Tag: body positivity

Thinner is Not Better – Healthy, Connected, and Happy Is

“Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don’t match our own beliefs about how we should look.” ~Martha Beck

I have so many women around me right now—friends, mothers, clients that are on a diet—constantly talking about their weight and how their bodies look, struggling with body image.

I am profoundly sad about the frequency and theme of those discussions.

At the same time, I deeply get it; it is hard to detach from our conditioning.

I too struggled with body image at one point in my life, and for a very long time. I suffered from anorexia in my late teens and early twenties. I was skinny as a rail and thought I was not thin enough. I hated the way I looked. I was never perfect enough.

I controlled my food intake as a way to regain control over my life, as a way to maybe one day be perfect enough that I might feel loved. I almost ended up in the hospital, as my weight impacted my health, physically and mentally. I had no period, no healthy bowel movement. I was so unhappy and depressed. I had no energy.

The messed-up thing is that the skinnier I looked, the more compliments I received from a lot of people, from family to friends: “You are so slim and gorgeous.” To me, this just validated the way I treated my body—and myself—with control, self-criticism, and harshness.

Then there were the magazines, showing skinny models, getting so much positive attention. I was obsessed. The more my body looked like those magazine pictures, the better; though I could never quite get to a point where I looked at myself in the mirror and liked what I saw. It was an endless circle of judgment, control, and unhappiness.

It took me many years to change the way I saw my body and debunk the standards created by “society” for women.

For many years I bit my tongue each time I would hear other women around me comparing and judging their body size and shape, repeating the same narrative of needing to lose weight. These conversations felt like an unbearable ringing in my ears, a knot in my stomach, the story in my head of “I am not good enough.”

I was in the process of creating a new set of standards for myself, of what it was to be a woman in this world, but the old stories were hard to escape and easier to follow because they were the gold standard. I did not have any role models of women out there, younger or older, loving their body just the way it was.

There was a point, though, when it was just too draining. I noticed that it was not the striving to get to a perfect body that brought me love. What brought me love was being vulnerable, authentic, sharing my inner life, supporting others, having deep talks, being kind with myself and others, and doing the things I loved.

From then on, I started to soften and release all those standards that had been gifted to me. I allowed myself to be okay with how my body looked, to enjoy food, to enjoy movement, to enjoy my body. I learned to truly love my body, and with that came a different type of respect: I learned to rest when my body was tired. I learned to eat really nourishing food. I learned to move every day in a way that was respectful to my body and that I enjoyed.

Thinner is not better. Healthy, connected, and happy is.

Practicing yoga helped me so much in embodying this new belief, and studying neuro-linguistic programming as well.

The truth is we are “society”—all of us, women and men—which means we are the agents of change. So let’s pause, reflect, and choose new standards. Is this constant need to lose weight healthy or serving anyone?

There are a few different things to separate and highlight here.

If your weight negatively impacts your health or your life, if you feel heavy in an unhealthy way and can’t do the activities you’d like to do, that is a different story; and yes, please, take care of your body, through what you think will work best for you: exercise, nutrition, mindset, support.

Your body is your vessel to experience life, so finding your way to a healthy body is a worthwhile investment. And daily movement and good nutrition will have such a positive impact on your vitality and health, physical and mental, so yes, go for it, with love, softness and kindness—no control, judgment, or harshness.

But if you feel that your body is strong and healthy, but you don’t like the way it looks… I feel you. I was there. I felt the shame, the discomfort, the sadness, the feeling of not being good enough. Allow yourself to feel this pain. It is okay, and human nature, to feel concerned about your appearance. We all want to be part of the tribe, to be loved and admired.

But then, ask yourself, is it me that does not like the way my body looks, or is it because of society’s beauty standards? Is it because of all the noise from my friends, constantly talking about weight and looks? Do I want to transmit those standards to the next generation? To my sons? To my daughters? Is it really the most important thing for us women, to look thin and good? Is this story serving us all? Is it love?

No, it is not love, and it serves no one. Not the women suffering in silence because they believe their body is not slim enough. Not the partners of those women who can’t appreciate their true beauty and fullness. Not the daughters that will believe the same messages and suffer as well. Not the sons that will not know how to recognize beauty in its diverse shapes and forms. Not society as a whole, which will be robbed of having a happy, compassionate, loving, self-confident population.

So let’s choose differently. Let’s celebrate our different body shapes and weights and strength. Let’s feel good and enjoy life, movement, and food without counting and restricting and denying love to our bodies and selves.

Let’s stop talking about our weight constantly and find other ways to connect.

Some might say that I am too slim to really speak about this subject, that I have it easy. This is not quite true. My body has changed so much throughout the years. I went from an ultra-skinny teenager and twenty-year-old with anorexia, to a healthy weight in my thirties, to ups and downs with weight throughout my two pregnancies and breastfeeding journeys. I have seen my body change quite a lot and have been judged for how I looked oh so many times. I have been judged for being skinny, or envied for being slim, and I have been judged for gaining weight.

Today I am forty-three. My body is not as slim as it used to be. I have a bit of fat around my belly, and my breasts are not as round and firm as they once were, but I feel strong and healthy. And I am SO grateful for my body for enabling me to experience life so far, and for creating life and feeding life, that I don’t want to ever criticize or shame my body again.

