Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ready to lose 40 plus pounds without giving up happy hours, weekend brunches, or date nights. Then it's time to uncover the hidden link between binge eating and toxic relationships. And finally, break free from both. Welcome to the Hungry for Love podcast with Jillian Scott.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Y' all ready?
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Let's go.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Hey. Hey. Welcome back. Today we are going to dive into the topic of reclaiming our bodies, and especially reclaiming our bodies after trauma. And this is going to be part body image, part self worth. There are a lot of aspects that go into it, because when I work with somebody, it's not just about losing weight. It's not just about shrinking your body size. It's about learning how to come home to it, how to feel comfortable in your body, in your own skin, comfortable with your habits, comfortable with what you're doing and who you're being. It's so much more than just the body size, shape, or weight. It's really, who are you being on a daily basis, really, what is underneath it? And for so many people and so many women that I talk to, it is really hard for them to love their bodies now. And this concept and this idea intrigues them. They maybe want to for some of them, but some of them are just, like, adamantly opposed or like, no, I couldn't possibly love myself now. I can't possibly love my body now. And it's this fear that if I love my body now, if I love what I have now, then I'm not going to want to change it, and that's just unacceptable. I can't accept it. There's really this lack of acceptance with where we're at now. So it's like, I can't accept it. So I'm not going to love it. I can't be nice to myself. I have to try to punish and criticize and ridicule myself into a smaller body. And that never works. It has us reaching for extreme diets so that we can hurry up and lose as much weight as fast as humanly possible. And it's really from this place of I'm not enough as I am right now. Something is wrong or inherently wrong, bad or flawed about me and my body right now. And because I weigh a certain amount, it impacts my worth and my worthiness and how good I am, how lovable or acceptable I am. It has such deep impact. And so, of course, it's no wonder we want these big, fast, extreme results, because we just want to feel good about ourselves. We want to feel good about our bodies. It's the whole Paradox of I can't change what I haven't yet accepted, until I can accept it, I can't change it. And that's the hardest part. Feeling safe, sufficient, okay, at an acceptable place with where we're at right now, with any goal. I really think this applies to anything. It applies to weight and weight loss, it applies to divorce or dating and finding a new relationship. It applies to healing, to finding a new job, growing a business. It's everything that we want. Just like when we are in a hard stage of parenting, for example, we're fighting it, we're resisting it, we're not at a place of acceptance, we keep wanting to change it. We, we only make the experience of it worse. And so this is why it's not just about losing the weight. It goes so much deeper, it goes so much beyond that because for many of us, our body size, shape, weight really dictates how we think about ourselves, how we compliment ourselves, how we talk to ourselves. It's how nice we are, right? It really impacts our self concept. The problem though is that when your self concept is attached to the size of your pants or the number on the scale, it means that it might improve once you lose the weight. But when you regain weight, when the scale goes up, even if it's just a mild fluctuation, when your self esteem and self confidence and who you are is so tied to that number on the scale, it will falter again. Because the diets that we're doing are not sustainable. We can't keep them up. So we inevitably gain the weight back and then we just feel like shit about ourselves all over again. And then even when we do lose the weight, it is now this fight for dear life to keep the weight off. And this is very much how I felt. It was like I was constantly dieting because I was either trying to lose weight or I was terrified of gaining the weight back because it had such an impact on how I saw myself and how I viewed myself and at a very core, deep level. And so I'm going to do a separate episode a little bit more around self worth in particular.
But it is hard to talk about body and body image without this conversation of self worth because they are very much intertwined. But your body is not the problem.
And I think this is one of the issues. Just like we go to war with food, we go to war with our bodies. But our bodies are not the real issue. It's our relationship with them. And it's that relationship that was shaped by trauma and diet, culture and Survival mechanisms. That's the real challenge. And it's not that our bodies are the issue or our bodies are what we need to go to war with. We actually need to learn how to create peace and acceptance so that we can change from a place of self, love, so that it's sustainable, so that when we lose the weight, we're not gaining it back. So that when we lose the weight, we're not just increasing and repeating the diet trauma that we've grown up with and spent the last several decades in. People come to me and they're in a position where they hate their bodies, in part because of how they look and how they don't measure up, but also in part because their bodies feel out of control. They feel unpredictable, unsafe. It's like the body becomes something they have to manage or override or somehow beat into submission.
