Body Image

Episode 165: (Transcript) Your Body Image Doesn’t Have to Suck Forever

January 14, 2025

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A Certified Eating Disorders Registered Dietitian (CEDRD) with a master's degree in dietetics & nutrition. My passion is helping you find peace with food - and within yourself.

Meet Katy

Katy Harvey: Hey, I’m Katie Harvey, a non diet dietitian. If you’ve spent years battling food in your body, I’m here to show you the path to healing here on the rebuilding trust with your body podcast. I teach you how to find your own freedom with food through tools, strategies, mindset shifts, and heartfelt discussions around what it means to make peace with food and your body while still existing in diet culture.

I believe that all bodies deserve respect. And that health is so much more than a number on the scale. It’s about connecting with our true selves and learning that our relationship with food is more important than the food itself. So if you’re ready to discover the freedom of rebuilding trust with your body, grab a seat and maybe a snack.

And let’s do this.

Welcome back to another particularly powerful episode of Rebuilding Trust With Your Body. Today, I am so pumped to share an incredible conversation that I had with Deb Schachter and Whitney Otto, authors of the book Body Image Inside Out. Let me explain to you who these two amazing women are and you are going to see why I cannot wait to share this with you.

Deb Schachter is recognized as one of Boston’s leading clinicians in the areas of body image and eating disorder recovery. She has spent her 30 year career helping people unpack their body’s story and all of the wisdom it has to offer. She believes wholeheartedly that we all have great wisdom inside and has seen how her confidence in her clients translates into change.

Deb also trains other therapists and health professionals on how to best approach body image with their clients and staff. Blending together her East Coast sensibility and her playful West Coast spirit, Deb has developed a language and an approach that is accessible to all, and you are really going to hear that shine through in this episode.

Whitney Otto is a certified coach and facilitator with over 20 years of experience in leadership development. High performance and personal transformation. Her coaching is grounded in psychological insight, drawing on her clinical work as a program leader, a clinician, and a workshop facilitator in the field of eating disorders.

As a rowing world champion, she integrates evidence based and embodiment practices to promote excellence and well being. Currently, Whitney serves as an executive coach and facilitator for CHIEF, serving the largest network of executive women in the world. She also works with clients through Whitney Auto Coaching.

They are really a dynamic duo, with Deb being a therapist and Whitney being an executive coach, and their approach to body image from the inside out is going to blow your mind in the best possible way. Without further ado, Let’s dive into our conversation. All right, Deb and Whitney, thank you so much for being here.

I have a million things I want to ask you. I can’t wait to dig in. Let’s do this first. I would love for each of you to give us a little bit more info and context about yourselves, like Who are you? What’s the work that you do? Give us a sense of where you’re coming from to set the stage for the discussion.

Deb Schachter: first. Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much for having us here, Katie. We’re really thrilled to be here. I am a clinical social worker. I’ve been doing some version of eating disorder and body image work for about 30 years in the Boston area. I would say my biggest passion is body image work.

And I really love it. I run a lot of groups and obviously run their workshops with Whitney. So I’m forever learning. And I feel like even though the book is done every day, I feel like I learn more and more about the ways that people are learning how to heal. Yeah. 

Whitney Otto: Whitney, what about you? Well, I’m currently a certified coach.

So I’m an executive coach and nobody leaves college and becomes a coach when you enter it from another profession. And so I started out as a Therapist and Deb was one of my mentors and we started dealing with our own Body image issues as well as working with our clients. And so we created these workshops 20 years ago, and so I worked in the field for about 10 years before evolving into the executive coaching, but my own relationship with my body remained.

And, you know, there’s a lot of similarities between healing one’s relationship with body image and healing one’s relationship with overachieving, with having a career look a certain way, you know, with being seen a certain way. So. A lot of the things that we created and worked on through Body Image, I continued to evolve with my clients in the corporate sector.

And so creating a book together was a lot of fun and a great way to sort of bring together my different worlds. 

Katy Harvey: Absolutely, yeah. So you guys came together and you wrote this book, and is the book basically based on the workshops that you did? Is it kind of like a, sort of a written version of the things you would do with people in these workshops?

Or like, describe the workshop for me, I’m so curious. Okay. 

