Episode 197: Chris sits down with Connie Sobczak to discuss her history with an eating disorder, the death of her sister, the birth of her daughter, and how all of those things influenced her to co-found The Body Positive, an organization that works with adults and youth in a variety of settings to support positive body attitudes and self-care behaviors.
Connie Sobczak is the author of Embody: Learning to Love Your Unique Body (and quiet that critical voice!), her book in which she skillfully and lovingly reconnects readers to their essence and life force. Her experience with an eating disorder in her teen years and the death of her sister Stephanie inspired her life’s work to help people live with more appreciation and love for their precious bodies. She co-founded her nonprofit organization, The Body Positive, in honor of her sister and to ensure that her daughter Carmen and other children would grow up in a new world—one where people are free to focus on the things in life that really matter.
Connie has been training Be Body Positive Facilitators for more than twenty years, and uses her writing and creative skills to produce The Body Positive’s curricula, videos, digital courses, and live trainings. She delights in working with students, parents, educators, treatment providers, and anyone who shares her vision of fostering body liberation and peace. Connie’s passion is watching the light that emerges when people recognize and embrace their magnificent, authentic selves.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 197 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is seven-health.com/197.
Seven Health is currently taking on new clients, and there are a handful of reasons that clients commonly come and work with us. Hypothalamic amenorrhea is the first one, and that’s the fancy name for not getting a period. This is often the result of undereating and over-exercising for what the body needs, irrespective of your actual weight. It’s almost always coupled with body dissatisfaction and a fear of gaining weight.
We work with clients along the disordered eating and eating disorder spectrum. Sometimes clients wouldn’t think to use the term disordered eating to describe themselves, but they do see they’re overly restrictive with their eating, fear certain types of foods –whether that be breads or carbs or processed foods – they feel compelled to exercise excessively, and/or find themselves binging or feeling out of control around food.
Moving on with dieting is another reason. Clients have had years or decades of dieting and are realizing it’s a failed endeavor, but they struggle to figure out how to eat and look after their body without dieting. How do they eat? How do they listen to their body? What will become of their weight? They’re confused and overwhelmed.
Body dissatisfaction and negative body image is probably the last one. Many of our clients experience feelings of body shame and hatred, and they find themselves fixated on weight, determined to be a particular size, and frustrated by what they see in the mirror. They may even avoid social events; they opt out of photographs or put off appointments with doctors as a result of negative body thoughts.
In all of these areas, we’re able to help, and we do so with a mix of understanding physiology and psychology, so understanding how to support the physical body and how the body works, but also being compassionate and uncovering the whys behind clients’ behavior and figuring out how they can change this.
If any of these are areas you want help with, then please get in contact. You can head over to seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is seven-health.com/help, and I will also include that in the show notes.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. Let’s start off today with the book giveaway. This week, the winner is Lolly O. Lolly, you’ll be receiving a book of your choosing from our Resources page, and we’ll be in touch shortly about this.
Reviews are a huge help to this podcast and can really help our listenership, and they’re also a way for you to win a free book. 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, and then you’ll be permanently entered into the draw. Thank you to everyone who has already done this.
This week on the show, it is a guest interview, and my guest today is Connie Sobczak. Connie is the author of Embody: Learning to Love Your Unique Body (and quiet that critical voice), her book in which she skillfully and lovingly reconnects readers to their essence of life force. Her experience with an eating disorder in her teen years and the death of her sister, Stephanie, inspired her work to help people live with more appreciation and love for their precious bodies.
She co-founded her nonprofit organization, The Body Positive, in honor of her sister and to ensure that her daughter, Carmen, and other children will grow up in a world where people are free to focus on things in life that really matter.
Connie has been training Be Body Positive facilitators for more than 20 years and uses her writing and creative skills to produce The Body Positive’s curricula, videos, digital courses, and live trainings. She delights in working with students, parents, educators, treatment providers, and anyone who shares her vision of fostering body liberation and peace.
Connie’s passion is watching the light that emerges when people recognize and embrace their magnificent, authentic selves.
I’ve been aware of Connie and The Body Positive for a while now. I read her book Embody and really loved the message of the book, so I wanted to have Connie on the show so we could talk about it.
As part of the conversation, we talk about Connie’s background and go deeper into many of the things touched on in her bio – her and her sister Stephanie’s eating disorders and how Connie got better while her sister never did, the birth of her daughter around the time of Stephanie’s death and how this was pivotal in shaping the career that she has gone on to have. We talk a lot about Carmen, her daughter, and how that impacted on the way that she parented and a lot of the things that she did throughout Carmen’s young life and then in her teenage years to support her to have a different relationship with food and body than Connie did when she was growing up.
As part of the training that Connie does at The Body Positive, there are 5 core competencies to this model. There’s Competency 1: Reclaim Your Health, Competency 2: Practice Intuitive Self-Care, Competency 3: Cultivate Self-Love, Competency 4: Declare Your Authentic Beauty, and Competency 5: Build Community. With this conversation, a lot of it is then going through each of these different competencies in detail to better understand what each of them is about.
Despite naming the company The Body Positive back in 1996, in more recent years there’s been some backlash against the body positive movement. There’s also been pushback on the idea of self-love, which is one of the competencies as part of the model. We have a great discussion about this, and Connie is very wonderful at being articulate about her position and how she thinks about these things.
I really enjoyed this conversation with Connie. Much like my conversation recently with Elyse Resch that was released back in January time, Episode 183 of the podcast, it was lovely to have the time to go through each of these components of the model and better understand them and for us to be able to talk about how these ideas play out in the real world through our experiences with coaching and with clients. So this was a really enjoyable conversation.
I will be back at the end of this episode with some further recommendations of things you might want to be checking out, but for now, let’s get on with the interview. Here is my conversation with Connie Sobczak.
Hey, Connie. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today.
Connie Sobczak: It’s my pleasure, Chris. I’m so happy to be here.
Chris Sandel: You run The Body Positive and have been doing so for a number of decades, and I know you offer many trainings as part of this, both aimed at practitioners and the lay public, which I think is amazing. A part of the Be Body Positive model that is one of the trainings you do, there are 5 competencies that you teach. I want to spend a chunk of today’s time with you going through those 5 competencies and helping people understand why they’re important and some of the practical ideas for how they can be addressing them.
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But as a starting place, do you want to just give the listeners a bit of background on yourself, who you are, what you do, what trainings you’ve done, that sort of thing?
Connie Sobczak: Yes, I’d love to do that. I’m the co-founder and executive director of The Body Positive. I founded it for personal reasons, mostly, so I’d love to share a little bit of my history and how I got where I am.
I had an eating disorder when I was a teenager. I had bulimia. It came from home pressures not on me, but on my sister. My father was very critical of my oldest sister Stephanie’s body. She was very tall. She was a big person. Looking back, I can see that she was probably binge eating during those years because of the shame she felt about her body and never fit in anywhere. I mean, her feet were size 12. She was this really big person, so he was constantly on her case about the calories. “Do you know how many calories are in that food?”
I was prepubescent; I was very small, different genetics, but I took all of that information in, and I didn’t want my dad talking about me that way. Then combined with all of my friends at school – I was probably around 12 years old; all of my friends were starting to diet and hate their bodies, so I really got sucked into all of that, and by 15 ended up with bulimia.
It really affected my life. My sister went to Weight Watchers, she lost a bunch of weight, she gained it all back plus more, as everybody does, and then she also developed bulimia. We found out at some point that we both had it. We bonded over our body hatred and really supported each other in our disordered eating. It was a really unfortunate connection that we had.
I was pretty lucky; at the age of 21, I got over my eating disorder on my own. I had transferred to University at Berkeley, California, and my eating disorder really went out of control. I kept dropping in and out of school, thinking something was wrong with my major. At the time I had it, there was no word for bulimia, so I was really lost. There was no support, there was no awareness, there was no internet. There was nothing. I was really isolated.
I got to a point where I was really unhappy with my life and didn’t know what I was going to do. I feel like there was this spark of life inside of me. That flame did not go out, and I hung onto that, and I healed myself. I changed my relationships. I left the partner I was with who had been a part of my eating disorder and wanted me to look a different way than I did. I made new friends who were not in diet culture who really enjoyed life and food, and we had fun together. I just really started living my life.
My sister, Stephanie, right around that time, a little bit before that, she had gotten breast implants, and one of them hardened. Two doctors took their four hands and crushed the implant, which caused silicon to ooze into her bloodstream, and she developed an autoimmune disease that was debilitating.
Fast forward to when she was 36, she died from complications from the autoimmune disease plus malnutrition, because she never got over her eating disorder. She was pretty much anorexic and bulimic until the day she died.
I had spent my twenties really healing my relationship with my body. I taught myself intuitive eating and exercise. Those words weren’t around. There was no field and no help. I really had to do it all on my own. I really learned how to listen deeply, deeply to my body and developed an intuitive life, is really what I did.
When my sister died, I was the mother of a one-year-old girl, and I just felt overwhelmed with the responsibility of raising a child in a culture that supported body hatred. I knew that it would never, ever, ever happen to her because I am a fiercely protective mother. So I decided I would change the world for Carmen, my daughter, and here we are.
From there, I figured out that I wanted to make videos for teenagers because I felt that if they’re going to be the next ones who are going to either have children or be role models for children in their lives, I wanted to plant seeds of a different way of being in a human being.
So I started with that, and then I met Elizabeth Scott, my amazing co-founder of The Body Positive. She’s a therapist who had been working in schools with girls around recovery from eating problems, so we joined forces and developed our Facilitator Training Program and made more videos and started working with all genders and all ages, and then started working with treatment providers later on.
Two and a half decades later, here we are. Many lives have changed. The world is still not changing as fast as I want, but I think the most powerful thing for me is to see that my daughter’s life actually was very different than mine, and she grew up with no – I mean, she was fully embodied, she was fully connected to her body. Not that her life is perfect, but she is a person who really so deeply knows herself and it’s really incredible to see. And thousands and thousands of other people who have been involved with the organization, seeing how their lives have changed – it’s been an amazing ride.
Chris Sandel: Wow. There’s a lot there that I want to go back and get some more color on.
Connie Sobczak: [laughs] That’s the quick version of my story.
Chris Sandel: Sure. You mentioned about your dad and the comments that he made towards your sister and how you took that onboard as well. Did you have a mum at that stage? What was her relationship with food like?
