How To Overcome the Adverse Effects of Body Shaming to Become Body Positive [Episode #710]

This week’s topic is: How To Overcome the Adverse Effects of Body Shaming to Become Body Positive

I think all of us in some ways have experienced negative self-talk. We felt badly about our bodies, about our outer form and our outer shape. And this of course has created anxiety. It’s created just general suffering in our lives. And it’s really important that we go beyond these very limiting thoughts, which are so much about the surface. It’s less than 0.001% of who we really are.

I can say for myself from personal experience, going beyond this hyper fixation on the surface, not only made me feel better mentally and emotionally, but it actually opens up energy in your body. And it has allowed me to maintain the weight the way that I want my body to physically look, especially around my midsection, which used to feel so bloated and big all the time. It was in this letting go process. That real change occurred on so many levels.

Have you been wondering about this very topic? If you want to know the answer to this question sent in by a Beauty just like you, listen now to find out!

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[Question Answered]

Sharie – Boston (Body Cornerstone)

I have always had issues with my body image stemming back to my youth. Whenever I go on social media it makes me feel not good enough. Do you have any tips on how to break free of this and feel good about the way I physically look?

Inspirational Thought of the Week

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Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

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• Happier With Gretchen Rubin & The Shame Game
• Channeling Our Female Power Over Body Shame

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Hi loves and welcome back to our Thursday, Q&A podcast where our topic this week is How To Overcome the Adverse Effects of Body Shaming to Become Body Positive. And I think all of us in some ways have experienced negative self talk. We felt badly about our bodies, about our outer form and our outer shape. And this of course has created anxiety. It’s created just general suffering in our lives. And it’s really important that we go beyond these very limiting thoughts, which are so much about the surface. It’s less than tiny, tiny 0.001% of who we really are. And I can say for myself from personal experience, going beyond this hyper fixation on the surface, not only made me feel better mentally and emotionally, but it actually opens up energy in your body. And it has allowed me to maintain the weight the way that I want my body to physically look, especially around my midsection, which used to feel so bloated and big all the time. It was in this letting go process. That real change occurred on so many levels.

Please leave a review on iTunes

So I’m really excited to get into this topic today, which of course I, and maybe you and most, all of us have experience around before we do just a little reminder to please give us a review on apple or every listen to our podcast. It’s such a beautiful way to support the show and really just a wonderful way to help other souls find information that can really help them. So thank you so much in advance. It’s also a great practice to share the show through a link or screenshot or whatever, mentioning the name to anyone that you think would benefit. This is how we expand ourselves through oneness, through connection, through sharing. So thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. And also please remember to subscribe to our show and that way you don’t miss out on any of these Q and a shows, which are always on Thursdays or our Monday interview or solo cast episodes.

Get Your Copy Of YOU ARE MORE

Um, my last little reminder is that our new book is out our community book, which is written right from my heart to share with you in a deeper way through the written word and also audio book format. If you prefer that, which is called You Are More More Than You Think You Are – Practical Enlightenment For Everyday Life, and you can check that out, wherever books are sold and it goes through topics around really connecting to your own energy. There’s one thing I realized now more than ever is that everything truly is energy. Whether we’re talking about the, the foods that you eat, the reasons that you choose to eat certain foods, what’s going on with your moods, what’s going on with your gut, what’s going on with your relationships and the world around you. And it is learning to work with energy in a deeper way in which you will transform your life, whether that’s in creating the body that you want or creating more abundance, more freedom, more healthy relationships, finding your soulmate.

It’s really about learning to work with energy. So this new book is a practical guide in that regard with practices and introspection and meditations and journaling prompts to really help you uncover working with the formless part of yourself, which is how you create the form in your life. All right? <laugh> so all that being said, let us get into our topic today.

Question around the topic of: How To Overcome the Adverse Effects of Body Shaming to Become Body Positive: I have always had issues with my body image stemming back to my youth. Whenever I go on social media it makes me feel not good enough. Do you have any tips on how to break free of this and feel good about the way I physically look?

