Latest / Many Things with Steph Libby / Body Image, Emotional Eating & Weight Loss

Transcript

Body Image, Emotional Eating & Weight Loss · Many Things with Steph Libby

0:00
Hello.
0:00
Hello.
0:01
Welcome back to Solitary Creature.
0:03
I'm Steph, and I'm journaling the ups and downs of my self growth journey towards living a more mindful, intentional, and fulfilling life.
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I'm just gonna dive right in.
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Last week I talked about body specific to the mind body connection.
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This week I'm talking more about things like weight loss.
0:21
Body image, those kinds of things.
0:23
So if that's at all triggering for you, feel free to skip over this episode and join me again next week, this past week obviously in preparation for this podcast, but my body has been in my mind.
0:34
A lot.
0:34
This past week, our marketing manager was asking us to take selfies and run them through AI and put spooky filters on them for our Halloween newsletter.
0:44
I didn't wanna do that in the first place.
0:46
I think she thought it would be like a really fun work break for us, but it's so fricking busy.
0:53
I didn't wanna waste time on this forced fun activity.
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I hate stuff like that.
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Anyways, I always have.
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I hate icebreaker games and team building exercises.
1:02
I hated college orientation week, but more than anything, I really didn't wanna have to take a selfie.
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I am so tired.
1:09
I'm tired from work.
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I'm tired from life.
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I'm wearing it all over my face.
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My skin has never looked worse.
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I look, I just, I look so tired.
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You can just look at me.
1:19
I have no spark or enthusiasm in my eyes.
1:22
So I thought, okay, I note taking a selfie isn't going to feel good right now, so I'm gonna avoid that part.
1:29
And I'm just gonna find a nice picture of me from when I was back on dating apps like a few years ago and my body has gone through so many changes in the last few years.
1:42
I thought I'm gonna avoid that part, and I'm just gonna find a nice picture of me from a few years ago when I was like on dating apps and stuff.
1:49
What a horrible idea.
1:50
So I found this picture and the AI stuff didn't work, but that's beside the point.
1:56
I looked at this picture of myself and I just thought God, you look so good, Stephanie, like barely recognizable, great skin.
2:03
My makeup was on point.
2:05
So the next day I was like, I haven't worn makeup in a while.
2:08
I've had some issues with my skin, which I'll get into in a minute.
2:10
But I just thought, I'm gonna I'm gonna try wearing some makeup this past weekend.
2:14
And so I did the whole makeup routine and I, when I was looking there, I was like, this isn't too bad.
2:21
Like it's a little rusty.
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'cause like I haven't worn makeup in quite a while.
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But overall, I felt oh, okay, like I don't, I look pretty good.
2:28
I decided to take a selfie to commemorate the occasion, and I was mortified.
2:35
First of all, I already knew I was not gonna look like how I looked in the mirror.
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I know that happens every single time.
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But on top of that, I just thought, wow, like I expected to like.
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Take a picture of myself and compare it against a selfie from a few years ago and be like, pretty similar.
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Pretty similar.
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It was not, it was depressing.
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It was sad.
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I was like, who is this person? I did not recognize the person staring back at me, and I just.
3:00
Felt so bad the rest of the day and I knew I shouldn't feel bad.
3:04
I knew it was not the end of the world.
3:06
It wasn't a big deal, but I think because I've been struggling so much with my body, my skin, all sorts of stuff, it was just really hard not to take it really personally, and just fall into this spiral of just feeling bad for myself.
3:20
My body has gone through so many changes in the last few years and some of it I'm sure is just age and how your body naturally changes every few years.
3:29
People prepare you for getting wrinkles and gray hair as you get older.
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I'm 38 currently, and the photo that I took from a couple years ago, I was like maybe 34 or 35.
3:38
People prepare you for getting wrinkles and gray hair, meaning that those things are talked about a lot in our culture.
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Good or bad, whatever the take is on it.
3:45
But they're at least in the zeitgeist of aging, so when those things start to happen, I wasn't thrown off by it or anything.
3:53
I actually think gray hair is really pretty and a part of me would like to just go full gray by now because I think I might actually be able to pull it off.
4:01
And I like how my hair is turning gray at the temples first It's like giving bread of Frankenstein in a way I've always thought was really cool.
4:08
But the things I can't stand about my body changing are the little but annoying and very persistent things.
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I have this mark on one of my boobs that no one can figure out what it is.
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I'm also getting these little red dots on my arms and on.
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One of my boobs called cherry angios, and they are really annoying.
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And the only way you can get rid of them apparently is by getting them cauterized.
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And that's not going to stop ones from forming.
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And there's really no rhyme or reason why they're popping up now.
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I asked if it was diet or hormone, something I could control and work on, but no, it's just like one of those things that happens.
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It is so beyond frustrating and.
4:46
The last few years, the skin on my face has really changed.
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I've had rosy cheeks most of my life, but my rosacea has really come forward.
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And on top of that, I'm dealing with fungal acne and really dry skin.
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And it seems like anything that's good for one of these conditions is really bad for the others.
5:03
I'm so sick of the trial and errors with products.
5:07
It's expensive.
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It's a lot of waiting around, I feel like.
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I had a really great skincare system that was really working for a few years, and then all of a sudden it just blew up.
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And I remember when it blew up.
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It was New Year's Eve weekend, almost two years ago.
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I was stressed, I had the flu, and I had just gotten this sulfur gel that was supposed to help with my rosacea.
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And I put it on, and the first day I was fine, but my skin was so dry the next day, so I slathered on a facial oil that I used frequently.
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It was not the first time that I used this oil, but it was really itchy.
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And I noticed for the last month or so that when I used that oil, it would be itchy.
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And I just thought that's because my skin is so dry.
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It's winter.
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My skin is always super dry in the winter.
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My skin barrier is probably damaged or something.
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I've used this oil a million times.
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It's probably just my skin or something like something, any, my skin's so dry, anything's going to irritate it.
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But this oil has to be fine.
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'cause I've used it a million times.
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But then the itching turned to burning and it was unbearable.
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My skin felt like it was on fire, so I wash it off and then I had to ice my face just to make the burning itchiness go away.
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And so I left my skin alone for a few days and then I noticed these bumps forming and it took me a few hours of research and I realized it was fungal acne, which is just an internet term for an actual thing that I can pronounce, but it's basically an overproduction of yeast.
6:33
And the only solution I could find was putting antifungal cream, like the kind you used for yeast infections or athlete's foot all over my face.
I had to smear it on.
it was so humiliating.
Here I was dying of the flu hungry because I couldn't eat anything for days, and now I have fungal acne all over my face.
I prayed that it didn't work because I just thought, can I have any dignity right now? Just like the tiniest bit of dignity, but it worked and every few months I have to slather my face in fungal cream.
And in between that I have to test a gajillion products, and usually I have to prioritize the fungal acne over my rosacea or the dryness.
So I haven't been able to wear makeup in two years because I can barely find skincare that doesn't aggravate my acne, let alone makeup, never my makeup that won't activate my fungal acne, but at the same time, work with my dry skin and cover up my rosacea.
