How to Practice Self-Compassion on your Intuitive Eating Journey
"i found in my research that the biggest reason people aren't more self-compassionate is that they are afraid they'll become self-indulgent. they believe self-criticism is what keeps them in line. most people have gotten it wrong because our culture says being hard on yourself is the way to be."
— Dr. Kristin Neff
Self-compassion is frequently misunderstood by my clients. It’s mistaken for self-pity, enabling bad behavior, self-esteem, self-love, and self-care. Some of those are good things, but they aren’t self-compassion. Let’s break down what self-compassion isn’t, what self-compassion is, and how you can embody and use self-compassion when healing your relationship with food and your body. This can be used if you’re in eating disorder recovery, healing from chronic dieting, or if you’re simply wanting to connect with yourself in a more compassionate way on your intuitive eating journey.
what isn’t self-compassion?
Self-compassion isn’t:
Self-pity: Self-pity is about being so preoccupied with all the bad things happening in your life that you can’t see anything else. In those moments of self-pity, there’s no way you’re able to distance yourself from the difficult experience. You might get lost in it.
Enabling bad behavior or self-indulgence: Like Dr. Neff said in the quote above, self-compassion is not a way for you to enable yourself to keep restricting, or to binge, or to procrastinate doing what you know will promote your healing.
Self-esteem or self-love: Those two things are more about feeling positively towards yourself, or thinking you are extra special in some way (which you probably are - don’t ever doubt that!). But it’s not the same as self-compassion.
Self-care: Practicing self-care can be a way you show yourself compassion, but it’s also easy to perform self-care and then judge or criticize yourself for it, which isn’t very compassionate at all.
what is self-compassion?
Self-compassion is essentially meeting yourself where you’re at, holding all the good and the bad. It’s about viewing yourself through the lens of your heart, rather than passing judgment with your mind. You don’t have to approve of everything you do or say, but you can be kind and understanding when difficult thoughts, feelings, and experiences pop up. The concept of self-compassion surrounds the fact that you’re not meant to be perfect. You’re meant to be human!
how to practice self-compassion with intuitive eating
While on your intuitive eating journey, there are lots of ways you can practice self-compassion. One way is to remove your worth from achieving. This also means removing judgment from “failing.” You can’t fail at intuitive eating. You can only learn and grow. Healing doesn’t exist in a linear fashion, so you can’t always expect to be achieving while working towards food freedom and/or eating disorder recovery. There will always be setbacks, unexpected twists and turns, things that thwart you and surprise you. As you’ve learned by now, self-compassion is not about not having any critical thoughts or negative feelings. It’s all about how you respond when you notice those things. So when you notice yourself getting down on yourself for not succeeding at something, or not achieving something, just notice. Divesting your self-worth from achievements is not something that can be done overnight.
Just like you can’t fail at intuitive eating, you also can’t do it “perfectly.” Having doubts about the process, toe-ing the line for a while, going back and forth a little bit, that’s all a perfectly normal part of the process. Is the ultimate goal to totally ditch those food rules and live in-tune with your body? Yeah! Is intuitive eating going to look the same for everyone? Definitely not. Because intuitive eating isn’t a diet, there really isn’t one particular way to “do it right” or “do it wrong.” So let go of the self-judgments that are telling you that your un-dieting journey and life has to look the same as Food-Freedom Francine. Because it won’t! And that’s so ok!
As we’ve already mentioned, self-compassion is not an absence of negative feelings. It’s caring for yourself alongside those feelings, and not judging yourself for having them. So on those negative body image days, or days when you’re struggling with body changes, allow yourself to feel what comes up. Replace any of those critical thoughts with loving thoughts, without trying to change the actual emotion. For example, if you are grieving a body you no longer have, it’s not about removing the grief. Or the anger. It’s about non-judgmentally allowing yourself to feel those emotions. It’s about nurturing yourself through a painful experience. When you nurture yourself through a painful experience, the emotions pass. A bad body image day or week reduces itself to a bad body image moment. It’s okay to grieve, feel anger, sadness, resentment, anything that comes up. When you meet it with self-compassion, the experience can sometimes be even cathartic and so so incredibly healing.
Lastly, if you’re ever feeling stuck in how to practice self-compassion, it can often be helpful to think: how would I talk to or treat my best friend in this scenario? If they were experiencing this moment, how would I support them?