Latest / Unlearning Beautiful / Ep. 15 Can GLP-1s Really Fix How You Feel About Your Body?
Transcript
- Kristina Bruce: If weight loss actually solved body image struggles, we wouldn't see so many thin women who still hate their bodies. Today, I want to talk about GLP-1 drugs, not to judge anyone taking them, but to explore this question. If these drugs change your body, do they actually change how you feel about yourself? Because I think that's the underlying question people are hoping that they'll solve. All right, let's dive in. 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. think the first thing that we need to address when talking about GLP-1 drugs is the health piece. Because originally these drugs were sold to help regulate blood sugar levels. And then they find out that there's a effect of weight loss for many people. And now they're being marketed as a weight loss drug. But here's the thing about these drugs. They just manage the symptom. They don't actually address the root. cause of it. And that's always been my personal issue with using pharmaceutical drugs to address chronic health conditions that are tied up in a lot of factors that relate to lifestyle. And lifestyle factors are harder to address, especially when a lot of the issues at their core are really mental and emotional. We know that there are changes that people can make to regulate their blood sugar levels that don't involve taking a drug. I recently read the book Glucose Revolution by Jesse and Choe Spee. I was really curious about it and I actually really liked the book because it was quite weight neutral and it was really just giving the research on what worked to regulate glucose levels and Through her findings, many people have been able to reverse type 2 diabetes and manage their blood sugar levels. So we know that there are other alternatives besides taking the drug. I really like the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza. He has spent a lot of time looking at how when we are living in what he calls a state of survival, so when we are living chronically under stress, worry, upset essentially emotional mental state that it absolutely has an impact on our overall health, especially chronic health conditions. He has shown that when we're able to come out of living in survival mode, and he does this a lot through meditations that he's created, we're able to down-regulate genes that create disease. and the body's able to come back into a homeostasis and a balance, resolving a lot of those chronic health conditions. I believe the work that he's doing is really on the forefront of new medicine. I think he's a pioneer in this field. I love that it's research heavy. taking a drug isn't really cutting it when it comes to truly resolving our health because we are a holistic system. Our mental emotional state absolutely impacts our physical state and I don't think enough attention is being given to that. We also know that there are many different health behavior changes that can be made that can improve these chronic health conditions. In my previous episode, episode 12, Beyond the BMI, Weight Loss Myths, I shared a lot of the research on the positive impacts of health behavior changes on chronic health conditions associated with weight. that we can implement. So I don't see how taking this drug is actually going to be an improvement of health. Also, there's a cost to it, because while it's quote unquote helping one area, it's creating a host of other poor health effects as well, like the laundry list of nausea and vomiting and serious risks like pancreatitis or kidney injury. I know a lot of people are coming off of these drugs because of that. I are we actually getting healthier taking these drugs or just trading one set of problems for another? So putting the health piece aside, another popular reason why people are taking these drugs is because they say that it silences the food noise that's in their head. And if you are living with lots of thoughts and stress around food and eating, I can only imagine the relief that can come by taking a drug that quiets that food noise. The drug acts like a mute button, but again, it does not actually heal the root cause of the food noise. It's only suppressing the symptoms. It's not actually fixing the broken relationship with food and body that created the food noise in the first place. We have a lot of food noise because we have grown up in a culture that is really disordered with our eating. We don't have food noise when we're little children. It comes from learning these ideas about good and bad ways of eating. You shouldn't eat that. You should eat this. Slowly learning to distrust our own food cues and signals and spending years of dieting and trying to control your weight is going to create food noise. I know for myself when I was actively suppressing my weight. I was thinking about food probably 50 to 70 % of my entire day. That was a direct cause of me being super fixated on weight and super fixated on food. So I could have taken a drug to quiet that food noise, but that would have not dealt with what was generating the food noise in the first place. The thing that really mattered was I needed to be able to stop dieting and I had to heal my relationship with food and with my body, which a GLP-1 drug is simply just not going to do. It's going to give that temporary relief. And it's totally understandable, again, why people would want that. But it's not ultimately going to be the solution. And the thing is that we're