269. Preference Or Altar? When Your Body Goal Costs You Peace
269. Preference Or Altar? When Your Body Goal Costs You Peace
When a Weight-Loss Goal Becomes an Altar
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to change your body.
You are allowed to have preferences.
You can love and appreciate your body while also wanting to lose weight, build strength, improve your health, or feel different physically.
Real empowerment includes choice.
You might choose to accept your body exactly as it is. You might choose to pursue a physical transformation on your own terms. You might create a personal balance between appreciating the body you have and actively working toward change.
The transformation itself is not necessarily the problem.
The deeper questions are:
How intensely are you pursuing it?
Why are you pursuing it?
What is it costing you?
At some point, a desire can stop being a preference and become an altar.
And an altar always demands a sacrifice.
The Road Trip That Revealed the Altar
In mid-July, I took a road trip to the United States to surprise my mom for her sixtieth birthday and spend time with family I hadn’t seen in far too long.
Historically, road trips have been difficult for me.
They often became three- or four-day spirals where I gave myself permission to eat everything in sight. I would abandon my normal practices, overeat until I felt physically uncomfortable, and return home feeling as though I needed to repair the damage.
This time was different.
I entered the trip with more consistency and presence than I had ever brought to a road trip before.
I enjoyed indulgent foods, but I also chose nourishing meals.
I continued my Kundalini and evening practices. I completed my scheduled long run. I drank water during the drive rather than spending eleven hours grazing on candy and Timbits.
Most importantly, I did not go to bed with a single overeating-induced stomach ache.
The trip was a genuine success.
When I returned home, I expected the scale to be temporarily higher. Long drives, restaurant meals, carbohydrates, sodium, and disrupted routines can all influence short-term weight.
I expected five or six pounds.
The scale showed ten.
Logically, I understood that this did not represent ten pounds of body fat gained over a few days.
Emotionally, I was devastated.
The number triggered frustration, confusion, and discouragement. I had several difficult weeks afterward. At my lowest points, I even wondered whether I should give up on launching the book I had spent months creating.
That reaction revealed something important.
The body-transformation goal was no longer behaving like a preference.
It had become an altar.
A Preference Can Disappoint You
An Altar Devastates You
A preference sounds like:
“I would like this outcome.”
“I am working toward this because it matters to me.”
“I will be disappointed if it takes longer than expected, but I will remain connected to myself.”
An altar sounds like:
“I need this outcome in order to feel safe, worthy, qualified, or at peace.”
“I can only trust the process when the evidence arrives on my preferred timeline.”
“If this does not happen, everything else loses its meaning.”
The distinction is not whether you care.
You can care deeply about a preference.
The distinction is what happens when the outcome appears to move farther away.
A preference creates disappointment.
An altar creates catastrophe.
An Altar Demands Sacrifice
The first warning sign is sacrifice.
When a body goal becomes an altar, you may sacrifice your ability to feel content where you are.
You sacrifice your capacity to experience a setback without turning it into a verdict about your future.
You may sacrifice pleasure, flexibility, rest, connection, and the ability to inhabit your current life.
The transformation begins demanding that you live somewhere else emotionally.
You worship the future body, the future number, the future launch, or the future version of yourself while treating the present version as an inconvenient waiting room.
Presence disappears because you are always mentally living at the destination.
An Altar Creates Bargaining and Conditions
Another warning sign is bargaining.
You quietly promise yourself that you will relax once you reach the number.
You will feel confident when your body changes.
You will trust your habits when the scale confirms they are working.
You will appreciate yourself when the visible evidence arrives.
Peace becomes conditional.
Gratitude becomes conditional.
Consistency becomes conditional.
You may continue following your practices while progress feels fast and exciting. But when the outcome stalls or temporarily reverses, the habits begin to feel pointless.
You think:
“What’s the point if this isn’t working?”
That question reveals that the habits were attached primarily to the external result rather than the identity, life, or relationship with yourself that you were trying to create.
Why Outcome Worship Destroys Consistency
If your consistency depends on constant evidence of progress, it will disappear whenever progress becomes slow, nonlinear, or temporarily invisible.
This is one reason worshipping a goal weight can be disastrous for food freedom.
When the number moves in the wrong direction, pressure builds.
Pressure becomes frustration, hopelessness, fear, and the urgent desire for relief.
Food can become the fastest available exit.
Then the eating creates more painful emotions because you believe you have widened the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
That distress creates another desire for relief.
Soon, the attempt to control the body has created the exact cycle you were trying to escape.
The solution is not simply to force yourself back onto the plan.
