11 Things I Believe Now (That I Wish I Had Known to Believe When I was a Child)

 Things I Wish I Had Known Way Back When

1.  There was nothing wrong with me no matter what weight or size I was.  I was already 100% valuable and worthy as a human being.  I was born that way and I will remain that way for the rest of my life.  
2. Being a thin child would not in and of itself have made me any happier about myself.  It’s not the number on the scale or the size of my body that makes me happy.  It is my thoughts about myself that are what make me happy or unhappy.  I can have positive thoughts about myself no matter what I look like or what I weigh.
3. Foods with flour and sugar make me so much hungrier than whole, unprocessed foods.
4. Exercise is for fun, not for weight management or weight loss.  Moving my body in a way that feels good is just plain good for me.
5. It is important to learn what true physical hunger feels like in my body so I can eat when I am hungry and stop eating when my body has had enough.  
6. Diet sodas aren’t helpful in any way.  Water is the only drink I need.  
7. I cannot compare what I eat and how my body looks to what other people eat and how their bodies look.  Different bodies process food in very different ways.  I could have focused on myself and learned how my individual body processed the foods I chose to eat.
8. Foods are not good or bad.  Food is just food.  Molecules stuck togetehr in different ways.
9. I wish I had been taught to understand where my feelings were coming from and how to actually feel my feelings.  
10. Weight and size based bullying is harmful, especially when it comes from myself aimed at myself.  They call this internalized weight bias.  Learning how to kindly and compassionately talk to myself was a game-changing, important life skill.
11. Wheat Thins are not a nutritionally dense food just because they have the word wheat in them!  (Yes, I did think this as a kid!  )