Can we love our bodies while still feeling imperfect or dissatisfied? Becca Clegg, a therapist, educator, and coach, tackles this important question in today’s guest post. If you like what you read, go check out more of her insightful musings at Life Beyond the Diet.

This week, I did a talk for a group of mental health clinicians on Eating Disorders.  The talk went great, and I was feeling really pleased with myself for being able to help other therapists learn more about a topic that I am so passionate about.

As I was packing up my stuff to head out, one of the therapists stopped and asked me a question.

“So, you talk about all this stuff, but you are slim.  Do your client’s ever ask you how you can talk about struggling with your body when you don’t look like you do?”

I answered her as honestly as I could, telling her that you can’t look at someone’s body and know what their own struggle is, as the relationship we have with food is truly internal, and doesn’t really have to do with how the body looks anyway.

I left and didn’t really give her question much thought, but later that day, her question came back to me & stated to morph into self-doubt.

I have been at peace with my body for a long time, but how would I feel if my body changed drastically?  Would I still love myself the way I do now if something external shifted?

Does the peace I feel about my body come from within, or is it more related to a judgment that things on the outside are “ok”?

Could I practice what I preach if I lost this sense of peace? 

One thing I know deeply is that every part of me is devoted to the idea of self-love and body acceptance.  I have a deep knowing that to help women learn to find acceptance is my passion.  So to be in this space of questioning was extremely unnerving, and I’ll admit that it hit me between the eyes.

As I started to think about how I relate to my own body, it dawned on me that I don’t actually think everything about my body is ok.  In fact, I still judge plenty of things that I see in my body as “wrong” or “not good enough”.

I break out.  I have awful hair days that even a hat can’t fix.  I am aging, and I am starting to see the laws of gravity demonstrating themselves.  I have flab here, and wrinkles there, and if I’m looking for it, I can usually find something that is “out of place”.

At first these thoughts jumped out at me as evidence that I must be an imposter. “Oh crap!”, I thought,  “How can I think those things and have the nerve to write blog articles about loving your body?”

And then I remembered a concept that I have been following for some time.  It’s the basis of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which basically espouses the following:  We are culturally indoctrinated with certain thoughts.  To try and change those thoughts is nearly impossible.  It is much kinder, loving, and quite frankly, easier, to accept those thoughts as what they are, old cultural ideas that have just gotten in your head.  Then you move on to commitment to change.  Commitment to living from a kinder, gentler thought that is more aligned with what you want to believe.

When I realized this, it gave me a sense of peace.  Quite the contrary to feeling like an imposter, it made me realize that of course I still have the judgments about my body that are less than loving.  I am human.

I am also, however, fortunate enough to realize that my judgment about my body is the cultural lie, social conditioning left over from being raised in a society that taught me that there is a boiler plate standard for what it means to be “good enough” as a woman in this world.  I also realized that the deepest part of me absolutely knows that this is a pile of B.S.

I can be committed to loving my body and have wonderful, blissful days where I am 100% full of gratitude for everything about it.

I can still be committed to loving my body and have days where I question and doubt and think thoughts that are less than ideal. Body love, like everything else in life, it isn’t all unicorns and rainbows.

I remind people all the time that they should avoid black and white thinking, and search for the middle ground.  I came out of this realizing that I needed a dose of my own medicine.

The lesson I took away was that trying to be ‘perfect’ at love, be it self-love or body-love, is as unrealistic and as stressful as trying to be ‘perfect’ in our bodies themselves.   I choose to ignore the thoughts that I know aren’t kind, and align with the thoughts that are kind and quite frankly, feel better.  That is my daily commitment.  And the biggest lesson of all is that that is enough.

Rebecca Clegg, LPC (www.rebeccaclegg.com), is a therapist, writer and speaker specializing in helping women overcome unhealthy eating patterns and body image issues.  For the last decade, Rebecca has worked in both hospital and outpatient settings, and has worked extensively with a variety mental health issues. She is the President and founder of Authentic Living, LLC, and creator of the blog, www.lifebeyondthediet.com, both committed to the growth and empowerment of women everywhere. 

