191: How The Hell Did I Get Here?

Lu Uhrich: Welcome to Episode 191 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as a part of this episode at the show notes, at www.seven-health.com/191.

Real Health Radio is presented by Seven Health. Seven Health works with women who feel obsessed with and defined by their relationships with food and body. Using a non-diet, weight-neutral approach that combines science and compassion, we help you to transform your physical, mental, and emotional health. We specialize in helping clients overcome disordered eating, regain their periods, balance their hormones, and recover from years of dieting, binging, and body dissatisfaction by learning how to connect with and listen to their bodies.

We’re currently taking on new clients, so if you’re ready to get the support you deserve in healing your relationship with food and your body, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. That address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and you can also find it in the show notes.

Hi, everyone if you’re a regular listener of the show, then you probably know by now that we’ve been giving away a book from our resource list with every episode. It’s our way of saying thank you to you, our Real Health Radio community, while also asking for your support and feedback through rating and reviewing the podcast.

If you’d like a chance to win, all you need to do is leave a review on iTunes, take a screenshot of it, and then email it to info@seven-health.com. Then you’ll be permanently entered into the drawing.

Weekly winners have the opportunity to select a book from our resource list, which can be found on our website at www.seven-health.com/resources. That page includes some of our current favorite books and blogs. We plan to update it periodically with new titles that we come across, but if you want to see the list as it stands right now, you can head to that address, www.seven-health.com/resources or simply head to the dropdown menu on the left side of our side.

For the book giveaway this week, the winner is Madelon P. Congrats, Madelon, and thanks for your review. We’ll be in contact soon to send you a book of your choosing.

Okay, after those brief announcements, it’s time to get on with the show, and – surprise! – today I’m your host and your guest. It’s my first ever solo episode of Real Health Radio, and I decided to title it, “How in the Hell Did I Get Here?” It’s all about acknowledging and understanding the many components of developing eating disorders, disordered eating, negative body image, and unhealthy relationships with food, body, and self.

If I’m honest, while the words and topic are my own, this whole solo pod thing was not my idea. I blame Chris and our operations manager Drew for somehow convincing me that it would be a good idea for just lonely little me to talk to all of you for 30-ish minutes straight. If you like the episode, you’re welcome – and if not, you know who to blame.

I’m kind of kidding, sort of, but this is a little out of my comfort zone, so please bear with me. I’ve been told by Chris that I can sound a little like the narrator of an audiobook when I’m monologuing and not actually engaged in conversation. I don’t really think it was a compliment, and I’m going to try to let my joyful, quirky, sarcastic personality come through while I actually teach you some valuable information and hopefully provide you with some stuff you can use. So here goes nothing.

00:03:55

"How the hell did I get here?"

While I kicked around a few ideas for show topics, this was always at the top of my list because I believe that it’s foundational – so much so that it’s a mainstay in my one-on-one work with clients, my coaching program, and public speaking engagements too.

How the hell did you get here? How did I get here? How did any of us get here? And by “here,” for the purpose of this podcast episode, I’m really talking about our relationships with food and body – who we are as eaters, movers, and skin-and-bone inhabitants.

For many listening, “here” might include behaviors and mindsets like disordered eating and exercise, body dissatisfaction, food guilt, shame, negative body image, eating disorders, and general self-rejection. Basically, all the things we here at Seven Health work with clients to address and overcome every day.

For the purpose of this episode, I want to help you begin to answer these uniquely personal questions: Why am I the way that I am as an eater or an exerciser? Why do I have these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors around my body? How did I get this way, and how can I become someone else?

Today, I’ll explain the general origins of negative body image, diet mentality, and disordered eating and exercise behaviors. But I want to be really clear up front that digging into the specific-to-you catalysts and solutions for disordered eating, body dissatisfaction, and other struggles or unwanted thoughts and behaviors is something that I can’t do here on Real Health Radio. That intimate and personal work is encouraged – in fact, again, that’s what Chris and I do every day with our clients in the context of one-to-one coaching sessions. It’s just not something that I could get into and serve you well enough and specifically enough here on the show.

