Welcome Back to Rebuilding Trust with Your Body. I am Katy Harvey, your host, and today’s conversation goes beyond just body image. It’s about getting comfortable with who you truly are at your core. We’re also going to be diving in how shifting your mindset about your body can transform the way that you show up in your life.

If you’ve been struggling with how you feel about your body lately, this episode is exactly what you need. Constantly feeling down about yourself. It affects everything. It affects the way you interact with people, the opportunities that you go after in your life, or the ones that you don’t, and even whether you allow yourself to dream big.

This isn’t about vanity or surface level self-love. This is about your relationship with yourself, and if the main reason you are unhappy with your body is because you think you need to lose weight or be smaller, then I need you to really listen today. Promise me that you will take this seriously. How you feel about yourself matters.

Your self worth is real, and the world needs you to believe in yourself. You’re not shallow, you’re not a joke, and your body does not determine your value. I’m coming into this conversation with some fierce self-compassion today. The kind that doesn’t just soothe you the way that tender self-compassion does the gentle side of self-compassion.

But this is the type of self-compassion that is gonna empower you. Kristin Neff, who is one of the leading researchers on self-compassion, talks about the two sides of it, the tender nurturing side, and the fierce protective kind. And today I am bringing that mama bear protective energy and I want you to know.

You’ve got this, so let’s go. Because nobody wants to feel bad about themselves yet. For so many of us, that’s the norm. We walk around feeling insecure about our bodies, and that’s seen as normal, that we’re just supposed to feel that way. We’ve normalized it that women will sit around body bashing as if that’s the most important topic of conversation that we can come up with.

And we don’t have the confidence that we need. It’s dismissed as fake or delusional. If somebody says that they feel confident about their body or they are accepting of their body, it’s almost like we can’t wrap our mind around that being a possibility, but I promise you it is possible. We’ve been conditioned to believe that criticizing ourselves is normal and.

And there are industries that thrive and profit off of this to the tune of billions of dollars per year. Diet companies, beauty brands, fashion, skincare, fitness, they all profit from our insecurities. Wanting to feel good about yourself is completely valid, but if your self-worth is completely tied to your weight or your body’s size or shape, it will always be fragile.

Sure you might feel a temporary boost of confidence when a diet or a weight loss plan seems to be working and when you feel in control. But that’s an illusion and it crumbles the moment that the weight comes back on, or when you find another flaw to fixate on. And remember, if dieting worked long term, if dieting was gonna permanently fix your weight and your self-esteem and your confidence in all the things, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

But what if. What if your confidence wasn’t based on the number on the scale or how you look in the mirror or the size of your pants, what if you could feel at peace in your own skin, no matter your size? What if deep down you knew that you are worthy of love, acceptance and belonging, just as you are just saying, that gives me chills because it’s powerful.

And I get that I am coming into this discussion with a ton of thin privilege, and for some of you that may make it difficult to hear this message from me, and I totally honor that and understand that. And if this episode is not for you, it is okay to skip it. It’s okay if you need to go learn this body image stuff from somebody whose body type more similarly resembles your own.

That is okay. But I want you to consider that this message applies regardless of what your body size is, regardless of your health status and all of that. We are having a conversation today about the way you feel about yourself as a human being, and the first step in this conversation is to be able to be radically honest with yourself.

That can be tough because we tell ourselves all sorts of reasons why we can’t accept our bodies, why that’s not possible, why things have to change in order for us to feel accepting. But the truth is, your body’s not the problem. Your body is not a problem that needs to be solved. Your body is not a fixer upper project.

The real issue here is the way that our society has conditioned us to believe that we should look and think and feel a certain way, and it’s time to change that. Before we dive further into this topic, though, you know what time it is? We’ve got some wellness. Woo. To talk about wellness. Woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health, but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims or just nonsense.

Today’s wellness Woo is mouth taping for sleep. This is one of those things that really took off on social media in the past couple of years, and I found myself wondering. I mean, it’s like that knee-jerk reaction like This is woo. But then I paused and asked myself, okay, what if there is some scientific validity to this?

You know, I try to keep my mind open to things until I’ve read the data and looked at the research, and then I think it also begs the question, are there any risks of doing this? So I did the deep dive here so that you don’t have to. In case you’re not totally tracking what I’m even talking about.

