What I learned in my 20s Lesson 2: Body Image is a State Of Mind

I have gained and lost 20-30 pounds at least 3 times in my life. The changes my body went through each time really had nothing to do with the food, it had nothing to do with my body, and the changes were more a reflection of how I was trying to process events in my life. When I felt good about my body this was more because of how I was processing my life and when I felt negative about my body this was also again how I was honoring and paying attention to my feelings.

Have you ever had the experience where you looked in the mirror in the morning and thought, "Damn I look great today!" and then as the day moved on and perhaps you got some bad news or you had a lot of work and a lot of stress arose and suddenly you looked in the mirror again and thought, "Ugh I wish I weighed 5 pounds less." Our body is actually exactly the same. It hasn't changed but what has changed is our connection and compassion toward ourselves and perhaps the heaviness we are feeling is not necessarily because of our body but because of how we are mentally processing external events.

I am guilty of having said in the past, "I feel so fat today." In my process of honoring and embracing my emotions and how deeply I feel things (which will come in another post) I realized that fat is not a feeling. Fat is something that is in our body that we need to be alive. Fat is something we eat. Fat is not a feeling. So when we hear these internal thoughts of I feel fat we get to take a pause, breath, and start to get curious around how we are actually feeling in the moment.

Perhaps we are feeling tired, mentally heavy, sad, frustrated, angry. In just the process of naming how we are feeling in the moment by stating out loud I feel fear, I feel tired, I feel stressed we embrace our human experience exactly the way that it is and we don't have to make our body the battle ground of fighting our emotions. We can separate how we are processing our life from our body image and that no matter what is happening day to day we are still wonderful and beautiful just as we are. When we create more internal space to foster compassion and kindness and self love toward our body then no matter what emotions arise or how we are processing our life we can still take care of our body and discover how we can even increase our level of self care in the moment.

I no longer reach for food when I feel stressed or anxious or sad or depressed. This is a process that took me throughout my 20s to re-learn how to honor my physical and emotional hungers. Give yourself so much compassion on this path. Every moment is a new moment where we get to begin again and to catch our internal thoughts and ask ourselves is this the most loving and nourishing this I could say to myself right now? If the answer is no then the power and choice is within you to re-shape those thoughts to ones that feel more loving to you just the way you are and that you are always doing the best you can to take care of you.

The beginning of March marks the month that I will turn 30. In an attempt to honor this decade (and to commit myself to writing regularly again) I am planning to write a series of posts of the lessons I learned in my 20's to close out this decade and celebrate a new journey into the next decade of my life.

Lesson #1: Your Parents Did The Best They Could

My parents separated when I was 13 years old and eventually divorced. It first took me years to acknowledge and cultivate awareness of how that circumstance affected me and shaped how I related to myself and others. Once I finally faced the immense sadness I felt inside it took me half of my 20s to process how what I needed as child from a parent was perhaps not what I received.

Our parents are always doing the best they could with what was set as an example to them from their parents in how to be a parent and the wounds and struggles they are sometimes processing throughout their entire life. When we fight internally who our parents are this ultimately causes strife and struggle within us. It took a lot of grieving on my own to grieve for what my parents were not, for the family dynamic I would never have, and to appreciate who my parents just naturally are and acknowledge all the ways that they did show up for me in their own unique way.  As adults at some point, when we are ready, we have to take responsibility to heal our internal wounds. Finger pointing ultimately does not solve anything but pushes us further away from ourselves and owning our perspective in how we processed our past.

The wonderful thing about being an adult is that we get to meet our inner child the ways we always wished we were met when we were younger. We all have an inner child inside of us. I have a picture of me roller skating when I was about 5 years old on my fridge to stay connected to her. Sometimes she is still sad and sometimes she needs my attention. In this journey in fostering a deeper connection with ourselves, we get to tell our inner child all the things they needed to hear when you were younger. So you can tell them how wonderful and amazing they are just as they are and imagine giving them a big hug and taking time to hear what they have to say so that they can feel heard, and seen, and acknowledged.