Throughout the episode, I hope that you can listen and learn for a general understanding, and then, in the hours and days beyond hearing this podcast, I encourage you to process your own specific answers to the question “How in the hell did I get here?” and reach out to a trusted practitioner, friend, or family member for additional help and support as needed.

00:06:00

Lu's tree analogy

Now, who wants to talk about trees? It’s an analogy, and one that I love to use when discussing the origins of our food and body thoughts and behaviors. What you’ll find out about me, if you haven’t begun to learn this already based on some of my previous episodes, is that I really love a good analogy, and I find this one to be extremely helpful. So let’s take it from the ground up.

Let’s imagine that you were once a tiny seed – a tree seed. Now, I don’t care what kind of tree seed you are or what kind of tree you’re growing into. Any tree will do. Just imagine being a seed, your infant self, tucked deep within soil. Figuratively, the soil is your personal, social, and cultural environment. It’s where you were first planted as a body-neutral, intuitive eating human years ago – because let’s face it: babies are intuitive eaters who couldn’t care less about visible abs or calorie counting.

So you’re there, planted in the soil. It’s where you were when you were young, and it’s where you continue to develop today. It’s all the places and spaces you’ve been planted, grown, or established yourself. In reality, soil is a mixture of dirt, nutrients, water, and wastes too. It can nourish and it can poison.

And the same can be said about the places and spaces where you’re planted in this life. Your environment affects your development, in both subtle and obvious ways. It’s where you construct your ideas of self and gain an understanding of what it means to be a human in this world – and for the vast majority of our clients and listeners, a woman in this world, a woman in your country, your hometown, and in your family. It’s the place where your identity is born, at least in part, by the demands, examples, and expectations, both obvious and assumed, of others.

In our cultural environment – which for the purposes of this analogy is the soil – there are countless barriers to making peace with food and body. I want to list a few of them here and explain them in a bit more detail. These are the most frequent and impactful, many of which may be familiar to you because we have discussed them in depth in previous Real Health Radio interviews.

00:08:00

The soil: barriers to a healthy relationship with food + body

One of the first barriers to creating and cultivating a healthy relationship with food and body is diet culture, and I like to use this definition from Christy Harrison, who’s the author of Anti-Diet and the host of the Food Psych podcast.

Christy defines diet culture as “a system of belief that does a few things. It worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin ideal.

“Diet culture promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is pretty clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years.

“Diet culture demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hypervigilant about eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.

“And diet culture oppresses people who don’t match up with the supposed picture of health, which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folk, people in larger bodies, people of color, people with disabilities, and damages both our mental and physical health in the process.”

If that isn’t a barrier to a healthy relationship with food and body, I don’t know what is. Now, a component of diet culture is diet mentality. That’s the constant awareness of food and the impact we believe it will have on our bodies, leading to the moralization of certain food and eating behaviors.

Yet another barrier in that cultural environment or soil is weight stigma. Weight stigma in general refers to negative attitudes and behaviors towards fat people. Attitudes and behaviors that make it impossible for people in larger bodies to participate in everyday society in the same way that thin people do. Attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate stress on the subjects of weight-based discrimination or people in larger bodies and lead to their personal and systemic oppression.

Weight stigma is theoretically similar to gender discrimination, racism, ableism, or any other body-based discrimination. For more on this, you can check out our previous Episode 186 between Chris and Dr. Jeffrey Hunger.

Fatphobia is a dislike of fat people and/or “obesity” as defined by the antiquated BMI scale. Virgie Tovar explains that fat phobia has multiple dimensions. It’s not simply something that happens to people in larger bodies moving outward from the collective us to others; it also moves inward, from our culture to ourselves, meaning that we can internalize the fatphobic ideas we’ve received from our environment. Going back to that tree analogy, it’s like a seed taking in the substances of the soil it’s been planted in. If you want to hear more from Virgie, you can check out Episode 185.

