Hello dear hearts,

I hope you are well and hanging tough as diet culture is blowing big money trying to get you to do what those who don’t know what you know… that food restriction doesn’t heal or make you a better person, just a preoccupied version of who you are.

Obviously, I’ve felt called to remind you of that on a weekly basis and it’s an honor to be here with you, making our way in a world that doesn’t exactly get that you want true connection and vitality, not a surface version.

Before we jump into the meat of this post, I want to share one more thing.

Whether this is your first time at my blog or you’ve been with me for the last 5 years, I am happy you are here to celebrate birthing my work baby:  the new website!

I am so excited that you can navigate more easily, find my latest blogs, free resources, videos and interviews, decide when you need attuned eating and body image help or somatic coaching and updates on new products and gatherings to support your recovery and peaceful relationship with food.

As many good things go, I thought it would take 2 months, but it was 7 and it was worth the work and wait.

Which does relate to today’s post! 😉

I get this totally legitimate question probably 1 out of 3 new clients when they first start the attuned eating process.

It goes something like this…

“Noticing my hunger and fullness make me think about food; I thought the point was to think about it less?”

Or

“Checking in is too much work/takes too much time/makes me feel stuff”

And here is exactly what I say.

“I know, it’s (hard, frustrating, however my client is emotionally presenting) and I wish it were faster and easier.  In fact, you and I would be rich if we could come up with a pill to cure the whole world from eating issues.

But the good news is that we were born to have these signals, and something got in the way.  Our job is to clear the distortions, the survival energy, shame and fear so that those signals are easy to discern and reliable.  And to do this, we need to slow things down to rediscover and trust what the signals of not only hunger and fullness feel like but also discern the difference between food needs and emotional sensations.”

It’s the simple truth and not easy to hear but I assure you worth the effort.  But let’s go back to the frustrations.

It’s not your fault you were born into diet culture or any lack of attunement to your needs and unfortunate and overwhelming things that have happened that made being in your body difficult.

It takes courage to be willing to go through an undoing process to be more fully who you are.

When I think of barriers what I usually feel is ambivalence, which basically looks like this:

“It takes time to say, slow down and if your desire to eat matches how long you just ate. How much time are you believing it will take to notice?  Or I’m wondering what it means to you to take that time for yourself?”

When I ask clients the above questions, what we find are different variations of:

Yes it takes time. And we are all busy.  Maybe the issue is that we are overwhelmed and over-scheduled and that’s how we were raised. We don’t know that there is another way and fear what will happen if we take more time for ourselves.

Will I be judged?

Seen as lazy?

Or selfish?

Or I’m afraid I will have to let go of eating out of non hunger because that’s all I have.

Or we don’t feel we deserve the time

So, we can blow up the time it takes to do a 10 second check in even every hour to do a scan of our inner terrain.

The fear of what it means about us to do this much self-care-taking is what is too much, not the time it takes to check in or the decision of what to do with that information.

So, we would rather deal with the pain of a plan telling us what to do (which takes time and effort btw) than to navigate the newness of full permission to eat and live. To learn to care less about what people will think of you if you Don’t hate yourself and choose to respect your body ,and. your time

Once we get to this part of a conversation, we start to unpack the actual meaning of it takes too much time/energy/not sure if you feel worth looking inside and gathering information.

It’s a commitment and takes willingness to be uncomfortable and takes a few moments several times a day to notice your body, your unmet needs and the wounds looped up with that.  It also takes a lot of compassion, which takes time to cultivate too.

I’ve also found that it takes a lot of willingness and courage to pursue inner work because IE is process where you don’t get a lot of external feedback for your efforts, especially because it doesn’t promise weight loss.

We are not blind to the fact people are conditioned to applaud external changes (weight loss, new job, etc.) and taking this on takes a shift in values and acceptance of “most people won’t know what I’m going through to follow the conditioning of diet culture”.  It’s not easy to put off immediate gratification or external validation.

The good news is there can come a time when people gravitate towards you, not for the size of your body, but because of the hard-earned ease with yourself, relationship with food, resilience, patience, solidness of presence and softness with your compassion for others.

And it will be because you took the time to slow down, take the steps necessary to unpack your fears, shame and anger that disconnected you from your body trust and embodiment in the first place.

For those struggling with the grace to slow down, I am taking on new clients for somatic attuned eating and body image coaching.  Let’s make time for a free chat to see what hasn’t work and get going with what will.   http://bit.ly/tracybclaritycall

Yours truly,

Tracy

PS:  Please enjoy the new look and ease of www.tracybrownrd.com. Look around and let me know what you think and what you would love more of!