It just sucks.
And.
I know that's probably a story that everyone listening has something about themselves that they are just so sick of I know that on a deeper humankind global scale, these are very first world problems.
I fully get that.
I get that these are not the major, there are bigger problems in the world.
There are bigger problems with my community.
This is like a very privileged complaint to have.
I fully get that.
At the same time, it is something that is on my mind a lot because it's something I personally have to deal with, and I know it's superficial.
I know there are worse things in the world I could be dealing with, but in the effort of full disclosure, that is something I'm dealing with.
And I think it's very human for all of us to have things that we are confronting on a daily basis with our bodies, whether it's our skin, acne, hair loss, thinning.
Body size, body shape, whatever we have to function in these bodies.
God bless you.
If you are someone who is perfectly fine and has no worries and it's never on their mind, I would love to know your secret, but I am just so sick of feeling like I have to compromise.
All the time, and I'm so sick of compromising period.
Like it's not just about my body, not just about my face, not just about my skincare.
I feel like all I do in my life is compromise.
I just want a win.
You know what I mean? I just, why can't I just be able to put on some goddamn makeup? I just wanna feel at.
Peace with myself, but I also wanna feel good in my body.
I wanna feel like a normal person.
I wanna feel like myself again.
I just want to feel like that woman who was staring back at me in those selfies from three or four years ago.
And I also just wanna feel not ashamed to want to be able to wear a little bit of makeup.
And I know I should accept things, how they are for my skin right now.
But it just sucks.
Can we all just admit that it sucks sometimes and just have a moment to relish in the suckiness of it all.
Life throws so much at all of us every day.
Can't I just have decent skin and it is that I want nice skin because who doesn't? But it's more than that.
I just wanna have one thing crossed off my worry list.
It could be.
Really great to not have to feel so embarrassed about my skin.
And I know that's superficial again, but I also think it's incredibly human to want to feel comfortable in your own skin without feeling like you're always forced to settle and accept or have the thing in the back of my mind where go, it could be worse.
I have such a problem with that saying and maybe that's something I need to look at and really think about but I have such a visceral reaction to that phrase.
It could be worse because I feel like it's very valid.
Obviously things could be worse, but is that really how I wanna move through life? Just everything that I encounter every.
Everything that I hate about myself, everything that I hate about my life, everything that I encounter that I don't like, that I just need to tell myself, like it could be worse.
I just, I don't know that's like the best way to move through life.
I just don't think that, it doesn't solve the problem.
It doesn't help me accept a situation.
It doesn't help me move on.
It just says I don't know, I, and maybe it is the answer, I'm just reacting so harshly to it, but it just doesn't feel like enough.
It just feels get over it, move on, and it's just.
I just wanna be able to feel my feelings and have people say, you know what? It does suck.
It takes a lot of work to not care about what other people think.
And it takes even more work to not care about what I think of myself.
Because even if I got to a point where I don't care with someone else thinks of me, I still want butter skin for myself.
I don't like the way it looks.
Sue me and.
I'm gonna talk about acceptance a little bit later, and I know that this is tied to that, but acceptance is hard, acceptance without any future resolution is really difficult to deal with.
And I feel like that's at a situation where I'm at now.
Like I just have to upset that my skin is always gonna fucking suck.
I'm always gonna feel uncomfortable and I'm just gonna have to like, get over it.
And it's like that just doesn't feel right, just like doesn't sit well with me.
All of this long example is.
To just remind ourselves that our relationship with our body is so immensely complicated.
There's pressures from society, there's pressures from just ourselves.
Even if we aren't aligning with society's expectations, we still have our own expectations for ourselves.
We have our own standards.
We have our own ideas of what looks good, and I'm not someone who really vibes with whatever the latest makeup trends.
Or anything.
I honestly just want a super simple routine of mascara and like a good tension moisturizer at this point, but there's aesthetics, there's function, there's health.
It just feels completely overwhelming to me.
I feel like I can barely get to a level of my own desire of what I want for myself.
What, like my base level of what looks good, what feels good.
I feel like I can barely get to that level, let alone whatever anyone else wants from me.
And as someone who struggled in.
Her relationship with her body for a myriad of reasons and not always about weight, even though that has been a recurring area of contention with myself, and it's just.
Occurred to me like, do we ever make peace with our bodies? Not just the size of them, but how much makeup we wear and skin issues.
And why do some people have naturally glassy skin and others have to spend thousands of dollars on face creams in order to like, feel like they look quote unquote, normal? I'm really working hard to move out of this place of comparison, but I also don't wanna oscillate too far to the other side where I lose all sight of what I want for myself because of how I wanna feel and look.
And I just have to be in this place where it's that's the card you were dealt, so move on.
And it's just ugh.
I don't know.
I really struggle with that.
I can't be the only one.
I don't wanna spend my life comparing myself to other people and wanting what I don't have.
But it also just seems shouldn't I be able to want something that feels fairly normal? Something that feels fairly average? I don't know.
It's like we have diet cultured norms and then like an extreme body positivity movement.
And it feels like we're being told extreme things from both sides.
You either need to think about your size all the fucking time, or you shouldn't be thinking about your size at all.
And honestly, I just wanna live somewhere in the middle.
I frankly don't like my size.
This does not feel like happiness to me, and I don't think it's a matter of just shifting my mindset.
I know myself pretty well, and I know the weight at which I felt the most at home in my body, even if it wasn't a time when I felt the most confident.
And I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but what I mean is if I could apply how I feel about myself now, most of the time to the body that I have in mind, I would be at my happiest level that I've ever been.
It's like the merging of two.
Of two world, I guess when I was newly single for the first time in 15 years back at the end of 2020, I really did feel my sexiest.
I felt really desired by a lot of people.
I felt unashamed, but honestly, there was also a lot that there was derived from external validation.
I felt sexy because other people found me sexy, which honestly, maybe that's not great, but when you've had zero self-esteem your whole life and you've.
Been in a sexless, stale relationship where your partner supposed fiance has never even called you beautiful.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a little external validation kick-starting your self-love.
Like I just, as long as your self love doesn't stay exclusive to external validation, I don't see anything wrong with it because sometimes you just have to feel it from someone else before you can believe it yourself.
And I know that's not the like kumbaya.
Advice that most people would give you? But I think it's real advice.
I think that's the reality of it.
At least I needed it.
In my case, there was no way.
That I was going to believe in it myself.
My self-love and my self-esteem was at rock bottom.
You can't get blood from a stone.
There was no way I was just gonna turn emptiness into a great, deep love for myself outta nowhere.
I just couldn't.
Maybe other people can, I could not.
I needed a little bit of external validation.
I needed that little bit of desire to feel, wanted to feel sexy again, to feel like.
Yeah, like you, you are sexy.
I had just been told by someone who I thought I was gonna spend the rest of my life with, that I was basically a nagging, annoying garbage person.