I have learned to love every scar, my stretch marks, my extra skin, because they are the witness of my life, my loves, my years.

So thank you, body, for everything you allow me to experience.

The alternative to loving my body—the constant internal criticism and self-doubt—is too draining.

We, as humans, are society, so let’s change this conditioning. Let’s never transmit this idea of what a woman’s body should look like to our daughters, to our sons. Let’s invent a world where it does not matter what you weigh as long as you feel healthy and good within. Let’s change the chattering from what diet we are on to how our heart is feeling.

Let’s celebrate bodies, in their diverse beauty and forms.

May 1, 2023
How I Learned to Love My Body Instead of Hating Her

“Your body does not need to be fixed, because your body is not a problem. Your body is a person.” ~Jamie Lee Finch

I was thirty years old when I realized that I was completely dissociated from my body.

I grew up in the height of the purity culture movement in American Evangelicalism. Purity culture was based on one primary concept: abstain from sex until marriage. But the messaging went further than this.

I sat next to my peers in youth group while the male pastor stood on stage and told us young women to always cover our bodies. For example, two-piece bathing suits were completely out of the question for summer activities. Why?

Our female bodies cause the young men to “stumble” and have impure thoughts. So out of love for the young men in our group, we must cover up and never do anything “suggestive.”

The message was clear: My body caused others to sin. My body is bad.

It would be impossible for me to accurately detail how many times and in how many different ways I received this message growing up.

I didn’t know it was happening, but over time, I learned to dissociate from my body. My body was bad, and I was trying to be good, so I must distance myself from her.

Thankfully, I listened to my body when she told me to leave this religious group and find my own way in the world. Yes, my body talks to me. More on that later.

Recently, society has seen more acceptance of bodies. We see variety in body shapes represented in the media. While that’s a great sign that we are moving in a new direction, simply saying that we love our bodies isn’t enough.

That feeling of positivity toward our body when we say that is momentary. We must take consistent action in order to make meaningful and lasting change.

Here are the ways I was able to radically change my relationship with my body and learned to see her as my greatest ally and most prized possession.

See Your Body as a Person

A concept introduced to me by Jamie Lee Finch, seeing my body as a person changed everything.

It allowed me to do one key thing: cultivate a relationship.

Once I started referring to my body as “her,” I understood how far from her I really was. I didn’t know my own intuitive “yes” and “no.” I didn’t know what I really wanted in life.

When was I safe? When was I in danger? These are questions that our bodies are designed to answer.

So I learned to listen to her. And I talked back.

A number of years ago, I noticed that I was constantly pushing people away. I really beat myself up about this, seeing myself as a cold, unloving person.

Eventually I realized that this behavior started after a traumatic body violation that I had experienced. I understood that my body was resisting vulnerability and closeness in relationships as a way to protect me from further harm.

I could see that my body had not been working against me, but for me. And I had the opportunity to say to her, “Thank you so much for trying to keep me safe, but I’m going to start trusting people again. I have learned from the experience and will trust my gut to alert me to danger.”

I realized that things I thought of as “wrong with me” were in fact genius protective and defense mechanisms that my body wisely developed in order to keep me safe in my environment.

I started talking lovingly to her, full of gratitude for all the ways she worked to keep me safe over the years. I started seeing past experiences through a different lens.

About ten years ago, I was in a relationship with a man who wanted to marry me. I was in constant turmoil inside about the relationship, plagued with doubt and uncertainty, unsure if I should stay or go.

I was so mad at myself for not having a clear “yes” or “no” about the situation. I didn’t realize this at the time, but I can see so clearly now that the anxious feeling in my gut was my body trying to tell me that this man was not my person.

In truth, my body was always working for my best interests. No one looks out for me the way my body does. She has always been my most fierce protector.

So I talk to my body and she talks to me. It’s the most important relationship I have.

Write a Thank You Letter to Your Body

There is a reason that gratitude practices have become so popular: they work.

One I started to understand just how hard my body had been working to protect me, I wanted to show my gratitude.

Writing a thank you letter can be the catalyst for a powerful mindset shift. It’s so easy to see all the things we hate about ourselves and our bodies.

Write a letter to your body. Think about all the millions of ways your body has worked to keep you safe.

How your body has alerted you when there’s danger, enabled you to speak truth by giving you gut feelings, and allowed you to experience the greatest pleasure.

We can never know all the ways that our bodies tirelessly work for us. Gratitude allowed me to further cultivate a positive relationship with my body and work in partnership with her instead of against her.

Gaze into Your Own Eyes

If you’ve done eye gazing with another person, you know how powerful and bonding it can be. This is true when you eye gaze with yourself.

I practice this by sitting on the floor in front of my closet doors that are large mirrors. I feel my body rooted into the ground before looking deeply into my own eyes.

As a woman, I often look into my left eye, which is generally considered to be the feminine side. The masculine is the right side.

This practice can bring intense emotions, so start with only a few minutes. You can grow your practice to twenty minutes or longer should you wish.

See yourself. Really see. And feel the feelings that arise.

It’s not uncommon for me to cry during this practice, reflecting on all the ways I’ve spoken negatively about my body and remembering how truly spectacular she is. She is beautiful, wise, and strong.

Eye gazing will allow you to see and experience these truths. And when you embrace those truths, your relationship to your body will change.

