What if…
~WW, Jenny Craig, South Beach, Atkins, Nutrisystem had never been created?
~Calories and fat grams had never been created?
~Frozen meals and meal replacement shakes had never been invented?
~Height and weight charts had never been created (by insurance companies)?
I asked myself these questions recently.
What if all of these things just didn’t exist?
What would I do if I wanted to improve my relationship with food and eating, and lose weight, but I didn’t have these reference points?
It’s trippy to think about the absence of diets and ways of measuring foods’ values because we are inundated by people and entities in our culture that tell us what we should eat and how to fix our weight “problem.”
But the truth is that all of the things I mentioned above are human creations. They are not universal laws and truths
So, what would I do?
I would have to trust myself.
I would have to trust that I had the answers to my own questions about what to eat, when and where to eat, and how much. I would have to listen to myself and my body. What does my hunger feel like? How do I know when I have had enough to eat? What foods does my body need? What do I want to eat for pleasure?
I would have to pause and be still.
We’re not taught how to listen to ourselves.
We’re taught that our weight is a problem and that the solution is outside of ourselves.
If that were true, we would all have found the perfect diet, lost weight, and kept it off.
But that’s not how it works. We lose ourselves because we don’t trust that we are our own authority. That we know what we need.
Listening to ourselves, and trusting what we learn is the seat of our power.