Strategies for Embracing Your Weight Completely Without Reservation or Adjustment

Strategies for Embracing Your Weight in Its Current Form

In a culture that often promotes weight change, accepting one's weight can be a challenging journey. Two experts from The Eating Disorder Center, Jennifer Rollin and Rachel Cutler, offer insights to help navigate this path.

Jennifer Rollin encourages readers to rewrite their stories about weight. These stories, she explains, can become automatic and potentially harmful. An exercise to identify and challenge unhelpful weight stories could be a helpful first step.

Rachel Cutler suggests practicing body gratitude as a means to challenge negative thoughts about one's body. She works with clients on radical acceptance, a skill from Marsha Linehan's dialectical behavior therapy. Radical acceptance means fully and completely accepting reality for what it is, without fighting against it. Cutler encourages asking what the body has already helped one do today to practice body gratitude.

Following new accounts on social media that build one up, while unfollowing diet and fitness accounts that bring one down, can be beneficial. It's also recommended to do a social media detox, adding in images of body diversity and removing those who make one feel badly about their body.

If one can't accept their weight, they should not let it stop them from doing anything, such as dating, socializing, or taking care of themselves. It's OK to set boundaries, such as telling a family member or primary care physician not to discuss weight or diet.

Cutler also suggests changing negative thoughts about body parts to focus on what the body enables one to do. Telling oneself: Although I don't love my body, I accept myself as I am and acknowledge that some things are out of my control, can be a helpful mantra.

Both Rollin and Cutler stress the importance of paying attention to the images one consumes and surrounding oneself with body positive images on social media. Acknowledging that often as one begins to fill themselves with things they find meaning in, acceptance will follow. Focusing on values, passions, and other meaningful things is important, as spending time on weight suppression can take away from valuable time and energy.

The therapist who contributed to the acceptance of one's own weight among the interviewed experts is not explicitly named in the provided search results. However, their wisdom and guidance provide a valuable starting point for anyone seeking to embrace a healthier, more accepting relationship with their body.