Try Mirror Work

Remember when you were younger and a parent told you to say one nice thing about your sibling or friend that you were fighting with? There’s something about acknowledging the good in another person that regulates emotions and stirs positive feelings. The same can be said about your body.

Mirror work is standing in front of the mirror and pointing out things you love about your body. This can be done clothed or unclothed depending on your comfort level.

The thing you love can be as small as an eyebrow or as large as your torso. As you start to focus on one thing you love and sit with the positive emotions that arise, you will start to consistently feel more positive about your body.

You’ll notice things you never saw before. Or see things as beautiful instead of ordinary.

The sexy curve of your left thigh, the strong shape of your ankles, the color of that freckle on your shoulder. You are uniquely you and that is inherently valuable.

Mirror work can be a ten-second practice or ten-minute practice. You can focus on the same part of your body every day or something different each time.

I incorporate mirror work into my morning routine when I’m brushing my teeth. As I brush, I look at myself in the mirror and pick one thing I love about my body that morning. This way, it doesn’t feel like I’ve added another self-help practice, but rather I’m taking advantage of opportunities to multitask.

When we take the time to see ourselves, what we really like about ourselves, we will learn to love what we see.

Commit One Loving Action

Similar to saying something nice about someone, doing a kind and loving action can also foster feelings of fondness and compassion.

For a week, do one focused, loving action to your body. If you can’t think of anything, ask this question: What’s something I have been wanting to incorporate into my daily self-care or hygiene routine, but haven’t done?

For me, this was moisturizing my feet. When I first did this practice, I had just moved to a new city with a much drier climate. My feet were so dry, but I wasn’t taking the time to moisturize them.

So I committed to do this once a day for a week. It wasn’t long before I started seeing my feet in a new way.

I was intentional when I sat on my bed and did this. I took my time rubbing the lotion in, observing new things about my feet I had never noticed before. Thinking about how hard my feet work and all the places they’ve stepped over my lifetime.

After doing this for a week or so, moisturizing became a natural part of my daily routine. In fact, I consistently moisturize all of my skin now, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Some extra tender loving care will naturally grow your love for your body and cause you to care for them better.

October 25, 2022
How to Protect Our Kids from a Lifetime of Food, Weight, and Body Image Issues

I went on my first diet when I was around fourteen or so because, as they often do in growing teens, my jeans started getting tight.

And because I grew up in the same anti-fat culture we all have, I hated myself for it.

Around the same time, an adult in my life who was always obsessed with “eating healthy” gave me a copy of the new book she was reading outlining the healthiest way to eat.

It was a book on the Atkins/low-carb diet.

The author spent the bulk of the book demonizing carbs, explaining in convincing-sounding detail all the science he supposedly had about not only how harmful carbs were but how they were the cause of weight gain.

Three things happened from reading that book.

1. I became scared of eating carbs and started trying to eliminate them because, while of course I wanted to be healthy, I was terrified of gaining weight.

2. Instead of losing the five pounds or so that I wanted to lose, I gained about five pounds and a slow progression of weight gain continued for years. Because the harder I tried to eliminate the carbs, the more I craved and obsessed over them; always eventually caving, eating them, and then hating myself for it and promising to start “being good tomorrow.

Eventually the caving led to overeating them because “as long as I was being bad anyway, I may as well eat them all and get them out of the house so I won’t be tempted when I start being good again.”

3. An almost three-decades-long war with my weight, my body, myself, and food began. A war that resulted in a hospitalization in my early thirties, after my first foray into the world of “it’s not a diet; it’s clean, healthy eating,” for bulimia so severe I often felt like I was going to eat myself to death.

And the whole time, I blamed myself for it. I believed I was stupid, weak, pathetic, a pig who needed to try harder to control myself.

So I kept trying. For more than half my life I tried, and it almost killed me.

I’ve been working with women around the whole weight and food thing in one form or another for over fifteen years now. I started sharing my story because after listening to other women describe their histories with food and weight, I realized that my story is not unique.

Varying degrees of my story are the norm, and they all start in basically the same seemingly innocent ways.

We want to lose weight or “eat healthier,” so we do what we’re taught we’re supposed to.

We start a diet or “healthy eating plan” of some sort that tells us what we “should” and “shouldn’t be” eating. This leads to a lifetime of trying to control our intake and our bodies, which results in disordered eating patterns, weight cycling, and self-loathing.

I regularly hear from women in their seventies or eighties who have spent their entire lives fighting this losing battle with themselves to “eat right” and lose weight.

In one survey of US women a few years ago, 75% reported disordered eating behaviors or symptoms consistent with eating disorders.

My recovery didn’t start until I realized a few basic truths.

First, if I had any hope of healing, I had to figure out what was causing my eating issues. Ultimately, it came down to my conditioning: patterns of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that had developed over the course of my life as a result of many different things, not the least of which being:

1. The stories I had learned to believe about bodies and the people in them: Big ones are bad, unhealthy, undisciplined, and lazy. Small ones are good, healthy, and disciplined, and they work hard.

These misguided beliefs taught me not only to live in fear of weight gain and the harsh judgment of others if I gained weight, but also to judge myself and my body harshly when I did so. This contributed to not only the decades of weight gain and disordered eating but ultimately the eating disorder.

