Body Security Principles 4 and 5
Hello, hi and greetings!
Welcome to summer- the land of magazine headlines that boast about the “beach bod”, an apparent necessity if we want to strut our stuff in the sun and sand. I am your host and long time ally, Jessica Curran, writer of Light Post Monthly and psychotherapist. Reminder: all bodies (including fat ones) can be sexy, or not sexy, or anything you want your body to be. You can wear a swim suit on the beach, or a t-shirt, or a full-on onesie. There is no moral value associated with the size of your body and how you choose to cover it (speaking from a fatphobic perspective- I realize that fashion and clothing are a part of other spiritual and value-based systems, of which I am not referring to here). This month we’re going to spend some time diving into Body Security Principles 4 and 5, talking a bit more about what it means to live without the dark cloud of diet hanging over our heads.
**Please note that in this edition, I share some of my experiences regarding the harmful impacts of diet culture. I also use some potentially harmful diet-culture language. These passages may be triggering for some readers. If you choose to read on, please know that you are not alone, and your body does not define your worth.**
To recap: here are the 5 principles of Body Security:
My body size and shape does not determine my worth
The thoughts that I have about my body are the result of a cultural system that idealizes a specific body type
Considering principle #2, it’s understanding that I have doubts about my body image
I can give my permission to have difficult thoughts/feelings about my body
When I have critical or dismissing thoughts about my body, it doesn’t mean these thoughts are true in reality
Here’s the thing- leaving diet culture behind is hard. It’s hard because critical messages continue to pop into our minds, long after we’ve decided to say ‘bye-bye!’ to restrictive eating. It’s likely that these messages continue to pop-up because we’re taught to live by diet culture’s values from a very young age. These values are engrained deep within us, they are tattooed to our skin. Deciding to leave diets behind will not stop the messages from pouring through our minds. Messages that tell us that our value is somehow minimized if we are “too big” (whatever that means), if we are fat, if we skip yoga, or if we eat popcorn for dinner (…ok- so popcorn is probably my favourite dinner). Body Security Principle #4 addresses these messages, by encouraging acceptance around these thoughts.
To this point, I think it’s story time…
I consider myself “recovered” when it come to disordered eating. I don’t restrict, I love celebrating my body, I’m excited about the freedom that this journey has afforded. I’m a new person, a confident person, an empowered person. I have no conscious desire to go back to being the obsessive, panicked, self-loathing individual that I was when I was in the throws of my disordered eating. Even still, I have thoughts. I’d like to say that these thoughts are random, but I know that I could probably trace them back to a trigger- a moment when I was confronted with a potential failure. You see, this is my thing- I’m terrified of failure. Why? Because failure is exposing, it leads to disappointment, which leads to skepticism, incompetence, and ultimately, abandonment. If I fail, I will be alone, and I’m scared of being alone. If I’m successful, people will love me. If people love me, they won’t leave me.
When I was “successful” in dieting and exercise, I thought I had it all together- I was succeeding, and people could see me and know that I had it all figured out. It’s important for me to tell you that this was a fucking performance. The reality was that my self-esteem was in the toilet, I craved- nay, needed- praise in order to fuel my behaviours and me keep going. Comments like, “how do you do it?”, “you’re so disciplined”, or my favourite- “look at you, you’re so small right now”, motivated me to maintain my restrictive diet and exercise regiment. Each of these external comments was a battery, a small charge to fuel the flame. Inside, I hated myself. I would spend hours looking at myself in the mirror, pausing to poke at the saggy skin and the stretch marks that revealed my secret- I was a secret fatty, a fat person walking around thin suit. I had to perform, so to hide the truth. Being fat felt like the ultimate failure- if people knew what I really was, they would see that I “didn’t having it together” because my body would wholly advertise my incompetence. When I strip back the layers of complicated emotion and years of problematic messaging, the bottom line is that I believed being thin meant being loved, and being fat meant being ostracized and alone.
I don’t perform that way anymore. I don’t pretend to have it together. I don’t stand in front of the mirror criticizing my body, and I don’t believe that my body has anything to do with how much my people love me. Don’t get me wrong, I DO stand in front of the mirror, and for the most part, I think, “remember when you got those stretch marks?”, or “I love this romper!”. Even still, every once and a while my mind very quickly takes me through a familiar repertoire of disordered messages about food and my body. Just last week, I was driving when suddenly I thought, “I should starve myself”. Wait- WHAT?!? The next thought: “Jess, give your head a shake, you don’t want that.”
I think of my mind like a spider web, all of my thoughts connected and intertwined. Sometimes it’s easy for me to see the connections, other times, it’s impossible. When I have these kinds of harmful thoughts about food, it’s not because I’m defective or unwell, it’s because these thoughts are connected to other thoughts in the spider web. I spent my whole life sewing together this web, so it makes sense that these connections still exists, and will continue to exist for a long time. It’s my job to call attention to these thoughts, rather than letting them take me hostage. There was a time when the thought “I should starve myself” would result in a carefully thought out, step-by-step process, where I would actually plan out the “How To” manual. Now, I can let that thought come, I can see it in my mind’s eye, and then I can let it go. This is the essence of Body Security principle #4.
The important part of this story is that it’s ok to have these thoughts, most of us have been wired to have these thoughts. I can give myself permission to be kind when I hear these thoughts echoing in my mind. I can stop myself and ask, “what’s happening in my life that these thoughts are being triggered?” Or “Is there something that I need that I’m not getting right now?” Or, for me, “What perceived failure am I afraid of?”. Body Security principles #4 says that we can give ourselves permissions to have negative or self-criticizing thoughts about our bodies. Having these thoughts does NOT mean we are failing, and it does not mean that we haven’t made progress toward the development of a healthy relationship with food, exercise, our body, or whatever it is that we’re struggling with in that moment.
Finally, Body Security Principle #5 provides the last bit of wisdom when working within the Body Security paradigm: having a negative, critical or dismissing thought about my body does not mean that these thoughts are true. Diet culture and the wellness movement have been carefully constructed to make us believe that we are bad or amoral if we aren’t thin. Further, thinness has been moralized, alongside our health. We have been taught that if we live in fat bodies, we live in unhealthy bodies and that being unhealthy is BAD. Hear me now: These messages are not true. There is no true universal guideline for the way your body should look or for the degree to which you value the wellness. You can choose to live the way that you want to live, you can choose to eat the way you want to eat, you can choose to move the way you want to move. These choices are not scored on some existential platform, there is no “wellness heaven”. Similarly, other humans do not have the right to judge you for your choices, and if they do, that is a THEM problem, or a larger systemic problem, NOT a YOU problem. YOUR BODY IS NOT THE PROBLEM…your body is actually quite remarkable.
And that’s it- the Body Security Principles explained. There is another important piece to these principles: this paradigm shift is not easy. Wiggling away from diet-culture can sometimes feel like taking 1-step-forward,2-steps-back. I love my body, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t experience hatred and disgust from the outside world, because I will, and somedays, that makes all of this really hard. Yes, it would be “easier” to live in a smaller body, because it makes the rest of the world more comfortable. But my body is not for you. It’s not a display piece, existing to evoke feelings of joy or pleasure in other people. My body exists for me, it holds all my good parts, all my bad parts and everything in between. I am a human being, a fat, amazing human being.
The information contained in this document is not intended as a replacement for medical care/advice, or mental health care. If you have questions or concerns regarding your physical or mental wellbeing, I encourage you to reach out to a trusted healthcare professional.
If you’re considering seeking out therapy for issues related to Anxiety, Body Image, or any other mental health issue that’s been heavy on your mind, please reach out for a no-charge consultation.
