Episode 257: This week on Real Health Radio I chat with Bri Campos. We talk about body image, specifically through the lens of body grief.
Brianna (Bri) Campos, LPC, is a licensed mental health counsellor based in New Jersey. As a body image educator and the founder of Body Image with Bri, she’s passionate about all things body image and practices through the lenses of Health at Every Size® and Intuitive Eating. Utilising a weight-inclusive approach, she combines her clinical skills and lived experience to teach others how to manoeuvre through their own unique body image journeys.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 257 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/257.
Before we get started, I want to mention that I’m currently taking on new clients. I specialise in helping clients overcome eating disorders and disordered eating, chronic dieting, body dissatisfaction and poor body image, exercise compulsion and overexercising, and also helping clients to regain their period. If you want help in any of these areas or you simply want support to improve your relationship with food and body and exercise, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include that in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist that specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders, or really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and body and exercise.
Today’s show is a guest interview, and today’s guest is Bri Campos. Bri is a licensed mental health counsellor based in New Jersey. As a body image educator and the founder of Body Image with Bri, she’s passionate about all things body image and practices through the lens of Health at Every Size and intuitive eating. Utilising a weight-inclusive approach, she combines her clinical skills and lived experience to teach others how to maneuvre through their own unique body image journeys.
I’ve been aware of Bri for a while now. She actually came up twice in recent guest conversations. The first was with Alissa Rumsey, and then the second time was with Michelle Viña-Baltsas. It was during the conversation with Michelle that she talked about learning about body grief from Bri and how helpful this had been in her practice. Grief isn’t something that I have explored on the show, and it’s been something that I wanted to talk about and explore on the show. So after I got off that podcast with Michelle, I promptly sent Bri an email and asked her to come on.
As part of this episode, we talk about Bri’s personal story, how a visit to the doctor’s office at a young age started her dieting and affected her relationship with her body; we talk about her weight loss surgery and what she thinks of this decision now; we look at grief generally and also specifically in terms of body grief; we talk about the five stages of grief and also Bri’s four-part formula for dealing with body grief; and we chat about the grief Bri experienced with losing her brother and how much this has informed the work that she does.
This is obviously not a light episode, but Bri is fantastic in her ability to talk about this topic. It’s a topic that doesn’t get enough attention, so I hope you get a lot out of this one. Let’s get on with the show. Here’s my conversation with Bri Campos.
Hey, Bri. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for speaking with me today.
Bri Campos: Thank you so much for having me, Chris.
Chris Sandel: You are a body image coach and educator, and you have a particular lens with which you view and explore much of this work, which is through the idea of grief. Really, this is what I want to spend our time today focusing on, talking about body grief from your own personal experience and also the work that you do with clients.
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As a starting place, do you want to give listeners a brief background on yourself – who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that kind of thing?
Bri Campos: Sure. My training was originally in mental health counselling. I got my start in working with body image, working first in eating disorder recovery as a therapist. One of the things I experienced firsthand as a provider was that the conversations on body image really just fell short. Even as a person struggling with my own body image, I’d read the material and be like, “This is garbage. This doesn’t even work for me. I’m not going to do this with clients.”
Chris Sandel: Could you give a specific example?
Bri Campos: Oh yeah. Like, “Name 3 things that you like about your body.” That doesn’t help anybody. [laughs] Or like “If you’re having a bad body image day, just tell yourself you’re more than a body.” Here’s the problem with work like that: while at the end of the day, that might be a true statement, the problem is that we don’t believe that. It would be like telling myself, “People don’t judge you for your body.” No, they do judge me for my body size – but why does it matter? That really is the heart of my work, getting into the belief systems around body image.
I actually remember it was one of my first times running a group, and the girls that I was working with were about to go to lunch. They’re like, “Okay, Bri, you’re going to have to give us something. This crap that they assigned you, the material they assigned you, that’s not going to work for us. We need something tangible.”
I remember getting up and going to the whiteboard, and I drew this diagram from a -10 to a 0 to a +10. I said, “Let’s imagine -10 is that you hate your body and 0 is neutral and +10 is you love your body. Where would you place yourselves?” All the women went around and said where they would place themselves on the spectrum. I said, “Our goal is never to get us from the -10 to the +10 in one shot. It’s going to take time. But with your time in treatment, can we just move the needle slightly from a -10 to a -8? Is that even in the realm of possibility?”
What I found is really working with mindset and working on your belief systems and exploring those belief systems really made such a vast change. So I work through this concept of body grief, which I cannot take credit for. I don’t know who has termed the coin ‘body grief’. All I know is I would hear providers talk about it, but nobody really went into it, which I actually feel like is pretty appropriate – or not appropriate as much as it is predictable. It’s a scary topic to even think of. Like, what is body grief?
I had to carve that out for myself and then just repeated what I carved out for myself for other people. Never expected to transition from a therapist to a coach to now an educator on body image, body grief, and mindset.
Chris Sandel: I think it would be useful – you said you had to cave this out for yourself, and I imagine that’s based on your own personal experience in terms of your body. Is that correct?
Bri Campos: That is correct.
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Chris Sandel: So let’s start with you, then. If we go back to young Bri as a kid, what was your relationship with your body like when you were a youngster?
Bri Campos: When I think about the first time that I felt really uncomfortable in my body, I couldn’t have been more than eight years old. Trigger warning to anybody who’s listening; I’m going to talk about a fatphobic doctor’s appointment. I remember being eight years old and going to the doctor for a physical, and I remember not wanting to do it. I remember feeling uncomfortable with the idea, and also not being prepared that you take your clothes off for a physical and the doctor’s going to do all these things. So I felt pretty violated in the appointment. And my mom was in the room and she’s like, “It’s okay, don’t worry, everything’s okay.”
Then the doctor proceeded to tell me – and I swear, I can’t remember if I was clothed or not, but I remember feeling naked. What that tells me now is that regardless of whether I had clothes on or not, I was feeling shame. The doctor looks at my mom and says, “She’s too fat. This is really bad, and we have to do something now.” She looks at me and points to her little chart and she goes, “This is where you should be, and this is all the way where you are. You need to start eating fruits and vegetables and exercising every day and not rewarding yourself with dessert.” This woman never asked me about what my eating habits looked like. This woman never asked me what my health habits were. She just went into this spew.
I remember crying, and I remember just feeling so embarrassed. This will speak to the brain space I was in as an eight-year-old; I remember going home, and I was in the bath, and I remember closing my eyes and praying to God that he would make me thin and that he would clean my room. And he did neither of those two things. [laughs] But just that magical, mystical thinking that I was going to get out of the bathtub and all of a sudden be thin.
What breaks my heart as an adult is thinking that that eight-year-old child thought that her body was wrong or bad, and really what it was was poor medical care, the harm at the hands of a doctor. And I know that my story is familiar for a lot of people.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I work with many clients who tell very similar stories.
Bri Campos: Yeah. When you look up the definition of grief, it’s defined as deep sorrow. When you look up the definition of sorrow, it’s defined as loss that causes distress. So this definition of body grief that I have, again, carved out, is the perceived loss that causes distress from a change in body. When our body is going to change or is about to change or could change – and that can be from weight gain, from illness, from loss of mobility – it is the distress caused by the loss that is accompanied to it.
Fast forward from little Bri to adult Bri, when I got a slew of medical diagnoses that probably contributed to my body size, never mind the years of yo-yo dieting that also contributed to that, never mind also my genetics – but the idea that I was ever going to get the thin body that I had dreamed of, that if I could just work hard enough for, that I would get, and realising that that was a pipedream and that was diet culture selling me on this pipedream and taking all of my money, knowing it was never going to work.
I had two choices. I could continue down the path of “Maybe I’m special. Maybe I’m going to be the one that gets to find the solution. Maybe I’m going to be the ‘after’ body.” Or the more realistic solution is that I don’t get to become the ‘after’ body, I don’t get the body that I’ve dreamed of, and that my life can still be full and amazing and full of great things. And in that moment, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like the loss was just too much, that there would be no end.
