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“The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself”. -Maya Angelou
Real talk. Real insights. Real stories of recovery helping people stop fighting food and their body since 2012.
Welcome to Recovery Warriors podcast channel. Where many voices come together to share the one great journey to full eating disorder recovery.
With a unique lineup of shows, your food, body, and self-esteem struggles are covered from every angle. Balancing science and soul, we tell stories and share evidence-based research behind what it takes to recover from restriction, anorexia, bulimia, over-exercising, binge eating, chronic dieting and disordered eating. Not only that, we also cover the underlying trauma, limiting beliefs, and painful emotions that keep you trapped in cycles of feeling powerless and stuck.
It’s exhausting constantly thinking about food and worrying about your weight. You, dear warrior, don’t have to live like this. Together, let’s march forward into a future where you’re living, breathing proof that recovery is possible.
Jessica Flint 0:02
Welcome to recover strong a podcast I will transform your recovery from an eating disorder by helping you go from theory to practice to mastery. This is your special time to learn new skills, tools and get the inspiration you need to recover strong. Let's get started. Good. Time to start today. Keep your head up. Don't understand your way. Hello, my warrior friends. How are you all doing? Welcome to this podcast. My name is Jessica Flint. I'm the founder and CEO of recovery warriors, a multimedia resource hub for all things related to eating disorder recovery. I personally recovered from an eating disorder and I'm here to inspire you to do the same. I believe recovery is not only possible, but it's worth it. That is why recover strong exists to help you see and connect to the potential that lies within you to find freedom from an eating disorder. Welcome to Five things Friday, a weekly show where you get more recovery wisdom in less time. Every Friday we talk about five things related to recovery. Whether that is five ways to avoid a binge Episode Five lies the eating disorder tells you or today's topic of five steps to improve your body image. Now what makes this show extra special and unlike anything out there is that it weaves together multiple perspectives and voices from the recovery warriors community. I will be the narrator guiding you from one learning point to the next with the support of our community members wisdom, and in the future, you have the chance of being a featured voice on five things Friday. Today we are talking about five steps to improve your body image. To start us off, I want to share a quote from the great Maya Angelou, she said quote, the real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself and quote. So the real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. How we think about ourselves is such an important factor in how we treat ourselves. Your perception of your body is simply that it's a perception. It gets filtered through your beliefs, your experiences, your upbringing, and other socio cultural factors. Now, what I want to make clear at the very top of this is the perception of yourself in your body can change. Now to help you open up to this truth and give you tactical advice on how to improve your body image. You'll be hearing from somewhere in an in a professional coach specializing in body image, self worth and confidence. And she is the best selling author of body image remix. Over the past several years summer has taught hundreds of women how to break out of the diet culture cage, so they can wear say and do whatever they want. Sounds like a hell yeah to me. So let's dive into these five steps to strengthen and improve your body image.
Number one, body neutrality. If your average day is full of negative thoughts about your body and generally feeling uncomfortable in it, then pushing to love your body and be body positive may feel like way too big of a stretch. Now there is a middle path. And that is one of body neutrality. Body neutrality is what can be viewed as the middle ground between Hating Your Body and loving your body. It's about taking away the focus on your outward appearance and focusing on what does your body do for you. Now think about these two statements. I love how my body looks today. Or my body is pretty amazing because it enabled me to go on a beautiful hike this morning. Now which one of these two seems easier to tell yourself? Body image expert summary Antonin has a beautiful way of looking at this concept.
