208. How to Have a Great Relationship With Your Body

Tired of looking in the mirror and hating what you see (or, ahem, avoiding mirrors altogether)?

Or waking up resentful because you never feel well rested?

Or maybe you’re stuck in sadness, lamenting the ways your body is changing as you age and move through perimenopause?

There are lots of obstacles to having a delicious relationship with your body.

Which is why this week’s episode of Satisfied AF is all about what those obstacles are, why they exist, and what you can do to overcome them.

Because you deserve to have a wonderful relationship with your body.

PS I’ll also touch on why you don’t need to love your body all the time (or at all) to have a great relationship with it.

This episode is filled with practical tips, hard truths, and a healthy dose of rebellion against the nonsense we're taught about our bodies. Don’t miss it!

Want customized support creating your wildly delicious life? Let’s hop on a free consultation call.

I’ll help you understand the blockers you’re facing and how to handle them moving forward. And I’ll share how a three-month 1:1 coaching package could supercharge your progress as well as your satisfaction.


WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

  • How societal beauty standards are rooted in some wild (and upsetting) historical factors you need to know about.

  • How to actually unhook from all the unending and impossible messages about what your body should be like.

  • How to build a better relationship with your body, even if it's not the size, shape, or ability you wish it were.

  • Practical strategies to stop tearing yourself down and start befriending the body you're in—right now.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

This week, we're talking about how to have a great relationship with your body.

The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.

Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to another episode of Satisfied AF. This is your host, life and career coach, Kori Linn, and we have such an important topic to talk about today. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately: how much our culture doesn't give women and girls room to be full human beings, generally, but especially in respect to our bodies. Like I've been thinking about the beauty standards specifically for stomachs and how so many of your important organs are in there. They're inside your belly and your, you know, your midriff, right? Your midsection.

Women are encouraged to just make that area of their body so small and slender and flat. And I'm just like. Why can't we just let women live? Why can't we just let girls have internal organs and give those internal organs room to exist and do whatever they need to do? Like, it's so bizarre and infuriating the way that our culture is always trying to shrink women and girls down, almost to the point of non-existence.

So as you maybe guessed from that lead in, today we're talking about something that's relevant for pretty much everyone, but especially for women. We are going to be talking about it through the lens of being socialized or identifying as a girl or a woman. And that is: how to have a good relationship with your body and especially how to have a good relationship with your body when you live in a culture that has all of these impossible ideas about what your body should be.

Whether your body doesn't look the way you want it to, doesn't have the energy you need, doesn't digest dairy the way you'd like, doesn't fall asleep easily, doesn't have the athletic ability you'd like it to, or even doesn't have easy orgasms (yes, we're going there) – there are probably things you wish were different about your body.

And I want to ask you, have you ever belittled yourself because of how your body looks or functions? Have you lamented your body's proportions or capacities or the ways it just does not measure up to what you've spent your whole life seeing and hearing it should be like?

I know what that's like.

I've coached clients about all sorts of frustrations when it comes to their bodies, and I've struggled with my body too. As a person whose body has challenges off and on with sleep, digestion, and pain in various places, I can get pretty salty towards my body. And while this episode is about how to have a good relationship with your body, in general, I don't think it would be fair to do this episode without taking some time to discuss the deeply toxic conditioning that girls, women, and folks assigned female at birth have received about our bodies and what they should look like.

There is, of course, the overwhelming pressure to be thin.

Even though I'm lucky that I grew up in a household that did not obsess over thinness and dieting, I still grew up in American culture in the 90s, and that alone gave me lots of very specific, incredibly unrealistic ideas about what my body should look like.

Over the years, I've met so many people who had experiences so much more intense than my own. People whose parents limited their food or served laxatives on their plates at dinner or made lots of negative and sometimes downright nasty comments about their bodies.

Here are some statistics for you to consider.

One study reports that at age 13, 53% of American girls are unhappy with their bodies. This grows to 78% by the time girls reach 17.

In the United States, 69 to 84% of women exhibit body dissatisfaction, typically preferring a smaller figure than their present frame.

Body dissatisfaction is so pervasive among women that it was coined normative discontent by Rodin, Silberstein and Striegel-More in 1984.

And according to the National Eating Disorders Association, 42% of first to third grade girls want to lose weight, and 81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat.

But the pressure to be thin is not all we face.