{via pinterest}

I’m getting to the end my pregnancy and I have to be honest: I’ve had an easy go of it. My body seems to have adjusted to this new state fairly well, which is an example to me of just what amazing things our bodies can do if we aren’t busy manipulating them or obsessing about them.

I was blessed to be passed over by the nausea gods and while I felt a bit tired in the beginning, I didn’t succumb to that consuming exhaustion that many people describe. Like I said, I’ve had it fairly easy.

But (and you knew there’d be a but, right?), I’ve had one symptom in particular that plagued me since the very beginning: I’m regularly short of breath.

In the beginning of pregnancy, I was told that this was due to hormonal and blood volume changes. Now, the baby growing inside of me has taken up residence on top of my lungs (or so it seems), and is constricting me taking a full breath. Regardless of the cause, the feeling has been the same — it feels impossible to get enough air.

Have you ever been short of breath, whether from illness, exercise, or some other reason? Honestly, it’s a really uncomfortable feeling. I was thinking recently about what makes it so uncomfortable. It’s not painful, per se. But it is scary. And I think that’s what makes it feel so awful.

Breathing is obviously so central to us staying alive as human beings. When we can’t get enough air, for whatever reason, our brain registers distress. This is clearly advantageous in most cases in which we can’t breath. Our brains need alerted that we need to do something to change that!

But what about when we there’s nothing to be done? I can’t make this baby move out of my ribs (as much as I would like to) or change my hormonal balance. So the panic response becomes pretty useless. It’s also useless because, despite feeling very much like I’m drowning, I can actually breath. It feels like I can’t, like I’m about to fall over after running a race, but in reality I can. If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be typing these words right now. If I can say the words to you, “I can’t breath,” I’m breathing!

So, you ask, what’s my point? You mean, other to get a chance to complain about my malady?

I was thinking recently how there are so many moments where we believe that we just cannot survive. We think we are drowning, we are going to die (literally or figuratively), and that we just can’t make it through. We feel hopeless and helpless. But in reality, if we can get enough perspective to take a single step back, we can see that there is a very alive “us” in there thinking that we’re not going to survive. In reality, the fact that we can think about how awful the situation is means we’re alive to think about it.

I realize with my breathing issue that the more I focus on thoughts like, “Oh my gooodness, I can’t breathe right now,” the worse the  experience becomes. Similarly, it’s in the believing that we cannot tolerate something uncomfortable (sadness or anger, for example) that we actually create pain. My difficulty breathing is not actually painful, really. It’s not comfortable. But the pain comes when I start getting panicked and frustrated and scared. My breathing shallows further and my body sends stress signals.

On the other hand, when I can remind myself that I am actually breathing and then focus on taking long, deep breaths in through my nose, my lungs suddenly fill further, my heart rate decreases, and I feel more at peace.

I think the same goes for any feeling or experience that we encounter. We have to take a step back, ground ourselves, and recognize that we can get through it – we are getting through it in each and every moment that we have the ability to think that we can’t, in fact. We just have to take it second by second, reminding ourselves that the pain only comes when we elevate the experience to something we believe we can’t handle. It’s amazing what can happen when we stop fighting against the experience.

Now, someone just remind me of this post when I go into labor.

{image via pinterest}

It was the weekend before our first ever baby shower when a couple people texted me to tell me that the registry we had created a major baby retailer had suddenly disappeared. They knew something was up because they had checked it out online before and now it was gone. Had we deleted it for some reason?

Noooooo…. I responded, confused. I checked myself and saw that they were in fact correct. The registry was nowhere to be found online. I started to get worried, knowing that our guests would likely be looking for it in order to purchase gifts. It wasn’t so much that I felt nervous to not receive a Baby Bjorn, but rather that our guests would be inconvenienced and confused.

