Let’s dive into the deep end of body image, beliefs and judgement. I've had my fair share of body shame, which has kept me small, kept me in self-judgement and comparing myself to friends and celebrities. It has an impact – let me share how, and where this comes from.
I’ll also share a simple and effective way to start reclaiming the love of your body and more importantly, your self-confidence.
When I was younger, I was a very skinny child and a very clumsy one at that, and often had falls which left scrapes on my knees, the scars from which can still be seen now.
As I was growing up, I was given many nicknames to do with my having long legs or skinny legs or being skinny, like ‘Daddy Long Legs’, which was claimed because I was able to jump lots of squares in hopscotch, ‘Giraffe’ because I was one of the tallest of my year in high school, and ‘Chicken Legs’ for having legs that were long and skinny.
These nicknames reinforced my state of mind about being skinny and the lack of shape that I did have in my body, particularly in my teenage and late teens and early 20s, continuing to reinforce the shame that I felt or the self-judgement that I was experiencing, that I was not the optimal shape or not an attractive shape.
Through high school, I actually found myself wearing lots of baggy clothes. Part of the reason for this was because my mum always said that we'd just grow into our uniform, but also this actually created a safe space for me because it meant that I wasn't revealing any part of my body. Wearing long, baggy trousers as part of my regular uniform, and larger shirts and blazers that didn’t fit my body, kept me and my body hidden.
Now, I used to experience quite a lot of embarrassment and was very nervous when we used to have PE and I'd have to wear shorts or the standard PE skirt. My school was an all girls school, so it was very normal for us to wear the PE skirt with the PE knickers underneath. This made me feel very, very self-conscious, not only because I had skinny legs, but the scars they had from all of the falls that I’d had as a younger child, and then how I looked in comparison to how my friends looked.
It's interesting reflecting back on some of these situations and these feelings and thought patterns now and how they actually continued to be perpetuated through my teenage years and through my 20s.
When I was in my early teenage years, I actually became quite unwell and as a result lost even more weight. I couldn’t maintain the weight I did have due to problems I was having with my gut, and this continued the perpetuation of the beliefs that I had around being too skinny, not being the optimal shape or the optimal weight, and reinforced by the doctors that I was seeing who told me that I was in the underweight bracket and needed to eat more food, put on more weight, and so on.
This actually continued into my 20s. I used to train quite a lot in my 20s when I started working full-time. I would train probably 30 to 60 minutes a day, three or four times a week after work. I was very conscious of my weight, maintaining what was supposed to be a healthy weight for my height and age bracket, and constantly striving to reach that or, more often the case, rather than maintaining my optimal weight, I would often quite quickly lose the weight because of my gut health issues.
So there I was, and there I have been, in this constant cycle of self-judgement, of being underweight, being skinny and being obsessed with putting weight on.
Now I have to say, and I've said this to trainers in the past, this is not a conversation that I would be able to have with my girlfriends because it's not something that is very commonly discussed. I felt that social conversations for women were all about losing weight and I had friends who were wanting to lose weight. So, it felt unacceptable for me to talk about it with my friends - that I'm trying to put weight on, or that I need help putting weight on, or I struggle to put weight on and keep it on. These felt very unacceptable to me, which continued to feed the shame I had around my body and what it looked like.
So where do these beliefs come from? Where does the shame and the self-judgement come from?
In developmental psychology, it is understood that up to the age of 7 or 8 we are forming our inner worlds, i.e. the subconscious programmes and beliefs that essentially make up our personality. These beliefs we've created, which have either been downloaded from our parents because of things that they've said, or been thinking and feeling (which as a child we can energetically feel), and from our broader environment – family members, from the school environment, from friends in school, and the reactions of people that we may even just pass by, and the things that they are saying, we take these on so quickly up to age 7 or 8 when our analytical mind starts to come into action.
Beyond that, after the age of 8, we're looking for and seeking out things in our environment which reinforce those beliefs that we've already programmed. For example, if I’ve created the programme before the age of 7 or 8, that I am skinny, or that my body is not attractive, or that I should be ashamed of my body, then I'm going to continue to look for things that make that belief or those set of beliefs true moving forward. The analogy that I use is when you go to buy a new car and you find one that you've never seen before and then all of a sudden you see that car everywhere before you've bought it. This is information that is now in your awareness. So when you decided to buy this particular car, the car now has become part of your awareness and you're seeing it in your environment. In the same way with our beliefs, though they may not happen quite so literally, we're seeking things out in our environment that reinforce the beliefs that we have.
The way that my beliefs were reinforced as a child, going into my teenage years and then into my 20s, I'm physically having a sickness that actually made me extra skinny, so was unable to put weight on, that actually was quite an embarrassing illness, so it made me feel shame for my body. Then doctors, reinforcing to me as I got older into my late teens, into my early 20s, that I was underweight for my height, and then personal trainers telling me that I was underweight for the ‘normal’.
Constantly seeking this out. Not to mention social media, TV celebrities, all of these things that are telling us what beautiful looks like and we find a way to compare ourselves to that.
One of the big things that I remember that really flipped the switch for me was in a workshop that I was doing. I've done a lot of self-development and belief change work, emotional release work over the last 15 years. But there was one thing that stuck out, and does still. About six or seven years ago, I was in a workshop and in a partnered activity. I wanted to programme for myself that I am 56 kilos and in the healthy range. My partner asked “Why do you want to be 56 kilos?” To me this was the mid-range or the midpoint of the range for my height and what I kept being told is healthy. That's the weight that I'm supposed to be. He asked me “Why do you want to be that weight?” I thought that if I was that weight I would be healthy. I want to be that weight because I want to be healthy, to have all the energy that I need to do all of the things that I want to do in my day.
And he told me, “Let’s put that into a belief statement.” So, my belief statement became ‘I am the optimal weight that allows me the energy to do all of the things that I want to do every single day.’
Now, how much more expansive is that belief compared to “I'm 56 kilos. I am within the normal weight bracket for my height”? Those are so limiting. What I really wanted was all of the energy that I need for the day to do all of the things that I love doing every single day and that I need to do every single day.
That's the real reason and driver behind weight goals. Certainly for the clients that I've worked with, there is a lot of this underlying goal to have the energy and confidence to do what they want to do every single day.
My tip to you today isn't necessarily about the belief itself, but what reinforced this belief for me.
I took action with my daily meditations, at the end of which I would touch my body. I would stroke my feet, my legs, my bum, my arms, my abdomen, my boobs. I stroked every part of my body; I touched and connected with every part of my body, and took a moment to be in real gratitude for it.
Now as skinny as I have been and as slim as I am, I've never had a broken bone, and I'm so grateful for my body, for my strong bones. That's one thing out of many things that I can be grateful for, for my body.
So I encourage you to take up a daily practice, whether it's after meditation or maybe it's when you come out of the shower, just to touch your body; touch and connect with every single part of your body and find something to be grateful for and really feel into the gratitude of that one thing.
Once you fall into the gratitude of that one thing, maybe repeat it a few times. Then find something else to be grateful for and keep repeating it, because when you are grateful for your body, your body will be grateful for you and will show up in a way that you desire it to.
Love, hugs, and magic!
Bhavna xx
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