Mouth taping is this process of putting special tape over your mouth while you sleep, like you are taping your mouth shut while you sleep. And the idea is that it forces you to breathe through your nose. Now, here are the claims that are being made about it online in particular, like on social media.

That it improves sleep, increases your energy, boosts your immune system, that you will see improved skin, improved digestion, improved mood, and even a sharper jawline. That it will improve your oral health, that it will prevent high blood pressure and heart failure, that it will improve the oxygenation of your tissues, that you will have a more alkaline body, that it prevents migraines and improves ADHD.

People are claiming that it fixed their snoring, that it cured their sleep apnea. And when you look at the research, there might be some promising benefits for these two things in particular, the snoring and sleep apnea. But the research itself is not thorough enough yet to be definitive on that. But the rest of this stuff, it’s not evidence-based, let’s put it that way.

So one of the things that is noteworthy. You see the discussion about mouth taping on social media. There is very little discussion of studies that actually pertain to mouth taping and. The conclusions that are being drawn are mostly coming from claims that allege that when you breathe through your nose instead of your mouth, it has all these benefits, and so they’re extrapolating this from that assumption.

So they’re making claims that aren’t specific to what happens when someone tape their mouth while they sleep, but rather they’re saying things that supposedly happen. Simply as a result of breathing through your nose instead of your mouth in general. So we’re, we’re taking a generalization and then we’re jumping to these conclusions about what that means If we tape our mouth shut while we sleep.

Now there was a comprehensive literature review that was published in January, 2025, and here’s what they concluded by taking a look at the existing literature on this topic. The main conclusions were that the current research, evaluating mouth taping during sleep is quite limited. That it might benefit obstructive sleep apnea, snoring and ventilation.

But we don’t have enough research yet. And the third thing is that most TikTok mouth taping claims are not supported by the literature. So most of what you’re hearing online is not. Scientifically valid and beyond looking at whether this is effective for the things they’re claiming it’s doing, we also need to ask ourselves, is it safe?

In this literature review, the authors noted that the as assertions on TikTok regarding the benefits of mouth taping were plentiful. You know, everybody’s talking about how it’s so beneficial, it’s gonna do all these magical things for you. And in the study that they did, only 20% of the videos mentioned any potential risks.

24% of the videos featured medical professionals, only two of the videos that were included in this study. Mentioned any specific research studies in the videos, and this is a problem that I see over and over again when health and wellness related claims are being made on social media. They’re not looking at the risks associated with it.

They’re not citing actual valid well done research, and they’re not. Being done by qualified medical professionals. It’s a lot of times people who have no medical training whatsoever or who are claiming to be experts when they’re not actually an expert in this field. So you gotta be on the lookout for that and.

Obviously the major risk that we would be concerned about is obstructed airflow. If you’re taping your mouth shut and therefore reduced oxygen levels in your body. And of course there’s also risks of irritation from the tape or that it would make it harder for you to sleep and kind of minor things like that.

From the deep dive that I did, it does not appear that any of the major medical professional organizations. Are recommending taping for sleep. So we’ve got, you know, like the American Medical Association and these associations that will make strong evidence-based recommendations based on literature.

None of these big organizations are recommending this for sleep. So right now, mouth taping its wellness. Woo. Especially for the stuff that they’re claiming, like that it’s gonna make your jawline sharper or whatever, or that it’s gonna prevent you from having heart failure. Like no. And we may see some evidence-based stuff coming out for snoring or for sleep apnea in the future.

For right now. If you’re struggling with those things, you’re better off talking to your doctor about it to see what’s clinically recommended for your situation and getting evidence-based treatment for it. So there you have it. If you have an example of wellness, woo, send it my way. My dms are always open.

Let’s move on to today’s main topic. If you’re feeling frustrated about your weight and your body, you need to hear this. Let’s first start with why the frustration happens. The root of this frustration is that I know that so many of you are feeling about your body, and I know this because you tell me every single day.

I hear it from people in my dms, in my client coaching sessions, in the programs that I’m running inside my Facebook group. I hear it directly from you. That you’re frustrated with your body. You’re struggling with your body image here in the States and the Northern Hemisphere. We’re on the verge, on the cusp of summer, and that can stir up stuff.