The deeper work is returning the body goal to its rightful place.
It can be a desire.
It can be a preference.
It cannot be the altar where you sacrifice your peace.
The Five-Element Path Back to Peace
When I notice that a desire has become an altar, I return to a sequence that moves through five elements:
Earth → Water → Fire → Air → Ether
The order matters.
High-performing women often have abundant fire. We know how to act, push, strive, build, and recommit.
But when earth and water are under-supported, that fire becomes a wildfire.
The answer is not to eliminate ambition.
It is to give the fire somewhere safe to live.
Earth: Body Cooperation and Presence
The first step is earth.
Any sustainable health transformation must begin with body cooperation rather than body control.
Earth asks:
What genuinely helps my body feel well?
What supports my energy?
What improves my sleep, focus, digestion, or mood?
What practices help me feel physically present?
What choices allow me to participate more fully in my life?
When I look beyond the scale, I know that stable blood sugar helps me feel more emotionally balanced, focused, and creative.
I know that poor sleep and prolonged overindulgence make it harder to show up fully for my work and workouts.
I also know that challenging movement is not merely about calories.
I carry a great deal of high-voltage energy. Running and dancing help that energy move through my body in a healthy way.
When I return to earth, the journey becomes bigger than the number.
It becomes about creating the physical conditions that help me feel alive.
Earth also returns me to the present.
I stop treating today’s body as an obstacle between me and my real life.
This is the body I am living inside now.
This is where cooperation begins.
Water: Compassion, Honesty, and Repair
Once you recognize that your fire became too hot, do not punish yourself.
Move into water.
Water is where you offer compassion to the parts of you that transformed a desire into an altar.
For me, it made sense that body-image pressure resurfaced while preparing to launch a book about food freedom.
I spent years working in the personal-training industry, where there is often an unspoken cultural assumption that a trainer’s body is their business card.
As I prepared to release the most important book I had ever written, part of me feared that I would not look like someone qualified to teach this work.
I feared that a person who could genuinely benefit from the book might judge it by its cover.
Of course that fear created pressure.
Understanding the origin of the pressure did not mean surrendering to it.
It meant I could meet it without shame.
Water is also where you stop expecting your humanity to disappear because you have developed expertise.
Mastery does not mean you never struggle with the material you teach.
It means you become more honest and skilful in how you meet the struggle, repair, and return.
Expecting yourself to never experience another difficult body-image day is perfectionism wearing a spiritual hat.
Water makes room for the hard moment without using it as evidence against your calling.
Fire: Desire Held Inside a Hearth
After earth and water, you can return to fire.
You are still allowed to want things.
You are allowed to feel ambitious.
You can pursue a health goal, business goal, creative project, or physical transformation with intensity and devotion.
But now the fire has a hearth.
It is rooted in presence, body cooperation, and compassion.
Hearth fire warms the home.
Wildfire consumes it.
Fire becomes dangerous when it forgets that earth and water must come first.
The goal is not to extinguish your desire.
The goal is to stop making the desire responsible for proving your worth or delivering your peace.
Air: Change the Story
Air is perspective, language, and the story you are telling about what happened.
My original story was that my body needed to look a precise way by the time my book launched.
That story created scale worship, pressure, and internal chaos.
I needed a new story.
An unexpected weight fluctuation and two messy weeks did not disqualify me from releasing a book about food freedom.
When I chose to lead myself through the experience honestly and in real time, it made me more equipped to teach the work.
In the past, I might have hidden this experience.
I would have waited until I had achieved the result I wanted, polished the lesson with hindsight, and presented the story once it had a neat ending.
But that version of leadership can quietly turn humanity into something that must be concealed.
Real mastery can look like allowing people to witness the return while it is still happening.
Air asks:
What story am I currently telling?
Is that story creating pressure or possibility?
Am I using this experience as evidence against myself?
What else could this moment mean?
How might this challenge deepen my work rather than disqualify me from it?
Ether: Trust the Larger Timeline
The final element is ether.
Ether is trust.
Trust in timing.
Trust in the larger path.
Trust that you may not be able to see every purpose the moment something happens.
Perhaps the difficult experience showed me where my inner work still needed attention.
Perhaps it reminded me that I can prioritize a metric or prioritize inner peace, but I cannot always worship both.
Perhaps the experience became the story someone else needed to hear.
Ether does not require you to pretend that disappointment feels good.
It asks you to release the demand that life unfold according to the ego’s exact schedule.
You can continue to participate.
You can continue to choose aligned actions.
You can continue to want the outcome.
But you no longer force the outcome to become your god.