I felt like I had been lied to by someone for 15 years who I thought.
Thought the world with me and thought I was special, and now it seems like he didn't like me for the last few years and never had the balls to tell me.
To be fair, I think there was a lot of projection in what he was saying.
I think he just really didn't like himself and he didn't know how to change while being in a relationship with me.
And he admitted later as much that it was just easier to blow up the whole thing and start over than to keep trying, which sucks.
But honestly, I don't even care.
I'm still just so relieved to not.
Being in that relationship, it was the best thing you could have ever done.
For me.
I'm forever thankful that he dumped me.
It was not working, and we would've been miserable forever.
But when I got out of that relationship, even to this day, I still find myself thinking, was he right? Am I that bad? Am I boring? Am I a nag? But by and large, I know I am who I am at this point, and I still have issues.
Myself, with myself, but for the most part, I really love who I am at the core of my being.
I think someone who ends up being with me should feel very lucky.
I'm not perfect, obviously, but I'm someone committed to self work.
I'm loyal.
I'm not a bullshitter.
I'm funny and sarcastic, and I'm a dreamer, and I will ride or die for someone else to help them achieve their dreams.
I'm compassionate and empathetic.
I'm giving and sensitive.
I'm emotionally available.
I'm smart, and I have some unique interests.
And while I'm not a risk taker per se, I have taken quite a lot of risk in my life.
I'm driven, even though I lack follow through sometimes.
So personality wise, I think I'm a catch.
And I don't wanna lose weight because I think it'll make me more attractive to others, or because I feel like I need to make up for something in my personality.
I know plenty of people who have wanted me at my highest weight, but I just don't like me at this weight.
Not just the number, it's how I feel in this present body.
I feel weak.
I feel out of sorts.
It feels like I'm in someone else's body, just moving through life.
I don't feel comfortable or connected to this body at all.
It feels like I'm wearing a costume or something.
This body doesn't feel natural.
Or like my own to me.
And that being said, i'm also not looking to be a skinny mini either.
I like having curves, I like having shape.
I just don't like this particular shape.
It feels like I'm walking around with the wrong haircut.
There's nothing wrong with it.
But when I look in the mirror, it just.
Doesn't feel like me looking back at me.
And so to go back to the whole thing that I was talking about with my skin, I, I have done a lot of work to love myself, to love who I am inside, to love who I am as a person.
There are some days where I just want.
A win.
Like I've done all of that.
I've done a lot of that self work to like myself.
I didn't always like myself at all, but I've done a lot of work to like who I am in my soul universe.
Can you just give me some decent skin to go with it? Can't that just be my reward? Like I did all this hard work.
Can you like make my skin not dry? Is that that Really too much to ask of the world.
It bums me out.
There's a topic that I think about a lot because it affects my day-to-day life and it connects back to body in a really big way for me, and it really connects back to my weight specifically, but it also ties back into what I was talking about last week with a mind body connection.
But in.
But in a different way than what I talked about last week.
And that's emotional eating.
So I am a member of Al-Anon and I bring this up because there are some major principles that I've been learning in Al-Anon that have really shaken up what I thought I knew and have really given me some new perspectives on things across a lot of areas of my life.
I was thinking about binge eating and emotional eating, and I'm supposed to be a recovering binge eater, but I'm not.
I still binge eat.
I still emotionally eat all the time.
I eat when I'm bored.
I eat when I'm feeling sad or angry or overwhelmed.
Food comforts me.
Food has always been there for me when I often couldn't rely on other people to be there for me, and I went to therapy for years.
To try to deal with emotional eating and to look at some of the underlying issues and when did it start and why did it start and how can I replace it? How can I refocus my energy and how can I like overcome this? How can I be in recovery from binge eating and emotional eating? And it worked for a while and it, but then it, then I just fell off.
It was almost like I don't need that anymore, or I don't want to need it.
And it does make me, I know emotional eating and food and all that is, to me is on a different plane than alcohol addiction or drug addiction.
There are lots of people who say they're one and the same, that it's the same kind of.
Neurological reaction and everything, but it's just, it's really hard for me personally, to be like, yes, they're one and the same.
Because I don't know that emotional eating is like destroying my life to the same degree that like I've seen alcohol ruin.
My life as by the people in my life who are addicted to alcohol and drugs.
So I just like, because of my experience, it's really hard for me to be like, they're the same.
But now again, I'm not like a, I'm not a therapist.
So that's just, that's also just like my bias.
But the point I'm trying to make is that, in Al-Anon you work steps too.
Recover from being addicted to the addicts in your life in the same way that people in Alcoholics Anonymous work steps to be in recovery from the addiction in their life.
I think what I realized this week in thinking a lot about body and revisiting my old feelings and my old journals around emotional eating.
I am not working like a program, I'm not doing anything to stay mindful of it.
I'm not doing anything to repair my relationship with food.
I'm not taking any active steps.
So that's why I bring up like the Al-Anon AA stuff, that component to it, because I feel like regardless about whether or not you think it's an addiction, I feel like you still have to have that mindfulness.
You still have to.
Retrain your brain and my relationship with food, and I'm not doing any of that.
I had been for a long time, but I'm not anymore.
And I need to get back to a place where I'm actively trying.
If this thing bothers me and it's impacting my life, maybe not in like crazy, colossal ways, but it still impacting my life.
I need to take active steps to get back into.
Recovery from it.
It's hard though because, for example, in my family, a celebration often revolves around the food that we're eating.
A lot of times growing up a birthday or an anniversary or a holiday was the only time my family could afford to go out and eat.
So over time we really learned to associate food with.
Emotions, especially positive ones like happiness, comforting emotions.
And as someone who still lives paycheck to paycheck, that is still very much the case.
Like a lot of times the only time I'm able to go out to eat is like when I'm having a friend over or it's a special occasion.
So it's really hard to separate that mindset, one of the things that they would tell me when I was in therapy is that you have to think about it as food is just fuel and food is just a meal.
If you go out to a restaurant it's just one meal, it's not the end of the world.
You don't have to think I'm never gonna be able to eat cake again.
I'm never going to be able to eat a hamburger again.
Or I'm never gonna be able to find a place that does vegetarian poutine again.
It's just but those are the things that I would tell myself, to justify the decisions that I'm making.
And it's also hard because people who say, then just don't eat that.
I really do think that they're trying to help.
Even when they're a real asshole, but I think they believe that they're.
Letting this fat person into some secret we've never thought of.
Oh yeah.
I never thought that I could just not eat it.
But anyone who struggles with emotional eating knows that it's deeper than just putting a fork down.
It's really not about, it's not about the fork, it's not about the food itself.
Half the time when I'm binge eating I don't, I'm not even necessarily loving the thing that I'm eating.
I just love the emotional response that dopamine hit that I'm getting from it.
I think there's also a huge misconception that all emotional eaters are fat people and all emotional eaters are binge eaters, which.
Isn't true, at least how my therapist explained it to me.
I bet everyone has that person in their office who's always oh, I'm so stressed today.