Deb Schachter: So what’s so interesting, yes, is that the original scaffolding for the book was the workshops. I was, um, Whitney and I have been doing these workshops for years and I ended up doing a few on my own when Whitney was having young kids or had young kids.

As I continued to do the workshops, I was so aware of the flow of it that it really felt, starting to feel sort of like chapters in a book. Like it just happened organically as we built these sort of unique work, unique exercises that we had sort of brought into the workshops and started to create this flow.

And I think to me, what feels so exciting about the process is that we had these original, maybe, I don’t know, I’d say half a four to five works exercises. And over time and as we started writing, these other exercises came to be because we realized there was so much more that we wanted to help people actually do in a concrete way that we had never thought to do.

So I think that part of what was so cool about writing my book was these concepts that we had brought. Sort of we carried inside that we wanted to teach them really got the opportunity to be Explained and created into exercises that they could actually do in ways that maybe they’ve never thought about body image work before 

Whitney Otto: And that was one of the creative challenges that we know was I thought was pretty exciting was to have a book experience feel like a workshop to sort of convey the warmth and safety that is crucial For any workshop on body image to go well and like the playful nature and to just make it easy and sort of fun versus like, we’re going to talk about body images, which, you know, as similar to your work has a lot of shame and judgment and stories attached to it.

Katy Harvey: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that was one of the things that jumped out at me immediately with your book is all of the different exercises and, you know, actionable pieces and, and things that people can actually do versus just reading about it. So while we’re on the topic of the book, let’s actually back up.

Tell us about the book. Like, what is it? What is it called? What, who’s it for? What’s it about? Because a lot of the, the rest of the questions that I want to ask you essentially tie back to the things you’re teaching in the book.

Deb Schachter: Great! The book is Body Image Inside Out. It just came out on October 29th, 2024, published by Hachette Press. Really, what the book is about is capturing the idea that we actually have a relationship with our body image. And most people don’t realize that. They just think they and their body image are the same thing. So it’s really giving people the opportunity. To be in more relationship and to get some space from their body image so that there really can be more discovery in the experience and I really think part of what felt so important to us is to make this not feel so heavy and to feel like such a scary topic, which is something that’s so often true for people.

We often say that people come into our workshops feeling terrified that we’re going to make them dance like a leaf or, you know, pick their favorite body part or, you know, wear a burlap sack and, and say they love themselves. And, you know, Really at its core is this idea about building a relationship with your body image and also doing this work in connection, but that’s been, it was really what, what our book was born in was our connection and the dialogues that we were having about our own body image and how that started to translate into sort of a deeper level of healing for us.

and our own body image healing, and then really bringing that to the experience as people read the book. 

Whitney Otto: Yeah, so Katie, you know, similar to some of the podcast episodes I’ve listened to of yours, starts out just with that similar to a relationship with food. It’s got a lot of shame in there. There’s a lot of judgment in there.

So first, we gotta bring awareness to even what our relationship is currently like, and how it’s serving or not serving us. And one of the best ways to do that is to just notice, you know, with that neutrality and then when that shame and judgment comes in to get curious instead go, Ooh, I want to learn more.

What’s going on here? As Deb said, when we learn more, when we learn more about why our body image is stepping in, why it’s getting loud, likely there’s some pain, there’s some anxiety, there’s some overwhelm. And then how can I? We have some compassion in those moments. Can we practice the muscles of compassion?

So we’re always practicing something and we are practicing a certain relationship with our body image right now, whether we know it or not, but once we bring some awareness to it, we can start to learn a little bit more about ourselves, how it’s functioning and swap out some different skills, some different tools so that we can be practicing something else so that we can be practicing something that get us more connected to ourselves versus more disconnected from ourselves because I think we can all attest to the fact that a really bad body image moment leaves us feeling pretty disconnected from ourselves. 

Katy Harvey:  The idea too that it’s a practice. But it’s really, as opposed to, I mean, there’s a place you nail where your body image is just steady and you just feel great, but that doesn’t exist for anyone because our bodies are always changing and our lives are always changing.

Deb Schachter: So really that idea, when we first actually were figuring out the subtitle of the book, A publisher said something about getting to healing body image and we both had a chuckle and we’re sort of like, that isn’t a thing, not in a bad way, but just that really that it’s an ongoing process of being, again, being in relationship to our body image and really staying in that curious state.

