008: Body Image, self image, and maintaining healthy habits - Lesson 2

In this episode we'll talk about how small, consistent actions taken over long periods of time will change your life, letting go of perfection and taking messy action, letting go of morality around food and exercise, eating when you're hungry, and tools for learning how to accept and respect your current body.

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  Hi, my name is Katy Blommer and my passion is helping women learn how to put themselves first, I learned all the tools for success on my own 12 year journey that has led me to finally figuring out how to live my best life. My journey included overcoming body image issues, and yo yo dieting, climbing the corporate ladder to a multiple six figure career, navigating mom guilt through a 60 hour workweek turning around marriage issues, and much more. Now, I'm truly living my best life. And I've pretty much become obsessed with teaching others my tried and true methods for creating balance, maintaining healthy habits, improving your relationship, career development, and how to stop tying your value and worth, to the way you look and how you serve others. I'm so passionate about helping others learn this, that I created the working mom happiness method to help you get there too. So if you're ready to learn how to live your best life, pull up a chair or put on your walking shoes and get ready to dive in. This is the working mom happiness method podcast.

  Hi, welcome to the working mom happiness method podcast. This is episode seven. And just a reminder to get you caught up if you've been following along. We're now in module two of the working mom happiness method. And Module two is focused on goals. However, in the first three modules, we have one section dedicated to basically body image self image and maintaining healthy habits. So that's what we're gonna cover today is the second lesson of body image self image and maintaining healthy habits. And a lot of the stuff we're going to cover today will be touched on later on in more detailed sections. In module four, which is all about tools for success, we'll go deeper on some of this stuff. But I also wanted to put some of it right up front as you're diving in and going through the program because these are very, very important components of living your best life essentially. So I'm excited to dive into them. Now, what you're doing today, there's not really any homework on this, like there have been on the last few videos where you're filling in that best life master plan document. At this point, you should have it all completed. If you're following along with the program via the podcasts and you're doing it sort of very formally with the best life master plan document, then you would have already have filled in that document up through your affirmations and your visualization and you have like your cool little page that's like a vision board. And then you will be the next thing you will add into that are your boundaries, which is going to be modules three, which will start fairly soon. So for this, it's more just enjoying listening, you don't need to take any notes. Well, it's always nice to take notes to help you retain information. But if you want to go for a walk while you listen, or if you're driving in the car, this would be perfectly fine to just listen into. So great. Let's jump in. So what I'm going to cover in today's episode, we're going to talk about small consistent actions over time and how those will legit change your life. We're gonna talk about letting go of perfection and taking messy action as it relates to healthy habits you're going to hear taking messy action as a theme throughout because I love that we've talked about it before in previous episodes, we're going to talk about the idea of introducing the idea of letting go of morality around food and exercise. And we're going to there's a there's actually a whole section later on in the method about Intuitive Eating where we'll go much deeper there. But we're going to introduce it today, we're going to talk also about eating when you're hungry, which will also go into more detail in Intuitive Eating later on in the method and getting more comfortable with your body. So let's start out with small consistent actions over time. And why this is just such an important concept. And if you read, there are a lot of great books on this like atomic habits that goes along with this principle, the book that I love the atomic habits, the book that I love that started me out on this quite a few years ago is called The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, I believe but if you just Google the slight edge, you'll find it. And so that's where this concept was first introduced to me and I just absolutely love it. And in the book, the way that he talks about it is if you think about kind of a timeline over and if you're watching on the YouTube, you can see I'm kind of like speaking with my hands but if you're listening, just just visualize a timeline over measured over the course of years, like maybe like five years. And in the book where he talks about his. So there he actually goes over like a specific case study of two men who are friends and live in the same neighborhood and they're both sort of like in a rut, right, they're in kind of the adult routine of just doing adult life every