Like, where'd that candy jar go? That's emotional eating.
Even coffee sometimes I think can be an emotional crutch.
It doesn't have to be large amounts of food to be emotional eating, but it.
I think it does have to be large amounts of food in one sitting to be considered binge eating.
And binge eating is like a subset of emotional eating, and I struggle with both, especially bored, mindless eating.
When I'm trying to shut my mind off from work and watch tv, I can't help but just wanna snack.
Especially if I'm watching a show where they're eating like Real Housewives, they're always going out to dinner, or like a lot of family sitcoms where they're always sitting down to eat dinner or something.
That stuff is really hard for me because I inevitably just want to eat as though I'm like part of the show, almost like a parasocial thing.
But it's also just like I see what they're eating and then I start to want that thing.
And I think part of it is just like.
I'm usually not hungry, it's just food noise and my brain becomes so full of food noise that certain foods become a craving that I just can't ignore anymore.
Food noise is the only thing that, when I hear people talk about GLP ones like ozempic and Majaro and stuff like that, when they talk about how the food noise just completely silences I can't even begin to imagine what that must feel like because.
The food noise is so incredible in my mind all the time, and it's not just about.
I want to eat, I'm hungry, I want to eat.
It's really it's not so much that, it's more like the food noise is more like I need comfort, I need to feel good.
I wanna feel happy.
I wanna feel I want that dopamine hit.
Like, how can I get that? This thing will give me that person's having that.
I want that.
Why can't I have that? I wish I could have that.
And not feel this way.
I wish I could eat that and not feel like the food noise is like really incredible.
And when I hear that people have that diminish almost completely when they use a GLP one, that is really like the only thing that makes me.
Consider using a GLP one.
I can't afford them.
My insurance doesn't really cover them or barely covers them, and that's just like more than I can probably afford right now.
But, but that just sounds so lovely.
It reminds me of the time when I was like really depressed.
And when I was younger and I was reading the book Prozac Nation, and I think Elizabeth Wetzel in that book described.
People always would ask her like, what does this feel like to go from feeling depressed to like.
After you start taking Prozac and you find like the right combination of medicine or whatever and what that feels like how do you realize that like you're not depressed anymore.
And if I remember right, I think she pretty much just compared it to you just wake up one day and that voice in your head is gone.
And I remember.
Reading that when I was like, at one of my lowest points and just thinking like, God, that sounds so amazing.
I can't even imagine what that would feel like.
And one day, when I was in therapy and those depressive thoughts finally moved aside for a while, it was really freeing and it was really opening and it was uplifting.
It did feel like there was a huge weight off my shoulders and a huge weight off my mind.
And like a path had cleared forward.
And I imagine that's like what it must be like for people who say that the food noise is gone.
I already said this earlier, but like I really struggle with calling food an addiction.
I know there is science to back it up, but because I have and have had people in my life who suffer truly crippling addictions that have either taken their lives or have made their lives unrecognizable, it feels really uncomfortable to me to talk about food as an injection to like put them on the same level.
I know that the science and neurology and all that stuff like.
And the physiology and the way our food reacts, like chemically.
It doesn't really matter what the addiction is.
It doesn't matter if it's a chemical, if it's a food, what it is.
But at the same time, I also don't know what else to call it because like when you feel out of control and you feel like you are giving into something that you feel like you should be able to control and being with someone who's been with addicts who say, like they addicts will often say things like, I've got this just one, I can control it, I can manage it, it doesn't control me.
All this stuff.
And it's like, when I think about it, it's okay, haven't I said all of that same stuff to myself all the time? And, but I've never found something.
That makes my relationship with food sustainable and constant and the, my relationship with my body sustainable and constant.
My relationship with my body, my relationship with food, my relationship with myself is like always in flux and that definitely doesn't help with the food noise.
There's food noise, but then there's like just self noise layered on top of that.
It's really hard to not buckle under the weight of all that's going on in my head.
There's impulse control, there's ritual tied to it, there's food.
Noise i's emotional relief that comes from eating quickly, followed by shame and guilt, which often perpetuates the next food cycle.
That's that's the cycle of emotional eating is it's no longer about what you're eating, how much you're eating to fuel your body.
It's not about any of that.
It's about.
You're really like feeding the shame cycle and it's really hard to break away from that shame cycle because then you have to sit in these feelings and learn to deal with these feelings that you have often turned to food to comfort and quell and soften.
And and I think people who haven't experienced that and haven't really gone to therapy to really think about what those levels are that they're dealing with.
It's really easy for people to go no fatty, just put down the hamburger.
But it's not that there's so much more to it than that.
And when you've grown up in a household where everything you do revolves around food, like my parents don't have a ton of hobbies.
Hobby is their hobby is.
Eating.
It's like they're not foodies, but they're people who enjoy eating.
They look forward, they like having a really hard day so that they come home and have a really good stick to your ribs dinner.
They enjoy going out to eat.
They enjoy they don't have a lot of hobbies, so like that's what it is.
My mom's favorite hobby is like cooking, watching the food network, feeding everybody, like showing her love through, making people their favorite treats and stuff.
So like that when that has been so ingrained in you that like you just get a lot of emotional relief from food your entire life, that's very hard to separate in the same way that a lot of people get emotional relief from certain substances for years and years.
We just, we also just expect them to just we'll just move on from it already.
It's easy for people who aren't in a particular mindset or in a certain circumstance to think that solving the problem is very easy and that there's nothing deeper to it, but.
There is, I don't think there's anybody who was trapped in an emotional eating or binge eating cycle that likes it.
I don't know that I've never met that person.
They might like it initially for a while, like in the very beginning because it is comforting and it's fun because you're just like.
Eating these foods that you love or you're getting that like quick fix, but eventually they don't like it.
I don't know anyone that is like loving it, because you don't feel in control and you don't feel like you have a good sense of self and you do feel like you are doing things that you don't really agree with.
That's like where the shame and the guilt and comes from.
So that's always on my mind.
But these are some of the things that, when we talk about body, it's not just on the surface of like how someone looks.
There's, it's such a deep seated.
All encompassing word, there's so much to it.
I'm a big girl.
I'm fat.
I'm not curvy.
I'm more than plus size.
I'm a big girl who never wants to be thin.
But I also don't love being in my current body for a lot of reasons.
Some are aesthetic, some are not.
I'm not gonna share my actual weight because that's none of your business.
And it shouldn't be about a number.
It should be about a feeling.
And when I was growing up, there used to be this thing that magazines would talk about and they'd call it like Your Happy Weight.
And I think.
What they were trying to do was more like, your happy weight should be like 1 35 or whatever.
Like they, it was about like the number, it wasn't really about the feeling they were trying to conflate like, oh, if you hit this number, you'll feel happier.
But I do think if you strip away all of their.
Connotations around it.
I do think there is a weight where people can feel really happy and I know that there is a weight where or like a size of my body that I know I feel.
I'm gonna feel the most comfortable.
And like I said, like I don't really feel at home in my own body and that's not 'cause I don't love myself I just don't like it.