I took a deep breath and called customer service. I talked to a fairly pleasant young woman for a while about the problem, and she was just as confused about it’s disappearance as I was. After about a half hour, she said she would transfer me to someone who may be able to help. And then she disconnected me instead. Deep breath. I was on my way to an all-day class, so I had to wait a few hours to call back. When I did, same routine… half hour with a representative, she says she’ll connect me with a manager, we are disconnected. I’m  starting to think this is a giant scheme… 

After my class is over, I take my tired and very irritated self straight to the store. Enough with phone calls! Being in the midst of the holidays, to call the place a zoo would be to insult zoos. There had to be six million people in this one store. I felt claustrophobic just walking in. I talked to a store employee for a while (time number infinity it seemed of explaining the story) and he agreed to have me talk to a manager. Now I can finally get some help!

Oh, how I was wrong. The manager seemed to have very little patience for my plight. But my shower! He kept insisting that the registry did not exist. Which it clearly did not, any longer. It was there, I swore. I’ve spent six months creating it. People had purchased us a couple of gifts from it. I came in this exact store and played with one of those little zapper guns picking out everything from pacifiers to a crib mattress.

And yet the manager insisted that there was no way that this was possible, given that it was gone. He told us that there’s no way it disappeared and that the only thing that could have happened is that we never created it or we chose to delete it. Now I want to scream. He had no interest in the fact that neither were true or even in the realm of possibility. In fact, he suggested that we had never even walked into the store before that day, implying not so subtly that we were possibly trying to scam him into giving us something as compensation for this. Because I spend my weekends playing out this elaborate scheme, while in my third trimester of pregnancy. What a great use of my time. Is this actually a pillow in my shirt? He said that his hands were tied and said that if we could even prove our story, he would be “so happy to help.” I hardly believed that, given that he looked like I was the most annoying person on earth in that moment.

I went home, feeling shocked, angry, and defeated. Here was my dilemma: Should I create a whole new registry, knowing that the shower guests would be looking for it, but knowing that this just make it impossible to prove our case (the store would see a registry and assume it was the same one as before)? Or should I hold out and search for a way to prove my point, delaying having a registry and inconveniencing guests and possibly forsaking getting my coveted Baby Bjorn?

I’ll be honest. I really wanted to hold out. I wanted so badly to prove this jerk wrong. I felt angry and insulted that he could imply I would lie about the situation, and I had already spent hours trying to fix the mess. I wanted retribution for my time and energy being wasted. Part of me really wanted to make this guy feel small, to be honest. I was so mad. The hormones didn’t help the matter.

When I got home, I actually got the evidence I needed. Someone had a receipt that showed the registry had been in existence the week before. I called the store, but of course the manager couldn’t be reached. I had another dilemma. Do I hold out to see if he calls me back (I left a message) or do I move on, suck it up, and create a new registry? Now I had the evidence leading to vindication in my hands. But it would require me to either wait (and, again, inconvenience friends and family possibly) or make yet another trip to the store, not even knowing if the guy would be working. And if I went, could he, would he, even do anything?

But man, I wanted to show him that darn receipt… Just to see his face and get an apology.

But would I even get an apology? Or would he have another rationale, a way to explain it away? Should I spend more time on this issue, time that I could be making a new registry and moving on with life?

Ultimately, I decided that the battle wasn’t worth it. I realized that proving myself to this person had become much too important to me. It wasn’t serving me to be so wrapped up in whether he knew that I was right and he was wrong, and in fact it was taking up more of my time and energy that just addressing the problem myself would have (wasting my time and energy being the thing I had just been complaining to him about).

I recognized that my intentions were to make someone feel less than me, and that was hardly the person that I wanted to be. This whole issue revolved around baby items, and I certainly wouldn’t want the baby in question to grow up feeling that being right was more important than anything else.

So I sucked it up. I complained to some friends and did something else for a while (and later wrote this post), which helped release some of the tension. And I was able to recognize that while it didn’t feel great forsake getting to prove myself, it was what needed to be done to release the negative energy I was holding on to. I wish I could tell you that I let it go for the guy’s sake, but ultimately it was what was best for me.

