Body Shame and Your Sex Life: It's Not Your Fault, and Only You Can Fix It

Body shame is pervasive, especially for women but increasingly for everyone, and it gets in the way of much more than how we feel in a swimsuit. It gets in the way of presence, pleasure, and our capacity for real connection. This is the first episode in a series I'm doing on body shame. If you've ever been so in your head about how you look that you couldn't stay present with a partner, or with yourself, this one is for you.I walk through where body shame actually comes from (spoiler: it's not truth, or you, that's the problem), the business model built on manufactured insecurity, the medical misinformation and racial history behind our cultural obsession with weight, and why shaming yourself has never once helped anyone change. I also share the exact steps I used to move from shame to neutral to genuinely loving my body.In this episode:Why body shame kills presence, pleasure, and desire, and why underconfidence itself isn't sexyWhere body shame really comes from: family, culture, diet culture, and a patriarchy that built this by design, not by accidentThe advertising strategy behind manufactured insecurity, including research on exactly when women feel worst about themselvesDebunking the medical myths: why BMI was never built to measure individual health, and why weight stigma itself, not weight, is the real risk factorThe racial history behind fat phobia and Eurocentric beauty standards, and how that bias still shows up in medicine todayWhy shaming yourself has never once helped you change, and what your inner rebel is actually trying to tell youMy own story of hiding my arms for years, and finally wearing tank tops without a second thought"Point positive," the whitewater kayaking principle I now use to retrain my brain out of shame spiralsThe exact steps for shifting from shame to neutral to genuinely believing you're lovable and attractive exactly as you areTopics: body image and sex, overthinking sex, get out of your head in bed, fatphobia, health at every size, mindset work for body imageResources mentioned: Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight, by Lindo Bacon, PhD  https://lindobacon.com/health-at-every-size-book/Send Laura Fan MailGet my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guideMore links: Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheelCopyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited.