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.

I'm sure you're seeing a lot of articles right now on how to eat less during the holiday season, what to fill your plate with to keep the pounds off, how to stay away from certain foods this Thanksgiving. I'm here to offer a very different piece of advice. Eat! Eat with pleasure! Eat everything and anything you want. Eat that pie. Eat the cake. Eat all the foods you have maybe been waiting to eat for an entire year.

When we restrict our food or tell ourselves that we can's have that piece of food that we want so badly we trigger a stress response in our body. Eating in a stress response shuts down our digestion and makes it more difficult for our body to assimilate and digest the food we are trying to eat. So you could be eating the healthiest foods on the planet this holiday season but if you are eating it in a stress response because what you really want is the gravy or the mashed potatoes or that piece of pumpkin pie then you actually won't be nourishing your body in the most optimal way which is probably your intention to begin with.

Now I'm sure some thoughts can perhaps arise of, "But if I eat that food I'm never ever going to stop eating!" When you hear these thoughts, I want you to slow down, close your eyes, and take three deep breaths, and invite in trust. Trust your body. Trust yourself that when you tune in to your body and what it is truly wanting to be fed that your desire for the food will diminish. A tidal wave does not keep getting bigger and bigger. Eventually all waves die down. So you can eat that piece of pie and then notice. Notice how it feels in your body. Notice the desire to eat another piece of pie and explore what would eating another piece give you? Explore the voice that wants more and more and see what it has to say, what does it have to teach you, if it had an age how old would that voice be? The more we deeply listen, the more those internal voices can soften because we are allowing them the space to be heard and acknowledged and seen and we get to embrace our human experience exactly the way that it is. You can invite all your emotions to the table. Invite in the fear, the excitement, the anxiety, and give them all a big hug for a being a grand messenger to remind you to be gentle with yourself.

Every eating experience we have is just an opportunity to learn more about ourselves. So instead of bringing in even more control over this holiday season, allow yourself to relax into the moment, and put whatever foods you want to eat on your plate. Fully enjoy them. Notice the tastes, the textures, notice what you love about that food, be fed by your surroundings and being around people you love or even just appreciate your own presence in the moment. When we eat in this way we bring our body into a relaxation response where the body can function optimally and digest any kind of food that you choose to nourish your body with.

I'm wishing you a holiday season filled with self compassion, acceptance, and kindness toward yourself no matter what you eat. I hope your plate is filled with pleasure, joy, and love!

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 learned over the years that it doesn't matter how healthy I am eating, that if I am eating quickly or when I am stressed, I have a difficult time digesting my meals.

Check out this video that it is not just what we are eating that contributes to healthy digestion but also how we are eating.

Please comment below: Have you noticed a difference in your ability to assimilate a meal when you are eating when you are relaxed or stressed?  I would love to hear from you!

Sometimes when my digestion starts to act up, I have to take a look at the things I am telling myself internally and not necessarily the food I am eating.  When my internal critic speaks up (and sometimes it can be really loud), I know that my whole body goes into a stress response, my gut cramps, digestion shuts down, and my ability to digest food and my life diminishes.

Meals that I could digest fine when my thoughts are kind and peaceful are suddenly not assimilating as well.  Our body reacts and responds to the words and the statements we are creating internally.  So if we are telling ourselves harsh words, putting ourselves down, judging ourselves, we are digesting those thoughts and those words along with the food we are eating. 

Often I talk about what digests and assimilates well in terms of food, but for a moment think about how the word hate would digest in your body.  Or what about the word ugly.  How would the statement I am not good enough digest in your system?  I know that even as I am typing these specific words I can feel my body tense up. 

When we think loving thoughts, let go of expectations, and just show up as we are in the moment, our body will go into a relaxation response and your ability to assimilate your food and your experiences will increase.  I know that I have had moments where I made a conscious decision to shift my internal thoughts to ones of love and appreciation for myself and then heard my stomach gurgle.  I took that as a thank you from my gut.  Thank you for feeding me love, thank you for nourishing me with appreciation, thank you for these thoughts so I can do my job properly.

I would love to hear from you!  Have you noticed a difference in your body's ability to function when your thoughts are positive?  Have you experienced your digestion change when you under a lot of stress and thinking stressful thoughts? 

When people find out that I am a nutritional counselor, I suddenly feel like they are nervous to eat in front of me.  Like I have all the answers and what they are doing is supposedly wrong.  I want to dispel that right now, that I never judge what someone else is eating. 