And as somebody who has personally experienced grief in my life, I remember feeling that in my personal life. And I want to clarify really quickly, grief and bereavement are not the same. Bereavement is through death. But I think it’s often like ‘grief is when someone dies’. No, grief is not. You can see grief in bereavement, but bereavement is really specific towards death. There was a death, though, in a dream that I had wanted since I was eight years old. I’ll often tell clients, take the age you are now and subtract it by the first age that you remember wanting to change your body. That is how old that story is. That is how old that wound is. For me, it was a 20-year-old wound, and now I said, “Now what? My entire life has been about changing my body, and now all of a sudden it’s just not.”
It doesn’t make it easier to stand up to people who don’t get it. It doesn’t make it less painful to experience the losses of not being able to do things. But I will say that having more brain space, having more emotional capacity, having way more compassion with myself than I ever have in my entire life, it has changed and transformed my entire life. That’s how Body Image with Bri started.
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Chris Sandel: Nice. Going back to that doctor’s appointment and more after that as well, what was your mum’s reaction? And what were the feelings in the household when it came to bodies and food and diets and all of those kind of things?
Bri Campos: Great question. I always start and lead with that I believe that my parents did the best that they could with the resources that they had available to them at the time, and that my parents have always been my biggest advocates.
But with that, because of the information that they had accessible to them, there was a co-signing of the information from the doctor. It was very shortly after that doctor’s appointment where it was then known that we were going to go on a diet together. It was a “We’re going to do it together. We’re going to get healthy together.” There was a very distinct pattern of when we were dieting, what life looked like, and when we weren’t, what we weren’t doing. There was a lot of this “When we’re dieting we’re exercising, and when we’re not, we get to eat all the fun foods.” There was very much a ‘this or that’.
But what I would say for myself is that unlike other people in my family, I held on to the weight after the regain whereas not everybody did that.
Chris Sandel: I get it from your parents’ perspective. If you’re going to a doctor and the doctor’s saying, “This is the thing you need to do to keep your child healthy”, that’s the role of medical advice. So it makes sense that your parents were like, “Okay, this is what we’ve been told; let’s try and help Bri. And oh, if we do it together, maybe that’s going to help.” So I can see how your parents went down that route, the same way it’s true with so many clients.
Bri Campos: Yeah. And again, I don’t blame my parents, especially growing up in the ’90s. It was all the rage. There was no awareness of the body positivity movement and that health at every size is possible, and if health really was the overall goal, could I achieve health without my body size changing? The reality is, had I not been given really shitty medical advice, I think that a lot of the diagnoses that I have could’ve been diagnosed a lot earlier. But everybody was just so distracted by my weight that they believed they could fix it, so instead they focused on that.
Chris Sandel: You said that when you were dieting, it didn’t really make that much of a difference – or did it make a difference, it was just when the regain happened, then the regained weight didn’t come off? I’m just trying to get a sense of, were you losing weight and getting praise and that was then reinforcing this behaviour?
Bri Campos: No, I never really lost a significant amount of weight, which, again – I’ll share for listeners, but I want people to know, having a diagnosis isn’t a qualification for being fat. You’re allowed to just exist. And I say fat in a reclaimed way. But I have a trifecta of Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease; I have low underactive thyroid / PCOS; I also have IBS. It’s a really challenging arena to know, what’s the best treatment?
But no, I can never remember losing more than a low double digit every time I lost weight. I remember feeling like I was doing something wrong, and then when I would regain weight, I would regain back the weight I lost and then some. And we know from the science that that is what happens with weight cycling, but I also believe for me personally, the thyroid and PCOS really played a huge factor in the insulin resistance. Had they maybe paid attention a little bit more – because my thyroid function was always low, but it wasn’t as low as it should be. Again, neither here nor there, but all of the other factors were ignored because they were so distracted by the BMI.
Chris Sandel: When were they actually diagnosed for you?
Bri Campos: It was that moment that I realised – first I was diagnosed with an autoimmune when I was 25, and that was the first time a doctor told me, that and a thyroid disorder, “It’s going to be very unlikely that you’ll be able to lose a significant amount of weight.” And then a couple years later, I was 28 when I first got the diagnosis of PCOS.
Even still, all of these diagnoses, even PCOS is like a rule-out diagnosis. I don’t want to go on a tangent on all of these things, but again, it was just another confirmation that my body size was out of my control. The part that sucked the most – and this is a skill that I’ll use with clients, like “What’s the worst part about it?” The worst part about it was that no matter how hard I’ve tried, no matter how hard I continue to try, I will never reap the reward of my efforts in the visualization of my body.
So when people would praise me, it was because I was practicing severe restriction and because I was very committed to moving and working out, and I also really loved to present as a strong fat person because I thought that was another protection from the fatphobia in the world. It’s like, “Okay, but I’m strong. You can’t say anything to me because I’m really strong.” And I got a lot of praise for being a strong fat person, and I loved that praise.
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I think for me, my relationship with movement has been almost harder than grieving my body because it’s revealing my own ableism and the elevation of mobility and how we in our society really don’t consider people who have a lack of mobility. And if we do, we moralise it. “Is it understandable because you have an illness, like MS, or an injury? Or did you bring it upon yourself?”
So having to unlearn that messaging is super hard and super painful, especially when health is already so moral in our culture.
Chris Sandel: Totally. Even if you weren’t being praised because of you losing weight, you were being praised because of certain behaviours or you were being praised because you were able to lift heavy things or do something along those lines. And as you say, that then has an impact on your relationship with exercise because it’s no longer about the joy of movement; it’s about “This is a way that I deflect from my failings in other ways.”
Bri Campos: Correct. Like, “Okay, if I can just control my movement, then if somebody’s ever concerned with my health, I can be like, ‘Bam, look at all that I can do.’” As opposed to now, where I’ve lost a significant amount of ability. And I attribute that, one, to Covid. They say if you don’t use it, you lose it, and I lost it very quickly. But it also revealed – I had strength, but I did not have flexibility. And I haven’t had flexibility for years, but nobody cared because I was strong.
I can’t remember the last time I was able to tie my shoes or cross my leg over my other leg, but again, nobody cared because “You can bench press and you can lift heavy things.” It’s like relearning how to do everything I should’ve done the first time. I was like, oh, do I know how to stand up off the ground? There’s this minute mobility pieces that were completely missing.
And that praise – we call it in the counselling world ‘cognitive dissonance’. It wasn’t until I started working in eating disorder recovery where I was like, huh, I’m sitting in session all day telling girls that you can eat all these fun foods and that you don’t have to subscribe to society’s standards, yet I’m over here cutting out these foods and over-exercising in the name of health. It was the first time I was like, “Something doesn’t align. What could possibly be going on?”
What I realised was the clients that I was telling this to existed in a smaller body, and I lived in a larger body. There’s this quote by Deb Burgard – I won’t quote it exactly, but it’s like, what’s prescribed in fat bodies is diagnosed in thin bodies. It became so relevant to me. I worked in eating disorder recovery – we never talked about fatphobia. I don’t understand how that wasn’t a core or a staple of the education for the provider to be able to say, “Hey, when our clients are afraid of gaining weight, we need to be able to handle that conversation.” Instead we have these rehearsed statements that I cringe to even think now that we would say these things.
Chris Sandel: Totally, that “Don’t worry, we won’t let you get fat, we don’t let you gain too much weight”, all of these things where – I have no control over someone’s weight. I don’t know what’s going to happen in someone’s recovery. One, why am I making a statement that I can’t possibly know what’s going to happen for, but two, why shouldn’t we be exploring, “Why is this a fear? What is behind this? This is useful for us to have a conversation around” as opposed to aligning with the eating disorder and telling someone the same thing.
Bri Campos: Exactly.
Chris Sandel: Coming back to your comment about inflexibility, I’m in the same camp as you on this front. It’s interesting; I think it’s in the last two months I’ve started to stretch and try to make it a fairly regular practice just because I notice how completely inflexible I am. I couldn’t sit on my knees properly. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been able to touch my toes.
