I use a tool in my practice I call a “mind audit” with clients who come to me wanting to lose weight, heal a relationship, or simply feel like themselves again. I ask them one question before we go any further: how can you change something you haven’t yet accepted needs changing — or accepted as belonging to you in the first place?
The Trap of Fighting Your Own Body
I’ve watched people strive relentlessly for a body they had in their twenties, while quietly resenting the body they’ve actually been given now, in their fifties. I’ve also walked with people navigating disordered eating who needed the opposite kind of acceptance entirely — not less food, but the humbling acceptance that their body genuinely needs to be nourished. Acceptance, in both cases, isn’t the finish line. It’s the door everything else has to walk through.
What Maslow Left Out
Most of us learned Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs at some point — food, warmth, and shelter sitting at the very base of the pyramid. I don’t disagree that they matter deeply. But I think Maslow was looking at us through a purely physical lens, and I don’t believe that lens is wide enough. We are spiritual beings first. From infancy, long before a child can name their hunger, their spirit is already reaching for love and acceptance — for connection with God. If Maslow’s pyramid begins with bread, I believe God’s design begins with belonging.
Where to Start
If there’s one thing standing between you and the change you’re chasing, I’d ask you the same question I ask my clients: what haven’t you accepted yet? Not resigned to. Accepted. There’s a difference, and it changes everything downstream.
I open my book, ABCs of Wellness Through Biblical Wisdom, with this exact principle, because nothing else — not rest, not nutrition, not movement — sticks without Acceptance of who you are which includes your physical attributes such as your physique,and deeper acceptance that you are loved and created by God for a purpose.
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