Connie Sobczak: My mom is really interesting. She’s 92 now and she lives with us. My dad died almost a decade ago. My mom is an amazing human. She never had body issues. She’s pretty much a farm woman. At the time of all of this happening, we were living on a farm, and she cooked for us. She never said a word about our bodies.
The thing was that she wasn’t really connected with us during those years in terms of talking to us about what we were struggling with. She never challenged my father about anything about what he was saying to my sister. So she was kind of absent, I think. Looking back now, my mom is a brilliant woman and should’ve been a doctor or somebody who was in science somehow. I see that at that time in her life, she was very unfulfilled and probably depressed. This was while my sisters and I were all teenagers. (I have another sister as well.) I think she was just absent.
But her relationship with her body – she never criticized herself. She never was on a diet, ever, in my life. All of this came from my father in her absence.
Chris Sandel: You mentioned about having a third sister. What was her relationship with food like, and how did this impact on her?
Connie Sobczak: It’s interesting. I see three sisters: one died, one thrived by facing death, really – I was suicidal at one point – and my middle sister struggled with body dissatisfaction for a long time. Nothing had to shake her to get through it, so I think she got stuck in the culture of thinking she was supposed to change. But ultimately, she’s had an off and on again relationship with her body. She’s doing better now.
Chris Sandel: You mentioned at the time when you developed bulimia, there was no word for it, or at least, you weren’t aware of a word for it. How was it then when you later discovered there was a descriptor and that this was a thing that other people dealt with? Because obviously you found out that you and your sister were doing it, but were you aware that this was a common thing that was going on among friends or among other people?
Connie Sobczak: It was interesting because it was a normalized behavior with all of my friends in high school. Everybody I know, all of my close friends had it, and we just thought that was a normal behavior.
In my process of healing, I had I think a month with a therapist; my mom paid for me to go to therapy. I kept saying, “I have some form of anorexia.” So finally, when I spoke out about it to my mom, I went to a hypnotherapist, who wasn’t helpful. I kept saying, “If I weigh X number of pounds, then I’ll never do this behavior again,” so that obviously didn’t work. Then I went to a male therapist who just sat and stared at me, and it was really bad.
But the one thing he did do the first day I was there, he said, “Go home and read our local paper.” I did, and there was an article about – they called it “bulimorexia” at the time. I read that, and that started a process of realizing that there were other people in the world that had it.
Then as I changed my friend group, I was working at a restaurant and I made friends with this amazing woman whose mother was a therapist treating people with eating disorders and who had a sister who had anorexia. So her mother ended up sending me a packet of information – articles and little pamphlets and all sorts of stuff about eating disorders. That really helped me a lot because that’s when I started to realize I was part of a larger group of people who were really struggling.
Then from there, after my behaviors were over – I did all of that really on my own; I stopped seeing the therapist. It just was not good. I really connected with my friend group. Not that I would recommend others to stop seeing their therapists at all. I just wish someone had said “Here’s a better therapist” at that time.
However, I did get to a good therapist finally after my bulimic behaviors were over, and she was the author of a book called The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness – her name is Kim Chernin – and early writings on the feminist side of body hatred in women. I was so fortunate I got to work with her. At that point, that’s when I woke up and I got really angry at the world. It was just one of these – chopped all my hair off, I got really mad, and I started seeing it as a cultural issue, not just individual. It broke the isolation completely.
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Chris Sandel: What about exercise as part of this? How was your relationship with exercise growing up? Was that a component of the bulimia in terms of over-exercising?
Connie Sobczak: Yes, it was. I was a compulsive runner. I stopped when I stopped the behaviors. I decided to step back completely. What I love in terms of creating intuitive movement in my life is at that point when I really made peace with my body and I put on weight – I was underweight, bulimic, and as I started eating food and nourishing myself, I put on weight. It was a really interesting process. I was, at that time, with a partner who was incredibly loving and saw me as a whole human being and really helped me heal as well.
I then started slowly adding in movement again. What I realized was I found the hills above my house – I hadn’t been in Berkeley that long, and I didn’t realize that there were these incredible trails up above my house. I started going up there and just playing. I love to run downhill. I love to walk uphill and work out my problems and think and then run as fast as I can downhill. So I started doing that, and just playing.
I had a friend that I would be in the hills with, and we would skip along the path and we would laugh, and we were in nature, and it was just so much fun. Exercise that way became a really beautiful thing.
Then I was able to start running again on a track. I had a track near my house, and I really enjoyed it. Because I had been a really fast runner and a “good” runner when I had an eating disorder, as I was on the track, as someone would go by me, I would have a mantra. I would say, “Faster than some, slower than some.” And as I passed by somebody else, I would say, “Faster than some, slower than some.” So I allowed myself to be in that middle place. I wasn’t trying to perfect anything.
My track was at the top of a hill where I could look out over the San Francisco Bay, so I just took in nature, even when I was running on a track. Nature has always been healing for me, so that was what I did.
Chris Sandel: And being able to find that love of exercise for a very different reason than I imagine it was in the earlier days, when you were running –
Connie Sobczak: Absolutely. It had nothing to do with trying to change my body anymore. It was to have fun. Yes, fitness is a wonderful thing, but even still, it’s not about “I’m going to be fit” or “I’m going to be ‘good’ and exercise.” For me, it’s just I need to let the tension out of my brain. My mind is a very active place. I have a lot of physical energy, so I need to release it through my body and through movement. I really need movement in my life to stay calm and happy.
My family, at a certain point I remember we were living at the base of this one hill, and I would be all tense and either my daughter or my husband would say, “Go for your hike, Connie! You need to get out.” And I’d come back and I’d be a different person. It was amazing, the release – and for me, being in nature and feeling connected to the earth changes me.
The one thing that saved me – it’s an interesting story – when I was a teenager, since the age of two, I’d been going to this lake in the mountains in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. There’s this lake there that has a mountain that rises 1,000 feet out of it. When I was around 12, my friends and I started climbing it. We’d free climb and just wander around on this mountain. Then as I got older, in my teen years, I started doing some technical climbing with one of the friends.
It really saved me. During the time that I was there, I was in touch with my body. I was in tune with my body. I didn’t think about trying to change my body. As I climbed, you have to know that where you’re going to move your hand or your foot is going to be safe and that it’s going to hold you up. It’s so intuitive. It’s so much about listening absolutely, 100% deeply to what I knew and how to use my body.
That is something that I think allowed me to develop my intuitive eating and exercise habits on my own, because I had this connection with my body in that way. I didn’t know at the time that that’s what I was doing, but that’s really what was happening.
Chris Sandel: Were you able to do that and come back to that because the rock climbing was unattached to the way that you thought about other exercise? Like whenever you were doing that, that was a moment where it wasn’t about the size or shape of your body; it was about the thing of doing climbing?
Connie Sobczak: Absolutely. This lake where I go – I feel so fortunate – it’s such a healing place. I still go. Literally, I’m turning 60 this year and I’ve been going every year since then. It’s such a healing place. Feeling held, almost, by this mountain and being connected to the rocks – I know it sounds a little goofy, but it is where my soul feels alive and where I feel connected to something much larger than myself.
So being on the rocks, and also being with a group of friends there that weren’t dieting, that weren’t focused on changing their body. I had this really beautiful once-a-year friend group all through my teenage years where I would go and have this open space, a safe space to be myself. They loved me, and they didn’t care what I looked like. That was a really unique experience, and very helpful.
Chris Sandel: Did you notice throughout those teenage years when you were bulimic that you weren’t participating in those behaviors when you were there?
Connie Sobczak: Yes, I was very aware. And then I would go home and it would all start again, and I would get incredibly depressed, and I would be depressed for months. I just kept saying, “I wish I could live in that place all the time.”
Finally, during the time when I actually healed myself, I had the awareness that I could have that in my mind. So I brought it with me, and that was a big part of my healing: bringing that experience home in my mind and holding onto it when I was having hard days.
Chris Sandel: That sounds like a great skill to have. How would you do that? Was that through visualization? Or was it you remembering things? How were you able to do that?
Connie Sobczak: I think both. I am a very visual person, so I think when I was sad, I could sit down and close my eyes and see myself there, and see myself with my friends and see myself on the rocks and see myself in this amazing place and in the lake and swimming and lying on my back and looking up at the sky and being under the stars. I could visualize it all, and I would do that. And then I think also through writing – I am a writer, so I write a lot, and I had journals during that time. So I would write it down and remember things.
When I was healing, I was 21, so I was through my teenage years. This is when it really started sinking in. I was making other changes in my life at the same time, so I was able to be more conscious about what was happening and what made me happy and what made me not happy.
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Chris Sandel: You mentioned about your sister and obviously her going in a very different trajectory to you. How was it for you as you’re recovering and getting better and then seeing her still stuck in that place? What was your relationship with her like?
Connie Sobczak: It changed our relationship. Part of my healing story is that right at the very end, when I was just about over my bulimic behaviors, she won a trip for two to Hawaii, and she asked me to go with her. So we went, but before we went, I said, “Stephanie, I’m not going to go if we’re going to engage in our binging and purging because I’m almost through doing that, and I don’t want to do that anymore in my life. I will not go with you unless you promise me that that’s not going to happen.” She promised.
So I brought all that literature with me from my friend’s mom, and we sat and we read through it and we started eating in different ways together and supporting one another in keeping the food in. Each morning, we would look in the mirror and put on our bathing suits, and I’d say, “You look just the same as you did yesterday!” and she’d say the same to me. So we mirrored each other.
It was this really beautiful experience. We were together for about 10 days. I came home and that was it. That was the end of my bulimia. But she went back to it, so my conversations with her were harder during that time, and I felt less connected to her than I had been before – and I needed to, on some level, especially in the early years, to be able to keep my own recovery.
Chris Sandel: You said that when you then had your daughter, Carmen, she’s been the big impetus of “I need to change the world.” Did you know that as soon as you got pregnant, or that became more of a thing once your sister passed away?
Connie Sobczak: It was more when my sister passed away. I was so fully recovered by the time I got pregnant and had a beautiful – well, I had morning sickness for 6 months. That was really interesting. I have to actually stop and acknowledge that, because I really was very sick for 6 months, so I was aware that this was complex for someone who had been bulimic. But it didn’t trigger anything.