The first biggest piece that I think we learned was if I'm a certain size, if I'm smaller, if I'm tall, thin, and have straight blonde hair, then I'm pretty, then I'm beautiful. By this external standard now I'm good enough. So from a very young age I learned this. And then I found more and more evidence as to how that was true. In my teenage years, my early 20s, it was like this kind of repeated view where my brain was like, looking to prove this true. Definitely. Though as a kid, I learned that my size, shape, weight needed to be controlled. And it became a way to earn praise, to earn then love, approval, and sometimes safety. And so sometimes it's what we picked up subconsciously from caregivers.
Sometimes it was an overt statement like, oh, be careful, Jilly, don't stretch out those pants, or that outfit doesn't look good on you, or you'd be so much prettier if you just lost some weight. It could be very overt insulting statements. And sometimes they're not directly trying to be insulting, but we can take it on that way.
Sometimes it's noticing what's not being said about you. One of the things for me was not so much that I was always criticized about my body, but I was compared to my cousin who was tall and thin, and I had a very different body type than she has even now to this day. I always wanted to look like her. And the irony of it all is we didn't realize this until our probably early to mid-20s, but she grew up wanting to look like me because she felt like she was taller than all the boys and she was uncoordinated and not athletic. And she felt like I was normal and she wanted to look normal like me. And I was like, huh? I always thought she was beautiful and unique and so special. And I wanted to look like her because she had all of these like model characteristics and things. But I also remember her getting praised for being tall and thin. And I didn't get praised for that. I would get praised for scoring a goal or being really fast or winning something. I might get praised in other ways, but I wasn't being praised for being tall and thin. And so as a kid, when, when we're five, six, seven years old, it's what we make that mean. So it's this is happening or this is not happening. That means. And then we fill in the blank with a very young, childlike definition of what is actually happening. And a lot of times we make it mean that something about us is wrong or flawed or not good enough. So sometimes it is very overt and direct. It is insulting, it is rude, it is hurtful, it is mean spirited. It is somebody trying to tear you down to make themselves feel better. This can come as a kid from all different sources. But we also married somebody who likely did that a lot. But the original seed was planted as a kid. Now not only do we pick up these subconscious patterns about our body, but we also learn them about food. So maybe food was highly restricted by one parent or maybe both parents. Maybe it was a total free for all. Maybe you learned that food and eating was how you stayed connected or it was an act of love. So I have to eat more to show that I appreciate the food or that I enjoy the food. It could be that there was some trauma and maybe there wasn't a lot of money or there wasn't a lot of cooked meals at home as a kid. And so it's like we learn food is scarce, food doesn't come easy, we don't know when the next meal is going to come. So get it while the gettin's good. There's all kinds of reasons in which a lot of our body and money and worthiness stories can get wrapped up in, in food. But the interesting thing here too is that food also creates a hit of dopamine. All food. And this is really important because I think junk food, like sweets and salty food, crunchy food. When we think about your standard junk food, we often think of that as creating a hit of dopamine. And yes it does. And sometimes that's why we're reaching for it when we're emotionally eating. But all food creates a hit of dopamine. I think this is how we as a species have survived all of these years. We, there had to be some kind of reward for eating so that we would do it consistently. I think this is really important though, is that we recognize that all food creates. That all food has a sense of being comforting or meeting emotional needs. Just like it's going to meet that dopamine receptor in your brain and be like, oh, this is a good thing. We like this, this is positive. We need to keep doing this. But we also have generations of this restrict binge habit that gets reinforced especially around your quote, junk food. And then from an emotional standpoint, our brains seek that out and we want more and bigger hits of dopamine to cope with life stressors. We pass down trauma around relationships just like we can pass down trauma around food and our bodies.
And it's typically not intentional. It is the subconscious patterns that play out. I think back on my mom, for example, having some body image issues and shame and not wanting to pass that down. But because she didn't know any other way, it naturally came out no matter what she did. It was like because she didn't have a way to fully address it at a younger point. And the solution was always, I just need to lose weight and keep it off. Then everything would be fine. Then I wouldn't have this issue. Then I could be happy with myself or with my body. On the surface it was, I just need to suck it up. I just need more willpower. I just need to eat less and exercise more. If only I could just do this, everything would be solved.