And I think that's totally fine.
I believe in body positivity and to me that means it's okay to change your body if it makes you happy.
I think I'm a person who believes in body positivity, but also believes if you want plastic surgery and that makes you happy and you're not doing it to like.
Super extreme level where it's obvious that you're like using plastic surgery in lieu of therapy, then go for it.
Like why should I care? If that makes you feel better.
Because we're all born in our bodies and we are all given a.
Things within our own bodies that we just don't like and I think it's perfectly fine to wanna change your aesthetics.
I think it's totally fine to whatever's gonna make you feel comfortable.
And I think because we've lived in a world where so long people changing their bodies was based on what other people think and what other people want them to look like, versus what I want myself to look like or what you want yourself to look like, or what you think is pretty, or what you think is aesthetically pleasing or what you feel makes you comfortable.
I just think that life's too short not to feel good in your own body, and I don't think it's crazy to wanna change some things about yourself.
Not in a, I think if your goal is perfection, that's where you're going wrong.
But if your idea is I just wanna feel more comfortable, I want this looks better to me, and it looked.
And as long as you're not knocking down someone else along the way because they don't want the same thing that you want and they don't think the same things are as desirable or aesthetically pleasing as you, as long as you're not knocking someone else down along the way, then what's the big deal? as long as you're not succumbing to pure peer pressure and you're doing it for your own reasons.
I don't see the problem in it, but there's something that has happened the last few years in the fat community where it feels like body positivity has taken to the extreme where if you even consider losing weight, then you're part of the problem.
And I don't agree with that.
I think that is just as toxic as the diet culture we all grew up in where everyone had to be real thin.
If you're someone that's happy in your body, you like your size, you feel sexy, you feel good, then good on you, go for it.
But if you're someone who is in pain or you want to look different and you want to be a smaller size, or you wanna be a bigger size, go for it.
I don't know what the problem is, and I feel like.
When someone is trying to knock someone down for wanting to change themselves to feel better about themselves, I think that says more about the person who is upset about it than it does about the person who's like trying to make the change again.
There are limits to everything.
Like you can't be going crazy and completely altering every inch of yourself and doing it because it's I wanna look like Barbie.
As long as you're not doing it to an extreme and being like, I wanna look like a Barbie doll, because that's what men think are attractive.
And it has nothing to do with whether or not you think that's attractive or whether or not, or if it's just because I think that's attractive.
'cause everyone told me that's attractive, so that's what I want.
That's where it gets maybe not, maybe you're, maybe you should really think about what you're doing, but.
If you wanna lose weight because you wanna feel better about yourself, who cares? Let people just live.
It's hard because like my mom did Weight Watchers, Atkins, she went to Curves.
She had bariatric surgery my senior year of high school.
My dad has struggled with his weight most of his adult life, and he even at one point wanted to get weight loss surgery, but he was denied because he he had a hernia and so they said that he was no longer qualified and he was crushed after that.
But, I grew up in a house where I.
Weight was on top of mind all the time.
Your body was on top of mind all the time.
My mom has said horrible things to me growing up.
Like I remember one time this, she does not remember doing this, but she did this numerous times.
She had a photo on our fridge and it was her and these Hot pants, so like kids who dunno what hot pants are, they're super, super short.
Shorts and she was like on top of a car and all this stuff.
And it was from like when she was like really like probably 1920 or something like that.
And she used to keep it on the fridge and I'm pretty sure she kept it on the fridge as like a inspo photo, like I wanna get back to this weight kind of thing.
And she used to point at the picture and say to me.
This is what I looked like before I had you, you did this to me.
And then she'd like point to her fat body.
And the truth is like that for all.
That was like devastating.
But I've worked past that.
Now I know that my, that's just how my mom is and.
She says stuff like that to anybody.
It doesn't actually have anything to do with me.
I can't control that.
I am, I'm not the reason why she didn't lose weight after having a baby, if that's what she wanted or whatever.
And I'm also not the reason why society has put pressure on her to feel like she needed to have a pre-baby body.
Like she, she needed to have a 20-year-old body for her entire life.
None of those things are my fault, so I've moved on from that.
And I've also just learned to accept that my mom is my mom, and she will say awful things to people her entire life, and you just have to walk away from it when she starts to do that, or not take it personally if you're gonna be around her.
Anyway that's a story for another day.
But my point is that.
I was always like top of mind in my house and I was always judged and I was always being judged for what I was eating.
Always little comments under my mom's breath about, my mom's breath about, do you really need to eat that? Do you, you don't, do we really need dessert tonight? No.
Why don't you like eat this instead? Then she hit me like cabbage soup when I was like clearly I'm wanting an Oreo.
She was always watching how much I was eating and all this stuff, and.
O one.
I've learned that a lot of my control issues have come from my mother and father, but especially my mother because, she wanted to control what I was eating because one, she had to control herself and what she was eating, and she felt like if she's gonna suffer, everyone else is gonna suffer.
Two.
She genuinely thought that she was like helping me, she thought by controlling what I'm eating, she's helping me.
What ended up happening is I.
Over time developed a really sick sense of what my body should look like and what it would take to be in that body.
And I had this trampoline.
I would be out there for hours and hours.
One summer I lost a lot of weight, like a lot of weight.
Like I was not eating.
My mom was on Weight Watchers and Weight Watchers, if you've never done it, has this thing where like this is how old Weight Watchers was.
I know it's like a little bit different now, but it was all points based and they used to have foods that they were called Zero point Foods, which meant you could eat as much of it as you wanted and you would, it would be zero points and depending on what.
What weight you were, you might only have like 10 to 15 points a day to be able to eat.
So my mom would make this cabbage soup.
And I like cabbage soup, but it was a lot of cabbage soup, but there were just certain foods that you could just eat endlessly.
So that was all I was eating.
So I was just like eating cabbage soup, going out on the trampoline, eating cabbage soup, going out on the trampoline, eating more cabbage soup, going out on the trampoline.
I was anorexic and I didn't even realize it.
I had started reading when I was growing up around the same time, what was like really popular for books were these like anonymous scary diaries, Go Ask Alice.
And stories about it happened, I don't know, it was like something like had happened to Helen or something like that.
And there was one I wish I could remember.
It had to something like the, I'll try to find it, but it had something like to do with something star, and it was like one of those anonymous diaries.
But this one was about someone who had anorexia.
And a lot of these stories, like a lot of these books ended up being proved that they were not real, but they were about like teen pregnancy or aids or, drug addiction or whatever.
It was always like this like very lifetime storyline where it was like supposed to be these diaries from these anonymous people that were like published and every bad thing that could have ever happened to them from like their decision of act accidentally taking drugs at a party or whatever and all this stuff.
But so this one was about anorexia and me and my friend were obsessed with this book.
I read it front to back probably five times, one summer, that same summer.
I only realized a few years ago.
That I was reading it, not because I found it interesting or because I found comfort or I found it relatable.
I was reading it as though it was a book of tips.
