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145: Body Positivity: Make Peace With Your Body as It Changes · The Everyday Awesome Project

• 0:27
  Samantha Pruitt: Hello, beautiful humans.
• 0:29
  Samantha Pruitt: Sam Pruitt here doing a solo pod this week while my girl Polly is climbing up and down mountains across the world on Trail Mont Blanc.
• 0:40
  Samantha Pruitt: I am there with her in spirit, but here today with you guys as she's on that epic journey.
• 0:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Today I want to talk about something that's been rolling around in my brain for a hot second.
• 0:53
  Samantha Pruitt: And I'm wondering how many of you can relate since you clicked on listen to this.
• 0:58
  Samantha Pruitt: The topic must have piqued your curiosity.
• 1:03
  Samantha Pruitt: Body positivity.
• 1:06
  Samantha Pruitt: Body positivity.
• 1:08
  Samantha Pruitt: First of all, what the hell is it?
• 1:10
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, it's a social movement and a personal mindset, encouraging people to accept and love all body types, challenging society's unrealistic toxic beauty standards, and instead focusing on health, mental and physical, and self-care, with the goal of promoting inclusivity of all human sizes, shapes, colors, genders, ages, and abilities, including normalizing our body's functions.
• 1:44
  Samantha Pruitt: So you might have been watching in the last, I don't know, three to five years or so.
• 1:48
  Samantha Pruitt: There's been quite a bit of this online, people in this movement speaking up and really trying to create a conversation about it, which I think is great.
• 1:57
  Samantha Pruitt: Long overdue.
• 1:59
  Samantha Pruitt: Long overdue.
• 2:01
  Samantha Pruitt: And then there's something else called body neutrality, which I didn't actually even know was a thing, except I've been practicing it for a long time.
• 2:11
  Samantha Pruitt: I didn't know it had a name.
• 2:13
  Samantha Pruitt: Body neutrality is a newer approach, asking us to focus on what our body can do rather than what our body looks like.
• 2:24
  Samantha Pruitt: Saying that our appearance shouldn't have, or should have minimal effect, that is, upon our life experience rather than dictating it.
• 2:34
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, unfortunately, all of this is challenging because humanity has marginalized people of various color, shape, size, sex, age, and ability forever.
• 2:47
  Samantha Pruitt: And most of us individuals lay on even more of that self-same, self-judgment, trying to conform to the standards of the social construct of beauty.
• 3:00
  Samantha Pruitt: Now we should all care about this, at least I think we should all care about this, and about how we and the people we love relate to their bodies, because our body is our true home.
• 3:15
  Samantha Pruitt: We are all alive because we get to inhabit this body.
• 3:21
  Samantha Pruitt: In fact, our only true possessions, our only true possessions are this body and our actions.
• 3:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Our only true possessions are this body and our actions.
• 3:36
  Samantha Pruitt: When we're born and we're entering life, this body that we drop into allows us to grow, to learn, to develop, to experience and to fully become us.
• 3:51
  Samantha Pruitt: It's an ongoing project in this body.
• 3:55
  Samantha Pruitt: When we die, it's in this body that is decided when, at least in most circumstances, and on our last breath, it is this body that we leave.
• 4:07
  Samantha Pruitt: Also, it's scientifically proven that how we live and treat this body moment to moment, decision to decision, action to action, greatly decides how this one precious body that we get to live in will function.
• 4:23
  Samantha Pruitt: Our body parts, brain, muscles, bones, heart, organs, our complex body systems, all eleven of them: cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, ingumentary, lymphatic, muscular, skeletal, nervous, reproductive, respiratory, urinary.
• 4:46
  Samantha Pruitt: This body is amazing.
• 4:51
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, personally, I don't know if you can relate to this, but personally, I bought into both the societal and media idea about what bodies were supposed to look like most of my life.
• 5:06
  Samantha Pruitt: And that how my body functioned wasn't that important, but how it looked was.
• 5:13
  Samantha Pruitt: When I was young, I punished my body for the way that it was, or sometimes the way that it wasn't, and worked hard to separate my mind from my body.
• 5:25
  Samantha Pruitt: My beliefs, my experiences, my relationship to self were not compassionate and not loving.
• 5:32
  Samantha Pruitt: And the world around me further solidified these toxic ideas and behaviors by normalizing comparison, superficiality, and by placing external values on myself and the humans around based on appearance rather than substance.
• 5:48
  Samantha Pruitt: So by the time I was an adult and actually raising my own child, I started to understand how cruel and ridiculous all of this was and how frankly unhumane these standards were.
• 6:02
  Samantha Pruitt: I started to break free emotionally from the chains of perfection and appearance as I discovered athletics for the first time as an adult in my late 20s.
• 6:16
  Samantha Pruitt: I gradually shifted my relationship towards my body as a performance-based health and status-based concept.
