Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Awaken Together podcast.
I'm Kat.
I'm Jen.
And today we are going to be talking all about body image and diet culture.
But before we get into that, how you doing, Jen?
Thanks.
I'm good.
Basically life has been super, super exciting and kind of adventurous.
I've been, I've shared that I have lived on the road since February, but we've done a
lot of pit stops along the way visiting friends and family.
And so this last couple of weeks has been a ton of dispersed camping in the middle of
the woods.
So I've been living very simply.
I actually didn't have cell phone service for three days.
That was like the longest I think I've gone without cell phone service.
Wow.
Yeah, it was intense.
It was intense.
But yeah, it is nice.
There's obviously like this initial like withdraw and kind of like, yeah, your imagination starts
creating this picture of like everything could go wrong because no one can get ahold of me.
It goes away pretty quick.
And yeah, I've shared a lot of photos, but I went mushroom foraging and that was really
nice and so nice.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
You were lucky, Kat.
I have not shared that like living in Massachusetts.
Like there, has you see a lot of mushrooms?
Like I've never seen so many mushrooms around this area.
It's funny you say that because I was back in Massachusetts over the weekend, as you
know, and I went on a hike with Kyle and his mom and my dad and it was so beautiful.
And now ever since watching Fantastic Fun Guy, I'm so attuned to look for all the mushrooms.
And you're right, like they were everywhere.
They were booming.
And I started nerding about, nerding out about sharing what mycelium is and just the magic
and mysticism behind it all.
Literally the same, same thing here.
Fantastic Fun Guy was a game changer.
So I was literally like, Danny, they're speaking to us and we just can't see it.
Oh my gosh.
I love it.
There's thousands.
But yeah, we don't have, obviously, yeah, Florida has a totally different where I grew
up.
Yeah, you don't even hike really.
And then Denver, yeah, I just never have seen this many mushrooms.
So the Upper East Coast has been freaking awesome and super fun.
And yeah, so what's been going on with you, Kat?
Good.
Yeah, I just shared being back in Massachusetts too over the weekend.
It was great.
Got to see a lot of family, got to see my best friend and yeah, just get the good family
time in celebrating.
There was a wedding we did.
We went to and Kyle's mom's birthday.
So it was really, really special.
And it's my favorite time of year back there too.
So grateful to get back for a little bit of time to explore while the leaves are changing.
Fall.
I love it.
Yeah, we're in it.
Fall is my like on time.
That's where I am so much better.
Summer has never been my season.
And when fall hits, I feel like Jen comes to life.
So it's so fun.
And another important thing to share is that me and you both have online retreats coming
up.
So that's been fun.
I've been working on planning that a lot and I know you have too.
Yes, mine's next week.
I think yours might be the week after or two weeks after.
Yeah, November 4th through the 7th.
So we both have some fun coming up too, exploring the virtual online retreat world.
That's right.
Good stuff.
Well, to get into the meat of today's talk, we have mentioned before how much your gut
affects your mental health for better and for worse.
But for today, we're going to discuss the impact of diet culture interfering with your
ability to fully step into self-love and keeping you focused outward instead of what's on the
inside.
So Jen, I'd love to hear your story around weight and how that's shown up in your life.
Yes.
Okay.
Diving into it.
And yeah, this is a huge topic for me.
So weight loss pretty much consumed most of my life.
I look back and I think that is a huge chunk of what was holding most of my thoughts, most
of my space.
I think I went on my first diet, which would have been Weight Watchers.
My mom was a big Weight Watchers advocate.
I think I went to my first meeting when I was about nine or 10.
Wow.
So very young.
I had doctors constantly concerned about the BMI, where I was at on that, which yeah, I
could do a whole tangent on when you're shorter.
That's also huge.
The BMI has so many issues.
But yeah, I was a very alarming BMI for my age and the fact that I've always been very
short.
And I remember, yeah, going to school, it was always, there was so many little like
mortifying memories, like a lot of the PE memories of the coaches talking about your
weight or talking about your performance on certain sports or there was the physical fitness
test.
I always said terrible on that.
I never, never did good on that.
And I, yeah, I look back to a lot of, a lot of things where the voice in my head started
getting louder and louder because of how many people were commenting on the fact that my
body wasn't right.
And so I think that that voice got so loud, that inner critic got so loud.
