Possible-izing the Impossible

Sometimes it feels like body image struggles, both physical and emotional, are impossible to overcome. I dedicate this post to everyone who keeps coming back to find their body love, even when it feels hopeless.

It may seem like one step forward, two steps back, but I have to believe - and I hope you will, too - that the reverse is True. So let's take those two steps forward, whatever they may entail for each one of us, and no matter how many times we have to take a baby step back again.

I say this to show my pride in all of you for whatever you do to increase your body love, but also as a form of self-encouragement! Since the beginning of this blog, two months ago, I have made major improvements on listening to my body and eating nutritionally.  I have not, however, been "moving" as often as I had wanted to, nor have I been slowly and healthily losing weight to relieve my joints and muscles. (See my first post for a more detailed account of my goals.)

I cannot express over typing how frustrating this is for me.  Here, I feel like I am doing everything right that I can possibly manage, and yet my body is not rewarding my efforts.  What is up with that?!

The answer is - it could be lots of things. For all of my body awareness, I cannot pretend to know everything that is going on in my body.  So I cannot despair, and I will continue to do what feels good, that is, to eat nutritionally and as my body needs it.

BUT, to satisfy my frustrated mind, I can postulate about mental blocks that may be in my way, preventing me from achieving the other hopes I have laid out for myself.  Talking with my besty from my home town this past 4th of July weekend, I discovered some of these personal mental and emotional blocks. I will go through them in reverse order:

3. My desire to feel ultra-relaxed during my downtime.  Logically, this cannot include movement.  Therefore, when I get home from work I am determined to be as sedentary (ie. restful) as possible.  We deconstructed this.

2. I feel hypocritical trying to lose weight, even healthily, because I know that a part of me still insists that I will look more beautiful if I am thinner. Even if that is not the ultimate reason that I desire a lighter physique, I feel guilty hearing it chatter away in the back of my head. We deconstructed this.

1. My sparring match with severe restrictive dieting has instilled in me an instinctual fear of hunger.  Any amount of hunger is automatic reason to find food, and if my stomach is growling, I must be restricting myself and something. is. wrong.  The problem with that is, in order to lose weight, I need to decrease my net calorie intake (ideally through exercise primarily), which, at the weight I am now, will not be quite enough to satiate me. So as far as I can tell, I will be a little hungry until my body adjusts.*  And I just cannot tolerate this. This did not need deconstructing because, as you can tell, I already knew where this one came from.

We talked these out for a long time and I won't bore you with the details.  What I will share are the solutions that we agreed may help.

Solutions (at least for now):
1. It is okay to be a little uncomfortable.  Try it and see. (I am currently experimenting with this.  It is going well, but I am still questioning when hunger is healthy and when it is not.  One technique I may try is eating small meals 5-6 times a day instead of 3 medium meals a day so that I do not feel as if I am operating on small amount of food all day.)

2. When I find myself focusing on ideal beauty, tag on a line about health (ie. "I will look so much better if I lose some weight...AND I will feel so healthy!")**

3. Relaxation does not have to be sedentary. I will attempt to do some moving as many days as possible before I relax all the way into my couch and can't get up.

A wonderful Beauty Redefined post-it note message
that I try to remind myself of when problem #2 surfaces.

Those are the experiments I am working on right now.   As I wrote this, I couldn't help but wonder if the experiments will ever end.  But why is that bad? If body health and body love will always be important to me, then, yes, I will always be asking my body what it needs.  Since it can't speak English back to me, I will have to continue to experiment to allow it to answer my questions. Maybe instead of calling it an experiment, I will call it a conversation.  Hm. Yes, I like that.  And I sure hope my conversation with my body will never end. (That would be bad.)

Well, that's it for now.  I'm off to move my body by wringing out hand-washed laundry (trust me, it is a workout).

With hope, clarity, and Dustin Hoffmanº,

Gabriella



*Since I have a doctor's check-up this week, I will follow up about this matter and let you know if that is, in fact, true.

**Ideally, I would love to cut myself off and say, "I will look so much better- NO! IT'S NOT ABOUT LOOKS! YOU WILL BE HEALTHY!" But I don't believe self-denial will do me much good.  I am subject to the unrealistic ideals of beauty as much as any other media-bashing, self-aware, body-image enthusiast out there.  The only way I can fight that body hate head on is to remove it further and further from my focus by redirecting my focus somewhere else (not by denying the thought in the first place).

ºHere's a little body love treat: