Advent Week 4 on Love
& Intuitive Eating Principle 8 - Respecting Your Body
It’s the final week of Advent and Christmas is two days away! Yesterday, the candle representing love was lit.
It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around the kind of love that we celebrate in the Christmas season. A love so vast and infinite, that would lead to God sending His son as a baby. A love full of grace and mercy. A love that leads to forgiveness, healing, and redemption. A love that truly “surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19).
I have loved many things, and I have been loved. I believe that God is love and have had felt experiences of God’s love. Sometimes love comes easy and sometimes love takes work.
When my son was little, he was a particularly challenging baby who grew into an equally challenging toddler. He cried a lot, and I struggled. I used to make up little songs and one that has stuck in my brain went like this:
“I like you and I love you…
My love helps me to like you…
And when I *feel* like I don’t like you…
My love helps me to like you again <3”
One day, a few years ago, I realized that I no longer sang that song to Liam. Liam had grown and changed and was a lot less fussy. I, too, had grown and could handle his emotions better. I was at a point where I genuinely loved him AND liked him.
Over the years I’ve learned that love is a choice. And in the hardest seasons of motherhood (and marriage), when it felt hard to “like” and even sometimes hard to love, I would choose love and hope that choice would lead to more positive feelings.
In my post last week, I shared a brief synopsis of how “easy” (or hard) each Intuitive Eating principle was for me to grasp at the beginning of my IE journey in 2020. I stopped with Principle 7, digging into Coping with Your Emotions with Kindness.
As I contemplated what to share on Intuitive Eating and love, I find it to be no coincidence that four years into my Intuitive Eating journey, Principle 8 can still feel like such an uphill battle:
I know, I know, this principle isn’t titled, “LOVE Your Body” … but for someone who hated their body for as long as they can remember, respect felt just as daunting as love. It felt like I was being told that I needed to think more highly of my body and I just wasn’t sure if I would ever be capable of doing that.
As a Christian who was raised with a lot of black and white, all-or-nothing thinking, the best gift of grace that I was given as I learned this principle was that “self-love” wasn’t actually the goal. The first step was simply neutrality. And so, I walked into 2021 with that as my word of the year:
2021 was a year of curating my social media feed to eliminate messages that spoke shame over my body. I did at least one closet clean out, maybe two, to get to a place where my clothes were comfortable and served my here and now body. I fought against all of the lies of diet culture that would creep in and on days when I began to feel particularly defeated, I vowed to not quit Intuitive Eating until I had tried it for the same amount of time that I had tried (and failed) dieting [20 years!]
It wasn’t until 2022, nearly a year and a half into my Intuitive Eating journey, that I read Jess Connolly’s book “Breaking Free from Body Shame” and was finally ready to believe the message and receive the freedom that was for me. Throughout the book Jess repeats over and over, “Your body is good.” And for the first time in my life, I finally began to let go of the negative feelings and learn to be a little kinder and a little more gracious with myself. I finally started to learn what it meant to have “self-compassion” as I embraced this message as true for me – my body is good because it was made by God and called “good” by God.
I wish that there was a magic wand that I could wave or a magic phrase that I could speak over you to make the mindset shift easy for you. It’s not easy. It’s a discipline of daily surrender. It’s taking captive your first negative thought and replacing it with a new thought – “my body is good.” It’s speaking TRUTH over yourself even when you don’t believe it (aka faking it until you make it). It’s asking for forgiveness when the thoughts and words that you speak over yourself are lies. It’s a few tiny steps forward and triggers that throw you so far back. It’s a journey that is in no way linear. Please trust me when I say, you’ve made so much progress and freedom is for you!
And now I get to be really honest and say, I’ve been an Intuitive Eater for four years and it’s been a solid three years of working on the body image stuff and last week was a terrible week for me. I struggled with my body. I struggled with the thought of showing up in public and being around people I hadn’t seen in five years. I was frustrated and disappointed and I was not loving or kind toward myself.
Here are the markers of growth that I experienced last week:
I reached out to my IE friends for support
I acknowledged that my body wasn’t really the problem and that it was more likely the fabric and style of dress
I decided I would accessorize and that would help
I showed up in my good body and I enjoyed celebrating Erika & Joey and seeing old church friends, some that I haven’t seen in five years
I did not allow my body to keep me from showing up.
Do I love my body today and am I going to tell you that you should love yours? Nope! But can we be a little kinder, a little more compassionate, and a little more caring towards our bodies? 100% yes!
From my experience, kindness and compassion lead to those neutral spaces and eventually those neutral spaces lead to appreciation. It might not be like, and it may never be love, but it’s growth.
Today I am thankful that God loves ALL of me and that there is grace for the areas where I am still growing. God’s gift of love, baby Jesus, gives me hope that someday I will be able to fully grasp what it means to love even myself.
What about you, does love come easy for you?
Where are you at when it comes to your body? Can you at least call it good today because God has named it good?
I am praying that as you move through this week filled with holiday gatherings, you feel confident knowing that your body is the least interesting thing about you. May you show up with peace and joy as you celebrate with friends and loved ones!
Merry Christmas!
