We live in a body neurotic world. When it comes to bodies and health it’s all just a giant mess of ideals and standards for women. There is so much noise that attributes a woman’s worth to how she looks. We learn to see ourselves and judge how we look from an outside perspective, trying to figure out what other people must be thinking about us and then conform to fit those standards.
In this episode I'll be talking about why loving your body and learning to love the skin you're in. You'll learn the top factor that leads to body hate and shame and how to reverse it to start loving your body exactly as you are today. I'll also give you four more tips to help you on your self love journey to create being able to listen to your body, have body acceptance while opening a path for body diversity to be the new normal.
Want to submit a question for the 100th episode? DM Karin @karinnelsoncoaching on Instagram. To schedule your complimentary consult with Karin click here. The Becoming You Again Program for divorced women is coming! If you want to be the first to know when it's available then you need to join the waitlist by clicking here. Make sure to follow and rate the podcast on your favorite podcasting app.
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Self confidence and high self esteem comes because of how you think about yourself. It isn't given to you by something you do or accomplish or someone outside of you. When you learn to love your body and feel good in the skin you are in you will automatically feel more confident, have greater self esteem and feel more connected to yourself than ever before. This can be your reality. If you are tired of feeling like shit every time you look in the mirror. If you want to stop hiding yourself in the background of pictures and start feeling like the fucking queen that you are and owning it, exactly as you are today without changing your body to do so, then you need to work with me. I can teach you to love yourself exactly as you are now, heal from your trauma of divorce and move into creating the kind of life you have always wanted to live - full of confidence, self trust and happiness. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
I’m Karin Nelson and you’re listening to Becoming You Again episode number 90.
Welcome to becoming You Again. The podcast to help you with your mental and emotional wellbeing during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the trauma of your divorce by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so your life will be even better than when you were married. I’m your host Karin Nelson.
Hello my friends. it’s a new week, a new podcast and this is episode number 90 which I think is actually pretty cool! We are very, very close to episode 100 which in the podcast world is kind of a big deal. Not a lot of podcasts make it to 100 and when you do, hurray. Celebrate. That is amazing. So I’ve been thinking about what I might want to do for the 100th episode and I was thinking it might be kind of fun to do a Q&A episode. I will answer questions for literally anything you want to know about. Anything you want to know about me. It does not have to be divorce related. It can be. But it totally does not have to be. It can be personal questions. It can be asking about coaching, asking about my childhood, asking about my partner, asking about my kids, parenting questions literally whatever you want. You want to know what TV shows I watch, ask it. You want to know what kind of music I love. Ask it. You want to know where I travel to. Anything and everything goes within reason. So this is how you submit a question for the 100th episode. I want you to DM me on Instagram @karinnelsoncoaching and if you remember to put the number 100 and there either at the beginning or the end. Just somewhere so I know this is specifically for the 100th episode. If you forget I probably will figure it out because it is maybe not going to be a Friday flip submission because it is not divorce specific but either way I will try to answer as many questions that come in as I can and I will be recording this podcast in a few weeks because I usually record a few weeks out and so you have until February 6 to submit your questions.
Alright so onto today’s topic. Loving Your body. We live in a body neurotic world. When it comes to bodies and health it’s all just kind of a giant mess of ideals and standards for women that have evolved over the years to where we find ourselves today; thin is in, strong is ok, but not too strong and if you find yourself living in a fat body – well can you just stay indoors so no one has to see you or interact with you because gross.
Don’t get me wrong, these ideals are changing. I know that. The industry standards are slowly changing and this is being led by women, men and leaders who are tired of being looked at as less than because their body doesn’t measure up on a size chart that was literally created by the diet industry. Right. These people are leading the charge in moving toward a society where listening to YOUR body is key, where body acceptance is the path and body diversity is becoming more of the norm. Strides have been made and continue to be made but I think there is more to do. And like everything that I teach, if we are going to make any kind of difference in this world we have to start with our world and where we have the most influence first – and that always starts with ourselves.
So today that is why I am talking about loving your body. And I don’t mean loving the body you had when you were 18, or the body you had before you had kids, or the body you had when you were active and went to the gym 5 days a week 10 years ago. I mean the body you have right now. Today. The one you woke up with this morning. Whatever that body that you live in at this moment is the one I’m talking about. My goal is to help you love yourself and your body that you are in right now a little bit more.
There is so much that is behind the body shame industry and why we have such a hard time believing that we are beautiful in the skin we live in. I’m not going to go into great detail about why our world and society and culture is this way in this podcast but if you would like to learn more about it and the idea of body objectification and body shaming and where this all comes from then I would recommend a couple of books that you can read that will help you and I am sure there are far more out there. I would recommend reading More Than A Body by Lindsay Kite and Lexie Kite. And of course there’s also a couple of great chapters about this in one of my favorite books that I talk about all the time which is Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking The Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski.
