How Can You Know Weight Gain Will Stop?
A shared anxiety of both undereaters and overeaters is the fear of weight gain.
While some coaches might address this fear by saying that if we learn how to accept all body sizes we can eliminate the fear of our weight changing, that’s not the first thing that came to mind for me.
I do believe that body acceptance is an important piece of having a strong and healthy relationship with food, and I believe that addressing body image concerns is a necessary component of improving your relationship with food, but I want to emphasize the food piece here—and how talking about eating, rather than body image, can help to alleviate a fear of weight gain.
Firstly, here’s where this concern came from:
One of my Food Body Self® students, I’ll call her Mimi, who is working to end long-term food restriction and restore her weight, expressed to me her fear that if she increases her intake, her weight might never stop increasing.
But here’s the thing:
I work with overeaters as well as undereaters to end behaviors like emotional eating and binge eating and the tools I teach both groups of individuals are the exact same.
So the strategies Mimi is learning and the skills she is developing now in order to restore her weight are the exact same ones that would apply to stop herself from overeating if that were ever a concern for her.
In one fell swoop, she is learning how to restore and maintain balance.
This is because in Food Body Self® coaching, we teach mindfulness tools to increase your self-awareness; emotional processing skills; and how to change your beliefs, resulting in a powerful, resilient mindset.
The end goal of these three pillars is for you to eat with love.
Eating with love means:
Choosing nourishing foods with an array of health benefits AND including some “fun” foods purely for pleasure
Paying attention to your hunger cues to decide when and how much to eat AND not feeling guilty if there are times that you eat when you’re not hungry
Eating mindfully and savoring your meals AND knowing that you don’t need to practice mindful eating 100% of the time
Learning healthy coping mechanisms to process your emotions without eating AND knowing that emotional eating is a neutral tool for self-soothing
We learn to eat with love not because weight gain is bad, but because eating with love is an expression of self-care.
When you love someone, you want to take good care of them. Care can be disciplined, flexible, and kind, just like your eating habits.
And again, love also includes acceptance and respect for body size, but if your primary concern is that your eating habits will lead to uncontrollable weight gain, those behaviors can be addressed in addition to improving your body image.
The solution to fear is not always necessarily courage; in this case, the solution is love.