Your worth has nothing to do with your weight…

One of the needs in the trunk of The Universal Needs tree is the need relating to our sense of value and worth.

In my experience of years of working with clients on their Universal Needs, this is one of the most consistently neglected and compromised needs in the entire tree.

And it’s easy to understand why, because we live in a culture where we are constantly bombarded with messages (especially in the age of social media) that subtly suggest that we are not ‘enough’.

That life would be better if we were:

• More productive
• More skinny
• More sexy
• More attractive
• More spiritual
• More ambitious
• More disciplined

Or if we had:

• A ‘better’ job
• A ‘better’ car
• A ‘better’ house
• A ‘better’ life
• A ‘better’ body

Every single one of these is a suggestion that we or our lives are not ‘enough’ in some way.

We saw it in some of the memes that flew around at the beginning of quarantine suggesting that if we didn’t come out of lockdown with a new skill, a side hustle or new knowledge it wasn’t because we didn’t have enough time, it was because (according to the meme that was COMPLETELY incorrect) we didn’t have enough discipline (see here for my earlier post correcting this message: https://www.facebook.com/TheUniversalNeeds/photos/a.504344893276937/1093020077742746/)

And unfortunately we live in a culture where ‘thinness’ is heralded, celebrated and valued, and fatness is not. It is actually a form of systemic discrimination in our culture called ‘fatphobia.’

And for women, who consistently get the messages from the moment they’re born that their primary value lies in the way they look, the impact of these messages lands even harder.

You just need to see the messages that we receive via the media about weight/size/shape. From the obsession in magazines with celebrity weight gain and weight loss (where gain is criticised and loss is celebrated), to the ‘jokes’ and themes in popular TV/Film (for example Friends and the storylines about Monica being ‘fat’ as a child) to the memes doing the round right now about the amount that people are eating and the size or shape they will be when we get out of quarantine.

Even to the simple lack of representation in our media of people who are larger than the cultural ‘ideal,’ which gives the subtle message that ‘thin’ people have more value (because they are the ones being shown) and that by extension, people who are not ’thin’ have less value (as they are not being shown). Just look at the average people you see walking down the street and compare them to the average people you see in the media and you will quickly see that our population is not being accurately represented by the people on screen. And a further extension of this is the stereotypes we see in the media around people who are perceived as fat as being also portrayed as being lazy, stupid, or sub-human.

Every single one of these messages is indicating that being fatter or gaining weight is a negative thing.

Now, I feel it’s important to say that there’s nothing wrong with someone wanting to FEEL good in their body, and making lifestyle choices based on what feels good to them. I myself made a conscious decision recently to change my eating habits for a while because I had been making choices that weren’t really meeting my needs well, and my body didn’t feel good as a result of it, and I lost weight as a result of those choices. There isn’t anything wrong with losing weight (or gaining it).

And it’s important to be aware that because of our conditioning around weight/size/shape and it’s connection to being seen as a more or less valuable human, it is VERY difficult to ascertain whether we’re losing weight because it genuinely meets our needs to do so, or whether we’re doing it because we’re locked into the conditioning that we need to be thinner to be more attractive/more desirable/more valuable, without consciously looking for and dismantling where we’ve internalised the messages connecting our weight and value.

And we need to be mindful that every time we post something where there is a subtle message underneath it that thin = good, fat = bad, we amplify and reinforce this message, and the connection inside ourselves between weight and value. For others, and most importantly, for ourselves. And, without necessarily meaning to, we also perpetuate this way of thinking for the next generations to come as well.

So one thing we can do in order to better meet our value/worth need is to begin to unlearn the message that our worth is in any way correlated with our weight and connect to the value and worth we hold as a human being regardless of our size, shape or the number we see when we step on a scale.

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As a woman, I am still on this journey myself.

As much as I don’t like to admit it, I will own that my recent weight loss was STILL in part due to the internal conditioning that I have connecting my value and my weight/how I look. It is something I am actively working to dismantle. I have made so much progress with this internal piece of work, and there is still a ways to go. It takes time. And I am human. And I am being gentle with myself as I slowly work to dissolve the link inside myself between the two.

And one of the things that has helped me so much on this journey so far, has been (through my Universal Needs practice) to consciously and intentionally cultivate and meet my value need in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with how I look or what I weigh. It boosts and bolsters my internal sense of value while simultaneously reminding me that this is completely unrelated to my weight or how I look.

So what is one way (unrelated to how you look or what you weigh) that you could remind yourself of your worth today ?