There's also pressure to be pretty, to look good, to be made up, to have your hair and nails done, to be put together. For girls and women, there is so much attention on how your body looks, like it's some kind of product that has to be packaged perfectly in order to be bought. And that's an accurate, if wildly upsetting metaphor, because that's a lot of women's experiences: that you need to look a certain way in order to move forward, whether that's in dating, job interviews, or even in your own private goals.

And of course, so much of this external pressure and conditioning becomes internalized over time. What starts out as others ideas or society's ideas and opinions can become your own preferences. You may think that you just prefer how you look with makeup, a slender figure, and your hair styled – I've certainly had all of those thoughts myself – but it's actually really hard to know what you genuinely prefer when you've been taught to like something a certain way your whole life, and those ideas have been continually reinforced through marketing, media, celebrity culture, and more.

Here's an interesting thing too, for many women, even when they try their hardest to adhere to the standards they've been conditioned into and now claim as their own, that does not guarantee they feel good or enjoy a good relationship with their bodies. If anything, the more we strive, the more disappointed we tend to be in the ways that we don't measure up to those impossible standards of beauty.

I don't know about you, but I just think that life is too long and too short to spend it hating your body because it doesn't match up to the current beauty ideals. And it's important that we mention that these are just the current standards. There were so many points throughout human history when the figure that was celebrated for women was not the ultra thin variety that folks worship today.

Learning that different body types have been considered beautiful and ideal throughout the ages can be freeing and allow you to unhook from the rigid standards of our own era. It can also be impactful to learn that the current focus on thinness has its roots in white supremacy.

Diet culture and the desire to maintain a smaller size were directly related to judgments about black people's bodies, particularly the size and shape of their bodies. Learning about the way beauty standards have shifted and where they originated from can shed light on these ideals and make it easier to let them go and embrace something else.

I think it's also super important to mention these standards are not actually about beauty and they're not designed with your wellbeing or joy in mind.

These are forms of control and judgment heaped onto women and girls that at best assert someone else's preferences about you, and at worst, treat you like you're some kind of beauty or sex product and that your looks and other attributes exist for the pleasure of someone else (on top of which those judgments are very likely informed by misogyny, fat phobia, ableism, racism, et cetera).

I'm also not going to insist that you choose to love your body and its physical appearance as is. You can, if you want to, and it can certainly be rewarding. But it's optional.

All I'm advocating for in this episode is that you can have a great relationship with your body, and I have some ideas about how to go about that.

In order to have a good relationship, you need to understand what the obstacles are. If the way you currently think about your body and its appearance is unpleasant and creates a feeling of animosity towards your body, if it creates disgust or disdain, or leads you to spending a lot of time looking in the mirror, picking apart your reflection, that might be something you want to address.

And there are lots of ways you can do that. You can address it by doing the work to unhook your idea of beauty from current cultural standards, choosing to see your current form as beautiful as it is.

You can address it by divesting from the idea that beauty is required and meaningful, choosing to focus on other interests and ideas.

You could address it by choosing to invest in body neutrality, focusing on seeing your body as something that's neither good nor bad, but just is.

There are even probably other ways you could address it that your own creativity can reveal to you.

I will say this: for a lot of people, this is some of the hardest coaching work they'll ever do. Maybe it's because of how deeply girls and women have been conditioned to see performing beauty as of the utmost importance. Maybe it's because of the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars that are spent shoving Photoshopped images down our throats. Maybe it's because of the rise of social media filters that make everyone look like they just don't have any pores. Maybe it's all of that and even more factors.

But what I’ve seen time and time again is that choosing to view your body in a way that’s outside of the cultural norm feels uncomfortable for many people and takes a lot of practice to become your new habitual way of seeing yourself.

That being said, don't let that limit you. Maybe you're the one in a million person for whom this turns out to be super easy. If so, that's amazing and I'm really excited for you! But if it does take time and effort and lots of repetition, that's okay and totally normal.

Okay, so we know that your body's appearance and the way it does or does not fit into societal standards of beauty and acceptableness may impact whether or not you have a good relationship with it. What else? Well, then there are all the ways your body does or does not function.

These are interesting because there is, of course, even more socialization at play. And inside that socialization, there may be internalized ableism, which is to say the idea that your body would be better if it could perform optimally. And that if it can't, it's bad. This is doubly frustrating. It's hard to have the desire to use your body in some way and be unable to accommodate that.