But I also thought that that inner critic was kind of the voice of motivation.
I remember having this kind of weird view of it that if I'm talking to myself really
negatively, then that can be the voice that will convince me to eat better, work out better.
So I remember doing runs and just having this voice saying like, yeah, you better be running.
Like picture what'll happen if you weren't doing this.
And just, yeah, just constantly thinking that that was this awesome fuel and that I could
use all that negative self-talk for good.
And yeah, there was, there was so much bad through middle school and high school, obviously
periods where I had lost a lot of weight and then periods where I put on a lot of weight,
but it was just all consuming.
Then when I go fast, fast forward past college, when I really started into my spiritual awakening,
my spiritual journey, I realized how much that negative self-talk was keeping me from
like the very things that I wanted and how I focused so much on what I was lacking and
what I needed to find externally that I hardly was ever figuring out why, what has kept me
from loving and accepting myself first so that after that I can blossom and be able
to pick and choose things externally that can only add to my self-love journey.
So I remember I threw my scale away probably about, I think it was pretty close to about
three years ago.
And that was a huge shift too, because I was to the point where at one point I was weighing
myself probably up to 10 times a day.
I mean, I would eat something and just want to see the effects of what it did on my body.
It was just constantly giving me the message on if I was okay or if I wasn't okay.
And so throwing that away and no longer having a number to identify with all the time really
took a lot of fuel away from that inner critic.
And I think I was able to start tapping into so much more of the underlying issues behind
it.
So yeah, a lot to say.
I resonate with that a lot, with a lot of what you said.
And I think it's what you said too of like feeding the inner voices that are healthy
and kind of starving the ones that are more toxic, those inner critics.
So yes, yes to all of that.
And thank you for sharing.
I know it can be a really hard and heavy topic, one that's near and dear to so many of our
hearts.
So yeah.
I want to hear your story, Kat.
I got you.
So yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny because thinking all the way back to when I was a
kid, I think I was maybe five when I started understanding what weight meant and just kind
of comparing my body to others.
And naturally when that happens that young, it's probably some of society, but a lot of
it stems from family, right?
And just being a sponge at that age and trying to understand what's good, what's bad, what's
right, what's wrong.
And I grew up with that belief of if I wanted to be accepted, I had to be thin.
And yeah, that really manifested its way into my life because I mean, first off, seeing
my mom a lot, just like always trying to lose weight, never quite being happy with how she
looked.
And I mean, I don't blame her at all for any of this now, especially looking back from
where I am now, because I know that she's just in her own struggle and how hard that
must be and it's just passed down from my grandmother and what a joyous thing to be
passed down between generations of women and men.
We can't totally silo, but I know it's a different story that they receive, but it's
equally as valid.
So yeah, I mean, thinking about my thighs, they were always, and I was never actually
overweight, which is funny.
Going to the doctor's overweight in the sense of BMI, like you said, which is such crap,
total updated.
And yeah, being short, I've always been a little bit more muscular too.
And I always hovered that line.
So I always got the warnings of, oh, well, make sure you stay inactive and make sure
you're eating your fruits and veggies and not too many pastas or cheeses.
And kind of those warnings is what I remember a lot growing up.
Whereas my comfort, I found a lot of comfort in, I have such a vivid memory of this, sitting
on the couch at my grandmother's house during the summertime when school wasn't in session,
watching the big comfy couch at 12 noon every day with a-
I loved the big comfy couch, Kat.
I like pre-stretched and got ready.
Yes, but I did not stretch while I was watching it.
Instead, I had a big bowl of tortellini pasta with butter every day for lunch while watching
that show.
And it was just the most comforting thing.
So yeah, I also remember putting on weight because of that.
And then it's what I was fed.
I was a child.
I didn't have control over this.
I didn't know anything about nutrition.
And then I was fed this stuff.
And then at the end of the summer, I had gained, I don't know how many pounds, but you could
tell by looking at me.
And then I kind of got shame for that.
Kind of got some guilt and I'm like, I'm a kid.
What do you expect?
You're feeding me.
Yeah.
So that's kind of how it started as a kid.
And then growing up, in high school, I was in an abusive relationship.
And I felt like there was very little I could control within my life at that time.
And the one thing that I learned I could control was my weight.
And I feel like this is how a lot of eating disorders start, is that lack of feeling like
you have control over your life.
