Episode 7: Six Things I Unlearned in my Health and Body Image Journey

The way society has long perceived body image has had a profound effect on many individuals, creating insecurities and false beliefs about their worth. The recent episode of our podcast aims to debunk these societal misconceptions and challenge the idea that smaller is better. The media often distorts our views about health and size, creating an unhealthy correlation between self-worth and appearance. We are firm believers that there are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to diet, exercise, or how you live your life.

During the podcast, we delve into a deeply personal journey of accepting and altering one's body. Gaining muscle mass can be a transformative chapter in one's life, leading to a celebration of the body rather than criticism. There is a prevalent misconception that one has to choose between loving and accepting their body and wanting to change it. However, it's important to understand the significance of introspection and the need to step out of comfort zones before choosing to change one's physical appearance.

The conversation takes a turn towards building confidence in our bodies, health, and fitness. Unlearning unhealthy and harmful messages that are often perpetuated by the media is an essential step towards body positivity. Sharing our journeys and talking about our experiences can significantly help build up our confidence. It also encourages others to do the same and promotes a sense of unity against body-shaming norms.

Throughout the podcast, listeners are reminded to remain sturdy and steadfast in their journey towards body positivity. They are also encouraged to engage with the podcast by following, subscribing, or liking it. This episode serves as a call to action for listeners to begin their body positivity revolution.

Finally, the podcast ends on a hopeful note, with the belief that every individual has the power to redefine their body image. This redefinition is a journey of self-acceptance and transformation that begins with the individual and extends to the community, fostering a more inclusive and accepting society.