And it also feels shitty to believe that your body is bad, wrong, or broken if there are some things it just can't do. How do you have a good relationship with your body when it's letting you down?

If you really want to take long hikes, but your feet, knees, or hips won't tolerate that.

If you want to have wild, delicious sex with your partner, but you suffer from vulvar pain.

If you want to take just a short walk around the neighborhood, but your stamina isn't up for it.

If you, like me, love ice cream, but your body does not love to digest dairy.

If you know you need sleep, but your body rudely refuses, even though you've been in bed for hours.

If you have an illness, terminal or autoimmune or otherwise, and your body is creating pain and other problems for you.

And to circle back to the body image piece, if you want to be taller or shorter or thinner or have more toned arms, or you resent the size and shape of your ankles.

How do you have a good relationship with your body when it's not 100% exactly what you want it to be. When I say it like that, it could be, how do you have a good relationship with anything?

With a partner, or a boss, or your enigmatic middle child, or the city that you live in? Because nothing in your life is 100% exactly what you want it to be. There are always parts that are lovely and easier, and parts that are harder and more confusing to navigate. And I think that's the key here.

Accepting that there will be ups and downs, delights and strife, and being willing to be a friend to your body through all of it.

Being a friend doesn't mean you're never disappointed. It doesn't mean you're not frustrated sometimes. It doesn't mean you always get what you want. It does mean choosing love and respect and accountability, even when things aren't going a hundred percent the way you want them to.

I honestly think sometimes people treat their body more like a servant expecting top notch performance while providing terrible working conditions and abysmal pay.

And I am very guilty of this myself. In my twenties, I I tried to operate my body on so little sleep, and I ended up getting pneumonia, and it was really scary. But I understand why my body did that because I literally was not giving it the things that needed to function well. And then I was demanding that, you know, it keep up with multiple jobs and a full time load at school and all of my social activities. And it just, it didn't make sense.

I think it's more helpful to believe that your body doesn't owe you anything. It doesn't owe you being a certain size or shape or having certain abilities. It's not your property. It's an animal that you have the privilege of living inside of. And that animal comes with pros and cons, ups and downs. There are some of those that apply to all of us, like we cannot breathe underwater or teleport, which I personally think is very rude.

And there are other things that are specific person by person or in a specific time of your life. Like, I started getting itchy from eating dairy a few years ago. I'm not super excited about it, but that's what's real and true for my body at this point in time. It wasn't true for my whole life, but it's true now. It's what's available to me now, with the animal I live inside of.

I think it's also helpful to touch on negativity bias here. Your body, no matter what it's like, can do so many wonderful, amazing, honestly, miraculous things. And most of them we don't even notice or pay attention to most of the time. Like my body can heal cuts, all the time, often while I'm sleeping. Yours probably does too.

Most of our bodies breathe and make our hearts beat, without us even noticing. It's upsettingly easy to only focus on what we don't like, what's not working, what we wish was different.

How often do you sit around enjoying your body? Feeling grateful for all the things you like about it? Probably not that often. And honestly, I don't either. But doing so can be a powerful balance and it can help you build a stronger friendship with your body.

Think about what kind of friend you'd like someone to be to you. If you were to be that kind of friend to your body, what would that mean? What would you start doing? What would you stop doing? Where would you soften? And where would you become more protective?

If you were to divest from beauty culture and bullshit body standards, what would that allow you to invite into your life?

Would you wear more interesting clothes?

Would you smile more?

Would you ask your cute neighbor out?

Would you buy clothes that actually fit your body as it is instead of punishing yourself by buying the size you think you should fit into?

Would you wink at your reflection in the mirror instead of cringeing at it?

If you were to befriend your body as it actually is (instead of as you wish it to be), would you take the shorter walk that actually feels good to you and relish it?

Would you feed your body different kinds of foods?

Would you go to a dance class, or the beach, or actually just stay in and curl up on the couch because that's what feels best to you?

Your whole world and your whole relationship to your body changes when you say it does.

Why not now?

If this episode resonates with you and you'd like help creating a better relationship with your body, I'd love to support you with that.

Reach out and let's have a conversation about working together to get you feeling satisfied AF – because you deserve nothing less.

Even just the consultation call will provide such insight and radically shift your life.

And if you decide you want to work together, we'll talk about that too.

Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a review. It helps others find the podcast and get the support they need to.

Until next time.

Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
 

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