And I’m saying this because I think it can be very easy for someone to go to the “Well, if she lost some weight, maybe she’d be able to touch her toes.” Like, I can’t touch my toes. It’s got nothing to do with that. I think it’s just useful to add that as a little bit of information.
Bri Campos: Because nobody cares if you can’t touch your toes. [laughs] They’re like, “Oh, whatever.” But for me, it’s a measure of like, “Well, but you could be doing more.” If I were to print out my history of everything I’ve tried, everything I’ve done, it still wouldn’t be enough for people. They would be like, “But you didn’t try hard enough.”
There’s this story that my mom loves to tell from when I was a kid. I wanted to learn how to tie my shoes. I had an older brother, older cousins. Everybody could tie their shoes, and I was like, “I am going to learn how to tie my shoes.” I would sit and practice until I got it. That is how much effort I put into dieting. I was like, “I’m going to be the best dieter that there ever was”, and I truly was. I truly was a great dieter. Would do it for long periods of time.
But what I can tell you is that it never solved the problem that I was hoping it would. I never felt more confident in myself. I never felt proud of myself. I never felt secure in who I was. I still was letting my body be the thing that like, “Okay, now I’ve met the standard.”
And I can tell you, in my largest body, in my most immobile body, I am the most confident, the most comfortable with myself that I have ever been in my life, and the only thing that has changed, by design, is my mindset and my belief systems.
Chris Sandel: I definitely want to go through that and I think it would be useful to talk about that as part of the grief process.
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But I think the final thing I want to talk about in terms of your story here is I know that you had weight loss surgery. How did that come about? How was it making that decision? Talk a little about this.
Bri Campos: Oh my gosh. As a thirty-something-year-old, I’m just so disappointed with all of the people in my life who helped encourage this decision. It’s mind-boggling. But neither here nor there.
I started looking into surgery when I was 17 years old. I was 17. I had family members who had had surgery. And let me just say this. If anybody is listening, if anybody has had surgery or is thinking about surgery, there is no shame. You have the right to body autonomy. I have clients who work with me and then say, “I’m going to go get surgery. Are you disappointed in me?” At the end of the day, it’s your body.
But the point of disappointment is, again, going to the mind of a 17-year-old, magical thinking, I literally thought weight was just going to melt off and I was going to have my dream body and that I was going to feel confident and I was going to feel secure in myself, and I was going to have no worries about walking into a room and thinking people are judging me.
I ended up getting the surgery approved at 19. Gosh, it makes me so angry thinking that that doctor was like, “Yeah, this is a good idea.” Regardless, it inevitably failed. The research on the surgery I had – there’s three kinds of weight loss surgeries. There’s the LAP-band, there’s the gastric sleeve, which was not a thing back then, and then there’s the bypass. The LAP-band surgery has a 100% fail rate. 100% of LAP-band surgeries will fail.
Chris Sandel: And what do you mean by fail?
Bri Campos: Fail means that you will regain the weight that you lost. So they don’t really do the LAP-band anymore. They really push the gastric sleeve before they do the bypass. But when I was getting it done, I don’t know what I was told. I went to these appointments by myself at 19 years old and I said all of the right things. I said things like, “I just want to do this for my health. I just want to be healthy.” Nobody ever asked me what ‘healthy’ meant. Like, “What does healthy mean for you?”
I had the surgery in 2010, and it mimicked eating disorder behaviours that I would now diagnose somebody with an eating disorder if they were to do such things. I would say maybe three months into the process, I had gone back – the way the LAP-band worked was you would go, they would put a saline liquid into the band to tighten it, because the band was around your stomach – so imagine a balloon and then putting a band around the balloon on the top. They would fill the band up so it would squeeze it, again, making the intonation that I was eating too much too quickly and that’s why I was fat.
I was actually pretty proud of myself. I felt like I had done a really good job, and it would be the first appointment that I went into knowing, “I know I’ve lost weight.” I was ready for my doctor to be proud of me, and he goes, “It’s going in the right direction, but I would’ve liked to see more.” And it was a significant amount of weight. It was the most weight loss I had ever seen in one time, but it was still a low double digit number. And I, too, was surprised. I was like, I thought the weight would’ve just melted off.
What he ended up doing was tightening the band more than he should’ve. I had driven all the way home from college, I had driven back, and my routine in the mornings when I was driving back to college is I would stop at a gas station, I’d get some shitty coffee, and I would head out really early and drive. And I remember as I started drinking the coffee, I had this feeling – you know like a Brita filter, where the liquid just drips out very slowly? Actually, the Brita doesn’t really do that now, but a good filtration system. [laughs] It’ll drip slowly. That’s what the liquid felt like in my body. I was like, “It’s not going down. It’s stuck in my chest. This is not good.”
It took me like a week for a friend of mine to be like, “You need to call your doctor.” I was like, “I don’t want to go back there.” He made me feel so bad. She was like, “Just call him. See what he does.” He booked an emergency session for me a week later. So now I’ve gone two weeks with nearly no food, no liquids. I had to drive myself back to a hospital – I was in South Jersey; the doctor was in North Jersey – for him to be like, “Oopsies, I filled it too tight.” So he emptied out the band.
And I just never went back after that. I never used the band the way that it was supposed to. Still lost weight, but then still had complications from it. Complications that I just felt like I wasn’t prepared for, like even if you eat something ‘healthy’, this thing could still get stuck in your system. I don’t know if you want me to be too graphic about the harmful experiences of it. I think I have a podcast episode on it if you want to link to it and I could talk about that more.
Chris Sandel: That’s fine. I can link to that or you can be as open and honest as you want to be.
Bri Campos: I would choke on carrots. I would be eating a carrot and all of a sudden the bite would be too big and it would get stuck in my chest, and I would have one of two choices. I either had to figure out how to get the carrot to go down or I would have to go and throw up the carrot.
I remember the last time that it happened, it was in 2016, and I was like, “I have had enough. I’m over this.” I had to get the band removed. And they were trying to peer pressure me into another surgery. I was like, “I don’t think you’re understanding me. I do not want another surgery. I want you to take this band out and I don’t want to put anything else into my body.” And this was before I knew all I know about Health at Every Size and intuitive eating. I was working in eating disorder recovery at the time.
But I was like, “No, I don’t think that stopping me from eating is a solution. I don’t want to put another object into my body that you say you have the research for now; let’s see where you are in 10 years from now.” [laughs] And we don’t even need that anymore. We know that these surgeries are not reliable on ‘fixing’ what they say they can.
Chris Sandel: And from your lived experience, if you’re nearly choking on carrots, something is up.
Bri Campos: Yeah, exactly. And then they tried to blame me. They were like, “Maybe you just didn’t get proper care on what to eat and what not to eat with the band.” I was like, “I’m eating a carrot. What do you mean, what I’m not supposed to eat?” It’s so frustrating and so disappointing.
And again, anybody who has had surgery, is thinking about surgery, that is not to shame you. But I did believe that this was going to be a miracle cure, and it was anything but. Instead it created way more problems for me that I didn’t anticipate.
Chris Sandel: How soul-crushing was that?
Bri Campos: I think it was worse than any other diet because at least when I was done with a diet, there would be a little bit of normalcy back to my life, but this wasn’t. It felt semi-permanent. Like, okay, yeah, maybe it wasn’t always carrots that I was choking on, but imagine going to a barbecue and thinking, “I’m just going to eat this hotdog even though I’m not ‘supposed’ to” and then the hotdog getting stuck, and then you missing out on the entire barbecue and everybody asking where you were because you’re stuck in the bathroom because it’s stuck in your chest. It was painful and shameful.
