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The Adverse Effect


Mirror, Mirror 6 Practices to Rebuild Your Body Confidence

May 16, 2019

Our bodies are defined by what we eat, how we move, and how we think.

Cera Byer, a body acceptance coach and trainer, shared a powerful story with The Adverse Effect of overcoming an eating disorder, obesity, and abuse because of a positive shift in her mindset.

That positive shift was in how she thought about her body. When Cera learned to treat her body with acceptance, she started treating her body with care.

Before then, her body was just an obstacle to her happiness.

Beliefs Gone Wild: Where Our Negative Body Thoughts Come From
Cera’s negative beliefs about her body started with her parents. As she shared, her parents saw the body as something to control. They saw fitness as a way to “fix” imperfections. If you were obese, you were supposed to use whatever it took to get to that “ideal” look.

So, that led Cera’s parents to push their daughter into diets….at the age of 6. Those diets eventually led to a cycle of eating disorders and obesity that Cera had to overcome.

Looking back, Cera no longer blames her parents for this. She understands that they, like most of us, buy into the belief that we will have better lives if we look like the “ideal” man or woman.

This mindset is reinforced early in our lives. Boys are given superheroes with big arms and six pack abs and girls are given dolls who are skinny and with “perfect” proportions.

This is reinforced constantly through TV, social media, and our peers. We are constantly urged to “lose a few pounds” or “lose that gut”. While the intent is framed as getting healthy, there is an underlying tone that our bodies aren’t “right” the way they are.

Cera started to realize this after an accident caused in part by excessive dieting and exercise. She realized that she needed to treat her body with love, not control. By treating her body with love, she could finally be happy building the body she wanted, not the one that “fit” some standard she didn’t’ ask for.

That’s what led her to body acceptance.

From Negative to Body Positive: 6 Practices to Help You Reconnect with Bodily Happiness

In her journey to body acceptance, Cera supported herself with a variety of practices. Some of these practices included:

1. Dance: From a young child, Sara always loved to express herself through dance. Unfortunately, her negative beliefs about how a dancer “should” look like kept her from fully enjoying the dance.

2. Education Once Cera realized that the negative beliefs about her body weren’t really based on facts, she started to educate herself on the facts. She became a personal trainer, group fitness instructor, and coach. Through that “re-education”, she was able to challenge the beliefs she had about her body growing up.

3. Community Another support for Cera was her support system, both online and off. Online, Cera gained a community of support by sharing her journey of having an eating disorder. That helped her gain courage, get advice, and get support when she needed it. Offline, her friends helped her navigate many obstacles, from getting legally emancipated to launching a book.

4. Journaling As mentioned above, Cera shared some of her journeys through eating disorders. Besides the support system it provided, journaling was also an expressive outlet for her. By journaling, Cera was able to reflect on where she was and where she wanted to be.

5. Boundary setting Once Cera began to take ownership of her own thoughts about her body, she set boundaries. She told her mother that she didn’t want to spend all of their time talking about diets. She wouldn’t allow herself to speak negatively about her body. By creating these boundaries, she was protecting herself from the negative mindsets that made her hate her body.

6. Self-talk, especially about our bodies is important. As Cera shared, “You can’t judge and love something at the same time.” If you are judging your body because it doesn’t fit a certain standard, you will never be happy with your body. Your body is not designed to fit a “standard”. Your body is designed to live. By reinforcing how you care, instead of judge your body, you change the narrative that runs your body.

The Bottom Line: Our Thoughts Are Powerful
The overall message that Cera learned from her journey is that our minds are truly powerful things. We need to make our minds an ally, instead of an enemy, of our bodies. If our minds continuously tell our bodies, “You aren’t good enough. You don’t look good”, there is no amount of dieting or exercise that will make you happy.. Because of this mindset, we may not take full advantage of the positive support that is already in our lives (like the things mentioned above). Without that positive support, life is just chasing a standard that will outlive you.