And our question this week comes from Sharie who lives in Boston. Thank you, Sherry so much for participating for being part of our community. So what we do is sending a big virtual hug there to Boston. What we do now is we take the questions and we rotate them through the cornerstones food body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth. In order to offer you this very holistic well-rounded approach to self care, to healing, to living your best life, which is always the most powerful way to come at this. And so this week we’re talking about body shaming. So of course we are in the body cornerstone and Sherry writes, I have always had issues with my body image stemming back to my youth. Whenever I go on social media, it makes me feel not good enough. Do you have any tips on how to break free of this and feel good about the way that I physically look?

So thank you so much, Sherry, again, for bringing this topic back into our conversation. This is something that’s talked about. And then sometimes we don’t talk about it, but it can be this underlying feeling in the back of our heads and our minds. Every time we pass a mirror, every time we look at an image, we get into that comparison mindset and we start to feel feelings of lack, not good enough. This brings up things from inside of us. And so, as I mentioned at the top of our show, there’s a lot of suffering that comes from this hyper fixation on the surface of our body. So I wanna give a little research now and then we’ll get into some discussion and then as always end with some takeaway tips. So this is unfortunately very common. We will link to some studies over on the show notes@mysolona.com. But this study from 2014 talks about body shaming. This idea of fat talk is associated with much greater body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviors. So when we look and we see this form that we don’t like,

It of course influences our feelings, our emotions, it re it, it ends up creating very unhealthy behavior. So now we’re participating, we’re taking action. We’re using our will to participate in things that are not wholesome and holistic and, you know, supporting and nurturing our holistic health. I know this firsthand because my disordered body image encouraged me to go down the path of BIA, where I go through periods of wanting to starve myself and being so hungry, I’d eat and then binging. And I remember being in it and feeling shame at those behaviors, but then I felt shameful about my body and it almost felt like a trap. Like I didn’t know the way out. And it definitely led to just mental health issues, a lot of anxiety, just so much wasted energy focusing on this. So I know what it’s like to feel like you’re in it. And research shows if you’re in this place, we’re gonna get to some solutions in just a moment. But I wanna share that another re another study, which willing to found that body shaming was found to affect 44.9% of people globally. So that is almost half of all people, which is pretty crazy. When you think about that, that statistic, it means that for so many of us, we’re spending so much of our precious time and energy, just focusing on the form on the surface.

And so one thing I wanna talk about here is the way in which we look at the corner, our cornerstone philosophy is if we’re really struggling in one area, it means that often we are not nurturing one of the other areas. So it’s like we focus and focus and focus on food or body in this case, but actually it’s the emotional wellbeing part of us. It’s the spiritual connection part of us, which is about really connecting to the soul, to the formless part of us and getting so deeply nourished with self worth, with these feelings of knowing that we are good enough, no matter what our bodies look like, no matter what the shape is that it starts to heal the other cornerstones. And again, I speak from deep personal experience here, and I’ll share a bit about my story, which was, as I mentioned, I was deep into these eating disorders. And then I went to college where I started to feel really connected to community. I got a group of friends that I just felt so connected with. We did everything together, these six girls, and then I felt free. I felt like I fit in because I was the only brown one. You know, I came from a very Caucasian town. I started to feel, you know, just expansive. It was a city. I went to college at Georgetown in DC. I was running at the time.

So I was running to monuments and I just started to feel so much opening up inside of me. So quite naturally, my vision for my life expanded and my focus away from my body expanded. But at the same time, I was just naturally to an extent, because this story is a little complicated. I was also partying. I was doing other things, but the point is my eating disorders healed this unhealthy behavior healed because I was just nurturing these other cornerstones. Now of course, professional health can be warranted in some cases. And if that’s the case, I encourage that as well. But there is this aspect of self healing means we take this more wider and more holistic approach.

And so it is this fixation on the form instead of the energy, which is the root of this issue. It means that we’re looking at our bodies in this very reductionist way. And often when we keep focusing on one thing, let’s say it’s thoughts of lack, thoughts of lack in this case, the lack, the body isn’t good enough. That’s what holds the energy in place. That’s what keeps it perpetuating. It’s like we do create our own reality. We are co-creators. And so in quantum physics, there’s actually studies around this, around electrons behaving differently when they’re observed, it’s called the observer effect, versus when they’re not it’s there’s quantum physics, um, treatises that talk about when we expect something and we expect something to appear, it actually does. It gets very complex. And there is some, a book that I would recommend we can link to in the show notes, it’s called quantum mechanics.