If I could advocate to 17-year-old Bri who wanted to have the surgery, I might ask her, “I understand you want to be healthy and I understand you think that this is going to be the solution. If you get to my age and it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t follow through on the promise of making you smaller, do you still want to do it?” And I feel like if I still had any inkling that it would help me lose weight, I still would’ve done it, unless I knew what I know now. If I were to tell 17-year-old Bri, “100% this is going to fail”, then I’d be like, “Absolutely not, no. I’m not going to put myself through that.”
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Chris Sandel: Was it then after this, or when did you then start getting therapy for yourself or working on this body image piece?
Bri Campos: I had already been in therapy for the body image piece. I mean, I have always been I therapy, but body image came up – in my graduate programme, I started graduate school in 2013, and they required us to do 10 sessions of individual therapy and then group therapy. My group therapist was so good. I was like, “Oh gosh, I have to work with you.”
She was the first person who called me on my bullshit. I was like, “I’m on this diet and I’m doing it because I want to be healthy.” She had limited understanding of what we know now, but she was like, “That’s great. What does health mean to you?” I was like, “Nobody has ever asked me what health meant to me. I don’t know. I guess if I had to describe it, health probably means that I don’t feel out of control with food, that I’m eating nutrient-dense foods, and that I’m exercising my body.”
She was like, “Oh good, so then you’re already healthy.” I was like, “Wait, wait, wait. I’m sorry, I also need to be thin.” She was like, “But that doesn’t match the definition that you just gave me.” I said, “But this is just known knowledge. I can’t be fat and be thin.” She was the first person to gently back me into that corner, like motivational interviewing of like, “Are these things mutually exclusive?” It was the first time I acknowledged, holy crap, yeah. I did not believe I could be fat and healthy. Those two things were not synonymous for me.
We started working on that, and that’s when I was able to say, “Hey, you know what’s really not healthy? Eating a carrot and it getting stuck in my chest. I can tell you that I don’t think that’s healthy. You know what is also not healthy? Fearing going into a room of my colleagues and being afraid that I’m being judged for my body size. That’s really not healthy.” So really being able to figure out, okay, there are things that I know are not healthy; what can I do about them?
My bloodwork – I can do the suggestions of my doctor and my team, but I can’t change that my thyroid is underactive. There are just some things that I can’t change. But I knew it was not healthy that every time I went to the doctor, I had a panic attack. And I judged the fact that I would have a panic attack going to the doctor. What I know now is that that was trauma. My body was trying to warn me, ‘danger is coming’.
And even though my life wasn’t actually threatened, it felt like it was being threatened. I think it goes back to that eight-year-old girl who didn’t know any better and went into a doctor’s office thinking nothing and then coming out feeling immense amount of shame. I did so much work with my therapist at that point about body image and realising how the beliefs around my body were keeping me from showing up in my life, were keeping me from going on dates, keeping me from showing up in the workplace because I was afraid that people would judge me.
And again, the only thing I had the ability to work on was my belief systems, and could I change – like, I don’t look at somebody else and be like, “Oh, they must be unintelligent because they’re in a larger body.” That is not at all how I feel. Or like, “They’re in a thin body. They must be very smart.” It’s just not something that’s even aligned with my values. This is the thing I talk about in my work a lot: realigning to my values. I had to do a lot of that.
And through that, through realigning my values, through building up my own self-esteem and self-efficacy, by challenging the negative self-talk about myself to myself, that is where I really began to see, “You know what? This is the belief that I was taught, but that doesn’t align with me anymore. So even though this doesn’t feel like a natural groove, we’re going to go towards this anyway. We’re going to go towards this new groove.” And over time, we’ve created a new groove. “Yeah, you’re going to judge me for my body? That says way more about you than it does about me.” And that feels true for me now. It didn’t when it started, but it does now.
Chris Sandel: It sounds like, from what you’re saying, this was a two-pronged approach. There was the exploration part where you’re trying to figure out, “What are my beliefs or what are my values? Is that belief really serving me? Do I believe that for other people or is this just for me?” So really having this awareness of the things that are going on either in the foreground or in the background of your mind, but also the “And how do I challenge myself from a practical standpoint so I put myself in a certain situation or I go and do this thing that’s difficult or challenging?” It’s not just theory; it’s like, “I’m now going to put this into practice to re-learn a different way.”
00:43:43
Bri Campos: Exactly. I have a four-part approach or framework to body grief. The first is building awareness. I don’t think we can change our thoughts and beliefs if we’re not actually even aware of our thoughts and beliefs. Part of what I had to do in the beginning is figure out, “This is the narrative, this is the story I’m telling myself”, and then I had to figure out, “Hey, is this true or is this what I’ve been taught?”
One of the narratives that was really stuck for me was ‘your body is undesirable and a fat body and no-one’s going to be attracted to you’. It felt very real. And the reason it feels real is because of diet culture and because of the patriarchy and because of the ideal beauty standard that we have set. Of course it feels like I will never achieve the ideal beauty. What I had to do was then challenge, “Do I judge people only based on their aesthetics? Would I turn someone away because of their body size?” The reality is no, I wouldn’t. then I can try to trick myself and be like, “People aren’t as nice as you or compassionate as you.”
So then I started thinking, “Let’s reality test this. Do I know people who are in larger bodies who are in relationships?” I’m like, “Yes, I know several people who are in larger bodies in relationships.” So it was beginning to be like, “So maybe this isn’t true. Maybe this is just something that I was taught and that has a semblance of truth, but isn’t true for everyone.”
The second part of the framework is the active unlearning. This is where it’s like, “Okay, how do I begin to actively unlearn this belief?” It starts by putting myself out there and going on dates. This is where I want to put a little caveat in doing this in a trauma-informed way. I urge people, don’t do it the way I did it. [laughs] Learn from my mistakes. I’m also a trained clinician, so I always say going to graduate school was paying for the mental health care that I could never afford.
So if you were to think of doing things like challenging that belief and then scaling them on a scale of 1 to 10, don’t start with the things that are a 10. I did. I was like, “Cool, I’m going to go on a date” and then almost passed out because I was like, “Why did we do this?” Could’ve started with something much easier, like, I don’t know, let’s start talking online to guys or something like that, or let’s see if your friend has somebody they can set you up with. In this day and age, there’s so many virtual options, but it was still a couple years ago. But I was like, “I’m going to do the challenge. I can do the hard thing.”
Then what would happen is I’d get in these situations and I would feel high levels of distress, which, I can tell you now, is your body signalling an alarm. It’s a fire alarm, but there’s no fire. So you don’t have to start there. The unlearning can start with a 1 or a 2. It doesn’t have to start with the thing that’s a 10.
I’ll give you another example: figuring out what clothing to wear. This is what we call the ‘sexy’ work of body image work. I was like, “I’m going to wear the crop top and then I’m going to take a picture and I’m going to post it on my Instagram.” I put the crop top on and I looked at my friend and I was like, “Nope. I can’t do this.” She was like, “Okay, go change.” I was like, “No, I have to do this.” She goes, “Why?” I said, “I don’t know, I just feel like I have to do it.” She was like, “You don’t have to do it. You’re allowed to not do this.”
And now I can wear a two-piece bathing suit, and what I realise is back then, it was too much of a jump. I was going straight into the ‘woo-hoo!’ I was diving in without a life jacket. It’s not a failure; it’s just information. You can start with the unlearning around things that are like a 1 or a 2, or a 3 or a 4. And that’s a self-assessment. You get to decide, is this a low challenge? Is this a medium challenge? Is it a high challenge?
So the framework starts with the building awareness, the active unlearning – over time. There’s this saying, this old adage that we’ll say, that time heals all wounds. That’s bullshit. Time heals absolutely nothing. But time does allow for things to become familiar. Like I said, several years ago when I put on the crop top, I was like, “There’s no way I can wear this” and now I can wear a two-piece bathing suit with confidence, and the reason is not because time exists, but time has allowed that narrative to be unlearned, and I’ve replaced the narrative through the active unlearning. It doesn’t faze me quite as much as it did in the beginning.
