Today we're getting real about struggles with self-worth and embracing our bodies, even amidst physical changes.
I've always been involved in sports and fitness, but one thing always has remained constant: carrying my own hidden battles with how I see myself, especially when my body has undergone multiple changes. In this episode, I'm laying it all out—talking about the tough but freeing road to understanding that our mental health doesn't always match up with how we look.
I share what I'm doing in real-time to try to find peace with my own body since gaining weight in 2023. Join me in this conversation as we take back control of our thoughts and live a more confident and empowering life!
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Shop our apparel! --> Love Your Body Now
Use Code: LYBNlistener at checkout for a special discount!
Follow us on Insta: @loveyourbodynow.podcast
Today we're getting real about struggles with self-worth and embracing our bodies, even amidst physical changes.
I've always been involved in sports and fitness, but one thing always has remained constant: carrying my own hidden battles with how I see myself, especially when my body has undergone multiple changes. In this episode, I'm laying it all out—talking about the tough but freeing road to understanding that our mental health doesn't always match up with how we look.
I share what I'm doing in real-time to try to find peace with my own body since gaining weight in 2023. Join me in this conversation as we take back control of our thoughts and live a more confident and empowering life!
* * * * * * * * *
Shop our apparel! --> Love Your Body Now
Use Code: LYBNlistener at checkout for a special discount!
Follow us on Insta: @loveyourbodynow.podcast
If you are someone who is on a journey towards self-love or you are passionate about the mission behind finding confidence in the body that you have now and building acceptance around it and really focusing on having body neutrality, then I need you to go and check out the Love your Body Now apparel. We come out with new designs very often and they are all about the mission of practicing loving your body, having a healthy relationship with yourself and also prioritizing your mental health and well-being. If that is something that you are passionate about and you want to represent this mission, then I encourage you to go and check out our apparel. We also have stickers. Because you are a listener of the podcast, I am including a discount for just the listeners of this podcast. There's nowhere else that you can get this discount. Be sure to head over to the link in our show notes and use the code LYBNLISTENER. I will also include that in the show notes as well, so that you can just easily copy and paste that checkout. All right, without further ado, let's get into today's episode. Welcome to the Love your Body Now podcast, the podcast for women who are ready to feel confident in their body right now and redefine what health looks like for them. I'm Savannah, your host, and together we'll be having conversations about what it means to accept and love our bodies now, while simultaneously prioritizing our health journey. We'll be debunking beliefs that do not serve us and diving into misconceptions and unhealthy narratives in the fitness world, so that we can rebuild our foundation from a place of self-love. Hello friend, thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. If you are new to the podcast, thank you so much. I hope that this episode serves what you are looking for. And if you are a regular listener, thank you for returning and being a huge support to the podcast.
Speaker 1:I am ready to dive into today's episode and bring it back to the roots of why I started this podcast in the first place, which had everything to do with tying in our body image struggles and just like, shining a light on them and talking more about them and how they tie into our health and fitness journey, because I come from a health and fitness background. I come from a growing up playing sports all my life. I played a college sport and have always had this continued struggle with my body image and have poured a lot of my struggles into my fitness journey and the sports that I play, in good ways and in bad ways, and I feel like it will always be a continued journey for me, which is why I'm so passionate about this podcast and my platform and the brand that I'm trying to build, because I feel like in the health and fitness industry it is so easy to hide our body image struggles and our skewed relationship with our bodies and our struggles with our weight, and it is so easy to hide behind the fitness, what the fitness industry teaches us and exercise and dieting, all of those things and convincing ourselves that we are being healthy and what we are doing is good for us. And maybe on somewhat of a physical level it can be, but sometimes just because it looks like someone is physically healthy does not mean they are mentally okay and that they aren't struggling with their body image and their self worth, and I feel like that has always been a huge struggle of mine, which is why we talk about it here, and I wanted to specifically discuss the struggles of letting go of that control and navigating what it means to allow change happen in your body and just how I've personally navigated that, and I feel like you know I'm not sharing this in a place of like I've overcome my struggles because I haven't.
Speaker 1:I struggle with it every single day. There isn't a single day that goes by that I don't feel some some form of like shame or just like not feeling good about my body. There's not a single day that goes by that doesn't cross my mind. And I think it's important that I'm super transparent about that, because for a good while, when I was health coaching and sharing on social media a lot, I thought that I had overcome everything because I was physically in the best shape of my life and looking at how I looked, I mean I physically looked the healthiest that I've ever looked before and I truly felt good about my body overall. However, I've realized in the year of 2023 that my body image struggles didn't go away just because I lost a bunch of weight and I became super like physically, like looked good or whatever, and I realized this because, over the course of 2023, I started to like gain weight and I I never actually weighed myself. I just could tell by how my clothes fit. There's something super humbling about watching your body change and maybe gain weight or get bigger, when for so long, you've preached about loving your body for how it is and simultaneously preaching that, while also watching your body change in a way that you maybe don't want it to, and almost like feeling like you're letting go of control over something.