Whitney Otto: Because how can we possibly heal something when our bodies change throughout our entire life? Like, it’s an impossibility, and I know our culture loves, like, you know, Check off the ten boxes, you bar bar, da la la la la. But that’s just not how this works or will ever work. It’s a practice. 

Katy Harvey: Yeah, there’s not a finish line to it and you know, as you were saying that, I was thinking how, I think with dieting and the promise of weight loss is that it dangles in front of us this idea that like when you get to whatever your goal weight is or your size or whatever with your body that like, then you’re just going to feel as though you’ve arrived and you’re going to get to check that box. It’s just this fantasy. And I think sometimes people translate that with body image, and they’re like, well, I want to feel that way without dieting. It’s like they sort of think that’s what it means to maintain their body. And it sounds like you guys are approaching this very differently. 

Whitney Otto: Yeah, 100%, this is where, you know, I say the carrots are everywhere in our lives. Like if you just get the promotion, you’re gonna feel great. You know, if you just or the partner, or the salary. And that’s why we have a section called the hope, hope in self hate, right? If I hate myself to motivate myself, to change myself, to change my body, to change my, you know, something about myself, then I will have a rise because that’s what culture is telling us all the time. There’s all these promises associated with this job partner body. 

Deb Schachter: I think for most people there is so much shame involved in body image struggles to think that actually there is perceived hope, I think, to take some of the pathology away from it. It allows people to think, Oh my God, that’s right. That’s actually what I’m wanting is whatever this thing is that it’s going to offer me, we have a whole section also on jealousy and that’s. You know, I think again, one of the sort of taboo subjects, we shouldn’t feel it, we shouldn’t think about it, we should just love our, you know, whatever grandmother’s thighs or, you know, embrace it.

The reality is we’re jealous of people for all kinds of reasons and we have a whole group of exercises around that and really deconstructing that so we can figure out what are we jealous of and why and what is it we’re coveting to go back to what we were both were saying, what’s in the experience they’re having in that body or that salary or that partner that we want because it’s really about us, right?

It’s really about what we see in them and we think they have. Yeah. That’s really much more information about what we’re longing for, the cool, you know, the cool life, the cool travel, whatever. And those may be things that we can create in different ways in our own lives if we get more clear that it’s not actually the butt or the toned arms, you know, or the perfect abs.

Whitney Otto: Curiosity, awareness, compassion, we can connect to what it is we actually think we want from the body, the partner, the job. And getting that clarity is so empowering and so valuable and it gives us so much more choice because there may be many ways to get more of what we’re craving.

Katy Harvey: Yeah, absolutely. What about, okay, so when people say, when they come back at you, I call them the yeah, buts. Oh, yeah, but. Yeah, buts. We know those well. Yeah, I’m sure that you do. How do you navigate that where it might be someone who’s like, well, yeah, but I can’t move my body without pain, or I can’t ride a roller coaster, or they may have very real and valid physical limitations with their body that they feel would be solved if they were thinner in the smaller body. 

Deb Schachter: Yeah. I mean, I think, I think there are a lot of ways to think about it. I think the first thing that comes to mind is this idea that So we break it down. I love those examples. Like I wrote, I would ride a roller coaster. I would go on a longer hike. I might continue to break it down and say, what do you want to feel?

What do you want to feel in your body? What kind of sensations do you want in your body? What, where do you want your nervous system to be? Because it may be that riding a roller coaster may not be the best fit, but they may say it’s, you know, maybe it’s floating on a lake on your back, being supported by the water or losing yourself in your favorite book in the sunshine in your backyard or, you know, thinking more on a sensory level as opposed to not because, and this is no way to diminish the feelings about maybe not being able to do something that their body may not be able to do because of pain or because of some, you know, restrictions and whatnot.

To  think about what it is they’re really longing for in the experience and how they can create that. I’m thinking of a client of mine in a larger body who really struggled, struggled with movement. And she ended up finding this really cool thing. It was on YouTube and I think it was called body groove and it was.