From the time we are little our environment, everything we see, everything we hear, we learn, we absorb in today’s society is body centric. That is a truth that surrounds us. There is so much noise that attributes a woman’s worth to how she looks. We learn to see ourselves and judge how we look from an outside perspective, trying to figure out what other people must be thinking about us and then conform to try and fit those standards. When we look different than what society is telling us is acceptable, we start to self objectify and tell ourselves that we are not good enough, we aren’t pretty enough, we aren’t skinny enough, strong enough, or we’re too skinny, too tall, too short, too fat, too strong, our boobs are too big, our boobs are too small, our butt is nonexistent, our butt is too large. All of this leads to low self worth. Okay my cat just decided to join me here in the closet and he is purring very loudly so if you can hear him purring just try and ignore it because I am going to keep going with my recording. But all of this leads to low self-worth because society is telling us we’re not acceptable by these made up standards and then we are telling ourselves that we are not acceptable. We then start to believe that we are not worthy because of it.
So a key element to loving your body right now is understanding your worth. Your worth has nothing to do with how you look. It has nothing to do with what the scale says. Your worth is not determined by whether you are married or you have a partner. Your worth is not determined by the size of clothes that fit your body. Your worth is not determined by your shoe size, your skin color, your hair texture, whether men whistle or cat call you when you walk down a city street. Your worth is not determined by how many wrinkles you have, or if your skin is smooth, or acne free. Your worth is not determined by how straight your teeth are or how flat your belly is or whether you have thicker calves or ankles. Your worth is inherent. Your worth was given to you the moment you were born and you have nothing to do with it you. Your worth is constant. It is unchanging. It is unwavering. You do not have to change or be different in any way to have more worth, because you have always been and will always be at full capacity of your worth at 100%.
Society doesn’t want you to believe that your worth is inherent. So much of our society and culture today is driven by making profits and keeping you under control and if you believe that your worth is already full – that you are already enough just as you are – then that means you’re not going to fall for the idea of needing to buy something to change how you look. That means you’re going to believe that your opinions are valid and acceptable and that means you might not be as controllable as they want you to be. The idea floating around us at all times is that your body is a problem and it needs to be fixed because then you might be able to be more worthy. But your body has never been the problem. The perception of your body and you not understanding your inherent worth, that is the problem. And it’s not your fault. It is not your fault that you perceive your body as not good enough. You have been grown in this garden of unworthiness and not good enough just by being alive in today’s world.
The idea of inherent worth may be new to you and it may just be more challenging to accept as truth. If that’s the case, then I want you to work to loosen your grip around your story of what makes someone worthy. What would be the upside for you in believing that your worth is inherent? Is there a downside to believing that your worth is inherent? Learning to believe in your inherent worthiness is like planting the seed of self love in the ground. Now we need to give that seed some water, and some fertilizer and some sunlight to help your body love seed to grow.
The singer, Lizzo, once said, “I don’t think that loving yourself is a choice. I think that it’s a decision that has to be made for survival; it was in my case. Loving myself was the result of answering two things: Do you want to live? Cause this is who you’re gonna be for the rest of your life. Or are you gonna just have a life of emptiness, self-hatred and self loathing? And I chose to live, so I had to accept myself.”
Loving the body that you live is accepting yourself. It is one of the components of self love. If you’ve lived most of your life nitpicking, judging, self objectifying and hating on your body, then it will make sense that it’s going to feel uncomfortable to start to see yourself and accept yourself and your body as it is. I don’t want you to think that overnight you need to change your perception of how you look. It is going to feel uncomfortable and I want you to try to embrace the discomfort and let your thoughts be a little messy here. You are going to have some contradictory thoughts. This might sound like I recognize that I felt more worthy in the body I had before I had kids. I also recognize that my body now has nothing to do with my worth. Or I know that my culture is telling me that I need to go to the gym so I can fit a certain mold of how to look. But I also know that when I move my body I feel energized and more connected to myself. So it is okay to have contradictory thoughts here. It is okay for this work on learning to love your body and the skin you are in feel a little uncomfortable. There is nothing wrong and it does not mean that you are not growing and learning to love yourself more. It is all part of the process.