2. The stories I’d learned about food: These are the good foods, the healthy foods, the foods you should be eating, and those are the bad foods, the unhealthy ones, the ones that cause all manner of disease, poor health, and weight gain. Those are the foods you have to give up forever, or only allow in moderation.

These misguided beliefs taught me to live in fear of food and my body becoming unhealthy or fat if I dared to eat the “wrong” thing. This created the never-ending pattern of promising myself I was going to “be good” only to end up craving, caving, hating myself, and starting over that I felt trapped in for so many years.

3. Disconnection with myself, my body, and my own needs: As long as I was trying to make myself eat or do the things I thought I “should” do in order to control my body and my food intake, I was stuck in my head. Stuck in fear. Disconnected from myself, my body, and even the decision-making part of my brain. Ruminating, promising, obsessing, hating.

In that state, I had no ability to understand the messages my body was constantly sending me about what it needed, nor did I have any concept that my body was something that could be trusted to tell me that. I saw it as an enemy to be ruled over, controlled, and beaten into submission… rather than the ally, healer, and communicator that it is.

4. Self-loathing: I didn’t like, love, trust, or value myself, so my entire self-worth and relationship with myself relied on what my body looked like and my need to control how others saw me.

The second truth I had to realize: if I had any hope of recovering and making peace with myself, my body, and food, I had to change the things that were causing the war.

That meant giving up the obsession with my weight and eating or looking perfect.

I had to recognize those things for what they were—distractions that kept me from dealing with the issues that were causing the problems in the first place and were making matters worse.

So I put all my energy into changing the causes.

It didn’t happen overnight, but one day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d engaged in compensatory behaviors. The binges were getting fewer and farther between.

And then I couldn’t remember the last time I binged or even overate, and I couldn’t even imagine ever doing it again.

It’s been many years since those things were my daily reality, and I’m thrilled to say they simply don’t exist in me anymore because I changed the conditioning that was causing them. I learned to reconnect with and trust my body when it tells me what it needs or wants, and I learned to value myself enough that I cannot imagine treating myself or my body poorly anymore.

Recovery and peace are blessings that I don’t take for granted for a second and I’m still grateful for every minute of the day.

But disordered eating and eating disorder recovery are unbelievably difficult, prone to multiple relapses, and many aren’t so lucky.

This brings me to my main points because the simplest solution to disordered eating or eating disorder recovery is to prevent those things from ever starting in the first place.

That’s my dream, to save future generations from growing up with the disordered eating patterns/eating disorders and horrible body/self-images that ours has grown up with.

It starts with us, as parents.

What I Wish Parents Understood

Living with disordered eating patterns or an eating disorder is a special kind of hell that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

It’s like living with the meanest, most self-destructive monster in your head one can imagine.

You know the things you’re thinking and the choices you’re making are harming you, you know they’re making you miserable, you’re desperate to stop, and yet… no matter how hard you try, you can’t.

You feel powerless. Hopeless. Helpless. Trapped.

Recovery was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life—and I’ve not had an easy life, so that says a lot.

Given this, it’s my view that in addition to helping those struggling recover, prevention at an early age needs to be a top priority.

And parents, I’m not trying to place blame, but after fifteen years of hearing women talk about their struggles, I’ve come to realize that we are often a big part of the cause, although not purposely of course.

We all have our kids’ best interests in mind.

We want our kids to be the healthiest, most confident versions of themselves, and we’re all doing the best we can to help them get there.

We want them to maintain healthy bodies and eat nutritious foods. Nobody doubts that we all want the best for our children and are doing our best.

But the way we’re approaching it is almost guaranteeing that our kids are going to struggle with the same food issues, eating disorders, or a lifetime of disordered eating and failed diet attempts that so many in our generation have.

They’re learning to fight the same wars we have in the same ways we learned to fight them.

All the things we typically do to try to help encourage health (restricting “bad” foods, teaching them that some are “good” and some are “bad,” encouraging them to lose weight or even acknowledging their weight) are among the worst things we can do for the health of our children.

It’s difficult to overstate the damage that weight and food shame does to adults, and that damage is worse in children.

We also have to remember that they learn from us. If your kids watch you struggle with food and your weight, if they see you tie your mood and your self-worth to your scale, they are going to be at a significantly higher risk for developing an eating disorder or living with those same struggles themselves.

So this is what I want parents everywhere to know: encouraging weight loss, labeling or restricting their food intake (good vs bad, allowed vs not allowed), discussing weight, restricting foods, and dieting yourself—all of those things that millions of us are doing every single day that diet and healthy eating cultures have taught us is expected or accepted—they’re putting our children at risk.

Research has shown that the younger girls are when they go on their first diet, the more likely they are to engage in extreme weight control behaviors like vomiting and laxatives (that’s an eating disorder), abusing drugs and alcohol, and becoming overweight by the time they reach their thirties.

One out of four dieters will develop some type of eating disorder. That’s a number that’s doubled in the last twenty years. And the majority of the rest develop very disordered eating patterns.

Eating disorders are widely recognized to have the highest mortality rate of all mental illness, while also being among the most underdiagnosed and under/poorly treated.

Not even to mention the levels of anxiety, depression, and self-loathing that typically come from years of living with disordered eating and battling with our weight.

There is a better way.

