Your Body Wants to Keep You Safe
In a world that seems to tell you that you can't trust your body, this truth...that your body actually wants to keep you safe...may sound a bit foreign. But once I really came to understand and believe that my body isn't out to get me, that it doesn't have to be an uphill battle to care for and keep your body healthy, everything just started to click! Making decisions about how to eat wasn't so difficult! Overthinking a menu at a restaurant wasn't a thing anymore! And I could take each meal one at a time, not worrying if I had the "perfect" combo of carbs, fat, and protein for the day.I could just relax around food! And what freedom that brought!A constant truth I'm reinforcing with women I work with is that you can trust your body to keep you safe. Counting calories, adding up macros in your head, or following a certain meal plan don't have to be part of your life every day to feel healthy and well in your body.
So, let's talk today WHY you can trust your body, why your body isn't out to get you and how it's actually trying to protect you. And, let's tie together a couple things to help you make this truth a reality for your own life. Because I firmly believe that knowledge can be so powerful when it comes to taking care of your body. And unfortunately, most of the time we can easily find ourselves following health fads without really being knowledgeable about the truth. You ready to dive in?
You can trust your body's ability to regulate your weight.
Let's start by talking about the physiological ways in which you can trust your body. Bare with me for a sec...we're gonna get a little sciency!First off, your body has some amazing things in place that help keep it healthy and strong. There's a weight regulation system which helps to keep your body's weight at a healthy place. Hormones tell your body whether it should be conserving energy or spending energy to help maintain weight. These signals are affected by a couple of things:
How much or how little food you eat.
How much or how little you exercise.
What stress you have going on in your life.
How much or how little sleep you get.
Too few calories taken in is going to signal to your body starvation, causing it to hold on to weight more easily as a way of protecting it from loosing too much weight. Too many calories taken in causes your body to work harder to keep your weight down lower. Same with exercise, stress, and lack of sleep.
But, these systems can only work effectively for so long before they fatigue, leading more often towards weight gain. Because weight gain is far safer for your body than weight loss. Think of it as you would a see-saw. Your body's ideal is when it's perfectly straight across, not teetering with one side lower than the other. **Also to note, this balanced see-saw isn't one certain weight, but a range of weight that is different for each and every one of us!** Naturally with life, with stress, with things going on, we may teeter lower on one side than the other. But, your body will naturally try and regulate, try to balance your weight back out.
What happens with too many highs and lows on the see-saw (if we're still using this example) is that it puts stress on your body. And repeated stress on your body's comfortable weight, as with what happens with chronic dieting, is that your body's comfortable weight range can increase. Again, it's a measure of protection. One which we can be grateful for. Because without this mechanism, your body possibly wouldn't be able to deal with the stress and who knows what damage that would do!
Your body regulates stress to keep you safe.
Stress is the biggest offender when it comes to the health of your body. But thankfully, our bodies are equipped to handle quite a lot of stress that we and our environment put on it. Think through the last time you were stressed out. Your heart rate probably increased, breathing quickened. You probably lost your appetite. All of the things you feel when you're stressed out are a normal response to stress that helps your body to cope with that stress.We trust our bodies to keep us safe when stress is put on us. You probably don't even think about your body handling that stress at the time because you don't need to...it just happens. And then as the stress decreases, everything returns back to normal. More on this another day. But just know, for today, your body's response to stress is a safety mechanism, a way of keeping your body healthy and meeting your needs in that moment when things feel uncertain.
Listening to your body can help you work with it in keeping you safe.
Thank goodness for the wisdom of our bodies! Without it, who knows what we'd be like. We'd definitely not live as long and we'd definitely not enjoy the time we have on earth as much because we'd be worrying about every little thing that could compromise our existence. We can trust our bodies and how they manage the things we eat, how much exercise we get, how much sleep and how much stress we put on our bodies. We can trust that our bodies are wise in how they manage everything life throws at them and know that we don't have to fight against our bodies. Our bodies are fighting FOR us, not AGAINST us! And the best way to live a healthy life is by teaming up with your body and supporting it in this.
Our bodies are wise and, like I said before, give us signals and messages that something is off. Whether that's a signal that we need to eat through hunger, or we need to drink through thirst. It signals that it's stressed through immediate increased heart rate and breathing, and stressed more long term by maybe turning off our reproductive function.Learning to trust your body, to know that it's goal is to keep you safe, can help you to tune into these signals and can help you to adjust something in your life to get back to health.It's not always easy when each and every day you probably get messages that you can't trust your body, you can't believe that it's goal is to keep you safe. But know this, friend, your body CAN be trusted. I've seen it in other women and I've experienced it myself.
Your body wants to keep you safe. It's not out to get you. It's goal is your health. Do you struggle with this concept? What about trusting your body to keep you safe is easy or hard to comprehend? Have you experienced any of the examples of your body sending you signals that something's off?