Your Embodied Activation
Choose one desire that currently carries emotional charge.
It may involve your body, health, business, relationship, finances, visibility, or creative work.
Ask yourself:
Is this still a preference, or has it become an altar?
Look for the signs:
Are you sacrificing present-day peace?
Does a setback feel catastrophic?
Are gratitude and confidence conditional?
Do you bargain with the future?
Does your consistency disappear when progress slows?
Are you using the outcome as evidence of your worth or qualification?
Then walk yourself through the elements.
Earth
Return to your body and the present moment. Ask what genuinely supports your well-being.
Water
Offer compassion to the parts of you that became afraid. Allow the real emotions to exist without judgment.
Fire
Reconnect with desire, but place it inside a hearth. Let ambition serve your life rather than consume it.
Air
Choose a story that honours your humanity and restores your power.
Ether
Release the demand for immediate proof. Trust that your path is still unfolding.
You do not have to stop wanting the thing.
You simply need to remove it from the altar.
Explore the Five-Element Process
The complete five-element method is explored inside Food Freedom Fantasy, including embodied exercises, rewrite rituals, templates, and practical tools for transforming these ideas into everyday change.
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You’re just misdiagnosed.
Links Mentioned
Episode 262: The 2 Elements That Keep Discipline From Becoming Diet Culture
You Are Not Behind: Building a Life You Love Without Having Everything You Want | Meghan Ryan Asbury
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior podcast. Today, we're tackling a deeply important question. If you have a weight loss goal, body transformation goal, or a health goal, is it a preference or an altar? Now, this is a show about food freedom, deep health, creativity, spiritual growth, and sometimes these things also include desires to shape-shift the physical body.
If you've listened to previous episodes like 226 or 262, you'll know that I believe real feminine empowerment is about choice. Just as women now have the choice to stay at home with their children, pursue a career, or master the art of balancing both, I believe in today's world, women also get to choose between either accepting their bodies exactly as they are, pursuing a transformation on their terms, or striking their own unique balance between loving, appreciating their bodies as they are now, while also working to create change.
I don't think it's ever the physical transformation itself that's the issue. I think the issue can become how intensely that physical transformation is pursued, why it's being pursued, and at what cost. Today, we're gonna cover the red flags that indicate your preference or desire for a body transformation might have turned into an altar. We're gonna talk about why worshiping a goal weight, size, or any metric is disastrous for food freedom and consistency. We're gonna talk about the elemental path back to relegating a body transformation to its rightful place.
Once you do this, food freedom, consistency, and honestly, just feeling less miserable and frustrated all tend to happen naturally as a result. This episode gets more personal than some of the recent ones, but I think this personal story is universal in many ways, and the lesson was incredibly valuable, so it's worth diving into on the show today
I had to ask myself this question after a road trip in mid-July. So I went down to the States to surprise my mom for her 60th birthday, see my siblings, my niece, my nephews that I haven't seen in forever, which was so nice. And also, road trips have historically been problematic for me. They tend to become these three, four-day F-it spirals where I'm devouring everything in sight.
Now, this road trip, I was determined to show up differently. I wanted to create a new proof of concept that I could go on a road trip, indulge some of the time, but also make more aligned choices and not use the trip as an excuse to eat so much that I'd go to bed every single night with a tummy ache, which has basically always been the case in the past.
I went into this road trip with more consistency than ever, more presence, and I was feeling really good about where I was physically, mentally, all the things. The road trip itself went so well. Yes, there were more indulgences than my everyday eating, but there was also more intentionally choosing healthier meals more often.
I kept up with my kundalini and my evening ritual. I made time for my long run on the Sunday while I was there, and I didn't get a single tummy ache from overeating. Even the drives themselves were not full of Timbits and candy and sugary drinks. It was basically all water and a few sugar-free energy drinks because let's be real, 11-plus hours of driving each way when I hate driving, yes, I still want caffeine, thank you very much.
And you know, when I got home from this road trip, I expected to be up in weight. That's normal after a prolonged drive where you have more sugar, salt, carbohydrates in the system. I expected five, maybe six pounds, and I got home to find out that I'd gained 10. Not five, not six, not even eight, 10
This led to a ton of frustration, confusion, and also some deep discouragement. I had a couple very off weeks after this happened. I also realized something during those off weeks. This realization came from listening to an audiobook called You Are Not Behind by Megan Asbury.
It was one Spotify recommended. Usually they do a pretty good job with that, and I had 11 hours of driving ahead of me. Now, this one was more religious than a lot of the books I consume. And if you're like me and more spiritual than religious, this book still has a beautiful message if you're able to read it with your own personal version of spirituality in mind.