Summer Innanen 4:00
I think we just have to know that this isn't like a path of perfection or 100% positivity. It's about just you know, notice knowing that there's going to be ups and downs and knowing that the end goal is to really kind of get to a place where you just don't think about your body so much anymore. You don't have to love it. You don't have to, like think that you're hot or anything like that. Like it's just about being able to look in the mirror and maybe like what you see or not, but be able to go on with your day. Like that's really what I
Jessica Flint 4:24
want for people. Body neutrality is about appreciating all the things our body allows us to do. I mean, isn't it pretty amazing that our bodies enable us to hug someone tightly and pumped up with all that feel good oxytocin. I'm just gonna hug myself right now and feel all that goodness. So how do you know if you're moving towards body neutrality? Well, it's when you start to consciously take away the expectation that your body needs to look or weigh a certain amount. That is when you're moving towards body neutrality. And speaking of weight, this moves us along to our next step in improving your body image
Number two, ditch the scale. What is your relationship with the scale? Do you have one? How often do you step on it? How does it make you feel before, during and after a hit pause and give this a little thought? What is your relationship to the scale? I know for me, when I was in the trenches of my eating disorder, I'd have the urge to step on the scale, particularly every time I went into the bathroom, getting rid of the scale was a monumental step forward in my recovery, because it took away one less trigger that sent me spiraling into destructive eating disorder behaviors, the less things I could measure related to food in my body, the better. And at the end of the day, my weight, your weight, anyone's weight is not a determinant of their worth. Some are in an in recommends to anyone she works with who wants to improve their body image that it is crucial to get rid of your scale.
Summer Innanen 5:58
It's controlling the way you feel about yourself. It's controlling your mood and your actions. And the only way to really start to listen to yourself and start to trust yourself and honor yourself is to get rid of it, get rid of those external factors that make you question how you feel about yourself. When I was at my worst, like, I was stepping on the scale, every time I went to the bathroom, like multiple times a day, it was so unhealthy, and yet, I did not see how unhealthy that was. But it was really like I wrote this one of the very first blog posts I wrote like many, many years ago was, I have an abusive relationship with my skill. When I really looked at it, it was my skill was like this abuser, like it was like, abusing me like it had control over me it was manipulating me it was making me feel belittle and bad about myself. And so getting rid of it can be one of the scariest things, first of all, because you feel like oh my god, if I don't have this, like, everything, like all hell is gonna break loose. But or, and I should say, it's one of the most important steps and one of the most empowering steps. And I think even if you need to just like put it in your garage, put it in your closet, like get rid of it for a set period of time, although I would say there's no point in getting it back. Because you're just gonna feel bad when you get it back. Like you're just gonna feel bad. The longer you go without it, the more you're gonna be able to really tune into yourself, she means your own desires to meet your own needs, and start to be more in your body versus like using some external measure to tell you how you feel about yourself. Because that's the thing, like, we don't even check in with ourselves. Like, we might be feeling totally fine. And then we go and step on the scale. And we're like, oh, I'm lousy, or like, I'm terrible, or I need to feel terrible about myself, you feel shame. And it's like, wait a minute, two minutes before you felt fine. Like, you know, being in your body is really about like, Okay, how do you actually feel in your body? Like before you've even looked in a mirror? or had any of these external things like how do you actually feel, and I think most of us aren't even checking in with that ever. And I think we'd be surprised that a lot of the time we feel okay, or we don't feel as bad as we think. And then we go and we check, we do a mirror check, or we do stuff on the scale. And we start to really just like criticize ourselves. So we want to get rid of that because we want to be more in tune with us. And then start to tend to how we actually feel in our body versus what that external thing is telling us.
Jessica Flint 8:23
I can still relate to summer when she mentioned feeling totally fine, and then stepping on the scale and feeling loads of shame. Been there done that. Now the more you can do away with external factors that lead you to question how you feel about yourself, the better and ditching the scale is a great place to start. But what do you do when you start to take someone's advice and tune in to how you feel in your body and you start to feel pretty darn uncomfortable? Well, let's move along and explore this in our third step to take to improve your body image.
