Body Image Blogs
Body Neutrality
Body Neutrality empowers you to embrace yourself as you are, including the parts you don’t like about yourself.
The focus of body neutrality focus is to avoid self-hate whilst simultaneously alleviating the pressure of having to love your body. The goal is to respect and accept your body for what it is – and that’s it.
Body neutrality recognizes that not everyone is going to love every part of themselves all the time. The reality is that some days you’re going to look in the mirror like ‘yess, thank you legs for taking me places, thank you arms for allowing me to reach for the biscuit tin, and thank you stomach for keeping my organs where they should be’, but then there’ll be those days where you stand in front of the very same mirror, focusing on that cellulite you hate, or the belly rolls that suddenly seem so obvious
Body Respect
My physical body is a vehicle for me to experience my life.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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The moment I realize that I had my self-worth all tangled up with the appearance of my body is the day that my new life began.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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The notion of body respect came into my life. Respecting my body was essential for me to feel better about myself. To increase my self-worth.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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Body Neutrality is the safe bridge between body shaming and body positivity. It’s about being grateful for your body and everything that it does for you because it does a lot. You are alive right??.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
My body neutrality journey
To say that accepting my body was easy is a wild understatement…
The act of accepting my body required of me to be courageous. To be vulnerable and lots of tears.
Choosing to make peace with my body was scary. Scary as shit to be honest!
Frightening to be a health professional in a larger body. In a fat body. In an “overweight body” as my colleagues like to categorize my body.
Nerve-racking to stand up in front of my audience and say that I no longer recommended to chase weight loss. That the most efficient path to health was thru acceptance.
Body neutrality and intuitive eating
Going Beyond The Food has taught me that courage is not the absence of fear rather the ability to act in the presence of fear. That’s what accepting your body requires in a society controlled by diet culture and the concept of thinness=happiness & health.
Intuitive eating teaches to respect your body. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Intuitive eating switches our perspective from wanting to control our body to need to respect our body. We can’t respect what we hate right?!?
No matter, where you are now sister on your path of body acceptance, know that I feel you.
I hear you. I see you. I know how you feel and the fear of what could happen…. You aren’t alone.
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Be reminded of one universal law: Love always win in the end. Not hate, shame or fear.💞
“Show up, be seen, answer the call to courage… ’cause you’re worth it. You’re worth being brave.”
Brene Brown
What is intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is proven and well-researched self-care eating framework that make YOU the boss of YOU.
Intuitive eating teaches us to have a healthy relationship to food empowering you to trust your ability to meet your needs, distinguish between physical and emotional hunger and ultimately develop body wisdom.
Get started with intuitive eating
If you’d like to explore intuitive eating and discover how it can help you make peace with food download our Get Started with Intuitive Eating Guide.
This free (and highly detailed) cheat sheet will give you a 3 easy to follow step process to help you get started with intuitive eating right away (and give you a shot of confidence to stop dieting … perhaps ).
Increase Body Confidence: The Journey to You
The mind is the most powerful aspect of health. It’s more powerful than your stomach which digests the food, or your hands which prepare it, or your legs that carry you through exercise. As I teach to the ladies in my free and private community : truly your mind is the thing that determines you, and how you view yourself will mold the way that your body actually looks and feels, not to mention how long it lasts. If you want to increase body confidence, you need to start with your mind.A Never Ending Cycle
We are completely overtaken with images from the media and fitness industries that bombard us with ideas about what we should look like. Women literally can’t get away without seeing them. All you have to do it to walk into the grocery store and you’ll find dozens of images that tell you what you should look like. You don’t even have to leave the house – flip on the television or open your mailbox and you’ll see even more.
These images have a huge impact on our ideas of self, creating an inner dialogue and goals that we might not even be aware of. They’re presented as truth, as beauty and as the ideal of self worth. If we don’t look like these standards of beauty, then how can you be worth anything? Unfortunately we find that the language of modern culture is one that places emphasis on outward images of self rather than of inner strength of spirit.
The cycle comes when we see these unrealistic images and try to attain to them in an attempt to help us to feel good about ourselves, again most often without even thinking. Then when we do attempt to make changes in life to create that image that we see in our own lives we of course fail, because again they are unrealistic, which makes us feel bad about ourselves and cycles us into negative self image. The cycle goes on and on.