One thing I loved about the book was that she didn't write in a holier-than-thou or self-righteous way. She was deeply honest. One of the things she admitted in the book was that sometimes she wanted the relationship or the job promotion more than she wanted Jesus. That stuck with me after getting home and feeling emotionally train wrecked by a 10-pound weight gain.
So emotionally train wrecked that I had moments where I wanted to give up on this book launch altogether. It was that bad. To be fair, there was also some absolute chaos with the book cover designing journey, which did not help matters. But I had to get honest with myself about the fact that sometimes I prioritize the external stuff, the body transformation, the book funnel success, the beautiful book cover I'd been dreaming about, more than I prioritize peace,
That was a hard thing to face. It's also not easy admitting this on the podcast, and I'm still sharing it because this pattern is not unique to me. It's something many people wrestle with, and I think it's especially common in high-performing women with a lot of ambition and big dreams.
And the ambition and the big dreams are not the problem. The problem is when those big dreams turn into altars instead of preferences or desires. The problem becomes when the desire stops being a desire and becomes a courtroom. So how do you know when a desire or a preference mutates into an altar? There's a few key ways, and they were revealed to me in my own lived experience.
First, an altar, by its very nature, demands a sacrifice. This is often the sacrifice of being content with where you are. It's often the sacrifice of being able to take setbacks in stride. When you have a preference, a weight fluctuation after a road trip may feel less than ideal. When you have an altar, that fluctuation can feel catastrophic, like the thing that mattered most was taken away in the span of a few short days.
You might also end up sacrificing presence. When you want your circumstances to be different with too much intensity, you sacrifice the joy of being where you are and start worshiping a future place that you're not yet.
And when something becomes an altar, there's often a lot of bargaining and conditions in place. You might make an internal promise to be grateful, trusting, and calm when the evidence shows up on your ego's timing. And maybe the biggest red flag that you've turned something into an altar is losing momentum and consistency when it feels like the thing you're worshiping gets farther away or even feels impossible in a hard moment.
So instead of continuing with the rituals and daily habits because they're attached to the identity you're building , there can be this feeling of, "What's the point? It's not getting me closer to the goal, so why bother?"
This is why worshiping the body transformation itself instead of making it a preference is disastrous for food freedom and consistency. If your consistency is conditional based on how much progress your consistency seems to be creating, that consistency is going to disappear when progress slows. And when progress slows and it feels like you might not get the thing you turned into an altar, that's when the despair, the frustration, the hopelessness, and the fear kicks in.
Pressure is gonna build in the system. Your body is going to seek relief, and this is where many of the F it moments with food come from. But then this often creates more negative emotions because now the gap between where you are and where you want to be has likely widened. So more negative emotions flood in, and then your body wants more relief.
The solution here isn't simply to get back on track with your habits. The solution, the deeper work, is to heal the tendency to worship a size, a number, or a destination,
and that often requires a sequenced elemental process. This is something I come back to in my own life because it's a framework that applies to so many things. This involves moving from earth to water to fire to air, and finally ether. Many high-performing women who struggle with this tendency to worship an outcome often have under-activated earth and water, and overactive fire.
You always want to start in earth, especially for body transformation and health pursuits. The very first part of any health transformation needs to be body cooperation instead of control. And then you also want presence, which is something that often leaks away when you start turning a preference into an altar
These two things are key if you want to keep a desire from turning into an altar. When you move back into this place of body cooperation and presence, it becomes about so much more than the number.
For me, I realize that when my blood sugar is all over the place, I'm more emotional, less creative, and less focused. Not only that, but when I'm fatigued from poor sleep or overindulging, it becomes harder to show up fully to my workouts. And my workouts are not about the calories burned. As someone with a ton of high voltage energy in my system, challenging workouts are part of what helps me stay balanced.
I even had a naturopath once tell me that I was a human pressure cooker and needed to run or dance regularly. Good news is that I love both. So that's earth. Then you move into water. And this has a few key pieces. The first is once you've noticed, oh, my fire got too hot. I turned this health goal into an altar again.
You do not beat yourself up or make yourself wrong. You give the parts of you that turned this desire into an altar compassion and understanding. I had to realize after this road trip that, of course, this might be something I come back to and struggle with from time to time. After spending so many years in the personal training industry, a place where there's this silent, unspoken rule that a trainer's body is their business card, of course, this would come up again as I get ready to release the most important book I've ever written, a book about food freedom. Now, for the record, this unspoken rule about the body as business card was not something my specific training studio I worked at subscribed to or endorsed.