day and don't have any like huge major awful issues, but also aren't really like living their best lives, they're just kind of in ruts. And you know, one man just starts to make these little teeny habits on a daily basis changes like little things. I mean, I think he starts by just putting on his shoes, his his walking shoes, he doesn't even look leave the house. And then he starts to kind of gradually increase to going on a five minute walk. And I think he does something with his marriage, like saying one nice thing to his wife a day are theirs, they're just like these little tiny things. And the other neighbor who is kind of like making fun of the sky, like, Oh, these are just silly, you think these things are gonna make a difference. And then, you know, it follows them both over time. And in the beginning, the line stays flat for both of them. So the guy who's made the little small, consistent changes that he's doing on a very consistent, you know, daily basis, he doesn't see a lot of change, either kind of just stay steady. And the guy who's not doing anything, just kind of staying in his rut, he also stay steady, for quite a long time. So if you're envisioning, like the line of five years, it might even stay flat for one, one year, maybe more, right? Even the guy who's doing the little changes. But then what starts to happen on the curve, if you're following the timeline, is the man who has made the little tiny changes that he's doing consistently. His life all of a sudden takes a steep curve up on the trajectory. And I'm going from memory. But if I remember, right, in the book, it's like, you know, his marriage is thriving, and happier than ever, his health has improved significantly, he has no health issues, because the walking turned into longer walks and other forms of exercise and other healthy habits. Because we know when we sort of get consistent on one healthy habit, others start to follow, right. And so he's kind of like over here living his best life with this curve that goes up. And then the other man, after a couple of years of just doing nothing, and not doing those tiny little consistent changes over time, his trajectory takes a steep curve down, when you go out over over the years really drops off, and his marriage falls apart. And he is significantly unhealthy, like having heart problems and things like that. So I really, really love that analogy, because we just don't believe so the little things that it takes to improve our healthy habits. And this can be with anything in life. This doesn't even have to be specifically healthy habits. But that's what we're kind of talking about in this particular episode. The little tiny things that we do on a consistent basis are genuinely what will change our life. What you do each day is what you will become eventually over time. And what's so tricky is that society has taught us and diet culture has taught us that these little tiny things that we can do to change our health on a daily basis aren't enough that we have to eat 1200 calories a day and go to the gym for an hour sweat session, or run three to four miles or right. We're it's ingrained in us to think that we have to do these extreme things in order to be healthy, and it just could not be further from the truth. And further from reality, what we actually need to do is little things that we can sustain for the rest of our lives. Because what happens when you start out with the big extremes, they're not sustainable, you can't do them consistently over time, right? It's why we see with shows like The Biggest Loser, these folks go on the ranch, and they're not living their real life, right? Like they're exercising six hours a day, they have chefs preparing their meals. And I don't know the exact statistic, I'll probably mess it up. But it's like, I mean, I think it's like 99.9% of contestants who've ever gone in the Biggest Loser have gained like almost all or all or more than all of their weight back after they got back into the real world. Right. So. And you know, I don't I don't like focusing on weight loss, you know that if you've listened to my previous episodes, but it's just a really great way to demonstrate what I'm talking about here. When we're changing healthy habits. We have to be implementing things that we can continue to do in our busy lives forever. And guess what's cool about it is the things that we can do the little things, they're enough to stay healthy, they're enough to stay healthy, right? And friendly reminder, our health has nothing to do with the way we look or with our body size, right? We can improve health without losing weight. And it's possible to decrease health or get into worse health while trying to lose weight because some of the diet culture habits that we've been, you know, ingrained into us are actually harmful to health. And lots of studies have have proven that so I actually mentioned this a bunch of times throughout the methods. So you're going to hear this over and over over and over again. But small consistent actions done over long periods of time will change your life. But it's going to take longer than you want to see the results, it's going to take a long, long time for you to continue those before your curve, your trajectory starts taking that spike. So we got to believe, and hang in there and do things that are sustainable for the rest of your life. Let me qualify that.