Encouraging Healthy Choices Without the Risk

DON’Ts

Don’t discuss weight, size, or bodies—not yours, not theirs, not anyone else’s.

Don’t let other people discuss their weight in front of them—not their doctor, not relatives, no one.

Don’t label foods—no good, no bad, no healthy, no unhealthy… no food labels. At all. Binary food labels can cause shame, create self-punishing behaviors, destroy our relationship with food, and contribute to overeat/binge/restrict cycles that can take years to heal.

Don’t tell them they are what they eat—our food choices don’t determine our worth.

Don’t restrict foods—let them eat what they want. Restriction leads to guilt, shame, overeating, or bingeing and fuels disconnection.

Don’t force exercise or “burning off calories”—encouraging exercise as a means of weight loss is setting them up for trouble.

DOs

Do encourage them to consider how their food choices make their body feel. How does that big mac and fries make their body feel when they’re done eating? What about the candy for breakfast? Do they feel good when they’re done eating? Or do they feel sick? Would they rather feel good, or sick? How does skipping a meal make their body feel? Do they want to feel that way? Do they really want to ignore their body’s most basic human needs with restriction? Why?

Do encourage them to consider why they’re eating. Are they physically hungry? No? Are they emotionally hungry? Teach them the difference and help them learn to accept, honor, and express the emotions they’re trying to feed or soothe rather than ignore or numb them.

Do teach them the value of understanding the why behind the choices they’re making and how their choices are often a result of their relationship with themselves.

Do teach them that the relationships they have with themselves, food, and their bodies are the most important relationships they’ll ever have in their lives and to protect and nurture them.

Do lift them up, teach them to value themselves exactly as they are, for who they are, not what they look like, weigh, or how they eat. Teach them to value and respect others, no matter what size they are.

Do teach them about self-acceptance, kindness, authenticity, self-compassion, and the power of mindful living.

Do teach them to appreciate the wonder and magic of their bodies, no matter what size they are. Teach them how to stay present in the moment and in their bodies, so they learn to listen to and trust their own bodies.

Do teach them humans come in all shapes and sizes—and that no one shape or size is any better than another.

Teach them that they are enough, exactly as they are, and that neither their bodies nor their food choices define their worth.

And that will all be way easier if you learn it for yourself first.

October 11, 2022
“Old” Isn’t a Bad Word: The Beauty of Aging (Gracefully or Not)

“Mrs. Miniver suddenly understood why she was enjoying the forties so much better than she had enjoyed the thirties: it was the difference between August and October, between the heaviness of late summer and the sparkle of early autumn, between the ending of an old phase and the beginning of a fresh one.” ~Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver

As an adolescent, I was always keen on looking and acting older than my age.

As the youngest amongst three, I always felt that my siblings held more power and their grown up lives seemed more glamorous to me. They would prance off to college or to high school, carrying their own bags and packing their own lunches, while I had to wait for my mother to drop me off, holding her hand as we crossed the street!

Naturally, I looked forward to my birthday each year, waiting for a sense of “grownup”ness to take me over even as I got giddy at the thought of opening gifts. Yet, over the past few years, my birthday gifts have come wrapped in a vague fear, that of becoming invisible.

In a society that values youth to the point of insanity, reaching that terrible “middle age” seems like a ticket to the circus of Forget-Me Land!

As I journal and reflect my way through all this, I wonder why this is a big deal at all. In fact, in many families across nature, growing older is a good sign. It’s a symbol of status and respect.

Take the example of the silverback gorilla: all that gray hair on their back gives them the authority to make decisions for the group! Wolf leaders, elephant mothers, and older dolphins are all instances where nature favors age.

Why, then, are humans obsessed with youth? From creams that remove wrinkles to references like “well-maintained” (as if we were a car!), we are told repeatedly that being younger is somehow better.

Personally, growing older has taught me a few things, and I wish I could go back in time and share them with my younger self. However, that’s not possible unless we invent a time machine, so I’ll list them here and you can take what you will.

To begin with, don’t obsess over beauty. Or rather, what society tells you beauty is.

All through my growing up years, I pursued being beautiful even at the cost of my true talents. I underplayed my reading habit, and I acted meek so men would perceive me as “more beautiful.” I have no idea where I received these ideas, but they were debilitating. I wanted to be beautiful so I would be chosen by men, but I never stopped to ask myself: Which man?

It is sad that I desperately wanted to be chosen by someone even as I rejected myself, day in and out. After battling toxic relationships and severe blows to my self-esteem, I realized that the pursuit of beauty has been absolutely useless.

What really helped me during difficult times was my sheer bullheadedness and foolish optimism. Surprisingly, being myself, with gray hair, crooked teeth, and a few extra pounds, is easy to do and has also earned me some beautiful friendships, with men and women alike.

Secondly, age is really just a number.

My dog doesn’t know how old she is, so she is free to act as she pleases. She jumps on beds, goes crazy over sweets, and gets jealous. She runs if she wants and as much as her body allows. It’s easy for her to do all this and more because she doesn’t have that limiting belief called “age.”

Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, conducted an unusual experiment where elderly subjects were asked to live like it was twenty years earlier, in a simulated environment. The men who underwent the experiment supposedly showed improvement in memory, cognition, and much more.

Even if the experiment seems outlandish to you, there’s an important takeaway: How you perceive your age makes a huge difference in how you approach it. So why not approach it with positivity?

