Latest / Unlearning Beautiful / Ep. 18 Summer Body Anxiety: How to Reclaim Your Enjoyment this Summer and Feel at Peace in Your Skin
Transcript
- Kristina Bruce: Here in the Northern Hemisphere, spring is upon us. The air is warming, the flowers are blooming, and after a long winter, you might be feeling your spirits rising. That is until you realize it's time to get out that summer wardrobe and dread sets in. You can no longer hide your body under layers of cozy wool. And unless you want to spend the summer boiling, you'll need to expose some skin. And I get how triggering that can be. So in today's episode, we're going to talk all about summer clothes and summer bodies and how you can feel more comfortable in yours so you can enjoy your summer. Now let's get into today's episode. Welcome to Unlearning Beautiful, a podcast for women tired of trying to look good enough and ready to feel good from within. I'm your host, Christina Bruce, here to help you let go of the pressure to look right or do it all right and reconnect with your inner guidance, your natural worth, and what truly makes you feel fulfilled. Because the freedom you're craving was never in how you look. When it comes to the challenges that we experience with body image and how we're feeling in our bodies during the summer, I feel like there's two different aspects. One is the physical aspect and the other is mental and emotional. I want to begin by talking about the physical. We're talking chafing, sweating, feeling hot and sticky. That's a real experience that we can have in our bodies in the summertime and If you have gone from being in a smaller body to being in a larger body, you might notice that you do feel warmer and things start chafing. Certainly that was my experience. When I finally quit dieting for good and suppressing my weight, I can vividly remember the very first time I was with a friend and we were walking from her house to a restaurant. And by the time we got to the restaurant, my thighs were on fire. And I was So upset. I was so frustrated because that hadn't happened before when I was smaller. But since I had gained weight, my thighs were bigger and they started rubbing together. It's really easy when that happens to want run back to dieting or blame our bodies or blame ourselves. say, ⁓ remember when I was center, I didn't have that issue. In those moments, what can be easy to forget is that When we were dieting and suppressing our weight, that came with a whole other host of challenges too. Feeling constantly stressed, fixated, worried, not allowed to eat what you wanted to eat, et cetera, et cetera. There's a reason why if you're on the body peace path, you moved away from that. Or maybe you're just starting to consider not doing that because it's coming to light. how life-sucking and stressful it can be to constantly be fixated on your body. So if you're in a larger body, well, in the summer, we just need to take care of it. I love wearing those little shorts underneath your dresses so that your thighs don't rub together, or there's those anti-chafing creams like Mega Babe that you can rub on your thighs. It's really simple things that we can do to help ourselves feel better in our body. I know that it's annoying, I know that it can be painful, but it's just a matter of taking care of ourselves. And the truth is, is that no matter what we're doing in life, there's going to be little annoyances. So I'm always going to need a step stool to get up to the highest shelf in my kitchen to grab something because I'm not taller. When we can let go of those frustrations and those what ifs and the blame on the body, It just becomes a real simple thing of making accommodations to help ourselves feel better. And one of the other things that we can do is making sure that we're taking care of our body and feeling good in it. The other day I did yoga and I was really aware of just how much better I feel in my body after I do yoga. I physically feel lighter, I feel stronger, I feel happier, and nothing in my body changed. I could have a different experience of my physical body. So what can you do to make sure that you're physically feeling better in your body? Noticing ways of eating that feel good, ways of movement, sleep, et cetera. You know what it is. It matters. It's important. And doing those little things, especially in the summer that might bring up extra annoyances, can just help mitigate that and make things easier. And also, you need to do what's going to make you feel cooler in the summer. Another point I want to bring up, I just remembered this because I think it's important to say, even when I was at my absolute thinnest, I still suffered the heat. I went to Mexico one summer in July. We'll never do that again. It was awful. Like, I just could not bear it. And yet, there were other people who could. It did not affect them as much as it did me. Just my disposition. Some people like cooler climates. Some people thrive in hotter climates, even in larger bodies. We just have to remember, it can be easy to just blame the body size and say, ⁓ it's something wrong with my body, instead of realizing maybe it is just another factor. But doing what you need to do to keep cool is important. And of course, that's going to mean wearing lighter clothing. It's going to mean wearing t-shirts or tank tops, wearing shorts. And that's where the bigger issue comes up. When we start to feel insecure about the summer, it's really about the fact that we're having to expose our bodies. And that is bringing up a whole host of emotion and insecurity. So I wanna get into the meat of that because when we're fearing the summer or we're anxious about the summer, that's really the crux of it. The physical part, it's annoying, we can deal with it. But the