  If you're doing yoga, yoga is a great exercise that can be done for the rest of your life. Now, what I don't mean is if you're doing Power Yoga, now you have to be able to do power yoga when you're 90. That's not what I mean. What I mean is, can you fit in 30 minutes of yoga, you know, a few times a week for the rest of your life? The answer to that is yes, absolutely. Right. I mean, provided that your body is able to do that. I understand that doesn't apply to everybody. But most of us could fit that in that could be like a stainable a sustainable thing. But if you hate yoga, then that's not sustainable for you. If you despise yoga, that's fine. That's totally fine. Then don't make that your healthy habit, right? Like for me, I really, really don't like running. And I used to do it. I mean, I've done triathlons, half marathons, I've done a full marathon, I've done so much running, because I would always sign up for races to lose weight. And ironically, I never did, because when you run, you're hungry, right? So it's actually plus your body gets efficient at running when you're training for a longer run. So it's just it's hilarious. And it's diet culture. But I didn't even realize until I got a therapist and one of my journey and learn how to appreciate and respect my body and shift over to True Health instead of weight loss that I didn't that I despised running, right, I knew I didn't like it. And I didn't enjoy it. But I it was just like this amazing weight lifted off my shoulders when I was like, I don't have to run to be healthy, I can walk, I can go on these amazing walks and listen to podcasts, which I really love. But just find something you love to do that is physically sustainable for the long term that works into your schedule, all those things, and you just start with little tiny, itty bitty baby steps like doing it for five minutes, right. And then once it becomes habit gradually increasing, so game changer. Okay, let's move into the next topic, which is letting go of perfection and taking messy action. This, again will apply to anything in life. But let's talk about it as it relates to healthy habits for this episode, specifically, so you have to stop waiting for everything or something to be perfect before you start. Okay. So whatever healthy habit it is that you want to do, I know a common one is waiting until you've lost weight to go to the gym. Because you don't like the way you look. And you don't want people at the gym to see how you look. Right? That's a that's a quite a common one. Um, even something as simple as like buying yourself nice workout gear, right? Like a lot of us will say I'm not going to buy it until I've lost X amount of pounds, right? So an example of taking messy action with those two things that I just brought up as quick examples would be just do it now. Don't wait, right. Um, and and I know that he's a lot easier said than done when it comes to being brave enough to go to the gym when you don't like the way that your body looks. So I do want to hold space for that, right? I'm not just saying like, suck it up and just go there are lots of tools. And I'm going to talk about some of them later on in this episode as well, that you can baby step into doing that. But we we just it's the mindset, we have to stop the mindset of waiting until x in order to do Y. And, you know, a really important component of that is like you, you actually never know how much time you have guaranteed in this life. Right. So this is a little bit taken out of the context of healthy habits, that when we think about anything in life, we're waiting to x in order, waiting until x in order to do Y. We don't know how long will get and so we might be missing out on however many things you can think of by waiting on doing something. Now, the way that that could relate specifically to healthy habits is oh, I'm working on a really busy stressful project at work. So I'm gonna wait until that's done before I start body movement again before I start a regular exercise routine again, okay. And by the way, I can't remember if I've mentioned this in a previous episode, but I like calling exercise body movement because a lot of us have a connotation in our mind with exercise and having to do really hard sweat sessions, which for helps. You don't you don't have to go that hard, right. But that's why I like calling it body movement, just moving our bodies consistently. So basically, if you're putting off starting that for something else. So in this example as a project at work, there's always going to be something they're always in adult life, there's always going to be something that feels stressful or busy or traumatic or like I can't get through it always for the rest of your life. I know that like sounds a little doomsday ish, but let's just get real and let's just set expectations that's always going to be the case. So in your adult life, there's always is going to be something that you can use as a reason or an excuse not to start focusing on taking care of yourself, okay? There's always going to be something. So taking messy action is saying right smack in the middle of that super hard, stressful project at work. You're just saying, Hey, I am going to start body movement now, right now, today, I'm going to put on my shoes, I'm going to walk out the front door, and I'm going to put a timer and for 10 minutes, I'm going to walk I'm gonna walk five minutes and walk back. And that is such a beautiful start. And so many of us don't do it, because we think that that it's not any better than nothing to do that short of a 10 minute walk, we think, Oh, well, that's just there's no point in that. So why would I even do it? Right? There's massive point in that. Not the least, I mean, the least of which your body does get benefit, the blood flows in your body. And that's a health benefit just from walking for 10 minutes. But also, the positive and feel good chemicals. And the upward spiral that creates within your brain. And your mind is literally life changing when you take those little tiny, small steps, and you start to do them consistently, as we just discussed, so we have to stop waiting for X before we do y and we have to do the thing now. And that's taking care. And that's taking messy action. Okay? Now, perfectionism and procrastination go hand in hand, right? So when we put something off a lot of times, the reason is because we're afraid we can't do it perfectly. We're afraid we will fail. Right? So embracing failure and trusting that the way human beings grow in life is through failure. Right? We've all heard the analogy of the baby who's learning to walk right? How do they learn to walk they try it 1000s of times and fall down a bunch of times. And you know, the analogy includes like, well, what if when you were a baby, you stop trying to walk, because you know, because you look silly. learning it, right? I actually I really love I know, we've all heard that. But I love that.