A few months ago, I read a very powerful quote, and it made a huge impression on me: Do not regret growing older; it’s a privilege denied to many.

How true! My mind immediately goes to my own father, who passed away before he fulfilled many of his dreams. I am sure he would have welcomed many more years with open arms, warts and all.

For a patient with a terminal illness, each day growing older can only be a blessing, even when the body feels frail. We don’t have to wait for something like this to feel grateful for our age. We have that opportunity each day and in each moment.

You don’t have to ‘maintain’ yourself.

You don’t have to look younger.

You can be thin, overweight, or anything in between or beyond.

Don’t hold yourself back from things you love just because you feel older/younger.

Don’t feel the pressure to age gracefully or anything else that society tells you to do. You have the freedom to age messily if you like. Heck, it’s your life, and it’s in chaos that order is born!

Maybe you don’t have a head full of black hair, but so what? You probably sucked your thumb at six, but you don’t do that anymore, do you? It’s the same thing.

Nostalgia is only helpful if it uplifts you. If it’s taking you on a downward spiral of “how I wish I was that age again!”, then it’s high time you closed that album of old photos. New sunrises and sunsets await you. Make yourself some frothy cold coffee and move on!

There’s nothing that you need to tick off by a certain age. We all have our own trajectories and our own truths to learn. Take inspiration from plants and animals. They don’t strive; they just are and their lives pan out beautifully! Be courageous enough to own your messy self and your messy life.

September 5, 2022
How Weight and Food Obsessions Disconnect Us and Why This Is So Harmful

“We are hard-wired to connect with others, it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it, there is suffering.” ~Brené Brown

I was inducted into diet culture in my early teens and then into the health and fitness industry in my early thirties, when my “fitness journey” had finally really taken off, and I ultimately became a personal trainer and nutrition and wellness coach.

Once we’ve given enough years of our life to diet culture, many of us begin to recognize the ways that it’s harming us and all the things it’s stealing from us.

Peace of mind. Self-worth and self-trust. Mental, emotional, and physical health and well-being.

My grandmother’s cookies.

The ability to just eat and enjoy food without fear.

Self-respect.

Body trust.

But we don’t notice all the ways “health and fitness” are promoted in our culture and how they do the same thing. And there are so many other things it steals from us that we often don’t think about or notice.

One of the biggest examples of this for me, and the women I work with, was connection.

Connection with myself and connection with others.

I didn’t start losing my ability to connect because of my induction into diet culture. That started earlier as a result of growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father.

But those industries preyed on it, fueled it, flamed it, and then ran away with it for decades.

Feeling connected is a core human need. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, love and belonging are right up there after things like food, water, and safety.

We are hardwired to connect.

Recent research has suggested that the brain processes the pain of feeling disconnected or rejected the same way it processes physical pain. Nearly every aspect of our health and well-being relies on connection.

And while it may seem like we’re constantly connected, especially now through things like social media or video calls, it’s not actually the case.

Loneliness has been on the rise, worldwide.

Chatting about what food we should or shouldn’t eat; commiserating over how much we hate our bodies, how much weight we gained, the latest diet attempt we just failed; bragging about how we did in the gym, how much weight we lost, how many steps we took, or how “clean” we’re eating—this isn’t connection. It’s not connecting with others, and it’s definitely not connecting with ourselves.

In fact, those things keep us from being able to connect with ourselves because we’re so focused on controlling external “shoulds.”

We may form friendships around those things, but they aren’t based on genuine connections.

Curating the picture-perfect Instagram feed, gathering around mutually hated or demonized “others,” and sharing memes or videos of the latest TikTok trend are also not the same as real, genuine human connections.

It’s all just filling space with mindless, external distractions.

It’s not truly allowing ourselves to be raw, real, and vulnerable. To be seen, heard, and valued for who we uniquely are as individuals—not just the perfectly curated image we present to the world but the messy, raw, and real parts we try so hard to hide.

The parts we fear make us most undeserving of love and belonging.

I certainly hid behind many of those things. I used them as a cover, as a tool to hide behind. A mask. A role I played, behind which I could feel (somewhat) safely tucked away and protected.

My “passion for health and fitness” allowed me to play the badass.

(In reality, I was scared all the time.)

It allowed me to play the inspirational “success” story.

(In reality, I was terrified of putting an ounce of weight back on because I desperately craved the praise and validation I was receiving. And it was destroying my mental, emotional, and physical health and well-being).

The strong, fearless, confident “fitness freak” that could do anything she put her mind to.

(Which, in reality, hid the fact that I was so scared and emotionally fragile and felt so broken that I needed the physical strength I could build through exercise just to get through the day.)

I was good at these roles. I loved these roles, at least in the early years.

Just be what people expected. Be what I’d seen get celebrated in others. Easy, right? Sure, until it isn’t.

The longer I wore the mask, the more it started to hurt.

The harder I worked to keep up those appearances, to maintain that external image of perfection through my body and what I was eating, the more damage it was doing.

Externally, I was doing everything “right.”

In reality? I ended up a binge eater, bulimic, clinically depressed, and living with generalized anxiety disorder and panic attacks. For many reasons, not the least of which because I was completely disconnected—from myself, my body, and from others.

