BodyPositive® Boosting body image at any weight

• Changing the motivation for change from weight loss to quality of life
  • Replacing the "will power" model with "inner parenting"
  • Making only those changes you can live with forever
  • Facing the limitations on our capacity to control weight
  • Ending the strangely addictive, unproductive cycles of dieting, weight loss and re-gain
  • Freeing energy and time for the more important projects of life
    
    
• Addressing the body blame underlying many different difficulties
  • Creating a "body disparagement free zone" around and within you
  • Healing the relationship with your body so that you are motivated to take good care of yourself 
    
    
• Building skills that are useful for life and lifetimes
  • Learning to defend yourself in a stigmatizing world
  • Creating multiple ways to soothe, stimulate, nourish and rest your body
  • Experiencing body competence, problem-solving and mastery
  • "Getting back on the horse" in taking care of yourself, when life bumps you off
    
    
• Studying EXERCISE as a Foreign Language
  • Naming and cultivating the "hunger to move"
  • Discovering personal preferences for different characteristics of activity
  • Building an athletic identity
  • Taking the time to become "fluent" (years!)
  • Integrating physical activity into life, for life
    
    
• BodyPositive Inspired Eating
  • Allowing your body to be your partner in choices about eating: telling you when it's hungry and when it's satisfied
  • "Dieting detox" - Undoing the damage of dieting to your trust in your body and its signals, your view of food as sensual nourishment, your sense of entitlement to much more than just food
    
    
• Incorporating decades of research about how people really change and what’s healthiest for real bodies
  • Cultivating a realistic sense of progress: thinking about making a change "counts," relapse is normal, pleasure and mastery are lasting motivators
  • Getting more support in the beginning when change is unfamiliar
  • Incorporating the resources in your real life to minimize dependency on a "program"
  • Supporting creative efforts so the changes are deeply personal and individual
    
    
• Letting go of and grieving the pursuit of body transformation/self transformation
  • "If a chemical got in the water that meant no one's weight would ever change again, how would you feel?"
  • Observing the way we are taught to prove our worth by perfecting our bodies
  • Learning to take this body as your lawfully wedded body
  • Examining with frankness the way that postponing self-acceptance keeps you from taking responsibility for your life now
    
    
• Building a supportive community
  • Creating a friendship circle to reflect the real you
  • Asking for what you need from family, but seeking it elsewhere if they can't give it
  • Becoming an activist to "clean up the culture."  No individual can thrive when the culture is "polluted."
    

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