What if addiction is any behaviour one craves, that relieves stress, has negative consequences for the person doing it, but who continues to do it despite those consequences?
The exercise of writing the list forced me to appreciate little things as successes that usually go unnoticed. A brilliant illustration of the power of attention with intention: wherever your attention goes, grows.
I ponder the concept of solipsism. It is the philosophical contention that only my existence is real. I’ve come to the conclusion that psychologically solipsism is the position that only my existence is trustworthy. Enter food.
My eating is like the damper pedal on the music of my soul.
I have decided to commit myself to something radical in 2016. Something radical because I want something radical in return. Liberation. I am going to blog this year about my challenging relationship to food. That is not easy for me to say.
in About Michelle / Blogging / Brené Brown / Change / Commitment / Courage / Feelings / Food / Shame / Uncategorized / Weight
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Things happened in our past where we felt like we would not survive our feelings. So we chose to go away from the present moment by eating. Years and years of this habit make it into a truth that we don’t question.
When we mediate our self-worth through the size of our body or conformity to certain eating expectations, we are distorting and diminishing ourselves.
There is no vitality, no growth, no fulfillment in safe. You need to keep in the front of your mind that any kind of enriching life will require risk.
Vancouver photographer Vince Hemingson gives a snapshot of a different kind.
And it will take your breath away.
Girls are being held to impossible standards of beauty, at younger and younger ages. Their sexualization is leading to low self-esteem, depression and eating disorders. How they feel about their bodies and what they are doing to them is heartbreaking. Hemingson offered this post in response to criticisms he has received on Facebook about the physical appearance of his female models.
By Vince Hemingson
In the past few days, I have had people leave comments on photographs of mine that I felt could not be ignored. And while the majority of viewers raved about the images, I was astonished that there was a vocal minority who felt that they could criticize women for being either too fit or too voluptuous. That they referenced the Holocaust and concentration camps, farm animals and beached marine mammals in their comments was beyond the pale.
It’s the new year! That magical time when everything seems to lie ahead of you and you envision yourself anew. One of the ways that many of you will do this is with a slimmer body. Over the past year (or even the past few years), you may have put on a few pounds, and you believe everything would be better if you lost it. Or maybe you catch yourself as you walk past a mirror; you gaze uncomfortably at the reflection of a larger self than you realized and can’t help thinking that you’re not the way you know yourself to be. Either way, changing your body typically means going on a diet. But if you’ve gone on diets before, you know you usually gain the weight back…if not more. You think if you could only do it better or if you could just find the right diet for your body type, then it would be different. You end up feeling like a failure. But have you ever stopped to wonder if you are really the problem? Maybe diets are the problem. On that verdict, the jury is in. Statistics say and have said for years that only 2-5% of those who embark on a diet will lose the weight they want and keep it off.
Those who do “succeed” often do so because they are willing to see the rest of their lives as a form of diet. Even the “saner” exercise-based programs for weight loss do not fare much better. And yet one of every two US women is on a diet right now. Girls are going on their first diet younger and younger. More and more men are joining women’s “dieting” ranks. When you include diet pop, gym memberships and bariatric surgery, in 2013, Americans spent $66 billion dollars on the weight loss industry. Canada is not far behind with its numbers.
Why is permanent weight loss so hard? I mean really, it should be as simple as “less in and more out.” To add insult to injury, obesity rates in the affluent western world continue to rise. I believe that there are many interesting reasons for this, and will be writing a series of articles on this in the coming months on this blog.
The first thing I want to emphasize is that diets don’t work. Why not? Because they are based on deprivation, and deprivation sets up an equal and opposite reaction. Weight gain. There is a brilliant illustration of this in the aptly titled book Diets Don’t Work! by Bob Schwartz.