As we’re thinking about switching out our layers of clothing and our sweaters and our leggings and our. Hoodies and, and the things that cover our body and make us feel cozy now that we’re moving towards shorts and tank tops and swimsuits. Sometimes that worry and that anxiety and that feeling of wanting your body to be smaller starts to get louder.

And why this happens is ultimately because society has conditioned us over and over and over again. To believe that thinner equals better, healthier, and more lovable, and that is a dangerous and faulty belief system. So I wanna start by recognizing here that weight stigma is very real. And we, as a society, there are many studies that prove this, that people in larger bodies are treated worse by our society and people, if you’re listening, you’re in a larger body, you’re like, yeah, no, duh Katy.

But I, I really wanna hammer this home. That’s real. That is valid and it’s not okay. And it’s not your fault. And it doesn’t mean your body is the problem. It means that weight stigma and systemic anti-fat bias is the problem. And people in larger bodies don’t get the same medical care that people in straight-size bodies get.

They don’t get as many job opportunities. There’s all sorts of ways that this plays out. Because of that, it’s this constant reinforcement of this idea that being fat or gaining weight is bad, and that being thin or losing weight is good. And most of us, even if we’ve done some work on this, and we’re aware of weight stigma, and we’ve really worked on our own internalized fat phobia, most of us.

Including myself, still have some degree of internalized fat phobia, and that internalized fat phobia is what makes you feel badly about yourself when you gain weight or feel less confident about your body when you see yourself in photos or it’s that thing that makes you feel better about yourself and more confident, and you have better self-esteem when you’ve lost weight and you’re getting all the compliments.

That’s our internalized fat phobia as part of what’s driving those feelings. And even when you’re rejecting diet culture and you’re trying to chip away at the internalized fat phobia, these beliefs and these thoughts and the feelings that get evoked, it’s not gonna disappear overnight. So you have to be patient with yourself and compassionate.

But we want to practice noticing that and recognizing that. The reason we think and feel this way is because we were taught to think and feel this way. Think how different you would feel if from the day you were born and your whole entire life. You were taught that normal bodies come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, and you were taught that some people just naturally are taller or shorter or fatter or thinner.

That that’s normal and that there’s no body type that’s superior to another. Imagine how differently you would feel if that was the fundamental belief system that we all. And I know that one of the things that really trips people up with this frustration, well two things really is number one, the health side of it and caring about your health, wanting to be healthier.

And I get that. I 100%, I hear you. There are health conditions that correlate with being at a higher weight. We have to remember, correlation is not causation, and we have to remember that dieting itself produces weight cycling, which makes all of those health conditions worse. So, yes, I care about your health too.

Let’s talk about that in an evidence-based way that works where we can directly address your health concerns, whether it be your cholesterol, your blood sugar, your blood pressure, whatever it. The second thing that often trips people up with their body image and their weight is the physical feeling within your body.

So sometimes people will say like, look, Katy, this isn’t about me wanting to look a certain way from an aesthetic standpoint. I don’t wanna be a supermodel. I wanna feel good in my body. I don’t wanna feel out of breath when I climb the stairs or walk to my mailbox. I don’t want my knees to hurt and my back to hurt.

I don’t like feeling like I can’t bend over and tie my shoes and things like that. The physical discomforts within your body. And again, I want to validate the suffering and the feelings and that that is uncomfortable. And of course, you don’t want to be uncomfortable, but we also want to recognize that different bodies have different discomforts for different reasons.

People of all sizes can have back pain and knee pain. Another example would be someone who’s short. They may have perpetual frustrations at how they can’t reach things, and how they always have to get out a step stool to put their dishes away from the dishwasher, or they can’t reach certain things when they’re going shopping at Target or whatever.

And our society doesn’t blame them for not being taller. We don’t shame them for that. And so people who are short don’t walk around feeling shame about it. They might feel frustration, but they don’t feel the shame that we feel when we exist in a larger body. And we experience some of the discomforts, and so the discomfort is valid, but we wanna expand your thinking beyond this tunnel vision, that weight loss is the only way to solve that problem.