You know, tons of people in larger bodies and lots of just really organic movement, and it was really the first step for her in moving, moving towards movement. You know, she sort of put the shoes out every day and said, I’m gonna walk around the lake by my house. And instead, to kind of just groove out in her own space, in a safe space, and start to really move her body was really, really profound. And now she’s someone who does Pilates regularly and feels really good about it in a larger body. So I think it’s really different for each person, but I think, again, that sensory experience is really, really at the core. 

Katy Harvey: That’s a great way to think about it. You also talked about this one dimensional way that people tend to approach body image. Can you break that down? Because I was so curious to like, understand more of the nuance of that and how do we approach it differently? And maybe it’s kind of what you’re already getting at with sensory and stuff like that. But I’ll let you guys talk to us about that. 

Whitney Otto: Well, we’ve been. I remember our very first logo was like a mirror with all these like sparkles coming out of the mirror because a mirror is two dimensional, a picture is two dimensional, right? An image is that way, but our bodies are multi dimensional, right? And so just that very idea that very often what we’re after is like something we see in a magazine or a billboard. In reality, there’s so much more going on here. So that’s the very first idea that we wanted to capture and grasp and have people start to think about.

Because it took us ten chapters to explain that. Ten chapters to explain how it has so much to do. We think it’s just about this body and all that comes with it. But it’s about our stories, our influences, our likes, our dislikes, how we’ve trained ourselves to think about our bodies and move through this world.

What we really break down in the book is how to understand ourselves in a multidimensional way and how to understand or even start to be aware of and listen to our sensations. So, we could probably answer this over the course of two days, so I will let Deb offer our answer. But. If I just bottom line it, you are a multi dimensional being, and we want to access everything that’s going on in there because it’s all influencing our body image.

Deb Schachter: Well said. What came to mind to me when you asked the question, Katie, as I was thinking about, you know, our story and in our story, how we met in the introduction, was that as we started to share each of our stories. And where we were in our own body image in those moments in time, Whitney was fresh out of being at the Olympics, I was fresh out of a major breakup, and we both were, you know, sharing with each other what was happening in our body image and noticing the ways that was happening in our body image seemed both in language and in the form.

The sensations and the feelings are related to what was happening in our lives at the time. That’s really when we started to get curious. What is it about each of these experiences that’s actually getting expressed through our body image? And to start to think about real body image as being this container and ultimately, right?

Our body is a container for all of our experiences. There’s no way that it can just be about a good butt, right? There’s no way there’s so much else happening in there. One of our favorite quotes, I’m sure you, I imagine, you know, Anna Sweeney is Anna Sweeney’s line, which is, yeah, is our bodies are the longest relationship we’ll ever have.

Right. So there’s so much to understand about what’s happening inside. And that’s why we’re so interested in what we call BIMS, which are bad body image moments in these moments when our body image really spikes, what else is happening in our lives. And again, all these dimensions, work, life, what’s happening in our physical body, what’s happening in our mental body, what’s happening relationally, you know, and with our kids, with our houses, with our health, all of those things.

So there’s so many dimensions that are getting expressed through body image. 

Katy Harvey: Mm hmm. And I love that word curiosity to be able to step back and just explore, okay, so let’s use kind of a real life example. Let’s say someone’s getting dressed in the morning and it just. It’s not a good day for body image and they’re just they feel like crap about themselves from the get go. What would you recommend they do or any strategies they could utilize in that bad body image moment?

Whitney Otto: Well we talked about this a lot. This is one of our favorite subjects. We have a whole chapter on clothing. But I mean the first thing to get curious about is What’s going on in the larger picture of my life? Is there anything about this day that’s different from another day? Am I gonna have interaction with somebody that I don’t normally have or just getting curious about that? And then I call that outside curiosity and then inside curiosity if I get the outfit, right? What do I get to feel? What am I wanting? What am I wanting to feel more of? So just starting there, and then I think the next thing is, okay, what do I want to feel? Okay, I want to feel confident and relaxed and snugly.

Okay, so I have a closet in front of me with different options as to how to feel snugly or confident, right? Or comfortable. So really aligning our internal desires with the external interactions with the world, which starts with our closet. So that’s what I would say off the bat. What would you want to add, Dea?

Deb Schachter: Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. You know, we use a lot of anecdotes about getting, getting ready, getting dressed for things because it’s so often, if we bring it back to sensation, that when we are experiencing a lot of feelings about what the day holds, Whether it’s the interview or the date or the podcast or the, you know, 10K, it’s likely that we’re feeling a lot of big feelings and that also often is accompanied by big sensations.

So that can really interplay with what’s happening, how close we feel on our body. So we often talk about love. You know, someone will have clients all the time to say that, you know, I had this, I picked this dress last week and I actually felt pretty good about it. And now I put it on today. There is no way my body has changed that much, but why all of a sudden do my arms look like sausages and my blah, blah. We would really go towards that and be like, great.

Your arms look like sausages. Let’s talk about your arms. What’s happening in your arms, what might be held in your arms, like really bringing curiosity to this intersection of the big feelings and the big, big body image moments that are happening and trying to understand what might, where that intersection may be and really bringing in the compassion to about, you know, when there’s this pile of clothes rather than feeling shame, which so many people feel like, wow, there is something happening right now.

There is something going on that I need to try on 20 pairs of pants and really then sort of thinking like, what is really going on and what might I really need? Maybe I need to cry on top of those. 20 pairs of pants. Maybe I need to wear a freaking skirt and just get over the pant, you know, the pant goal, or maybe, you know, calling a friend and saying, I can’t figure out what to wear.

You know, I want to talk it through. So I think there’s so much again, you know, the curiosity just opens up the door to really giving us a chance to understand what’s happening. And then the other thing I guess I’d say that Whit and I talk about all the time is about the connection, which is When we have the opportunity to share this, this could be with, you know, with each other we could, you know, we’re friends with therapists, with trusted people to say this is what happened today and to just be able to, at times, maybe be able to find a little bit more humor and levity about it and also just really bring some more of that curiosity that is sometimes hard to get for ourselves when we are sitting in there feeling so bad about our pants.

Katy Harvey: It is hard. What about creating the space between the thoughts and the judgments that we have. So when someone’s trying to be curious and they’re noticing the thoughts that are happening and the judgments towards their body, what do they do next or do you guys have any tips on that?

Whitney Otto: That’s a great question. And we say notice without the attitude. So, I look terrible in this dress, and I can’t find anything formal to wear to this event. That’s got a lot of judgment. So what if we take the attitude out, take the judgment out? I’m having a lot of negative thoughts about my body, and I’m having trouble finding something to wear.

In one, the judgment is baked into this statement, and in one, there’s nothing wrong or bad about me. It’s just describing the moment and that can really help people just, again, practice the muscle of experiencing themselves separate from the judgment. It’s just practice. It doesn’t mean they still don’t need to do maybe the other steps we mentioned or some of the other things, but I think it’s really important to notice without the attitude, especially for our younger generation, because they’ve got years ahead of them. If they can practice noticing without judgment, think of how many reps they’re gonna get in that versus judgmental thoughts in their brain. 

Katy Harvey: Right? Yeah, it’s like thinking how many reps of the judgmental thoughts we’ve had. And it doesn’t take place. 

Whitney Otto: Exactly. Those are heavyweights and they’re building, they’re strengthening their judgment.

Katy Harvey: Yeah. I feel like people need to write it on a sticky note as like, notice without the attitude. I just love that. I feel like that’d be a great thing to just have in front, like on your mirror in your bathroom. Or a t- shirt. We might need a t- shirt. Or a t- shirt. Totally. 

Deb Schachter: Well, and we often talk about people in the workshop or people that we’re chatting with individually will say some version of. Why the hell did I do blah, blah, blah? You know, why the hell does this matter so much? Why the hell do I have, you know, 40 pairs of pants on the floor? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we always say, can you say that again without the tude? And they start laughing because they didn’t even realize they had the dude until you invited them to realize it.

And then they’re kind of like, Oh, there’s two different voices in there. One is about what’s happening and one’s about the judgment about what’s happening. So how, you know, starting to untangle that in and of itself for them can really start to just naturally build space for the curiosity to be able to step in a little bit more.

Whitney Otto: And you could practice that in any area of your life. 

Deb Schachter: Right. 

Whitney Otto: If you’re having trouble practicing that with body image, you can practice that anywhere in your life. That’s so true. Maybe practicing it in other areas helps to start to build that muscle that you can use. 

Deb Schachter: Totally. 

