Latest / Unlearning Beautiful / Ep. 37 You Don't Have to Love Your Body to Be at Peace With It
Transcript
- Kristina Bruce: But before we get into today's episode, I want to let you know that in a few weeks, starting in early September 2026, I'll be opening registration for the next round of my Body Peace Small Group Coaching. If you've been listening to this podcast and have already made some progress feeling more peaceful in your body, but you're ready to go deeper, we'll work with practical tools you can actually use when old thoughts and patterns show up, while doing this alongside four to six other women who get it. Especially when you may be the only one you know in your life not dieting or using GLP ones. If you're ready for more body peace and self-trust and want support putting it into practice, join the priority interest list through the link in the description. You'll be the first to receive the details and application when registration opens. Now, on to today's episode. Body positivity came into the mainstream, finally telling us that we didn't have to hate our bodies. In fact, we could love our bodies, celebrate them, feel beautiful in them just as they are. But what happens when you hear this message and it feels like it's only possible for others, not for you? Making the jump from body hate to body love can feel like a near-impossible task. The good news is you don't have to make loving your body the goal in order to start feeling better in it. Today we're talking about body neutrality, or what I call body peace, and why focusing on making peace with your body is a lot less daunting and a lot more doable. Let's get into it. Welcome to Unlearning Beautiful. A podcast for women tired of trying to look good enough and ready to feel good from within. I'm your host, Christina Bruce, here to help you let go of the pressure to look right or do it all right, and reconnect with your inner guidance, your natural worth, and what truly makes you feel fulfilled. Because the freedom you're craving was never in how you look. When body positivity went mainstream, that was a really important and I feel like necessary shift. We started seeing women in all different bodies saying, I'm beautiful. I love my body. I'm proud of my body. And I totally understand what the mainstream movement was trying to say. All bodies have value. And you don't have to conform to a certain beauty standard in order to feel beautiful and to love yourself and respect yourself. But what can often happen is that somewhere along the way, we hear this message and we start to internalize it as I should love my body. I should feel beautiful. I should feel confident. And then when you don't feel that way, you can feel like you're now failing that body positivity too. Before it felt like I just had the wrong body. And now it can feel like I have the wrong relationship with my body. So the point with body positivity is not to now make this into a new goal or standard and our minds just end up doing that anyways. But it's realizing that we don't have to meet any standard in order to feel okay in ourselves. If you've had a relationship with your body that felt more like body hate than body love, think of it like a staircase. Body hate is being at the bottom and body love at the top. It's an impossible ask to. Say, hey, jump now to the top of the staircase. And let's imagine it's more than just two steps. It's probably like 10 or 15 steps. What we really just need to do is take it one step at a time. If you're at the beginning where you're just starting to open up to the idea of maybe I don't need to spend the rest of my life constantly dieting and hating my body and think I'm not good enough, dropping the idea of loving your body altogether can be a really good start. Rather, you can make your North Star as less fighting your body, less obsessing about it, less judgment, less comparison, just the ability to feel more at peace, to feel more at ease, to just be able to actually live your life and your body not being this thing that you're constantly thinking about or is always on the back burner of your mind. You don't have to go to body love to just stop fighting with it. So I call it body peace. Well, what does it mean to be at peace? It just means a sense of ease, a sense of okayness, a sense of well-being. And we can actually be at peace even if the circumstances around us are not the way that we would want them to be. When we say, you know what, I've made peace with it, means I'm stopping fighting it, I'm stopping resisting it. It is what it is, and I'm okay with it. Now Even the idea of body peace can stir up resistance because then we think, well, I'm really not okay in my body right now. We often have this idea that comes up, peace means resignation. No, it does not. It just means a different way that we're taking action or not. We know that there's different ways that you can respond to, say, a child who has misbehaved. You don't need to bring out harsh punishment. You can use it as a teaching moment. With more love and more understanding and compassion. So we're just shifting the way that we're relating to ourselves and our body. Body hate is a very punitive way that we do it. We're shifting it more in To a loving way of being with our body. And from that peaceful place, a whole new set of ideas, inspiration, and