This week a client shared her distress and self-judgment around body image concerns rearing their head after years of solid eating recovery and body peace. First, I tried to reassure her that body image concerns does not negate her progress and stability in eating recovery. Then we talked about how (sadly) normal it is to have a resurgence of negative thoughts and fears about our bodies. Our relationships with our bodies are dynamic and ongoing. Sometimes these relationships are harder than other times. When new or familiar body image concerns arise, I try to practice self-compassion and frame this as an opportunity for growth.

In our body acceptance group, Embodied, I invited group members to write themselves a letter from the perspective of their own bodies. If your body could speak to you, what would it say? While I did not share it with the group, I also wrote a letter to myself from the perspective of my body. I will share this letter here in hopes that you may know our journeys with our bodies are always dynamic and growing.

Dear Anna,

I am so grateful for our decades of life and adventure together. I really appreciate all the work you have done to see me, respect me, and love me. It’s meant so much to feel your care back, as I continue to take care of you. I love when you invite me to play. I love how much joy I bring you. I love scaling mountains together and drinking in all the beauty our mother earth offers. I love how you see me as more than your earthly companion; you hold me with so much love and see me as a source of wisdom and growth for you. 

Speaking of growth, I have a wish for you. As we have officially entered middle age, you notice how I am continuing to change. I know you tell me that this change is fine and expected. I also know you say this partly to reassure yourself that we’ll be ok. I know some of my health concerns are hard for you to accept but I appreciate your compassion as you try to be gentle with me and some new limitations. We’ve had to settle into a softer way of being in the world. I can’t operate with fearless abandon anymore and more is required for my recoveries. In this new space, you have noticed I have softened even more around all my edges. 

This is what I want from you at this point in our journey together. I want you to see and recognize that I am your soft place. 

We don’t need a world with more angles and edges. I offer you softness. We have done so many hard things together. And I am sure we will do even more. And now I want to invite you to find respite and comfort in the softness I offer you. 

Consider how your children love my softness. I am their soft home. They gravitate toward me, snuggling into me, sitting on top of me, and smashing their noses into my soft stomach, breathing in the smell of their mother. 

I am your soft home too. 

I know there are parts of my aging that are unwelcome. Like the grey hair you try to hide under blonde highlights. And the annoying paradox of middle age acne. I know as we age and move away from the arbitrary cultural ideal of youth, paired with my increased needs and limitations, it is harder for you to love me as fiercely as you have. 

I want to reassure you that I am still doing my best for us. I am navigating these new changes right along with you. I also want to remind you of what a privilege it is for us to grow older. Aging is a sacred gift and I am offering it to you. Let us age and understand that I continue to be strong for you, not in spite of, but actually IN my softness. 

I look forward to many beautiful years ahead together. 

Always yours,

Your body

If you feel you could benefit from more concentrated relational work with your body, I hope you will join me for our next session of Embodied: A body Acceptance Group. In this community, you will grow in your relationship to your own body as well as connect in healing ways with others who are on similar journeys! I am taking group sign ups this month and hope to hear from you! 

I was so grumpy. I hated the world and everyone in it. It was grey, and dark outside and I felt the same inside. My children were grating my nerves, and my husband couldn’t do anything right. I wanted everyone to go away and be left alone with my self-loathing.

I knew I could turn to my “toolkit” for help with my mood, but I resisted. Sometimes I just want to let the storm rage rather than rally the strength required to quell it.  

Hours later, reluctantly, and almost angrily, I decided to try one the strategies that had helped me in the past. I started looking through my camera roll at happy memories from the last year and started writing a gratitude list. It took about 30 minutes, but I felt better. 

I’m NOT about to give you an advertisement on the power of coping strategies. I have a love -hate relationship with coping strategies as much as my clients do. I share this experience because I want you to know I was surprised at how well this strategy worked for me in this moment. This usually isn’t the case. Coping strategies are important elements in our wellness toolkits but they are often disappointing. Coping strategies are exactly that…ways to cope. They aren’t strategies to produce miracles. 

Because mental illness doesn’t like to play by rules or respond perfectly to “formulas.” We can always do things to help ourselves in difficult emotional spaces…but the degree to which those emotional spaces change in response to our efforts, varies from time to time.

Sometimes we can overcome mental illness. And sometimes, perhaps more often than we want to talk about, mental illness is something we manage. 

For me, this is my on-again, off-again relationship with depression. 

Depression entered my life when I was a young teenager, but I would not understand it as depression until much later. I interpreted it as teenage heartbreak and body self-loathing. It wasn’t until I recovered from my eating disorder that I saw depression quietly abiding beneath and I was able to name it.

Medication and therapy changed everything. Later, in graduate school, I successfully went off my antidepressants and sustained my “recovery” from depression. I was doing well. I was hopeful that depression was a thing of my past, part of my broody teenage, young adult life. I believed the dogged optimism I inherited from my father, paired with the valuable skills I learned training as a psychologist, was everything I needed to leave depression behind. 

