Rules You Never Actually Agreed To
In my practice, I hear a version of the same sentence often. “I know it’s irrational, but I still feel like I have to…” finish that sentence with skip dessert, cover up at the pool, or apologize for taking a second helping. What follows is usually a long list of rules about food, eating, and how much space a body is allowed to take up.
Here is what I want you to notice: almost none of these rules were ever actually chosen. They were absorbed, long before anyone was old enough to question them.
Where the Rules Actually Came From
Think back far enough, and most of these rules trace to a moment that had nothing to do with you personally. A comment at the dinner table about someone else’s plate. A relative sighing at their own reflection in front of you. A magazine cover, a school hallway comparison, an offhand remark about a “good” body versus a “bad” one.
Layer on top of that years of comparison, diet culture, and the pressure to look a certain way as a partner, an employee, a parent, or a student, and the rulebook gets thick fast. Organizations like NEDIC have documented for years how much of this messaging is absorbed long before anyone consciously chooses it.
Repeated enough times, moments like that build an internal rulebook, one that treats your body as something to monitor, correct, and constantly compare against everyone else’s.
The Accumulated Cost of Following Inherited Rules
Living by rules you never agreed to takes a toll that rarely gets named directly. It looks like:
Checking your reflection in every window you pass, almost without noticing you’re doing it.
Turning down an invitation because of what you’d have to wear.
Narrating your own meal in your head before anyone else even asks what you’re having.
Going somewhere else in your mind during dinner with someone you love, because part of you is still tracking what you ate an hour ago.
That last one is worth sitting with. These rules do not just cost you peace with your own body, they cost you presence with the people in front of you. A relationship needs your attention to grow, and it is hard to be fully in a conversation, a date, or a family dinner when part of you never clocks out of evaluating yourself.
You Are Allowed to Question the Rules
Here is the part of this work I find genuinely hopeful: if a rule was absorbed rather than chosen, it can also be examined, questioned, and in many cases, set down entirely.
That does not happen through willpower or a new set of stricter rules. It happens by tracing where a belief came from, asking honestly whether it was ever actually true, and questioning if it still applies presently.
Body Image Therapy in Guelph and Online Across Ontario
If you have spent years following rules about your body that were never really yours to begin with, you do not have to keep carrying them alone. If this connects to a harder relationship with food as well, my Disordered Eating page covers that in more depth. Reach out to schedule a gentle, no pressure consultation.