Speaker 1:And I think 2023 I've talked about it in other episodes I feel like it was such a learning year for me, of growth and like learning about myself and just like reflecting on myself and what I know about me and I. I feel like this year was a real struggle for me. I'm grateful that I've gone through the things that have gone through and I've had the opportunity to learn more about myself. But with this year, I feel like I navigated different seasons and with that happening, my health and fitness got put on the back burner a little bit more so than it ever has been. And not that's not to say that I've completely neglected my health that's not what I'm saying but it has not been my top priority, not because I like wanted that to happen, but that's just like the reality of what my situation looked like in 2023 and I really struggled with it.
Speaker 1:You know feeling super frustrated that that was happening and I was managing my stress in ways that I wish I hadn't, but like it was just what I was doing, because I felt like I was in survival mode and, you know, my my physical health kind of shifted a little bit from that and at the same time, I was still trying to talk on my podcast and help educate women and just talk about body image and health in general. And so while I was doing that and also struggling with my own health and fitness, it felt like I was being an impostor and it felt like I was kind of lying to myself because I started to realize that, oh, I am preaching that we all need to, you know, find beauty in who we are and see our worth outside of our body and our physical looks. But then here I was still internally struggling with it, so much more than I realized. I just realized and again, like I, like I mentioned earlier, it's one thing to be super healthy, to be super physically fit, to be able to prioritize your health and fitness very easily and then preach to other people that we need to take care of our bodies, we need to love them, we need to stop worrying so much about what our body physically looks like and what the scale says. It's so much easier to do that when you are healthy and you look healthy, and it is another thing to continue to talk about those things.
Speaker 1:When you are like letting go of some of those things and I thought I heard this and it was a good way of putting it of like when you are gaining weight and maybe not staying the same size as you always were, it's almost like this morning process that you're going through, because at the same time, you know how hard you worked for your body to look the way that does, or for you to become as physically fit as you are, and when you feel that control slipping away from you, it's almost like you're mourning an identity and you're mourning something that you worked so hard for and you know how hard it was to get there. But then, at the same time, you're watching yourself. It's almost like out of body, like you're watching yourself slowly slipping from what you have accomplished and you can't help but feel like you're failing in some way, because at least this is my own personal journey, because I have always defined success in looking a certain way and being a certain size and, you know, working out a certain amount of times a week, and I think that that's why I started talking more about my health and fitness online and starting this podcast because I needed to shift the narrative in my head. So bad, like I was so desperate to shift this narrative that the only way that it felt like I could actually stick to it and make it happen was by building my brand all around it and like making it my duty to share about it, because if I didn't, then I would continue to internally struggle with it and not prioritize it. So, in a way, I have this brand for my own selfish reasons, because I, if I, if I don't make a commitment to talk about it regularly and to prioritize it and to do my best to be a role model for others, then it's like I won't heal as much as I would like to. And I think 2023 just really made me realize that like I've still got a long way to go and maybe that means I need to shift how I share about my journey, because I think for the longest time I shared about my journey like I'd overcome my body image struggles and I'd come such a long way and I do think that I have but at the same time, I realized that that was almost like a like something I was hiding behind, like my, my fitness. I still was very controlling of it and I used that as a way to feel better about myself.
Speaker 1:And I think that there's a lot of like gray area with this right because, like I don't like that, I let my health kind of go on the back burner a little bit this year. I don't like that. I stopped working out as much as I used to. But I also think it was super important for me to go through that process this year and learn a little more about myself and have the opportunity to reflect on how I react when I am losing grip of control a little bit, because a lot of what happened was I became super busy with my W2 jobs and I was commuting a lot and I got to experience what it was like for other people who I've helped in the past before, kind of like feel like I was at a point where I just was surviving, whereas before, when I was really focused on just health coaching and that was like my main focus, that was kind of like what I was trying to do to earn income and then maybe like work a part-time job on the side. That's a very different scenario of I've got a lot more time on my hands to prioritize my health and fitness. And also I was, at the same time, like, if that's what you're doing trying to do for income and you're trying to help people, you kind of have to be that role model for others.