And in the end, our shower was full of love, laughter, and a plenty of gifts.

Have you ever been faced with a situation in which you knew you were right, but someone else didn’t think so? How did you handle it? 

{image via kindovermatter.com} 

Imagine a young family, piled into the mini-van on a brisk winter day. Snow is falling softly on the car and the children are in the back giggling as each snowflake makes it’s way past their brightly lit eyes. Everyone is excited as they make their way to the highway on their way towards their grandmother’s house, where they can’t wait to be greeted by the whole family waiting to open Christmas presents. As they pull onto the on-ramp of the highway, one of the kids’ favorite carols come onto the radio, and dad leans over from the wheel to turn the music up. As he does, he looks in the rearview mirror at the beautiful, smiling faces of his children, singing happily. He looks over at his wife, grabs her hand and squeezes it in a gesture that she recognizes as, “Aren’t we lucky?” He glances back into the mirror and sees a car coming down the highway…

Then what happens?

If you didn’t immediately think “car crash,” you’d be in the significant minority, at least according to Brene Brown. According to the shame and vulnerability researcher, a few will say “nothing” or something benign, a few will say something truly creative and terrible (like an ax murderer flies in on a UFO and abducts the children), but most will say some version of an accident.

In her recent talk on her new book I had the opportunity to attend, Brown used this example to highlight an everyday occurrence that, honestly, shook me to my core. I felt relieved to hear that it did the same to Brown when she started exploring it.

She was pointing to the danger of joy. Joy and danger aren’t usually associated with one another, you might recognize. But Brown astutely pointed to their deep association in our minds.

What she was acknowledging was how quickly our minds pilfer our joy in an attempt to protect us. As I began to think about this, I recognized that this process happens so regularly for me, sometimes I barely even notice it. It’s insidious, and at the same time a direct opponent to vulnerability.

To be filled with joy is to be vulnerable. To feel truly happy is to be at risk. That’s the truth of it, the truth that is both beautiful and ugly. You might recognize this as what happens when you’re standing over your children’s sleeping bodies at night filled with the most exquisite love you can imagine, and you suddenly feel a sense of intense dread that they won’t wake up. It might look like getting an amazing promotion at work, one that fills you with excitement and pride, and suddenly fearing that you won’t be able to live up to the new expectations. Or it might be having an amazing first date and after saying goodbye dreading that the person won’t call – or will meet someone else on their drive home.

Many of us don’t allow ourselves to feel joy, to really feel joy.  The kind of joy that envelopes us in a softness and safety. We get so terrified to experience that emotion because with it comes the possibility of it being suddenly ripped away. So many of us cut it off at the pass. We do this by imagining worst-case scenarios, distracting ourselves, or even numbing ourselves. I’ve worked with so many individuals who report emotionally eating when something good happens just as often as when something bad does.

People say things like, “Why should I let myself be happy when I just know it’s going to end?” or, “It’s better just to end the good feelings myself than to wait for the other shoe to drop.

So how do we let ourselves fully experience joy? How do we free fall into happiness bound with uncertainty?

Brown made an interesting point about this when she said that those in her research that reported being the most joyful in their lives were the ones that regularly cultivated a sense of gratitude. Apparently, gratitude is the antidote to joy-stealing; it protects our fragile hearts from the minds that want to prematurely rob us.

It’s a beautiful idea, and one that makes a lot of sense to me. Those in my life that live with the strongest sense of gratitude do seem to be doing something right. They seem happy, and more importantly, content.

I’ve made my own commitment recently to cultivating gratitude and joy in my life, and I hope you’ll join me. For me, I plan to go to bed each night acknowledging something I’m grateful for from my day, and to work on sharing my feelings of gratitude with others. What will you do?

Do you allow yourself to fully experience joy? Do you practice gratitude regularly?