  It's still true, it's still true. As an adult, we have to get comfortable with failure with looking silly, sometimes making mistakes messing up, because that is how we learn. And that is how we grow. So if you've been putting off anything that relates to your healthy habits, because it's not perfect, a lot of times nutrition comes into play here. Like if you don't do what you consider to be the most perfect nutrition that diet culture has brainwashed you about, right? And me too, all of us, then it's very all or nothing mindset, right? It's like, oh, no, I ate that thing. That was That wasn't like perfect nutrition. So therefore, I'm just going to ignore nutrition and eating foods that make my body feel good for the rest of this day or the rest of this week. I'm going to start again on Monday, right? So we have to take messy action and messy action that includes working on your you know, your eating habits, your sleep, your sleeping, great. Your body movement, all of the the feel good non negotiables that we talked about back in episode number one. Okay, so that's huge. And being okay with failure. Now, again, I get these are hard things. So I'm not saying you have to just snap out of it and just, you know, be comfortable with all this. Now, I'm just saying what can you challenge yourself with today, that you can stop procrastinating and take messy action on as it relates to your healthy habit? Right? Just think of one thing because that's what this is all about this messy action thing. Just think of one thing and start with baby steps. Okay, one of my favorite quotes of all time, and I don't even know who first said it. I heard it from a business coach of mine. But ready is a decision, not a feeling. I'll say that again. Ready is a decision, not a feeling. There are very few important things in life that you're ever going to feel ready for. Okay? Especially the things that are going to be like your most important growth moments, you're not going to feel ready, they're going to feel scary. So when you get that scary adrenaline feeling going challenge yourself to take the leap because that's when you're going to grow, right? But it's a decision you have to make the decision. You're not going to feel ready, you make the decision, okay. And then readiness comes along with failing, learning growing from that. So I love that quote, ready is a decision not a feeling. You know, corporate culture has moved to this. Not even culture, not even always corporate, but like startups, entrepreneurship, to this, this model called design thinking that is all entirely based on failing fast and pivoting creating a minimum viable product. So these large companies now have huge technology builds on their new project, where they're doing a methodology called Agile, and an agile methodology. You have these two week they're called sprints, two week sprints, where you start out with minimal viable products and prototypes or whatever it is you're trying to build. And in the beginning, they're ridiculous. They're hilarious, right? Like they don't work. They're broken. You can poke a million holes in them from all angles, but what they found Doing this in corporate world is, if you screw up a bunch of times right in the beginning, before you spent $20 million on what you're trying to build, you save a lot of money and time on the back end, because you've worked out a lot of your kinks on the front end through failure, right. And I love this. And I love that corporations are slowly moving towards encouraging failure in the workplace, because it's taking risks are how we grow and how we innovate. So I think that's awesome. I think the corporate world has a long way to go before people really feel super confident taking risks. And I know that varies company by company, but it applies here on this letting go of perfection and taking messy action. Okay, you're going to get and it's the same with the small consistent actions over time, if you just jump right in and take messy action and order those cute exercise clothes, regardless of what your body looks like now, right? Just throw on your shoes and go for a five minute walk. Those are the things that in the long run are gonna save you the health equivalent of the $20 million, right? Like, I mean, not literally $20 million. But you know what I mean, you get what I'm saying. So the comparison is, it's going to save you a lot in the long run by just starting these little messy things in Messy ways that aren't perfect, and trusting that your value and your worth isn't rooted in this perfection that you you know that the society has had us believe that it is okay, so awesome. I think that covers that topic. So let's move into the next one, which is there is no morality related to food. Okay, this is hard, because diet, culture and society our entire lives and our parents and everyone around us. Right, there are bad foods, and there are good foods, right? And I always like to use the common scenario that all of us have run into where, you know, you're like, let's make up a scenario where you know, you've you come into your office on a Monday, and over the weekend, somebody says, or even you might say, Oh, I was so bad. This weekend, I was so bad. I ate, you know, four donuts, five donuts yesterday, I was so bad, right? So we've all heard somebody speak like that before in our lives. Literally probably every single person hearing me say that has heard someone say something like that in their lives. And what we don't understand is how incredibly damaging it is to our brains to say that I was so bad. Saying that you are bad because of what you ate, is creating a wiring within your brain. That is just, it's so sending us on a downward spiral. The truth is what you eat has nothing to do with how good or bad you are as a person, right? We all know that. You know that when I say the obvious, whether you eat a doughnut or a salad has absolutely nothing to do with your morality as a person, you being a good person or a bad person. Murderers eat salads.