The final cultural barrier to a healthy relationship with food and body that I want to discuss is the beauty ideal. Beauty ideals are really just standards of culturally-determined optimal appearance and appeal. While they affect all genders, those identifying as women are under the scrutiny of the feminine beauty ideal, which includes female body shape and size, among other things.

The feminine beauty ideal is a socially constructed notion that physical attractiveness is one of women’s most important assets, and something worthy of our energy, resources, and time to achieve and maintain. Generally, this set of standards is rooted in heteronormative beliefs, though it can affect women of all sexual orientations.

Obviously, the cultural barriers to a healthy food and body relationship are only a piece of the puzzle, so now take a minute to consider your own personal and social environment – your family, your friends, your partners, your neighbors, teachers, maybe religious or recreational leaders and communities.

I’m willing to bet that if you gave yourself time to consider the relationships, places, and spaces that made up and continue to make up your unique community, you’d probably recognize some influential moments and messages that fostered the beliefs you currently have about eating, exercising, and existing. Some you might think of fondly and consider a positive factor in your relationship to food and body, but others might’ve contributed to unwanted symptoms and experiences that you’re presently facing.

Here are some examples. A mother who was very body-conscious and critical of her own shape and projected those judgments and her associated criticisms and behaviors onto you. Maybe a father who was emotionally absent or abusive. Relatives who objectified bodies or moralized food. Siblings or parents, maybe caretakers, who struggled with disordered eating themselves. Family members who sensationalized health or prioritized physical accomplishments without any apparent concern for rest or mental and emotional needs and desires.

Being part of a sport where weight and size were scrutinized and considered representative of ability. Two that come to mind for me personally would be dance or track, but I’m sure you might be able to think of others in your own life.

Dating someone who criticized and commented on your physical features and insinuated that you were less or more lovable based on them. Fatphobic dieting, nutrition, and gym classes, whether in school or community. Specific instances of teasing, bullying, and trauma are also notable.

What’s more, when it comes to clinical eating disorders, there are other factors that contribute to the development of these serious but treatable mental and physical health conditions. They include biological and psychological aspects, in addition to the sociocultural components that I’ve already addressed, like diet culture, weight stigma, fatphobia, and beauty ideals.

Biological risk factors might include things like having a family history of eating disorders or a personal history of dieting or food scarcity, a family history of mental illness, or negative energy balance, which essentially means the consistent utilization of more caloric energy than is being consumed.

There’s psychological risk factors, too, like a personal history of an anxiety disorder, body dissatisfaction, perfectionism, and behavioral inflexibility, so that desire to follow rules and stay within the lines no matter what.

All of that, everything I’ve shared from the biological to the psychological and the sociocultural environments are more or less the soil of your food and body relationship. The environments, events, and experiences you’ve had all play a role in making you who you are today as an eater, mover, and person living in a body.

00:14:20

The roots: our judgments + beliefs

So, are you still with me? We’re still in the ground, talking about the seed in the soil, because it’s a really big deal. But now we’re going to move up the tree to the roots. The roots are the unseen part of the tree that grow beneath the surface and anchor themselves into the soil. They support the entire plant and seek to help keep it safe and secure. They carry the nourishing and not-so-nourishing components of the soil into the visible parts of the tree – all that stuff we actually see above the ground.

You can think of your beliefs and thoughts about self, food, and body as the roots of the tree. Feeding off of the cultural messaging and the personal environment that they’re buried in, your roots reflect and reproduce the soil in which they exist.

Roots are judgments and beliefs like these:

“I can only be happy if I’m thin.”

“Weight gain is synonymous with laziness and loneliness.”

“I must be pretty and perfect.”

“My appearance, my size, or my weight – that’s the most important thing about me.”

“My health can be controlled by me if I only eat clean and micromanage my food.”

“I’ll never find a partner unless I lose weight.”

“I need to earn my food or punish myself with exercise.”

“I don’t deserve to have my needs met in this body.”

“I can’t control much in life, but I can control what I eat.”

“Dieting proves my determination and willpower.”

“Body size is indicative of health status.”

“I won’t have the life I want until I lose weight or eat right.”

“I’m unworthy of love.”

