Hey hey hey, Facebook friends! I’ve been having this really interesting conversation with Kylie, my business partner, and a bunch of the ladies in our groups who work with us as well, about this question:
What would you rather if you could only choose one: would you rather have Food Freedom (freedom from food rules, obsession and disordered eating) or would you want Body Confidence?
It was interesting that on the surface level the answer seemed to be resoundingly food freedom, even though body confidence still had a lot of votes.
Kylie and I really work with women’s subconscious minds, so there’s a lot of secondary payoffs or secondary benefits – and it really brought this interesting conversation around freedom.
You see, food freedom, when you focus on being free from food obsession, food crutches, needing wine, caffeine to pep you up in a day and chocolate to weather the storm of your emotions, when you are chained to those kind of crutches, there’s a lot of negative consequences that happen to your body.
That’s why our body confidence can often be affected – and it’s interesting to hear how intertwined these two are.
A lot of times women are talking about creating that food freedom so that therefore the next step would be body confidence.
And a lot of the people that I speak to, there’s a lot of really shameful words around their body, critical thoughts.
It’s interesting separating the two.
But if we actually think about first and foremost the thing that happen – essentially when you are feeling trapped and chained to certain disordered eating behaviors, food is the first place it’s going to show up, but food is actually just kind of like the way it sprouts out into the surface.
And, actually, there’s a bunch of things under the surface going on that are really affecting your mood, affecting the way you think about yourself. A lot of times women put this all into the basket of “If I just lose this certain weight then I’ll be happy, if I just stopped eating this food then I could be this weight and then I’d finally be happy.”
When, really, it’s the disordered thinking that happens before the food is even eaten in the first place.
That’s probably why Kylie and I really had this great discussion about freedom and how if you really focus on freedom you can therefore focus on freedom from that inner critic, you can have freedom to turn up the inner cheerleader in your life.
So often women play this “what if” down game, something I heard about recently about often they’re always playing this “what if” game and rarely is it “What if today is the best day of my life?” or “I’ve just eaten something really healthy, what if I keep this up forever and this is going to be easy, and I’m just going to be rocking my ideal body in the next few weeks and it’s a foregone conclusion?”
That’s really a foreign way to think for a lot of women.
Instead they play this “what if” down game where maybe you feel like “Ugh, my pants still aren’t fitting, what if I never ever lose this weight?” “Oh god, look at them , I can’t even last one day on a diet. What if I’m just going to be fat forever?”
There can also be a lot of trauma that’s buried deep in the past as to why that “what if” down game feels so much better to play. And then also trauma within the body where you are looking to eat foods that actually match the same frequency.
So if you’re constantly like this in your head, thinking of all these frenetic thoughts, it’s going to make more sense for you to gravitate towards foods that vibrate at the same kind of white noise level as well, which often is junk food, caffeine, and things that give you a high and have a down effect afterwards.
Is it really food freedom that you want or is it freedom to actually enjoy and be present in your body, to be free of the shackles of that inner critic of all the things that you think you’ve been judged about, all the things that you think you need to be or you should be, all those expectations that you feel like you should be living up to and instead feel constantly falling short?
What if you were to focus on freedom from that?
And then the food stop being such a lifeline, then the food stop being like the only way to experience joy or the only way to soften or distill that negative emotion.
We’re always refining things, but that’s why Kylie and I are really moving to this place of focusing on freedom – freedom to be your best self, freedom to escape the iron maiden, freedom to really step up and shine in all your glory.
When you really focus on that as your birthright and health as your birthright and a calm sense of confidence that you can create your reality or draw into your experience, whatever it is that you would like to attract into your life, when you’re able to sit in that place of calm and positive expectation, a whole bunch of things in your life actually benefit as a result.
Your job starts getting better, your relationships start getting better, your finances start getting better, and you actually find that the freedom from within starts building into a whole bunch of other areas.
Lots of awesome things in store. I’d love to know what’s more important for you: Food Freedom, Body Confidence, or is it the freedom you think you would have once you had that body confidence?
Look forward to speaking with you next time and hearing your response too.
After suffering a fairly serious breakdown I was unable to cope with life in general. My body felt broke, old and frail – I didn’t just feel middle aged, I felt half dead. I hadn’t realised that my body was self destructing and I was doing it to myself, working long hours, too much alcohol, lots of bad food and absolutely no exercise.
After six months of working with Bianca, I no longer need my blood pressure medication, anti depressants and my cholesterol is in a safe zone. I have lost 2 dress sizes and more than 26 kilos. I now have a life outside of our business and can see a happy, healthy future for our family. I hope the person I became never comes back as I like this girl so much better.
I had heard of Bianca through some magazines – it was an investment but I had tried and failed so many times but in six short months, 20 kilos melted off me and it had a massive and unexpected effect on our styling business. While working with Bianca we secured a national gig, increased our prices to a level we previously thought no one would pay, AND we were booked out weeks in advance.
The majority of this 20 kilo weight loss has only been 5% diet and exercise, the rest has been an emotional journey. Bianca confronted me and called me on my BS and challenged some of my most deeply help beliefs about who I am. And the results are undeniable. I haven’t completely quit drinking, I still get to eat chocolate, I’ve had the best year in my business EVER – and perhaps the most important thing is how differently I react to things emotionally.
Who knew that taking it slowly and being kind to yourself could get you the results that yelling at yourself couldn’t.
Before working with Bianca I was super stressed and I thought it was too hard and I didn’t have the time to be slim AND successful. But I was surprised at how easy it was to implement Bianca’s system – I haven’t counted calories and I still pig out on foods I love. It’s been no coincidence to me that as a result of the new clarity of mind I’ve actually doubled my business at the same time I’ve made these changes to my body.