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It's free! On this episode of The Daily Dollar, we're chatting about poor body image or body dissatisfaction. Actually, makes you eat worse. It's dollop time.
Hey, hey, my name's Kate. I'm a registered nutritionist, and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, I'm tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start. And so, I'm changing the conversation. You deserve to feel confident in your food choices and empower to maximize your health.
Every weekday will dollop an episode into your feed, covering everything from busting nutrition myths, practical food ideas, my thoughts on trending topics, and habits for a healthy life. My promise to you, it will always be sustainable, realistic, restriction-free, and strictly no-woo. Only good science translated into easy, everyday advice. Let's do this.
Welcome back to The Daily Dollar Podcast, everyone. Happy Wednesday, if you are listening to this episode on the day that it is coming out. I am joined again by the wonderful Stephanie Leckis. Hey, going, Steph?
Pretty good. Thanks, Kate. How are you? Very well.
Thank you. We are deep in a discussion on body image, which is one of the things that we both like talking about, and I know it's a particular interest area and favorite topic for you to chat about with clients and in general. And so, we're going into more what to do type advice over the next two episodes. So, if you want to catch the first two, go back and listen to them and then do these two episodes there, a nice little compliment to each other.
So, if it's been discovered that you're kind of struggling with poor body image, and you're also really noticing that it's quite a sticking point for you making positive changes, there are a bunch of things that you can do to get help. But what are some things, Steph, that people can start to do on their own in lieu of getting help, because certainly getting help, and we might talk about this at the end is very helpful as well, but what are some things that they could start to do on their own with this stuff? So, those of you who have heard me speak before or have worked with me will know that I always push for awareness as the first thing that we do. And awareness is something that can be helpful in this place as well.
So, in the case of negative body image or poor body image, we're thinking about zoning in on those thoughts that hold us back. And these are the thoughts that we may or may not know we're actually having on a day-to-day basis. So, these are often negative or unhelpful thoughts that are around perhaps what we look like or how our body functions or what we think about ourselves. I'm not going to give examples.
I don't need to put any more bullying thoughts on anybody's head. And noticing these can be tricky, because they're often what I call the mixed tape running in the background. Now, this day and age, we're probably moving on to the Spotify playlist. Let's be honest.
But it's this idea of what are the common phrases, what are the best off hits that you're constantly having play in the background. And this stuff has been around for so long. It's been replayed so many times that it's just in the background. And you may not even notice that these thoughts are popping up.
So bringing some awareness to what these thoughts are and noticing in the moment can be really helpful to start moving beyond them. Now, in the first instance, it really just is about noticing them and catching them. And this idea of catching the thought and giving yourself a little clap or a pat on the back or something like that that says, hey, I caught that. That could have gone through the cake, but I caught that.
I clocked it in the moment. And that's the important thing to start doing. Yeah, just noticing it. Is it beneficial in this part of the activity to journal it?
Like, write the thoughts down. It definitely depends on the person. Yeah. I've had many clients over the years that are journalists by nature and that's how they process their reflecting time happens through writing.
And if that sounds like you, then absolutely. I've got others that see it as a chore. And I've got to write it down. I won't do it.
So if you're that person, don't think you have to write it down. It certainly can be helpful. In the moment, stuff is very much about going, hey, I heard that. I caught that.
And that may naturally build to something else over time. But whether you're writing it down or just noticing it, whether you're sharing that with a loved one, that you can confide in. Hey, I just had that thought again. If that's the way that you reflect and that's the way that you process things, that's fine too.
But find a way that that's going to work for you that isn't going to feel like a chore. Yeah. I love that. I remember a story from a client I worked with many years ago who we were focusing on health behaviors with this client.
But their weight was a really important thing to them still. And it was something that was feeling hard to let go of, which is totally fine. Like we completely understand that element of living in this current culture and everything. And there's so there was no problem with that.
But that was where she was at at the time. And what was happening was this like real self sabotaging behavior with her food in that she would just regularly just throw her hands up, even though we talked about sustainable and realistic things and be like, what? I don't care anymore. Like what's the point?
And just kind of like effort type in the way of saying an expletive and getting explicit rating on the podcast. Right? You know what, when I'm thinking about everyone, it's right. Everyone is.
And so what I encouraged her to do, and she was just like, I just need you to give me a kick up the bum and just, you know, just give me a kick up the bum and motivate me. And I was like, I think there's a reason why that's happening for you. And we're not going to like, telling you to like pull your socks up and try harder. I don't think is actually going to help in this situation.
So it's like, why don't you try and like, when that happens, like capture the thought? Like, what is it that you're thinking? Because that might give you a glimpse as to the underlying belief system or value that you're holding or like what's going on, like at a deeper level for you. Anyway, she was like, okay, I'll be like not what she was wanting and expecting.