Katy Harvey: Yeah. In the book, you guys have an exercise that’s called going on a first date with your body image.I just thought that was so clever and fun. Can you go walk us through that? I’ll start. Go for it. Well, ideally, when you go on a first date.

Whitney Otto: You don’t know anything about the person, right? You’re just, your job is to get to know them and to notice, so your job is to be curious. Your job is to be aware and your job is also to notice how you feel in their presence. So that’s a lot of what the muscles that we’re trying, the skills that we’re trying to build is that curiosity, that awareness and that attunement with ourselves, that noticing for ourselves.

Deb, I know dating has been a big part of your life, so I can’t not let you weigh in on this one. 

Deb Schachter: You’re very sweet. Well, it makes me think about, you know, chapter five is, I think for both of us in some ways, the chapter that we didn’t know existed before we wrote the book. And it’s body image and relationships.

And it starts with Anna Sweeney’s quote, and then it leads into this idea that Our relational experiences inform so much about what goes on in between us and our body image and starting to invite, I’m thinking about, you know, if we’re using this metaphor of the first date, Whitney’s point, how do we feel on a first date?

What’s happening in our bodies? And we actually have an exercise that isn’t specific to dating, but to this idea, when you leave an interaction. And you feel like your body’s changed, it’s growing before your eyes, your pants feel tighter, somehow the rolls all of a sudden feel like they’re pouring out some part of your body or whatever, sensations feel like they’re louder, it’s a time to tune in and figure out what happened in that interaction that didn’t feel aligned, didn’t feel right, Did we not feel seen?

Did we not feel understood? And we actually have a handout we call, I think it’s called the BIM Debrief, but it’s basically this notion that if you have a bad body image moment, After you have an interaction with someone, then asking these questions like, what do you feel full of? What did you not take in?

What felt like too much to take in? What happened in the interaction that’s now leading these different sensations and dynamics in your body and in your body image that really can tell you about how you felt about that interaction. So it really gives people an opportunity to think about how there is this incredible interplay between relationships and body image.

Whitney Otto: Yeah, so that’s a both and answer. What do you think about practicing your relationship with your body image skills like on a first date? And if you do go on a first date, we have this great debrief tool and can kind of help you tap into How does this relationship make me feel because I know personally I have and we know so many people who leave encounters with folks whose relationship style or way of relating makes them feel, right?

Makes them feel unheard, makes them feel disrespected, maybe makes them feel angry. And the body will, our sensations will get loud in that moment. So, but what’s sad is that so often we leave going, I’m so too much, or I’m so heavy, or I’m so blah, blah, blah, versus my body image feels uncomfortable and it has a lot to do with how that interaction felt.

Deb Schachter: It makes me think, is it okay if I jump in? Yeah, go for it. Okay. I was thinking there’s this section, it’s, I’m going to kind of merge what you asked about in terms of the clothing stuff. And what Whitney was describing as I’m thinking, and in our clothing section, we have this great anecdote of a friend of ours who carried the same skirt with her through her entire life.

She’s now in her. I think she’s close to 60. And what was so interesting when we, when Whitney and I met her and we were asking about the infamous skirt, you’d think it was sort of like, oh, you know, do I still fit in it? And, you know, what does it say about me if I don’t? And as we kind of explored it with her, what we found was it was actually about how she felt in the skirt when she wore it.

And for her, that really was very connected to when she first met her partner. And it was such a cool conversation to say, yes, part of it may, you know, we’re sort of, again, so well practiced and sort of do I fit in the same clothes or if I change my body, you know, that whole diatribe, but there was this whole other layer that she wasn’t aware of, which was how did I feel when I first met my partner, which was like a way that I never felt in my family of origin.

And that was part of why the skirt actually kept going with her. Move after move was really much more about how she felt in the relationship more than how she looked in the skirt. 

Katy Harvey: Wow, that’s brilliant. Okay, so how do people get to those types of insights and realizations, like how, and I know you guys also talk about decoding, like how do we understand beyond like the surface level of the, you know, I feel bloated or these pants or this skirt feels too tight and I feel bad and blah, blah, blah, like how do we go deeper to understand what’s beneath the surface?

