Women, Weight & Size Acceptance: Accept Your Wonderful Self – Diet
Women, Weight & Size Acceptance: Accept Your Wonderful Self
Marsha J. Hudnall, MS, RD, CD
Size and Self-Acceptance for Achieving Healthy Weight
If we let ourselves, we may start to believe that magazine cover girls whose photos are air-brushed and trimmed in, mind you! are the norm and that the rest of us are somehow deeply flawed. What we get then is the soundtrack "I hate myself" or "I hate what I see in the mirror" playing over and over again in our heads, fueling our endless dieting cycles and painful frustration.
"If you are caught up in not liking yourself because of your size, it quickly starts whittling away at your motivation," says Marsha Hudnall, MS, RD, Green Mountains program director. "That inner voice makes you feel helpless and hopeless."
Self-Acceptance: The Key to Achieving a Healthy Weight
If we are to have any measure of success, it is crucial that we permanently press stop on that soundtrack and work to genuinely accept our sizes and, by extension, ourselves. Hudnall, who has more than 20 years experience in the weight management field, knows this can be a tough sell for women with lifetime struggles with weight. But shes not suggesting that size acceptance means denying the importance of healthy weights.
Denial is not acceptance. Rather, self-acceptance means adopting a non-judgmental attitude toward yourself. Its the ability to see things as they are in the moment without harmful, self-critical voices interrupting your view of yourself. Hudnall has seen it again and again in women who come to Green Mountain: Self-acceptance is instrumental to reaching your healthy, natural weight. "Size-acceptance means focusing on the things you like about yourself while working to modify what you dont like," she says.
For women who have been listening to the self-disgust soundtrack forever, size acceptance is also pretty scary. Does accepting yourself the way you are imply that change may be impossible Mimi Francis, the behavioral health therapist at Green Mountain, has a simple response to those doubts. It should resonate even with the most diet-savvy cynics. "How well has not liking yourself worked so far" she asks. The truth is, it hasnt. In fact, if you dislike your body, its that much easier to abuse it.
So the aim then is to get your attitude to work for you, not against you. Self-acceptance means acknowledging where you are now, and not repeating the mantra "Ill like my body when