  I mean, it has absolutely, it's when you really think about it that way. It sounds ridiculous, right? But we say I was so bad. And that creates a subconscious wiring in our brain, it creates neural pathways that make our brain think that we are a bad person because we ate a doughnut, then what does that do creates a negative self image and a negative body image. And if we have a negative self image and a negative body image, we are much less likely to take care of ourselves and do consistent healthy habits. So how do we change this, we have to stop talking this way, we have to stop speaking this way, right? You've all heard him and we'll get into this too. Later in the program. thoughts become words, words become actions, action become habits, habits are life. So that thought starts with beating yourself up for eating the food. And then you say it out loud, I am so bad, I was so bad because I ate that. And this hardwired in your brain. And your brain actually believes you're a bad person when you eat a doughnut. And then you beat yourself up. And then you eat more to soothe the the guilt and the shame feeling that comes along with it because that is actually shame. There's guilt, which is feeling bad about doing something. And then there's shame, which is feeling bad about who you are. And when you say I was so bad. That's shame. And shame runs deep. So we have to stop this language. So the first key is to catch it when you do it. Okay, so don't beat yourself up. Just it just next time you hear something related to food that's like, oh, that food was so bad or that food was so good or junk food or naughty food. These are all words that create shameful neural pathways in our brains that we don't want. We don't want for health and for taking care of ourselves and putting ourselves first we want to we can change these. It's we have to work on it. But we can rewire these neural pathways to feel more positively about ourselves. But it starts with catching our words and changing our words. So think about that. And this week, pay close attention to that it's a good sign For this week, pay very close attention to how people are talking about food, how you're talking about food, how people around, you are talking about food, okay? And the same goes for the way our bodies look, when we think about and talk about our bodies, we want to catch those things and stop them and change them, we're gonna get a lot more into that when we go into intuitive eating as well. Okay, eating when we're hungry, I'm going to touch on this, this is so important, I'm going to touch on it and introduce it quickly here. Because when we get into Intuitive Eating later on, down the road in the method will go way deeper than this, but your body is smart. So our bodies know when to tell us that we need to go to the bathroom. And that is crucial to our survival. If we don't go to the bathroom, we will eventually die. Right? I think we all understand that. This is same thing with hunger, our body's really smart to tell us when we need to eat, to keep our metabolism going and our body functioning the way it needs to function. Right? Yet diet culture has brainwashed us and taught us that basically, the equivalent of if your body tells you you need to go to the bathroom, well that your body's not right, hold it and ignore that. That's basically what diet culture is taught us with hunger with our hunger cues. And so the the problem with that is it's messed up our hunger cues, most of us who have done diets off and on for our whole lives and yo yoed We don't even know what hunger feels like or what our own hunger cues are. And that's really normal. I didn't I I'm still working on this and, and learning this and I'm getting better at it, I've gotten a ton better. But learning your hunger cues is amazingly important. And I can tell you that for me. And for a lot of people when my stomach is growling, that's too late. Like that's not my hunger cue, my hunger cue starts way back down the line. And in order to keep our metabolism going and feel good throughout the day and keep our blood sugar at a steady level, we need to learn what the hunger the original hunger cue was before we got to either hunger mode or stomach growling mode or low energy mode because we should be eating well before that right? I learned for me distraction is one of my first hunger cues. So before my before I feel gradually stomach or consciously hungry, I start to get like distracted. If even like I'm working on something at work, I'll notice I'm picking up my phone more or something like that. And I'm like, Okay, I better start thinking about what I'm going to eat and have that ready. So really start to be more mindful of that.