The funny part was I couldn’t eat vegetables. That was what made me nauseous. So I was eating foods like meat and greasy food. I couldn’t get enough fat and grease in my body. My mom was really wonderful during that time. We would talk about it and how the body needed what it needed. Because I was so in tune with my body, I just gave it everything it wanted. It was a very intense time.
But I had no problem with gaining weight. I gained a lot of weight. I felt so good about it. I was happy. I was so happy being pregnant and having a baby. And even afterwards, I had none of that “I need my body back.” I don’t know if it was a different time. It’s really escalating now; it’s horrible now. But I never had that “I need to fix my body to look a certain way.” I was in love with my baby and my family, and we had this beautiful relationship together. I was able to really ease back into whatever – never back to that body, but to whatever body was going to be my new mother body.
So I was fine in terms of raising her and feeding her and everything. I felt comfortable. Then when Stephanie died, it was this real wake-up call, like, “Oh, maybe I’m not going to be able to do this.” It created some fear in me that “Maybe Carmen won’t be safe because this is just what happens to girls, especially.” That’s when I thought “I’m going to change the world.”
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Chris Sandel: It’s interesting, you talking about being pregnant and the kinds of foods you were craving. I’ve got a 2-½-year-old, and when my other half went through pregnancy, for the first 3 or 4 months, all she wanted was like mac and cheese, and just stodge, and even if I put a salad on the table or vegetables on the table, she’d be like, “You have to remove that from the table. It is angering me, and I don’t want to see any of this kind of food.” [laughs] Then at some point it changed, and that was the point she was in.
She also gained a lot more weight than is “normal.” She was at the far end of the bell curve in terms of that, and then once it was over, it went back to normal. It was a really great illustration of how much the body does what it wants to do, and if you don’t try and control it and you just go with it, it really will navigate you in the right way.
Connie Sobczak: Yes. I’m so happy to hear that story. That makes me really, really happy because I feel that there’s so much pressure on people who are pregnant to stay in that zone, and “this is the zone of how much weight you can gain, and you should eat these foods, and you must do this.”
Our bodies know what they want and need, and yes, listening to them and honoring them – and they do go back. Finally I was able to eat vegetables later. But I couldn’t eat broccoli, ever, through my pregnancy. I would even say the word and I would feel nauseous. [laughs] The funny part is that my daughter’s favorite vegetable when she was little, and one of the only ones she really, really loved was broccoli. It cracked me up because I could not go near it. And I love broccoli. It’s one of my favorites. I love vegetables.
I remember the moment I was sitting, and I was about 6 weeks pregnant, and I was eating this beautiful salad. The day before I had been able to eat the salad, and then I just sat and looked down at it and – like the person in your life, the mother of your child – I said, “Take this away,” and I threw it in the garbage like “never again.”
Chris Sandel: As you say, there is now so much pressure on women to get their pre-baby body back and all of this. My heart goes out because I’m like, you’re missing out on the most precious time of being with this new human being when you’re now having to try and focus on “I need to reduce my calories, I need to be upping my exercise” or whatever it may be as opposed to just being in the moment.
Connie Sobczak: Yeah. I have another story that’s related around the body piece around children and bodies. My daughter was in fourth grade, and her teacher was a very large woman, this incredible human being. My daughter and the teacher bonded in this incredibly beautiful way.
One day, Carmen came home and I had picked her up, and she had her legs wrapped around me and had her head on my chest, and she said, “Mommy, it’s so much more fun to hug Ms. Brown because she’s squishy.” Then she freaked out because she realized that she had said something that might hurt me, and I said, “I am with you on that. I love hugging Ms. Brown. She’s so cozy. She is the coziest person.”
Then I had this moment to talk about genetics and I said, “This is who I am. I’m kind of bony on top. I have more flesh on the bottom, but I’ve got bony shoulders. It’s just the genetics of who we come from. I am completely fine with you wanting to hug Ms. Brown and knowing that that feels good to you.” It was very sweet because children are not looking for their mom to be perfect in what they look like according to society’s standards. They want a cozy mom.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. You handled that situation so well. I think for so many people, there’s (a) the fear of saying the wrong thing, but (b) because there’s so much ingrained fatphobia and fear about being bigger or gaining weight or whatever, any kind of comment like that from a child, even when it is from a place of neutrality or curiosity or whatever, the adult’s lens gets put onto that comment and they think, “Oh, what’s the right thing to say here?”
Connie Sobczak: Yes. For me it always has been, and always was, letting her express herself and what she felt, never taking that away.
There was another time when she was little and she told me she loved her preschool teacher more than she loved me, and I just said, “That’s wonderful. It’s so great that you have all of these women in your life. I’m so glad. I love Jen too. She’s amazing.” Again, she kind of freaked out, and I never added anything on there because I knew she loved me, and she needed to express herself.
I’d love to tie the piece around communication with our children or with other people back to this intuitive piece. I think of myself as having learned intuitive communication as well, which is really owning my own stuff when I need to, but allowing people to be able to say what they need to say without – especially with my child – without having her feel like she has to take care of me. She can express these things, and I can just feel it and feel how it sits.
If there’s something that hurts me, then yes, I’m going to say, “Ouch, that hurts.” But in those cases, she needed to express herself, and it wasn’t personal. That’s really important, I think.
00:38:20
Chris Sandel: What were some of the other things you did with Carmen when she was growing up – and this can be either when she was just a little child or even in her teenage years – to help her have a different trajectory than what you and your sister had?
Connie Sobczak: Many things. I was lucky; we had internet, and she had games and computer time, but it wasn’t the same. She was born in 1991. We had limited screen time. She did have limited television time, and when she was very young, we chose not to have her watch commercial television, so seeing commercials.
This was a media literacy thing. It was pretty funny. She would go to friends’ houses and she would see things and watch cartoons and everything, and we had more of the public television shows for her, and she came home and somehow she figured out the remote and got the commercial television, and she said, “Oh look, we now get this channel!” I was like, “Oh, look at that, we do!” [laughs]
A commercial came on, and it was this purple plastic pony, and she went crazy. “I want that, I want that!” She had a fit. She just had this huge tantrum, wanting this purple pony. After she calmed down, we turned the television off and we had this conversation about “This is what advertising is and this is what it does to you. How do you feel right now?” She said, “I feel awful.” Then I said, “Imagine if you had that thing. Would you really actually be interested in it for very long?” She said, “No, I wouldn’t. I realize this is not something I need.” So we had this talk about this is what advertising does to you. That was one of the early media literacy things.
One of her friends gave her Barbies. I chose not to buy them, but I didn’t ban them from our house. My mom had actually banned us from having Barbies; I still got an eating disorder. It didn’t make a difference. But when she got it, I said, “I just want you to know, some girls feel like they’re supposed to look like this.” Then I did this goofy – I stood on my tiptoes and said, “If I had that much hair, I would actually fall backwards.” So I did this thing around pointing out that this is not a realistic body and just said, “Go play and have fun.”
Watching The Little Mermaid, having a conversation about the Little Mermaid is actually anorexic and she’s given up her voice to get the man, and that’s not okay with me, and having a conversation about how girls and women are portrayed in media – but then watching the movie and having fun with it and singing the songs together.
So I did a lot of that where I did media literacy but not make things bad and make her feel shame for wanting them. Same with magazines and all that stuff. We would talk about things. Billboards, when we were driving from Berkeley to San Francisco across the Bay – all these billboards at that time were all about clothes and really horrible imagery about women, so she and her friends and I would have conversations about that. But not like “This is terrible and bad and don’t do that.” It was conversation to let them explore what they were feeling about it.
Then with food, when she was very young, she always had a wide variety of foods and she was never forced to eat anything. But we had something – we called it a “no thank you” bite. If I noticed she was only eating certain foods on her plate, I’d say, “Hey, do you want some broccoli tonight?” She’d say, “I don’t know.” I’d say, “Why don’t you take a ‘no thank you’ bite?” So she’d take a bite and then she could say, “Yes I want more” or “No, I don’t want it.” Then if she said “No, I don’t want it,” it didn’t mean “you can’t have dessert” or anything like that. But sometimes she would say, “Oh yes, I want more,” and then she’d eat more and more and more of it.
Then teaching her about foods in a fun way and about what foods helped her be able to climb trees and what foods helped her as she was learning to read and her brain. We did it in a really fun way. There was nutrition education; it was just done in a lot of fun ways and not “You need to eat that because it’s good for you.” Never, ever, ever did that.
Chris Sandel: On the media literacy front, it sounds like you were talking to your daughter – not like she was an adult, but actually having grown up conversations as opposed to trying to dumb it down because she was just a child.
Connie Sobczak: Yes. I will never forget when she was actually very small, I was at the pediatrician’s office and I was talking to her as I talked to her always, and the pediatrician said, “Oh, it just drives me crazy. Moms talk to their daughters like they think their daughters understand.” I was blown away, because I thought, “Yes, she understands.”
So for us, communication with honoring her intelligence all the way through and her wisdom, even as a little one, was really important to me. I think children understand way more than we think. The thing that is really hard for me is when parents say, “Just do this because I said so.” I think that’s such a missed opportunity for – the only time I ever did that was when there was a danger or a safety thing. I would have a certain tone and I would say, “This is a danger moment” or “This is a safety moment,” and she would know, like “You listen to me. You do not question anything I say in this moment.” Then I would explain afterwards why. But other than that, I explained everything to her.
Chris Sandel: That’s the approach that we’re taking as well. With Ramsay, my little one, he’s really verbal. Even though he’s 2-½, we can have proper conversations. I think all kids probably understand the same degree that he does that just don’t speak as early as him in all cases. But there’s stuff where he is able to remember things, and I was like, “How are you able to remember this?”
It’s been a real insight into, yeah, there is a lot going on upstairs, so it matters the way he gets talked to or the things we focus on. You can have the kinds of conversations that you were talking about, and you don’t have to think “Oh, they’re just a little kid; let’s dumb it down.”
Connie Sobczak: I’m so happy to hear that. I agree with you that children who aren’t as verbal are still taking it in. They are taking in everything.
I think the other thing about communication with children is that they are taking in the nonverbal as well, so how we are. That’s why it’s so important for us as adults to have that embodied relationship ourselves so that we are – there’s research to show that one person who is embodied in a child’s life – and with embodiment, I say that’s being fully connected around all parts of our bodies and with food and movement, but also with how we express ourselves and all the ways that we are connected to our bodies – so one person in a child’s life can help that child grow up connected to their body.