Our first form of love often came from nourishment from a parent so for the rest of life food can be connected to am I loved, am I seen, am I supported, am I heard? When our relationship perhaps does not feel nourishing with our parents or when we are not feeling those emotions and sensations in our life it is completely natural for food to then come into that space. It is when we cultivate awareness of our emotions around how we were seen and held as a child and just allow our emotions to be there without trying to change them or make them go away that our relationship with food can find a very different place in our life as we nourish and satiate ourselves emotionally.

If you have wounds around your parents, I offer this suggestion to allow yourself to feel your wounds, feel the pain, feel the sadness, feel the anger. It was in feeling these emotions and no longer pushing them down that I felt more and more connected to myself again. When we push down our emotions we disconnect ourselves from our aliveness and from accepting and embracing our human experience as is. I know it can feel intense but just like a wave does not keep getting bigger and bigger the more we feel our emotions the waves eventually crest and calm down into gentle waters once again. I want you to know I have been through that process and am completely here for you.

I find more and more these days my clients are finding they are sensitive to the foods they are eating every day.

Eating the foods we are sensitive to can cause low grade inflammation in the body and cause all sorts of bodily and emotional distress.

Watch this episode of Gut Guru and learn about how you can spot and identify a food sensitivity without all sorts of medical or blood testing (which can sometimes miss the foods we are sensitive to anyways).

Have you discovered any food sensitivities? How did you learn from your body around what foods did not work for you? I would love to hear about your experience discovering and learning from the foods you have found simply don't digest well in your unique system!

Ah, one of my favorite topics in the world.  Poop. I get far too excited in my initial intakes with my clients talking about how their bowel movements are doing. 

Honestly, poop is one of the best indicators for how your insides are doing and how clean your digestive tract is.  Dr. Ken Heaton created the Bristol Stool Chart as a tool to measure the transit time of the colon. Take the chart with a grain of salt but many practitioners still use it today as a way for individuals to talk about what their stool looks like.

We typically want stool that is soft, well formed, and easy to pass. This means that food is not staying in your digestive tract too long and fermenting or not transiting too fast and thus increasing the likelihood of not absorbing the nutrients in your food.

Your bowel movements can change from day to day, month to month depending upon what you're eating, your physical activity, your stress levels, even how much you're chewing your food. Use your stool as information and an opportunity to reflect on your eating habits and stress levels. Through healing my digestive tract, I have seen the health of my own bowel movements improve. So don't fear how your elimination is going now, it can and will change.

If you find you're having too many hard bowel movements or stool coming out too easily try incorporating more vegetables into your diet, sip on a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in water with meals, take some probiotics (especially those with Saccharomyces boulardii), try some digestive enzymes for a short period of time to assist with the digestion and elimination process, and add some fermented vegetables like Kimchee or sauerkraut to your meals (just make sure there is no added sugar!).

Additionally, your bowel movements are such a wonderfully unique way, that rarely gets talked about in my opinion, of how to check in with yourself and come into the present moment.  Your stool can tell you a lot about how you're doing emotionally not just physically. What might you be holding on to? Or where are you not creating appropriate boundaries for yourself? Are you holding on to past experiences or fights or grudges and having a difficult time letting go? Do you share everything that is on your mind and always say yes to everything and having a hard time nourishing your soul and identifying what it is that you need?

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with your own poop and what you have learned from your ability or difficulty with elimination.

I have taken Robin Williams death pretty hard.  I have definitely cried more than once.
I felt like I grew up with this man, that he was a part of my family, and brought my family together through his movies (I have seen Birdcage more times than I care to admit). Here is a man who brought so much joy to the world and who secretly struggled with bringing that same joy into his own life.  I relate to that on so many levels.

Part of being a counselor is about showing up. I have tried to show up more authentically in this past year in particular because I also hide behind a wall, a facade of put together, confident, happy, and thriving. When I was in Grad School in therapy, my therapist actually asked me to draw that wall.  What did it look like? What was it made out of?

To my surprise the wall I drew was made out of glass. She responded when I was done that it was interesting my wall was made out glass because then couldn't people see me? I hide yet I want to be seen. I want to see and observe life but I fear participating. I have dealt with depression most of my life. I have seen members in my family deal with depression most of their life. I have gone to the depths of my soul mucked around, lied on the carpet of my room in my mother's house for two weeks straight before, and I always come back .