• Full Transcript

  Jess: 0:01

  Hello friends, and welcome to Sturdy Girl, a podcast focused on strength, not size, where you'll hear conversations around healthy body image, cultivating confidence and being a resilient human in both body and mind. Sturdy Girl is the podcast where we shift the focus away from your appearance and on to living the big, rad life you deserve. Hello friends, and welcome to episode seven of Sturdy Girl. You get a solo episode today. It's just me, myself and I as we dive into things that I had to learn and unlearn while improving my body image and self-confidence. I want to keep this a shorter episode, a fun episode, one that can help you reflect on, maybe, your journey or some of the things that you had assumed or believed and have worked through and realized what the heck was I thinking? We all have those, we all go through those, and I will say this as a preface for this entire episode. We are forever a work in progress. We are forever learning and unlearning things throughout our lives, so this isn't a compilation of all my life lessons. These are the big things that I have learned over the last decade or so, and mostly, I would say, in the last seven or eight years, so let's dive into the first one. Smaller is not better. Look, we know this. We've heard it. We know that media is so focused on smaller equating to healthier. We've heard that, but have we actually internalized the fact that smaller isn't better? Because that's something that I feel like we continually have to work on. For me, learning that shrinking my body did not improve my body image. The focus on making myself smaller only made me spend that much more time and energy and brain space on diet and exercise, when that energy could have been spent on living a more intentional life. It could have been spent on living out experiences that had nothing to do with how my body looked. I spent so many years as a runner trying to quote unquote look like a runner, lose five pounds, because my running coach at the time told me that I would get faster if I just lost those last couple of pounds. And along these same lines. Health does not have a size. So keep that as food for thought, because maybe there is a better quality of life to be had in your case from losing a few pounds, from changing your body composition, but most of the time, we get so caught up in the vortex of needing a flat stomach and a big butt and a smaller than pant size, smaller waist size, all of those things when that doesn't lead to any health benefits. So that was lesson number one smaller is not better. The next thing that I unlearned was that performance does not equal worth. I equated my worth to my performance. I was a runner for over 10 years, everything from 5Ks to 50Ks and my worth and my sense of self came from my performance. Believing that my body has to look a certain way to be that kind of athlete to try to get smaller, right To be a quote unquote better runner, to look more like a runner. Equating the checked off workout as a reaffirmation of my self worth, of my value as a human. Eating, sleeping, living my life around performance metrics. Now, most of you listening, if you have some kind of pursuit of sport running, lifting, hiking, rock climbing, whatever it might be you're probably a recreational athlete versus, say, someone who is semi competitive or sub elite or something along those lines. We have lives outside of whatever sport it is. We're doing so. Eating, sleeping, living your life around that performance metric probably isn't the place we want to focus. Our worth doesn't come from our performance. Our worth doesn't come from how hard we worked out or how much we focused our life on that performance piece. Now, if you are training for a marathon, there is a component of performance where you look at nutrition, where you look at your training plan for improved performance right, there's a place for that. But your performance, in whatever sport you are doing, should not affect your self worth. Your self worth is inherent, it's innate, and it's so hard to separate those things because we're so used to being human doing instead of a human being. The next thing that I learned in my body image, fitness, self confidence journey is that there are no rules. Now hear me out. A few years ago, I was watching a movie with the hubs and I think it was called Pacific Rim and it's like robots battling monsters and I'm sorry if you love this movie and I'm totally watching it forgive me, but we're watching this movie and these crazy stunts kept getting pulled in this movie and I started laughing and I'm like, oh my God, there are no rules. And it became this joke of when things were out of control or you had a crappy week or something was going on and we just exclaimed there are no rules. And then we were watching the movie everything everywhere all at once and there's a part where these humans get turned into rocks and then there's little speech bubbles above them and part of them. They say there are no rules. So I had to include that in this episode Because, honestly, there really are no rules to how you live your best life. Truly, there are no rules when it comes to how you need to eat. There is no one perfect diet. Screw all the fad diets. Food does not have morality. There is no one right answer for how you should live your life. There's no one perfect exercise modality. You get to choose how you want to live, what kind of choices you want to make. Sure, we can look at things on an informational basis and understand that for our bodies to thrive, there are certain nutrients, micronutrients, macronutrients that are needed for body processes to go smoothly, for us to have energy to feel good. But you can choose how you want to eat. You can choose how you want to move your body, because there is no one perfect way to move your body. Now, are there guidelines for frequency and intensity of strength and cardio training to maintain muscle mass, for metabolic health, for those kinds of things throughout your life? Yes, there absolutely are guidelines, but, again, there are no rules and you get to choose what you want to do, and I think that there's something really empowering in that that there's no one right way to live. If you want to be the person that trains for an ultramarathon every year and then in your off season you're rock climbing, and maybe you're the person that hikes year round and wants to make sure to eat a cookie every day in your diet, great, what brings you joy and satisfaction and allows you to thrive and live the life you love. Live the big rad life you deserve, because that's what sturdy girl's about, right? I have to laugh as I'm recording this right now because I get so excited. I feel like I'm full on on a soapbox for this whole episode. To just be like friends. There is so much more to life than spending time and energy on exactly how much you eat and exactly how much you move. Movement should feel good and enjoyable. Food should be enjoyable. It's not just a set of nutrients. There's so much more to it. Okay, I think the biggest thing for me that I have unlearned in the last few years is that my stomach tells others absolutely nothing about me. I spent so long, so long with my stomach as the source of shame, the source of my shame. I tried in middle school, high school, to learn belly dance and embrace my stomach and it did work for a time. And it took me many years and actively working on my body image to realize that my thought process was if someone saw my stomach and saw the visible fat and rolls and the cellulite that exists there, that I would be seen immediately as a failure. That my quote unquote inability to have a flat stomach meant I wasn't disciplined enough or dedicated enough to live this particular lifestyle as identified as a runner, a lifter, a coach, a human being trying to live my best life. For me it felt like such a source of shame, a source of failure, because I couldn't achieve a flat stomach, couldn't get rid of all of those rolls. And, honestly, if I had to pinpoint one thing, that was the turning point for me because, again, to be honest, I'll probably struggle with some form of this my whole life. I don't think those negative thoughts are ever going to fully go away. But the big turning point for me was getting into powerlifting, and I'm not saying you have to get into powerlifting to work on this yourself, but the shift away from the obsession in the running world of becoming smaller which that conversation has shifted a lot but getting into the powerlifting space. Powerlifting is not about your size. It is going out there and giving your best effort, testing your strength, seeing what you're capable of, getting curious for how much of a challenge you can take on. It helped me embrace how your body changes when you gain muscle. I remember reaching out to my coach at the time when I first started I think I was about eight or 10 months in. We were in the thick of training for my first powerlifting meet and I remember messaging her and saying oh my