Show us your body so we can see what your relationship with food is actually like
 
Thankfully this comment was not directed at me but instead posted on the video of a friend creator coach of mine and when it was reshared, I was tagged a couple of times
 
I moved out of half-naked pictures of myself a whilst back and although I vacation there sometimes for a wee taste of nostalga, much like beans on toast and mum’s veggie sausage roll, it’s nice to be around but I don’t want to be immersed in it
 
You know by now that your body is not a reflection of your relationship with food
 
You can look at the 1000s of transformation pictures online that celebrate ‘incredible fat loss’ without giving any indication of how someone got to that end point and know it was often through severe restriction, creating fear around food, minimising rest and a lot of these people come to work with ETPHD afterwards because they regain the weight and more because their relationship with food is so damaged
 
Fun fact: there’s are a couple of well-known fitness coaches that uses transformation pictures of multiple people I subsequently worked with who (and they don’t mind me sharing this) have such hard relationships with food that it’s brought them to tears multiple times, struggling to see how they’d ever stop binge eating and gaining weight. Meanwhile, these coaches are selling their fat loss transformation to 1000s of people to make more money glorifying their fat loss as ‘this is what success and hard work looks like’

 
I want you to ask yourself something super honestly and you don’t need to share your answer with anyone:
 
Do you equate a ‘normal’ body to an average person?
Do you equate a super lean body to a more successful or dedicated person?
Do you equate a larger body to a less motivated or successful person?
 

I use the term ‘normal’ in reference to say, a ‘healthy BMI’, because saying there is a ‘normal’ body is like saying there’s a ‘normal’ scene in Saltburn and I don’t know about you but I’ve lived that bath scene except maybe in some twisted nightmare I had one time but that’s for another day
 
We’ve started doing it again you see. As much as I’d love to say we’ve moved out of diet culture and internalised weight stigma something changed the last few years.
 
As we rebelled against the unhelpful extremes of wokeness we also started equating ‘above average’ with bodies that look like they come from super dedicated people. We’ve started equating super lean bodies with super dedication again.
 
Let’s not blame Kim et al they’re too easy a scapegoat (and I’m sure they lose a lot of sleep over it)
 
Here’s my hypothesis:
 
Diet culture x hustle culture = a narrative of thinness = dedication + success
 
Look at me Mrs Russel (my forever exasperated high school maths teacher) aren’t you proud I’m still really using that B grade
 
It breaks my heart when I speak to people who feel ‘lazy’, like they’ve ‘let themselves go’, because they’re not super shredded anymore but have built a successful business, created space for a loving relationship, healed their relationship with food and now live comfortably, intuitively eating, in a healthy body with healthy levels of body fat
 
It worries me that we’re being sold this story and we’re internalising it again that in order to be above average, to be seen as outwardly successful, that must look like leaner or smaller than before
 
This is all rooted in creating feelings of never fully being enough, you know that right?
 
If we always feel less than, mediocre, average, then we will always want to level up, pay money towards being more successful, in our lives or in our bodies
 
But our bodies cannot tell the world anything about us:

• Our dedication

• Our success

• Our happiness

• Our relationship with food

 
It is physically impossible
 
Yet we believe it, deep down, don’t we?
 
We continue to strive for more, do more, be more, work more, diet more, WANT more. Which inherently isn’t a bad thing, but when it’s driven from a place of scarcity and not-enoughness, it’s a really lonely and hard place to be
 
Leaving us unable to rest, slow down – unable to live, to be. Unable to ever really feel enough
 
You deserve to feel enough, regardless of your body, your relationship with food and your levels of ‘motivation’ or success (whatever that looks like for you)
 
When you do feel enough, you’re more likely to succeed too FYI. Feeling less than leaves you to carry out behaviours and habits that confirm you’re not enough, that keep you feeling small.
 
So this narrative you may feel is helpful in some way, that it’s motivation, but if there’s anything I know from 20 years in sport and exercise science, nutrition and behaviour change it’s that the best results come from when people are able to act from a place of enoughness

It is very difficult to achieve your goals when you don't believe you deserve them

 
I’ve gone on today and the storm outside is calling for me to attempt my weekly jog (anyone else like to run in the rain and pretend they’re in a music video or is that just me?)
 
I hope to have left you with things to think about and challenge yourself on. Not blame, we are products of our environment and much like low self-worth, shame and blame only hold us back
 
We live in a society that makes money from us by selling us more things and encouraging us to do more things that make money for us to spend on being ‘less average’ and by doing so creates a sense of shame around simply being – but our bodies should never be the vessels of societal persuasion
 
Challenge the stories you tell yourself about yourself and others
 
I’m always here
Em