I have learned through my journey and relationship with food that what works for me isn't going to work for everyone else.  I don't live in your body, I don't truly know what your body needs from moment to moment (I do however love teaching how to learn to communicate with your unique body).

At the beginning of my gut healing journey, I was told how mucus forming dairy was and that it could be causing some of my issues.  You want me to give up my yogurt!? I loved my sugary added yogurts and the first time I heard this I was not ready to take that advice.

I tell you this story because it took me another 3 years to actually experiment with completely taking dairy out of my daily eating habits to find out that indeed dairy and I are not friends.  When we are ready to deepen in our relationship with food and ourselves we will.  What I have learned through my client's and my own process with the gut is to be patient and to give yourself plenty of time.

Embrace where you are now with your relationship with food.  Sometimes it may just be too intense to look at how you are nourishing yourself because it may be a protective blanket covering up some intense emotions that you are just not ready to deal with yet.  And that is totally fine!  Love yourself up and know that you are doing the best you can in this moment to take the very best care of yourself.

I wish I had been told this more on my journey to heal my gut.  Every time I had a digestive upset I felt like a failure and that all my effort to heal was for nothing. But every decision, every effort, every choice I made in the direction of listening, of tuning in to myself, especially in the moments that I was in pain and I didn't want to listen, brought me closer to myself and to my body and what it truly wanted.

So if you find yourself eating in front of me, just know that all I wish for you is an enjoyable experience with that food. We are all at different phases and stages in our relationship with food and I find the journey beautiful and full of deep wisdom and knowledge for who we are and the stories we bring with us from childhood.  It is all right there on our plate.

The stomach lining changes over about every 5 days, your taste buds change every two weeks, every day you shed over a million skin cells, the uterine wall for a woman sheds every month.  We are constantly changing and from day to day we are never living in the same body.  How will you begin the process of coming into relationship with your body and your gut for who they are and what they need today?

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.

Letting go of control has probably been my greatest challenge in life.  My head, at times, can definitely rule my heart.  This often gets in the way of how I truly feel or what I want on an emotional level.  When new situations enter into my life I can accept them at first, and then immediately afterward my brain kicks in and the mental spinning initiates.  Do I really think I can rationalize, analyze, and understand life?  Yet I find so often that for many people the monkey mind can get in the way of the emotional body.  How often has something wonderful come in to your life and then immediately afterward you tried to self sabotage it or explain it away or made yourself believe you didn't deserve it?

I see this so often, not only within myself but in others.  Life can be colored by fear, and mainly fear of letting go of control.  Life is unexpected and yet at every turn we try and make expectations so we can try and foresee the future to feel some sense of groundedness in our life and existence.  I like to understand, to comprehend every tiny little thing in my life.  I've been like this since I was a kid (no wonder I've gotten into psychology now).  I want to understand on a collective whole why we do the things we do and why I act the way I do and how different people ultimately bring out different sides of me.

Letting go of control in our own lives is never easy and then we throw in relationships.  We're in relationship with ourselves, with others, with our family, with a significant other.  All these relationships constantly throw curve balls into whatever plans we make and any sense of control we try and set up in our lives.  And every tiny little thing around us is constantly being digested in your system.  We are digesting out atmosphere, our relationships, our emotions; everything going on externally and internally is being processed through our body.  So when we are in the act of eating, we are not just eating food, we are also consuming our life.  Pretty intense to think that with every mouthful of food you are chewing, swallowing, putrefying, and churning through your existence.

Letting go of control can help us return to the larger perspective of life.  We really have no control over what happens in our life and no control over our digestive tract.  When we begin to relax into reality our whole system can come out of fight or flight mode and our parasympathetic system can kick in as we settle, relax, and our entire system (especially our digestive tract) can begin to run smoothly again.  Meditation has definitely been something that has helped me to achieve this state of being.  Truly coming into the present moment is about getting out of the thoughts in your head and coming back to description of now.  Noticing your posture, your sit bones on whatever your sitting on, the sounds around you, the smells.

As we draw ourselves back down into our bodies, we can begin to see the larger perspective and picture of life.  We can find the humor in our dramatic movies that we play screen by screen in our head.  I find that when I finally reach that point, it is hard to feel anxious about the thoughts in my head because I can begin to see them not as reality, but a dramatic movie that I should pull up some popcorn and watch and then tell me friends about this awful or hilariously funny movie I just saw haha....Once we can find the humor in our own life, it can became our aid to deal with the difficulties of letting go of control in life.  As I have reclaimed my own humor in my life, I have seen the affects of being able to laugh at my humanness.  What helps you to let go and how have you used or can use humor to be your side kick?