How to love your body: Part 2- Body Neutrality
By Tanja, Psychologist for Eating Disorders & Body Image
In the first part of the series “How to love your body”, I talked about Body awareness as the first step on your journey towards body love. You have to know your body and pay attention to what is going on in your body before you can start to build positive feelings like acceptance and love towards it.
Hi there!
I’m Tanja. I’m a qualified psychologist specialising in eating disorders, negative body image and body hate. I’m also a survivor of anorexia.
My mission is to help you to end your lifelong struggles with food and your body and inspire you to uncover and embrace you true worth. Read more…
In the second part of the series, I’m going to talk about body neutrality, which is a crucial process of unravelling your negative feelings towards your body.
If you want to read more about how you can fall in love with your body, read my blog articles about Body Appreciation in the third part of this series and the fourth part of the series Body Love and Acceptance.
The version of body love that is promoted in our culture and social media nowadays can seem unreachable, as it feels as though you are expected to accept and love your body, shape or weight all the time. This can be unrealistic and counterproductive, as we can’t just switch immediately from negative judgment and body hate to body love in one step. A more realistic approach to building more positive feelings towards your body is to embrace feeling neutral about your body.
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What is body neutrality
Categories
Anorexia
Binge Eating Disorder
Bulimia
Intuitive Eating
Mindfulness
Orthorexia
Strategies for Recovery
Body neutrality is all about having a neutral attitude to your body. This approach is about respecting and honouring your body and focusing on what your body does, while not giving too much focus on how your body appears and on negative or positive thoughts about it. Being body-neutral is a middle path between love and hate, whereby you can be free of hateful and destructive thoughts while still not completely embracing your body as “beautiful”.
To get an idea of what neutrality looks like, try to identify something else in your life that you feel neutral about. For instance, I feel very neutral about my striped socks. I would never myself buy socks with striped patterns. But if I get striped socks as a present, I will wear them. I don’t feel positive or negative about them. Striped socks are just neutral to me. They are good enough to keep my feet warm and cosy, but I don’t actively love them or judge them. They don’t excite or disgust me. They are just socks.
And the same applies to your body; your stomach, your arms, your legs and your bottom. They are just parts of your body, which help you to hold a cup of coffee, move you from one place to the other or sit on a chair. They are not good or bad. They are just simply a part of who you are. And that is just fine.
Living Body Neutrality
Becoming body-neutral doesn’t mean ignoring your body. It is the opposite: it encourages you to respect your body enough to try to take care of it. By focusing less on the way your body looks, you will free yourself to pursue what genuinely makes you happy and fulfilled. When you don’t spend your time criticising your body or thinking about calories, you have more space to find inner peace and make choices based on what feels good for your body that day.
How to practice body neutrality
I will now show you several ways how you can practice body neutrality every day.
1. Change the focus of your conversations
Try to avoid self-criticism and begin to think about your body in neutral terms. For instance, instead of “My stomach looks fat in this T-shirt” say to yourself “I see curves and a feminine woman”.
Avoid body-centred conversations with your friends and family and surround yourself with people who don’t focus on appearance and body-related topics.
2. Change the topics you focus on
Choose the people you follow on social media carefully and the articles you read wisely. Focus on articles and people that don’t focus on beauty, clothes and other body-related matters. Avoid messages that trigger competitive or comparative thoughts around beauty.
3. Focus on how you feel in your body
By asking yourself this question, you will get an understanding of what you and your bodyreally need to feel good. For instance, your body needs food, so choose food based on how you feel, rather than based on restrictions such as dietary rules. Choose your clothes based on what feels comfortable and allows to express your individuality.
4. Focus on the functions of your body
With so much focus on what our bodies look like, we forget what they can actually do. So focusing on your body’s function rather than its form can be an effective way to improve your body image and body confidence.
To get into the habit of focusing on function over form, try to complete the sentence “My body can _____________” with as many answers as you can think of. Also think about what each function means to you.
For instance, you might say things like “My body can take me on sightseeing tours, which give me new memories and impressions about the world.”
Doing this exercise daily will help you to value all the parts of your body more and to create a more balanced perspective.
By practising body neutrality every day, you will find that the pressure to reach the perfect body shape and size becomes less. Ultimately, you will learn an important truth: that the other aspects of yourself are much more important than your body shape and clothes size.
You don’t need to struggle alone on your recovery journey. Simply get in touch to discuss how I can help you.
It is entirely possible to overcome an eating disorder or body hate – I have done it, others have done it and so can you!
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Receive a weekly dose of inspirations to help you make peace with your body and food.
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Hi there!
I’m Tanja. I’m a qualified psychologist specialising in eating disorders, negative body image and body hate. I’m also a survivor of anorexia.
My mission is to help you to end your lifelong struggles with food and your body and inspire you to uncover and embrace you true worth. Read more…