It’s hard because especially in diet culture, we have all of these tools and measures to measure our progress. We have the scale. In diet culture, we would do like ‘non-scale victories’. It’s really hard to measure your mindset. So the only thing we have are these experiences and these moments where like, “Hey, a month ago I tried to do this and it was a scale of 10. I just tried to do this now and it was only a difficulty of like a 4 or 5.” That’s the progress we can measure over time.
So the framework being building awareness, the active unlearning, over time, and the fourth and most important piece is: in community. I feel like diet culture has done such a good job at convincing us that we are wrong or we’re somehow promoting anti-health, and I think we can gaslight ourselves back into diet culture. But when you are sitting with someone who’s experiencing the same struggle as you and you can hold compassion for that person because you’ve been that person, it allows the self to be able to mirror, “This is how I need to respond to myself.”
I’ll give you a quick example. I just went to the doctor Friday, and I knew going in that my bloodwork was probably going to be a mess because my life has been a mess the last couple of months. My doctor, I have always said is a great doctor. She is so safe. My dietitian advocated for me. She doesn’t bring up weight. And naturally, this is the first time in four years that she’s ever brought up weight. I remember sitting there – and I am not a fighter, I am not somebody who likes conflict. My MO used to be “I’m just never going to come back.” I said, “No, we’ve worked too hard to get to this point.”
I thought to myself, “How would you advocate for one of your Body Griever clients in a way that is kind, it’s not rude, but it is assertive?” I said, “I’ve been working with you for four years and this is the first time you have brought up my weight, and I have to tell you, it does not feel good.” Of course, she went through her whole, “Now I’m worried because I’m looking at this chart and thinking about you getting older and if this is your new norm.” I didn’t say it like this, but I essentially was like, “I call bullshit because my bloodwork was fine six months ago.” So why is it that six months ago everything was great, but now all of a sudden six months go by and “this is your new norm”?
And she acknowledged, “Okay, maybe I overreacted. Maybe I jumped to conclusions.” I was like, “You did. Weight loss can never be a conversation, or I won’t come back. I can’t do it because I know my history, and I know how harmful this is for me.” She said, “Fair enough. I will never bring it up again.” And I’m going to hold her to that. I was proud of myself. I mean, I wish I could’ve been a little bit ruder or meaner, but it’s just not my style. [laughs]
Really, it’s that community piece of if I didn’t have my Body Grievers to advocate for, to be like, “I need to be able to make a script to say, ‘Hey, this is exactly what you say’” – because one thing we know is that doctors do not know enough about eating disorders. So you say it, it’s a buzzword, and they’re like, “Okay, crap, I can’t say this.” I was like, “I’ve shown up consistently for four years. If it’s something I was doing, it would’ve been ‘evident’ by now. I told you that I wasn’t taking my meds, with purpose, because I was feeling discomfort.” As opposed to – and I talked to my aunt who’s also a doctor, and she was like, “Doctors are human, and they’re fallible. She probably got scared for herself and thinking, ‘I have been steering her wrong by not having this conversation.’”
It’s unfortunate, it is disappointing that I had to be the one to advocate for myself. And this is the suck. This is the grief that I express to my clients. And I can tell you, it’s been three days and there is no reverberating shame narrative, because I know the truth, and I know that regardless of my size, I deserve quality and kind and compassionate medical care, and that if they aren’t going to offer it, I’m going to demand it.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I also think it demonstrates where you’re at with this, to be able to advocate for yourself. As difficult as it was in that moment – you talked earlier about values. That must then be very much in alignment with your values, and you got a moment to really test, “Is this a value that is more idealised and aspirational, or is this a value that is a real, true lived value and I was able to show that I live by it in the moment?”
Bri Campos: Yeah. I feel like a lot of clients will probably resonate with this. I identify as a recovering people-pleaser. I don’t like conflict, I believe because a long time ago I learned if I just do what people want, it will make them happy, and then we get to avoid the conflict piece. I am seeing the ramifications of that in my life in many places. So this is one area where it’s like, I don’t need my doctor to like me, but I do need her to provide me with quality medical care.
And this will make me a little bit emotional, but I do have the skills to advocate, and I’ve sent a lot of clients her way. So I’d rather be the one that she tests this out on. And now that she knows, anybody I’ve sent to her who has said don’t bring up weight loss because of eating disorders – I hope that that conversation resonates in her head.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. That’s that thing of you’re doing this not just for you, but for the whole community. It’s bigger than just you.
Bri Campos: Yeah, exactly. And that’s so in alignment with my values.
00:55:37
Chris Sandel: I want to come back to the body grief piece and start at the beginning. I know you’ve given a bit of a definition for body grief, but let’s go over it again. How would you define grief and how would you define body grief?
Bri Campos: Sure. Again, from the definitions of grief and loss, grief is defined as deep sorrow, and sorrow is defined as loss that causes distress. So my working definition of body grief is the perceived loss that causes distress that comes with body change. That can be body changing from weight, that can be body changing through puberty, that can be body changing with age, that can be body changing with a diagnosis or an illness. Again, body grief is the perceived loss that causes distress accompanied with body change.
Chris Sandel: I know with grief, you talk about the five stages of grief. I assume then body grief maps onto that as well.
Bri Campos: Oh, absolutely. I’ll use this with clients all the time. If you were to take every stage of the dieter to the anti-dieter, or the person who is struggling in their body image to body acceptance, the stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and what I find is that most people are stuck in the bargaining stage. “Maybe I can still fix this.” It’s not like, “I’ve accepted this, woo-hoo! I love this!” We fall into that body image depression where it fucking blows. It just sucks. And that to me is the grief.
Yeah, it sucks. It makes me so upset that no matter what I do, I can’t guarantee that I’m going to go to the doctor and get the medical help that I need. That I have to advocate for myself. And I have accepted it, knowing that I need to advocate for myself just like I would advocate for any single one of my friends, colleagues, or clients.
When our clients are doing this, I say, “If you wouldn’t do it for you, would you do it for your daughter, for your child, for your godchild, for your niece, your nephew, for the younger version of you? Is there someone in your life who you can advocate for?” And that piece we call in therapy the ‘re-parenting’ piece. It is becoming the advocate or the safe person you needed when you were younger.
Chris Sandel: I like that as a concept, and I think it works, or it helps some people. I also find that if someone is very much still entrenched in the belief that “I have to be thinner to be healthier” or “I have to be thinner to be accepted” or “I have to be thinner for my life to be better”, even when that is transferred to a niece, a nephew, a younger daughter or whatever, they can still see it through that same lens of “I would do everything to help them try and get that body because I think that’s the thing that is going to be their salvation.”
Bri Campos: Oh, to me that’s just so sad. Give me a person who that’s actually worked for successfully, who hasn’t developed an eating disorder, and who actually loves their body. This is what I say to clients where there’s still this desire to lose weight. It’s like, tell me one person who you’re like, “This is what they did and they get all of the benefits.”
I’ll use the example of the Kardashians. I have something the Kardashians will never have, and that is body acceptance. No matter how much money they have, no matter how small their body is, no matter how many surgeries or touch-ups or editing apps, they don’t accept their bodies as they are. And that’s got to suck, to have literally wealth and resources at your disposal and still to not have peace in the body that you’re in.
I also would like to say that if for whatever reason, any of the Kardashians or any famous person hears this, there’s no judgment. I have less judgment for you because of how much in the public eye and in the public criticism you are. I take umbrage when you then try to capitalise on your own insecurities that you haven’t figured out yourself. That’s where I take issue.
But yeah, there’s not one single person who we can say they got a smaller body, they did it in a ‘sustainable’ or ‘healthy’ way – and when you look at why people do it, there’s a couple of reasons that we see these answers. One, it’s for comfort. They want to feel more comfortable in their body. Two – I’m thinking of Rebel Wilson, who was like, “I want to be able to get different roles.” They’re just sad. They’re just sad reasonings that I don’t think you’ll ever be able to guarantee.