already seeing that when people come off of these drugs, the benefits that they have from it start to wane. And they wane over a year's time or maybe even two. So then, People are saying, you have to take the drug for your entire life. And knowing the negative effects that the drug also has and then being dependent on it and also realizing it's not actually curing any of the root causes of the symptoms is that what we want to be doing for our whole life is taking the drug when we're not dealing with what's underneath. And so the third factor that comes up for why people are wanting to take these drugs is They want to feel better physically in their body from the weight loss. That's totally understandable. It makes sense. If you lose weight, the conclusion is I'm going to feel lighter. I'm going to be more mobile. I can do more things. But I want to dig into this a little bit more because we know that people who are also in thin bodies will often say, I feel fat or they feel heavy. And so we know that How you actually feel in your body is also a state of being. It's not just the physical weight. I know this from when I was thin, and I would have days where I would work out and I would feel light and energetic, and I could have swore that I lost weight, only to find out that I didn't and I was upset. And to the contrary, I would have days where I felt sluggish and heavy and slow, and I could have sworn that I gained weight. but I didn't. So how we are feeling mentally and emotionally absolutely can impact how we feel in our body. Now, I'm not saying that if you physically have more weight on your body that it doesn't impact your mobility. I know that when I gained weight, couldn't fold as far forward in a yoga posture like I used to. And I remember that that upset me. I hated it. I hated the feeling. of the roles of my stomach against my body. But why did I hate that? Like, why did I feel, quote unquote, physically uncomfortable in my body because of the stomach rolls? Was it actually the stomach rolls or was it the way that I was perceiving the stomach rolls? And I'm going to say that it's the latter. I had a lot of negative thinking about those stomach rolls. See how we view fat is completely conditioned by our culture. We have grown up in a culture that hates fat, detests it, that associates negative characteristics of a person with being fat. It's one of the first insults usually that kids throw around at each other on the playground. We have grown up swimming in waters of a culture that hates fat and praises thinness. So how you are going to feel with fat on your body, do you think it's gonna be positive? It's gonna be negative because we have such a negative association with it. So how are you gonna feel good in your body if there's fat on it, if all you've learned is that this is a bad thing? Because really the body is neutral. So if it's fat or if it's thin, it has no inherent quality except what we give it. If bending over, if there's a little bit of stomach in the way, that might feel annoying, but if you didn't see it as a bad thing, you could adjust around it. I mean, there's many things that we can do in our life that are annoying, like I can't reach the top shelf in my kitchen, I need a ladder to get it, we adjust. But because there's such a negative association with that, I think it's really hard to be clear on saying, yeah, no, it really is just the fat in my body and that's why I'm feeling uncomfortable. We have to look at it in the greater context. And also we need to look at, what are we doing physically with our bodies? Because we can absolutely increase mobility, strength, endurance, feeling stronger and healthier in our body, even if it's in a larger body, through physical movement. And I know this, and I'm sure you had the experience yourself of exercising. for a couple of weeks and feeling a lot better in your body, being more mobile, and yet your weight didn't really change that much or not significantly. So we absolutely can feel differently in our bodies with fat on it by actually focusing on increasing mobility and strength and also changing how we view our body. Another factor too is our mental emotional state, emotions have a weight. I can't remember the name of the book, but I had read it at one point where the author was talking about that you can actually physically weigh emotion. They can measure it. And the denser, heavier emotions like sadness, grief, shame are very heavy. So if you're feeling a lot of that in your body, especially if you look at your body and then you start to feel those emotions and you associate it with the body, you're gonna feel pretty terrible in your body and not like how you feel in it. And so changing the state of how you feel, because if you're feeling happy and joyful, you're probably not even really thinking about your body. You're just in the moment, you're with other people, you're enjoying what you're doing. Notice that when we're in a good state, we don't have a problem with it. It's only when we're feeling negative emotions or we're feeling some discomfort, we end up blaming our body. But again, I would question, is it really the physical body or is it something else? Now, I know there are people who will say, I lost weight and I feel so much better in my body. Well, again, I have to say, what did you do to lose the weight? What changed? Because it didn't happen in a vacuum. There were things that were done, exercise, change in diet, change in sleep. And also too, when we lose weight, we