If you’re interested in reading about some of these very interesting studies that really defy Newtonian physics and science that we’ve been taught in school that really just show, wow, we are participating in reality. And this has been measured in this form of science. And so what that means as far as our topic is if we are expecting our bodies to be fat, if we are constantly bullying ourselves with our self talk and filling our mind with thoughts of not good enough and repeating that and comparing ourselves on social media, we keep it in place. We don’t break away. We don’t create, create great change in our lives.

So it’s very important that we shift and we go wider. As I like to say, in our Solluna Circle, we talk about this concept of zooming out, because when we hyper fixate in the minutia, you can tell in your body, in your life, if you’re getting too enmeshed in something, let’s say it’s drama in a conversation, or let’s say it’s a fight with someone or details at work or whatever’s happening there. Um, it’s really important that we zoom out and look wider. And so we don’t, we don’t get caught up in the weeds, which again just keeps us mired and localized and small. So the first thing I wanna say here is we want to go beyond the body in a larger sense. So practices become really important, including our meditation practice. If all we connect with is our physical body, that’s great and all, but it’s limited.

So the meditations that we do on a daily basis, this experience of expansion helps us to feel free and break through the limitations of our little bodies. And again, I can say this from personal experience. So please check out our free guided, practical enlightenment meditations, which are on the app. Please sit in this energy of expansion every morning, just seven minutes or so. And it starts to untether us from this deep, deep pressure to have to look a certain way and be so tied up in this self identification of the physical form. Now we can start to connect to bigger than the physical form beyond the physical form. And what’s beyond the physical form is the true self. Is this expanded energy. Number two, when we are in this more formless place, this deeper, more intuitive place, this is where we want to start to make decisions around body care.

So, and this is, this is what happened to me. I started to go into this place of what does my body wanna eat right now? What feels really nourishing to me, not the cravings, not when you’re in a reactive place or something stressful happened or old habits from the past. But when, how do I really nurture myself? And you have to start to learn to listen to that. What is the best way for me to exercise today? How do I wanna move my body? I never feel as fit as when I, as I do when I’m in Hawaii and I’m not, I’m not doing like a specific workout for me. That’s what feels really intuitive, but yet I’m gardening. I’m farming, I’m running after my kids, I’m doing archery. I’m living this very natural life. We’re hiking to the waterfalls. And so somehow in this intuitive place without pushing the body starts to open up, I do take detox every day, which is really important for releasing.

So I just feel more loose and relaxed. I’m having bigger bowel movements every day, but it’s from this wider place of loosey more loosey goosey instead of rigid, rigid that I feel that the body naturally lets go of excess weight that the body naturally just starts to let go of fight or flight. The nervous system starts to heal. More. Regeneration comes back to the microbiome, more blood flow, more circulation. Your body starts to become a more efficient machine when we’re coming from this less rigid and more intuitive place. So play with that a little bit. Play with listening pausing before you eat, before you order in the restaurant while you’re food shopping, just to see from your gut, from your heart instead of the mental place, what am I drawn to? What recipes would serve me right now when vegetables would serve me, number three, really starting to be aware of the fat talk.

And I wrote about this in beauty detox power. I started to just listen and create awareness around how much I would beat myself up how much I would say, wow, your thigh are enormous. Your arms are so fat and gross. And I would just hear this in my head. I would start to wake up to it. Like, what am I telling myself? Like, why am I so mean? So if we’re not aware of it, then we can’t really change the language. We can’t change the conversation. So at first, just start to witness it and be aware. When we start to wake up to something and create real awareness, then we can start to untether. We start to, we stop identifying. We stop creating those really dense, repeated behavioral patterns. So just start to notice and start to next time you start to get pulled into it.