So if a parent was like, “I need to make sure my kid exists in a smaller body”, I would first ask, if they say it’s for health – because I think most people would – I would have them define health. What does health mean? And if we get 10 years from now, if the outcome they are desiring isn’t achieved, would they still want this? If we get to 10 years from now and your child is still struggling and is in a larger body, is this the path you still want to go down, knowing it’s not going to make a difference?
It’s a 95% chance. 95% of diets are going to fail, or for 95% of the people. It’s a big gamble. Do you think you’re of the 5%? And I also don’t want anyone to quote me on that research because I know that doesn’t even take into consideration those that develop eating disorders.
What I would ask that parent to do is think about, what do they want for their child? What is it they want? What would feel like, “In 10 years, this is what I want to see with my child”? If they’re willing to give up control and say, “Maybe I can’t control my child’s body size, but my child will work on their body image, my child will work on their self-esteem, and my child is going to eat and their body is going to do what their body is going to do” – the less control we have, the more peace we end up having. And the more peace you have, the less control you need.
Chris Sandel: You don’t really even have control. It’s an illusion of control.
Bri Campos: Exactly.
Chris Sandel: You get real control by giving up the reins and letting your body do what it’s going to do, and then you get your sanity back through that.
Bri Campos: Yeah.
01:03:42
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting; when I look at the stages of grief, my sense – and you tell me your thoughts on this – most people who are in that dieting loop are probably just stuck in the first three. It’s denial, then anger, then bargaining, and then we go back to denial, then anger, then bargaining. Maybe there’s moments of the depression that then sends them back, but I think the depression piece, as far as I’m understanding it, is more because there’s the realisation of ‘this is futile’. And until you reach that point, you’ll just keep going round that loop.
So there’s the depression of ‘this is futile’ and then from that, you can reach that place of acceptance, but it feels like most people, or a lot of people, are stuck in the first three.
Bri Campos: Yeah, and I just don’t think everybody’s going to get unstuck because I think that’s how powerful diet culture is. But I didn’t have a choice. My choice was to continue to do the same thing over and over again with no different results, or to try something different. And it was a bargain. It was like, “This could not work out well, and yeah, I’m in the largest body that I’ve ever been.”
I would be lying to you if I said there aren’t things that I miss. I miss being strong. I miss having – not mobility, but just the confidence of like “Oh yeah, I can do this. This is no problem.” Yeah, there are things that I miss, but I also don’t miss out on life. I no longer feel like I have to spend all of my time and energy and money on my body. I always say that my body was my project, and I invested so much into that project. They talk about all the brain space that comes after dieting, and I was like, “Now what do I do?” I’ve had to really connect to, what am I interested in? What are my hobbies? What do I like to do? How do I want to spend my time?
There’s such an autonomy to that, and it’s scary. I almost don’t trust me with my own time. But I feel like this hopefully more than second half – this part of my life, I just feel like my life is so much fuller. My body is bigger, but so is my life.
Chris Sandel: And I would also add there are many people who lose mobility, who go through a lot of the same things that you were describing, and yet their body isn’t bigger. I don’t think that is the only explanation for why those things have changed.
Bri Campos: Correct.
Chris Sandel: I think that’s a useful thing to remember as well, because otherwise it gets all lumped into that category, and it’s like, no, that’s not the only reason.
Bri Campos: Exactly. I’ll use this term ‘scapegoating’. I think we’ve done such a good job at scapegoating our bodies. For anyone listening who’s unsure what that means, it’s essentially just blaming everything on my body. Anything that could be wrong in my life – I’m single? It’s because of my body. I didn’t get the job? It’s because of my body. I can’t tie my shoes? It’s because of my body size. Everything was blamed.
And this is where being able to actually look empirically – this is something my PT taught me. He said, “Could weight be a factor in mobility? Absolutely. Is it the only one? Absolutely not.” I actually have a podcast episode on that called ‘Body Pain Is Not Punishment’ because I think so often, we think that when we experience pain in our body, it is a punishment from our body for being the size that it is. And actually, that’s your body communicating to you. Do we trust our body and can we listen to it?
Chris Sandel: I think the scapegoating, or some form of that, happens a lot with the clients I work with, but it’s more the other way around where no matter what’s happening, it’s like, “My solution is I need to restrict my food” or “I need to do more exercise.” It doesn’t matter if I got an email that I didn’t like, I had an uncomfortable conversation with a partner – everything gets seen through the lens of “This is my coping skill” because it really is, and it’s a coping skill that works very well and it’s the best that someone has found up until that point. But it’s just that’s the lens which everything is seen through.
Bri Campos: I 100% agree.
01:08:40
Chris Sandel: In terms of grief outside of your body, have you experienced grief in other areas of your life that meant that you started to see things in the same way because you could see how similar the experience was?
Bri Campos: Yeah. In full transparency, I’ve shared several times before on other podcasts, but for those that are hearing me for the first time, my understanding of grief actually came through the bereavement of my brother. My older brother passed away when I was 21 and he was 23. I remember it was something that we had suspected might happen, but I don’t know, I think sometimes in situations we think we’re invincible and bad things can’t really happen to us. They could, but they won’t.
So when it did, I remember it didn’t feel real. It just felt like “No, this didn’t really happen.” I pretended I was fine. I was like, “Yep, I’m good. I’m okay. This happened, next.” People in my life were like, “It’s okay to be sad.” I was like, “Nope, I’m good, I’m okay.” It was very quickly that that story started to unravel.
In the first two weeks when he died, we were just covered with messages and support and encouragement and food and blessings, and then two weeks later it was all gone. It was like everybody went back to normal and I was now left with this gaping hole that I didn’t know how to exist with.
There’s nothing that will ever replace my brother. There’s nothing that will ever remove the void. But in the 10 years since we’ve lost him, I can say that I have learned to live around the void. There’s the five stages of grief that we talked about, but David Kessler, who worked very closely with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who created the stages of grief, talks about a sixth stage called ‘finding meaning and purpose’. He said some people might not ever get there, but if you can make meaning of your grief, it will mean that it is not all for naught. Like this random bad thing didn’t just happen to you, but somebody can experience healing through the community of that grief. And Elizabeth Kübler-Ross is famous for saying “Grief shared is grief abated.”
If given the choice today, if I could unlearn everything I have but I get my brother back, I would unlearn it tenfold. But since that is impossible, since that will not happen, I am so glad that I have been able to find meaning, to take something so devastating and birth something so beautiful from it. And never in my wildest dreams did I ever think, one, I would have an Instagram platform or be a businesswoman turned coach – none of the things that have happened in my life did I plan for. And because I learned how to grieve my brother, I have been able to figure out how to grieve in other areas of life, specifically my body.
Grief is unending. There’s no arrival. There’s no like, “Okay, done! We’re done grieving.” But having the tools, and the tools that I teach my clients, and the tools that I use myself – when grief rears its head, I know what I need to move through to get to the next phase, to just survive this. You explore the outer edges of grief and you feel like, “I’m going to fall off”, but you don’t. You don’t.
The thing that I have found the most meaningful in grief is grieving with others. So that’s the community piece that is just so essential.
Chris Sandel: Nice. It is such a tragedy to have experienced that, and then as you say, to be able to find some meaning because you can’t change time, you can’t reverse anything, but if I can make something good out of this thing – I think that’s amazing.
Bri Campos: Thank you.
01:13:44
Chris Sandel: What were some of the resources that were most helpful for you as part of that in terms of understanding grief? It could’ve been in that moment, it could’ve been later on as you’re looking into this in terms of body grief.
Bri Campos: Unfortunately, many of the resources were just resources that I figured out myself. Just to add a fun other layer in here, I grew up with a very religious background, and there was also a layer of religious trauma with this grief. So it was very messy.
I would say having a therapist in that time was so essential because I felt crazy. I felt like “I am out of my mind”, and she said, “Nope, you’re grieving.” I was like, “No, no, I was so angry I wanted to key my neighbour’s car this morning.” She was like, “Yep, that’s grief.” I was like, “This feels like an excuse.” She’s like, “No, it’s grief.” Just really normalised every single thing that I was feeling.