“I’m not enough.”

“I’m too much.”

“I’m broken.”

Just like tree roots, our beliefs provide direction and meaning to our lives. They originate from our lived experiences and environmental observations and become predictive guides of how we’ll operate, respond, and express ourselves.

Yes, we can absolutely change our beliefs. For instance, I’m willing to bet that most of you listening don’t still believe in Santa Claus, but of course, that change takes challenge and choice and time. Left unchecked, the components of soil get absorbed into the roots of a tree, and likewise, the components of your cultural, familial, and social environment are absorbed into your psyche.

00:16:35

The trunk: our philosophies

So now, where do those roots or those thoughts and beliefs lead? They lead to the trunk of the tree. The trunk is the base and support of all that’s exposed to the outside world. It symbolizes what happens aboveground in your food and body relationship and represents your general philosophies and expressed beliefs about eating, exercising, and existing in your body.

These philosophies stem from your root thoughts and beliefs, and when you’re steeped in diet culture, they’re often adopted from and reinforced by your popular health coaches, trainers, nutritionists, influencers, marketing and social media. These are the do’s and don’ts of eating and exercise, the black-and-white thinking you have around food and bodies and health, all as a result of your figurative soil and roots.

I’m about to drop a little horticulture science on you. I think it’s horticulture. Arborology? I don’t know. What is tree science? Either way, I’m going to drop some of that here. Somewhere along the way of using this analogy over and over again, I was told that tree trunks actually respond to changes in atmosphere, environments, and root systems. That’s why the tree rings inside the tree are sometimes different widths and might have a different appearance. It’s because they indicate the years of a tree’s life, and you can learn about the years of the tree’s life by observing and investigating those tree rings.

Your food and body philosophies are indicative of your personal growth and evolution, and just like tree trunks, apparently, they can change over time too, and that evolution can tell a defeating or a liberating story; the choice is all yours.

00:18:10

The branches: our behaviors

As we all know, tree trunks split off into branches. Some are larger than others, some longer or thicker, but they’re all essentially offshoots of the base.

Your general philosophies and beliefs around food, exercise, and bodies have offshoots, too. These are the specific diet plans you follow, the food rules, the fitness programs, the workouts. When you’re dieting, they’re your color-coded meal containers, your personal trainer’s eating and exercise recommendations, detox teas and shakes, month-long boot camps. They represent your best-laid plans – the detailed rules of eating, exercising, and existing in your body.

I’m talking about behaviors like abiding by daily calorie allotments, specific macro ratios, rigorous lifting schedules, fitness programs, weekly running mileage goals, meal plans, or other arbitrary demands and limits.

Branches in the context of this tree analogy are any and all of the specific actions that you take in order to uphold your current food and body convictions. As those convictions mature and change your related behaviors will too.

00:19:10

The fruit: the outcome

Are we still following? We’re talked about the soil, the roots, the trunk, and the branches. The only thing left to talk about – and arguably the most notable part of a tree – is the leaves and the fruit. Typically, these are the components that receive the most attention on a tree. They are primarily what a tree is known for. I mean, think about it; you can distinguish an oak tree from a maple tree by its leaves, an apple tree from a peach tree by its fruit.

Leaves and fruit identify a tree, and they also quite often reveal when a tree is in need of a little extra TLC as a result of damage or disease.

Metaphorically speaking, as I’ve been doing a lot, I’m willing to bet that it’s the fruit of your food and body relationship tree – or, if you’re here listening on behalf of someone else, like clients, friends, or family members, the fruit of their tree – those outcomes reaped from the behaviors exhibited and the beliefs that inspired them, that led you to be listening to this podcast.

Binges, reactive eating experiences, eating disorders, yo-yo dieting, compulsive behaviors around food and fitness – did I already say disordered eating? Exercise obsession, body hate, mirror checking, shame, weight cycling, food fears, missing periods or other hormonal dysregulation, mood swings, depression, anxiety, confusion, all-consuming eating and exercise thoughts. Those are just a few of the fruits hanging from the branches of a lot of food and body relationship trees today.

