At this point most of you know my position — that 99% of women’s “food issues” really boil down to body image problems in disguise. 

Body dissatisfaction is the fuel that drives both the diet-binge cycle (which I explain here), AND most of our emotional eating (which I explain here).

The problem is, many women don’t actually put the work into developing body love at their current size, despite knowing this information, because they have conscious (or sub-conscious) objections to the work. 

Objections like…

1. “Loving myself as is, will make or keep me fat”
2. “Loving myself at this size is not possible”
3. “But no one else will love me at this size!”
4. “But HEALTH!”

Etc.

Since human beings don’t generally do anything unless their honest objections have been handled
first —

Step one in achieving body acceptance is identifying your rationalizations for body shame, and challenging the validity of those beliefs.  

I’m gonna start this party by sharing some of my counter-arguments to the objections listed above. 

1. “Loving myself as is, will make or keep me fat” 

   Interesting…has hating your body all these years resulted in any kind of permanent weight loss? Has it successfully “motivated” you into healthful behaviors around food in the long-term? (i.e. kept you from binge-eating, emotional eating, etc.) I’m assuming no… (This is a common objection to giving up the scale. Women always think “giving up the scale” = weight gain. Nope. Not a thing.)

2. “I just don’t see how I could possibly like myself at this size” 

   I love when people make assumptions about what’s possible before making any real commitment to achievement. Not to mention that dieting has a 90-some-odd percent chance of failure, but you sure as hell gave that one your all! To be clear, I’m not saying body acceptance is easy or will happen over night; but given the pretty clear and universal stats on dieting, you have a significantly better shot at achieving body-acceptance than permanent diet success.

3. “But no one else will love me at this size!” 

   Ahhh now we’re getting to the root of the issue — fear of judgement by others! But since loving yourself doesn’t make you fat and hating yourself doesn’t make you thin, this is a totally moot point. Your feelings about your weight have no impact on how other people will feel about your weight. (Although, your feelings about your body may have an impact on how pleasant you are to be around in general).

4. “But HEALTH!” 

   Again… Loving yourself doesn’t make you fat (or unhealthy), and hating yourself doesn’t make you thin (or healthy). In fact, I could easily argue the opposite is true, at least on the health front. I could also write an essay about how health and weight are not the same thing (more on this here), but I think I’d be missing an even greater point…that being unhealthy doesn’t make you unloveable. Period. 

Overall,

Objections to self-love — i.e. reasons we tell ourselves we shouldn’t love our bodies the way they are right now — are every woman’s biggest hurdle in healing her relationship with food. 

The moment we overcome our objections to a body-loving approach to food, is the moment it actually starts happening.

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