For me, I knew that that was key, how I was in myself. And not just my relationship with my body, but at one point I realized the whole piece around self-love on a larger scale beyond my body. I was fine with my body, but I was still really mean to myself about other things, and critical. I realized, “Oh, this is something that I’m going to role model as well.” So I had a concerted effort to change how I felt and do my work around building a practice of self-love.
With all of this, there’s no perfection. There’s going to be days when we don’t like our bodies and there’s going to be days when we’re mean to ourselves. But overall, can we have an overarching sense of “How can I love myself more?” Because that is also translated into all people, whether I have children or not. If I’m just relating to other people, the more I love myself, the more I am a role model and show others that this is possible.
00:47:00
Chris Sandel: Was there anything that really influenced that in terms of “this book really helped me” or “this movement really helped me” for you to be able to get to that place?
Connie Sobczak: No, it wasn’t from the outside. It was more from the inside. Most of my work is done – I mean, I read things and I get information from others, obviously, but a lot of it comes from some sort of deep place inside. I still have this intuitive self that’s very powerful and strong and speaks to me all the time.
But this one came – at that point, The Body Positive was going and I was working with teenagers, and I was sitting in a meeting with them and they were talking about, each one of them, how they were working to love their bodies. I realized, “Okay, I’ve gotten through that part, but I have this mean side, and it’s no different. I have work to do.” And I said it out loud to them.
They were so grateful. Many of them said, “I thought I was going to get to this place in adulthood where I was going to be basically perfect in my love for myself, like you grow up to be perfect because all adults are perfect and they’ve figured everything out.” [laughs] I said, “Nope, that’s not the case. Let me role model imperfection to you and let me role model someone who’s going to be growing for the rest of my life, and learning.”
It was a really big moments for me, and for them too, and made me realize that in teaching and in working with others, it’s so powerful to be ourselves and to speak our insecurities and to be vulnerable because that’s really how people are able to then see themselves in a way where they know that they can do the work too.
Chris Sandel: Your conversations with our daughter, has there always been this real openness that you guys have had?
Connie Sobczak: Yes. We definitely started talking the minute she was born, and we’ve been open ever since. We’re still really close. I mean, we had moments. Her first year of college, she came home and she was really needing separation from me, and that was fine.
Again with the not taking it personally. Yes, it was hard in moments, but I didn’t take it in personally, and it didn’t last long. And then I realized that I had said something to her like, “It’s weird because I’m really not a mom anymore,” and I didn’t mean that I wasn’t her mom; I just meant that after she left home, there was this big space in my brain where I wasn’t thinking about her schedule or whether she’d eaten. So I had this whole self again of thinking about other things. That’s what I had meant, but it didn’t come out right.
She was really hurt. A year later, I realized that she was hurt by that, so we were able to reconnect at that point. I said, “I am always and forever your mom and want to be with you. It’s just that I misspoke.” It shows how communication can not go well and what happens then. But we got through it and we talked. And she needed separation anyway. That’s natural, too. But yeah, we’re very close.
00:50:20
Chris Sandel: I want to now spend a bit of time talking about the Be Body Positive model and going through the different competencies as part of that and what each of them mean, what you cover as part of them when you’re doing workshops or as part of your book, and then any practical suggestions that the listeners can implement.
The first competency is Reclaim Health. What does this mean? What do you cover as part of this?
Connie Sobczak: Reclaim Health is about, first of all, looking at who we come from, who our ancestors are, how they live in our bodies in terms of our body shape and size, all things about our bodies, and then also including our health – what we’ve inherited from all of those people who came before us, how this body really is part of a lineage of people, so really looking at that and seeing who we are. In this culture, because of so much pressure to be a certain shape and size, how can we honor who we genetically come from?
Then we are looking at helping people become the expert of their own health – learning about Health at Every Size, learning how to unlink weight and health from each other, learning how to see what messages we have gotten from the external world about how we are supposed to be in our bodies, and really using our minds – this is the mind part of it – and breaking down mythology around what we’re supposed to do in our lives to be healthy. So that’s what Reclaim Health is all about.
Chris Sandel: When you were coming up with all of these competencies, where was Health at Every Size at that stage? I’m just thinking if this is going back to 1996, was Health at Every Size even formed at that stage?
Connie Sobczak: No, it wasn’t. There was no name for it, but there was a movement. I had met a lot of the people who started the Health at Every Size movement. There was a group of mostly women in the San Francisco Bay Area who were working on issues around fat liberation and working to try and change the medical world. I was part of that community in terms of coming in as an ally and coming in as someone who was interested as well in making change.
Social justice is a huge part of The Body Positive’s work, and so social justice for fat people was a big piece of that Reclaim Health competency. But then Health at Every Size became a name, so that made it easier. And then Linda Bacon’s book was published, and that made it even easier.
But I was talking to doctors all during those years and trying to explain, especially to people who were working with young ones, why this isn’t working to try and make everyone thin. It was a challenge.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. In terms of the mental health piece, is that a big component as well?
Connie Sobczak: Yes, reclaiming our health on all levels. All of our work is honoring that we deserve health. If we need help externally, saying “Yes, I deserve to get help. Let me find it.”
In that case, helping people find Health at Every Size and size positive and size-inclusive practitioners, whether it’s a therapist or someone who’s dealing with physical issues. So yes, definitely. So many therapists, if a larger person comes into their practice and they say, “I’m unhappy,” they help them lose weight. They think that that’s helping them, and that’s not the case. So we are always trying to encourage people to find body positive therapists and practitioners.
Just backing up, about the model and all of the competencies, it’s a feminist dialogical model. In the early days, we based it on – the work I was talking about, about embodiment earlier, the research – Niva Piran is a Canadian researcher, and she, at the time when we were first starting, had started doing this work with girls with eating disorders in a ballet school or something. The question was, what are the messages you’re getting? How do those messages make you feel? And what are you going to do about that, and how can we support you?
Really helping people be able to see what’s going on, how they feel, and then how they want to change their environment and how we can support. We just started asking questions and questions, and talking with people of all backgrounds, and that’s how we came to these 5 competencies that we think can really support people in having a more peaceful relationship with their body.
Chris Sandel: Am I getting the impression right that when you were first putting this together, it was very much aimed at teenagers and with the framework or the questions being what is most relevant for them? Or was it from the beginning also more broad and appropriate for all age levels?
Connie Sobczak: The work is the same for all ages. Even for young ones through the very elderly, the questions really are all the same. We were working a lot with teenagers at that time, and yet then we were expanding out to work with college students, and I was working in companies and doing body positive work in corporate settings in some cases, and Elizabeth had her clients she was working with of all ages. So it really came from a very broad group of people, the questions, and seeing what everybody needed.
The interesting thing is always – I remember this one day where I went from speaking to seventh grade girls in one of the most affluent areas where I live to speaking at a free drug rehab center for women who were coming from very different backgrounds from these girls, and the conversation was the same. Exactly the same. It was really fascinating.
Chris Sandel: Wow. That’s a really good example of how this cuts through everything.
Connie Sobczak: Yes.
Chris Sandel: You mentioned this first competency, pointing people towards Health at Every Size. Is there other advice or practical suggestions you would have if someone was like, “I want to better be doing this”?
Connie Sobczak: First of all, one of the things that we talk about and one of the activities we do for this is figuring out one’s body story, so really taking time to look at the messages that we have gotten early on, from all the different places in our lives – not just from media, but from friends and family and doctors and perhaps churches and religious groups and all the different places we get messages – and then how those impacted how we live in our bodies now and what the messages are that we get now. Then I always think about how I’ve internalized those messages and how I then give those messages to myself, and which ones are helpful and which ones are not helpful.
Then from there, going to, where do I want to go with this relationship with my body? We think of it as a tree or a flower – how do I want to blossom into this more peaceful, joyful relationship with my body? So the body story is really important in this part of reclaiming health. That’s mental and physical health.
Chris Sandel: From reading through your work, I get the impression that the stories are relevant through all of the different competencies.
Connie Sobczak: Yes. Our work is all about storytelling. That’s really important to point out, because that’s why it works for all people. We are not telling anyone how they should live their lives, and we don’t have any idea how someone should live their life.
But what we are saying is you are the author of your own story. We are going to listen to your story in an open, curious place. Your story, your life experience is your own, and there is no right or wrong with that. So where are the obstacles to having better physical health or better mental health? What are those obstacles, and how can we support you finding ways to remove those obstacles?
People say, “What about for someone who’s trans?” or “What about someone who is this or that?” Because it is each human being’s own story, it works. These are tools, and take or leave them. See how they work for you. How our work looks at the end for each human is as individual as every single person who takes it on.
01:00:10
Chris Sandel: Then Competency 2: Practice Intuitive Self-Care.
Connie Sobczak: This is where we come into the body. We’ve gone from mind and now we’re in body, and this is the listening piece. This is learning how to listen deeply to our intuitive wisdom. It’s trial and error and trial and success and seeing how that works. In terms of food, an example would be, “What do I want? What do I really, really want?” and taking the time to listen and figure out, “What is it that I am craving? What is it that I’m needing?” and then getting as close to that as one can and honoring one’s life circumstances, whether it’s a student in school or someone living at home and not being able to control their food or someone who doesn’t have the resources. But in whatever way possible, how can you get as close to that as you can?
And then afterwards, “How do I feel?” That’s the key piece. People say so much, “Oh, if I just listened to my body, I would only eat junk food,” or “I would only eat Snickers bars,” I heard someone say once. Well, if you continue to d this feedback loop, “How do I feel?”, your body’s going to be craving other things. So yes, you’re using your mind, but ultimately, “What do I want? How can I have that?” and afterwards, “How do I feel?”
With everything. With a relationship, with movement, with food, with rest, with all of the things in our lives, this coming into really doing the work to listen and taking time whenever possible. And it’s not always possible, but taking time when we can to really sit with our bodies in quiet into that place of figuring out what we know.
Chris Sandel: I think your comment there around “if I just listen to what I want, I’m going to eat nothing but Snickers bars,” or if you extend it out, “if I listen to my body, I’m never going to get off the sofa” and all that – that to me speaks to where someone’s thoughts are within that moment or to their probably dieting behavior. It doesn’t really map onto reality. Pick your favorite food and have it every single meal for a number of days, and within that short amount of time you’re probably going to get sick of it.
