Getting 'back'

/
IMG_20200621_201853_592.jpg

"I just want to get back to...":

  • the weight I was <insert time of life>

  • the diet that worked for a while that one time

  • the body I had when I was doing competitive exercise

  • my pre-baby weight

  • fitting back into that one pair of pants

"then I'll be happy and I won't diet any more and I will accept my body."

I hear so many versions of this desire to get ourselves, our diets and our bodies back to another time. But what do we do until then, do we just keep hating ourselves and telling ourselves that we're failures for not being where we once were?

We hear this concept a lot in many different ways. When my mum died, well meaning people used to talk to me about 'getting back to normal', but normal back then was with mum around, so I used to wonder how I could ever get back there. There are many products, diets, exercise regimes that promise to get you 'back to your pre-baby body', but your body pre-baby was one that had not yet grown and birthed a new life. This concept can also reach over to our diet when we try to go back to a particular time by eating the foods we ate then. It's important to recognise however, that our nutritional needs are ever changing, our bodies and our metabolism change at different times in our lives, so going back to a particular way of eating may not actually get the results we're looking for. When we're babies, our diet consists solely of milk, we see the teenage years needing more food and more nutrition than at any other time to support growth in a way that we don't need later in life where our nutritional needs change again. For those who menstruate, our nutritional needs change at different times in this cycle. Pregnancy and menopause also provide differing nutritional needs. We go through so many experiences in life, some of these experiences change us and there is no going back.

These experiences offer us an opportunity for reflection and learning. If you're someone who often thinks about getting back to somewhere in your life, I'd like to invite you to have a deeper look:

  • What was it about that time/that weight/that body that I feel I don't have now?

  • What wasn't working so well for me at that time?

  • Was there anything else going well for me at that time?

  • What is the feeling about that time that I want to recreate?

  • What can I put into place in my life now to feel that way right now?

  • Is there something from this time that I need to grieve so that I can continue moving forward without it?

Can you take this deep dive as an opportunity to learn about and accept where you are right now and to focus on where you would like to move forward to?

Taking a deeper look at what it is that you are really wanting 'back' can help you to take some steps forward, to have a richer view of your life's experiences and to combine those things that are important to take from the past with that which you need right now in the present.