Why I don't help women lose weight
Putting body positivity and self love before the cultural ideals that define beauty
One of the most popular uses for hypnotherapy and EFT is weight loss. I have many colleagues who help people of all genders to lose weight. They change lives and they make good money doing it, so why don’t I offer this within my practice?
We can definitely come at the idea of losing weight from a perspective of wanting to be more healthy, feel fitter and be more energised in our bodies and this, of course, is a brilliant thing. However, no matter how great our intentions are, it’s almost impossible to untangle these empowering self care goals from the idea of changing our appearance.
The details may be different depending on where and how we were raised, but the vast majority of us grew up with a concept of how a woman’s body should look. In the predominantly white, western culture that I was raised in, the ideal was to be slim and for much of my life I was. As a result I gained much admiration and it was difficult not to tie my self worth to my size and shape. As menopause approached, though, I began to gain weight and some self judgement crept in. I began telling myself that I needed to get back to my slimmer size but as I thought more about this it eventually occurred to me that another way we could look at being slim is to not take up space.
Although we now hear more about body positivity and we know that healthy women come in all shapes and sizes, the message of ‘slimmer is better’ is still everywhere. We see it in advertising, we see it in TV shows and films and many of us still hear it every time we’re around other women. Women being shown that the best way to be a woman is to take up less space, women telling each other about how well or badly they’re doing at taking up less space but is this what we really want?
The patriarchy has spent many centuries convincing women to be smaller both physically and metaphorically but if we were to allow our bodies to take up as much space as nature would have them occupy, would that make it easier for our voices, our opinions and our needs to do the same?
As my body has begun to take up more space I’ve struggled with the part of me that was taught that slimmer is better, but the more I look at my change in size and shape from the angle of taking up my fair share of the space, the better I feel about my body and the more able I feel to celebrate inhabiting a different kind of shape.
None of this needs to override the desire to be fit and healthy of course, it just shifts the focus of it. Movement becomes a way of expressing joy and feeling alive as well as helping me to feel more energised. Healthy food becomes a kind and enjoyable thing to do for my body without the agenda of trying to change the way it looks.
Of courseI haven’t eliminated my conditioning completely, I still experience the thought ‘if I exercise/eat healthily then I might lose weight’ but I’m better and better at noticing it and asking myself whether I’m doing those things for myself or to myself on behalf of the culture. The answer makes it clear whether I’m making the best choice for me in that moment.
If you’d love to unpick your conditioning around the desirability of being slim and learn to love your body exactly as it is, check out this week’s tapping video https://www.youtube.com/@healingwomanhood
If you’d like to go a little bit deeper with this work, get in touch for your free one to one consultation to see how EFT can help you.