Connie Sobczak: Right.
Chris Sandel: Same with don’t move your body for a really long time where there is no one putting pressure on you to move it, and eventually you’re like, “You know what, I kind of want to move my body.” So I do think a lot of people’s knee-jerk reactions or instant thoughts around why this doesn’t work speak more to their beliefs than reality.
Connie Sobczak: I agree with you. I know there’s some conversation now about how intuitive eating doesn’t work for marginalized groups, and I understand where that’s coming from. I think it’s this idea of what “intuitive” means. That’s what we have to look at, and how that word is used.
To me, the word “intuitive” means it’s my connection – I know when someone’s had trauma, it’s harder to listen, and I want to really honor that with all of this work. It’s way harder to listen to our bodies and to follow them if we’ve had trauma. This is very important. And I do believe that the goal is for them to say, “I’ve had trauma. I’m struggling with learning how to listen. I can’t figure out how to do that. I can’t do it.” That person, you deserve help. How can we then create support systems for people everywhere to be able to get the help they need to heal from the trauma and get to that listening place? It will take longer, most likely, and it’s still worth the process.
With intuition, there is somewhere deep inside of us where we have that knowing. There is a knowing there of my own life, my own unique knowing, whatever we want to call it, of “This is my life.” There is that place inside. So how can we get help to keep peeling off the layers to be able to get there?
Chris Sandel: I also think people misunderstand intuition. It gets this really – like there’s only one layer to it, where I think there’s a lot of things that can come into play with this when you’re making a decision. I’ve talked with Elyse Resch around this.
There will be times when you don’t feel hungry, but it’s still intuitive to eat some food because you realize “I’m not hungry because I’m under stress, and it’s been a really long time since I’ve had something to eat. Even if I’m not necessarily feeling hunger, I know that I’m probably going to do better after eating some food.” There may be times where I feel like X food, but I actually know that the last five times I’ve eaten X food, I just haven’t felt great, so I’m not going to have that food on this occasion.
I think sometimes intuitive eating almost feels like, in people’s minds, you’re offering cake to a 3-year-old every single time, and they’re not going to think about any other things rather than just “How is this going to taste on my lips?”
Connie Sobczak: Yes, and in that moment. The interesting thing is that if you have a 3-year-old who’s never been restricted, they might eat the cake and they might not. Elizabeth’s daughter – I love this story – she remembers picking her up from school one day, and she bought her a candy bar or something. She felt so good, like, “here’s this nice reward.” Her daughter, Uma, looked at her and said, “Mama, I need something to nourish me.” [laughs] Her bedtime snack that she always wanted was raw fennel and all these vegetables and carrots and things. That’s what she wanted because she never had restriction. Not that every child is going to do that, but that was her thing.
My nephew was so sweet, the son of my sister who died. My niece and nephew moved in with my parents, and they were over their natural weight because their father hadn’t taken care of them, and he then died. So when they moved in with my parents, my dad was wanting them to lose weight, and they wanted to lose weight, thinking that it would feel better, which – they needed to have changes in their lives around their diet and movement, but it wasn’t about their weight.
I came up, I talked to them about “Here’s what it’s like to live with your grandpa around food; he’s got his own eating issues. Your mom died because she went to Weight Watchers, so you are not going to Weight Watchers.” I started this whole thing, and my nephew really healed so beautifully and had this beautiful relationship with his body.
One day he was staying out of town with friends for a week, and the mother of this boy was feeding them really crappy food, just all fast food, and then their home meal was something put in the microwave. No vegetables. So Bill said he left early because he wanted to go home for one of Grandma’s salads. His body was craving vegetables. That was a teenage boy. That shows that our bodies know what they want.
And then we do use our brains. [laughs] That’s the whole point. I think people think intuitive eating means you never use your other senses. It’s important to bring that in.
Chris Sandel: Maybe using the example of a 3-year-old in front of cake was the wrong example, because I had a similar thing happen yesterday or the day before. Ramsay and Ali, my partner, had spent the afternoon making banana bread, and he just loves banana bread. I then came down and was like, “Why is there a piece of banana bread on this place with one bite out of it?” She’s like, “He had a piece and then asked for another piece, and then he had one bite out of it and he was done.” He knew that he’d had enough.
Connie Sobczak: Isn’t that great? It’s so funny; my daughter’s partner Chelsea was telling me recently that when she first met Carmen, someone had sent Chelsea a box of chocolates or something, and Carmen had taken a bite of one and then put it back. Chelsea had never seen anybody do anything like that. She said, “Why didn’t you finish it?” Carmen said, “Because I didn’t want the rest of it.”
That was the first time Chelsea was aware of this whole idea of listening, that our bodies know exactly what they want. She’s had a blast learning about all this stuff, and we talk a lot about – we’re going to do a project together around intuitive living, because she’s just taken it on, and it’s so fun to see how someone’s life can be changed in that way.
01:09:45
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I know this also connects to the movement that you were talking about earlier on in terms of joyful movement and being self-aware to know the kinds of movement you enjoy, and enjoying getting your body out, as you talked about, in nature for the right reasons.
Connie Sobczak: Yes. The interesting thing – and this is what I struggle with in the school setting – is how children of all body types are expected to be able to run an 8-minute mile. Oh my God, so horrible. It’s torture for some people. Why not let others do yoga or be in a pool or figure out what movement works for them? The whole physical education system in school just makes it impossible for some young people to ever be able to physically enjoy movement.
Chris Sandel: It’s so random, what we value in terms of what the body is able to do. As a kid, when I was at school, I was always tiny. Yes, I could run and play sports, but if we valued being able to lift heavy weights, then I would be the most undervalued person when I was at school because I was tiny and I couldn’t do any of that. I was just lucky to live in a society that didn’t value that; otherwise my experience would’ve been very different. And that’s not because of anything that I did; it’s just because of the system.
Connie Sobczak: Yes. I think what also happens is the play and the fun is taken out of it all. When Carmen was in middle school, she would come home and say, “Ugh, I hated P.E. today. We had to run around the whole school and I had asthma, so I had to walk, and then I felt awful because I was the last one.”
I had this opportunity, because I was working with the school around body positive work, so I told that story, and the P.E. teacher was there. I said, “Think about this. Maybe next time, have them play tag. Create a game where they’re running. They have to run everywhere, but it’s a game.” I never said a word to Carmen. She came home the day that that happened and she said, “Oh my God, P.E. was so fun today. We played tag and I ran, and I had no asthma.” That just showed me right there that there’s something wrong with the system, and we can change it for children. She had a completely different experience – and even a physically different experience because she had no asthma.
Chris Sandel: Wow. In a slightly different setting, that reminds me of a story of a guy called Alfie Kohn, who has written a lot about child education and was talking about a teacher who had a girl in his class who was really struggling. He’s like, “She just can’t remember anything.” Then he had her in the car taking her somewhere – I can’t remember how it was – but then for the 20-minute ride, she was able to sing every word of every song that came on the radio. There was this lightbulb moment of “Okay, something is going on here, because it’s not that this girl can’t learn; it’s because the setting is not right. She’s clearly able to remember lots of things.”
Connie Sobczak: I love that. It’s so true. And yes, I understand that education systems have to have some form of restructure, but I think if there’s a way to allow these different types of learning to happen even within that setting, think about how much it could change human life.
01:13:35
Chris Sandel: I think also connected to this competency – and I know this comes through in terms of your book as well – pleasure, and pleasure being a guiding principle for much of this work, and maybe at the other end of that spectrum is shame. Do you want to talk about how pleasure fits in?
Connie Sobczak: Yes. It was really fun when I learned actually how physiologically, pleasure created humans to be able to go out and find the food, but then knowing when it’s time to stop is because the pleasure diminishes in eating the food. So using pleasure as a guide in terms of knowing what and how much of something is really powerful. With your son, that last bite, the pleasure after that was gone, and he knew instinctively that that’s when to stop.
For me, I think pleasure has gotten such a bad rap, and it’s connected with overindulgence, this idea of “I’m going to have pleasure, so I’m just going to forget anything else and I’m going to over-consume,” or over-whatever it is. Then that’s not pleasure anymore. I know when I was bulimic, that first bite of the binge would be like, “Oh, this is so pleasurable,” but then overeating to the point of being sick was not pleasurable.
I learned pleasure is something, when I’m really listening, that allows me to know what works and what doesn’t work for my body. Just allowing pleasure in movement and taking away all of these rules and all of the stuff that we put on ourselves because of the messages that we’ve gotten from others of “It’s supposed to be hard work” – it just makes me sad.
I think also, for me, the piece around pleasure, having had a sister die at such a young age, and knowing that I want to have as much pleasure when I’m on the planet as possible, and learning what that means for me, what is pleasurable for me.
Chris Sandel: I think also this connects back into what we were talking about with people’s diet-y thoughts around food. You can get pleasure from eating cake. You can get pleasure from eating a salad. You can get pleasure from lots of different things, and I think it’s people’s relationship with food and constantly being on a diet that has meant that if they think of pleasure, it is in this very narrow band.
Connie Sobczak: Yes. “Either I’m being good or bad.” I think this piece around good and bad – “I’m being good; therefore, I’m not eating that food. But now I’m going to give myself pleasure and be bad, and I’m going to eat as many chocolates as I want instead of really tasting that chocolate” or whatever it is. I think that’s the key. When we are pleasure-focused, we’re using all of our senses as we eat.
I have a great example. The company I was working at, one of the women, I remember her saying – it was one of the last days I was there – “I’ve got this intuitive eating thing down, except for with chocolate-covered almonds. I just can’t stop eating them.” We were standing at her desk and she had this box of chocolate-covered almonds, and she was just shoving them in her mouth and crunching and swallowing as fast as she could.
I said, “Okay, stop for a minute. Just take one of them, just one almond. Put it in your mouth. Don’t chew it. Just suck on it. Now think about and taste and feel what it’s like to let the chocolate be melting in your mouth and mixing with your saliva. What is that sensation like? Okay, when you’re ready, now crunch it. Listen to the crunching sound, and feel the crunch and the mixing of the nut with the melting chocolate.” I took her through this whole sensual experience, and then I was like, “Okay, now swallow it. What was that like?” And she got it. It’s like, “Oh wow, okay.”