I was reading it to find out.
What was this girl who had anorexia eating? Even though I knew it was like fake, I was like there's gotta still be some tips in here.
And this was also around the time that there were a lot of pro anorexia websites that were popping up in chat rooms.
And I was in those and I was getting tips from those people.
It was also around the time that like Lifetime was also airing a lot of anorexia, teen drama movies.
So I was watching a lot of those.
I got so bad to a point where my mom didn't allow me to watch any of those shows anymore, which again was like not, didn't really help because it just made me feel like there must be something of truth there.
She's not wanting me to watch these things.
And then finally my parents sat me down one night.
And basically banned me from using the trampoline and told me that they were concerned that I had lost so much weight that that they were like really concerned for me and that, and my parents went about it in all the wrong ways because I felt like they ended up like, punishing me for this instead of like really trying to understand why I was doing it.
But the thing that sucked is like when I tried to explain why I was doing it, it was pretty much I thought you'd be proud of me because everything I had been hearing for years had been your weight.
Weight is what matters.
Like it's so important for my mom to be back down to like her 20-year-old weight.
So here I am working really hard to lose weight.
I've done it like I remember.
Thinking to myself that there were some days where my total Weight Watchers points for the day would be zero because I didn't actually eat anything of any substance all day, and I thought that was the goal.
I had this morbid sense of weight watchers that the point wasn't to hit your, somewhere between like your nine and 12 points a day.
It would, I thought if that's, if you could get down to zero, that would be even better.
That means like you're really.
Committed, like you're really doing it.
And when I tried to explain to my parents, like I obviously didn't say it like this to them, but like when I was trying to explain to them like, I did this because this is what you taught me.
They lost it on me.
They refused to accept any responsibility that they had created this environment where all that mattered was your weight.
And that, of course, I'm thinking about my weight constantly because you are constantly talking about your weight.
And of course I'm trying to lose weight because you keep telling me I shouldn't be eating cake and I shouldn't be eating brownies and I shouldn't be eating full fat dressing.
And all you guys do is talk about your weight.
All you guys do is talk about what you're making for dinner that's like low fat, low calorie, whatever.
And I felt so angry and betrayed and it took me a long time to realize that that conversation is when a lot of the issues with my mom started.
Was from that conversation and there had been like, obviously things before, it wasn't like that was the starting point, but that was like a real.
Moment of change in our relationship.
I felt betrayed by her because I thought I did exactly everything that she wanted and I had this amazing outcome.
And I think there was also part of me that was like convinced, and I still think that part of this is true, is that I think she was pissed that I lost weight and she hadn't lost much weight.
She will never admit that, but I do think that played some part in it.
I think she was mad, she was always mad at my dad when he would lose weight because men oftentimes lose weight much easier than women.
But I remember one time my dad was like doing really well on a diet and it was like the only time he'd ever done really well, and he had lost like 40, 50, 60 pounds or something.
But my mom had only lost like 30 and she berated my dad so hard and made him feel so guilty.
And instead of.
Congratulating him for doing really well and looking great and feeling great and having lots of energy and instead, she just had to let her jealousy take over and my dad ended up feeling so bad that he stopped losing weight and gave up on the diet altogether and then.
Of course he gained all the weight right back.
'cause it wasn't a sustainable life-changing diet.
It was like Atkins or something.
But like the morbid kind of form of Atkins where like people are only eating bacon eight times a day.
Like it was like that 1998 version of Atkins.
Since then, I've never had a good relationship with my body or with my weight.
Frankly, I am not at my weight today because of healthy habits.
I'm not saying people at my size can't be healthy because I, in fact, am.
I just had an extended panel of blood work and test done, and there was nothing wrong with me.
The only thing I have is asthma, which I've had since I was a kid.
Not because I was fat, but because my mother was a heavy smoker.
And then I have that like hip pain that I'm always talking about, which I'm gonna be going to physical therapy for.
But that was it.
And I had them look at hormones, I had them look at everything.
'cause I was like, I just wanna make sure everything is okay.
I'm not I'm not pre-diabetic.
Which I think people look at me and probably assume that I am just diabetic.
So when I say I wanna lose weight, it's.
It's also because like I think I'm pretty lucky for not having any health issues.
Like I'm, I think I'm very lucky and I think that if I were to continue to gain weight, I don't think that would be the case anymore.
And I think as I get older.
Being at this weight is only going to make me more susceptible to certain diseases.
And I wanna get ahead of that because I don't want to be someone like other people in my family where they have been overweight overweight, and then they've been doing fine, and then suddenly they start to have health problems and everything starts to go downhill.
And that's probably maybe just me being fear-based, but but it also just like.
When I say I have unhealthy habits, I'm talking about like living a sedentary life and turning to food for comfort there, and I don't want those habits anymore.
I wanna be the girl that goes for a walk after dinner.
I wanna be the person that does active things on the weekends instead of feeling so burnt out from life that all she can manage to do is like.
Sit in front of the TV or sit in the sun and read a book.
I wanna be the person that goes on a hike.
I wanna spend more time in the river.
I want to do more of the things I enjoy doing, which a lot of them are actually active things.
I don't wanna feel tired and burnt out all the time.
And I think the way I live my life and some of the unhealthy habits that I have contributed to that and have also contributed to my weight.
And for me it's not really about a number on the scale.
It's just more about how I feel in my body.
I just wanna feel at peace in my body.
I wanna feel sexy again.
I wanna feel proud of myself when I look at myself in the mirror.
And I don't feel that way right now, partially because I know I'm not doing the things to help me feel proud about my body.
I often find that people who are upset about other people's bodies are usually just hurt people, and some of them have been changed for the way they look.
So they need to shame others instead of being a solution.
They become part of the problem.
Some are really insecure, maybe not about their bodies.
And some I think are angry that they have worked so hard to create the body that they have in order to keep up with peer pressure.
Some of whom I don't think they even like the body they're in that now.
They feel like if someone else isn't in the gym four hours a day and living off of protein shakes and chicken breast then that person is failing.
And I just think there's gotta be something in the middle.
I think I've met a lot of people who like conform to the pressures of society and then are pissed that I'm not conforming to the pressures of society.
And so they take it out on me and it's no one said you had to either, like you should have done what felt good to you.
And if going to the gym four hours a day and living off of protein shakes and chicken breast feels good to you, then great.
But you don't need to go around shaming everyone else 'cause they're not doing that.
And being resentful at the same time.
I don't think I know a lot of fat people who resent.
Thinner people who are going to the gym and eating healthy and go, like the person, it's always someone who, like when we go out to dinner or something and someone gets a salad and they go, Ugh, live it up a little ugh.
Always with the salads and it's I love salad.
And I like getting a salad when I go out because I don't keep beets in the house.
I don't keep goat cheese in the house very often.
I don't keep blue cheese and walnuts and cranberries in my house.
So like when I go out, a lot of times I get like one of those like really fancy spinach salads that just have like beets and all those stuff in it because I don't have that stuff at home.
