intuitive eating principles,#8
respect your body. this is everything.
i’ve been blogging on the many facets of body respect for 5 years and will not be able to cover them all in one post. but very basically, body respect means:
accepting your inherited size and shape, and your body’s unique weight set point, and
honoring your body as a living organism deserving of care irrespective of its aesthetic qualities
respecting your body means practicing interoception, living from the inside out, learning to attend to the body’s cues, from hunger to gut instincts, rather than imposing rigid, external, culturally determined rules on, to borrow mary oliver’s phrase, the soft animal of your body. it’s not treating or speaking about your body any worse than you would the body of a friend or a child or a pet–your body is as valuable as theirs. body respect does not require the presence of “positivity,” but it does require the absence of cruelty.
respecting your body means caring for the body you have today, not punishing it for the sake of a future fantasy. it means honoring your health by determining what behaviors are available to and appropriate for you, and to what degree. it means reckoning compassionately with limitations, cultivating boundaries. it’s learning to collaborate with the body in the pursuit of meaning and self actualization, instead of treating the body as an obstacle to those things. it doesn’t mean never changing the body in any way, but it does mean distinguishing between alterations which can improve quality of life (e.g. transition) and those which, in the long term, cannot (e.g. intentional weight loss).
body respect is wearing clothes that aren’t painful, physically or emotionally. it’s affirming the total okay-ness of your bare face, even if cosmetics are sometimes needed for practical or creative purposes. it’s unlearning messages that body hair is undesirable; it’s decolonizing your beauty standards, defining the idea of beauty for yourself and deciding what place that idea has in your life. it’s exploring the possibilities of ugliness. body respect is highly political.
sometimes the best body-care practices are not within our power to access, and sometimes they are. in the former case, body respect is remembering what our bodies do deserve, and holding the injustice the body suffers with compassion. it’s appropriately externalizing blame for those injustices (which are structural), not turning blame inward toward the body.
respecting your body is a lifelong process. the more you practice it, the better attuned you will be to the needs of the moment and the long term, from responding to hunger to choosing relationships to coping with inevitable illnesses. your body is your companion; your body is you. all of you deserves respect.
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