I have experienced how depression takes you away from other people, it puts you in a tiny black box where perspective is hard to be seen. I am lucky enough to have a few close individuals and a mother who were always there for long phone calls, crying, and telling me it is time to get out of bed. I have had to come to terms that the hole of depression never really goes away. Some try to fill that hole with medication, some use supplements, or food, or drugs, but it is still always there.

As part of being a nutritional counselor, I know I can use my experience with depression as a strength. I can sit with my clients in the muck, in the dark, in the depth of their soul and see the beauty and wisdom that is there. I see often in my work how so many are tying to fill this void, this hole with food. It unfortunately can't be filled with food, trust me I have also tried.

I share my experience with depression and that it still hovers around me from time to time to connect with you my reader. You are not alone in your struggles. I believe so many, including myself, were shocked about Robin William's death because we just had no idea the struggles and the depth of depression he went through on a daily basis. I believe it was a triumph that he lived for as long as he could with a secret dark cloud hanging over his head and a smile on his face.

I may not know you, but I welcome anyone to reach out. I have always found the thing that brings me out of my own darkness and into the light is connecting with others and lifting our spirits together.

Let's get vulnerable shall we?  My first year of Graduate School to get my Masters in Body Psychotherapy was intense.  The way I like to describe the experience to others, is that the classes are shaped in a way to rip your heart out of your chest, make you look at it, so that you can do the same for others.  Additionally, while going through the program, you also have to be in therapy so that you know what your triggers are and don't project your issues onto other people.

So my first year of Grad School I was mucking around in the deep dark depths of my soul.  I was looking at pains and wounds I hadn't explored probably ever.  There was a lot of crying and a lot of eating.  I had never binged this much on food in my entire life.  I was uncomfortable and it was unsettling.  Here I was still calling myself a nutritional counselor and spending whole days just eating dates.

While being in that period of time felt like forever, I can look back on it now and feel grateful for that experience.  I was using food as a tool to cope with emotions that just felt too big to manage.  I was talking about situations from my past and deep wounds that I wasn't entirely sure how to sort through, process, assimilate, and digest.  My binging was a way to protect myself.  It was a way to feel grounded on earth, that I was still alive, and that these situations didn't eat me and swallow me whole.  It was a way to fill myself up when I was exploring situations that left me feeling so empty.  

The one thing I want to offer you that I could have done without during that time was the judgment.  If you have ever binged or are currently struggling with binging it is not something that is bad, not something to be shamed, or ashamed about.  It is a message from yourself to yourself.  You can learn from these experiences with food and they can teach and reveal to you your own resiliency.  Whatever your binging is trying to help you get through, it is actually a sign of your strength.  You are getting through whatever difficult experiences that are happening.  The situation and the binging will eventually subside (even if it has been years), I promise you. 

Binging is a way to feel connected to yourself, to feel your aliveness.  I recently heard Marc David, founder of IPE, say that binging has a lot of power to it.  So you engaging in the act of binging can just be a misguided attempt to step into how powerful, resilient, and strong you are.

The lesson that my time with bingeing helped me to discover was to reach out and talk.  So I will leave you with this the next time you are feeling the need or desire to binge on food, pick up the phone and talk to someone.  Call your mom, your dad, a sibling, a friend, a significant other, whoever you want and talk about your emotions.  You can talk about the fact that you want to binge but that is skirting the issue that some big emotions are coming up that feel like they have the power and are going to consume you. 

Even if you have the binge, once it is over and you feel yourself coming back in to your body, still pick up the phone and call someone or take out a journal or a piece of paper and start writing.  Find some way to connect back with what is coming up for you because even after the binge is over the emotions will probably still be there.  And remember to send yourself so much loving kindness because you are just trying to do the best job you can taking care of you and, trust me, you are doing a pretty damn good job.

Happy Day after July 4th!  You might have gone to a big BBQ yesterday, ate a lot of food, and now today feel perhaps sluggish, tired, bloated, and gassy.  Additionally, often times after a large meal there is a judgmental voice that pops up.  "Why did you do that?"  "You are such a failure for eating that much." "I have to restrict what I eat today to make up for yesterday." "I have to go to the gym today and work this all off." 