That’s not how my life progressed. At this point, I honestly can’t count the number of depressive episodes I’ve had. Sometimes they last months and months. One episode, postpartum, lasted two years. And then sometimes depression visits only for days, which technically means it doesn’t qualify as an “episode” but is painful nonetheless.

Each experience with depression varies by degree and intensity. Sometimes the episode is so subtle that it’s not until the depression lifts that I realize I was depressed at all. Other times the darkness is so visceral and consuming it is physically painful.

I have done a lot of work to understand my experience with depression and my relationship to it. In my 20s, when I was between depressive episodes, I lived in constant fear, wondering when the next episode would come. That is no longer my experience. 

I am not afraid of my depression anymore. I still hate it, but I know how to manage it. I know how to take care of myself when it comes knocking and decides to stay for a while. 

When I recognize it, I let depression help me grow. It stretches me, and it increases my compassion for others. It connects me to the humanity all around me as we each fight our own battles. Depression forces me to slow down, prioritize, and live more gently in this chaotic world. It forces me to plunge depths I don’t want to explore, but when I emerge, I am more deeply appreciative of the light. If I let depression be my teacher, it sure helps the visit pass more tolerably. 

Sometimes, depression just sucks. Part of managing mental illness can be letting myself ride the waves without having to tell myself “This is great because I’m learning to swim!” Sometimes I just feel dark, alone, scared, and broken. And that’s ok too. Those feelings, like all, will ebb and flow and I don’t always have to paint them pretty or make them meaningful. 

In summary, here’s what I’ve learned from my personal experience: Mental health matters. But mental health doesn’t always look or feel like what we expect. Sometimes mental health is full recovery. Sometimes mental health is resiliency. Sometimes mental health is growing through pain. Sometimes mental health is being gentle with ourselves in the torment.

A client recently said, “Anna, I’ve been working on my relationship with food and my body for a long time. I feel pretty confident and stable in recovery. When do I get to work on changing my body?” And I replied, “You mean, when do you earn the right to lose weight?” To which she responded, “Exactly.” 

This may resonate with you on your own journey with body and food. I’ve heard similar versions of this dialogue from several clients. A rendition of, “Now can I lose weight the ‘right’ way?” 

First, what is always true is you have body autonomy. You have every right to claim your body in whatever ways feels true to you. 

With that said, if weight loss feels true to you, I would want to understand why.

Why do you want to lose weight? What do you believe would be different for you if you lost weight? What is unacceptable about your current shape and size? 

Almost universally, I hear clients say they will “feel more confident” if they lose weight. When I hear that, I interpret that to mean, “I believe I am more likely to be accepted and loved by others. Even admired. I can show up in my body in spaces and not worry about rejection. I will also find myself more acceptable and loveable; therefore, I won’t reject myself.” 

It is true that our society reinforces weight loss, admires weight loss, and gives more respect and admiration to people in smaller sizes. It then follows that it makes sense that you may believe you would feel more confident by also being in a smaller size. You may even experience, in your history of weight change, an increased sense of confidence in a smaller size.  

But what is that confidence based on? It is based on something external to you. It is based on perception. And something external is never sustainable. True confidence is an inside job. 

And true belonging is not a size. The diet industry thrives on our fears of rejection and loneliness and perpetuates the lie that diverse bodies are unacceptable. People of every shape and size belong. They are found in communities, marriages, families, and every type of relationship available to our species. If we take the time to notice all the humans around us in all their diversity, we will know this to be true. 

Therefore confidence and belonging is not size dependent. 

Another common reason to want to lose weight is for “health.” 

It is also a fallacy that size is an indicator of health. If health was really your truth, weight loss would likely be counterproductive to this goal. In pursuit of health, some people find organic weight change to be a byproduct. But this is by no means universal, nor is it the goal. Health is about nourishing and moving your body appropriately. It is about taking care of your body and yourself. Deprivation in service of weight loss is not health. 

The “health” reason to pursue weight loss is almost universally a cover-up for continued body dissatisfaction.

Ok, so obviously, based on my profession, training, and experience, you know I’m biased. So this is where I will say weight loss, or even pursuing it, isn’t inherently bad. 

What matters is the why underneath the what. Why do you want to lose weight? 

I am chronically and deeply saddened by our culture’s obsession with weight and weight loss. In my experience, there are very few whys for the pursuit of weight loss that aren’t based on false premises or cultural lies. I desperately want to live in a world where our mental and physical energies are spent pursuing our actual truths. In pursuit of our true passions. In pursuit of our contributions. Not in pursuit of how much (or little) space we believe we should occupy in our bodies. 

We all deserve to take up space. Body acceptance and true confidence are not earned through body change. Our bodies, as they are, are acceptable and worthy of love and belonging. Peace with our bodies can be found in any size.