Have a relationship. This is all about relationship with food and movement. If we just are doing it without consciousness – and sometimes we have to when we’re eating, and I want to honor that, too, if you’re on the run and you have to get some food and just eat the food and go. But when we have this opportunity to have the sensual experience, it really changes things, and we are then very aware of what’s going into our bodies and how it feels and how it digests. It helps the learning process.
Chris Sandel: I think counterintuitively – you would think if you’re eating the almonds in that way and trying to maximize pleasure, you’re going to end up eating more of them. But that’s actually definitely not the case because of that level of awareness.
I had a client once and we were going through a similar process, so she then went out and bought the most amazing chocolates, these phenomenal truffles, and she would say, “I now end up just having one some nights, and I really pay attention and enjoy it, and that was it. I didn’t need any more of it because I was present and in the moment and really tasted it, and I knew that actually just one of them was enough.”
This isn’t to say that the whole point of this is so that you eat less or that you have smaller amounts. It’s to say, how can you enjoy that experience the most? Which typically translates into you work out the point where it’s now no longer pleasurable.
Connie Sobczak: Right, and that’s that satisfaction point. Instead of eating to that perfect point of fullness, you’re eating to satisfaction. Sometimes that might be slightly over-fullness. Sometimes that might be slightly under. But in each of those moments, you have that knowing.
I think the other key piece about all of this, with the good/bad and “I’m being good or bad,” is “I’m going to eat this now because I’m never going to have it again” or “I’m going to go on my diet tomorrow, so therefore I need more now.”
When I was healing from my eating disorder, one of the things I would ask myself is, “Do I want this now? I can have it later.” Do I want this extra – maybe I’ve had two or three cookies and I’m thinking I want a fourth or something, or however many it was. “Do I want this now? I know I can have it later. Oh, I can have it later. That would be fine. That would be great.”
My mom was a respiratory therapist, and when she was teaching people how to quit smoking, she would ask them, “Can you wait until later to have this?” Then they could say yes, and then maybe way more time would go by than they thought for that cigarette.
For me, knowing I was never restricted from anything and I could have anything whenever I wanted it, I didn’t have to overeat in the moment to the point of not having pleasure and feeling uncomfortable. Because I don’t like feeling uncomfortable. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable in my body. And I do sometimes because I’m loving food, but overall, I don’t want to feel uncomfortable in my body.
01:23:00
Chris Sandel: The next competency is Cultivate Self-Love. Talk a little about this.
Connie Sobczak: Cultivate Self-Love is what really makes all of this work. This is this whole piece around heart, to really develop this relationship with ourselves that is based on the awareness that each one of us has this incredible purpose and value in why we are here, and we deserve to be loved. Building a practice of self-love and working with the critical voice and honoring the fear that we have and turning towards it instead of rushing away from it allows us to be able to take risks in the world, to be able to have that place of peace.
I think of my self-love as allowing me to have a safe place to come home to in myself, because it’s really hard being out in the world sometimes, and it’s painful. If I’m beating myself up all the time, then I have no safe place. I have an abusive home, and that’s in my mind and in my body, too. So for me, this practice of building self-love is really where I feel like that is my only protection in the world.
Chris Sandel: Are there particular competencies that people struggle with more than others? It feels like this may be more difficult than others for most.
Connie Sobczak: It’s interesting because people think that this one is the crux of all of them. Being able to get this makes intuitive eating so much easier. Trial and error means you’re going to have error. We’re not always going to have trial and success, so trial and error. Having self-love allows us to forgive ourselves when we “make mistakes” and when we fall down. This is a piece.
We do a lot of work helping people understand the critical voice, what it is, how it’s just fear. I do a lot of teaching around how it’s just this little child inside of us, and how the child is having a tantrum because it wants to be listened to, and it’s trying to protect us in some way. It’s trying to be heard. If we just say, “Oh, shut up,” then, just as I communicated with my child, that’s not going to work.
So communicating with my own little self and saying, “What’s going on with you? What are you afraid of? Let’s have a conversation about this,” and then doing a practice where we get down to, ultimately what I’m looking for in X critical voice is “I’m really needing validation right now” or “I’m really needing extra security right now, or safety” or “I want to feel calm right now.” The voice is telling me something’s going on that is stopping me from finding that life-enhancing quality that I really need.
But if I don’t listen to it, it’s just going to get louder and it’s going to keep beating me. If I turn to it and say, “I’m not going to let you be talking to me like this, but let’s have a conversation: what’s really going on?”, then I can actually do the work that I need to do with myself. Like, “Wow, I have been not feeling validated. How can I get validation in my life? Or how can I have more discretion?” or whatever it is. Whatever that quality is. “How can I feel more beautiful right now? How can I feel more love right now?”
All these really life-enhancing qualities. How can we use the critical voice to get there and then quiet it, like the subtitle of my book, “quiet that critical voice”? It doesn’t run the show, but we’re not trying to cut them out of us.
So yeah, it’s not the easiest practice, and it is practice. Practice, practice, practice. It’s not something to perfect.
Chris Sandel: Are there people or books or movements or whatever that’s really impacted upon you coming up with this competency? I’m thinking of self-compassion and people like Kristin Neff, or other things that have made you have a better understanding around this?
Connie Sobczak: Kristin Neff’s work is wonderful and really backs up what we’re teaching. She calls it self-compassion; we’ve chosen to call it self-love. I love the word “love.” It’s interesting; there’s a self-love movement that’s really in some ways – people will say, “Yeah, I keep hearing I’m supposed to love myself, but I can’t do that.” So yeah, her work is beautiful.
Elizabeth is a Buddhist scholar, so a lot of our work comes from her teachers, especially this piece around turning towards the fear and turning towards the critical voice and then pouring the quality that we find we actually need into us. A lot of that comes from Buddhist study.
I also love Rick Hanson’s work around taking in the good. That’s been really powerful as well.
01:26:25
Chris Sandel: One thing we haven’t chatted about yet – obviously, you named your company a very long time ago, and now that has taken on a very different feel in terms of body positivity. One of the big gripes of that is “this used to be a movement that was about changing society, and now we’re told we have to love ourselves.” I’m just wondering, is there ever any pushback when people look at this at surface level and think, “Hang on, what are you trying to tell me to do?”
Connie Sobczak: Yes. There’s also the body neutrality movement now, saying body positivity is too hard. I’d love to just take a moment to say The Body Positive isn’t related to everything in the world that is body positivity. In fact, it just spun off with the internet and went full-on in many directions. A lot of people are arguing about what it is and who it’s for.
Our version of The Body Positive, as I said earlier, because it’s about each individual story, it’s for everyone. It’s not about “I love myself and I love my body and I always feel positive.” It’s finding this overarching sense and awareness of who I am and that I have purpose and value and deserve to be loved, and now I’m going to do the work of being a human, which means I will have suffering. There will be suffering. There’s no perfection in this.
But how can I be aware of my connection with my body, aware of this body that gives me life, and how can I create a relationship with it honoring that it is my primary relationship and that I choose to have nonviolent communication with it and – this is how I see it – choose to not be abusive and not have an abusive relationship? That is my commitment to myself. I make a commitment, and then I am responsible for my own life and responsibility, in a beautiful way, of the ability to respond to what’s in front of me, and how can I do that as much as possible with more love and more kindness and more gentleness?
So it’s a practice for sure, and it’s not something that is – I think the problem with a lot of the social media part of this is it’s all still really stuck in the head. We’re talking now about Cultivate Self-Love. We’re talking about the heart, and we were talking about the body. It’s beyond just thinking. It’s feeling and it’s moving into that place of connecting with something larger than ourselves if somebody feels comfortable with that. It’s this sense of “Who am I in this interconnected web of the entire world?”
Chris Sandel: As I hear you describe all this, I’m like, this is amazing and I’m completely onboard with it. I do imagine, though, that just seeing the words “Cultivate Self-Love” could bring up some connotations of what people expect that is meant to mean.
Connie Sobczak: Yes, I’m sure they do. I actually read a blog about this because people will say, “I can accept myself, but I can’t love myself.” I had this moment – I was driving down the road one day and it just clicked in me, and I thought, oh wow, I think it’s the opposite, for me especially. I love my body for giving me life. I love my body because I am still here, and I feel very grateful to be here, especially, as I said before, having my sister die. I feel really lucky to have a life, and I’m lucky I made it through my eating disorder, and I’m lucky to have survived.
I don’t always accept myself. I am an aging woman. I’m going to be 60. My body is changing every day, and I look down or I look in the mirror and I’m like, “Whoa, what happened there?” Because of societal imprinting, I have in me, somewhere deep inside, the message that an aging body is ugly. So I have to do my work every single day to accept what is happening to me.
Do I love myself? Absolutely. Do I love my body? Yes, I do, because that’s life. That is life. Acceptance comes after that, and acceptance is bloody hard sometimes. For me, love is easier than acceptance. The body neutrality piece of “I will accept myself and I’ll be neutral” – I hope for people that they can see it as the opposite. How do I love a friend? How do I love my child? How do I love my partner, if I have one? How do I love a parent? Or maybe I don’t, but finding that person that you unconditionally love – or a being, or a pet. What does that feeling of giving unconditional love to somebody else feel like? Now imagine that coming into us. That practice of continually bringing that back to us is where we go.
Chris Sandel: The way you’ve explained it there is beautiful, and to me just shows the power and the importance of language and words, and that two people can have very different takes on the exact same word. The way that you feel about love is possibly the way that someone feels about acceptance and vice versa.
Connie Sobczak: Right. The thing is, I say all this – and with all of our work, I am so not attached to how people choose to do it. I think what I struggle with is people saying, “Body positivity doesn’t work. This works, that doesn’t work.” I get tired of that because it’s creating a hierarchy of the words. That bothers me, I have to say. It bothers me when people are fighting about “This doesn’t work, this works.” It’s like, how do you know? I don’t know what works for anybody. I’m not saying that what we’re teaching, and neither is Elizabeth saying, that this is right for everybody. I am so not attached to how people live their lives and what they choose.
But let’s focus on ourselves more and what works and offer people ideas and tools, and then let them take them and go from there and make decisions for themselves and what works. Then people are going to get much more quickly towards healing.