Do any of these sound familiar to you?  This list goes on in terms of what that voice can say, but it is a voice that is loud, mean, and not looking after your health and well being.

So here are a couple of steps you can take after eating a big meal:

1.  Focus on Emotional Nourishment

Being with friends and family nourishes us in a similar and different way than food.  We can get filled up by the experience of being around loved ones.  Chatting, catching up, funny stories, playing games, effect the way we digest our food.  When you are being emotionally nourished by the situation your body is in a relaxation response and your digestive tract can handle any input of food easier.  So as those voices pop up, redirect your thoughts toward how you were nourished by the situation.  Often big meals are eaten in the company of others.  Instead of focusing on how much you ate, reflect on how the people, the situation, the environment was ultimately very fulfilling.

2.  Be gentle with yourself

Think of the negative, harsh, internal voice that arises after a large meal as your inner child.  The more you ignore the fact they are whining, the louder they get.  Listen to what your inner child is saying, rub their back, and tell them everything is going to be alright.  The voices may still be there but you can acknowledge them and choose not to do anything about them.  This can be an opportunity to delve deeper into what the voices are really trying to say.  Is eating a large meal mean you deserve less love?  Is feeling overly full mean that people won't like you anymore?  Be super gentle with yourself after a large meal and think about what you can emotionally nourish yourself with throughout the day that doesn't have to do with restriction or self punishment.  Take a bath, take a walk, listen to some music, call a friend, do something that nourishes your soul.  It is all about coming back to self love.

3.  Eat something fermented/take your probiotics

I of course had to add this in!  After a big meal, there might have been a lot of sweets, sugar, or carbs that were consumed.  By eating some kimchee, sauerkraut, taking a probiotic, drinking some Kevita, you will be flooding your gut with beneficial bacteria which will go to work to make sure those foods are not sitting in your stomach and fermenting.  Getting in the good bacteria after a big meal will help keep your mood up and aid your belly in digesting all the yummy food you just ate.  Additionally if you take your probiotic with a glass of water with a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar in it you will increase your stomach acid to also help break down the large meal.

And just remember every time we eat is an opportunity to learn more about ourselves.  Every meal is a chance to explore our relationship with food and others.  There is no judgment here.  Be curious like a child and explore the situation with fascination and inquiry.

I will start by saying that I am jumping out of my skin in excitement.  I just posted this article on my facebook page. "Enter psychobiotics: a live organism that, when ingested in adequate amounts, produces a health benefit in patients suffering from psychiatric illness."

I am trying to calm my enthusiasm for a minute to truly connect with why these findings and the continued findings of how important our gut microbiome is for me.  I spent years in digestive pain.  I ate poorly because I didn't know that eating something else would help me.  I became complacent with the pain and the bloating.  I thought this was what life was like for me and that I would never know anything different.

When the pain got worse in undergrad so did my anxiety and I began experiencing panic attacks.  I had no clue at the time that all these symptoms were connected.  There have been a lot of things that have helped healed my gut over time (and trust me when I got motivated and aware that I could heal, I tried everything).  But, one of the factors that I believe helped me the most was working on changing the microflora in my gut.

I grew up eating my emotions.  I loved sugar, I loved fatty meals, I loved gluten.  When my parents divorced, food came in to numb that pain.  I had no idea that how I was treating my body as a kid over time would destroy my gut, destroy the healthy balance of good to bad bacteria, and leave me in pain and confusion as to how I got there. 

Gut bacteria can:

Help with digestion
Protect the intestinal barrier
Direct microbial-produced neurochemical production (like GABA a neurotransmitter for relaxation)
Help to prevent stress induced alterations
Direct activation of neural pathways between gut and brain
Improve absorption of nutrients from food
Limit small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (which many individuals with digestive pain have and have yet to be diagnosed)
Reduce anxiety
Decrease cortisol production
Influences neural development, brain chemistry, emotional behavior, pain perception, and how the stress system responds in adulthood
Play a role in manufacturing the body’s supply of serotonin, which influences mood and GI activity

I could go on and on.  There is even research being done right now on what would happen to our body and our self expression if we entirely changed the bacteria in our gut.  Basically, what if we are just large bacterias walking around.  Is bacteria running the show?  Is bacteria really the "soul" we talk about on the inside?

