Have you ever wondered if it is possible to have a healthy relationship with food and your body and be able to pursue strength, weight, physique, or health goals?

*Trigger warning: This post discusses weight loss. If that is not a topic that is beneficial for you at this time, this post is likely not for you but feel free to check out many of the other blog posts available on this site*

This article is a brief outline from a podcast episode, to hear more detail about each topic/point, listen to the full episode here.

To preface this article, you absolutely do not need to have strength, weight, or physique goals. However, many people would like to pursue health and fitness-related goals without negatively impacting their physical, mental, or emotional health and are not sure how to go about that process with diet culture being so pervasive. 

At the beginning of the episode version of this blog post, I opened up by discussing self-acceptance and why it is okay to have goals....

Are you looking for mental health support? 

This blog post provides different resources and options to find the mental health support that best fits your needs. 

Therapy is cool :) and can save and change a life.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:

24/7/365 crisis and prevention services. 1-800-273-8255 https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

Open Path Collective:

A nonprofit that allows therapists to provide affordable, in-office, and online psychotherapy sessions between $40 and $70 ($30 for student intern sessions). 

Find a practitioner: https://openpathcollective.org/ 

EMDR Therapy: 

Highly regarded form of trauma therapy, studied, reviewed, and researched. It is known as one of the most effective forms of trauma and PTSD therapy.

Find a practitioner: https://www.emdria.org/find-an-emdr-therapist/

NARM: 

A cutting-edge model for addressing attachment, relational and developmental trauma, by working with the attachment...

Your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship you will ever have. It is the one relationship that is inescapable and the one relationship that can affect all other relationships in your life. 

So it is important to evaluate whether you operate primarily from self-acceptance or self-abandonment... 

(Listen to the full podcast episode here)

What is self-abandonment/rejection? 

Essentially, it is rejecting or abandoning one's needs and feelings.

Self-abandonment can look like some or all of the following:

•  Rejection of own needs, thoughts, and feelings
•  Always putting others' needs above our own
•  Hiding parts of yourself you feel ashamed of
•  Ignoring our need for self-soothing and relying on food or other substances to shift our state
•  People pleasing- being who you think you need to be in order to be accepted and loved
•  Frustration for not being "motivated" enough or sticking to healthy habits
•  Ignoring our...

Are you struggling with emotional eating? 

Let's break down exactly what emotional eating is and how you can stop emotional eating for good...

(Listen to the full podcast episode on emotional eating here)

Huge misconception = all emotional eating is bad and should be prevented

Emotional eating = self-regulation strategy

We eat not because we are physically hungry but because we are trying to use food to soothe or shift our internal state.

This means eating when we are:

• Angry, upset, sad, depressed, lonely, unhappy, confused, stressed, or in a state of discomfort - eating becomes a way of avoiding having to feel something you don’t want to feel
• As a celebration or reward or for the pleasure or joy of eating

Emotional eating is not inherently bad. In fact, it is impossible to remove emotions from food altogether. It is totally okay to sometimes reach for some chocolate or ice cream when you're having a bad day. It is when numbing your emotions with food becomes your only...