And, like leaves on trees, those experiences are the result, not the cause, of a fragmented relationship with food, body, and self that started way back with the seed in the soil and continued to grow and produce from the ground up – which is why any successful attempt to alleviate those unwanted fruits has to start from the ground up, too.

It’s the soil, the root system, the trunk, and branches that demand our attention. It’s our environments, our beliefs, our philosophies, and then our behaviors that create the undesirable fruit. That fruit simply signals a problem.

So when you’re asking yourself, “How the hell did I get here?”, the answer is it all started with the seed in the soil, and no amount of behavioral change, no new diet or fitness plan, no doubling down on restrictive, shame-inducing beliefs is going to get you out of there, because the fruit is not the problem. It’s the result of the problem.

If you want to see new fruit, we have to change or disrupt the current environment, uproot limiting beliefs, and develop new, compassionate approaches to eating, exercising, and existing in your body. Essentially, a new, more favorable harvest can only come from tending the entire tree.

That’s it. That’s the tree analogy. I hope it made sense. Basically, to heal from unwanted symptoms around eating, exercising, and existing in our bodies, we can’t just keep addressing those symptoms. We have to go deeper than that. We have to take a look at the catalyst for those symptoms.

If you can’t already tell by the tons of time I spent focusing on this tree analogy, I have one more for you. You can take ibuprofen for a headache all day, and it might work temporarily to treat the symptom of pain, but if that headache is caused by say a tumor, it’s going to come back. And if that tumor isn’t addressed, the headache is probably only going to get stronger and last longer – maybe you’ll end up getting other symptoms too, like vision loss or seizures, until you find the cause of all the things and excise that. The headache was the symptom, not the case.

There’s a reason we call it getting to the root of a problem, whether we’re talking about a headache, disordered eating, or actual fruit on trees. The condition of fruit isn’t actually changed by cutting out the rotten, dead, or otherwise unwanted parts, just like a headache isn’t cured long-term by temporarily treating the pain. We have to assess and adjust the environment and other more basic conditions to produce new and healthier results long-term.

That’s essentially the point of the whole tree analogy. Your food and body relationship can’t be positively affected by adjusting behaviors and symptoms only. You’ve got to address the underlying factors that produce those things in the first place: the mindsets, beliefs, philosophies, and environment they developed and continue to thrive in.

00:23:20

A real life example from a client

Again, I can’t speak to your specific experiences on this podcast, but I thought it might be helpful to give you a real life example to drive the point home, so let’s talk about a former client of mine now, who we’ll call Christine.

Several years ago, Christine came to me with these symptoms. She didn’t have a period or a libido. She was physically exhausted, binge eating, had digestive issues, had trouble sleeping. She had a lot of fear and restriction around food, and was unable to participate in family and social gatherings without a ton of anxiety based on eating or exercise. She had negative body image that was indicated by constant mirror-checking and weigh-ins, dissatisfaction, comparison, and difficulty getting dressed for work or social events.

Now, working backwards from the symptoms, it was easy for me to recognize the behaviors that contributed to them. She was over-exercising, undereating, macro counting, definitely restricting fat and carbs. She was comparing herself regularly to aspirational fitness influencers and coaches. She centered eating and exercise activities around body fat percentage or weight manipulation. She prioritized gym time over relationships and work.

Those behaviors were indicative of general philosophies and beliefs around food. Christine had ideas around what health and fitness looked like, never mind what it felt like mentally, emotionally, or physically. She also experienced impostor syndrome and felt like a fraud or outsider at work and in her social and family relationships, and therefore she hid behind the whole “fit chick” identity a lot.

Restriction, over-exercise, and bodybuilding gave her purpose. They also gave her this proximity to a pursuit of purity and righteousness and obedience – things she was taught were valuable through a religious upbringing that she was actually in the process of deconstructing and questioning when we met, but she still felt a level of safety around it, and she could perpetuate some of those safe feelings and those old beliefs through her FitFam culture.