Whitney Otto: Well, I would say the decoding. is the advanced part of the book. So, and I say that because I think that you have to practice the other pieces to get there. Right? You have to practice removing the judgment. You have to practice being curious. You have to practice finding a way to have compassion and connect with yourself.

You have to practice tuning into your body and having curiosity. And those, for some folks, that’s gonna take some time. So I just say that to really honor that it’s not just a, you know, a cute five step. process, then you can, again, once you practice it, like now, if I feel really uncomfortable in my body, and my, you know, my first thought is a body image thought, then my second and my third is, huh, what else is going on?

Huh, I feel really heavy, like what am I full, heavy with, what am I full of? Again, it’s just curiosity that becomes more automatic when we practice it. Now, Deb, The sensation piece is Deb’s baby, so I’ll let her chime in here, but Katie, do you have any follow up questions that maybe Deb could answer about that? Because again, I feel like it’s really nuanced and complex, so I’d love to explain it as best as I can. We can. 

Katy Harvey: Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, that it’s more advanced. And so yeah, it’s like, how do you connect those dots, you know? But I love your question of what else do I feel full of or heavy about? Like, is there some symbolism there maybe?

Deb Schachter: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So what we do in the decoding chapter is again, this idea that we really discovered together that often the language. So, in our introduction, for example, I had a nickname for myself and Whitney. Well, I think it was a burst kind of between Whitney and I, but I called myself the crazy raisin because I felt like I was aging and I felt like.

I was dating and both of them made me feel crazy. So we kind of came up with this nickname around this idea that there was, I actually felt like I was sort of shriveling up both mentally and physically in this process of online dating in my thirties. And that notion that if we start to. Listen for the language that people are using, that there are often cues in the language, whether it be sensory or even descriptors, like I feel so crazy when I’m dating, or I mean, it took us a while to get to crazy and raisin together, and that kind of made it funnier at the time, but you know, there was a way that both of those things felt really true to me and to take them out of sort of this sort of language that goes circling in our head and actually get curious about the words and we do in chapter six.

Have people actually write down the words that they use that are, you know, sort of in regular rotation in their body image thinking, and then looking at those words and asking questions like, Are there any aspects of these words that have more charge? First, we have to identify the words that have more charge.Then are there any aspects of where these words that have more charge may be paralleling other arenas of your life or things that are happening in the broader context of your life? And actually thinking about, you know, cause again, if you pull the words out, then you can think about it a little bit differently.

So if it’s jiggly or flabby or heavy or any of those things, then you really get this opportunity. To start to kind of toss it around a little bit and then you may also start to think about are there synonyms to those words? So we actually have them break down other words that are like these words or opposite words I’m often listening for the opposite of if it’s I feel Empty full, you know all those kinds of words where else in their lives are they feeling too much or too little of something?

Whitney Otto: I’m curious for you, Katie, sort of about your work, if you feel similarly, but like my fantasy is just that in our relationships that people would just start to have this vocabulary of deeper curiosity, right? Because so often we’ll say, Oh, I feel that one. I’m like, are you? It’s great on you, you know, we don’t know what else to do, but if we could say like, Oh, well, what else is going on right now?

And like, actually, what are the sensations in your body? And we just had the questions to ask one another in our trusted relationships. That would, I think, open up more options for us when it comes to body image. So I’m just curious, Katie, for you, like if you have similar thoughts around what you’re hoping to do.

Katy Harvey: Well, for sure. I think sometimes my clients get tired of hearing me use the word curiosity. They’re like, Oh, here we go again. But yeah, I mean, I think so many of us don’t have an emotional vocabulary. So you ask somebody like, well, how are you feeling or how does that feel? It’s like, I feel bad. I feel overwhelmed. Can we articulate this a bit more to better understand what’s going on? 


We had a little bit of a tech issue at the end of this interview, which is why it ended kind of abruptly, but we were just getting to the end where I asked them where you can connect with them if you want to know more about their work and their book, Body Image Inside Out.

I have a copy of the book and let me tell you, it is incredible. It’s really practical and it’s like a workbook where there are writing prompts and exercises for you to do that will really put this into practice for you. I recommend 10 out of 10 recommend! I have linked to their website where you can find the book as well as their Instagram in the episode description and the show notes for you.

So go check them out and show them some love. And in case nobody has told you today, you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon!

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