Sweet Bodies ~ Section 3: Why Accepting Your Body is a Problem.

The problem is how easily it is to repeat the familiar cycles, even when you want to change. Learn how to change familiar thoughts about the body without focusing on weight, weight loss, or dieting.

So far, we have discussed the dream to increase your feelings of acceptance, appreciation, compassion, and kindness toward your body and decrease your hate, anger, disapproval, and disgust. However, if you have been dieting or hating your body, thighs, stomach, hair, feet, toes, or hands for a long time, then hating is familiar. Familiarity is a force that pulls you back to unpleasant feelings and unwanted behaviors.

So, you want to change, but the direction you want to move towards is unfamiliar. This situation creates doubt about the change, which pulls you back into repeating the past. 

“The problem is how remarkably easy it is to repeat the familiar cycles, even when you want to change.”

No Weight Loss Required is a free weight-inclusive newsletter. It is published two times a month. Paid subscribers also get access to our newest feature, Sweet Bodies: Practical Body Image Tools for People With Diabetes.  This five-part guided program includes a recorded video and ebook to help you change your body image from anger, disapproval, and disgust to increasing feelings of tolerance, acceptance, appreciation, compassion, and kindness toward yourself; no weight loss required.

What can you do to accept your body?

Now that you see the problem (congratulations!), you can work towards acceptance. Although acceptance seems simple on paper, it is harder to achieve when triggered, frustrated, or uncertain.  

Focusing specifically on body image, the change is to make acceptance, appreciation, and compassion familiar to you. This means you want to change your body image from hate, anger, and disapproval to acceptance, appreciation, and compassion. Because your body and body image are a tender topic, we will start small with simple, less emotionally charged examples. Slowly, we will move to you working directly on body image. 

Learn more: Can hunger and fullness stabilize blood sugar when you have diabetes?