New 4-Part Video Series to Help YOU have your Body-Food Transformation!
Learn how to….
Set yourself free. Sign up for my new training, and I’ll show you how!
“What was your mother’s relationship to her body and to food like?”
It’s a question I always ask new clients, especially since 99% of my clients are women and the mother-daughter connection to body image and relationship to food is profoundly strong and heavily correlated. In just that one question, a whole inner world and history unfolds. In that one question lies a tale of body hate, diet culture, and ideas of femininity based in restriction, dampening of desires, and the Big Lie.
What is the Big Lie?
It’s the one that has been sold and told to women and girls from generation to generation.
It’s a mathematical equation of sorts that leads to a lifetime of cutting off parts of ourselves to meet someone else’s criteria of who they think we should be. It’s one that leads to wearing a mask of false satisfaction and joy. It’s an agreement to dampen one’s appetite for just about everything in the hopes of being chosen and kept safe. And it keeps an almost 300 billion dollar industry humming.
It goes something like this:
Pretty + Thin + Youthful = Being Loved, Chosen, and Secure
In other words, if you want a good life (and want to have/keep a partner), you have to follow this formula. (We only have to look at celebrities and models to know that is 100% not true (constant breakups, multiple divorces, and many tragic stories), but we are still sold this…)
Our great grandmothers were taught this equation, who then taught it to our grandmothers, who taught it to our mothers who then taught it to us.
Sometimes explicitly, sometimes covertly.
Sometimes it was taught by them telling us our bodies and our hunger were wrong and needed to be fixed. Other times it was taught by them telling us or showing us through their actions, words, glances (as they passed a mirror or passed another woman on the street), or the various diet books they owned that their own bodies and hunger were wrong and needed to be fixed.
No matter how it was translated, we got the message. Any chance of it leaving our psyche was made impossible by the culture at large that made sure it seeped into our very being, leaving no room for us to escape.
[click to continue…]
Let’s talk about the term Body Love.
This is a term that gets thrown around so much in the body positivity space…I know I’ve used it too, and I do believe in being a fierce lover and protector of your body home.
But what if you aren’t loving your body right now?
What if you are feeling at odds with your body, going through a health challenge, or going through body changes that you are less than happy about?
One of my dear friends has really been struggling in her second year of menopause. She’s eating nourishing foods, she’s seeing her doctor, moving her body, she’s started hormone therapy…and yet, she’s feeling less than happy about the extra 10 pounds that won’t seem to budge and not making headway on a lot of her symptoms.
I get it. None of that feels good nor is it an experience she, me, or you want to be having.
Understandably so, this is leading her to not feel so good in her skin. And when we don’t feel good in our skin, we can start to feel guilty about NOT feeling the body love for ourselves.
And I want to take away the guilt that comes on the other side of body positivity, the guilt you feel for not feeling good in or about your body at all times. The last thing we want is more guilt; we get enough of that from the culture telling us to have perfect eating, movement, and bodies…we certainly don’t need to feel guilty for not loving every inch of our bodies at every moment of every day too!
So what I want to offer you today is instead of having to quickly progress to or always feel pressured to stay in “body love,” move into adopting body respect and body kindness.
The reality is, feeling all loving and accepting of anyone, including your body, at all times is an impossible standard.
Take our relationships to our romantic partners for example.
Look, I’m going to keep it 100 with you. I love my boyfriend and he’s gorgeous and funny and kind…but sometimes, he’s not my favorite person. Sometimes he irritates me, angers me, frustrates me, and yes, hurts my feelings. Sometimes I need space from him. Sometimes I don’t understand him or his reactions. Sometimes I’m not liking him all that much.
And I know he feels the same about me. We are humans, and we are doing our best, but aren’t perfect and we get it wrong sometimes. Sometimes we are on very different pages and need to find common ground again.
Sometimes we have to work at finding our flow again and reboot the navigation system to get back on track. Conflict and getting derailed happens.
Yet years ago and in some of my past relationships, conflict scared me. I would immediately assume that any sign of an issue, feeling that things were off, or if I wasn’t feeling nothing but love for my partner meant that I had failed or the relationship was doomed. All or nothing perfectionist thinking would lead me to a very anxious and fatalistic place.