When we notice, then we start to not just witness after the fact, but you’ll start to notice when that tendency starts to creep in about wanting to say something mean to yourself. And so it’s really important that you just catch yourself and just say, I’m gonna take a breath. I’m gonna take a pause and we just not go into that negative thought. And then we start to try to shift the energy into something expansive, positive, maybe a jump like, oh, I feel so beautiful right now. Maybe not, but maybe expansive, like, let me take this deep breath. Let me look out on the horizon and see this beautiful sky. Look at the sunlight. Let me feel gratitude in my body for my children or for this beautiful crystal on my desk. We wanna expand remembering that talk words and thoughts about fat talk or that my new shut getting caught up in the smallness. So just move into a more expansive place, move the energy away. So as co-creators

Are of our reality, part of playing with the energy means we move it in different directions. So if you notice this pattern of I’m playing small and keeping myself small, you direct it to an expansive place. Again, it doesn’t have to be fake positivity if you’re not feeling it, but something that’s expansive around you. We ultimately we’re all one, we’re all connected. So the birds, the sky it’s part of you feel into that feel into this gratitude energy. And then the next thing, number four is to just very much monitor what’s coming into your space, including your social media, this includes accounts, moving away from things that make you feel that trigger of not enoughness. Um, just these accounts that may be over. Um, what’s the word like photoshopped and so perfect. And there’s just too much emphasis on the surface versus the energy sharing about the energy underneath something feels uninspired to you.

If it feels limited, just unfollowed, just mute it and don’t be on there too much. Notice how much time you’re spending again, move energy away from the these limiting practices. And you know, your question Sherry is like, I go on social media, maybe just in the beginning, don’t go on there too much. You know, that’s a really important practice is so to train yourself, my energy feels better when I’m cooking, when I’m baking, when I’m going on a walk or when I’m just planting these herbs in my garden. So do more of that. Doesn’t have to be, we don’t have to be locked into these patterns. And then the next and last thing I wanna say is the community aspect. This is expansion again, for me in my story, I shared when I went to college, I started to feel this community more than ever.

I started to feel like I really fit in, and this is a way of expanding beyond the limited body, into a group of people that we feel connected with. Now this could be in your area. It could be online. This is a great place. Again, to mention our very supportive Sona circle community over there on the app section of your phone, you can search our Solluna app and it’s so important that we tune into this, um, support that’s available to us. And when we do that, it also helps us zoom out. And it’s really, really important that we do that day in day out weekend, wake week out. So we don’t get into our heads too much. We don’t go into these feelings of isolation and limitation, which really do limit us. So let me know, play with all of these aspects and let me know how else I can support you. What questions you have. You can write into the website, into the show. You can also reach out to me on social media at underscore Kimberly Snyder. And we will keep this conversation going. But today I hope that one or a few of these tips resonate as well as the overarching idea, which is going beyond this hyper fixation on form means we tune into energy. We tune in, we feel the energy inside in meditation. We feel our needs. We come from this more intuitive place. We don’t just need to play on the limited surface.

Thought of the Week

And so wanna end with a quote of the week, which comes from page 82 of our new book, You Are More More Than You Think You Are – Practical Enlightenment For Everyday Life. And this comes from the section called Wholeness in Nature. You are everything on the surface, and at the same time, you are the wholeness of the True Self, shining through it all. So what this means is on the surface, you may gain weight. You may lose weight. Your body may change. You may age it’s okay, all these things will come and go. Sometimes you’re happy. Sometimes you’re sad.

Sometimes you are angry and selfish and sometimes you’re loving and kind, these are all different behaviors. These are all things. The body, the behaviors change on the surface, but yet underneath as this powerful, constant energy, this stable part of you shining through more and more, just waiting to connect with you through what I spoke about today, especially through meditation, stillness being in nature. So connect to that energy inside and you won’t be so unhappy with how your body looks. You will start to appreciate yourself more in a very deep, very sustainable way. And when you do that more and more of the body, it’s funny how it just starts to naturally self correct. Anyway, little blockages digestion starts to flow for me. My body weight just started to maintain at its ideal level without the hyper fixation. So work with the energy and sending you so much love. Remember there’s lots of support for you. Other podcasts, recipes, meditations over at mysolluna.com, sending you lots of love. And we will be back here Monday for our next interview podcast, Namaste and Aloha.