20 Quotes to Inspire You to Start to Make Peace With Food and Your Body

The past few days I have had a number of conversations about food, diets and body acceptance. These conversations inspired me to add the following 20 quotes to start to inspire you to make peace with food and your body on the journal 🙂

20 Quotes to Inspire You to Start to Make Peace With Food and Your Body

I hope the following quotes start to inspire you to make peace with food and your body –

1. “You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.” ~ Geneen Roth
2. “When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself – that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control.” ~ Geneen Roth

3. “You did not fail to keep the weight off because you are lazy, weak, or undisciplined. It’s not because you didn’t want it badly enough. You regained that weight because the contributors to your body weight, such as what, when, and how much you eat, as well as how you expend energy (including your inclination to move), are not completely under your conscious control.” ~ Linda Bacon

4. “…but I do know that the only definition of God that makes any sense, is one that uses this human life and its suffering – the very things we believe we need to hide or fix – as a path to the heart of love itself. Which is why the relationship to food is a perfect doorway.” ~ Geneen Roth
5. “Our bodies and their symptoms are our biggest allies in this endeavor, because nothing gets our attention as quickly. Our bodies are a wonderful barometer of how well we’re living in the present and taking care of ourselves.” ~ Dr Christane Northrup
6. “Once you consider the extent of the magical thinking that tends to be tied in to the fantasy of thinness, you can understand how threatening it is to consider the idea that you may never get the thin body you crave. It means that you never get to become the person you want to be. Wow! No wonder it’s so painful to let go of the drive to lose weight! Accepting your body is not just about physicality, it’s about accepting who you are, not continuing to wait until you become the person you imagine being.” ~ Linda Bacon
7. “Instead of using food to avoid discomfort, they are going to learn how to tolerate what they believe is intolerable.” ~ Geneen Roth
8. “Why would any sane person believe that tolerating the intolerable is a worthy endeavour?” ~ Geneen Roth
9. “Women turn to food when they are not hungry because they are hungry for something they can’t name: a connection to what is beyond the concerns of daily life. Something deathless, something sacred.” ~ Geneen Roth
10. “But when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we evoke that is in us that is not a story, not caught in the past, not some old image of ourselves. We evoke divinity itself. And in doing so, we can hold emptiness, old hurts, fear in our cupped hands and behold our missing hearts.” ~ Geneen Roth
11. “… ending the obsession with food is all about the capacity to stay in the present moment. To not leave themselves.” ~ Geneen Roth
12. “Think of your body like a magical garden – always growing and changing, full of color and life.” ~ Dr Christane Northrup
13. “When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away: our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when. Our belief in ourselves. Our right to decide what goes into our mouths. Unlike the diets that appear monthly in magazines or the thermal pants that sweat off pounds, unlike a lover or a friend or a car, your body is reliable. It doesn’t go away, get lost, stolen. If you will listen, it will speak.” ~ Geneen Roth
14. “Sensual pleasure is our biological reward for taking care of ourselves.” ~ Linda Bacon
15. “When you love something you wish is goodness; when you hate something, you wish to annihilate it. Change happens not by hatred but by love. Change happens when you understand what you want to change so deeply that there is no reason to do anything but act in your own best interest. When you begin to inhabit your body from the inside.” ~ Geneen Roth
16. “Just so, there is no way back to the body; the body is the way. You leave and then you return. Leave and return. You forget and then your remember. Forget. Remember. One breath and then another. One step and then another. It’s that simple. And it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been gone; what matters is that you’ve returned. With each return, each sound, each felt sensation, there is relaxation, recognition, and gratitude.” ~ Geneen Roth
17. “External rules, such as belief systems about good foods, bad foods, or appropriate amounts or time to eat, drown out our innate ability to respond to setpoint cues.” ~ Linda Bacon
18. “The beginning always involves noticing where you are and what you are doing.” ~ Geneen Roth
19. “Freedom from obsession is about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognising what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you can’t have it.” ~ Geneen Roth
20. “Fat isn’t the problem. Dieting is the problem. A society that rejects anyone whose body shape or size doesn’t match an impossible ideal is the problem. A medical establishment that equates ‘thin’ with ‘healthy’ is the problem.” ~ Linda Bacon

Over to You…

Which quote was your favourite? Do you have one that is not listed? If so, feel free to let us know your favourite quote that inspire peace with food and your body below or post the quote on our Facebook page 🙂

If you are ready to reclaim your courage and take the next step towards making peace with food and your body, why not join our Toolkit? Also – you are invited to download the free 10-minute mindful eating exercise here.