Because even if. It were true that you might have less aches and pains or better blood work at a lower weight. The question becomes, how are you going to do that? Because even if it would make you feel better, that doesn’t make dieting an effective solution. It’s just like even if winning the lottery made your life better ’cause you had more money and you’re not stressed about you’re paying your bills, it doesn’t increase your odds of winning the lottery.

So we wanna expand our thinking. How can we help make you physically more comfortable in the body that you have without assuming. That weight loss is the only way to do that because there are a lot of things we can do to help improve knee pain or back pain that aren’t about going on a diet. In fact, a couple episodes back when I talked to a physical therapist named Pretty Jaw, she talked about how if someone comes to her with knee pain.

The first thing she’s looking at is how we directly address that Through strengthening the muscles around those joints, through lubricating those joints. She has all sorts of tricks up her sleeve and telling somebody to go lose weight is not even a thing, a thing that’s on her radar. And that comes from somebody who, she’s a doctor of physical therapy, DPT.

And that is her training and her expertise. And so I want you to hear that there are things you can do to feel more comfortable and you may have to do things to accommodate yourself in certain ways. You know, another example of societal weight stigma is getting on an airplane in a larger body. I’ve just had so many clients tell me what an awful experience that can be and how much shame they feel about it.

You know, having to kind of squeeze into the seat or ask for the seat belt extender. And the thing is, you deserve to be comfortable when you fly, even if that’s not what’s being provided to you. It’s also like someone who’s, you know, six feet, five and they’re cramped and their, and their knees are up to their chest, you know, they deserve to feel comfortable when they fly, and yet they aren’t.

But we don’t shame them for that. So this comes back to the root of the frustration is society’s beliefs around this. Another thing I wanna look at are the false promises of diet culture. So diet culture promises that if you lose weight, you are going to be happier and healthier. You’re gonna feel better, your life is gonna be so much better.

And there’s so many ways that we’re taught that. I think of the classic example of those billboards where they show people with before and after. And of course before, they’re in their larger body. They look so sad and depressed, and then afterwards they’re smiling. They’re usually holding up an old pair of their pants that’s too big for them now.

And the implied message is, my life is so much better because I lost weight. But what they’re not telling you and what they’re leaving out. That there is an almost guaranteed chance that you are going to regain that weight. So what they’re showing you as the after isn’t really the after. It’s more of the.

Is when you’ve regained the weight. And a lot of times people will regain more weight than they lost in the first place. And we call that weight cycling. Diet culture’s not telling you about that part though. They’re only telling you about the part where if you try hard enough and if you have enough willpower, you can lose weight and then you’re gonna be happy and healthy.

And if you don’t sustain that, then shame on you because you failed. You didn’t stick with it, you didn’t try hard enough. Despite the fact that that’s the norm for most people, because dieting itself goes against your biology and it’s never gonna work long-term because it works against your body and it messes with your metabolism.

And so when you’ve done that cycle, enough times of losing weight, gaining it back, you end up feeling like you failed. But you.

Of this process. It was an ineffective strategy to begin with, and nobody told you that. And staying stuck in that constant pursuit of weight loss is going to continue leaving you frustrated, and ultimately it does make your body feel worse. It makes your health worse. It makes your metabolism worse.

Weight cycling is very harmful to your metabolism and to your health. The research on weight cycling, yo-yoing of your weight shows that it increases your risk of cardiovascular disease. It increases your risk of blood sugar issues. It increases your risk of continued weight gain, it increases your risk of premature death.

Weight cycling and dieting are not good for you. But we’re constantly told, if you lose weight, you’re gonna be happier and healthier. And that’s because most of those studies are only looking at a short period of time during which the person’s weight is lower. They’re not fully following and playing out the pattern to what happens when their weight rebounds, and what impact does that have on their health in the long run.

The other thing I want to talk about in relation to this frustration that happens and why you feel so frustrated about your weight and about your body is because you haven’t grieved it yet. There is a grieving process that we must go through in order to get to a place of body acceptance. Of letting go of that dream body that we were promised that we thought we should have, that we thought we could have if we just did the right type of diet and stuck with it long enough.

There’s grief in letting go of the fantasy, and often it gets interpreted for us as letting yourself go. That’s not letting yourself go. You’re coming to terms with reality that dieting doesn’t work. You’re experiencing radical acceptance that is now opening the door to you, finding a new way to relate to food and to your body.