You can also start to work on how you think about your body. I am no different than you and have been working on loving my body exactly as it is for years and years. A few years ago I was meeting with a woman for a new skin care routine and she was asking me some questions about my skin. When she was done asking the questions she said, “I noticed that you referred to your skin and yourself as ‘gross’ several times in your answers.” I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even realize that I had referred to myself and my skin as ‘gross’ – and not just once but several times and we had only talked for like five minute. That was a big wakeup call to me to start paying attention to how I think about myself, my body and the skin that I am in. I decided to begin to change that narrative for myself, but I knew I couldn’t just go from I’m gross to I’m not gross – I’m lovely. I had to start with some neutral thoughts about myself because my belief just wasn’t there yet. One of my coaches likes to gives the example of trying out a neutral thought like, I have a body, when talking about learning to love your body. Another neutral thought might be, bodies come in all shapes and sizes. My body is one version of that. You can start with some of these neutral stepping stone thoughts or come up with a few on your own and then begin the practice of daily belief and redirection when it comes your body and how you think about your body.
The next step in learning to love your body is to stop filling your brain with images of what society is telling you how women ‘should’ look. In every book I’ve read about loving your body and in every masterclass I have taken, every single expert agrees that normalizing real body shapes, sizes, and all kinds of color makes a huge difference. Stop following accounts on social media where you find yourself comparing yourself to the woman and then feeling bad that you don’t look like her. Because you know what that is doing? That is leaving you hating yourself and feeling terrible. Start to fill your feed with accounts of women who first of all look like you. Right. They have your same shape. They have your same size. They’ve got big boobs like you or small boobs like you or a big giant butt, whatever it is, fill your feed with some women who look like you, first of all. Then go a step further and work on some body diversity and follow accounts of women with body shapes that are different than yours, but not in a way where you are comparing but rather noticing the beauty of the difference. Follow women whose body shapes are different than yours, hair texture that is different than yours and skin color that is different than yours and start to notice how they are no better or worse than you, but rather diverse.
Our brains have something called confirmation bias which means that we look for evidence to support the things we already believe. So if you believe that you are ugly, different, and the wrong shape, then you will look around and see women who are the ‘right’ shape, who are pretty and who all kind of look the same – but different than you. By filling your social media with a new narrative and looking for the beauty in the diversity of shapes, sizes, curves, colors you will be changing your confirmation bias to find evidence that supports diverse women including you and including me are what the definition of beauty; and what the new definition of normal; or however you want to think about it.
The final thing I want to say about this is dress in a way that makes you feel good. Buy clothes that fit you. I am not kidding. Buy clothes that fit you. Get rid of the jeans that you’ve kept in your drawer for five years hoping to get back into. Stop wearing the oversized T-shirts that you got for free that they handed out at the basketball game because it is two sizes too big but it at least fits. Throw away the clothes that have holes in them or that just don’t fit right.
A few years ago I was going through exactly this thing where I was looking to find some clothes that made me feel good when I wore them and when I looked in the mirror – number one because they fit right – and number two because when I saw myself in them I thought, ‘I look really great in this!’ But the problem is I really, really, really hate shopping. I hate it with a passion. I don’t like to go to store and store and try on a million things and spend an entire afternoon doing that only to come home with one thing may be. I hate that. To me it is just not a good use of my time and I do not enjoy it. Now I know lots of people do and I am not saying that you should not. If that makes you happy and you love to do that go for it. It is just not my thing.
So I signed up for one of those online style websites where you tell them your sizes and your style and then a stylist picks out a few things and sends them to you each month and you try them on and keep the ones you like and send back what you don’t. I have to say I really loved this. I didn’t have to use my brain power or energy to curate the clothes and shoes and instead just had to try stuff on and if it felt good on my body than I would keep it. Now you do not have to completely overhaul your wardrobe in one go. I am not saying dump everything and go start over. Most of us cannot afford to do that. Most of us do not want to do that. But give yourself permission to buy a few items and where some things that fit right and make it very easy for you to think about how amazing you are in your skin. In the body you are in right now.
Remember, you are inherently worthy. Changing your body to fit some ridiculous cultural ideal will not make you more worthy – it can’t because your worth is already at 100%. Change the way you talk to yourself, starting with neutrality if you need to. Fill your feed with diversity and stop following accounts where you come away feeling not good enough. And buy clothes that fit and help you to feel good about yourself. You are in charge of loving your body. Nobody else can do that work for you and this is work worth doing.
That’s it for today, my friends. I will talk you soon.
If you like what you’re learning on the podcast and you’re ready to create lasting change and results in your life then you need to be working 1:1 with Karin as your divorce coach. This is where we take everything you’re learning in the podcast and 10x it with implementation and weekly coaching where you start to see change in yourself and your life immediately. To find out more about how work exclusively with Karin go to www.karinnelsoncoaching.com . That’s www dot Karin nelson coaching dot com.
Thanks for listening. If this podcast episode agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give it a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure to check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.
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