My body of evidence
A voyage to body confidence and ownership
I haven’t spoken on here much about body confidence and my weight – even though I do believe I included it as part of my initial mission statement. That’s probably part of the issue though because an inconsistency about commitment to self is often inherent in both situations and, in each case, likely links back to self-esteem issues and suchlike.
But I’m probably being inconsistent and digressing…again. I have thought about writing more about it, have had flashes of inspiration, but then usually pull back from it. Why do I do this? Because I usually feel rather silly talking about it. Even though many people have asked me to talk more on this subject, and so many, many people still ask me about that first big feature and cover story I wrote detailing my issues and tell me how much it resonated with them, how they felt seen (for others it was that they finally understood the difficulties someone else close to them had been going through). Even still, I can’t help but think to myself ‘why on earth am I still struggling with this?!. How on earth can it still be an issue?’. I look at the news, or even at a passing ambulance with its siren and blue light in full swing (I’ve followed and been in many of those as my mother’s health declined) and think to myself well, there goes a real problem, there goes someone wishing they had my healthy lungs, or use of my limbs, what on earth am I doing and why am still being felled on this same battlefield over and over again, like some sci-fi movie where I’m forced to relive the same moment until my brain finally overrides itself. Except in real life you don’t get to stop time and re-do things till you get them right, you keep going and try to work out the same old recurring crap whilst also dealing with anything else that comes along.
(Photo by Elisabeth Hoff that became my cover shot)
And it feels even sillier today, on what is in my case a happy heavenly father’s day. It’s been over 25 years since my father died. He was a gentleman and a gentle man but his grit meant he made it to my big brother’s wedding – clearly in pain but still impeccable – before he died exactly 7 days later from prostate cancer. He had always kept in shape, never went through a chubby phase, wasn’t a boozer or a smoker or a doing-anything-wronger. How he’d wished for a bit longer to see his children grow up and for the chance to get to meet and know his grandchildren. But here I am, my health intact (as far as I know) and still on a body and self-care stop-start sequence, still uncomfortable in my physicality, the very thing that allows me to live a life. And I feel so guilty for struggling with something that I feel I should have been able to overcome by now. So, I become embarrassed about talking it and then shy away, back off like a nervous horse, from my own story (and just berate myself instead).
It's well over 2 years since I first spilled my soul into that big feature about always struggling with my body confidence and my weight and that my own ‘addiction’ or life crutch or whatever you want to call it was emotional eating. Not a lot has changed. Of course, it’s more complex issue as I’ve said before. It isn’t just a case of I don’t like my knees (although I don’t). It’s more about never having felt that I had full agency over my own body. There can be many reasons for this including societal. In my case, I believe much of it stems from a somewhat difficult childhood, the key elements of which are not to be mulled over today but suffice to say that if you don’t feel physically safe as a child – and even into your early adulthood – then it’s likely that the connection between your brain and your body is going to short circuit somewhere along the line. And mine just doesn’t to have fused back together properly yet. As much as I berate myself for this failing, for not getting it all under control, I realise I also have to accept that it took me a ridiculously long time to realise and accept all of this and that it can be complicated to unravel – however much I perceive that difficulty as my own failing. Then once you throw the menopausal years into the mix, well you start to not even recognise a body that you never felt great about in the first place and a whole new element (and unwanted visitor) enters the situation. Argh!
But – and I know (believe me, I know) that I’ve said this before - I am trying to shift things. In a 12-month timeframe that has definitely had its fair share of challenges I have not reverted to crunching down on Wotsits and wine gums to deal with stress and instead have tried hard to remain mindful and to keep making shifts in my consumption that are forever rather than knee-jerk. And, after two bad falls last year, I can finally move without pain so am walking more and more (a return to a gym routine will have to be the next step however daunting it will be crossing that particular threshold). I plan to try out different workouts and treatments and therapies and will share it all as I go – both on here and on Instagram. And I plan to learn more, try more, and relax more about my body in the process.
Hopefully, some of this will be useful to others and not just to myself. Essentially, I’m going to try to stop getting in my own way and just start walking down the road that I know that I need to be on. Feel free to join me.
A few things spring to mind:
- Everyone's pain is a 10!
- FEAR (False Evidence Appearing Real)
- HALT (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired)
NOT being any sort of mental health expert, except in that I have had to live with my head for 55 years (!), it seems important these days to focus on the cause and not the symtom - and, of course, that if you want something different to happen, then you have to do something different. My simple technique for this has seen me spend money on a mentor or guide to be accountable to.
Anyway, on the cause element, I have heard a few phrases or approaches recently, which have allowed me to feel better.
I similarly feel slightly guilty that I still carry all my childhood trauma wrapped around me like an uncomfortable cloak, but the phrase I heard just over the weekend, was that everyone's pain is a 10! Which is exactly right. We only know what we know. Have only felt what we have felt. Of course many have it worse, but they are not us. We should allow ourselves to accept that what happened hit our own 10! Having accepted that, perhaps we can start to move on.
These other points of FEAR and HALT are used in all sorts of phycho-analytical work, but I hadn't heard them until fairly recently. But I think they start to strip the symptom away and allow focus to be applied to the cause. Or maybe I mean that light can reach the cause, and we all know that shedding light on something can remove the worry.
False Evidence Appearing Real clearly speaks to the fallout of believing what was said or how one felt during the periods of pain that reached 10. But these don't have to define us. We know this, but it seems hard to believe yourself as you try to crawl out from under the weight of those beliefs. One step at a time, but we should keep questioning these bad thoughts and interrogate the FEAR and start building our own evidence supporting the thinking that we can do what we want or are better than we feel.
HALT is then the synonym that does seem to get to the heart of why we are taking our own pain out on ourselves. Taking a beat and asking ourselves why we are (again!!) taking these steps to sabotage ourselves is so easy with HALT. It has been amazing to me to realise that, more often than not, being Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired can really quickly identify the cause for the backstep and by addressing that, one can avoid the bad behaviour that is the symptom of the pain.
Anyway, perhaps all very phase 1 analysis, but it has changed much of what I am doing and allowed me to change some behaviours where I want to. And as we know, changing nothing changes nothing.
J