Instead of also recognizing that these are often much deeper, very complicated issues that we're working through and working on. I don't blame her in any way, but I recognize that and I really own the fact that I am breaking cycles. And that is a huge piece is I'm going to help you break cycles as well. Around food, around body image, around emotional capacity, around relationships, around dating and marriage and divorce. I am going to help you break so many cycles, it's going to take some effort and some intentionality. This is how we create a life that is so good, it doesn't make sense. A life that's so good, it lights us up. It's pinch me is this real kind of thing. And it can be, you can create that, but that's what it is. It's an intentional creation. We are no longer just sitting back passively letting life happen to us. And this is a really important distinction. It has to be the Same way with food and body, we have to be very intentional around what we're doing and understanding why, recognizing what the patterns are and then creating ways to break them to break the cycle and better understanding where and how to do that. And that's exactly why I'm offering the conquer your craving cycle calls this month specifically is because I want to help you better to understand the cycle that's playing out and how to change it, how to really decode and unwind the cravings and the urges and this desire for food.
So I'll make sure that there's a link in the description to get that. But this is specifically to help you to really understand all of these pieces. Because a lot of the food restriction comes from our thoughts and views around our body. It's the scale is too high, my body is too big, my size is too large. Therefore this food needs to get taken away. It's like this punishment of I don't get to eat enough food that my body actually needs. I don't get to eat certain foods. So we take away food and it is very much punishment for the scale, for our size, what we ate the day before for that binge you had over the weekend. We're doing our best, but that's all we've learned is to restrict and then binge. We regret and then we repeat it. All we know how to do is take away the food, take away the food and exercise more, just eat less and keto harder. That's what we have to change is the whole process. And we break it in the restriction part. We stop restricting and we learn how to create a healthier relationship with food. And in so doing, we also have to create a healthier relationship with our body. Because the thing is, we are not going to lose 30 pounds in three months and be able to keep it off. It's just not realistic for most people. Now it depends on how much weight you have to lose as well. I will throw that caveat in there. Everybody's body is a little different. But for not continue losing at that rate and being able to keep that off, if you just had that 30 pounds to lose, yes, you can do it quickly, but it always finds you again because you don't ever address the long term habits, the real life circumstances, the emotional eating. We don't address how this actually fits into our real life. And that's what we've got to do. We also need to recognize how being good around food is often a proxy for being good as a person.
And we keep trying to Control food, to control and manipulate food so that we can control and manipulate our bodies. Because if I can get my body to look a certain way now I'm good enough now I can be happy, now I can talk nice about myself, now I can feel good, positive things about myself. But until I hit a certain number, until I reach a certain goal, I don't get to think positive things. That is often the subconscious belief and the pattern that's running the show here.
That's what we have to break. And it's going to feel really hard because we are going up against decades, decades of the opposite decades. We have told ourselves that we're not allowed to think nice things. We're not allowed to eat certain foods if we're a certain weight. And this is not about indulging in binge eating and telling yourself this is part of how you lose weight or something like that. This is where I also have a problem with the body positivity movement. When they say, if you want to change your body, it means you hate your body, or if you want to lose weight, it means you hate your body, I really disagree with that. I feel like they are just as extreme as the diet culture is. The problem is that we don't know how to love our bodies now, accept our bodies now and lose weight from that place of love, from that place of health, from that place of I want to create better habits for myself. I want to improve and enhance what I'm working with and allowing that to be okay. It can be both. And it doesn't have to be so mutually exclusive. It doesn't have to be so all or nothing. This is hard because we are used to life being all or nothing. We are used to so many aspects of life being all or nothing. And we are used to moralizing ourselves based off of what we eat or how much or all of these other aspects. That's often what it is, is I can't feel good about myself right now.
But when I eat the right foods, when I do the right exercise, when I lose the weight, when the scale shows a certain number, then I can feel good enough. It's always out of reach. The goalpost is often moving. And then again, often we can't stay there, number one. And number two, trying to stay there creates a miserable life experience.
Because the process is, what can you do for the rest of your life without hating your life? That's where we have to start. That is our starting point. And it allows you to meet yourself where you're at right now and to get 1% better day by day, just making 1% better decisions.
So we have to stop trying to earn our worth through our size, shape, weight. A lot easier said than done, right? Like logically we'll be like, yeah, that sounds amazing.