emotional piece, I think that's the bigger piece that comes up for people. We are inundated with this idea of what a quote unquote summer body is. Let me remind you, all bodies are summer bodies because bodies are bodies and bodies are all seasons bodies. But we are marketed with this idea, ⁓ summer's coming up, you gotta get in shape, you gotta have a summer body. And that has a particular look. And in our culture, that is thin, that is muscular. I find this really amusing because I think this idea of a summer body really points out when these fitness companies are saying, ⁓ it's about health. But in the summer, it's not about health, it's about how you look. And I think it's like they're exposing themselves, that that's really what this is all about. Because you can focus on health, but you might not have what is the quote unquote ideal summer body, although you could be perfectly healthy for yourself. It's this idea that I'm gonna be better, I'm gonna look better. It's a collective agreement that we have subconsciously bought into that says, yes, looking this way is what we are gonna call beautiful. But that is made up because throughout history and throughout time in different cultures, ideal bodies have looked different. In some other cultures, being in a larger body is considered more beautiful. In the past, being in a larger body was beautiful. I remember hearing, I want to say it was in the Victorian area, I'm not exactly sure the time period, but they would call the fat on a woman her silken layer. What a nice way to think about it. Now we're just told it's terrible and fat and ugly and we need to do everything to get rid of it. So this idea of a summer body is totally bought into and you don't have to buy into it anymore. What I would like you to do is to take a moment and remember, as a child, did you have any issue with your body? When you were at the beach, were you worried about it? This might have been two, three, four years old. So you might not have a memory of that because I have talked to women who say, yeah, I don't have a memory of me not feeling insecure in my body. But if you don't have that memory, go to the beach, go to a pool and look at little children. They're not pinching their stomachs. They're not wearing oversized sweatshirts. They're just playing. They're having fun. They're loving being in the pool and swimming and experiencing summer. And that is our true nature. That's actually how we all are if we weren't carrying these ideas and beliefs about our bodies that simply are not true. Because that's what's happening now. Summer brings up exposure. Because we're exposing our skin and because there's this idea of a summer body, our mind immediately is going to bring to the surface all of the ideas and beliefs that we have accumulated about bodies. And it's gonna go into comparison mode. It's gonna say, does my body fit the ideal? Am I good enough? Do I look good enough? that could show up in the form of fear of judgment from other people. Being on a beach and then saying, ⁓ my goodness, what are other people thinking about me? Even though we might know logically, most people are just thinking about themselves. But yeah, some people can judge you. So that is real and you probably know it. You've probably had people judge you or you've heard people judge other people. So we know that it exists and we can understand that that is going to come up. There's this fear of judgment. But there's also the beliefs about ourselves. It's how we're judging ourselves. It's this idea that I'm not good enough. I'm not allowed to show my body. It's somehow wrong. It's somehow bad. And we are inundated with these beliefs over and over and over. All you need to do is turn on the TV, listen to a podcast that isn't this one. It's talking about these things. And you're going to hear the judgment. You're going to hear fat is bad. You're going to hear compliments about people losing weight. It's the waters that we're swimming in. But we're carrying this ourselves and it is literally the thing that's taking you away from just being okay in your body even in the summer, even when you're exposing skin. The summer is actually, if you want to choose to take it this way, a prime opportunity to do some work to start to release these beliefs. to start to retrain the nervous system to feel safe in your body because it's bringing it all up to the surface. It's right there for you to look at. And if we start to treat it in a different way and say, okay, I'm gonna use this now to help free myself from this, it can be a very different experience. So what's happening? You're wearing a tank top, you're wearing shorts, you're wearing a bathing suit, whatever it may be for you. Usually the first thing is you have a nervous system response. You start to feel insecure. You start to feel some form of fear. There's a contraction in the body. You feel like you want to hide. You feel like you want to shrink. Okay, well, why is that happening? Could be a memory. So that's being triggered of the time that I was shamed for being. called fat or whatever. I have a belief that says, I'm ugly, I'm not good enough. The response is signaling that we have some programming, some belief, some idea running in the background that is affecting how we're feeling. It's not actually you, it's an idea, it's a program. You can start to notice it and see, okay, I am being affected right now from this belief. And then ask yourself, how would I feel if I didn't have this belief present, if I felt like I was safe, if I felt like my body was okay. And you can try this out. If I had no negative thought about my body right now, how would I feel? And you're just gonna feel okay. You'll feel neutral, you'll feel good, you might even find yourself being more