get complimented. We are growing up in a culture, we live in a culture where we are having positive associations with weight loss, even for ourselves. So if we hold the belief that fat is bad and ugly, our minds are going to tell us we are better. We look better if we lose weight. So yes, I understand. There can be more physical mobility. Literally, I can bend forward more if I have less stomach in the way. But the emotional component to how I feel about that, it's not the body itself. It's the way that my mind is perceiving it. And we can increase how we feel in our body through changes in our movement and our emotional state. Lastly, I think one of the biggest drivers is this feeling to be safe and to belong because in this culture that we openly and blatantly see how poorly we treat people and judge people who are in larger bodies. Go to the comment section of some social media account where there's a celebrity who has just a little bit of pudge on her stomach or a little roll on her back. and the vitriol that you will read is awful. We are picking that up and our survival system says, I am not safe, I am going to be judged, I am going to be ostracized if I gain weight. And it wasn't that long ago that when we got kicked out of the tribe, it meant high risk of physical death. That is running through us. We are so afraid. of being ostracized and judged by other people that being thin feels safe. And also we hold that bias ourselves, so we're judging ourselves. And so we think, well, if I just lose weight, then I'm gonna meet the criteria. I'm gonna be safe, I'm gonna belong, and I'm gonna feel okay about myself because we have adopted these beliefs that says, if I'm thin, I am disciplined, I am healthy, I am good, I am worthy, and if I gain weight, I'm undisciplined, I'm lazy, I let myself go, everything negative. We have an extremely black or white belief about weight in our culture. And so we have adopted that. So losing weight feels safe and we can start to feel better about ourselves. Except I am sure you have had the experience of losing weight or being thin and still not feeling that great about yourself. That was exactly what happened for me. And I know it's happened with clients that I have worked with. I looked back on photos of myself when I was thin and I did not feel confident. I did not feel worthy and good enough, even though I looked the way that my mind told me looking that way would make me feel all those things, except I didn't. If it really was true that losing weight and being thin was going to be the thing that would make you feel safe, secure, confident, and worthy, then you will never feel insecure while you're thin. And yet we know that that's not the case. You wouldn't see models feeling insecure about themselves, and they do. So it can't be that it's the weight itself that is going to make you feel safe. It can temporarily do that. but not for long. And if you need a drug to rely on that, it's a crutch. If it gets taken away, if you have to get off of it because the negative effects are way too intense to live with, then what are you left with? Well, it's a good thing actually if it gets taken away because it brings you to a point where you say, well, maybe I need to actually look at the root cause of this. I need to go into myself and see that I need to unlearn. everything that I've been taught about fat and my worth, my appearance, because it's all learned. When we are children, we know our inherent worth and value. We don't have anything negative about our bodies. We absorb it from the culture. We absorb it from our family. And it's heavy and it weighs on us. And then it starts to run a cycle where we are on a hamster wheel for the rest of our lives, trying to maintain the small body size. in order for us to feel okay. The best you will ever get is temporary relief and a lot of stress of trying to keep it going. So unlearning that is actually the ticket to freedom. You don't need a drug for it. You need to actually see that the worthiness and the goodness and the feeling okay comes from within right where you are. So while some people may be taking this drug and that is the journey that they wanna go on, that is totally fine. In fact, some people may need to go on it to have the experience of this didn't do it either. It again, did it temporarily like every other diet in the past, but it wasn't the answer. And some people may choose to stay on it for the rest of their lives, just like some people are gonna choose to diet for the rest of their lives. And that's okay. But if you're listening to this and you are one of the people who are like, I don't wanna keep. dieting for the rest of my life. I don't want to be taking this drug. I am telling you that there is a way that you can feel good in your body as you are reconnect with yourself. Quiet the food noise by actually healing the relationship to food in your body and returning to your own inherent self-worth. That is what I do with my clients in coaching. So if you're new to this, I invite you to download my free guide to body piece. The link will be in the description below. And if you want to explore what coaching together could look like, how I can support you in this process, you can also check out the link to my coaching below as well. All right. Thanks for listening to this today. I hope it was helpful and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. 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 this 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.