But, the thing is, when it comes to navigating this relationship, I have a lot of tools I didn’t have years ago. Things that keep it healthy. Things that help me process my feelings. Things that help us repair, rebuild, and get stronger because of conflict, not in spite of it. Things that, as we change and grow, will help us find a new homeostasis.
Does that make sense?
[click to continue…]
I owe you an apology, maybe a few.
I didn’t get it right and years ago, I may have caused you more harm than good…and for that, I’m truly sorry.
And what I’m about to say might ruffle a few feathers, especially because I work in the wellness industry, but these things need to be said and called out, including calling myself out for the mistaken, harmful thinking of my earlier days in wellness.
Let me explain…
You see, at the beginning of my coaching career, I felt empowered with all my nutritional knowledge, that I had broken free from counting calories, points, and carbs, that I had traded in my running shoes for my yoga mat, and finally found a happy, healthy weight that I felt good at. I felt like I had figured out the magic sauce that could help so many others leave dieting behind and walk a whole new, whole foods path. But what I didn’t see at the time was that I had unknowingly swallowed the newest dieting culture rhetoric where the labels of “health and wellness” were really, in more ways than not, just a disordered relationship with food/body in a hipper, newer disguise.
Even though it wasn’t Weight Watchers or Atkins, I was still on the hunt for a way of eating that would keep me safe by giving me structure, rules, and protocols. Had the quality of my food up-leveled? Sure it had; I still can look back and see that I was eating way more nutrient dense food as well as no longer starving my body with a ridiculously low calorie count (cause y’all know that’s what most diets are really cleverly disguised as, right? When you count anything- points, calories, carbs, hours by which you are allowed to eat- you essentially cut calories, thereby temporarily losing weight, followed by your sanity when your hunger rules out, and you gain all the weight back plus some). So by that measure, yes, I was moving in the right direction.
But even though it’s a great thing to eat nutrient-dense food, I was still at a very visceral level afraid to trust my body, my pleasures, my own instincts.
[click to continue…]
It was inevitable.
We had to break up….again.
I knew it wasn’t healthy for us to get reacquainted, let alone fully involved, like on a daily basis.
But somehow, somewhere, I got lured into his charms and false promises.
He promised me I would feel so good in his company…and I did.
On the days he would tell me what I wanted to hear, my heart would sing. I felt foolish to be caught up in the rush of it all…because who knew what tomorrow would bring.
But nevertheless, there I was…foolishly returning to him day after day, seeking his approval and affirmation, living for the fleeting lift he would give me.
Until, of course, he didn’t.
He stopped telling me what I wanted to hear, stopped showing me what I wanted to see.
And my whole sense of identity and self-worth would inevitably crumble.
So I would slink away, full of shame and regret, asking myself what I did wrong. Didn’t I do all the right things that would appease him?
Apparently not, because what he showed me revealed all I needed to know…
I had…not lost a pound. In fact, I had gained not one, but two.
Friends, I’m not talking about a shitty ex-boyfriend.
I’m talking about the scale.
But damn if the two aren’t basically playing the same game that you and I will eventually lose if we choose to play it.
[click to continue…]
I wish this wasn’t the truth…
But the reality is that there are many nutritionists, health coaches, and wellness professionals who struggle with a disordered/unhealthy relationship to food, exercise, and to their bodies, carefully hiding it under the guise of wellness, detoxing, and restrictive food plans and joyless workouts.
Many are not giving up or limiting certain foods because of their body’s biofeedback (i.e “My body hurts when I eat X, so I choose to avoid it.”). Instead, they are often giving them up because they still have an extremely fearful, restrictive, and painful relationship with food. The more restrictive they get with food, the more safety they feel…but it also feels lonely, pleasureless, and can lead to a binge-purge cycle with food.
And this mentality more often than not transposes itself onto how they approach working out, with exercise being a punishment for the body they have or the food they ate, instead of it being a way to celebrate, enjoy, and move the body because of self-love and a desire for greater health and self-care.
This painful relationship with body and food does not just effect the practitioner; inevitably, it effects their clients and how their clients see and relate to their own bodies and to food.
[click to continue…]