Body Confidence or Food Freedom?

If you could only choose one which would you rather – Body Confidence or Food Freedom?

Transcript

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.

The inner monologue that happens in so many women’s minds can be really, really nasty and downtrodden.

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?”

This all or nothing thinking, this really negative Debbie Downer type of thinking, that’s really the ultimate root cause of this imprisonment – and food is just kind of the surface way it shows up.

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?

What I would just like to ask you is to consider:

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, a whole bunch of things in your life actually benefit as a result.

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.

Bianca x