Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and I have a provocative question for you. How can we develop a healthy, positive relationship with our body and our body image? A woman named Carolyn wrote in to me a little while ago. She said, "Hi. I started Boot Camp 2.0 exactly three weeks ago, and I've lost 8.6 pounds so far. Yay me. I've been sticking to my Bright Lines and the thoughts about food have quieted down very quickly. However, I'm still obsessing about my weight. When do you think the thoughts about my weight, my size and criticism about my body might go away? Every time I look in the mirror, I get depressed, partly because I always see a fat person, even when I actually look better and I cannot stop focusing on my flaws like cellulite, etc." Oh, Carolyn, first of all, I just want you to know you're so not alone. You're so not alone, and this is not something in my experience that goes away on its own as readily as the food chatter can go away. For me, at least, body issues have been far more persnickety. Now, that said, I do a lot of active things to keep food thoughts at bay, and so your question really got me thinking deeply about what a comparable body image mental program would consist of.
The first thing I want to point out is that we don't come by our negative body image accidentally. It's not just like we just have it. It was programmed into us in many different ways. It was programmed into us by a society that exposed us to relentless images of an unrealistic beauty standard, including mostly images that aren't even real. They're photoshopped and altered and so forth. By friends and sometimes parents or role models growing up who modeled and indoctrinated us with shaming fat, talk about their bodies and our bodies, a society that talks about the body as a project. I know that a lot of people would look at Bright Line Eating® and say that we perpetuate that by focusing on helping people to lose weight. We're just perpetuating a 1980s diet culture. I think that there's some truth in that, and we've really worked on peeling away a lot of the aspects of the program that were there in the beginning, like the tagline, "Happy, Thin, and Free," and we just don't use that anymore. Thin is not, well take it from someone who used to smoke crack and snort crystal meth daily to in part, to be thin, thin is not well, and it should not be held up as a standard or a goal in and of itself. So there's that.
The programming is potentially continuing as we perpetuate it now. We've internalized it. All of those initially external things, and I remember one of the first ones that happened to me was I was maybe 10 years old, and I had not started to go through puberty yet at all, but I had a summertime playmate. She was maybe 11 years old, and she was way taller, and she was blonde and she was super curvy already at 11 or 12 years old. I was kind of just a little rectangular brick, and we were in our bathing suits. The father, of the Mesa, this was in Colorado on the Mesa, he looked at the two of us and he focused on her and her body, and he said, you have no idea what kind of doors are going to open for you and what kind of benefit it's going to be for you in your life to have a body like the one you have. And I was pretty, I don't know, I've always been pretty ambitious, and I was a straight A student, and I liked to have the good things in life, and I kind of looked in the mirror, we were in front of this full length mirror looking at ourselves in our bathing suits, and I looked at her body and I looked at my body and it was, it's my first memory of something's not right about my body. She's got a good body in a way that I don't have. He mentioned something about her curves and her waist and things like that. And I mean, I know creeporama, I know, but I think a lot of us have experiences like that. This is the programming that came in from the outside.
So, fast forward decades. Decades. Here we are on the other side, wiser, older, and so kind to ourselves and to others in so many ways, but maybe not this way. I was imagining a new kind of story if we were going to write out our old body story. My old body story is I don't like my midsection. My belly's always been too fat. I gain weight immediately in my belly. I never had a cute figure like other girls did. I was overweight already going into puberty, and the cheerleading outfit didn't fit me. I dropped out of cheerleading because the waist was too tight on the uniform, and I could just go on and on. But okay, so that's the old story. A new story might be, I picture a town that's besieged by war because a bigger neighboring country or whatever has come to take over and they're bombing and their soldiers are marching in. This town has one massive effective tank, the kind with not wheels but tracks, those big oval oblong tracks of steel that it just rolls over anything in the desert, one of those big tanks. It's completely enclosed and it's got the scope that it can see out and it can shoot bombs out and stuff. It's got one big tank, and that tank can do the work of hauling from place to place, supplies, people, keeping them safe, keeping them sheltered. This tank over the years endured bombs and shots and torpedoes, and it got dented and dirty, and it's just been through hell these years, decades of war. The town wins the war at the end. It wins its freedom. There's just this one tank standing that's done almost all the work of moving things from here to there and just getting the job done. It was never thanked for any of that work. It's gotten beaten up. At the end of the war, the townspeople look at this tank with such love and gratitude, and as a matter of fact, they build a whole park in celebration of this tank, and the tank doesn't want to retire yet and just sit there with a plaque there. It's still got some life in it, but that tank has earned the enduring gratitude of all the people. That tank is my body. If the tank were ever resting it in that park with the plaque there, with flowers there and a garland around its scope and just flowers and just letters of appreciation, a banner of thanks, if anyone were to look and say, yeah, but it's got that dent from that time that the bomb hit, the people of the town would look at that person and say, it would just be disgusting, "Be quiet. Do you know how much that tank has gotten us through? Do you know what the hardships have been and how it survived all of that?"
