The Root Beer Float

When my son was a teenager, he mentioned — casually, in passing — that he'd like a root beer float.

I couldn't get to the store fast enough.

I didn't get there that day, as it turned out. Life intervened and I ended up waiting until my next grocery trip. But the eagerness was instant. He wants this. Let's make it happen. No negotiation, no internal debate about whether he'd earned it or whether it was a good idea or whether he should want something different instead.

He mentioned it. I wanted to meet it.

I've been thinking about that lately.

What would it look like to treat your own body that way?

Not with the checklist. Not with the internal negotiation — should I? do I deserve this? is this the right choice? what will happen if I do?

Just noticing what your body is asking for — rest, movement, a particular food, a stretch, a glass of water, ten minutes of quiet — and meeting it the way you'd meet your kid's small want.

Immediately. Warmly. Without negotiation.

Most of us have learned to treat our body's requests as proposals that need approval.

The hunger has to be justified. The tiredness has to be earned. The craving has to pass a series of tests before we'll consider honoring it.

We became very good at overriding the signal. At waiting to see if it goes away. At deciding that what the body is asking for isn't quite right, isn't quite deserved, isn't quite appropriate right now.

And the body keeps asking. Quieter and quieter, sometimes. Until it stops asking in ways we can easily hear.

Your body is not making unreasonable requests.

It wants what it wants the way a teenager wants a root beer float — not because it's trying to derail you, not because it's your enemy, not because it can't be trusted. Just because something sounds good and the body noticed.

That noticing is information. It's the body doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

What would it feel like to respond to it warmly? To say — without the negotiation, without the internal tribunal — you want this, let's see what we can do.

Not every request, every time, in exactly the way it arrives. Life is more complicated than that.

But with the same basic orientation you'd bring to someone you love making a small, simple ask.

This is not a small shift. For a lot of us it's a radical one.

We've spent so long treating our bodies as problems to manage that responding to them with warmth and curiosity feels almost foreign. Maybe even dangerous.

If that resonates — if the idea of meeting your body's requests without negotiation feels like a stretch — that's worth sitting with. There's often a lot of history underneath that hesitation. And you don't have to untangle it alone.

There's a place to begin, if you're curious. A quiet corner of this work devoted entirely to finding your way back to your own body — outside the noise, outside the rules, outside the trance that told you your body couldn't be trusted in the first place.

If that sounds like something you're ready to explore, I'd love to have you there.

The Outside the Diet Trance email series is a gentle place to start. You can find it at https://www.drjamieenglish.com/living-outside-the-diet-trance.