Number three, self compassion. Your self compassion is where it is at. Literally, I could scream this from a mountaintop because there is a growing mountain of research that backs it up as the practice to call on during experiences of shame. International shame researcher Dr. Rene brown defines shame as quote, the Intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging and quote, shame essentially is feeling that you are not good enough as you are. Now if you have internalized shame, which is a very common experience of people who develop eating disorders, the body can become the scapegoat. The body gets blamed for feelings of unworthiness and disconnection that are much deeper than the surface body. A research study in the Journal of mindfulness found that increased self compassion is significantly associated with improvements in body dissatisfaction, body shame, body appreciation and contingent self worth based on appearance. So self compassion showed him improvements in all of these areas related to body satisfaction. Self Compassion is scientifically linked to help improve one's body image. And the good news is, is self compassion is like a muscle and get stronger, the more you use it, some are in an in has a powerful exercise for you to try and put into practice.
Summer Innanen 10:21
So something I like to try and have people do is trying to quiet the voice of the inner critic. So we can do that by even just taking some deep breaths, one of the exercises I use is by having them almost picture like a stereo in front of them, and have them like, turn the volume up on on the voice of the inner critic, and then have them turn the volume down like so that they can sort of see like, oh, I can actually control this. And then you want to try and turn the volume all the way down. So the way I do that is I'll usually say Okay, let's take a deep breath in. And then let's exhale and turn that volume all the way down. And then now what now when you have that place of silence and peace, you can ask yourself, like, what do I need to tell myself right now? What is my voice of compassion? Say, What does my heart say? However, you sort of want to connect with yourself. And that whatever answer you get there is really going to be the most truthful, authentic way to build up that sense that you are good enough. This takes practice, this is not like, sometimes it's easy for people. And sometimes it feels a little weird. Sometimes it feels a little clunky. But that's one way to tap into it, I would say for sure. And I think I mean, I've always encouraged people to say like I've done enough, I am good enough. But if it doesn't feel authentic, you can also say to yourself, like, I'm learning to be good enough, I'm learning to know that I've done enough just adding that little piece in makes it feel even more true, because you are learning that you might not be there yet, but you're learning that. So those are definitely good ones if you want some to just go off of but I really encourage people to try to just like get to that inner voice inside of them, to connect with it even just on a day to day basis. And often it's just the most simple answer, like you're okay, or I'm here for you, or you are enough. And I think that that is often like how simple compassion can be. But we just never listened to it. And we don't tap into it. And so there, we're stuck with like this voice of this inner critic that just keeps getting louder and louder.
Jessica Flint 12:36
Now remember, the voice of the inner critic and the voice of compassion can be turned up or down just like the dials on your car radio, give it a try and drown out that inner critic with the voice of compassion. Now let's move on to our fourth step to improve your body image.
Number four, stop checking your mirror. Mirrors, just like scales can be used as a form of body checking and can be an external object that impacts our internal mood. What is the mirror situation in your life look like? Maybe give a second to think about where our mirrors do I see them in my house, or in my work or in the gym or my yoga studio? Where do you catch glimpses of yourself in and around town in that home? Summers, here's a story of getting rid of her mirror and what happened next,
Summer Innanen 13:28
I got rid of a full length mirror like just coincidentally because I moved away from a house that had mirrors on the closets to house that didn't and I just didn't get a full length mirror. And I swear it made such a huge difference not having that because I was such a mirror checker, which is the same thing as stepping on the scale, which we don't even realize. But and not having that again, like I just had to kind of be present with like how I felt and it was huge. It was huge. And so I think that's another thing for people to like if you have already gotten rid of your scale, and you feel like Oh, I'm a mirror checker like that's my thing as well. Maybe you do an experiment where you kind of like cover up the full length mirror for a while and just sort of use you know, like a bathroom mirror so that you're not so fixated. Again, we want to get rid of any of that external stuff that is dictating how we
Jessica Flint 14:15
feel about ourselves. The goal is not to get rid of all mirrors in your house, but to minimize those external factors that lead you to fixate on your appearance and dictate how you feel about yourself. Another thing that can help is to write loving phrases on your mirrors with an eyeliner pen or cover them in post it notes that have encouraging mantras. This was something that was really helpful for me when I was in recovery for an eating disorder. And I continue to do it to this day because I absolutely love seeing soul affirming statements on my mirror and it helps me work on a more subconscious level. Now let's move on to the final thing to improve your body image.