I did a lot of journalling in that time of just trying to be able to get words out, like what I was feeling. I’ll often use this analogy for people: when we were kids and we’d jump in the pool and we’re like, “Let’s touch the bottom of the pool!” and you swim down and you touch the bottom. And then you’re like, “Oh shit, I’m running out of air, I need to swim back up the top” and you’re swimming, swimming, swimming, and you’re like, “Thank God I’m almost at the top because I’m running out of air” – and then you think you’re at the surface but you’re not. So then you start to panic and you’re like, “Oh no, this is how I die. I’m going to die swimming to the bottom of the pool.”
That moment from “I’m going to die” till the moment you reach the surface – that’s what grief feels like. That unknowing, unending experience of sheer terror and anxiety and “This is it”, and then there’s a moment of relief. I’ve seen this in my body image. I’ve seen this in – something happened with my therapy job during the pandemic. I ended up being let go, and the shame that I felt and experienced from that experience, I was like, this feels a lot like grief.
But the thing that makes grief harder is when you shame yourself for having those feelings. So I really had to use the same resources of like, “How would you talk to a client who’s experiencing this? How would you advocate for younger you? What would adult you say to you now if she was experiencing this?”
What I can tell you, and what I will gladly say – I mean, it was community mental health. It wasn’t my agency. It was an agency I worked with. It was them. It was completely them. If I wanted to pursue it, I probably could’ve argued it, but to me it was almost a blessing in disguise because I didn’t want to keep working for them. But it was inappropriate, and still it felt shameful that it had happened. I had to be the one to be like, “Nope, you don’t need to justify your experience or why you did what you did. You have evidence from many clients that you’ve worked with who can speak to the issues that they are ‘concerned’ for.”
At the end of the day, they were upset that I didn’t agree with them on a decision and they wanted me to agree with them, and instead of just saying, “Okay, I’m going to agree with you”, I said no, and then they were like, “You can’t take any jobs with us.”
So grief is going to happen in multiple areas of life. It’s going to come up in rejection, it’s going to come up when you don’t get the date, when you don’t get the job, when something you were supposed to do was supposed to happen and it doesn’t, when something happens that you don’t plan for. What I tell people is that if you have the tools, if you have the resources to be able to work through said hurdles, then it really doesn’t matter what it is; you have the resources to move through it.
And those resources include being able to understand the story and the narrative that’s playing out, the ability to cope and identify with how distressful it feels and you experience it in your body, and the ability to reframe and to challenge the negative beliefs or thoughts that are currently taking place.
Again, if somebody’s like, “I want to wear the bikini” and then the thought of wearing the bikini is a stress of a 10, maybe we don’t start with the bikini. Maybe we start with – I don’t know, I can’t even think of something. I can do a better one with “I want to not grieve what I look like in pictures, but looking at pictures causes me trauma.” I’ve had clients like, “I’ve gone and paid for a boudoir shoot and now I’m devastated because I looked at the photos.” I’m like, “Maybe that was a big reach. Maybe we start with looking in the mirror and seeing how we feel in the mirror. Is that less traumatizing? Or maybe we start with your own boudoir shoot at home that you have the ability to control all the angles.”
There’s just so many different things and resources that we can pay attention and trust our body to communicate, “Hey, we’re not ready for this.” There are still things that I am not ready for. I have not weighed myself in the four years that I’ve been going to this doctor, and the idea of weighing myself still gives me enough anxiety that I don’t think it’s important for me to know. I’d love to get to the point where it’s neutral. It might never be neutral. But for right now, there’s no purpose. The only thing that will do is make my day worse.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, there’s no upside to you knowing that number.
Bri Campos: Not at all.
Chris Sandel: There’s no number on there where you’re like, “I’m really glad I did this.”
Bri Campos: It’s a trap. It’s like, “I’ll just see where I’m at.” No, that is a bad idea. I don’t recommend, 10/10.
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting, you talking about the understanding piece with grief and I guess coming to terms with the new reality. I was listening to – I can’t remember what podcast it was, but they were interviewing Michael Lewis, the guy who wrote Moneyball and The Big Short and quite a few books that have been turned into films, and during the pandemic, he lost – it was either his daughter and her boyfriend or his son and his girlfriend. They were in a car accident, and they both passed away.
He was just talking about the experience of grief and how tiring it was. He said just the lethargy and the sheer exhaustion of the grief. And the realisation that he’d come to was that part of this was just his mind now having to rewire and reimagine the reality and the future now without his son or daughter in this world. And that just took a huge amount of brain power, a huge amount of energy for the body.
As you said, it’s not just ‘time heals all wounds’. It’s that time with doing the right kinds of things. But yeah, I think you talked about this experience you had where you were eight years old, and then fast forward 20 years, when you then started to work on this – that’s a lot that you’re then going to have to process. And it’s only then at age 20 years on that you’re starting to come to terms with the reality of “I’m not going to be in the thin body. This thing that I’ve hoped for my whole life isn’t going to come to reality.” And that’s a really long process of having your mind really, truly understand that.
01:22:40
Bri Campos: Absolutely. The other analogy I give for grief, because it’s relatable – and I’ve heard other people describe it like this – it’s like the ocean. If you are trying to swim against the tide, it’s going to wear you out. And so many of us are trying to swim against the tide. We are trying to swim against the inevitable. We are trying to swim against what I call acceptance – the “Okay, this is where we’re at.”
You can keep swimming, but it is exhausting. It is so tiring. So when you get to this point of – and I had this experience with my brother – “You know what, there are going to be times where I am in the grocery store and I randomly start crying, or I will hear a song and it will dishevel me, or somebody will bring up something and it’ll make me realise, oh wow, this is a new grief that I hadn’t even thought about that now I have to figure out how to exist around.”
What I used to do is push off the feelings. I was like, “Nope, I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s fine. Everyone’s fine.” And then the tears would be like, “Okay, we’re going to come out either way.” And I always say, “I don’t cry. I’m not much of a crier.” Or I actually remember my first group therapy session, I told a group, “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I cry in front of any of you.” Of course, I ended up naturally crying in group at some point. But it was like a badge of honour. I was like, “No, I’m not going to cry. It’s fine. I can be in control of this.” I was no longer in control of it.
So now, when grief arises, rather than saying, “Nope, I’m swimming away from you”, I say, “Okay, where are we going to go? Take me where we’re going.” The sooner you accept the wave and the tide and the direction of the tide and you let the tide do its thing, it will throw you back on shore. Eventually. But you can fight it and be exhausted, or you can go with it. Either way, it’s the same result. One is just far less exhausting.
Chris Sandel: I would also imagine when you go with the wave, there’s a completion of that cycle. You experience the grief, and then you move through it, and if you’re thinking about it from a healing perspective, a little bit is then healed as part of that. But when there is the lack of “I’m going to go with this” and you’re fighting it, even if those tears come, my sense is there isn’t the same healing ability.
Bri Campos: Correct. Exactly. There’s no formula for grief. I remember asking my therapist, “Is there a book or a workbook? How do I know that I’m doing it right?” She said, “I can give you some recommendations, but there really isn’t a framework for grief. It’s just messy. It’s just continuing to live your day and learning to exist around this loss.”
Especially when it comes to body image, if your whole life has been centred on your body, it’s like, where do I even begin?
Chris Sandel: Totally. I think by framing it in this way, it allows someone to see the magnitude of it and to then hopefully appreciate why this can be so challenging.
Bri Campos: Right, absolutely.
Chris Sandel: I recently read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I have to hold my hands up and say I haven’t experienced any major grief in my life, so I’m waiting to have this be an experience for me that I can then talk about from a personal place, but I found that book to be at least eye-opening for someone who hasn’t gone through that experience.
The reason it has that title is her constantly thinking – it’s about Joan Didion’s husband passing away. It’s a memoir and about the year of her life following that incident, and her talking about “I’d better not throw away his shoes in case he comes back and he wants them” even though in the same breath, she’s like, “I know he’s not coming back.” And just having this experience again and again.
