How to uncover your limiting body beliefs

What do you believe about your body?

Are you aware of the beliefs that you hold about your body? Or how these beliefs might be holding you back from living a fulfilling life?

If you want a better relationship with your body, you firstly need to uncover the limiting beliefs you have about it.

In this post, I’m sharing a quick exercise that will help you uncover your body beliefs.

With your new found awareness, you can then begin to challenge the unhelpful beliefs and create empowering ones instead.

Watch or read below:

Be careful what you believe

Whatever you believe about yourself comes true for you.  This is because your brain looks for evidence to reinforce the beliefs you hold, and it will usually find the evidence that it’s looking for.

So if you want to change the way you feel about your body, it’s important that you first of all uncover what beliefs you have about it.

It’s not often that people stop to question their beliefs.  We tend to take them as a given.

But one of the vital first steps in body image work is understanding which of your body beliefs are holding you back from living the life that you truly desire.

With this awareness, you can then work to challenge and re-frame your existing body beliefs, and create new empowering ones.

Shine a light on your body beliefs

To help you shine a light on your body beliefs, I’ve got a quick exercise for you.

Take a sheet of paper and write out the following sentence:

“I can’t ____________ because my body is __________”

Without thinking too much about it, complete this sentence in as many different ways as come up for you.

For example, you might complete the sentence by saying:

I can’t go swimming because I’m too heavy

I can’t wear a sexy dress because I’m too old

I can’t get a boyfriend because my body is gross

These sentences give you an indication of what you believe about not only your body, but all bodies.

If for example, you won’t wear a sexy black dress because you think you’re too old, you have a belief that it’s only acceptable for women under a certain age to look sexy.

Looking at your answers, ask what beliefs you have about your body or bodies in general?  Do you notice any themes?  For example, you may have beliefs about the size of your body dictating what you can do in life.

Uncovering your limiting body beliefs can be enlightening if you haven’t ever thought about the beliefs you’ve accepted as truth.

This exercise is about raising your awareness, because you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

Further work

Once you’ve done this exercise, you may find it useful to check out some previous episodes of Body Confident Friday that will help you to challenge your body beliefs

Episode #22: Get other peoples’ voices out of your head and Episode #43 Let go of the opinions of others will help you with that

And Episode #46 will help you create empowering body beliefs.

I’d love to know, what have you learned about your body beliefs?  Leave me a comment below.

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