God, alyssa, my pants don't fit anymore, my scrubs are too tight in weird places and this is really overwhelming and realizing that my clothes didn't fit the same way they used to because I had gained muscle mass, clothes were fitting differently. And being able to accept that that added muscle mass allowed me to pick up 150 more pounds off the floor, that that muscle mass allowed me to feel so much more strong and confident, and was such a turning point for me to realize that the answer isn't getting smaller, the answer isn't trying to make my stomach flatter. In fact, my waist has stayed exactly the same size while adding on muscle mass over the years with powerlifting, but my core strength has increased exponentially and now there's so much less energy and thought given to how my stomach looks when I get dressed. Yes, I focus on the clothes that feel good, that I feel comfortable in, that I like, but I don't obsess as much now about how much does my stomach show in this. Do I want to wear the crop top today? Does it feel good? Because my stomach is no longer my source of shame, it is no longer a source of anything. It is just part of my anatomy that I have come to accept. And you know what? Honestly, I still don't love my stomach, but I don't really care about it in the context that I used to, and I think that's my big point here, because the showing my stomach tells people absolutely nothing about me. And while we're talking about bodies, let's go into the fifth thing that I've learned in this never ending journey, and that is that you can do both. Now, if you're an OG human who has followed me on social, you will remember that the original tagline to my coaching to ever wild was you can do both, and that was in context of being a hybrid athlete, of running and lifting, both. But in this case I'm talking about being able to simultaneously accept your body as it is body acceptance and want to change your body. Because there are these camps that seem to exist that say, if you want to love and accept yourself, you can't be trying to change your body as well, you need to learn to accept yourself as is. That's it, the end. And then there's this other camp that says, if I love and accept my body as it is and don't have the desire to change it, then I've given up. I can't accept it as is, because then I'm gonna lose the momentum and motivation and discipline or whatever other term you want to use to keep working out and keep moving my body. You don't have to belong to one of those camps. You can accept your body, whether that acceptance is body love, body appreciation, body positivity even, but that acceptance piece of I accept my body as it is. I accept that I am a human that is so much more than just a body, but I also want to change my body composition or something about my body. There is nothing wrong with doing both. Now we've talked about how much our body image is internal brain work. It's beneficial to do this work first before delving into wanting to change our physical appearance, because, again, changing our appearance isn't going to magically change our life or how we feel about our body. Right, losing the weight, gaining the muscle, changing our bodies does not automatically improve our life. Now, again, context there are some people whose body composition is such that decreasing fat mass can improve their quality of life. Suddenly they're able to keep up with their kids, go on the hikes, they want to do the things in life that they want to do. But just because we want to change our bodies doesn't mean we can't, at the same time, have a healthy relationship with ourselves. That's my point, and that, for me personally, is still something ongoing. It's something that I continue to work on, but it's something to grapple with, because a lot of books that you will read about improving your relationship with yourself or improving body image talk about diet culture and talk about being anti-diet, talk about dismantling those pieces and not subscribing to any of it. But there's a gray area and there's a place to be in the messy middle of both, of being able to say yet diet culture is bullshit and I don't subscribe to any of the fat diets. However, your relationship with yourself is so important. It's worth taking the time to treat your body with respect, to nourish your body with the foods and the activities that you enjoy and that are sustaining. Okay, we can do both. Don't think it has to be one or the other. The sixth and final thing that I have learned is that doing the hardship helped the most. Now I could say the whole. The magic happens outside your comfort zone, and it's true it really is. But doing the things that didn't always come easy is what helped build my confidence the most. It's like getting stronger in the gym. The more reps you put in, the stronger you get. The more you're showing up the frequency, the consistency, the amount of weight on the bar, getting uncomfortable, challenging yourself, working in those end-rep ranges. That is exactly how growth works in the real world. Building confidence requires practicing the thing. If I wanted to go become a public speaker, the more I practice public speaking, the better I'm going to get. Doing the hard things, the scary things, the things that put us outside our comfort zone showing up, deciding for me showing up, and deciding to create a podcast recording myself, editing my voice for hours afterwards you guys, I get so tired of hearing my own voice. So I'm so glad that you enjoy listening to me but showing up putting in the reps, because if we go back to that episode, if you haven't listened to the episode on building confidence, I highly suggest going back to it. We learn that confidence is a skill. It's a skill that's developed by being willing to try, being willing to take that risk, being willing to take action. Confidence is built in action. So what are you going to do? That's hard and puts you outside the comfort zone. And those are all six things, major things that I have learned through building confidence, through working on body image, through my fitness and health journey. I feel very buzzwordy saying that, but just to recap, smaller is not better. Performance does not equal worth. Three, there are no rules. Four, my stomach tells others absolutely nothing about me. It is not my source of shame any longer. Fifth, you can do both. You can work on a healthy, flexible body image and want to change your physical appearance. And, lastly, doing the hardship helped the most. This was so fun. Okay, before we end this episode, I do want to go over some of your submissions on the things that you had to learn or unlearn in your own journeys. I had a number of you submit that learning that foods were not good or bad was a really big component in your journey, learning that foods had no morality. And then I had probably a dozen different submissions that were variants of saying that it was learning to be okay with not being a huge fan of certain parts of your body, but that those parts don't cancel out the parts that you do like. I really appreciate that, but at the same time, the reminder that you are so much more than just a body. You are so much more than the sum of your physical parts. And then, lastly, I love this submission they said one of the things that they learned was understanding why they want to improve their body. Is it for me or for others' attention? And yes, so much yes to this, because If you can develop that awareness around why you've set a goal or why you want to change, it allows you to do some introspection, to say, did I decide that suddenly I want really big shoulders or I want to lose X number of pounds because of something I saw while reading the news or schooling social, or my friend so and so posted about some new fitness thing that they're doing. I don't know I'm trying to think of a specific example here but oftentimes, if we can figure out why we are desiring that change in our bodies, having that why can be so powerful and so important, because maybe that why is something that means a lot to you. Or you've done the work on your body image and, yeah, great. If you say, jess, I want to build bolder shoulders, we're like heck, yeah, let's do that. You're allowed to want to change your appearance and change it in ways that you like and enjoy, just so long as you're not doing it for other people, that you're doing it for you. Such great submissions. Always happy to start conversations on Instagram at sturdygirl underscore if you want to talk more about any of these things, if you want to share about your journey, things that you have learned or unlearned, building confidence in your body image, in fitness, in health here for it, love it. Hope you enjoyed this solo episode. As always. Thank you so much for tuning in and I will talk to you next Wednesday. Stay sturdy friends. If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please feel free to follow, subscribe, like whatever the heck you do with podcasts. As always, stay sturdy friends and we'll talk to you next week.