I think the first rule of a new world in which we have a positive body image we're developing a positive body image is a really firm no putdowns rule in my family. I have three girls that I'm raising. I raised them very young with a no fat talk policy. That would, as soon as they would start to talk about their belly or whatever, their friends would do that kind of stuff, they would bring it home. I would say, "Oh, no fat talk. We don't talk about our bodies like that here." They never hear me talk about my body or obsess about my body in any kind of way. And yeah, we just don't talk about our bodies like that. No put downs, no fat talk. They're like, we just don't do it. So, that would be the first thing and invoking the image of that tank and the gratitude and honor that the townspeople would give to it, just the minute an internal voice that represents old programming says something negative. Just bite your tongue, bite your tongue. No, no, no. Those pock marks from cellulite, those are bullet dents. This body kept you safe and going all those years.
The second thing I would say is really be careful of the gap that you're minding. We tend to focus on the gap between what our body looks like now and what our mental ideal is, which is obviously a never winning situation. We're never going to close that gap. The ideal doesn't even exist. The ideal is a fantasy, but there's another gap, which is between what our body is today and what it used to be or what it could be at its worst, like less mobile, more pain, right? I mean, if you think about it right at this moment, you and I, our bodies are the youngest they're ever going to be right now. We have the youngest body we're ever going to have the most functional. So, maybe not the most functional if we have an injury that we're recovering from or something, but focusing on the gap between the amazing attributes that our body has and what it used to have, maybe when we weighed a lot more or what it could have if we lost a lot of functionality broke, a leg, went blind, etc. If you already have blindness, then lost another sense, focusing on the gap between the body that you have and just noticing how it's improved in Bright Line Eating, how much less pain there is, etc. Because Carolyn, I know that you have lost already now a significant amount of weight. You wrote in this question a while ago. So, you've lost a lot of weight, your body's functioning way better, focusing on that gap is a helpful thing.
Then another change of focus is to focus on function rather than form, as opposed to how do my legs look in these shorts? That's a question of form. Really look at function. How do my legs function on this hike? Could I get on a bike and ride it? I haven't ridden a bike in a long time. That kind of function over form, really noticing the function and then asking ourselves, what do we want our body to be able to do? I mean, this is hearkening back to an old vlog that I put out a long time ago on goal body. Instead of thinking of goal weight, what number do I want to achieve? Think about goal body. What kind of functionality do I want to achieve? What do I want to be able to do in my body? As you know, I decided that I wanted to be able to do a pull up before I turned 50, and I did, and then I did two, and then I did three, and then I did four. So, focusing on function is an interesting one.
Another thing we can do, notice that these are all effortful and they're all in the theme of reprogramming. We were programmed to hate our bodies and summon the inner rebel to say, "I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm not going to be a mindless soldier for the opposing army that was besieging my precious little town trying to convince me that I needed to be wiped off the map." I didn't have a perfect body. No, nobody has a perfect body. So mantras of acceptance and humility can go a long way here. The reality is humility. Humility is a way out of this mental juggernaut where we're excessively focusing on our cellulite, the size of our belly, our rolls here or there, the whatever it is. Humility around this is my body. It's war weary in a lot of ways. It has battle scars. And thank God for clothes. I love that mantra. Thank God for clothes. I'll never be a bikini model. I never will. And that's okay. And I so love what my body can do.