And there’s grief in letting go of that fantasy that there’s some diet or some way of eating that’s gonna make you in control of food, that’s gonna make you happy and healthy, that’s gonna make you physically comfortable in your body. It’s a big, huge bone to let go of that fantasy, but what I can tell you is that on the other side of doing the grieving.

Your life gets so much bigger and better when you’re not chasing a smaller body, and you get to address your health and your physical discomfort in direct ways that are effective, that improve the quality of your life. And just like with grief, there’s the different stages of grief that happens with our body image too.

You know, the denial is when we’re still attached to this idea that we have to lose weight, that we have to go on a diet, that that’s the only way. The bargaining is when you tell yourself, okay, I’m not gonna diet anymore, but I’m just gonna try to lose weight the healthy way. Or when you tell yourself, I’m just gonna go on one more diet to lose the weight, and then I’ll come back to intuitive eating and accepting my body.

That’s the bargaining right. Then what comes next? Do you know? Do you remember? We get to anger, getting angry at the lies that you’ve been told. Angry at diet culture, maybe angry at yourself for falling for it so many times, angry at the time, and the money and the energy you’ve wasted on dieting. Angry at the way that it drove your set point.

Weight up, angry at the way that it messed up your relationship with food. Then comes the depression that you need to allow yourself to sit in the suck and sit with the sadness without jumping back into the arms of diet, culture, and some type of fix it strategy. And it’s only when you’ve done all of that that you will reach that final stage of acceptance.

And for some people, this is like the newer thinking in the grief world, is the making meaning stage, being able to take that and have a positive ripple effect on others around you. By helping them see it a different way as well. Okay, so let’s work on how do we shift your mindset to help you find peace with your body so that you don’t just have to stay frustrated?

The first thing is I want you to think about redefining success. So when it comes to your health and your happiness and feeling confident about yourself as a human being, instead of focusing on weight, let’s think about what success would actually mean. What is it that you’re aiming for? Perhaps you want to feel more vibrant and have more energy.

Perhaps you want to have more fun and adventure in your life. Perhaps you have some big dreams for your career that you’ve been putting off, telling yourself that you can’t do that until you’ve lost weight. Perhaps you have a health concern that you’ve been chasing a lower number on the scale for, and you haven’t yet experimented with the other ways to improve your health.

So I want you to think about redefining what success would mean and what is it that you do want for yourself if we remove. The weight loss piece of this from the discussion, like, or sometimes a way to get at this, what it is that you’re actually wanting is to ask yourself, keep, to keep going deeper with why.

Okay. I wanna lose weight. Why? So that I can be healthier. Okay. Why? So that I can feel better and live longer. Okay. What does feeling better mean for you? Like what doesn’t feel good? What would help you feel better? And that’s where we can start to hone in on the things that we can actually directly address, that your brain is assuming weight loss is the only avenue to get you there.

But what I am telling you is that there are other avenues to achieve those same things. And that it’s not usually just weight loss for the sake of weight loss that we want, it’s weight loss for the sake of what we assume that that offers to us. And again, it is still very real and true that we live as a society filled with weight stigma.

And so, you know, part of it is you want to be treated with respect and the same level of dignity as every other human being on the planet. And our society doesn’t operate that way, and that’s messed up. And again, that’s not a you problem. That doesn’t mean you need to go change your body to fix that.

That means that we need to keep having this conversation and taking a stand against that in our society. We also need to work on challenging your old beliefs and recognizing and questioning the diet culture.

So I want you to practice catching these thoughts. When you’re having a day or a moment where you’re feeling frustrated about your body and about your weight, or about your body image, however you think of it. I want you to do a brain dump, either in the notes app of your phone or on a piece of paper, and ask yourself.

What are the thoughts that are going through my mind? And to actually capture in writing what those thoughts are, and then to go through those thoughts one by one and counter them or challenge them with a more helpful, supportive, truthful statement. A couple of examples for how you might counter some of those thoughts about your weight.

You might remind yourself, weight is not the sole determinant of health. Your worth isn’t tied to your size, that you are a worthy human being no matter what you weigh. This is exactly what we are going to be working on inside of days one and two of the intuitive eating and body kindness unchallenged that I have coming up where we’re going to be looking at your food rules, your old beliefs, the diet mentality, these thoughts that you have that are still.