However, it's going to feel very unsafe when the opposite has been true. This is where it's helpful to have a coach, a community.
This is why I do what I do, and this is how I will help you, is to be able to do that, to actually put that into practice, learning how to reestablish and redefine your self worth so that it's not tied to your body or the number on the scale. And we stop using the scale as evidence or permission to feel good about yourself. You get to feel good about yourself first. You don't wait for permission to feel good from the number on the scale.
And that's really hard because a lot of us have really shitty relationships to the scale. Our emotional state is very much wrapped up in that number.
And again, it's a learned behavior. It's a pattern that you learned, which means it's a pattern you can unlearn, but we have to be conscious and intentional with it. It's not going to magically unlearn itself.
So what does loving your body actually mean? Because I think this is where we can get really tripped up.
And again, you can love your body now, love yourself now and still want to change things about yourself, about your life, about your body. There's nothing wrong with that. But we get hung up because we assume that loving means that I love how I look in the mirror every single day. I like what I see every single moment of every single day. And really it has to be more of like acceptance. We really have to find peace and acceptance with where we're at right now. And, and it's a commitment to stop criticizing, a commitment to stop hating on your body, a commitment to finding peace, ease, and ideally some joy and pleasure in and through your body. Right now, every single day.
This is where we get really hung up because we're afraid that if I love it now, I'm not going to want to change it. And if I don't want to change it, that's a problem because we're still very much tying a lot of things in our body to our worthiness, to how we get to feel.
And it's like, well, I can't stay £250 because that's not good enough. I'm never gonna be loved. I'm never gonna Be okay at that weight. We get really hung up on it. And it's finding the peace and the place of I can love myself. And here's what love actually looks like. Because love is in part thoughts, but we see love reflected more in actions. And so when I was talking with, with the boyfriend about this early on in the relationship, I had told him my version of love. And my view of love is through actions. I think actions show intention and that is how we demonstrate love. I told him, I was like, in my opinion, words are cheap. You can say I love you every which way, up and down, in all kinds of languages. Like you can say it and it costs you nothing but to show it, to demonstrate it. That's where we see love in action. I think that's where we see real, true love.
And coming out of a relationship where it was easy for somebody to say I love you and for him to do very unloving things.
It didn't add up. And my view has really changed. And so when we take that same approach and we look at our bodies now of okay, I want to work on loving myself now, but the first step is to make peace and to find peace and acceptance and to work towards that first. The way that we get there is finding things that we like about ourselves, finding things that we can still do and we enjoy doing. And it's really catching all of the criticism, all of the shame, all of the self loathing. And it's consciously choosing to rewrite that, to change the thoughts, to change the beliefs, to no longer allow ourselves to say that and to think that most diets and diet culture set us up to try to lose weight from a place of I'm not good enough just as I am right now. The thought error is if I was the right size or if I was the right shape, if I had the right weight, then I could feel good enough. But the diets that we typically do in most diet culture is very punitive. It is very much based on punishment. It revolves around food being taken away often for punishment, for that number on the scale.
And because we desperately want to feel good about ourselves, especially in the beginning, we're willing to do whatever it takes. We're willing to starve ourselves, literally. We are willing to starve ourselves, to do these ridiculous diets, try to over exercise in the hopes of losing weight so that we can feel good enough. It's very much an unhealthy, toxic relationship that we have developed with food and in a way around our bodies, because we just want to feel worthy. We want to feel good enough, we want to feel valued, we want to feel accepted. And we are so used to looking for somebody else to do that, for us to dictate that we are enough. And we're looking for all of these metrics of now I'm good enough. Now I own my own house, now I've paid off my vehicle, now I have a certain job or a certain title. Now the scale says this number. Now I can feel good about myself. It's like whatever it is, we can have all kinds of metrics. And then I am worthy, then I am good enough. And until then, we will continue to struggle. And this is one of the biggest markers of growing up with a narcissistic or emotionally abusive caregiver. Growing up in some type of dysfunctional relationship. It could be that you had an alcoholic parent or somebody who was addicted to alcohol or drugs. Any number of issues like this, any type of the cluster B personality types. That is a breeding ground to have issues with self doubt and shame and abandonment and helplessness. And a lot of this self doubt and the shame really revolves in I'm not good enough. Really revolves around that story. I would say it's the number one and one of the most common stories that people come to me with. It is a core belief, a core view of I'm not good enough in some way, shape or form. It is not constant, it is not innate. It is very much dependent on these other things.