This might be triggering for some to hear because it was very real.
It was very real for me.
And so yeah, like I said, I was never even overweight, but it was just something to control.
So I ended up losing a lot of weight.
I found community in this really toxic environment on MySpace.
Back in the day, I had a separate MySpace for my eating disorder page where I wouldn't
show my face really.
It was just like body pics.
And people would encourage each other to keep going.
And like thin is in, and all of these quotes that are just so unhealthy and just really
toxic would float around.
And that would be my fuel to keep me going down this negative spiral of weight loss.
And then that relationship ended.
And guess what else ended?
My extreme desire to be thin.
Now it wasn't overnight.
It did take time.
I was seeing a therapist.
I was on medication, but I began to understand that this behavior was linked to that relationship.
And then I went to college, change of scenery, things got better.
But then I kind of swung in the other direction of orthorexia, which is another eating disorder
where you're just obsessed with being healthy.
And I think it's really common actually in this day and age, but I don't think people
talk about it nearly as much as it's a thing.
So are you familiar with that, Jen?
No, I haven't.
I haven't heard that term.
Okay.
Yeah.
So it's people who count macros.
It's people who get obsessed with intermittent fasting.
It's people who track every little thing to make sure that their health is just so on
point.
It's people who exercise every day and feel bad when they don't.
And yeah, I definitely used to fall into that.
I'd say within the past two, three years, pretty recent, I let go of being on MyFitnessPal
every single day and tracking my nutrients with each meal, not even as obsessed with
the calories as I was with I need to make sure I'm getting the right carbohydrates
and protein and fat.
So it's all linked there.
So it's like, how do we find the balance knowing that there's one extreme to the next?
We were talking about this before, how weight loss is often looking at the symptom rather
than what the root cause is underneath it all.
Yeah.
Your story brings up so many points and things for sharing as well.
And yeah, I think firstly, going back, we have to really look at the toxic generational
patterns in the family because body image can be a huge centerpiece.
My family, my mom's mom, they were all raised in Kentucky and Kentucky had this big emphasis
kind of on your outer appearance and what you looked like, making sure that we were
presentable in a certain way when we left the house.
And I look back and I think of going to visit my grandma in Kentucky and the second we walk
in the door, feeling like we're on this runway and we're going to be critiqued by the judge.
She would immediately comment on if our body was looking better, we'd get praise for it
and say, wow, the boys must really be after you.
You're looking really good.
Or it would be this, oh my goodness, what have you done?
And then a lot of critique on my mom, like, what have you been letting them eat?
What are they eating?
And I really watch, you know, my mom, I think just kind of let it, you know, just go right
over her.
She didn't give it a whole lot of attention, but you know, she was raised with probably
a pretty harsh critique about her body image.
And I think my mom trying to be different than the way her mom raised her really tried
to not bring up my body image very often.
She was very open to us getting to eat what we want, which was nice that I wasn't feeling
like all this pressure that I had to eat a certain way.
That was probably her way of giving more freedom to it.
But I also watched her beat herself up.
So I didn't really get a good example of what true like self love looked like.
She was constantly, you know, talking about how she looks terrible in this outfit or looks,
you know, it's she isn't looking the way she wants to or commenting that she shouldn't
have ate that, you know, all this all this little talk, but didn't really say a lot to
us.
But we still saw that as an example.
So I think we have to look beyond just our our close family, but hone out some and look
at the societal pressures that came in.
And one of it is, yeah, there's there was such a lack of education, I think, in general
on nutrition and also, yeah, people would just make comments really making it because
the reason you're gaining weight or your underweight has so much to do with your food choices or
how much how much or how little you're moving.
And there would just be this critique on all this superficial stuff and not really looking
at the mental health component.
But as you said, Kat, when you were in that toxic relationship, your body really matched
a lot of the issues that you were dealing with from that relationship.
I feel the same way when I look back at pictures.
I can really remember what was going on in my physical world at the time and where my
mental health was in those moments.
And I do think my body reflected a lot of those waves of mental health.
There would be times I'm very, very stressed and you can just see the external manifestation
of that if that makes sense.
It really does.
It totally does.
And it reminds me of the energetics of weight and food and how I've talked with my mom about
this a lot about how unhealed trauma will store itself in the body.