action can come forward. So it's more about my appearance isn't the measure of my worth. Or the number on the scale or how I look in the mirror doesn't have to determine if I'm having a good day or a bad day. Versus where you step out of the shower and you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, because let's be honest, how many times have you like walk past the mirror and not want to look at it? Instead of it now turning into this spiral of I'm so ugly, I need to start a diet. I hate myself. You can just walk by the mirror and see your body. And while you may not be looking at it totally enamored and think, ⁓ my gosh, look at this stunning, beautiful woman in the mirror. I mean, great, but again, top of the staircase and not even that maybe necessarily the goal that you're looking to achieve. Just can I walk by the mirror and I'm okay? And I don't run into a panic. That's body piece. That's the place I think that we would want to aim for. And when you don't like your body, we have to really look at why. Why we care so much about how we look and how we feel about our bodies is there's so much meaning heaped onto it. The stakes feel so high. It's about our worth, our desirability, our discipline, our success. Our value, and especially as women, historically, our age and our looks has carried that. We have attached our worth and value to how we look. And so of course we're going to become preoccupied with it because it feels so big. It feels existential. We've been taught that it's so important. But if your body didn't carry all of that meaning, if it didn't determine whether or not you would be lovable or whether you would be successful, then It's not something that we're gonna focus on so much. I've talked about this before, and I'm sure you know it too. The way that we've come to view our body has been heavily influenced by our culture. It's the images that we see. And we've literally been brainwashed. It always comes to mind this image of in those movies where there's a person sitting in front of like 20 TV screens and the music's loud and they're showing all these images over and over and over again. And it's like, Brainwashing them them into this idea. Well, that's been happening to us, but just on a lot more subtler level. It's been happening every single day of our lives as we see a bus that's going down the road that has an advertisement of a woman that looks young and beautiful and says something about fighting the signs of aging. And then so that gets implanted into our mind. So we have to see that this is a pattern and a program that has been put in our mind that is causing all of this stress, that is causing us to feel not okay in ourselves. And we can work with that. We can start to deprogram ourselves and free ourselves from that conditioning. We can start by removing these conditions that we have, these rules like I can only feel good about myself if I lose weight. Like, is that really true? Have you ever had a moment when you were exactly the same weight as you are and felt good? Well, what happened there? I mean, if it was impossible to feel good in the body that you're in, why in that moment were you able to feel good? When we have these thoughts that say, I can't feel okay in my body as I am, they're blanket statements. And yet we have proof all the time that it's possible to feel good in our bodies as they are. And the key point to that is when those negative beliefs aren't present, we're okay. All you need to do is see that when those negative thoughts aren't there about your body, the default is you will feel okay. So what happens is you're gonna get triggered. You see a picture of yourself, and then you go into a story of body hate. Well, now we're moving to can I just feel okay when I see that photo? Can I realize that even if I wear something that my mind tells me doesn't look good, that that's not gonna ruin my day or make me feel like I have no value. We want to get to a point where You can actually just move along your day because the truth is you don't really care about your body that much. Not on a deep fundamental soul level. You care about your family. You care about your friends. You care about the work that you're doing, whatever it is, that's what you really care about. The body stuff just gets in the way of you doing what you actually care about. And so when you are neutral with your body, when you are at peace, you're now actually more fulfilled because the body hate stuff isn't in the way. And you're probably a lot happier and you didn't have to love your body in the process. When you're practicing body peace, because this isn't now I'm at peace with my body forevermore. Again, that just becomes this new ideal. It's meeting every moment and starting to build that pattern to say, ⁓ Here it's happening again. I see a photo of myself and I notice my initial reaction is to criticize myself. And I look away and I want to delete the photo. So then we build up the capacity to say, okay, well, here is the reaction. Here is the pattern. ⁓ I can see my mind is playing out a story about how I'm not good enough. I can work with that now. Maybe I can stay five seconds longer looking at this photo. And allow myself to have the feelings ⁓ move through me instead of immediately just saying I need to start another diet or calling up the doctor for