our perpetrators while also making choices that prioritize our own inner peace. If you’re struggling with finding compassion for your parents and others who have sabotaged your relationship with food or body, you’re not alone. It’s never too late to begin to show your body its worth listening to, worth being respected, worth taking up space. Sure, maybe the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time to plant a tree is today.

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Postpartum body image tips: from an ED therapist with ED lived experience

Posted by: Raquel Griffin

Time to read: 5 minutes

Originally appeared on: NEDIC.ca

At first, I thought I was successful in combating ED thoughts and the diet mentality that followed the birth of my child. Sure, my ear would initially be tickled with ED whisperings of fatphobia and diet culture. But just as quickly as they appeared, self-compassionate and comforting hums would replace them. But as time passed, I began to feel more stress about my new body shape and size. I had a number of friends and acquaintances who gave birth very close to when I did, and I really began to struggle with body comparison. Why was my body larger than theirs? Why did it seem like they were restored to their pre-pregnancy body sizes when I wasn’t? These fatphobic thoughts and expectations hung like a cloud as I squeezed my body into my too-small clothes.

At 4 months postpartum, I was horrified to come across a post in my social media feed from my local hospital’s pregnancy unit for an upcoming Q&A on C-sections. The post included a naked, very thin, flat-tummied, stretchmark-free, White person, from the navel down to the thighs. Laying on top of this body was a newborn baby, peaceful in slumber, blocking the birthing person’s labia but also positioned low enough down to wonder how this person had no pubic hair. It was a completely unrealistic picture of any body, let alone a postpartum body. I was so upset that a reproductive-focused medical facility was perpetuating such a harmful body standard (not to mention a weirdly sexualized one). I felt  shame about my postpartum body and at times bought into this diet-culture idea that my body should be getting smaller the further away I got from  my child’s birth date.

Pregnant people are often highly encouraged to try nursing at any cost (a whole separate conversation) and one of the “benefits” often included is weight loss. I hate to admit it… but when feeding/nursing was going well with my baby I was partially relieved, because in the back of my mind, I thought it would help prevent me from needing to adjust to a drastically new and different body. But, I was wrong. I was experiencing shame that my postpartum body was “too large” or differently-shaped. And, then I had shame about my fatphobia-induced shame, as that was not aligned with my values.

It’s a strange thing to hold reverence for the body that withstood such a major medical event and brought my treasured child into the world, while also resenting the bodily evidence left behind. To admire the softness and smoothness from stretched skin where my child was held in their first home, then to shortly thereafter hold disgust for new skin/fat folds and stretch mark scribblings. The good news is, with a lot of work, over time my relationship to my new body as a result of pregnancy and childbirth is becoming easier. If I’m being honest, I’m not yet at a place where I like my postpartum body and I’m willing to accept that maybe I will never be. But, I am at a place where my feelings toward my body are much more neutral and compassionate. My body has been and is capable of great things. My body is worthy. 

These are some of the things that have been helping me move toward body acceptance:

Remind yourself that eating is especially important during this time
Our bodies need energy in the form of food. Providing consistent and adequate nourishment following labour and delivery is extremely important—especially for postpartum bodies. The last thing your body needs right now is to have its starvation response triggered.

Whether your birth was vaginal or Caesarean, your body needs to recover and it needs food to do that. You will need the energy from food to help you combat the sleep deprivation you’ll be experiencing. I was able to have several family members and friends provide food and meals in the weeks after my birth so that I didn’t have to worry about cooking. This was an absolute life-saver. I also made sure I had Ensure and meal supplements on hand to quickly consume nutrients with little time/effort. Eating enough consistently and regularly will also help your milk production if you are nursing.

Respect your body by dressing in clothes that fit and are comfortable
Stop trying to squeeze into your old clothes. Wearing clothes that are too tight does not feel good. 

Pregnancy/maternity clothes are meant to accommodate a changing body. Your body may keep changing postpartum so just because you’re no longer pregnant doesn’t mean you should stop wearing pregnancy clothes if they are comfortable and fit. If it helps you feel better, stay away from the items that accentuate a “bump”.

If you find that your new body shape does not fit in any of the sizes provided in a store, consider buying a size that is too big and then taking to a tailor or a family member who has some sewing skills. Get familiar with thrift stores. I have bought some items new, but I have found most of my success with thrift stores. I’ve even bought a couple items with the tags still on.

Engage in re-embodying activities
With pregnancy, labour, child-birth, and nursing, there is a long period of time where you may feel like your body isn’t fully your own anymore. And, if you have a history of disordered eating and disembodiment, these feelings could be exacerbated. Where possible, engage in pleasurable activities that help you reconnect with your body in positive ways. For me, that was prioritizing walking, getting back to choir rehearsals and singing, and maintaining sexual intimacy with my partner. 

Reject the Diet Mentality
Shortly after giving birth, I completed my Intuitive Eating Counselling Certification. Immersing myself in anti-diet values, principles, and scientific research really helped me to reject the diet mentality and ED thoughts as they arose. 

There is no research to indicate that long-term weight loss is a realistic endeavour.
Speak out against harmful diet culture when you see it. For example, that Instagram post I mentioned— I commented something along the lines of “I’m really happy to see this event on C-sections will be taking place but I am very disappointed you chose to use a promotional image that perpetuates an unrealistic body standard”. Many other commenters followed suit and the account ended up removing that promotional image.
Consume weight-inclusive content, media, and literature that aligns with anti-diet values, fat-liberation, and Health at Every Size. Some of my favourites are:

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