The words that finally helped me accept my body

I was standing in my hospital gown, waiting in a cold corridor at 6am to be weighed for the third time that week. I was doing everything right. I was eating all my meals and snacks and I’d attended all the groups and challenged my thoughts from the minute I woke up. Discharge back into the real world was looming. So why didn’t I love myself? Wasn’t that supposed to happen when you were in recovery? Could I have possibly gone through all of this, only to recover “wrong”?

As someone who has recovered from an eating disorder, I know all too well that the concept of body positivity and body love can feel daunting and unattainable. After almost a decade of suffering silently with disordered eating and thinking from the age of 12, it caused me to question what recovery really meant for me. And if I couldn’t achieve body love, was I really recovered?

In a world where being “body positive” is considered the epitome of body empowerment, the pressure to fall in love with your body has never been more overwhelming. Whether it be an eating disorder or just general body dissatisfaction, body-positivity messages can be incredibly disheartening if your current relationship with yourself and your body is more self-loathing than self-love.

While the body positive movement can be glorious and inspiring, it just isn’t the reality a lot of people are facing. We don’t run before we can walk, we don’t freestyle before we can dog paddle, so why are we expected to love our bodies when we can’t even tolerate them? In my journey, the concept of “body neutrality” emerged while working as a counsellor in the public mental-health system. While I was recovered in a physical and behavioural sense, my brain hadn’t quite given up convincing me of my worthlessness.

I was working with clients on thought-challenging and loved teaching them about neuroplasticity – the power our brain has to shift and develop new neural pathways. It felt inauthentic, however, to insist that a profoundly depressed person introduce thoughts such as “I have a good life” or “I am a wonderful person” when tolerating their mere existence was agony. Oh, how I could relate!

We need to start smaller. I began to explore the concept of neutral affirmations, both within myself and with the clients I was working with. I found interest was piqued when we discussed the possibility of merely developing a tolerance to ourselves. While this concept might sound miserable to some, for others it is absolutely life-giving. Neutral affirmations remove the positive or negative aspect of self talk, leaving it looking something like this:

“This is just the body that I am in.”
“This is simply how I look today.”
“It is fine if this is what I am capable of today.”

From a body-neutrality perspective, it’s liberating to realise that we don’t have to love ourselves and that we can get on with our lives while tolerating and accepting our bodies for what they are. It is a shift to a way of thinking that feels more authentic and less like a cheerleader who isn’t convinced his or her team will win.