Our minds do not know better than our bodies

It is none of my business what size my body decides to become.

The size of my body is not actually relevant to anything.

In this past year I have been humbly deeply learning FROM my body.

Listening to the intensity of my hunger.

Responding to food cravings regardless of what my mind thought about the food.

Responding to my body’s desire for A LOT of physical rest even while my mind was like “if you want to be healthy you should move.”

I let go of my goal of “health.”

Which only ever led me into restriction and frankly non-health.

I am neither perfectly healthy on the left or on the right.

But I am less healthy on the left.

And I am happier on the right.

I am so surrendered to this process.

The process of completely un-restricting

The process of letting my body teach me, without any mental rules

My body does millions of things per second to keep me alive and almost all of them I have no clue about.

The rate my body packed on fat over the last year was a direct response to how deep in a famine I had been for so long.

I have absolutely no idea at what size my body will land and I barely think about that anymore.

Literally. I do not spend any time wondering what weight I should be.

There is a very big difference between creating mental rules for ourselves about what is healthy and what our bodies need. Versus letting our bodies lead us.

I don’t think it is possible to know how to let our bodies lead us until we un-restrict all the way and stop trying to mentally figure it out.

Our bodies know more than our minds ever will

Often when people say a food is “healthier” what they really mean is that they are attaching morality to it

A “healthy” food is “good” and an “unhealthy” food is “bad”

I don’t believe there is good or bad

I believe there is what my body knows it loves and needs

My body/mind relationship is like that of a child’s again, craving and learning how a food makes me feel. (if our children were not taught morality about food, which unfortunately rarely happens)

Our minds do not know better than our bodies

I find that nowadays my body craves things like raw liver and oysters

Not because I think liver is a “good” food

But because I want to devour a plate of raw liver.

It’s hard to explain because I wouldn’t have understood anyone saying this a year ago

But sugar cookies and liver have the same weight in my mind

The same neutrality to them

There is no judgement

I might crave liver and I might crave a sugar cookie

Either would be fine.

I couldn’t get to a place where I could hear what my body truly wanted til all foods became equal.

I couldn’t get to a place where my body deeply desired to move until I had months and months of rest.

Up until now cravings for foods most people would consider “healthy” or a desire for movement came from my mind telling me what it thought I should do to be healthy.

This is a tricky thing to unwind.

And I am still learning from my body.

The girl on the left is starving.

She probably looks healthier to most people

She was so moody and so controlled and she didn’t make any jokes

The woman on the right makes very funny jokes and laughs all the time.

She lets in all of life and she has a lot of space and depth to hold it.

She wants more sex

She loves herself more

My body is a miracle

It has been repairing itself from all the places I did not take care of it