Yeah, I think what works for everybody is great. I just get sad, I think, when people get stuck and say they can’t love themselves. That makes me sad. So I hope people can go and see that being neutral – yes, that’s great – and love is possible. There’s a belief that love is not possible, and I believe love and self-love is possible for all humans, and I think it’s worth it.
In my book, I talk about Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work around the difference between amour-propre, which is the type of self-love defined in the dictionary, which is all about conceit and competition and comparison and selfishness, and then he talks about amour de soi, which is a quality that all beings – animals, every being on the planet – need in order to thrive and to survive. It’s a self-preservation, and it has nothing to do with comparing or contrasting or hierarchy. It’s that I need self-love in order to thrive and survive, and every animal on the planet does.
That’s to me the definition of self-love that is powerful because to truly thrive and to actualize our life purpose and to be able to live as fully as possible, that’s deep. That’s what I’m hoping people can see and go for. The planet needs that in each of us.
Chris Sandel: I agree with everything you’re saying here. Hearing you be able to talk about it I think is helpful for people so they understand what this really means.
Connie Sobczak: Great. Thank you for asking. We can go deep into this conversation. [laughs] We’re just skimming the surface of it.
01:35:15
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Then Competency 4: Declare Your Authentic Beauty. What does this mean? What does this look like?
Connie Sobczak: This is coming back to the ancestor piece again and being able to see our ancestors as they show up in our beauty in our bodies. Whether someone knows their ancestors or not, if they’ve been adopted – a lot of the young people we work with don’t really like their ancestors that they know in the moment – so imagining all the way back to those first humans. Who are your people, who do you come from, and how do they live in your body? Or creating your own community.
I was working with someone who identifies as queer saying that they created their own family, their own ancestry, and imagined those people, whether they were biologically related or not, who come through and live in their body, and it helped them express their beauty. This idea that if we start our definition of beauty with ourselves, we take ourselves out of the beauty hierarchy. So I’m not saying “I’m beautiful” meaning I’m conceited about it; it’s just that deep sense of beauty that is a need for all humans.
Again, just as this need for love is there for thriving, humans need beauty. Again, with a word, too, how can we shift the definition of beauty to be something so expansive and ever-changing and dynamic that allows us to be part of that definition? Then that allows me to see beauty everywhere in the world. I am not in competition with others to have beauty or not have enough. I see so much beauty in people, in everything around me. There’s more light because I’ve chosen to add myself to my definition of beauty.
Chris Sandel: Which I think is so important because we have such narrow standards of what is talked about as beauty or as cultural ideals when, as you say, if you expand it out you can see this in so many other places. Again, as you say, that’s so important.
Connie Sobczak: Yes, it is. This is so much fun – in our work and in our workshops and in our courses online and everything, this whole piece around really exploring beauty and being able to say it out loud when we’re with people, or even – I just did a meeting yesterday where we got to do it through a Zoom call. There were a group of us, and each person – we go through an activity and then each person says, “My beauty is…” after doing this activity. You could even feel more light from the computer of everybody feeling lifted up.
Elizabeth, my colleague, talks about this beautiful piece around – she says when we meditate on our flaws in the morning, then we go through our whole day searching for flaws in others. What a horrible practice that is, right? Why would we want to start our day meditating on what our flaws are?
If we can start our day meditating on our own beauty and seeing beauty in ourselves, just as we are – with that same thing around acceptance, it’s not going to be perfect, but if we can see our value and see ourselves – I love to think about when I’m in alignment with my spirit and my soul and my body, it’s all expressed through my body. I can have internal beauty, but I also believe that it’s important to feel my external beauty, because that’s how I express my internal beauty. It comes through my body.
When I’m in alignment, it’s energy. It’s not about what I look like. It’s about the energetic field that I’m putting out. It’s sometimes there and it’s sometimes not, but I know when I’m in alignment, there is an energy around me that people can be attracted to. I don’t always want that, so I can shut it down or turn it on, but attraction is not about what I look like. It’s about choosing when I want to attract people to me or shut them out. It’s a different way of looking at it.
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting the comment around do you start the day looking for flaws or start it looking for beauty. If we’re talking about this purely in the body realm, I do an exercise often with clients of getting them to go from head to toe, every body part, what are their thoughts around those parts? What invariably happens is there’s parts they like, there’s parts they’re neutral about, and there’s parts they dislike.
I’m always like, “Where do you put all of your focus?” and it is on the things they don’t like. I’m like, “Okay, it’s not that big a surprise that you feel the way you do around your body. Just start to look at, how could you be shifting your focus so that you’re focusing on the things you do like?” This is obviously specifically about body, but it can be about all areas of life.
Connie Sobczak: Yes. I love that. One of the things too is, for me – my thighs were probably a big part of my eating disorder when I was young. I was teased about the size of my thighs. They’re strong. They were athletic. I look back and I see pictures and I think, oh my God, I’m so sad that I hated them. Now they’re aging. So I made peace with my thighs and I had this beautiful relationship.
At the age of 55, so almost 5 years ago, I was on the street and I was standing between lanes of traffic, in a median, and trying to get across. This woman rolls by in her car with her window open and said, “You shouldn’t wear shorts like that with legs that look like yours.” It really was hard because I had made peace with my thighs, and then I looked down and I went, “Oh my God, they are changing. The texture of them is changing. They have lumps on them, and they’re not perfectly smooth skin. My muscles aren’t perfectly toned.” It was really, really hard.
I kept it inside for a long time. I didn’t say anything to anybody. I was back doing a speaking engagement in the town where I grew up, where I had my eating disorder and was obsessively running and hated my thighs. I was getting ready for that speaking engagement and I was looking through some of my poetry, and I found this poem I wrote about the lake that I love and how, in the afternoon when the wind comes up, the lake is ripple-y, and the light shines off those ripples and creates these diamond sparkles. It’s just the most beautiful thing.
I looked down at my thighs and I saw the ripple-y texture of the lake, and now, whenever I look at them and I start to see ugliness, I stop and I stay with them. I stay with the parts that I struggle with, and then I think, “Oh, think of the diamond sparkles,” and I see my legs as the ripple-y surface of the lake, which I just love. I love ripples on water. It’s so beautiful. And then imagining that light that can shine off of me. It changes how I perceive them, and it allows me to have acceptance and working on the love for them because of their texture now. So that helps me a lot.
Same with – I think of nature all the time – my neck. I’m getting layers and lines and wrinkles in my neck, and I see it as the rings of a tree and the core of the tree and how it’s showing the years that I’ve been living on the planet.
Chris Sandel: Which touches back into something you talked about earlier on in terms of the stories we tell ourselves. Part of the exercise when I get clients to do this, I’m like, the bits that you don’t like, can you imagine there is someone who has that same body part that looks the exact same who actually really enjoys it? How are they able to do that? What are they telling themselves? What are they focusing on?
I remember having a conversation with Ali, my partner, after she had the baby and her stomach now looks different than it did before. I was like, “How do you feel about it? How do you think about it?” She’s like, “I love it. I now get to remember that that was where I grew a human being.” It was just such a great response, and it really showed me that there could be a client that I work with who has her exact same stomach and hates it and has a completely different story around why they hate it.
Connie Sobczak: Yes. That’s what I love about storytelling. If we see ourselves as the author, we can – I look back and see how I changed my community around me. I changed characters. [laughs] I got rid of some characters in my story, and as I started new chapters, there were new characters. As I age, it gets to be this new experience with my body in a new way, the aging body. But I am the author.
This is where it’s so hard because of the pressure and the amount of messages we get from society, and that filtering down into the human beings in our personal world. If they are critical of themselves or of us, it’s so hard to be able to remember who we want to be and how we want to feel about ourselves – which really then leads us into the fifth competency, Build Community.
01:45:10
Chris Sandel: Yeah, talk about that – and also the fact that you started all of this two decades ago, when the internet was in its real infancy, and now it has become a whole other thing. So building community, how much of that is offline versus online, and how has that shifted?
Connie Sobczak: It’s shifted a lot, and now it’s shifting even more back to being online. We’re on lockdown with the whole coronavirus, so creating online community is going to be really powerful at this point.
Yes, Build Community. We can’t do any of the other competencies without having even just one person in our lives who is choosing to also live what we call a body positive life, which is – honoring there is no perfection, honoring the human experience – but doing the work to say “I want to have a more peaceful relationship with my body and my life.”
I just need to back up one moment and say all of this work doesn’t mean that someone’s not going to want to make changes with their body. I want to honor that, especially for people who are not connected to the gender that they were assigned at birth and want to have transition surgery and change their gender. But that is part of being body positive as well. It’s really important to put that out there right now: when I say having a more peaceful relationship with one’s body, that means that we are doing the work to feel in alignment with who we are on all levels.
So having others in our lives who are choosing to live this way too makes it all really work. Our in-person gatherings are incredibly powerful. It’s so beautiful to see people come together, and when you create a space where there’s no comparison and there’s no judgment and there’s this open space to be brave and vulnerable, it’s so beautiful to see how people connect with one another and truly see that there is more light in the room as people start to lift off these burdens of shame and guilt and all of the other things, and body hatred. It’s just powerful to see.
Staying connected with people like that, whether it’s a phone call, whether it’s an email, whether it’s being online with somebody through social media in a way that is connecting – instead of picking ourselves apart, instead of connecting over body hatred, we connect with “Hey, this is how I’m feeling today. I’m struggling because of all these messages, so I need support there” or “I’m feeling really good today about my body because of this” or “I just made this beautiful meal and I enjoyed it so much and I need to share that with you.” All of these different ways to connect are really important.
I have a young woman in my life who, when she goes to the doctor, she gets harassed about her body size. When she was younger, she sometimes would go and then afterwards, she would feel so much shame that she would binge and then feel terrible. This one experience happened where then she called me, so I said, “Next time, call me as soon as you leave the doctor, before you self-harm.”
She started doing that, so she could remember who she was, even after having been tortured by the doctors and the nurses telling her she needed to lose weight even though she was perfectly healthy. Having that kind of community, being able to reach out to be able to remember who we are is how I think of it.
Chris Sandel: Which is also a really good reminder, because I think someone could read “building community” and think, “Oh gosh, I need to now find this huge group of people.” And actually, what you’ve demonstrated is community can be one person. It can be having conversations with one person. I think that can take away some of the overwhelm that maybe can come up when they see “build community.”
The other thing that I’m wondering for you guys – when did you shift some or more of your trainings online versus doing them in person?