Past relationship trauma taught her to pursue perfection and worth in the way that she looked. In general, she was an overachiever who was seeking validation through academic, professional, and personal or physical achievement. And f course, all of those cultural barriers that I discussed at the beginning of this episode – diet culture, weight stigma, beauty ideals – they affected her, too.

So then our work together wasn’t simply about modifying her behavior, though that was definitely a part of it. Our coaching sessions went deeper than that, to thoughtfully analyzing and adjusting her environment to be more supportive of body neutrality and acceptance, food freedom, intuitive movement, and self-compassion. Again, that environment that we work to adjust was comprised of psychological, social, and cultural components.

We also regularly assessed her beliefs through an inquiry process that I shared about a few months ago on our Seven Health blog. It goes like this: curiosity, challenge, possibility, and change.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining that now because I did do a pretty thorough job of explaining it in our blog. You can check that out at the link that’ll be in the show notes if you’re interested, but suffice it to say from that process of curiosity, challenge, possibility, and change, Christine and I created actionable next steps that led to incremental transformation and a recovery from disordered thoughts and behaviors around food, exercise, and body.

She experimented with new ways of being when it came to eating, exercising, and living. She observed her thoughts and behaviors and emotions, and together, we creatively addressed both her personal environment, influences, and beliefs, as well as the collective and cultural ones.

Over time, Christine became someone who, in her own words, fully embraces her body, her appetite, and herself. She recovered from disordered eating and compulsive exercise and now practices body acceptance and self-compassion. She also regained her period and libido and has brought her understanding around weight stigma, body politics, and diet culture into her career as a medical professional too.

She’s basically a badass who’s no longer obsessively pursuing a “good” ass. What I mean is she’s no longer chasing supposed aesthetic perfection at the expense of her physical, mental, and emotional health.

And she’s not the only one. The success of Seven Health is built on recovery stories like Christine’s – stories that center on more than just nutritional and behavioral changes and get to the true roots of disordered food and body relationships.

00:27:35

Exercises to improve your relationship to food + body

So now, what does this mean for you? You have the analogy. You’ve seen how it played out in a real life example. But what about your real life? You’re probably starting to see how in the hell you got here, but I bet you’re wondering how in the hell to get somewhere else, so I’ll leave you with a few suggestions.

These are going to be tangible exercises that you can do in your free time, so if you’re driving or otherwise unable to jot these down, you can come back and listen to them or check out the show notes, and they’ll be there waiting for you.

Exercise 1 would simply be to grab yourself a journal or spend some time mentally reflecting on the answers to these questions:

Where am I currently? Or more accurately, who am I currently as an eater, an exerciser, and a body inhabitant? (I use that term a lot, and what I basically mean is who are you in your body?)

Be sure when you’re reflecting on this question of “Who am I?” or “Where am I currently?” that you’re taking a few things into account: your thoughts and beliefs, which are your opinions, ideas, and your regular mental chatter; your feelings, so the states of emotions or your reactions; and your behaviors, so what you do or maybe what you don’t do in each of those areas.

Exercise 2 is to consider getting artsy and drawing your own food and body relationship tree. You can take some time and draw a tree with all of the components that I talked about – the soil, the roots, the trunk, the branches, and the fruit. Then take some time to note your specific insights around each of those components.

What is your cultural, social, and familial environment like? What are the beliefs that those places and spaces and relationships have created? What are your general philosophies? What sort of behaviors or specific experiences have they led to? And then ultimately, what’s the fruit that’s being produced?

Just a note that sometimes it might actually be easier to work backwards, so starting with the fruit of like “Agh, here’s what’s going on; let me think through how I maybe got here. Let me look at my behaviors. Why do I have those behaviors, and where did they come from? What underlying beliefs are they, and where did I get those?” So you can work from the ground up or from the top down. It’s up to you.

And know this: you don’t have to have all the answers in order to benefit from this activity. Your tree drawing can be a working document that’s adjusted and added to as you begin to better understand your thoughts and behaviors.

This is where I’m going to plug that inquiry process again. It can be really helpful to go through the process of curiosity, challenge, possibility, and change on your own – or, if you need help, consider reaching out to someone that you trust.

