Social gatherings can be stressful at the best of times: they require your time, energy, money, and you have to figure out what to wear. Add in the expectation that someone will comment on your weight, what you’re eating, how you vote, or how you choose to live your life and the anxiety can build as soon as the event is on your calendar.

If you are already dreading a few get-togethers on your calendar, below are some helpful scripts you can use to shut down unwanted comments and criticism. Read through and choose which ones might be helpful to you. Feel free to bookmark this blog post or take a screen shot on your phone so you can come back to this anytime you need to feel empowered to redirect an uncomfortable conversation.

 Try being warm and polite:

• “It’s the holiday season, let’s focus on the positive. What are you excited about right now?”
• “Let’s keep things light today. Tell me something wonderful that’s going on with you lately?”

 Try being gentle but clear:

• “That is
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Managing your inner critic can be difficult. Its comments are cruel, judgmental, and criticize everything from your body to your intelligence to your dreams. That voice inside tears you down with comments taken from friends, family, society, and social media. Sometimes they are word-for-word and sometimes your inner critics twists them to be extra painful. We tend to internalize these negative ideas and our brain feeds them back to us as if they are true.

They aren’t.

There are a few ways to address your inner critic. I’ve talked before about how to push back against these inner comments (without falling into toxic positivity!) and today I want to give you another strategy to try out: listening to your inner critic.

Now, that doesn’t mean believing your inner critic. When thoughts like “You’re so dumb” or “No one likes you” come up, see if you can sit with them for a moment. These thoughts often jump to the surface when you’ve been triggered by a situation and your immediate action ...

Self-sabotage is a sneaky habit that is getting in the way of, well, yourself! You might have recognized your patterns, even be aware it doesn’t make you feel good, but feel helpless to stop the action. Self-sabotage keeps you feeling stuck because there is familiarity in the outcome. Yes, it might leave you feeling shame or overfull but it feels safe.

Self-sabotage behaviour can look like:

• Perfectionism. Needing everything to be perfectly aligned and ready before taking action. But the truth is “perfect” doesn’t exist, meaning you’ll never end up taking that step forward.
• Procrastination and avoidance. It is easy to pick up our phones and scroll or focus on what foods we want to binge on as a way to numb out rather than face something.
• Constant self-doubt and criticism. This can be feeling like you never measure up or that you can’t possibly meet your goals, so why even try.

These patterns of self-sabotage show up not just around a fear of failure, it can also come up as a fe...

Checklists can be a helpful tool: they can organize your day and make you feel motivated. But when it feels like you’ve got a never ending to do list, you can feel defeated and constantly drained.

You might even find yourself unable to relax or feel like you haven’t ‘earned’ rest because of all the lingering things you need to get done. With this mentality it is easy to fall into emotional eating patterns to avoid your to do list.

Food becomes the only ‘acceptable’ way to take a break, so you go grab an afternoon pastry to get away from your desk or find yourself in the pantry looking for a snack to focus on something other than your tasks. This pattern of eating also packs a one-two punch of helping you disassociate from your to do list and all the feelings around it: stress, overwhelm, anxiety, fear. 

It is unavoidable that life will get busy, but that doesn’t mean you have to live in a constant state of stress eating. Here are four key strategies to bring you some peace of mind, ...

The snow isn’t the only thing swirling as we face the holiday season: emotions can feel all over the place as we’re faced with more things on our to do list that usual. Plus, there are so many opportunities where we are faced with food: dinners, potlucks, parties! If you’re an emotional eater you might dread this time of year.

But you don’t have to feel helpless. Below are three key things you can implement right now to start feeling calmer around food.

This time of year might bring with it specific family recipes you look forward to or limited-time store-bought items you crave. But this mindset can have you believing that these foods are scarce and you have to eat them every chance you get to make sure you take advantage of them being available.

• Try this: Start by giving yourself permission to eat the things you really enjoy. Practicing this means you’ll be much more satisfied by what you put in your mouth. And an interesting mental shift can happen when you know you can eat what
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Social media constantly gives us benchmarks to compare ourselves to.