present in the moment. What's really happening when you feel that fear is it's just bringing to the surface these false beliefs and ideas that we have come to see as true about ourselves. Those beliefs and ideas are up to be questioned, to be let go. Another aspect to this is when we have this desire for approval from other people, when we think I need other people to think well of me in order to think I'm okay. And most of us have been trained to live our life this way. And some of us had so baked in, we can't even conceptualize what it would be like if we weren't receiving that approval and validation. Like, how is it possible for me to feel okay in myself without that? Well, it is. It is absolutely possible because I always have to go back to when we're children and I'm always going to bring us back there because that is the purest form of our true self. When we're children, we come into this world in our purest form. It's before. We had any sort of negative experiences and started to create these beliefs and adopt these beliefs about ourselves and about our bodies. We feel okay. When you look at children, they're naturally confident. They don't need somebody to tell them, you're a girl, you're a good boy to feel confident, but they feel okay about themselves before hearing that. So it is naturally an A in us to feel confident and good in ourselves. But we have been taken away from that knowing by focusing our sense of okayness by external validation. Why the summer can bring this up is because it's just going to keep exposing this kind of thing. In this world that has summer bodies and the ideal body, if you're on a beach and you're comparing yourself to others and maybe you're with family who's very self-conscious of their bodies and upholds this idea of thinness and beauty and you don't feel like you fit in and you're wanting their approval, you're going to feel bad and less than if you don't have it. But it's not not having their approval that's causing the pain. It's actually seeking the approval in the beginning. Because if you don't need their approval and you're just okay as you are, you're free. And that's a place that we want to get to because that's where freedom lies. And so this summer can bring up that. Can I be able to let go of the approval of other people? And if I'm getting judged by other people, can I also see that their judgment says nothing about me? Because it's not actually about you. You could swap out any other person who looks just like you, and they're gonna judge that person. So how can it be personal? It's just an image, it's just an idea. All they're doing is they're expressing their belief outward. And the thing about that is when people are judging, you just know that they're also judging themselves. You can't judge somebody else without also having the exact same judgment about yourself. It's painful to have that judgment of yourself. It takes you away from your peace and your freedom. So what you can do this summer is you can start little by little taking that step to wear the tank top or wear the shorts and notice what's coming up. Notice the emotional reaction that's happening, the nervous system response. You might want to ask yourself, what am I believing right now? We have an emotional guidance system that tells us if what we're thinking is true or not, and it's based on how we feel. If we feel bad, it means what we're thinking and believing about ourselves in that moment is not true. If we feel neutral, open, or good, it means that we're in alignment with ourselves. You can test it. Go to the grocery store, you know, wearing the tank top or the shorts. And if you feel the insecurity, just breathe, let yourself know I'm safe and practice who would I be without these negative thoughts? If I didn't have this negative thought here, how would I feel? And it's this matter of shifting our nervous system state and starting to unbelieve these beliefs that we've taken on. And that's really what you do. It's the same fundamental principles for feeling better in your body. It's just that summer is going to bring it up. Summer ends up being a really prime opportunity to do this work. It takes though this intention to reclaim your power back because we can only do it for ourselves. Nobody can give it to us as much as we would like that because as cheesy as this might sound, the sun shines equally on all of us. We are equally all worthy of the enjoyment of summer. So maybe make the summer the one that you reclaim your enjoyment back, that you reclaim your power back from these untrue beliefs. And if you want support to do that, then you can check out my body peace coaching. I have a link in the description below. and you can look at how I can support you through this process to feel more freedom at the end of the summer. And if you're new here or you just kind of want to dip your toe into this idea and you haven't yet got my free guide to body piece, there's also a link in the description where you can get that too. Just remember, you are allowed to enjoy your summer and the only thing that's holding you back from it is ideas that we're believing that are not true. And you can release those question them, let them go, and return to the peace and confidence that is an eight within you. I hope you found this episode helpful today. Look forward to seeing you in the next one. Thanks for listening to Unlearning Beautiful. If this episode resonated with you, follow the show and share it with another woman who's ready to see beauty and herself in a new way. And if you feel moved, leave a rating and review. It will help the show reach more women who need to hear it. Remember. You're already everything you've been trying to become. Enough worthy and free. I'm Christina Bruce. Until next time.