Breaking the Body Image Cycle to Increase Body Confidence
If this is a negative cycle, then how can you possibly go about freeing yourself from it? The answer is with a dramatic shift of understanding. Smart women like you know that the pictures that you see on the covers of magazines aren’t any more real than the images on Saturday morning cartoons, airbrushed and painted over as they are. And yet when you see them they tap into your subconscious, which doesn’t know that they aren’t real. Your natural inclination for self improvement kicks in and pushes you try to meet that goal, or you get a kick in the pants that tells you that you’re not worth much because you have already failed to look like that.
Understanding the connection between your body and your emotional self is how you break free and increase body confidence. Remember that your mind is the most powerful tool that you have when it comes to transforming your physical self, and you’re in control of it! Learning to harness the power of your mind to create a positive perception of your body will bring you into the reality of your beautiful self. For many women, it’s hard for them to comprehend the wonder and beauty of their own bodies.
“Stephanie has helped me make the connection between my emotional body and physical body, which has helped me heal and also lose weight.” -Shelley Langlois
Finding support is your first step in the process of creating a healthy body image. Realize that you are not alone in your struggle, and that there are people who have been there and who can help you increase body confidence. It’s possible for you to love your body and also to recognize that it needs to change so that you can feel better and live longer. That doesn’t mean that your goal is to look like some person who you’ve never met and who is for the most part a creation of a marketing company, but it does mean that you goal is to be the best that you can be. Emotionally and physically. You have the power to make it happen!
This is the first article in the series ” Journey to YOU”. You can find the next article of the series on Empowerment right here. Hope you enjoy!
Body Messages: A Personal Story
What are body messages?
As I teach the ladies in my tribe, think of it as a knock on the door. It is a way your physical body talks to you.
Let me give you an example from my own life…
Body Messages: My Personal Story
My latest project of taking my nutrition practices and my business in the stratosphere in the online world is so scary, yet so exciting all at once. I have fears just like all of you. Fear is an absolute normal emotion. Fear means that we are working outside of our comfort zone which also means that we are growing.
My comfort zone didn’t include being in front of a camera because of my body image. I had huge issues looking at myself in the mirror – let alone having someone take a picture of me.
I have conquered this fear by working on my body image during the past three years. Am I now super comfortable to be in front of a camera? No, I’m not but it is much better than it was. I can now see beauty when I look at pictures of myself… I can see now what others see…because we are all beautiful. Yes, we are.
This weekend was another one of these moments in my life – professional photo shoot with a designer, makeup artists, and the best photographer in town.
Body messages
I felt nervous for 3-4 days leading up to the shoot.
I was anxious and craving carbs.
My body was tense which, for me, equals pain in my lower back.
I had poor sleep quality the night before.
I listened and observed my body messages with interest. I realized through my body that this experience was a huge and significant step for me in my life journey because of the intensity of the messages. I didn’t worry about the “symptoms” (body messages) or take a sleeping pill or supplement to help me sleep. Rather, I enjoyed the process. I felt the sensation in my body of each body message and was grateful for the growth that was happening within myself.
How to listen to your body messages
What are your body messages when you are working outside your comfort zone?
Do you listen to your body messages or simply ignore them?
Do you find that your body messages are just an annoyance?
You just can’t wait to shut them down with food or another drug of choices?
Guess what happened the day of the shoot? I had the best time of my life with the best team…. I shared with my team of three brand new people that I had never meet before, my life journey and my anxiousness about the day.
I was vulnerable and shared in a positive manner so they resounded with nothing but love for me on my journey. Without their support, I couldn’t have put my true self out there and the pictures wouldn’t have been nearly as gorgeous and powerful as they are. I’m so grateful that I have crossed paths with these three professional and loving human beings – Nikki, Luis and Onna = xoxox. I will forever be grateful to have met you.
Listen and Feel
Listen to your body messages aka symptoms, disease, discomfort and imbalances with care, patience and love.
Feel your body messages – the intensity, the location, when, where and how it happens.
Learn from your body messages.
Make decisions in your life based on your body messages and on the communication between you and your body.
Everything happens for a reason for the best outcome possible.
FREE GUIDE
What to say when a client want to lose weight
GET THE EXACT WORDS I USE IN REAL COACHING SESSIONS—WHEN WEIGHT LOSS COMES UP AND I’M HOLDING A WEIGHT-NEUTRAL STANCE
FREE GUIDE
What to say when a client want to lose weight
Get then exact word I use in real coaching session when weight loss comes up and I'm holding a weight-neutral stance
Welcome!
I’m Stephanie Dodier
I am a non-diet nutritionist, educator, and feminist business leader challenging everything we’ve been taught about food, health, and coaching.
I help health professionals confidently coach food and body without co-opting diet culture.
Join me in leading the health coaching revolution!
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