So many people when I go out to eat, when I have that, they go, oh are you on a diet? But I don't know.
On top of the food noise and your own noise and your own history and your own experiences, it's really hard to not have the peer pressure and other people's thoughts piled in.
That is like.
One of the hardest things to overcome and work through is just I've lived in a life where I'm just surrounded by peer pressure.
I've been bullied, I've been bullied by people in my own family.
And it was, it's funny 'cause when I think about peer pressure, I like to think about my brother my entire childhood.
My brother used to make fun of me for being fat and chubby and all of that.
Cut to.
After he moves out.
My brother is like nine, 10 years older than me, so he's older, but so cut to when he finally moves out of the house and we get to meet his girlfriend, for the first time, who eventually became my sister-in-law.
But we meet her and I guess the way my brother had always treated me, I expected him to show up with this Barbie bombshell because that's what he always made me feel like I needed to look like.
He was really into Pam Anderson barbed wire and stuff like that.
So I just thought like that's who he's showing up with, right? Because that's, he's such an asshole.
There's no way he's not gonna show up to this dinner with our family, with anyone that doesn't look like that.
After all the bullshit he said to me his entire life, guess what that is not who he showed up with.
He showed up with someone who was bigger.
She's was lovely, like I love my sister-in-law, but but I just remember seeing that and going you fucking asshole.
Like this whole time you've been giving me a hard time.
And when it comes for time for you to pick your girlfriend, the person you're gonna spend time with, the person that he eventually very quickly wanted to marry, you are gonna pick someone who's bigger after all the shit you've said to me my entire life.
And that's when I realized that peer pressure is bullshit because no one actually holds themselves to their own standards of people that they put that they pressure other people into.
It's just, it's all a control mechanism.
It's all bullshit.
And that's what I learned like.
None of it matters because people, most people are gonna say one thing and they're gonna do the exact fucking opposite.
So that's when I started to try to let peer pressure go a little bit.
That's when I first it didn't let it go immediately, but that's like when I started to really open my eyes to peer pressure's.
Not really where it's at.
There's a lot of fuckery going on in this peer pressure, So acceptance is something I've been thinking a lot about and I know I started this podcast being like, fuck acceptance.
I tired of compromising all that.
That is not really, first of all, I was bitter because I was dealing with a bunch of face stuff this morning, so I wasn't really feeling it.
But there is an art to acceptance and if you don't like your body, if I don't like the way my face looks right now.
I think you still have to accept where you are right now.
You have to meet yourself with a certain level of kindness.
You can want something different, but still not have to rip yourself to shreds because no matter how much or how little weight you wanna lose, or if it's not weight, or if you just wanna feel stronger, or maybe you're like me and you have a skin issue.
You have to meet yourself where you're at now.
You have to accept where you are now because if you keep ripping yourself to shreds in the meantime, you are never gonna get where you wanna be.
And you're always gonna feel miserable, and I realize that like acceptance always sounds counterintuitive.
If I accept myself, then I shouldn't wanna change.
But that's not really like what acceptance is.
And that's not true.
Like you can accept yourself and still want to do better.
You can accept where you're at and still want to change.
And I think it's easier when we frame acceptance in things like like in something like a boundary or something.
It's so much easier to be like.
I know I'm trying to get better at setting boundaries and I'm still slipping here and there, but overall I'm doing much better and I accept that like I'm bad at boundaries and I'm learning to do better.
And you can give yourself like a little bit of grace and not.
And be able to like move through your day without spiraling over it.
But when it comes to accepting our bodies or accepting something physical for whatever reason, at least for me, it just is 10 times harder.
I can accept a lot of things about myself and I can accept that.
Like I don't always say the right thing and I sometimes stick my foot in my mouth and all this stuff, and I can be self-conscious and anxious.
I can accept all of that and move through life knowing those things about myself.
But when it comes to physical stuff, it is so much harder, I think to accept yourself and, I wanna work on things like codependency, but I also love that I'm an empathetic person.
My empathy definitely morphed into codependency at some point.
I don't wanna lose that part of me.
I like that part of me, but I also know that I need to improve my codependency.
And acceptance doesn't mean you're okay with a situation or circumstance, and I think we hear acceptance and we think that just means I'm perfectly okay.
And everything's a hundred percent positive and that's not really it.
That sounds like what acceptance is, but that's not actually what acceptance is.
It just means that we recognize where things are currently at.
I think therapists explained acceptance to me once that it was like a neutral state.
There's no judgment.
It's a statement of facts.
You don't need to like or agree with the current state to accept that it is.
So my acceptance of myself, for like how this looks with me and my body, particularly my weight, is that I don't need to beat myself up every day for my weight.
That's not gonna help me hit my goals faster.
That's not gonna get me outside to do something active.
It's also allowing me to buy a couple of new outfits at the size that I am right now because I have this body right now and I need new pants.
So I went out and I bought new pants.
Usually I tell myself, you can get new pants when you've lost the weight, when you've earned it, earned those new pants.
And some people might see that as well.
You're just setting a goal, but not having decent pants makes me feel like shit.
And it reminds me of when I could only fit into pajama pants when I was a kid.
So that's all I wore for half the year and people made fun of me at the time, they just didn't really make kids' clothes that were in the size that I wore.
So if I wanted to buy pants, I'd have to go to like dress barn, which was for like 50-year-old women, and that was like embarrassing.
And when I went to school, you could tell that I was wearing something from dress barn and that it made me feel like I was a 40-year-old administrative assistant at my high school, rather than a 17-year-old trying to get through school.
Another example of acceptance that I love is I never used to wear shorts.
Never did.
It's been a long, I can't, I didn't wear shorts in the summer when I was younger.
I think between the ages of 15 and probably 34.
I never wore shorts.
I would go the entire summer without a short.
Barely any skirts.
The most I would do is like a Capri legging maybe.
And that was rare which was still pretty hot most days.
And a couple years ago, when I met my most recent ex, I just figured, what the hell? Why am I not wearing shorts? Everyone else is, and I'm dying all summer.
So I finally said, fuck it, I'm gonna wear shorts.
And to me that's a form of acceptance.
My body is what it is, but I still gotta wear shorts.
I still need to feel cool in the summer.
And it was really freeing, to just just be like.
Fuck it.
I'm just gonna do it.
Like, why am I torturing myself? No, who cares? I used to love swimming as a kid, but as I got older, I hated being in a bathing suit, so I avoided this thing that I love.
Then again, like I met my most recent ex, and he loves swimming, and he got me back into swimming, and I was back in a swimsuit for the first time in a very long time.
For the longest time, I wasn't accepting my body.
I wasn't accepting where I'm at, and it just made me feel so small and like I needed to get out of everyone else's way, and that I was just like taking up space that I didn't deserve.
And honestly, when I'm in a mental state where I accept my body more and I treat myself and my body with kindness, those have traditionally been the times when I feel the healthiest, when I'm the most active, when I'm the most successful with losing weight and when I feel the most.