I think it would be the same with the body image piece as well; even when you can logically understand it, there are still moments where you have that cognitive dissonance, like, “That doesn’t really even make sense, even though I’m still holding this belief at the same time.”
Bri Campos: Yeah. I think it’s also so much harder with body image than it is death because even for death – we do it so bad here, at least in the United States. It’s like seven days or max two weeks. It’s like, they die on a Monday, you have a wake on Wednesday, memorial or whatever, service on Friday, and then the next week people are like, “I’m so sorry” and then it’s done. We never bring it up again.
But for body image – there isn’t even a normalcy of grief for most things. Like when you get rejected from a job, when you get rejected from a partner, when you are missing out on experiences for whatever reason. We don’t necessarily know how to hold space for that. This is why even in the grief journey, when people tell me “I’m not ready to let go of the idea of losing weight” or “I’m not ready to let go of my clothes that don’t fit me anymore”, I get it. I absolutely get it. And is there something that we can do in the meantime, in the current, is there something we can do so that you don’t have to keep wearing the clothes that don’t fit? Or okay, maybe you’re not ready to let go of the idea of losing weight, but can we still work on how you speak to yourself now? Because that’s going to be a skill that you need for the rest of your life.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think the analogy you used earlier in terms of what’s a 1 out of 10 or a 2 out of 10? Like, how do we move the needle just a little bit so this is helping you? Especially if there are skills like you talked about there, like talking to yourself more kindly, that is a life skill that is going to serve you in many arenas. Could we start to work on this? It doesn’t even have to just be attached to body image. We could even remove it from being attached to body image, and let’s work on that in other areas of your life where you feel like “I could be talking to myself better there.” So yeah, I’m definitely in agreement with you on that.
Bri Campos: Absolutely.
01:30:18
Chris Sandel: You talked there a little about holding space for clients. What does this look like for you as a professional, but also, for those who are listening, if they’ve got friends or family or even themselves, how do you think about what holding space looks like?
Bri Campos: Holding space for me is just a fancy way of saying feeling your feelings. I’m clearly really big into analogies. I like to say that body image is like an archaeological dig. The reason I say that is because I think there’s often this misconception that “Okay, I’m going to go on this body image journey and then I’m going to do something for a couple weeks and then all of a sudden my body image is going to be healed.” That’s just not reality, and I can’t in good conscience tell you “Yeah, this is going to work.”
But what I can tell you is that it’s like an archaeological dig in that maybe there’s no arrival. We’re not looking to arrive at a certain place, but we are looking for those litmus tests of can we explore, can we get curious, can we just get all of the information out before there’s a judgment?
When I have a client hold space, I will ask them, if I hear them trying to judge it, like “I know I shouldn’t have done this, but I did this” – I’m like, “Hold on, let’s not hold judgment just yet. Let’s just get curious on what happened.” And differently, for a provider, if you’re trying to hold space, I would say, “Let’s not try to fix it. Let’s not try to go right into fixing or looking for a solution.” Instead, just being open to sitting in the suck.
And I say this a lot to my dietitians. I feel like the way that they are trained is very much solution-focused. “Here’s the problem, here’s the solution.” Encouraging them to be like, what would it look like if you were to not have a solution but know a framework, like “I know where we’re going to try to go throughout the session, but I am not going to say, ‘They said body image? Let me pull out my scripts for body image.’ Let me figure out the worst part about this for them.” And then uncovering those underlying root issues. They’re saying body image, but the reason they’re saying body image is because they’re fearful that people will say things to them, like their family. So what they really need is, one, some compassion from somebody who’s like, “Hey, you don’t deserve this”, and two, maybe we need to set boundaries with people in your life. Really getting specific to each individual person and making it more process-based.
So holding space is without judgment and without an exact strategy of like “Ooh, I’m going to do this.” But framework is good. Having an idea of like, “This is how I’ve moved through it.” But this is the part where it’s like removing myself. Maybe this worked for me, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work for everybody.
Chris Sandel: I think, as you’ve said there, it is just exploration. You’re asking more questions, you’re trying to figure it out with this person, because a lot of the time the script or the explanation that someone gives is the thing they’ve rehearsed the most or the thing that most comes to mind, and actually when you dig a little deeper, as you gave the explanation there, maybe this is more about boundaries or maybe this is more about something else. Let’s really understand this.
There’s often times with clients where they’ll talk about their body like, “I feel worse when I feel fat.” It’s like, okay, what do you mean by that? And actually when we start digging in, they’re using the word ‘fat’ to describe bloating. They’re using the word ‘fat’ to describe when they’re having low mood. It’s this shorthand of a word that they’re using that actually is capturing about five or six or ten different experiences. If we can then really understand what those different experiences are about, we can start to look at, what could be helpful in that situation? How do you sit with the suck in that situation? Or whatever it may be. But I think when it’s more at that surface level, you don’t get very far.
Bri Campos: Absolutely. I always tell my clients this, and I’m sure you say the same: fat is not a feeling. It’s a descriptor of a body type. I think if somebody is ‘feeling fat’ but what they’re really feeling is discomfort, now there’s three things we need to assess. One, we need to assess, are you even really connected to what you’re feeling, or is this discomfort really just fullness? Two, if it is discomfort, can we detach from discomfort feeling fatness and instead, what is this feeling? Is it distressful? Or is it just discomfort?
And third, is there shame? When someone says “I’m feeling fat”, to me there’s a shame narrative that’s coming up. Can we let that go in order to really pursue the process that our client is working through? What is it that they need in this moment to make it to the next group? What is it they need to make it through to their next meeting at work? What is so distressful right now that is also shameful? Shame is not helping you.
So we can undo the shame, explore the discomfort, is it distressful, and then also, is the discomfort actually fullness and can we work on connecting to our bodies in that way?
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think it’s many more layers to this. I think so much of the work is, as you talked about, having clients feel their feelings and being able to correctly label those feelings. It’s about values, and you talked about meaning. I think that’s important. There are so many different ways that this can go. As you said, using a framework as opposed to “I’m going to come up with the exact right solution” is a much better approach.
Bri Campos: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Sandel: Bri, this has been wonderful. Is there anything I haven’t asked you or anything we haven’t gone through that you wanted to chat about?
Bri Campos: No, I think you got everything.
Chris Sandel: Nice. The final question then is just, where should people go if they want to find out more information about you?
Bri Campos: I would say the best place to find me is to come hang out on Instagram with me, @bodyimagewithbri. I am also on TikTok, but I’m barely on TikTok and Facebook. I also have a podcast called The Body Grievers Club. I am not a true podcaster in the sense that I upload every week, but we have a lot of episodes on there that anybody can go and listen to. I try to title them appropriately so if there’s something that stands out to you like “Ooh, this might be helpful for me”, that could be a really good resource.
And then I always encourage people to check out the link in my bio or my website to figure out how you can work with me. I work with everyone from the body griever to the professional who is looking for body image supervision. So definitely check out the link in my bio or my website, www.bodyimagewithbri.com.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put all of those links in the show notes, and thank you so much for coming on the show. It was just great having this conversation with you.
Bri Campos: Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I really appreciate it.
Chris Sandel: So that was my conversation with Bri Campos. She is doing such incredible work, and I love the framing of how much of body image work is about body grief and exploring it through this lens. If you want more information, then I highly suggest checking out Bri’s site and the courses she offers over there.
I don’t have any recommendations at the moment; life has been very busy, and it feels like a lifetime ago that I watched a documentary or something of note, but hopefully that can change soon and I’ll be back with sharing ideas of things to check out.
As I mentioned at the start, I’m currently taking on new clients. If you want help with an eating disorder or disordered eating, chronic dieting, body image, exercise compulsion, getting your period back, or any of the topics that I cover as part of the show, then please reach out. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help for more information.
I’ll be back next week with another episode. Take care, and I’ll catch you then.
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