Ep. 33 Can You Make Peace with Your Body and Still Want to Lose Weight?

Why do we actually want to lose weight? I believe there's two reasons for this.

The first is that most of our weight loss desires aren't really about the weight.

They're about believing that you'll finally like yourself more, or you'll feel attractive, you'll feel more confident, or people won't judge you, or you'll finally feel like you're enough.

And that's where our cultural conditioning comes in, because we have been conditioned to believe that thin equals beautiful, that thin equals disciplined, that it equals healthy, and that fat equals lazy, unhealthy, and unattractive.

That's conditioning, not objective truth, because different cultures believe differently around beauty standards and health.

And over history, there have been completely different ways of viewing bodies.

So before we even get into this conversation about wanting to lose weight, we have to recognize this lens that we're looking through.

Here's the thing.

If we require our body to change in order to feel okay, we're postponing peace because peace can be felt now.

It actually doesn't come when or if.

That's only what we believe is the case.

And we see this happen in all different areas of our life.

We're waiting until we have the right body to feel good enough, to have the perfect relationship, to have the career, to have the money, the house, to be seen in high esteem by other people, to finally have the approval of our parents.

We're waiting for all of these things outside of ourselves to be okay in order for us to feel okay.

But that's a losing game because while we might have one area going well in our life, another area is going wrong.

Or while this person might think good of us, somebody else thinks bad of us.

And that's why it's so stressful.

Most of us in this culture are running around constantly trying to keep all of these balls in the air just so that we can finally feel okay.

And yet the reverse is what is true.

Feeling okay and feeling at peace comes from within now, regardless of the circumstances around us.

That's why I'm sure you've seen two people in a very similar situation, and one person seems to be unaffected and the other person is really affected, yet the same thing is happening.

It's because the internal state is different.

Now, there's many different reasons for why our internal state is different, but when we realize that it's the internal state, that we actually have to deal with what's going on within, not without, That's when we're going to make real change in actually feeling okay in ourself because life is going to be throwing at us things that are out of our control all the time, including our bodies.

We could be doing everything quote unquote right, giving our best efforts, and yet it still is going to change or it's not working in the way that it used to.

And so when we need our body to be a certain way in order for us to feel okay emotionally and mentally, we're in a losing game.