309: Body Image Freedom With Jamie Magdic

Chris Sandel: Hey. If you want access to the transcripts, the show notes, and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can go to www.seven-health.com/309.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach and an eating disorder expert, and I help people to fully recover.

Before we get started with today’s episode, I just want to say that I’m currently taking on clients. As I said a moment ago, I truly believe in full recovery, and this is the case whether you’ve been living with an eating disorder for a very brief amount of time or this is something that has been going on for many decades.

So if you are living with an eating disorder and you’re sick and tired of living with an eating disorder and recognising how compromised your life has become and how small it’s become and that you want to do something different, I would love to help you reach that place of full recovery. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and as part of the subject line, just put in ‘Coaching’, and then I can get the details over of how we can work together.

On today’s show we have a guest interview, and my guest today is Jamie Magdic. Jamie is a registered dietitian nutritionist and the founder of Side By Side Nutrition, a group of fiercely passionate Health at Every Size, weight-inclusive registered dietitians. Jamie is passionate about providing accessible, expert, quality care to help people fully recover from disordered eating and to learn true body trust and acceptance.

I’ve known Jamie for quite a while. This is something we touch on at the beginning of the show. When wanting to get Jamie to come on the show, we were thinking about different ideas of what we could cover, and Jamie has a book. The book is called Food and Body Image Freedom Workbook and Journal: Find Body Love and Food Freedom Without Diets, Food Obsession, and Weight Shame. As the title would suggest, this is all about body image work and helping someone to do that work and all of the different processes to go through as part of that.

So that is really what we cover as part of the show. It’s all about the different aspects of body image. As part of this episode, we talk about Jamie’s relationship with food growing up and her body growing up and how she developed and overcame her own disordered relationship with food and body, and I think a lot of this was then the impetus for the book and her then becoming a dietitian, as she talks about.

In terms of the body image stuff, we talk about brain science and body image, we talk about body tolerance, we talk about inner positivity, body checking, body attunement, exercise and body image, and really so much more. There is a lot that we cover. This is a very wide-ranging conversation, really touching on so many different aspects of body image.

So that is it with this intro. Let me get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Jamie Magdic.

Hey, Jamie. Thanks for joining me on the show today. I’m really excited to chat with you.

Jamie Magdic: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

Chris Sandel: We were talking before we hit record that it was probably back in early 2019 that we first chatted, and I’ve been following what you’ve been doing since then, so it’s really nice to actually have you on the show. I think in 2019 I came and did an Instagram Live for you or did something with you.

Jamie Magdic: Yeah, we did a little video back in 2019. It’s good to connect, and a lot has happened since then, so this is exciting to reconnect.

Chris Sandel: Yeah, definitely. I think for today, we’re going to spend most of our time talking about body image. I know this is a topic that comes up a lot for my clients; I’m assuming the same for your clients. It’s something that is very front-of-mind and comes up a lot with eating disorder recovery. So that’s really where I want to spend a lot of our time today.

00:04:00

A bit about Jamie’s background

But I guess just as a starting place, let’s talk about you. Give listeners a little bit of background on yourself – who you are, what training you’ve done, that sort of thing.

Jamie Magdic: Yeah, absolutely. Jamie Magdic, she/her pronouns. I’m a registered dietitian nutritionist. Prior to becoming a registered dietitian, I was a teacher for about four years. Right away, I knew that I wanted to do something that was still helping people connect with people, but that felt a little bit more aligned with my passions. So I went back to school almost immediately and became a registered dietitian.

What my career has looked like as far as being a registered dietitian has been exclusively in disordered eating, eating disorders, body image at an outpatient level. I came right out of school and started that and started taking clients and began supervision and mentorship and all the learning. I started where I wanted to do working with disordered eating, intuitive eating, and quickly, quickly found that on the spectrum, you are going to see eating disorders.

It’s really funny because ultimately, when I was going to school, I thought, “Eating disorders is the one thing I don’t want to see.” That’s the thought that I had. I didn’t explore it; I think it was kind of unconscious, because it’s something I didn’t look at in myself with what I was struggling in the past. Because in the past I did struggle with an eating disorder for quite some time – probably on and off for seven years without any help, and then it became more disordered eating. So yeah, it’s really wild how the stars aligned.