Comfortable in my body and some of it is because I'm losing weight, but I actually think a lot of it is just because I feel better about myself.
So the losing the weight is still important to me, but it's not the end all be all.
I'm not back to that mind state that I was in when I was 13 years old.
Eating cabbage soup 24 7 and jumping on my trampoline, there's just not that same kind of pressure there.
So I think acceptance is really powerful and I'm trying to accept my body.
I'm trying to.
Except my body every day, and not just like in these sporadic moments and be grateful that I have a healthy body.
I was really nervous that this last doctor's visit that there would be something wrong.
Just because it had been a couple years since I had done a really thorough physical, but there wasn't.
and I trying to be grateful for that because there are people who have gone to those doctor's visits and they are not, there are people who, aren't able bodied and can't get around as easily as I can.
And I feel like I am not taking advantage of having a body that could do that for me.
As I get older, I'm also thinking a lot about people like my grandmother and my great aunt who are much older than me, obviously, they're in their eighties.
They can, they have a hard time walking and not just because they're old, it's because they just haven't lived an active life.
And, but there are people who are also in their eighties at the same retirement homes or at the same church groups or whatever that they're going to, and they are still running marathons at the same age, or, they're going for four mile walks every day.
And.
You would never guess that they're 84.
I don't wanna be 84 looking like 104.
I'm 38 and I always make this joke like I'm 38, but I feel a hundred.
And it's like I'm doing that to be funny.
But it's also there are some days where I wake up and I feel like why is, why do I feel so old? It's because I'm not really taking care of this body that I have.
I'm not being mindful about it.
I'm not making the decisions that I know would help me feel better in my body, regardless of weight.
Just things that made me feel better in my body.
And another thing I wanna mention about the idea of losing weight, and I mean, I think it's odd that I feel like I have to, I feel like I'm trying to defend why I wanna lose weight But another thing I wanna note about why I wanna lose weight is 'cause yes, I wanna be more mindful, but I also just don't feel like I'm in control of my.
Body anymore or I that I'm even in control of my mind anymore.
It feels like my body and my mind are just sort of running amuck and I'm.
Just here for the ride, and I don't actually have any control over it.
And that's probably why I exert a lot of control over other people why I'm so codependent and with my exes, I've tried to control everything and I'm, why I'm so particular because I can't, I don't feel like I have control over this thing that I should have the most control over.
If there's anything in my life that I should be able to control more, it is.
My body and what I'm doing to my body and how I am helping my body or not helping my body.
And, but instead, what I do is I just exert control over everything else I can in my life just to kind of take the attention off of myself, because I know that it's probably the hardest thing.
I can do right now is to pay attention to myself and my body and be present in my body and my mind because I felt so disconnected from it for so long.
You know, there's a lot of fear there.
Like I'm, I am nervous, like this whole journey, like we talk, when we talk about self-growth journeys and self-improvement, I think a lot of it comes.
A lot of it gives us this vibe of like, go Girl and positive vibes and everything.
But I don't know that we talk enough about how scary it is to face yourself.
If you're someone who has some real demons inside of them, if you're someone who is struggling with certain things, whether it's like depression and what all those underlying things, like if there are emotional reasons for your depression.
Guilt from your past and that also all feeds into emotional eating.
Emotional eating is not just about like getting a dopamine hit, it's also about like not knowing how to cope with your emotions in any way other than distracting your mind.
And for me, that's why I binge eat a lot.
It's just for those 30 minutes, all I'm doing is thinking about whatever food I'm snacking on.
I get to disassociate from reality while I'm eating.
My brain shuts off.
Um, because it's, I think because it's just so overwhelmed by the chemical reactions that are happening now that like my brain gets to shut off and my brain doesn't get to shut off much during the day.
So I looks forward to that release so.
It can be really scary to like turn towards these emotions and turn towards these behaviors that have probably gone unchecked for a very long time.
You know, I have a habit of not.
Focusing on things and procrastinating on things until they become so unmanageable that I just either explode or I implode and I don't, I need, I wanna stop that cycle of explosion, implosion, explosion, implosion.
I want to go through most days at like an even keel, an even caliber, so I know that this episode has gone on really, really long, but it's, I think it speaks to how complex and deep rooted a lot of these feelings are for me, and I think that they're deep rooted for a lot of people, which makes them so complex and why I think a lot of people have a hard time talking about.
These things.
I mean, I probably shared things in this episode that I've like never shared with some of my closest friends or, people I've dated.
Like I don't know that I've ever let them inside my mind quite like I have in this episode.
And it really is only scratching the surface.
This is just kind of like a summary of my history.
About very specific things that have to do with body image.
But they are some of the big ones.
And I don't know that I really have done justice to all these things, but I think that is part of the messiness of self-improvement and healing is at some point you just gotta like, at least scratch the surface and then you can dig deeper later.
But if you never scratch the surface of it, if you never at least.
Name the issue that you're having, you're never gonna address it.
So I guess I would consider that's what this episode is, is just me sort of stating an intention and starting to think about why these things are the way that they are and why they mean so much to me, and why am I spending so much time in my day talking about them.
And I think getting them out in a way like I'm doing here is.
Very cathartic and it's a good first step in all of that.
There's also one thing I wanna correct again, I know this is running so, so long.
I do think it'd be like really interesting to do an episode about the books I read as a kid.
And in the nineties and early two thousands there was this like phenomenon of like I was saying earlier, these anonymous diaries, but also just memoirs about drinking drug use, sexual abuse, and depression and, and a lot of eating disorder books.
And so I, I think that would be very interesting.
'cause I feel like I read every one of them that came out.
I think I'm gonna do an episode on that.
I think maybe I'll reread some of these books and see like, what was I gravitating towards when I was a kid? But I did take a break real quick to look up.
It was really bothering me.
What the name of that book was that I was trying to remember earlier.
It's called Second Start of the Right.
And it was written in 1981 by Deborah Hotze.
I might have butchered that name.
Um, and it wasn't an anonymous diary.
It was just a work of fiction, but it was about this teen age girl, I think her name was Leslie.
And her battle with.
Anorexia Na Rosa.
So I was obsessed with that book.
I read it, I remember.
I just wanna say like, this shows the level of obsession I had with it.
I was camping with my friend Robin and her family and all I did the whole day that we were camping there is sat in their like RV just reading this book and basically like ignoring my friend the whole time because I was so engrossed by this book and it, looking back, it was so fucking rude.
I mean, she was like also kind of obsessed with it, but not, I think for the same reasons I was.
But, so I just wanted to call out that book because I was, it was really bothering me and I, I hate when there's like a name on the tip of my tongue and I can't quite get it, but this episode is wrong so long.
But thank you guys for bearing with me.
I really appreciate you listening.
As always, you can find me on Instagram at Solitary Creature Pod DM me.
Let me know how you're liking the show.
If there's any topics that like you'd be interested in hearing about, I'm always, wanting to know what's interesting to you guys and what you're finding relatable and all of that.
So tune in next week.
I'll see you there.
Bye.