You’re having a conversation with a close friend. There’s something exciting going on in your life and you’re dying to fill them in. As you talk, you’re brimming with energy and enthusiasm about your venture. When you finish, rather than sharing in your excitement your friend says flatly:
“What’s the point?”
Slightly stunned, you ask them to explain what they mean.
“Well”, they say, “it’s just that you’ll never do it. You’ll never achieve that. You might as well give up”.
How do you feel?
“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me…Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” – Shel Silverstein
It’s that time of year again when I ask myself the searching question: “why didn’t I take two weeks off work so I could watch TV?”.
Yes, it’s Wimbledon – the tennis tournament most beloved by players and fans alike.
One of the things I love about tennis is the way a match can turn around.
Continue reading “Food for Thought: Staying Connected to Hope”
Exercise.
I can practically feel the groaning and eye rolling.
In preparation for writing this blog post I did a bit of research. I googled some exercise slogans. What I found ranged from the ridiculous – “squat till you puke” (eww) – to the downright offensive, which I won’t repeat here (guys, seriously?).
Many of the so-called “motivational and inspirational” quotes I found conveyed the message that to have the body you’re “supposed” to have, you must punish it into submission.
No wonder the ‘e’ word has such a bad rep.
Continue reading “Gentle Reminder: Make Movement Joyful Again”
“Advertising for many commercial goods functions by cultivating our body insecurity or hatred in order to sell products. If we all believed we were attractive as we are, for example, we would have little need for most commercial beauty products. Women in particular are taught that their self-worth is determined by how well they match the cultural standard of beauty.
Most of us therefore feel inadequate and that we can never measure up. And it seems as if advertisers have recently realized that they were so busy exploiting women’s insecurities, they’d forgotten half the population. So now they’re doing their best to make men feel equally horrible about themselves. Buying into these images doesn’t benefit anyone but the advertisers”.
– Linda Bacon & Lucy Aphramor, “Body Respect”.
A few years ago, when I was facilitating a workshop on emotion-driven overeating, I was talking about not buying into “the cultural standard of beauty” that Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor describe. One of the participants became quite angry and said something like “it’s all very well to say that but this is how the world works”.
Continue reading “Expert Insight: Body Appreciation vs. Body Loathing”
You’re sitting in a café having coffee with a friend. Every few minutes you surreptitiously tug at your top so it doesn’t cling to the contour of your stomach.
You receive an invitation to your school reunion. You’d love to go but feel you can’t because you’ve put on weight and you worry about what people will think.
You regularly scan your body in a full-length mirror, thinking “God, look at my thighs/belly/insert other body part here”. When you’ve examined all your “defects”, you mutter a conclusive “ugh” before walking away from your reflection in disgust.
“There is deep wisdom within our very flesh, if only we can come to our senses and feel it”. – Elizabeth A. Behnke
How could someone allow themselves to put on so much weight? Why can’t they just come to their senses? This – and much worse – is often what people who are Not Thin fear others are thinking about them. To be fair, it sometimes is what people think if they’ve never had any kind of overeating issue themselves.
I know from personal experience how easy it is to put on a lot of weight without even knowing. Hard as it might be for some people to believe, it’s not difficult to put on 5 stone or more without really noticing.
Julie de Rohan 