But she was open to giving it a try. In the next session, two weeks later, she was like, yeah, so you want to know what the thought was? And I was like, yeah, are you happy to share it with me? She was like, my thought is, it's too late for me.
She'd 1060, her kids had left home. She was, you know, grieving her younger woman's body and life. It was like a huge new change of life for her. And so, but bringing awareness to that, she could actually be like, and I realized that it's actually really not too late because I've still got like probably 20 odd days to live life.
And I don't want to live it on the diet off the diet and restriction binge. And I don't want to live it in this space with this headspace around the food with my body image always disrupting. So I love that. It's a really nice, some exercise that can produce good things.
But I would, you would say, you don't have to change anything just yet, just notice, right? That's right. Yeah. You might find that eventually you have those revelations like this person did.
But they are not meant to come straight away. And this is why the awareness stage is really important because I've had so many times people come and say, I did it, but I haven't changed anything. I didn't change anything. We talked about changing anything.
We talked about just creating that awareness. And this particular type of awareness, it might have a real name. I call it in the moment awareness. And I think about two types of awareness.
I think about overall awareness and I think about in the moment awareness. And overall awareness is, oh, I know I'm being to myself, for example, or I know I have poor body image. In the moment awareness is I just had that very specific thought that is related to me having poor body image. And it's those in the moment awareness, it's that it's that in the moment awareness that helps to propel us forward.
Because it's not just this, oh yeah, on the whole, I know this about myself. It's, oh, and this is when it's happening. And when we talk those moments, we give ourselves the confidence and the ability. We get what we practice.
So we get good at noticing these things. And then we hopefully have a little bit more capacity to do something about them. But that comes later. Yeah.
I love that. So I'm feeling like there's a really good segue here into the sex. Into the second thing that we want to talk about today, which isn't sex, but something else. Wow.
And that is this idea that a lot of us hold and weight loss marketing companies, a lot of wellness, you know, marketing tells us that we can't be proud of our body until it looks a certain way. Or we can't be happy or experienced XYZ until our body is a certain way. And so we put off doing these particular things in lieu of, okay, well, once I get my body right, then I can enjoy XYZ. But I wonder if a lot of those things that we want to enjoy are almost like particular triggers that we could become aware of when those thoughts pop up.
Like for example, going to the beach with your family might be something you put off or you don't engage in that activity because of your body. But it's also at the same time, a trigger where you notice, oh, I'm having all these specific in the moment thoughts about my body when this happens. How's that for a segue step? Love it.
It's great. So let's talk about actually, I guess, breaking that mindset around that and doing the things we're putting off. Why is that a good thing to do? Well, I mean, why do you want to do those things in the first place, right?
Usually because they're fun. They're fulfilling the thing that gives you a vibrant life. So why wouldn't you want to do them at any particular point in time, right? And it's diet culture and it's the weight loss industry.
And it's all those icky things that I just like that put us in this position that go, oh, you get to be happy when you're happy with your body. And I'm wondering if maybe we're not happy with our body and that's okay, that we kind of just fake it till we make it. And we go, what if I tried to do the thing that would bring me happiness now, rather than waiting until I'm happy with myself to allow myself to have happiness? I hope that makes sense.
I love that. I actually used to find being at the beach in swimmers as a young woman a very triggering experience for my body image when I was younger. And pleased to say that it's absolutely not an issue for me now. But I remember going to the beach with a friend of mine who, by society's standards, had a body that society would say you need to be insecure about that body.
And she used to go to the beach in all manner of swimmers and she never gave a rat's ass or that's what she appeared. She always had a great time running, playing, happy, never covered herself up, come out of the water being like, that was freaking great. She's wringing out her salty hair. And I used to sit and watch her all the layers on me covering myself up thinking, I wish I could just like, you know, and I just think how wonderful.
And she was such a big inspiration to me because I was like, well, I could have that kind of happiness too. And obviously it doesn't happen overnight, but there's this reframing that can slowly come with this being like, just do the thing anyway. Yeah. And you're right, it doesn't happen overnight.
But one of the things that we can do to get the ball rolling is write the things down. Instead of writing down when I'm thinner, I can do X, Y, Z, just write down, I can do X, Y, Z, or I want to do X, Y, Z. And have that be a bit of a list. And look at it, you know, look at it logically.
This logic doesn't always come into a potty meter. I know that much. But look at it and go, are there things on this list that I could actually have a go at now? Yeah.
Do I really have to be smaller in order to do one of these things? Yeah. And almost always, there will be things on that list that absolutely have nothing to do with size. Yeah, amazing.
Yeah, I love that. So this leads us into the podcast topic that we're going to talk about tomorrow, which is potentially you might be thinking, oh, well, if I let myself do all the things I'm, you know, in lieu of losing weight, like, what if I just like fully let myself go, like, what am I doing? I, let's talk to sort of that mindset in tomorrow that for so so join us. The Daily Dollar Podcast is proudly brought to you by Ailer Health.
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