  And the other thing is like diet rules like, it doesn't really, like we have this misconception in our minds that we should only eat at certain times or meals. And that's truly not how our bodies work. So let me give you an example of this. So I know for me, my family usually eats dinner around six o'clock. And at work around five, I always start getting hungry. Okay. And diet culture taught me well, no, you don't eat at five dinners at six. And not even diet culture. But even like our parents taught us that growing up, right? No, I'm not going to feed you before dinner, because then you won't eat your dinner, your spoil your dinner. So it's ingrained in us from so many different ways. But the reality is, what happens when you don't feed yourself at five, when you're actually hungry, you get super grumpy, you get really starving, you come home to a household of people who need things from you, and you're pissed because you're hungry, and you're in a bad mood. And then you start to make dinner. And while you're making dinner, you're eating things because you're so hungry. And then you end up having the equivalent of two meals, right? Because then you eat your dinner. Whereas if you just would have planned a snack, maybe a light snack at five when you're actually hungry and ignored diet culture and what our parents taught us and just been like, Hey, I'm hungry. Now I'm going to have a light snack because I know dinner's in an hour, right? Like maybe something high in protein. I like to do like a little protein bar at five, game changer, game changer in so many ways to be nicer to your family. When you get home, you're going to feel better, you know, you're going to be able to eat like a regular sized dinner and not two meals and feel stuffed and miserable afterwards, right? So we have to learn to trust our bodies and eat when we're actually hungry. Okay, and this is hard this is there's a lot of stuff that has to be rewired to get to this but it is so life changing. And it feels amazing when we get there. So the only other thing I want to touch on well, two other things here, fasting, I know that intermittent fasting is this huge trend. And here's the thing, there are some benefits if you have hormonal issues. Yes, there are some benefits I don't want to go into in detail, but there are some health benefits that that studies have shown come out of intermittent fasting. However, it is not a successful tool for weight loss. It's just not. It's just it's not been proven to be a successful tool for weight loss. And I don't want to focus on weight loss as I keep reiterating, but a lot of times our diet culture program to brain, you know can get really tricky with us and we can think oh I want to try intermittent fasting, but we're secretly doing to try to lose weight, it is not a good way to lose Wait, because your body just gets all messed up and, you know, goes into that like starvation storage mode, and it's just, it's not great for weight loss. So fasting is okay occasionally for, you know clearing out your digestive system for spiritual purposes, right? Maybe you just feel like you ate a lot of food over the weekend and your system just feels like it needs to break. You. There are lots of different reasons that fasting is okay. But fasting is not okay for weight loss purposes, it will never sustainably lose weight, you will always gain back the weight if you're losing weight from a fasting purpose. Same thing goes with super restrictive diets, like keto, for example, if you are cutting out entire food groups that is not sustainable for the rest of your life, and you will gain the weight back the way that you know that most people do keto is not sustainable. And so we have to be so mindful and so careful about when we're implementing healthy habits. We have to be willing to do the healthy habit for the rest of our lives. Okay, we have there, there's no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to health, we have to be able to do baby steps and sustain things for the rest of our lives. And being healthy takes a lot less work than what diet culture would have us believe it does take work. It does take work. I don't want to minimize that. But it's a lot less work than what diet culture would have us believe. Okay, so there's this hunger scale that I like to think of, and I like to use and I think I got it from intuitive eating. So if you think about hunger scale on one to 10, one being like ridiculously starving, famished, barely functioning and 10 being like, Thanksgiving sickening, full, miserable, because you ate so much stomach's gonna explode. There's this sweet spot right in the middle between four and six, right? So as you're trying to notice your hunger cues, I want you to start paying attention and thinking of a hunger scale from one to 10. And try to start kind of trying to assess like, Okay, well, where am I at? And how do I feel? And when I get to if I let myself get to an eight, how does that feel? And you know, fullness. And if I let myself get down to a to like, how do I act and what happened to get there and, and the goal is to keep yourself between sort of that full four and six feeling constantly that keeps blood sugar regulated, which is great for health, great for mood for energy, the way that we feel. And if you can keep yourself in that sweet spot, that's going to be really a game changer and things with lots of protein and fiber, right will get us in that sweet spot. And one thing too, I was going to mention this at the beginning of the podcast, and I forgot. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a nurse. I'm not a therapist, I write I am not a medical professional. Okay, so this is all just based on what has worked for me what I have learned on my journey and what has worked, as I've worked with other women. But please, please, when I talk about I'm not a nutritionist, right? Like I don't have any of those certifications. So I am not telling you specifically what you should eat on purpose because I am not qualified to do that. I'm just telling you tricks that have worked for me. So if you are about to change, a healthy habit that relates to your overall health, absolutely always, you know, consult with a doctor, a medical professional, a nutritionist, whatever makes sense, most sense for you. But it is important that I that I state that but that's just what has worked for me and worked for a lot of people who I've worked with basically so awesome. Okay, let's just jump into the last topic for this episode, which is getting more comfortable with your body. Okay. And this is huge, because I've talked a lot about this already. Remember that our body is the vehicle that carries us through this life. Okay, so if we have strong negative feelings towards our body, it is not possible to truly love ourselves. And if we don't truly love ourselves, it's really hard to take care of ourselves and put ourselves first right so that is like, it's so crucial. And it's so important to get more comfortable with your body and get yourself to a point where you feel neutral or positive about your body and it is so hard so don't beat yourself up. It's a journey. It takes time. It took me literally years, and that's okay. Remember small consistent actions over time as it relates to this stuff. So some tips and tricks to get more comfortable with your body. Start by diversifying your social media feed. So go out there and find social media feeds of women who who show bodies of all sizes, so I love the birds papaya on Instagram. I love body image by Bri that's B ri body image by Bri there are just lots of them out there. And

  if you just fill your feed with all different shapes and sizes of bodies, because the more you see all different shapes and sizes of bodies, the more comfortable that's gonna help you become with yours. And if you have bodies in your social media feed that trigger you please unfollow, right that that make you beat yourself up about the way that you look. Definitely unfollow those Because that's not going to help you towards getting more comfortable with your body. Stop judging other bodies. This is huge. We judge based on our own insecurities. And this is there's an interesting component to this. So there's there's a judging like larger bodies who maybe post pictures of themselves in small amounts of clothing, you might be judging that and being like, Oh, she should not be wearing that. Notice that notice that? Like, why do you care? Why is that offensive, it's probably based on diet, culture, and brainwashing of our society, most likely. But and here's the kicker, and this is the one we don't think about. judging other people's bodies in positive or nice ways, is also very detrimental to our journey to learn how to be neutral or positive about our own body, okay? Because when you see somebody who you think has what society would call an amazing body, just by commenting that, thinking that saying that either to yourself or to the other person, you're making a judgment about your own body, okay? And, and we've talked about this, in previous episodes, all bodies are different, even if we ate exactly the same way and exact and exercised exactly the same way and lived with that person and mirrored their actions, our bodies would still look different, they would still look very different, because all bodies are different, genetically. So stopping judging bodies at all. And this is hard, this is really, really difficult. I've gotten a lot better over the years at not judging larger bodies. In fact, I don't really do it at all anymore. I've gotten really good at that. But I still occasionally will judge a body that society would say is, is an amazing body, right? Like fitness models or whatever. And that's just not true that a fitness model body is no better than a larger body, like it's just bodies, they're just bodies has nothing to do with who that person is the impact they make in the world, their value in the world, right, they're literally just bodies. They're just bodies, like, even regardless of the health of the body. And and by the way, looking like a fitness model does not mean you're healthy. And being in a larger body does not mean you're unhealthy. So we have to start stop judging, judging not to because health truly doesn't have a look, diet culture has brainwashed