Stuck in your brain and how do you dismantle those and unlearn these things that diet culture has taught us and replace them with new beliefs that serve you better moving forward. And so if this is something that you’re wanting to work on and it should be for all of you listening to this, then I 10 out of 10 recommend that you get inside the UN challenge.

You are gonna create so many shifts and so much momentum in just five days. It is insane. And for under $80, it is such a steal of a deal. In fact, one of my colleagues told me last time that I ran this, that I should be charging a couple hundred bucks for it. She’s like, Katy, this is crazy. Look at everything that is included in here, and I agree it’s worth that much.

But I want it to be accessible to you, and I want you to experience these wins and this quick burst of momentum. So run, don’t walk to get inside. It officially opens here in a couple of days, but if you DM me, I’ll let you sneak in early. That’s my special deal here for you podcast listeners. Okay, so challenging the old beliefs, that’s one thing.

Another thing is practicing self-compassion. You’ve gotta practice speaking to yourself with kindness rather than criticism. So when you’re feeling frustrated about your body and you’re having one of those bad body image days. I want you to ask yourself, would I say these things to a friend? And I know that this is corny as all get out, but it actually works.

If you would not say that to one of your friends, if you would not tell your friend that her thighs are disgusting, then stop saying it to yourself, and then I want you to flip it around and say, well, what would I say to my friend if my friend told me that she was having a really hard time with how she feels about her body?

What would I say to her? My hunch would be that you would instantly have something kind and caring and compassionate and supportive to say to her, and isn’t it so interesting that we have a block against even considering saying those things to ourselves? It’s like it doesn’t even occur to us. That’s why I do the, what would I say to a friend trick?

Because it helps us get out of our own way and access that self-compassion because we so readily will give it to other people. So what would you say to a friend? Those are the things you need to be saying to yourself, and I want you to also remind yourself that body fluctuations are normal. Our bodies change.

Your body has been changing since the moment you were conceived and the moment you were born. It’s always changing. Your body is gonna change with different seasons. For women with a monthly cycle, you know, it changes throughout the month and throughout the course of our cycle with our hormone fluctuations.

Our bodies change as we get older. That is normal. We are not robots and we are not all meant to look the same as human beings. We are meant to have body diversity, and this is another thing. We’re gonna tackle this inside the UN challenge on days four and five when we talk about how to navigate your feelings about your weight and this practice of body kindness and self-compassion, which is a skill that you must build.

I also have, while we’re on the topic of Body Kindness, I have a free body kindness guide that shows you how to create this as a habit in your daily routine. So if you go to non diet academy.com/body Kindness, it’s totally free and it will help you on a daily basis to practice these little things that help to hardwire your brain towards being nicer to yourself instead of living in a constant state of frustration and shame about your body.

The next thing that you need to work on and remind yourself of is trusting the process of intuitive eating because part of, of the early stages in particular is that your body is learning to trust you because when you’ve been doing all that dieting, when your weight has been yo-yoing all over the place, when you’re between restricting and binging and everything in between.

Frankly, your body doesn’t trust you. Why would it trust you that there, that you are going to feed it on a reliable and predictable schedule when you haven’t been doing that? When your body doesn’t trust you, that’s part of what actually makes your body want to drive your weight up higher and higher over time.

Because it’s a survival mechanism. Your body’s like, oh, we only have intermittent access to food. Oh, there might be some food scarcity going on. There might be periods of time where food is unavailable. Cool. We’re just gonna store some extra weight so that we don’t starve to death. That’s your body’s primitive biological way of thinking about that.

Trusting the process of intuitive eating means that. Is gonna learn to trust you back, and that happens through a period of time, of months, even years of you eating and honoring your hunger, honoring your fullness, providing your body with reliable and consistent and predictable opportunities to eat satisfying food and to be fully nourished.

That is when your body is going to trust you, and that is when your metabolism will work its best as well. That is when your weight will stabilize at your set point weight, where your body is meant to be, and part of the frustration there might be that your set point weight currently in your life may be higher than it used to be.

It may be higher than you wish it was. It may be higher than you think it should be. Part of doing the work here is learning how to tolerate and accept where your body is meant to be. When you’re not on that dieting rollercoaster anymore, and remind yourself over and over again that healing takes time.