Now, it's likely that you have a Part or Parts of you that hold onto this body negativity and doing some good Parts Work here can be helpful. You can use an IFS therapist or you can get into Everett Considine's amazing course when he offers it. You can do Bright Line Grit if you're in the Boot Camp, or you have access to the Boot Camp as a Bright Lifer™, you can use the bonus module in the Boot Camp. Just go into the Boot Camp, Boot Camp 2.0, and one of the bonus modules is The Break Through Your Resistance Roadmap. Break through your resistance. The resistance here is the resistance to having positive body image. There's a 13-minute meditation track there that you can use for a meditation stimulation, like to meditate on the questions or to journal on the questions, and use it to go deep inside and to find the Part of you, you might need to do it more than once because there might be multiple Parts of you that hold on a body perfection standard, and get curious. Get curious about those Parts of you that hold onto that standard. What are they thinking? What are they afraid of? Why are they thinking that it's important that your body look or be a certain way? What belief are they holding onto? What fear do they have? Get really, really curious. And notice that really what they're wanting is love and acceptance. That's what they're wanting. They think they want it from others, but actually they want it from you. They want it from your highest authentic self. They just want deep love and acceptance from you and from the divine flowing through you deep inside. You can hold court and play mama bear and reparent those scared, judged Parts of you and let them know that they're enough now and that you see them and that they're beautiful and that they don't need to be any different or any more or anything other than who they are, and that the body is just as it should be and it's celebrated. It is the war tank tourist attraction of the entire city. It is the destination for exactly what it's been through for exactly the triumph and victory that it has won. It is all of those marks and dents and imperfections, so-called imperfections that are the symbols of the victory that are what make that tank so beautiful.
And lastly, if you want to work on this stuff, I really encourage you to form within Bright Lifers, dear Carolyn, a body celebration group. Do it in an app. You can do it in Marco Polo, in WhatsApp, or create a meetup around it and regularly invite people to celebrate their body, to share body victories, to share. "I just put on an outfit, and I feel amazing in it." "I am so grateful for this body." "My thighs are typically a problem area for me, and I just got to say in these shorts, I feel great. I feel really great." "I'm so grateful that I can walk well." "I'm just going to go out into the day and enjoy this day," or fill in the blank.
We talk about non-scale victories in Bright Line Eating. Let's talk about body victories. Let's talk about body love and let's deliberately form communities and Mastermind Groups and collections of people who come together for the purpose of celebrating our physicality and our bodies and the things that we can do. Our bodies are miracles. I mean, just get a cut and then watch your body. Just heal it up over the next few days. Miraculous what your body's doing all the while making sure your pupils are dilated the right amount, making urine while you're not even thinking about it, and expelling all those wastes, making sure you're breathing just the right amount, making sure your heart still pumps, making sure that you can sit and stand up again and just do things that need to be done to live a life. However your body does it. I want to acknowledge that.
I may have shared in this vlog things that your body can't do. I understand that there's a lot of ableism that is built into that. What if your body can't do those things? I caught myself when I said, you can see, maybe you can't see. Maybe you have blindness. Body has an array of abilities, an array of disabilities. Every single body has that. On average, as we're young, we have more abilities and less disabilities. As we age, we get fewer abilities and more disabilities. That is the trajectory of the human life. Again, the tank in the celebratory park, it's not beloved because it functions optimally today. It's beloved because of the experiences it's had and the fortitude that it's demonstrated. Even when it wasn't being appreciated, even when it was being beaten up and maligned and shot at and worn down, it never gave up on us and our freedom. And so, if we have some degree of freedom from the food today, let us also celebrate the body that got us through that war so that we could win our freedom. Let's not let any spectator within ourselves look at that tank in that park and say some disparaging comment about a pockmark here or a dent there. Really like bad form, right? No. Let's just close our mind to that and say we love that tank because it's amazing. It's amazing, and it's worthy of celebration. So, thank you, Carolyn, for the question. I know this is an ongoing journey for all of us, and it takes work, it takes effort. This is a process of focus, redirection, and reprogramming, and it's possible. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