us to believe that because they make billions and billions of dollars off of us believing that. So really, really important. Another thing, there are two other things you can do. Well, there are lots of things, but two things that I like to recommend to the ladies who I work with. And these can be very triggering and traumatizing. So So baby steps are good here. Don't force yourself into quickly we can modify, but I'm wearing your swimsuit around the house. So just putting on a swimsuit. I mean, if you want to push yourself, one that you feel particularly uncomfortable in the way that your body looks would be awesome. And you just wear it around the house and you just see yourself as you pass near you just sit on the couch with it, right you just watch TV in it, just put on your swimsuit and spend more time in your swimsuit. Okay, it's exposure therapy, you're exposing yourself to your body in your swimsuit, you see it more, the more we see our body, our current body, the more comfortable we're going to get with it. Okay, and then one that I love, and that was a game changer for me, is looking at your body naked in the mirror every day. And my therapist challenged me to do it for one minute every day. And one minute feels like an eternity. When you struggle with body image and you're looking at it naked in the mirror. It was very difficult. But the whole thing she had me say something positive about my body. That was years and years and years ago. This was like 12 years ago for me or 11 years ago when I first started this. What I've learned since then that's that is I think is a little bit more effective is don't force yourself to do 60 seconds. If it feels traumatic and horrible. Just start with maybe like 10 seconds. And if that is traumatizing you and putting you in a downward downward spiral for spiral for the day, just do it in close, just just be closed and look in the mirror for 1015 2030 seconds. And instead of saying I love my body, which may be so far off from how you actually feel, if that feels too crazy, and it's okay to say that even if it's a lie, that's okay. Even if you don't believe it, you can still find it. It's effective. It worked for me. But you can just say something positive about yourself. Look at looking at your body, you can say I'm a good mom, I'm a good sister. I'm

  a good friend. I'm good at my job. I'm a good cook, just something positive while you're looking at your body will help reprogram those neural pathways that we were talking about right? And again, small consistent actions done over long periods of time. So for me, I was doing this for like six months before it actually sort of teeny bit started to feel like okay, maybe I can get a better relationship with my body. So you're in this for the long haul, okay, you're really in it for the long haul but ease in on these ones because they can be really traumatic and we don't want to try entice you. So baby step in modify. Start with clothes on start with maybe even just a smile, even just looking at your body and smiling. This, literally force it put put the sides of your lips up, right? That can we know that can change all sorts of brain chemicals, right by just creating a smile on your face. So, play around with that. Okay, so I think we covered everything that I wanted to talk about a quick recap of the most important things, small consistent actions done over long periods of time, are the key to living your best life. The right time will never come. So start now, ready is a decision not a feeling, embrace and welcome failure. You are not good or bad air quotes based on your eating and exercise habits. Work on not using that language, eat when you're hungry. More exposure to your own body will help normalize it. So if there I know in the beginning I said there wasn't homework for this episode there is there, there is some homework, it's just you don't have to write anything in your document. The homework is start moving your body now. Take messy action, start moving your body now even if it's, you know, five seconds or sorry, five minutes walking in place, right five minutes, walk outside, start now take messy action. eat when you're hungry. So start thinking about that and start learning about your hunger cues. Okay, and then think about that one to 10 Hunger Scale and try the whole looking at your body more whether it's in your swimsuit in the mirror hanging out in your swimsuit, looking at your body in the mirror naked if you want to, like really go all out and go for it to just start looking at your body naked in the mirror. Okay, so I'm so excited. Let me know in the comments. As always, if you felt like this was helpful, please leave me a review. It helps more people see the podcast when you leave me a positive review. And that's my goal. My goal is to get this information out to as many women as I can help with it because I'm so passionate about it, it changed my life. So please let your friends know. Subscribe and Like and leave positive review. It would mean the world to me. I appreciate it so much. So thanks for listening and talk in the next episode.

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