Speaker 1:And 2023 was the year where I kind of like took a step back from my health and fitness, like coaching, and my focus turned other places where I was focused on a new job. I was focused on trying to like do really well at these jobs and I wasn't focused on health coaching as much anymore and I kind of wanted to reflect on where I wanted to take my career in, the direction I wanted to go with things, and eventually it really just led me into me becoming super busy with my schedule, with my W2 jobs, and you know I had to navigate it for the first time of how do I manage all of this and how do I balance this in the best way that I can. And this was something that I really hadn't had to go through ever in my life for the first time. So I think it was a. It was a very humbling experience and a necessary experience for me to learn about myself and to be able to talk about it better with on my podcast. For people who do work full-time and maybe you even have kids and you're trying to balance it like I I can't. I mean, I went through trying to have a super busy schedule and like trying to balance everything and I don't even have kids. So that's a whole nother level of having to make time to prioritize your health and your well-being with everything you have going on. So I think that it was a super necessary experience for me and it allows me to again understand myself a little bit more on what it is I need to work on in 2024 mentally, with like letting go of control over basically controlling what I look like.
Speaker 1:I think that that was the hardest part was for the longest time working in health and fitness. You know there's this kind of this stigma that you have to look a certain way and you have to, you know, prioritize your health and fitness. Obviously, if you're going to be working in a health and fitness industry which kind of made things easier for me to stay consistent with and to prioritize because again, like there's this identity you kind of have to carry for yourself If you're going to be selling fitness services you kind of need to like walk the walk type of deal. And so when I started working after college like I've always been in the fitness industry I played sports like exercise has always been integrated into my life always and then I started coaching online. So then that's how it became integrated in my life outside of sports.
Speaker 1:And so again, this year was the first year where it kind of like things shifted and what I pursued and it no longer became this like kind of foundational thing I had to have for my job or my career or my identity and slowly, slowly, slowly, over the course of the year it just kind of stopped becoming as much of a priority because it was not my main focus anymore and I just got to learn about myself of when I am super busy, what are the ways that I turn to manage my stress and why do I do these things. And just like understanding more about myself. I feel like has been the biggest learning lesson for me in 2023 is seeing how I react to these very stress inducing situations and just like a very busy schedule and trying to navigate managing that. And I'm really, really grateful that I went through that and got to experience it firsthand for myself so that I can continue to try and connect with others and help them navigate that what they're going through as well.
Speaker 1:And now that I have kind of gone through that process of you know, I've lost a lot of weight, I've gotten super physically fit, I've gone through that and then I've also kind of like reverted backwards, but I mean I so I've gone back and forth. I've kind of experienced a little bit of both and regardless anyone like having anything to say about my body and my weight or whatever, like I still don't think is necessary, like I just I think that's probably why I stopped sharing so much on social media about my fitness and like my transformations and all of that, not only because for me it just was no longer a narrative I wanted to continue to like pour into, but also like I just could not stand like other people having something to say about my physical looks, regardless of their intention, because I know most people had good intention behind it and are just showing support in the best way possible. But for me, like I just wish it was just wish it was no longer a stigma in society that smaller is better, that just because you look physically healthy means that everything about you is healthy, like. I just wish that we stopped taking the time to point it out for someone, because, again, you just don't know what's going on internally behind closed doors and the types of narratives that people are struggling with and what it is how it is affecting their overall quality of life and their well being. So that is something that I have had to navigate this year and I feel like for me, I had to navigate it in my own way.
Speaker 1:So for the first half of this year I actually ended up having to like start journaling and really figure out when these negative feelings about my body were coming up the most, because I just all of a sudden started noticing that they were coming up a lot more frequently than I was used to. Because again I have I had felt like I had made a bunch of progress mentally on not focusing so much on my body image, and so I had just like journaled out every time that like I felt like it was coming up the most, and then from and then from there I just tried to adjust, adjust the situation and control what I could control. So if I was feeling super insecure about my body when I was wearing certain clothes. Then I stopped wearing those certain clothes just to try and prevent myself, my thoughts from coming up negatively about myself. So that's just one example. And then from like, from there, I feel like what I had to do was really just try and shift from you know, I was so used to feeling super confident with my body to not really catering the thought at all and just trying to be super neutral. And I don't say this like it, just like came to me and just was like super easy for me to do, like I'm talking.
Speaker 1:This entire past year has been a struggle for me mentally with my body, and so every time I shouldn't say every time, but like recently, as these thoughts have been coming up, what I've had to do to navigate them is to, literally, once the thought comes up, I immediately like stop, like I don't allow it to continue what it normally would want to say about myself and just like the rabbit hole that it typically will go down with, like the negative self talk about myself. I have had to completely literally like stop it, like make an intentional effort to stop the thought and just remind myself that I am practicing body neutrality at this point, where I'm not necessarily trying to love my body, I'm just trying to make myself feel neutral about it, as, like neutrals I would feel about a body part that literally has like no significance, like maybe like my hands or something that, like I just don't even have. I don't have an opinion about them, like I don't, I don't have a negative or positive to say about them. It's more so like I just am neutral about it. And that has been the mentality I've been trying to have about, like my stomach or my legs or whatever, my arms, even my face, like I've just been not allowing myself to cater into that, and I can't say that it has been successful every time, because when your brain is so used to saying negative things about yourself on autopilot, which has kind of become more of a regular thing this year, it's just kind of like grown a little bit. It is much harder to stop it and be aware of it because it is so normal for our brains to think about.
