When we were 6…
Do you remember being 6? Do you remember how carefree and easy things like eating and moving were? When I was a child I had no concept of what or how I was eating, I literally didn't give it a second thought. At some point in my life (teenage years) food suddenly became 'good' or 'bad' and diet culture and all of its false promises had crept into my life.
One minute I'm unaware of what society considers to be beautiful or why it would even matter if my thighs meet at the top or not, and the next I'm checking my reflection in the mirror and weighing myself daily.
When I was a child I would move my body in ways I enjoyed, not because I needed to 'earn' a takeaway on a Friday night but simply because it felt good to run around and try new things. I rested when I needed to without self judgement of being lazy, I ate when I was hungry without fear of weight gain and I certainly wasn't stood in the pantry late at night spooning Nutella right out of the jar in the dark hoping nobody would know! (as an adult I have done this more times than I care to admit!)
30 years later and with children of my own, it's clear to me that we are not born hating our bodies or fearing carbs, we learn this stuff and the good news is we can unlearn it too.
We don't need to live our lives feeling out of control around food, nor do we need to spend any more of our precious time hating our bodies. We can learn new ways to reconnect with our intuition to help us make choices on how we eat from an internal place not meal plan given to us from the latest fad diet craze.
Children are naturally intuitive eaters, we are all born with an instinct to find food and sustain our body's calorific needs in a way that is unique to us. No two people are the same, no two people have the same energy requirements in any given moment.
My 6 year old honours her hunger, she eats when she’s hungry, she stops when she’s had enough. Sometimes she eats simply because she likes the taste of something, sometimes she eats dinner and she’s hungry 10 mins later, other times she eats alot and gives herself stomach ache……. but let me tell you what she doesn’t do, she doesn’t spend one moment of her time feeling guilt or shame or self-loathing and nor should we.
As adults, we are so conditioned by diet culture, we are told time and time again in sometimes very subtle ways that we simply can’t be trusted around food. We are led to believe that we have this problem that needs fixing. Is it any wonder the diet industry is worth billions of pounds? At the centre of this very clever marketing we are continually sold the solution to a problem we don't have. Our bodies are not broken, our bodies are extremely clever but we need to reconnect and trust them again.
'but what about being thin?' I get it, its hard to let go of the idea that if we simply try harder, if we could just get that willpower in check our bodies will suddenly reach the goal weight we have in our heads - I really do hear you, because that was me for the last 20 years. Every single time I lost weight I just couldn't keep it off, I tried EVERYTHING! I was tired and finally realised enough is enough.
I'm healthier both physically and mentally when I'm not controlling numbers, macros, points or syns. Why don't we eat in a way that we don't have to cheat on? Why don't we see how it feels to just eat without judgement, fear or shame.
Our bodies are just as amazing now as when were we’re children, our bodies are still capable of navigating what we need. It's time to reconnect with the body we have right now and trust ourselves again.