Connie Sobczak: We built the Fundamentals Course, which is the course that takes people through the 5 competencies of the model, in the spring of 2018. Then last year we put up our Facilitator Training so if people love the work and want to teach it to others – that just happened last fall, so it’s pretty brand new. We’ve been mostly in-person for decades.
I’m really excited about this right now because we’re training people all over the world. Right before we got on our call, I was watching this video of one of our facilitators in Chile, and she’s doing the most beautiful work. She took it out to her community in this wonderful way. She’s a songwriter, too, and she wrote this song and she asked women how they feel about their bodies, and she has this whole beautiful video of women speaking about their bodies.
We have someone in Nepal and Mongolia, and all over the world now, that are taking these tools and offering them to people to be able to shift how they feel. So that makes me very excited.
Chris Sandel: That’s amazing. Part of the reason I was asking around this is you talked about how amazing, when doing these trainings, it can be in the room. So I’m just wondering when some of that shifted more online. Was there a focus of like “how do we get that same openness and vulnerability and whatever that then creates by being in the room with other people?”
Connie Sobczak: We were concerned about that, definitely. When we were making our training and the videos of Elizabeth and me, we have some of us together in conversation. People love this because it’s just us, and we’re just chatting with each other. Some of the teaching – when I look at the videos, yeah, I see me and I feel like it’s me. I wish that I could be in the room; it’s harder to talk to a camera. But we have a lot of conversation, and in our Facilitator Training we have a lot of our facilitators who have worked with us, and they’re teaching and doing things. You really get the sense of who we are.
I’ve gotten the feedback from others who have taken the training saying they feel Elizabeth and me coming through and they feel our energy and they feel the love, and they feel it almost like we are – I mean, obviously it’s never the same as being together energetically, person to person, but it’s pretty darn close. So I’m really happy with that feedback, because it’s all pretty brand new. I’m very excited about that feedback.
And then yesterday, as I said, we did this meeting, and we had our younger facilitators doing some work with people in The Body Positive world. We did the activities online. We did the beauty activity and we did a self-love activity, working with the critical voice, and it went really well. It worked. It was a small group; there were five of us. I can see it working especially in small groups, and then getting people in their own little chatrooms together online. I think it’s very powerful.
With the way the world is right now, I’m really glad that people can connect in this way.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It seems like that’s going to be the only option for a little while.
01:53:10
Connie Sobczak: Yes, I know. Another thing – I think in terms of young people, adults are always blaming social media as the main reason why young people have body hatred. I just was working with a group of high school students, and one of them was saying, “I love social media because my friends and I are really supportive of one another.”
We teach intuitive social media use, just like with intuitive eating. How do you feel? If you’re following people who are all about diet culture and it’s all about weight loss and it’s all about perfection, how does that make you feel? You feel worse about yourself, you feel like you’re comparing, you feel like you’re not good enough? Okay. Now you have choice. Do you want to keep going in that direction? I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t because I’m not in charge of your life. But how do you want to feel? Do you want to feel better? Maybe you don’t want to follow that. Maybe you choose to say “I’m not going to do that today and I’m going to find someone who makes me feel uplifted,” and then how can we shift our social media feeds in order to have something that makes us feel good if we’re choosing to do that? That, again, I think is an option.
All of this comes down to there is personal responsibility. There is also honoring the trauma, and there’s honoring the societal pressures. And yet for me, I think that it really comes back to this is my one life. Each day, if I can ask myself, “How do I want to feel and how can I get closer to having more joy and more love and more pleasure and fun while I’m here on the planet?”
Chris Sandel: I really agree. I think the social media thing, or even just the internet in general – yes, it can create a lot of harm, but it can also create a lot of good. I imagine back in the day, when you were struggling with bulimia, if there were people online who were able to give you information, to offer support, how helpful that could be. So yeah, it does come back to how are you able to curate things that are helpful for you, or how can you be self-aware around what is going to be supporting you in that intuitive way?
Connie Sobczak: Yeah, definitely. There’s so many things about my life, if I had had an online community – I think I also probably would’ve been a victim of sexual harassment online, because I was in person and through bad situations that happened. So I think it would’ve been a blessing and a curse for me when I was young because there wasn’t much support. But I think if there had been a body positive program in my school where it was actually in person in my school, it would’ve completely changed how things went for me because I would’ve had a place to go where I was safe to talk about a lot of the things that were happening to me that definitely contributed to my eating disorder.
That’s the piece for our work. How can we create communities, whether they’re online, whether they’re in person, but especially for young ones who are isolated and thinking it’s all them and they’re the only one struggling – but all ages – but really, if we can work with young children growing up, knowing that this is really their birthright to feel good about themselves and to see the beauty in their bodies and not ever question and think something’s wrong with them – imagine what the world could be like then. That would be amazing.
Chris Sandel: Totally. No matter what changes have taken place and how many good things there could potentially be, there is no part of me that wants to be a teenager right now. [laughs]
Connie Sobczak: No. [laughs] No, no, I’m grateful I made it. For this coaching work, I had to write down my life stages, and I really took it on. I took each part of my life and wrote notes about what happened to me during those times, and I don’t think I want to go back at all, any age. People are so afraid of aging.
Here’s another thing I just have to say, in ending this. We try so hard to be healthy. Part of that is so we will live longer lives, but then we hate the body that we get if we live a longer life. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The body’s gong to age no matter what. If you’re lucky and you stay healthy and you do all those things to give you longevity, then you’re going to look old. [laughs]
It’s sad to me that people strive and they’re so tight and fearful about trying to be healthy when they’re not really paying attention to what the purpose of that is. Yes, it’s to have a long life, and then you’re going to look like you lived. Be grateful for that, and do the work to shed the bullshit of society at that point in our lives, too, to be able to say, “I made it. This is me. Here I am” and let go of all of that pressure to try and be something and be grateful in however many years we all have left. Who knows?
Chris Sandel: Totally. It’s not about living the longest amount of time. It’s like, how can you enjoy the time that you do have and be present during the time that you do have?
I remember there’s a Robert Sapolsky quote about people working and working harder and harder to get into the care home of their choosing. [laughs] You do all these different things, for what? If you’re not paying attention and being able to embrace and enjoy the journey, then what’s left?
Connie Sobczak: That’s why I get sad, seeing people who are living with so much fear – fear around their bodies, fear around how I fit in, how I don’t fit in, fear of all the things that society puts on us. Society meaning whatever that is that’s in the air and coming from corporate advertising or capitalism or whatever it is that then filters down into the people in our lives. It’s just coming so much. It’s amazing that we all can feel as good as we do. But how can we keep shedding the fear and really have that pleasure of “I am here, I am living, and this body allows me to be here on the planet”?
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Connie, this has been wonderful. Is there anything we didn’t cover or I didn’t ask you that you want to mention?
Connie Sobczak: Just if you want to let people know how to find us, we are www.thebodypositive.org. The “the” is very important in finding us, because there’s a lot of body positive out there. But we are TheBodyPositive.org. If people are interested in personally doing the work, we have our Fundamentals. There’s my book, Embody. That’s a great way to get to know me more and to hear more stories from other people who are doing this work. There’s beautiful stories from a hugely diverse group of people in the book.
And then if people are interested and excited about this and want to bring it to their communities, we would be honored to have you become a Facilitator. Anyone can become a Facilitator, so I invite people in.
Our social media is lovely and supportive. Our Instagram is really beautiful, and people are loving it and feeling uplifted by it. We just really want to stay connected to people in any way that we can and support the healing of others who are struggling now or helping others who are in the struggle with their bodies.
Chris Sandel: I’m going to put all of those links in the show notes so people can go there. Obviously, The Body Positive, people can go to, but in terms of Instagram and other social media, they can find it in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time today, Connie. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Connie Sobczak: It’s been a pleasure, Chris. I just want to say to you, I love hearing about your relationship with your son and with your partner. It just fills my heart with a lot of joy, knowing you’re doing the work to help others feel good about their bodies. So thank you for what you’re doing. It moves me.
Chris Sandel: That is lovely to hear. Right back at you. Thank you for everything you are doing.
Connie Sobczak: My pleasure. To be continued.
02:01:55
Chris Sandel: That is today’s interview. Connie was such a pleasure to chat with. I highly recommend her book, Embody, and checking out The Body Positive. I personally love what they’re doing and the trainings they’re doing, and I just like seeing what they’re putting out into the world.
Today I have two recommendations for you for things you might want to be checking out. One is light and easy; the other is more heavy going.
Starting at the more heavy end of the spectrum, it’s a podcast called the Catch and Kill Podcast by Ronan Farrow. Farrow was the journalist who broke the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and the podcast is really all about this and the two years of work that he put into trying to bring all of this to light.
While I’d obviously heard some of the allegations about Harvey Weinstein – and how could I not have? It was such a big story – but what was fascinating was the depths of the story, both the depths of Weinstein’s behavior and the difficulty that Farrow faced in trying to get the story published and to see the light of day. You really get the sense from listening that if you are powerful enough and if you have enough money, there’s a lot you can do to silence people and make problems disappear.
It’s definitely not a light podcast, but it’s produced really well and it’s intriguing and eye-opening. It’s called the Catch and Kill Podcast by Ronan Farrow.
The lighter end of the spectrum – I must’ve been living under a rock, but I’ve only recently discovered the TV show Community. The first season came out in 2009, and it finished up in 2015 after six seasons. I’d definitely heard of the show and knew of its existence, but for some reason it just passed me by. But now I’m really loving it. It’s very easy viewing. It’s super funny. There’s lots of movie and TV references, and given my love for this stuff, I’m really a sucker for it.
Each episode is only 20 minutes or so, so it’s easy to dip in and dip out of. So if you’re looking for something that is light and funny to watch – which, given the climate and the times that we’re living through, might be something that you’re interested in – and if you’re like me and somehow missed this a decade ago when it first came out, then I would recommend checking out Community. It’s on Netflix, it’s on Amazon Prime, and probably other places online as well.
That is it for this week. As I mentioned at the top of the show, Seven Health is currently taking on clients. If you are struggling with disordered eating, eating disorder, recovery, body image issues chronic dieting, any of the topics we cover as part of the show, then please get in contact. You can go to seven-health.com/help.
I will be back with another episode next week. Until then, take care of yourself, stay safe, and I will catch you soon.
Thanks so much for joining this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!
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