I was so focused on trying to be something I thought I was supposed to be, so I’d be liked, admired, impressive, that I lost who I was and what I needed.

I lost what truly mattered to me and in life.

I lost the ability to trust myself, to trust others, to let them in and truly see me.

In fact, I was terrified of being really seen.

Because I didn’t like myself and I didn’t believe anyone else would either if they knew the real me.

So I hid behind what my body looked like. My external strength. The image I built.

Holy cow, it got exhausting. And soul-crushing.

You simply cannot simultaneously spend your life worried about what other people think about you (or your body), trying to micro-manage and control the image you project, and also be truly connected to yourself and others in any meaningful way.

Because in order to keep up those appearances, you have to actively work to hide parts of yourself—large parts of yourself that you’re terrified will be seen if you dare take off the mask.

If you’re actively hiding parts of yourself, you’re not able to truly feel seen, heard, and valued… because you are hidden away. Locked in some dark, dusty corner of your inner world, and in my case, stuffed down with food.

After a while, I didn’t even remember who I was. My identity became so wrapped up in who I thought I was (a worthless failure who was completely undeserving of love or acceptance) and who I was trying to be (the perfect, badass inspiration) to hide it, that I was lost.

And completely disconnected. From myself and others.

What I wanted or needed didn’t matter because my entire existence was being driven by fear and the disconnection that causes.

Fear of rejection and abandonment if I stopped playing the role.

Fear of weight gain and not looking “good enough.” Fear of not being good enough. Fear of what the binge eating was doing to my health. Fear of what would happen if I stopped micro-managing every morsel of food I ate and just trusted myself with food.

Fear of judgment.

And every time I turned around, there were diet, “health and wellness” cultures swooping in and stoking those fears.

Eventually, I recognized that I couldn’t keep it up. I couldn’t keep playing the role. I was too tired, and it had completely broken me. I couldn’t keep caring about trying to be impressive or accepted. I had to start caring about being healthy and at peace with myself.

In order to do that, I needed to find my way back to myself. I needed to shut out the garbage that was keeping me disconnected and learn how to connect.

First with myself, because how could I ever truly connect with others if I didn’t even know who I was when I wasn’t playing the role?

And how could I heal all that weight and food stuff if I stayed in the fear and obsession that kept me so disconnected from myself?

I couldn’t.

So I started working on being present with myself, not an easy feat when you don’t much like yourself. But required, nonetheless.

I started getting curious and practiced connecting with my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my needs… my inner world.

Who was I, really?

What really mattered to me in life?

Forget what I thought I should eat or do… what did I need?

Was I really put here to spend my life hating myself, obsessing over these things that are destroying me, distrusting myself, and fearing real, meaningful connection with others?

What if I could find a way to unconditionally accept myself and my body? How would that change the way I treated it and showed up in the world?

What did I want to eat? Forget what I was “supposed to” eat; what did I want? How were the foods I was eating making me feel? How did I want to feel in my body?

Forget what it was supposed to look like or weigh; how did I want it to feel to live in? How were my thoughts and conditioned patterns with food and exercise impacting that? Were they helping or harming? How could I learn to change them if they weren’t?

And I started practicing being more intentional with my thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Intentionally making choices that were loving and kind, that helped me feel better, in general and about myself. Anything that wasn’t helping me live or feel better, and more connected with myself, could have no place in my world anymore.

Once I started feeling deeply connected with myself and my body, I slowly started working on learning to connect with others.

That’s still something I find difficult and am learning to do, but I’m still practicing. In baby steps.

Because what I learned when I started reconnecting with myself was how much living with an alcoholic father impacted me as an adult.

It taught me that not only is the world scary, but people are. They’re scary and unpredictable. It also created abandonment issues, and it’s where the fear of not being good enough, and the feeling that I needed to play a role to be loved or accepted, had actually begun. No wonder I had so much trouble connecting.

I share this story because I’ve come to realize that most of us have an underlying fear around not being good enough that started in childhood for one reason or another. And those predatory industries sneak into every corner of our world, capitalizing on our fear with broken promises that do nothing but make things worse.

The weight and food obsessions are a diversion.

A socially acceptable, surface-level distraction that keeps us so externally focused and consumed that we spend most of our adult lives not even knowing that we’re disconnected—or that we’re living in fear and we’re just trying to “fix it” by making ourselves feel more socially acceptable.

All while disconnecting us more and more. From ourselves and others.

Because we’re hiding behind diversions and masks.

Well, my mask is finally off.

Under it, I have belly rolls. I have wrinkles. I have gray hair. I dye it because I prefer dark hair, but sometimes I put it off and rock a solid skunk stripe of gray down the middle of my head.

Like all bodies, mine changes.

None of that means I let myself go. It means I let myself just be.

I’ve overcome a lot of things in my life, but still struggle with some others.

I screw up a lot, even fail sometimes. Often, actually.

I’m exceptionally good at some things and full-on suck at even more.

I can’t do everything myself. Sometimes I need help and support. I’m still not very good at asking for it, but I’m working on it.

All of that simply means that like you, I’m human. And I cannot connect with myself or anyone else if I’m trying so hard to be impressive that I’m not being real.

So I don’t anymore.

