Will I Be Able to Love My "Intuitive Eating" Body?

A fear with jumping all in with intuitive eating is the fear of what your body will do. Will you gain weight? Will you lose weight? Will you stay the same? Your fear is probably more, however, will I gain weight. We're going to talk through this fear and it is my hope that you'll be put at ease.Will I be able to love my "intuitive eating" body? I hear this question a lot. Essentially you're asking, what happens if I gain weight with intuitive eating and don't like what I see. Let's take a deep breath first and address where this fear comes from.Diet culture leads us to believe that there's such thing as an ideal body. It also has us believing that healthy looks a certain way...thin, toned, athletic, curves in all the "right" places. An image that is so far from what many of us have in a body if we truly allow our bodies to lead the way. And this leaves us feeling less than and seeking out ways to conform to our culture's ideal.When you notice a fear in your life that's potentially holding you back from something great, like here with a fear of what your body will do with intuitive eating, I want you to look into where that fear comes from. What specifically is it for you? I know I had this same fear come up when I was first breaking up with diet culture and learning to embrace more of an intuitive way of eating. Here's what was going through my head at the time...If I let go of my rules with eating I'll lose control and not be able to stop eating.If I start to gain weight I'll keep gaining and won't stop.I won't want to eat healthy food on my own.I'll eat all the time.I'll overeat.I'll be unhealthy.I won't like myself.These were a few of my fears. You see, I had them too! You are not alone in your fears.These fears all come from lies we hear from diet culture...you know, our current culture that's obsessed with thinness and dieting. Lies that in order to be healthy you have to have rules. Lies that your body can't be trusted around food. Lies that your body doesn't know how to self-regulate weight.Maybe you don't really know these to be lies in your own life. You've only ever experienced feeling like you have to reign in your natural tendencies with food because in the past if you didn't, you found yourself overeating or eating only non-nutritious foods.But here's the deal with intuitive eating...when you get rid of all the lies diet culture has drilled into your mind all these years, strip it all away, and get to the core of how you were made, you will find that your body is amazing at self-regulating your appetite. Your body is amazing at giving you cravings for the things that it needs. Your body is amazing at stabilizing your weight where it needs to be.So back to where we started this conversation...what if that weight that you're "supposed to be at" isn't a weight that you want to be at right now? What if that weight is more than is maybe socially acceptable in our world today?While it may be hard to fully grasp right now, I can reassure you that for both myself and for the women I've worked with, when you experience the peace and the overall joy with living intuitively, trusting your body, eating confidently, and feeling that sense of "ahhh I can relax" around food, all of these things far outweigh the worry of will I like where my body ends up. While I can't for sure say what your body will do, I can reassure you that it will be where it needs to be a healthy, and strong, you!So where to start? Start by working to clear your mind of the diet messages that have filled your thinking. What this may mean is really putting yourself in, what I like to call, an intuitive eating and body-positive bubble. We are so highly influenced by those who are around us, so here the very first thing to do is make sure your influence is by those who are somewhere close to where you want to be.Then, though this is tough and I recognize it, put weight on the back burner. Anytime a thought comes to your mind like, "What will my body do?" or "Am I gaining weight?", find yourself some healthy distraction to move on from that thought to something more in line with where you want to be. For instance, saying I don't know where my body will be or where it will go, I recognize that it will be always changing, but I choose to nourish it and care for it regardless.And that's just it, intuitive eating requires that weight be put on the back burner because if your mind is flooded constantly with thoughts of what will happen with my weight, it's really hard to truly tune into what's going on internal and what cues your body is giving you. Weight is an outward indicator and what we want is to really focus on tuning into those internal indicators and learn to trust them again. Trust that your weight will stabilize and be where it needs to be...I promise.I hope this helps you. If you're still struggling with jumping into intuitive eating and feel that this fear of "what will my body do" is a main reason, I'd love to talk and hear your concerns. Feel free to comment below as well!