Speaker 1:But, as I was reflecting on this year and just trying to understand myself and my actions and my thoughts, it is something that I have just really made the decision that I'm not wanting to bring with me in 2024 whatsoever. And I just have no intention of catering these beliefs anymore. Like I just they are such a waste of my time to think about and they bring no positivity into my life whatsoever, and I've always known this. But I feel like it's really hit me recently that it is just such a complete waste of my fucking time to worry about how my body looks and how much I hate my body, because no good comes from it whatsoever. Like no good. I don't make positive decisions based off of the hatred that I have for myself. Yes, it may lead to me deciding oh, I'm not gonna eat, I'm not gonna have ice cream today, because I know I feel like a piece of shit after.
Speaker 1:Like yeah, I guess you could consider that a positive decision in some way, but mentally it doesn't feel positive for me because I'm not making the decision from feeling empowered. I'm making the decision because I feel disempowered and I feel awful about myself. So it's like fuck that. Like I'm not, I'm not going to continue to make decisions out of like feeling shitty about myself. Like I just I'm not going to carry that energy with me into 2024.
Speaker 1:I am so done with it. I am so done with making myself feel like crap or allowing others to make me feel like crap because you know, I don't look the same way that I did a year ago or whatever, like I'm not doing the same things that I did last year, like I just don't care and I want to do things for me because they make me feel empowered, they make me feel positive and they just make me feel good and they lead to the best version of myself. And I know that if I continue to allow negative thoughts about my body image to continue, I'm not going to have the life I want in 2024. And I just do not have the fucking time for that anymore. I have so many big goals for myself and for my life and I know that if I want to get there and attract those things this year and stop allowing myself to manipulate or self what's the word I'm trying to say to like prevent them from happening, I just like can't continue this way of thinking. I have to trick my brain into believing it is the person already that I want it to be.
Speaker 1:If I'm going to show up the way my future self needs me to show up, and part of that has so much to do with my belief in myself and my self worth and how I view my physical self Like it just does not matter and I just do not have time for it, and I just am so grateful that I am in a space, in a season of life now, that I can leave all of that behind me and I can finally move forward and make decisions out of abundance rather than scarcity and being in survival mode. I think that that was the first step for me was to get out of survival mode, which I finally did, and it's allowed me to, it's like freed up my mind to make decisions that are more aligned with what I want and what I need and just like what feel right for me, and I really, really hope that by me sharing this about myself, it inspires you and it motivates you and it allows you to step into the best version of yourself for 2024, because we cannot manifest the things that we want in our life from a place of negativity, from a place of hatred and disgust from ourselves. It is just not possible. You can't have that kind of energy in your life if you are trying to literally be abundant and manifest super powerful things into your life. And I think that I've started to realize this as well, and you know it sucks that I had to spend an entire year in 2023 kind of like going through this and realizing this, but I had to in order to come to this realization and realize about myself and what I really needed to do, moving forward in order to achieve and attract the things that I want in my life for the new year.
Speaker 1:I hope that this episode was helpful and I hope that it motivates you to let go of thoughts that literally hold you back and lead to you staying where you're at and as much as we'd all it all be so much easier to stay the same and just allow our thoughts to continue as they always have. It is important to realize what does not serve you, even if it is hard to let go of, because I get it Like it is so challenging for me to think a thought that I've always thought before and to kind of dwell on it and just like sit with it. It is so much easier to do that than to stop the thought and convince myself that I no longer believe that. Shit it is. It is hard, it is challenging to do that, but it is a lot simpler to convince myself that I am neutral of these thoughts rather than try and convince myself the opposite of them. So if that is you, I encourage you to join me this year in finding neutrality with yourself. If you were in have always been in a space of negativity and limiting beliefs about yourself, the first step is to at least feel neutral and eventually we will get to a point where we truly feel that authentic love and empowerment again. But we've just got to take it one step at a time and we've got to meet ourselves where we are at. So I hope that this was helpful and I will chat with you next time.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. You have no idea how grateful I am to have you as one of the love your body. Now listeners, if you are loving this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you subscribed and left a review. This helps me get the message out to more women just like you who are also committed to their journey. And if you love this episode, please be sure to share it with someone who you know needs to hear today's message. Together, we can help more women recognize their self-worth and build their confidence from a much deeper place, just like you're doing right now. Let's help change the world, one woman at a time. Alright, talk to you soon, friend.