• 6:26
  Samantha Pruitt: That was about 28 years ago.
• 6:30
  Samantha Pruitt: Let's just say it's been a long road of both healing and of self-investment.
• 6:36
  Samantha Pruitt: I had an autoimmune illness at 30, and that was a forced reckoning.
• 6:44
  Samantha Pruitt: My years of separation from my body, and in fact, rejection of my body had created disease.
• 6:52
  Samantha Pruitt: At age 30, I had a choice to continue to abuse and reject this incredible home, my body that I lived in, or to work to integrate all of my parts back together and heal my body, my brain, my spirit.
• 7:10
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, you know what happened because I'm still alive and you're listening to this, and in fact, I'm thriving.
• 7:16
  Samantha Pruitt: And why, how?
• 7:20
  Samantha Pruitt: That's a lot of years and a lot of work, but basically, bottom line, I self-invested.
• 7:27
  Samantha Pruitt: Now most days I relate to my badass aging body with love, with gratitude, and with deep respect.
• 7:36
  Samantha Pruitt: But as any human rolling around in the deep of culture and media and community engagement and all the things that we do with our obligations out in the world, I do occasionally fall back into judging my body's appearance, wishing it were different or overcriticizing it for, you know, the discomfort I might feel in certain clothes or next to certain people or doing certain things.
• 7:59
  Samantha Pruitt: But now I catch myself quickly and I call bullshit on myself because I do subscribe to body positivity and I do value all humans, shapes, sizes, sexes, colors, ages, abilities.
• 8:17
  Samantha Pruitt: I stand for equality and for body freedom, mine included.
• 8:26
  Samantha Pruitt: The massive unlock for me was breaking my back at CrossFit last year after completing another Iron Man race at the age of 56.
• 8:38
  Samantha Pruitt: This time I had 26 years of experience developing, training, learning about, knowing about, and in fact, loving my body.
• 8:47
  Samantha Pruitt: So when it came time to rebuild again, I saw through all the imperfections of my well-used, gracefully aging body, and I saw the truth of how this body not only has saved my life over and over, but how it supports my goals, my dreams, how it has carried me thousands and thousands of miles through this incredible life journey I am on.
• 9:19
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, recently now, at age 57, I partnered with my body again to not just survive, but to truly, truly crush the 253-mile solo hike on the John Muir Trail with 35 pounds on my back.
• 9:38
  Samantha Pruitt: Again, I partnered with my body this time.
• 9:42
  Samantha Pruitt: Completely immersed in the wild for 18 and a half days alone.
• 9:46
  Samantha Pruitt: I had zero attachment to how I looked.
• 9:50
  Samantha Pruitt: Zero.
• 9:52
  Samantha Pruitt: Instead, I was totally connected to how my body was operating, carrying the load, enduring the miles, conquering the mountain peaks, utilizing the fuel, recovering day after day after day to continue to meet the challenges.
• 10:10
  Samantha Pruitt: And truth be told, my body blew my mind.
• 10:16
  Samantha Pruitt: So now, as I have focused on my next physical and mental challenge, I'm running 100 miles across the Arizona Trail in April.
• 10:26
  Samantha Pruitt: I do see myself so much more honesty and more real and more beautiful than ever before.
• 10:33
  Samantha Pruitt: Because my body, like your body, is home.
• 10:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Beyond the concepts of body positivity and body neutrality, both of which I support, is body, mind integration.
• 10:52
  Samantha Pruitt: Here is where your physical body, your mind, and your spirit become one, no longer detached or separate.
• 11:00
  Samantha Pruitt: It takes consistent self-investing in all three of these areas, knowing that the body is your home of your entire existence.
• 11:12
  Samantha Pruitt: To feel whole and to recognize and care for yourself in a way that allows you to reach your dreams, maximize your full potential, this must become your reality, driving your thoughts, your decisions, your actions.
• 11:28
  Samantha Pruitt: You're no longer separated from your physical body.
• 11:33
  Samantha Pruitt: We will not disrespect ourselves, we will not mistreat ourselves, judge or punish ourselves.
• 11:41
  Samantha Pruitt: When we finally start to see and feel our body as us, not a separate thing to numb, avoid, or to put down, we'll recognize that our body is everything.
• 11:53
  Samantha Pruitt: It is in fact the ultimate gift we received upon birth.
• 12:00
  Samantha Pruitt: We are only alive because of this body.
• 12:06
  Samantha Pruitt: Our only true possession is this body and our actions.
• 12:13
  Samantha Pruitt: I urge you to self-invest by listening to, looking at, being with, making peace with, and empowering your body.
• 12:25
  Samantha Pruitt: I promise you it is beautiful.
• 12:29
  Samantha Pruitt: You are beautiful.
• 12:31
  Samantha Pruitt: And in your body, deep in your body, self love is waiting to be set free.