Controlling food is a microcosm of the bigger picture: The way we look at our whole lives. We tend to treat food the way we wish we could treat everything. We want to control it, we don’t trust it to work out, and we don’t trust ourselves to make the right decisions.

Eating can then become the one thing we think we actually can control: When everything else is impossible, “maybe I can at least stick to this diet this time. Maybe I can at least control my body.”

Trying to shrink away and control our body’s external appearance often represents our fear or shame over being seen. Being afraid to exist. Being afraid to be ok. Being afraid to be enough. Being afraid to take up space and be your own unique human being. Being afraid that the things we have to say, people won’t want to hear.

But we deserve to be alive. We don’t need to walk around in skeletal/jacked body armor in order to be worthy of love and peace and happiness and respect and food and nourishment and rest and ease and fulfillment.

Sometimes we believe that shrinking away and shielding ourselves through our attempts at perfection will strengthen us, but instead it weakens us. Because life doesn’t actually work that way. Hardening your heart doesn’t mean that no one will ever hurt you again. And hardening your body doesn’t mean that we going for our fullest potential. Denial is not the way to fulfillment. The world opens up to us and softens when we do the same to the world.

Action, love, nourishment, trust, and letting go are the keys to getting what we want. We want to be alive, to experience things and to connect to people and to allow our full potential, and controlling what you eat and what you look like does not have a place in that. You can still dress well, and look vibrant and beautiful and happy and free and glowing without doing a thing to control it.

Truth dagger: We cannot control anything. Not even our bodies. Our bodies exist as they will. Treating your body with love and respect will only do wonders for your body, but still, it cannot control any outcomes. In the end we know this. Health, and longevity, and extenuating circumstance are not fully in our control. So best to stop pretending we can.

Open up, and promise yourself to try to let go a little bit today. To actively trust the world to guide you and support you and show you. Actively trust your body to go through the process of recovery and nourishment and no control. Trusting will not lead you astray, and a little voice inside you knows that is unwaveringly true.

Don’t shrink away from your life. Don’t be afraid of existing and taking up space and being “imperfect”. That IS life. Life is about action, not control. Action takes your forward, control spins you in a pointless, fruitless circle.

Trust.

And fuck it.