An introduction for people that don’t live in my head
Sometimes you don’t know you’re doing something over and over again that’s interesting, useful, or even impacful until other people point it out to you.
Here’s a little bit about one of those experiences that hatched what was to become my 4-Step Framework for Body Liberation.
We all have to start somewhere
Long, long ago, when I graduated from health coaching school, I was sent out into the world with a 6-month program all laid out for me, complete with worksheets, guides, recipes, and even newsletter templates. That program was supposed to help me guide someone from their “unhealthy” starting point to a “holistically happy and healthy” human being.
I’ve come a long way from those well meaning, but misguided beginnings.
Letting my body be my teacher
By using my own lived experience and journey toward body liberation as a touchstone, I started guiding my clients through a program that was very different from the one that the coaching school gave me.
Not only did it feel more authentic and easier for me to show up for helping fat people embrace their bodies, but I also saw that it somehow was more effective for my clients. I started to see them experience real shifts in their lives.
Let me tell you more about how that all went down.
Starting at the actual beginning
Step 1: Education
My clients came through my virtual door with very similar goals.
They wanted to start their work with me focused on how they could add more vegetables into their meals, or on changing their mindset and becoming more confident, or even on sticking to the ways to move their bodies that they enjoyed.
Basically, all of them wanted to be happier, healthier, and able to live better than they currently were.
The truth was that, no matter what suggestions we came up with together, they all got stuck when they hit the invisible walls of the cage erected by the culture of dieting we live in.
That was the actual place we needed to begin: unveiling and understanding the traps laid by diet culture.
The mental and emotional heaviness of living in an unruly body
Step 2: Reframing
Learning about diet culture gave us traction, got us moving in the right direction.
But then there were the tripping hazards thrown in the way of our work, courtesy of the stories in their heads.
My clients would make steps forward only to be confronted by the voices in their heads that told them they were being bad, or doing it wrong, or destined to fail because they were simply just not good enough because of their body size and the fact that they were no longer chasing thinness.
Challenging all of that was the next hurdle that moved them forward in the work.
Prepare your toolkit and identify your resources
Step 3: Self Care and Resilience Building
As they learned and unlearned, rewired and unwired their old ways of thinking about themselves, their identities shifted. They moved through the world differently.
But alas, the world did not change with them.
This required us to make sure they were prepared to take care of themselves when they, inevitably, were faced with agressions and harm.
And part of that was also learning how to find community support in order to build more resilience into their lives.
Blaze the path toward liberation for all bodies
Step 4: Advocacy
But the real jewel of the work we had been doing together was when they were rooted firmly enough in themselves and their value and worth that they could go and ask for their needs to be met.
Where they could go from meekly nodding and smiling in the face of a medical professional shaming them for their weight, or agreeably perching and squeezing themselves into a chair not made to fit their morphology, to a place where they could find their voice and request the thing they really desired for their comfort and safety.
And the best part?
This opens up possibilities for other fat folk that come behind them and creates ripples of change in their wake.
A roadmap to find your way towards a liberatory future
And ever since the day I discovered my 4-Step Framework for Body Liberation, I’ve been using it as a guide for all the teaching, facilitation, and creating that I do.
This powerful little framework made up of steps that, at face value, seem really simple are quite challenging.
Yet, they can be used as clear touchstones for the often esoteric and amorphous “Work That Needs to Be Done,” allowing you to have checkpoints and guidance as you iterate, repeat, pause, refresh, and process through the next learning edge you encounter on your way toward body liberation.
Use it liberally and often.