Your Instagram and TikTok feeds are filled with picture-perfect videos and photos of happy kids, clean houses, and expensive vacations. These platforms are also overwhelmed with weightless “success” stories and details of restrictive diets to try to ‘give’ you the body of the influencer posing on the screen.

It’s tough not to get caught up in these images! It’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, so even before reading the caption or hearing what they’re saying, the image they are projecting is perfection. They are trying to sell you on the idea that if you buy this, do that, you can look just like them, have a life just like theirs.

Talk about a comparison that is only going to make you feel bad about yourself.

But this slim slice we see of others online—a highlight reel—is no yardstick for your own messy, beautiful life!

Here’s the solution to social media comparison:

1. You’ve probably heard this be
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It can be so easy to get obsessed with the numbers on your bathroom scale and hop on/hop off every day or sometimes multiple times a day. You might be telling yourself that it’s “just to check in” but let’s look at your motivation a bit more closely:

If the number on the scale is higher than yesterday, do you have a bad day? End up picking yourself apart and vow to restrict what you eat?

Are you stepping on the scale more than once a day? Do you have set ‘rules’ for when you weigh yourself (for example, must be after using the washroom, must be without clothing, etc.)?

If you find yourself letting the number on the scale dictate your mood and actions, here are four reminders you need to hear. Feel free to print these out to read them when you need to, or even tape them on your bathroom mirror!

1. It is normal for your weight to fluctuate during the day depending on what you’ve had to eat, drink, or if you’ve had a bowel movement. And if you’re a woman, you can expect your weight to
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The summer ‘uniform’ is made up of shorts, tank tops, and sweating! All can make you feel uncomfortable if you struggle with body image. But perhaps the most dreaded of all is the bathing suit. At some point we go from children who love being in the water and playing in the sand without a second thought, to worry-charged and self-conscious adults who will actively avoid situations that require suiting up.

If this sounds like you, you’ll want to bookmark this post to come back to when you’re faced with a bathing suit event. Here are 4 tips to make you feel more comfortable (dare we even say confident!):

• You’ve heard it before but it bears repeating: no one is as concerned about your appearance as you are. We in no way want to discount experiences where someone something commented on your body. No one gets to do that and here’s what you can do if it happens. But we can be our own worst enemy when it comes to criticizing ourselves. Consult someone you trust, a partner or friend, who c
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You may have seen yourself in our last blog post about body checking. It is the practice of monitoring and critiquing your appearance based on diet industry standards. Our tip there was to catch the negative thoughts in action and try and counter them.

In today’s post we’re going to take it to the next level: once you’ve caught that negative thought, how you can support yourself into creating a positive experience when looking in a mirror (either literally or in the form of comparison with other people’s bodies).

• Find the positive. After identifying the negative thought that came up, you might feel empowered to not only challenge it—saying it isn’t helpful—but to spin it into a positive. For example, instead of picking apart your thighs in the gym mirror, you could remind yourself that your legs just carried you through a workout! Focussing on what your body can do, instead of how it looks, can really start to reframe how you feel about your body.
• Dress in a way that feels good. C
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It might feel normal to pass by a store window and check out your reflection. But if you’re noticing more than simply adjusting your scarf or hat, you might be falling into body checking.

Body checking is any way you monitor your body’s appearance. This might look like:

• Pinching or pulling at skin to temporarily manipulate how your body looks.
• Examining your stomach in the mirror while trying to “suck in” as much as possible.
• Stepping on the scale often.
• Taking photos of your body constantly, swearing they will be your “before” photos.
• Comparing your body now to one you had as a teenager or to others around you.

You might even notice that these habits become even more frequent when you are stressed, feeling sad, or even just about to go on vacation! The issue with body checking is that you’ll never feel like you are measuring up to whatever you’re hoping for because it is a way of constantly critiquing your body. The diet industry doesn’t help us at all! Even if it changes i...