the GLP1, whatever it may be. It's a process. And then over time, you start to notice that. You saw the photo, it bothered you a bit, and then you forgot about it. Well, now you're living more in body peace. And as you intentionally practice that over and over, you will find yourself one day. Feeling more at peace in your body, and it's a much better place to live. And there's a really interesting paradox about focusing on body peace. You have more space. You might start to notice you're listening to your body more. What would feel good in my body today? Do I want to go for a walk? Do I want to do that workout? And that is more loving. So now without realizing it, We're starting to move into body love. I think sometimes in our culture, the the way that we've been taught about love, which in the movies is very dramatic and ⁓ my God, I'm so in love with you. I can't live without you. That's like a honeymoon phase. If we really look at what is love? Love is often coming out in the very daily simple acts. It's making lunch for your kids. It's giving somebody a hug. It's feeding the dog. Those are ways that we are being loving. And we can start to do that for ourselves. So loving your body then doesn't have to be having glamour shots on social media. It could look like that if you really feel that way. But I think love is often quiet and love can be peaceful. So By not focusing on loving your body and just focusing on feeling at peace, what ends up happening is we do end up moving towards body love. And it actually caught me by surprise one day. And I think I shared this at one point where I saw a photo of myself and there was a moment where I felt love. And I was like, wow. Like it genuinely surprised me. And I want to tell you that that came up years after doing this work. I mean, I remember when I was at the beginning, years felt like something I just didn't want to wait for, but we're living our life anyway. So years felt a lot faster. And you don't need to be genuinely having those moments of loving yourself right away. It can come later. What matters most is just being able to live your life, which I really believe is what's been intended. I actually came across this video of Elizabeth Taylor. when she was older. The interviewer was asking her something about how was it to be considered the most beautiful person and receive all these compliments. And she was like, it was lovely. And then she went on to say, and it really didn't mean anything. And she said, our faces are just a bunch of parts arranged in a certain way on your face. And somebody may say it's lovely, but that's not really what matters. And it's not who you are. And I loved it. I loved it so much. And I thought, man, that is a woman who is really grounded in herself. I don't know what she was like in her younger years or what it took for her to get to that point. But I thought that's it. It's nice to receive a compliment. And if we need it or we think that we can only be okay if that's happening, we will suffer. So what we really need to do is start to remove these heavy layers of negative thoughts about our body. That's really what it is. If you stand in front of a mirror or look at yourself in a photo and you feel bad, all you have to do is notice what are the thoughts that I'm thinking about myself right now. And there's gonna be a whole host of thoughts. First you'll be aware of the surface thoughts. I don't look good. I'm too fat. I look old, I'm ugly. Okay, and what does that mean? We can always tie it back into these thoughts of I'm not good enough, I'm not valued, I'm not lovable. And those are thoughts that we can question. Even these ideas of I'm too fat or I'm ugly are completely relative. If you were the only person that existed in the world, how could you know if you were too fat or ugly? You couldn't. It would be impossible because you would need something to compare it to. It's those comparative and negative thoughts that weigh us down. It's why when we see little children, they haven't absorbed all that thinking yet and they're a heck of a lot lighter. Well, we can do that for ourselves. And the feeling of peace in your body is actually right there with you now. It exists underneath all of those thoughts. And when you're at peace, it doesn't matter if you're aging, it doesn't matter if your weight goes up or it goes down because your sense of okayness is not contingent on your body being a certain way. And that's freedom. And ⁓ when we actually let go of those negative thoughts. We naturally are more loving. That is our natural state. Then maybe one day you will find yourself looking at your body and have love for it. But that doesn't have to be the goal. To me, that's the cherry on top. If you're at that point where you want that for yourself and you want support to do it, this is the deeper work that I do with my one-to-one clients. If you're curious about that, check out the description below and I'll have the link there. Hope this episode landed for you today and look forward to seeing you in the next one. Thanks for listening to Unlearning Beautiful. If this episode resonated with you, follow the show and share it with another woman who's ready to see beauty and herself in a new way. And if you feel moved, leave a rating and review. It will help 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.