Also, if it’s difficult or traumatic for you to dig into the more personal catalysts to disordered eating and exercise, that’s okay too. We can all start with the cultural stuff, because that affects us all, and addressing and healing those components of your food and body relationship is a wonderful beginning that I hope will create the momentum that will lead you to deeper levels of introspection and healing over time when you’re ready. And again, that may be best navigated with a professional.

So, now that you know where you are and how you got there, if you really want to go somewhere, it’s always helpful to know where exactly somewhere is. I’m about to bring another analogy. I promise you it’s my last one of this episode.

But there’s a reason we put our destination into a GPS before it spits out the directions and charts a reliable path forward. We have to first know where we are, say where we want to go, and then we determine the path. So what’s your destination, and where do you want to go? These are questions to ask yourself.

You can ask them the same way you started. Instead of saying, “Who am I?”, adjust those questions for “Who do I want to be as an eater, exerciser, and body inhabitant?” Again, be sure that reflection includes thoughts and beliefs, feelings, and behaviors for each category.

Then all you’ve got to do is take small and attainable steps in the direction of those desires, turn by turn. It’s as simple and as complicated as that to change your location and shift your relationship with food and body.

And that’s it. That’s really all I have to share with you today. I hope you found this solo episode informative and encouraging. All the links to the resources I discussed can be found in the show notes to this episode at www.seven-health.com/191.

I would love to hear your thoughts, questions, and reflections on this, so please feel free to reach out at that web address, because under each of our podcast posts, there is a place for comments. Or you can find me on social media, through Seven Health company or at some version of Lu Uhrich on all the platforms.

If you’re ready to really dive into this work that I talked about with an experienced and compassionate practitioner by your side, Seven Health is here to help you take these analogies and make them a reality. It’s what we do: helping individuals who feel obsessed with and defined by food and their bodies go from where they currently are to where they want to be. We can help you improve your health, transform your perception of your body, and have a relationship with food and movement that serves you with more freedom and less fear, more joy, less shame, all through a non-diet, weight-neutral approach that works.

If this resonates, or even if you’re at all curious, you can learn more about working with us by going to www.seven-health.com/help.

I hope you have a wonderful week, and if you’re still listening, I want to give you an extra thank you for supporting me the whole way through my first solo episode. We made it together.

00:33:10

Lu's recommendation this week

Now, here at the end, I’m just going to follow in Chris’s footsteps and share a little something that I enjoy, one of my favorites, to top off every episode. If you’re disinterested, that’s okay. Feel free to shut down your podcast app and we will meet again next month.

Like Chris, I’m a bit of a podcast junkie, and I’m guessing maybe you are too because you’re here, listening to us. So I have a podcast I want to share with you. It’s one that I really enjoyed, and it’s called Dying for Sex by Wondery.

Dying for Sex is hosted by two best friends, one of whom at the time of recording was living with Stage IV terminal breast cancer and had been given a short time to live, so in her final days, she got to work experiencing human connection and pleasure through some wild and unconventional sexual experiences, and then she talks all about them on the podcast, both respectfully and unashamedly, spilling the details to her BFF and anyone else who’s listening.

They even interview some of her former lovers on the show, and it’s just so funny and interesting and endearing. It’s a really well-done podcast. Obviously, based on the title, it is sexual in nature, so use your discretion when it comes to who you’re listening with and where you listen. There also may be some triggering material, but the show is really good about sharing those warnings and disclaimers up front.

I could go on here and get super existential and emotional, because as much as this podcast made me laugh, it also made me cry. I have so many thoughts and questions still coursing through me. But I’ll let you take that journey for yourself if you’re a deeply feeling and thinking person like me, and if you’re also intrigued by the idea and concept of that show.

If that doesn’t sound interesting to you at all, no worries; we’ll be back here next week with more of the content you’ve come to love from Real Health Radio. Until then, you can find us at www.seven-health.com, and the show notes for this episode, one more time, can be found at www.seven-health.com/191. Bye for now, friends.

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