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.

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.

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? 

This was my very first episode of Gut Guru. 

In this episode I talk about cravings and how they are meant to be heard, they are meant to be listened to, and they typically have a message for you.

How do you typically approach your cravings?  What do you find yourself craving on a regular basis?

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?

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.

I get really excited about things.  Ethan, my boyfriend, often compares me to a dog when I get really excited because I can't contain myself.  I want to pounce on the opportunity, the conversation, the situation.  I get so wrapped up in the moment that I can forget about waiting my turn to speak and being patient with my surroundings.

Furthermore, I grew up in a family where I am the youngest of 3 and the only girl.  So I constantly felt like I had to interrupt to be heard over two very entertaining and loud brothers.  This continues to show up in my life now. 

I try to be kind and compassionate with myself when I notice I am getting super excited and want to speak when it is not my turn or feeling the urge to interrupt someone else to make sure I get my point across.  I'll admit, this is a constant practice for me, both to pause and take a breath and to be kind and compassionate toward myself.  But, something that has helped (besides talking to myself to either calm myself down or tell my inner child that they will be heard eventually) is to start to focus on what the other person is saying.

I teach my clients that we are not just nourished by what we are eating but also by our surroundings and environment.  A conversation can satiate you just the same way a meal can when you are really hungry.  When we slow down, not just with our meals, but with our friends and family we get the chance to enjoy their company and truly listen to what they are saying.  When we sit and listen to what someone else has to say we can then process that information easier and digest that experience thoroughly because we were truly present and not in our heads thinking about the next things that we want to say.

Greek Philosopher Epictetus said: We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

When I am able to listen with both my ears, my excitement does not diminish but it gets contained; it becomes more manageable in the moment so that I can stay present with myself and those around me.  This feels more nourishing in the end.  When we are able to be nourished and satiated by our conversation with others, we feel connected to our surroundings and thus more connected to ourselves. 

Have you ever spent an entire day lost in your head, only to arrive back home in your body after dinner, and wonder, "where the hell did that day go?"  I find my mind amazing.  It is smart, intelligent, amusing, and it plays tricks on me constantly.  I have had to learn that what my mind says, is often not the truth or fact and even writing this my head is arguing with me (which is quite amusing) saying, "nooooo I'm always right!"  It is an arduous and difficult task to differentiate between the mind and the body.  And for some of us (raises hand) it takes some time to first build up the courage to battle with our mind, and then more time to sit with the emotions in the body to figure out what the true message is here.

I often struggle with this like I did today.  My brain has been on triple warp speed asking every possible question it can ask and doubting just about every action I make.  Am I doing the "right" thing, am I making a mistake, am I eating the right things, drinking at the right time, involving myself with the right people, in the right jobs....blahblahblah goes my brain.  And finally I asked my brain this afternoon (as I have realized I often have to engage myself in conversation to stop the yaddayaddayadda of my mind) why is being "right" so important.  I had an ah-hah moment.  I was so lost in the questions in my head that it was difficult to see and hear the underlying rock blocking my way.  I have found that usually fear is underlying most mental rants.  In my case, engaging in "right" action means I am not failing and that my life has purpose (something I often fear-losing my purpose or not even living up to it at all here on earth).

The monkey mind is a protective mechanism, hiding us from our deep core wounds from childhood, from family, from relationships.  We all have them.  One of my favorite yoga teachers constantly talks about how we're are all broken and to embrace the shattered broken pieces because they are truly beautiful.  She asks each one of her students to share their broken pieces because she has been just as broken before as well.  It is a beautiful thing when we can finally get out of our heads and accept ourselves even with all our fears.  With tears rolling down my face in the arms of someone who truly cares about me this evening I realized that I can share my own broken pieces with others and be truly accepted and actually appreciated for sharing the fact that I do not have it all together.

It is quite a conundrum how often we accept others with their insecurities, fears, worries, tears, rants, etc. and yet we fear revealing our own.  This blocks us from self acceptance and has us heading into the fridge/cupboard/restaurant/grocery store to stuff down our fears.  Perhaps if we could breath into our fear and face it with total acceptance that we would not try and stuff our emotions down.  I have noticed in my own life the more I speak my truth and let myself be truly seen for who I am instead of who I feel I should be, the less I feel like being up in my head, off some place else, and reaching for food to comfort some emotion that I am not allowing myself to feel.  Let yourself be seen.  For even just one minute a day get out of your head, breath into your body, and speak your truth, even if it is just to yourself.