I'm referring to the larger, more universal assumptions people make about a person's body when they're in a health-related field. So this is universal, not personal. So it makes sense that more pressure would come back in this season because while the body doesn't tell the entire story, it does tell part of the story. There is this part of me that fears not looking the part of someone who's qualified to teach food freedom.
Because there's a fear that someone out there who could truly benefit from what I'm sharing turns away because they judged the book by its cover. So of course, I might get a little too fixated on the cover, both metaphorically and also hilariously with my own book cover for this book the other part of this that feels even trickier is not only having challenges around food resurface on occasion, but then also having these old challenges around body image resurface. But I've also realized that expecting to never have these challenges come up is a form of perfectionism in disguise, and I think this is something many leaders struggle with.
Speaking of books I've loved lately, I'm in the middle of Into the Body by Andy Love, and I don't remember the last time I've highlighted so many parts of one book.
She shared that she sometimes thinks that she should be more embodied, regulated, and feel more powerful since she teaches on these things. And she commented on the violence of turning your humanity into evidence against your calling, which, yeah, I felt that one on a visceral level. She also shared these lines that I highlighted: "This is the part about expertise no one talks about enough.
Your mastery does not exempt you from being human. In fact, if it is real mastery, it brings you closer to your humanity. It makes you more honest about it. It makes you more responsible for it. It keeps pulling you back to the floor, the breath, the repair, the truth, the body you are actually living inside."
Personally, I will probably come back to those lines many times. And if you're also in a leadership field where sometimes you feel like your hard moments disqualify you, they do not. Instead, they're deeper invitations to learn and grow through the hard moments so you can help those you're leading do the same.
Water brings you closer to your humanity. It's where you stop demanding that you never have hard moments and start getting deeply skilled at repairing when you do. Water is also about acknowledging the truth, the real emotions, the frustrations, the doubt, the moments where you find yourself slipping back into unwanted approaches.
When you notice your hearth fire has turned into wildfire. Water helps you come back to yourself to repair, to forgive, to release, so you can return the goal to being a preference instead of an altar. Then you bring back the fire, the desire, the ambition, the hunger. But now it's from this place where you're rooted in presence, body cooperation, and a willingness to be a messy human instead of a volcano goddess of unrealistically linear progress.
This is fire with a hearth, not the wildfire that forgets earth and water come first. Once you've got fire back in its rightful place, you move on to air, your perspective. I was previously telling a story that my body needed to look a certain precise way by book launch time, and that story was creating pressure, scale worship, and internal chaos.
I had to begin telling a new story, the one I recently read about in Into the Body. An unexpected weight fluctuation and a messy two weeks afterwards do not disqualify me from delivering this book. They make me even more qualified when I choose to lead myself through the mess in real time and learn from it There was once upon a time when I wouldn't have even shared this on the podcast.
It would've seemed too shallow, too messy, too human. I would've either never talked about it, or I would've come back months later after making all the progress I desired and been like, "Yay, here's the big lesson I learned from that hard moment months ago." And sure, that can be helpful, but it's not mastery.
Mastery is letting you in on what's truly present when it's here, and showing you how I lead myself through it in real time without waiting for the polish of wisdom that you gain in hindsight. And finally, ether. This is about trust. Trust in timing, trust in a higher timeline, trust that things will ultimately work out as they're meant to for the highest good of everyone involved.
Maybe I had this happen to reveal where my own inner work needed to be directed. Maybe I had this happen to remind me that I can prioritize a metric or I can prioritize inner peace, and the latter matters 100 times more. Or maybe I learned this lesson so I could share it on this episode and help the person who needed this message.
Maybe that person is you. If it is, I'm so happy you heard this when you did. Your embodied activation for this episode is to audit a desire or a goal that maybe has some charge around it. Could be a health goal, business goal, anything that creates some distress when the results don't come fast enough.
And then ask yourself, "Is this still a preference and a desire? Or has it become an altar?" And if you've ended up with an altar masquerading as a preference, you can also take yourself through this five-element process I just shared. This is also the process I walk you through so deeply inside my upcoming book, Food Freedom Fantasy.
And I go deep, so almost 300 pages explaining the method, the sequence, and the process. And this is not just ideas. There are rewrite rituals, templates, embodied exercises, things that will actually turn this into real-life change. You can be the first to hear about its release by heading over to embodiedwritingwarrior.com/gift.
Signing up there gets you a powerful mini course and onto the Fire Starter Diaries newsletter. All right. Have an amazing rest of your week. Until next time, take care.