May 26, 2022
Discovering Pleasure in Movement Instead of Exercising from Fear

“The choice that frees or imprisons us is the choice of love or fear. Love liberates. Fear imprisons.” ~Gary Zukav

I come from a family of runners. When I was a young girl, my father would rouse us out of bed on the weekends to run the three-mile par-course at the local park, competing with my siblings for who could do the most sit-ups at the stations along the route. We would end the event with a bunch of chocolate eclairs from the local 7-11 as a reward.

As benign as this story may be, it describes a pattern of connection between exercise and food that, by my late teens, became a rigid and dominating force in my life.

The rules were clear: if you run or swim, you’re allowed to eat ice cream (my favorite treat); if you burn enough calories each day, you are a valuable human being who deserves to be on the planet and feel good about yourself. These beliefs crept in and took hold in my mind and became a kind of religion, complete with rules and a doctrine, as well as self-inflicted emotional punishments for deviation.

As many of us do, I received messages from the world about needing to control my body and food.

One family member told me that “making friends with my hunger” was an admirable power I should strive to achieve. Another time a complete stranger hit on me in a bar and when I declined to talk to him further, he said he thought at first I was “fat” (or maybe “phat”?) but now decided I was just “large.” I guess one was a compliment and the other an insult, but I found both mortifying.

In a strange way, I think becoming bulimic saved me from this rigidity. If I ate too much and didn’t feel like exercising, I had another way to repent of my apostasy: I could always purge. I read somewhere that people with bulimia can be described as “failed anorexics,” and maybe this was true for me.

By the time I reached my early twenties, I had made great strides in healing my eating disorder through psychotherapy, taking a deep dive into spiritual practices like meditation, and tuning into bodily wisdom and intuition. But my inner critic continued to torture me with demands for intense exercise.

I gained more weight than I ever had before as I let go of the most dangerous part of the eating disorder—the purging—yet it was more difficult to surrender the last line of defense between me and the fat, ugly, undisciplined mess I was sure I was doomed to become.

One of my mentors made a gentle suggestion that I give up exercise completely. I thought she was out of her mind! Her suggestion posed a threat to my ego’s fragile illusion of control over my body, so I pretended to entertain the idea but secretly shoved it away.

Eventually, though, I took a good, raw look at the state of my body and mind. I had chronic shin splints from high school and college sports that had never fully healed; my body was always hurting as a result of developing an autoimmune disorder; I had come to hate exercise; and outside of the ephemeral moments of peace I found during meditation, I was depressed and anxious.

It was time to put things on the line and test out the radical new approach to self-love, of not exercising. So I decided that I wouldn’t exercise unless my body asked for it. For-real asked for it, not obeying the dictates of mental compulsion.

I waited.

One month passed.

The first month was the hardest. Lots of self-criticism emerged, as well as fears about gaining weight. I breathed and talked to friends, did manual work cleaning houses (my gig at the time), journaled, meditated, prayed to a feminine divine presence whose wisdom I had begun to trust—if only just a little bit.

Then the feelings came. Lots of feelings. Crying, memories of things I had forgotten about from a childhood riddled with trauma and loss, fear about the future. Feelings of shame about my eating disorder, my body, my lack of accomplishments despite a higher education.

The second month.

I started to notice more pleasant feelings. Pockets of peace and well-being, even moments of joyful laughter began to open like surprise packages from myself. Without exercise, my days became slower, more meandering and unstructured, and I felt free for the first time since I was quite young.

The third month.

I became aware of an effervescent feeling inside my legs, a bubbly, tingly sensation. I asked myself—what the heck was that? Then it came to me, my body wanted to move!!

That day I took the most delicious walk in Golden Gate Park, not having any agenda about where I was going or how long I’d walk for. I found a grove of eucalyptus trees that shrouded me in complete silence, the kind of silence that is a palpable presence against your skin, like a hug, and I sat down in the middle of the grove and wept with joy. In that moment, I knew I was going to be okay.

In that moment, I didn’t care how big or small my body was. I just wanted more of this moving-for-pleasure, this moving that comes from deep within. Moving because I’m in a body that wants to express itself with joy, grief, play, and all the emotions in between.

That’s what happens when we stop pushing ourselves from a place of fear—fear of losing control, gaining weight, and not being good enough. We eventually feel pulled by a sense of love—for ourselves, for our bodies, and for the deeply satisfying and invigorating act of moving.

Did I ever feel “fat” again and try to force myself to run to make the “feeling” go away? Or suffer an attack from my inner critic? Yes, of course.

But what I discovered was that the journey out of an overexercising pattern doesn’t come from listening to the same old toxic and relentless demand for exercise. I had to rediscover the deep and spontaneous source of my body’s own desire to move in order to begin to heal.

Once I found that natural aliveness, even though the old fearful and manipulative thoughts preyed on my mind from time to time, they didn’t have as much power as before, and I could hear another, kind and compassionate voice, stemming from deep-body-listening.

My practice after that was to wait for that tingly bubbly feeling in my legs, which usually happened every four days or so, and use that sensation as a guide. Then I would take my bus pass, put on my running shoes, and walk or run as far or as little as I wanted.

Sometimes I made it miles to Ocean Beach and sat on the wall meditating, then took the bus back. Other times I just went to my favorite grove of trees and prayed and cried and felt so incredibly lucky to have listened to the small, quiet voice bubbling up from within.

August 22, 2021