This is not a quick fix. We are not promising what diet culture promises and doesn’t deliver on, which is quick fixes. This is not a quick fix. You’re playing the long game here, but it’s worth it because when you’re no longer controlled by the shame about your body, by the rules of diet culture. You eventually start to feel more accepting of your body, more deserving of living the life that you want to live, and more able to directly take care of what it is that your body needs from you.

And there is something that is so empowering about that, and it is worth it, but you gotta stay with the process through the thick and thin and the ups and the downs. A few practical takeaways for you and some journal prompts that I think are gonna be really helpful when you are feeling frustrated about your body.

Here are some journal prompts. You might wanna jot these down and save these. I want you to ask yourself, what negative messages about my body am I holding onto? Let me say that again. What negative messages about my body am I holding onto the next one? What is the story I’m telling myself about my body and my weight and what it means about me?

What’s the story I’m telling myself next? What do I worry that others are thinking when they look at me? What do I assume other people think when they see me walking down the street or when they see me with my plate of food, or when they see me in a picture, what do I assume they’re thinking? Spoiler.

Those are probably things you’re also just thinking about yourself already and then you’re projecting it onto other people. And again, part of what’s challenging is that sometimes the world around us is thinking those things because of weight stigma. And then the last question for your journal prompt is what fears do I have about my body or my weight?

What are you afraid of? What are you worried about? And it can be really helpful to have some type of a daily affirmation that you use to put this on a sticky note somewhere that you’ll see it, put it on the, the monitor of your computer, or stick it on the dashboard of your car, tape it to your mirror, some type of daily affirmation.

An example would be, my body is not the enemy, or my body is my friend. And another practical step you can take is that Body Kindness guide, because that’s a tangible action step that you can take each day. So in the Body Kindness Guide, you pick three small things to do for your body as body kindness.

And it’s not like big things. It could be something like go through and unfollow triggering accounts on your social media. It might mean wearing something that fits your body comfortably that day. It might mean that you’re gonna drink more water and not just run on caffeine all day long, on any given day what your body needs from you or what would represent body kindness might look different.

And that guide is going to allow you a structured and intentional way to integrate that into your life. So again, it’s non diet academy.com, body kindness, and I want to leave you with encouragement to stay the course and to remember it’s okay to have hard days. You’re sometimes going to have to sit in the suck.

It is so important to acknowledge when you’re feeling crappy about yourself and about your body. Acknowledge it. We don’t just wanna pretend everything’s fine, we’re all fine, and you don’t wanna gaslight yourself. It’s okay to acknowledge it and instead of trying to make that feeling go away by fixing your body or by jumping into some type of of diet or exercise plan.

We wanna sit in the suck, but you also don’t have to stay in the suck. Sitting in the suck is part of doing the work and then figuring out how to get yourself out of the suck without returning to dieting behaviors. That’s the linchpin of this process, and it’s easier said than done. And if you ever need help figuring out how to do that, reach out to me for support.

That’s what I help people with all day, every day. And I want you to see that frustration is part of the journey. It’s not a sign that it’s not working or that you’re failing or that you’re not doing it right, and it’s not a sign that you need to go back on a diet. It’s part of the journey. It’s part of the process.

It’s basically a rite of passage and learning how to recognize the frustration, sit with it and practice body kindness even on the days where you desperately wish your body were different. That is part of doing the work, and it’s part of making progress. To be able to stay with that and not go back and bail on your intuitive eating journey and go back to the restrictive dieting behaviors.

I also wanna remind you and leave you with this message that your body is not a problem to be solved, and you are so much more than your weight or the size of your pants. So don’t forget to grab the Body Kindness Guide. I’ve also linked it in the show notes for you. I would love to have you join me inside the UN Challenge.

We’re kicking off on April 14th. It’s a five day program where we’re gonna practice these skills and these mindset shifts, and the doors will be opening soon. But if you wanna go ahead and secure your slot early, let me know. I’ve got some fun bonuses. I’ve got a VIP experience for you. All the things.

We’re gonna have a ton of fun. It’s gonna be a high energy action packed program to get you unstuck, to give you some wins to help you get. DM me if you want those details. And in case nobody has told you today, you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

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