And sometimes that looks like a lot of weight just feeling stuck on you.
And sometimes it looks like a lot of restriction and not allowing yourself to take up space
through healthy weight gain.
And so that's a lot of what happens through therapy, through doing shadow work, through
going on this personal and spiritual growth journey is reflecting on just that, of the
stories that you've told yourself along the way, what you've been taught, what you've
taken on and how that's affected you as a holistic person.
And yeah, and beyond that, once you've done kind of that more particular self journey,
I think it's also really good to always keep in mind that the message that society is constantly
selling you, I think they do sell, as we said, to men a little bit different than women,
but they want you to feel like you don't have enough.
It's constantly advertised this body shape that we now know because of technology, we
get to discuss this stuff a lot more openly, but we know how many of the ads are being
highly edited.
We can see a lot of the tricks, I think now we're getting more of the shadow side behind
it all.
But society has wanted to make us feel like we don't have enough because when we feel
like our body's not enough, if we feel like we're looking older, we need to do something
about that, if we constantly feel like there's something wrong with us, we will buy double
the amount of things to try to fix it.
We will purchase the thing that's going to help and it just keeps us constantly drawn
out of the external.
So knowing that that is the message that society wants you to know, that is already can be
a very groundbreaking thing and taking your power back.
And we were discussing this beforehand too, but I think another huge shift for me beyond
realizing that society wanted me hating myself and really just understanding that deeper,
it also was good to see how the food industry even works.
I am a huge advocate of all the documentaries such as Fed Up, What the Health, I Love Cowspiracy,
Plant Pure Nation.
I've watched so many of the documentaries and they really explain that some of these
big companies, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, some of these just big food chains, a lot of them
are very tied into our American Heart Association.
A lot of these advocates for health and wellness are being funded by some of the very things
that are toxic and can have a lot of negative consequence on your body, yeah, physically.
And it's good to know that too, that there is a whole world of things trying to pull
us away and we really have to take that power back within ourselves as well.
It's so, so true.
And to add one little health trick, health tip to know when thinking about the scams,
the mislabeling, the misinformation out there within the food industry is, well, one thing
that comes to mind is when I was a kid, my grandmother, she would say, oh, this blueberry
muffin is okay.
She would say, in a diet, which in Greek means it's diet.
And I looked at the label and on it, it said low fat.
Well, guess what happens when things are labeled low fat?
Double the sugar.
Yep.
It means the sugar has been increased.
And same thing with the sugar.
A lot of the time when there's reduced sugar, there's increased fat or increased other chemicals
because the companies still want the stuff to taste good so that you buy it again.
They don't really care about your health.
These big name brands, their bottom line is really at the forefront of their minds.
So it's up to us consumers to educate ourselves.
And really good rule of thumb is less processed the better.
If you can buy things that aren't in boxes, aren't in packages, in plastics, you don't
even need a nutrition label on there because you know it's just a sweet potato.
That's going to be the simplest and easiest.
But yeah, just a little tip there of not buying into the labels and the diet culture within
the supermarket even.
Yeah.
And I just remembered another point that had popped into my head, but I think one of the
other really confusing things, and yeah, we'll go into a little bit of this is definitely
another societal issue, but a lot of these diets and a lot of these ways of eating do
have success stories behind them.
And that's the part that gets confusing is when you talk negatively against one of these
very popular diets, you'll have a whole team of people attacking you because it changed
their life and made a huge difference for them.
But the big thing to look at is we're not wanting ourselves to be on a constant roller
coaster of highs and lows.
We're not wanting to have all of our power based on so much of the flow of how things
are going because you're not always guaranteed your health.
It's a very big privilege to even get to pick and choose what's going on because that's
not the case for everybody.
Something can always come in and affect your health.
So making your groundwork and your base self-love and then from there building off of what we
call a physical therapy that works, that is such a more sustainable way.
And I'll share a story to help this make a little bit more sense.
But I'm in physical therapy as my profession, so I've seen tons of different age ranges
and I've worked with a lot of athletes and I've also worked on a lot of middle age people
that had a more athletic background.
And then all of a sudden are struggling with movement or they had an injury come in and
they no longer can walk or they're having issues with walking or running the way that
they used to.
And all of a sudden I see this giant mental crisis.
They're angry, they're deflecting, they're just so frustrated.