And the problem is that if you don't fix that now, it will just jump from one thing to the next. So at first it was I'm not good enough because of my body. Then I had the body. Now I'm not good enough unless I'm married. Then I get married. I'm not good enough unless I'm making a certain amount of money. Now I'm making some money. But then as I'm not good enough unless I'm making this much money in my business with this amount of expenses, it's like there are so many caveats and it just keeps jumping from one thing to the next because we never truly solve it. We can lose the weight, but we don't ever fully feel good enough. Because we are so used to striving for it, we're used to having to earn it. That is part of the emotional abuse cycle. It's part of the narcissistic dynamic. That's why relationship trauma and diet trauma go hand in hand. And it's why so many of us who struggle on the body side of things with our worthiness because of our body and our shape and our size. We also have had emotionally abusive and narcissistic people in our lives.
We're used to striving, earning, having to achieve love, achieve worthiness.
It's how we were raised, it's how we were bred. It's no wonder this is still in place. We've had this thought process and this belief and this pattern for decades.
This is normal to have. It's also normal that it takes a little bit of time to rewire and to untangle the pattern, to really be able to change it. This is why I recommend that people work with me for six to 12 months. And recently I've been more in line with 12 months. And it really depends on the person and who's coming to me. But 12 months is often my first recommendation because we typically need more time than we realize. Right when we have spent 40, 50, 60 years with certain beliefs and habits and patterns, six months to rewire all of that is simply not enough time. We can start to make progress and we can start to lose weight and we can start to change habits. But to truly transform from the inside out, to truly reclaim this new self concept and belief and self trust, to show up as a renewed version of yourself, that takes time, effort, energy, repetition. It often takes more time than we would like. This is one of those hard things of, yep, we want instant results and instant gratification. It's why the diet culture has worked for so long. It plays into that of, hurry up, just lose the weight and then you'll be fine. Lose the weight and then you can love your body, lose the weight, and then you can go and travel and do all those things that you've been putting off instead of, we create a life that we love right now. We create a life that lights us up and we start doing the things that bring joy, pleasure, adventure, excitement, so that we're not relying on food and alcohol to do that for us. But we want to love our bodies, want to accept our bodies now and all the way down the scale.
[00:25:04] Speaker C: So this is when the Internet guys came and slightly interrupted things.
I am actually just gonna make this.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Part one and then we'll do part two later.
[00:25:13] Speaker C: And it's so interesting because in talking about our bodies, so many other aspects get woven in. This episode has actually had quite a bit around food.
And in talking with some girlfriends last night, our bodies really change how we relate to a partner. With sex, it plays such a bigger role. And this is why it is so important that we feel at home in them, that we learn to love and make peace and accept our bodies. And a big aspect of this is also no longer trying to force and manipulate and hate on our bodies. And this can be challenging, especially when we have health conditions that we're dealing with or we feel like we can lose the weight but it never stays off. We can get so angry with our bodies. And this is all about reframing and deciding to change the relationship with it on purpose. So I'll be back with Part two here shortly.
But if you would like to really understand and address a specific craving cycle, I'm offering the free Conquer the Craving Cycle calls where we are going to decode the urgent, untangle the pattern so that you can respond differently. We have to understand why it happens and what is truly going on underneath the surface. This is going to allow you not just the awareness but the deeper understanding of how to show up differently in the moment. So the more data we have, the more we have to work with. If you would like to really address one craving, one urge, one specific pattern that I can come in and help you with, then schedule a free call so that we can talk through it.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: And I can help you to see.
[00:26:46] Speaker C: Things from this outside perspective. You can see things in other people, but now when it comes to yourself, it becomes harder and that's normal. This is why coaching can be so powerful. I will drop a link in the description. Would love to chat with you soon. Happy Valentine's Day and here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[00:27:11] Speaker A: If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free. Free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships. Your next step?
Book your free Break the Cycle call where you'll finally see why your binge eating and relationship patterns are so deeply connected and how to break free from both for good.
You'll walk away with fierce clarity and a game plan to step into a life full of fun, adventure and self love.
Grab your spot now at www.bodyyoucrave.com VTC.
It's time to break the cycle.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: I'll show you how.