Number five to rewire your brain, your brain has the ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. Now, this is called neuroplasticity. Many of the behaviors that you've used to try and control your body or beliefs about your body are rooted in diet culture. And it takes intention and action to unlearn these toxic messages. Summer has a lot to say about this.
Summer Innanen 15:22
I feel like we're always gonna have a part of us that desires thinness like I think that because of the culture that we live in, because that pursuit of thinness has been essentially, ingrained in us from the time that we're born, that we're all gonna have even a smidge of us that still like that still kind of wants that. I think that's really hard to like, erase completely. But I do think that we're really going to feel that way when we're first starting this like because, of course, you've always wanted that you've spent 10 years, 20 years, however long feeling that way? Well, if you can't just get rid of it, you can't just switch it off, I think that we have what we have to do is acknowledge that like, I am always going to want that unless I work on accepting my body. And it is literally a day by day choice or an hour by hour choice. It is is like dirt when you're about to eat, okay? Like I have to make the choice that I am not pursuing dieting anymore, you know, and you make that choice, every time that you have a meal, every time that you decide you want to work out. And you have to kind of detach from that being the driver of your decisions. And the more that you do that, the more that you're able to then start to trust yourself. The more that you're able to acknowledge the benefits of actually listening to your body and feeding yourself, the way that you need to feed yourself and the things that actually will nourish you. And over time as you continue to like work on accepting yourself. That desire gets so much quieter, I would say. And I think another thing there is really challenging the beliefs that you have about weight. So we have to like unlearn all the things that we've been taught about weight and health and body size and what it means to be a woman. So really immersing yourself in like research around that like to really unlearn all the myths that you've learned about health and weight and dieting, like all that stuff. So like the book Health at Every Size or body respect by lindo bacon, like those are really good resources to help without unlearning, following, like those instant Instagram accounts that also promote those messages about like the real facts around health and weight and dieting. And immersing yourself in like stories and imagery of people in bodies that look like your own are larger, that are just living their lives and doing the things that you don't think are possible because of body size. So whether that's like going to the beach in a bikini or taking a dance class or having a really great relationship with somebody else. Like we have to completely rewire our brain. And that takes intention and action. And it's about like, Okay, I've got to burn this old script of everything that I've learned about what it means to be in a larger body, and rewrite a new script and really look to the places that are going to where that script is positive where that script is, like actually people with those experiences that I'm going to feel more inspired by and using that is an excellent way to kind of overcome those fears and work on acceptance of yourself.
Jessica Flint 18:32
You really have the power to ditch the old script and rewrite a new one. And to change the thoughts and beliefs that are preventing you from all the amazing things you truly want to do in your life. Your body doesn't have to be a burden that holds you back from truly doing things that bring you joy and happiness and lead to greater fulfillment. Thank you to summer in an inn for sharing her wisdom with us. You can find more info about her on the show notes page for this five steps to improve your body image over at recovery warriors.com or to make it super easy for you down in the description box for this podcast. To review our five steps to improve your body image. You want to embrace body neutrality. Ditch the scale, cultivate self compassion, stop checking the mirror and work on rewiring your brain. As Sommer said all of these steps are you day by day choice. Give yourself a round of applause for prioritizing your recovery today by listening to this episode. Well, my warrior friend, thank you for having the discipline to listen in. If you found this episode helpful and know somebody in recovery who could benefit from its inspiring message, please share the show with them. It would mean the world to us recovery warriors if we can get our cause out to more people struggling with an eating disorder. So if what you heard today was helpful, share the show with another warrior or anyone on your treatment team. You can do this directly from your podcast player or send them over to recovery warriors.com We have a goldmine of free resources there for all stages of recovery. And until the next episode compassion like the path you were on encouraged keep you on it. You totally got this warrior