And they're like, I just need to get back on the track, I need to get back on the track.
And there's this ansiness behind it because so much of their value has been, I've been
able to keep my body in this perfect shape and if it doesn't stay like that then all
of my self worth is gonna go down.
People build an entire franchise off of their body image.
And that is lovely in some ways because yeah, you can have a healthier body and that's always
wonderful.
But we really wanna look at what that root is.
What has been your base, your foundation, your soil to bloom from because yeah, little
things can come in and take that away.
Yes, it's so true.
Bottom line, love yourself at any weight.
And of course it can be easier said than done, but there's a lot of different things that
you can do simply even looking in the mirror every day and telling yourself one thing that
you love about yourself physically.
And fake it till you make it.
Like it sounds crazy, but this stuff works.
There's also something to be said about normalizing it and so something with me, like I mentioned
earlier, I used to hate my legs.
And so I tried to trick myself into liking them by thinking about all that they do for
me, all of the steps that they've taken in my life to get me here where I am now.
Think about I would wear shorts more often and tell myself, you look good.
And the more that I did that, the more normal it became.
And so now I have a much healthier relationship with my thighs, which is a massive win.
And it's funny to say that, right?
But yeah, and so let's talk a little bit about diet culture.
There's something called the dieter's dilemma and it all starts with the desire to be thin.
What this does is it takes us to the next part of the spiral, which is dieting.
If you want to be thin, it seems like that's the natural next step that people choose.
So they diet.
Then what happens there after they restrict food?
Cravings happen because when you're in this place of restriction, it's problematic for
both your mental health and sustaining your wellbeing.
You tell yourself, I can't have that, which then increases your hunger and your cravings
for those things.
It decreases your energy and your feelings of worthiness while you're doing that too.
So it's a pretty nasty combo.
If you've ever been on a diet, you know this to be true.
What happens after that is overeating.
You can only suppress those cravings for so long until you're like, screw it, I need it.
Right?
And then you have it and then after that you feel like crap about yourself and you regain
any weight that you did lose.
So from there, the spiral continues, that desire to be thin, to dieting, to cravings,
to overeating, eating, regaining that lost weight.
And this spiral is exactly what the diet industry profits on.
Yeah.
Thanks for sharing that.
And I think, yeah, my top advice to just kind of integrate this, one of the biggest things
that I realized in my own personal journey was I really stop and I ask myself, what is
the motive or intention behind what I'm doing?
And I ask myself that often.
If it's coming from a place of fear or it's coming from a negative self-talk place, I
better go run.
I really just need to go do it because I ate terribly and I'm doing this like fuel towards
this bad motive.
I don't let myself do it under those intentions anymore.
So I really have changed the intention to being around looking at, okay, I'm feeling
anxious.
My mind is very worried and I'm having a lot of busy thoughts.
Let me go work on turning some of my thoughts off by dropping into my body and creating
some sensations in it.
And when I run, I'm creating enough sensations in my body that I get out of my mind.
So I always am looking at what the intention is behind going into those movement practices
and trying to make sure that I center my thoughts around it being more about my mental health
and less about my body.
If it becomes about my body, then I know that I'm feeling bad and not so much the good,
at least for my own personal journey.
Yeah, really, really good points there.
And I think you're onto something because I really believe society's conditioning has
caused us to lose the ability to listen to our bodies and let emotional eating and numbing
out become the new norm.
So I mean, in a society where numbing out is the norm, how do we understand what will
truly benefit us in the moment?
Right?
It can get a little complicated because when you take away the distractions of food, of
Netflix, social media, alcohol, any other substances, what's left?
It's you and your thoughts.
And this might be scary in certain times.
So it's all about finding that balance of meeting yourself where you're at, giving yourself
what you need in the moment, knowing that it's coming from a really healthy place rather
than one of distraction or numbing out like you were just saying.
Yeah.
And that is a perfect segue into what our next episode is going to be, which we're going
to go right into trauma because a lot of this stuff is linked.
I already mentioned it a few times in this episode, but we're really going to talk about
trauma and the body and how the body keeps the score.
But thank you for this episode, Kat.
It's been lovely talking and sharing with you as always.
Always, always good to hear your side of the story too and how we're not so different.
Yes, it's always so close.
Yeah.
Love you, Kat.
Love you too.
Talk soon.
All right.
Bye.