Being Kind to Yourself Won’t Result in Apathy

Being kinder to yourself about your eating will not result in apathy. True self-love does not create overindulgence, but rather healthy habits motivated by care.

“If you talked to your friends the way you talk to your body, you’d have no friends left at all.”’

-Marcia Hutchinson

Many of us become aware that we are very harsh and cruel towards ourselves about our eating habits and our bodies.

I personally still struggle to some extent with kindness and compassion towards myself, but compared to how I used to treat myself, it is much, much better than it used to be. In fact, one of my close friends helped me see recently that this is still an issue I need to work on: the tendency towards harshness towards myself rather than compassion. It was something my mom taught me, and it's how she responded to her own eating and weight challenges.

Many of my clients have shared the following thoughts they've had towards themselves (I've also had many of these towards myself too):

"You're disgusting. No one will ever want you if you look like this."

"How hard is it to just wait till you're hungry and stop when you're full? It isn't rocket science. Get it together."

"With this eating, clearly you don't care that you're killing yourself. How selfish can you be to do that to your family?"

On some level we often realize we need to change this attitude. However we might be worried,

"But won't kindness and compassion mean leniency?"

"If I'm nice to myself about my eating I'll never get to where I need to be, I won't take it all seriously enough."

I can relate: I visualized myself being nice and kind towards myself about my eating and body, and I would see a person who wore too tight clothes they were spilling out and scarfing pizza because now it was all ok.

Often, the only two experiences we've had with food and our bodies are:

MODE 1: Overeating on junk food, not caring, feeling like it's "fun" and "freeing" but feeling tired, lethargic and unhealthy.

Often this is modeled in families where food addiction to avoid emotions is modeled and presented as "living in moderation" or "being fun and not too harsh".

MODE 2: Whipping ourselves into compliance through self-imposed fear tactics and sharming, and having some better health habits. This is also a learned response from our parent(s) responses to their own eating and weight and how they regarded others' struggles with it.

We often cannot imagine that there is a third mode we could live in. It looks like this:

MODE 3: We have consistent, healthful habits that are exactly what our bodies need to thrive, we don't overeat all the time or go overboard on junk food, and there is no judgment, fear or harshness.

We are motivated to care for our bodies because we love our bodies from the inside out: not just the number on the scale and the shape and appearance, but the internal health: we love and want to care for our liver and our heart and our blood and our pancreas.

We also are motivated towards balanced food habits because we now see emotional connectedness -- feeling our painful and uncomfortable emotions rather than suppressing them with food -- as true self love and kindness.

So I urge us all (myself included) to take more leaps in faith and emotional experimentation.

Are your beliefs and fears about what it will look like to offer kindness and compassion to yourself, and to give up judgment and fear tactics, really true?

"It has never been true, not for a moment, that shame leads to love. Only love leads to love."

-Geneen Roth

Photo by Ekrem Osmanoglu via Unsplash