I wrote my thesis on how to cultivate a relationship to the gut brain to teach to therapists about how their clients are eating and treating their body will help facilitate progress across time and in sessions.  The fact that more research continues to come out about the connection between the health of our gut and our mental health fascinates and excites me.  What if someone dealing with severe depression could one day take a prescribed dose of specific strains of probiotics instead of prozac to help them heal their gut and their mind. 

If there is anything that you take away from this today it is start feeding your gut some healthy bacteria every day!  Eat some fermented vegetables, kimchee, sauerkraut, take a refrigerated probiotic.  And then notice how you feel, notice how it affects your mood, your digestion, your ability to focus.  And if you are experiencing digestive pain, give your body time to heal.  When you set up the best internal environment it will heal.

Today on Gut Guru I discuss one of my favorite topics!  Bacteria!  Specifically probiotics.  Watch and enjoy!  I go over what they are, a few reasons on how they are useful (although I only skimmed the surface of what probiotics can do for your body!), and I share some of my favorite products to get probiotics into the body for the day.

I will be honest.  I don't eat sugar.  Ever.  I don't eat processed sugar, brown sugar, agave, honey, or maple syrup.  I rarely eat fruit and I will occasionally dabble with coconut sugar and stevia, but that is about it.  And this is what works for me and may not work for you.  Let me back up first and give some back story.

I loved sugar as a kid.  I loved cakes, cookies, gummies, candy, sugary cereals, chocolate.  If it had sugar in it, I wanted it.  Now as we have learned in the present day that sugar is as addictive or maybe even more addictive than cocaine, I understand why I wanted the stuff so badly.  Eating all that sugary food as a kid though destroyed my microbiome in my stomach. 

Bad bacteria and yeast feed and thrive off of sugars.  So the more sugar you eat, the greater the possibility of feeding those bad bacteria and the less room there will be for good bacteria to thrive.  And seeing as how 95% of our serotonin or happy neurotransmitter are made in the gut there is a pretty good possibility that your ability to feel happy can be compromised by eating sugar and highly processed carbs. 

Once I learned this and slowly stopped eating sugar (which was a very slow process over many years) I just never turned back.  So when I hear other people say to me, "but don't you feel deprived" or "what about everything in moderation," I think why would I eat something that is so addictive to my body and that makes me feel awful in my system? 

Sometimes there are some foods that we just need to stay away from.  If you feel emotional, unstable, ungrounded, lacking clarity, mental fog after eating a particular food ask yourself what is it about this experience of eating this food that feels addictive?  Is there some part of you that is so used to your physical and emotional reactions after eating a particular food that you have become complacent that this is just the way life is. 

1.  With those foods you have to decide for yourself, is "in moderation" worth it if it makes you feel a certain way that blocks your ability to be your most vibrant self. (And I want to make sure I state that for you it may be worth it!!  I do not believe in deprivation, but please understand I do not feel deprived not eating sugar when there are other foods and things in my life that bring so much sweetness.  Whatever you decide, honor that decision that you are making the best choice for your health and well being.)

2.  Next step is to ask yourself is there an alternative you can have in this moment?  For example, if I really need something that tastes sweet I will go toward berries, cooking something with stevia, baking some vegetable that has a sweet flavor like acorn squash or spaghetti squash or sweet potatoes.  Get creative!  If your thing is chips, would making some kale chips satisfy?  If your thing is a cheeseburger, could you make a burger at home and wrap it in a romaine lettuce leaf.  Or if your thing is sugar, could you make your own chocolate with raw cacao powder and stevia and freeze it in the freezer.  (more recipes to come soon on my blog ;)

3.  Last, ask yourself what would happen if you never had that food.  What emotions come up?  This is a lot of information about how that food is possibly nourishing you on an emotional level but not a physical one. 

At this point you don't necessarily have to give up that food altogether but you now have more awareness to make conscious decisions.  And that is really what this is all about.  Instead of asking yourself what would feel good in my system right at this very moment, you could ask how do I want to feel in an hour, two hours, the rest of the day, how do I want to feel tomorrow?  Your choices today effect your future self.  The choice is up to you and just remember there is no wrong choice.  Every action just gives us information to make informed decisions.