Body Complex

It was stunning. The acceptance of my body came in the most weird, backward way and from the most painful, horrid struggle of my life. Life after the death of my son had made my struggles with my body pointless, meaningless, powerless. My priorities had so completely changed that my relationship with my body become just another part of life. Acceptance, permission to do and eat whatever, whenever I wanted. Some sort of balance had snuck up on me. I was floored.

I realized that I had learned to trust my body by not dictating it. This is not to say I'm not still scared to try another pregnancy. This is not to say that I claim to be the healthiest woman on Earth. But it is to say that I gained trust in my body's ability to know what's best for it by letting do whatever it wanted, by focusing on other priorities and trusting myself. It has taken me another additional year since the death of my son to completely accept that his death was not due to a failure of my body. And the trust I gained from that one comment of that one nurse has played a huge part in this process of acceptance, of permission rather than dictatorship.

Now, I don't recommend enduring the death of a child in order to deal with your body issues or eating disorder problems! I'm not saying that at all. But what I am saying is that our relationships with our bodies are complex. There are no text book answers for how to come to terms with our bodies after eating disorder. There is no one answer that will work for every one of us. And the healing of our relationships with our bodies might come at the most unexpected, unlikely time in our lives-- a time that drives us to action, to do something outside our bodies, to have priorities outside counting calories and ticking off the number of minutes of exercise we get each day.

You just never know what's going to happen in a day. You never know when you might lose a loved one or lose your own life. So while you still have life and your loved ones are still here with you, why not try living with your body instead of

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