When I went back to school and started doing my education outside of school as well and found the intuitive eating space, the Health at Every Size space, the fat positive space, I started also diving deeper into my relationship with food, and then I really fell in love with working with more complex eating disorders. So I shied away from doing more of the intuitive eating and disordered eating and really wanted to work with those complex eating disorders. Ate up all the education and mentorship and worked with a lot of wonderful supervisors.

So that’s how the stars aligned and I fell into it. And then the stars aligned again with forming a group practice. It was just me, solo private practice, and there was a need for folks who provided accessible care and specialised care in eating disorders that were also what I felt practising from a safe, ethical place. So because I couldn’t refer to people back then in 2020, because there weren’t many of us who took insurance and followed similar philosophies and worked with eating disorders, I decided to hire my first provider. Then wanted to take really good care of her, so it continued to grow into what it is now at Side By Side, which is 12+ and growing dietitians at our practice. We’re able to serve 200 clients a week and growing. It’s been fabulous, and such a journey.

So yeah, that’s what my career has looked like so far. I’ve branched off and I’m doing some other stuff as well now. But yeah, does that answer your question and give you a little bit of background?

Chris Sandel: Yeah, it does. It definitely gives us some background. I’d love to find out more about you before you were a dietitian.

00:07:43

What food was like for her growing up

You mentioned, obviously, that there was this eating disorder and disordered eating. If we go back earlier than that, what was food like growing up? What was food like in your household?

Jamie Magdic: Absolutely. I don’t reflect on this too much. It’s interesting; sometimes when I’m asked these questions on the spot, it’s the first time I’m processing and thinking through it. But yeah, growing up, definitely there was a lot of diet culture in the house. Definitely ‘good food, bad food’ mentality. Also ‘good bodies, bad bodies, acceptable bodies, unacceptable bodies’ – comments like that from grandparents and parents, and also at school. Even in junior high, people were already bullying each other and making comments.

It was definitely something that I internalised without really being very conscious of it, as I think many people aren’t. But it’s something I started to internalise and follow rules and overexercise from probably 6th or 7th grade. I remember 7th grade, making sure I got in a certain amount of exercise every day, from a punishing place, and started really restricting food and not really understanding it, but I remember it feeling very defeating from that point.

So growing up, food definitely was still enjoyable; we enjoyed all different types of foods. There was really no food off-limits at my house, and I was never told that’s something I needed to do. There were some comments made about my body for sure from different people, but I also was very much a perfectionist, really caretaker, wanting to be in control. I think that’s part of my personality that picked up on this as something that I should also look at and perfect and control as well.

So it was a combination. There was a lot of good things about food and enjoying food and then there were also a lot of comments that for sure I picked up.

Chris Sandel: When it started to change and you said the exercise started to increase or you started to restrict your food, was there some pivotal event before that? Is there something where you went to Weightwatchers with someone or something happened that sent you down that road?

Jamie Magdic: It’s so hard to pinpoint what exactly started it and how heavily I got into it because it was such a long time ago, and I was not very aware of it, my parents weren’t very aware of it. I never got any help or support around it. It was never noticed, although it did impact me so greatly.

But I think that what I did notice, when I reflected back on my journey, there have been pivotal moments of different traumas in my life where it really spiked and it really got a lot worse. And then when those things felt a little bit better or before the next event happened that was pretty traumatic, I would have a period of feeling a little bit more ease with food and body image, and then something would happen. So of course, reflecting back on it, it was absolutely a form of coping with my emotions and big emotions and me feeling very sensitive to other people’s emotions and struggles, where it really took hold, I would say.

So those pivotal moments – but I don’t know really when I started to fall into and why I started to fall into those behaviours.

00:11:36

How she began recovering from her eating disorder

Chris Sandel: And then in terms of finding your way out of that stuff, when you were talking earlier, it sounded like it was through studying as a dietitian that you started to become more aware of these things. If I pulled you aside when you were 15 or 16 or 17 and you were honest, would you have thought there was something going on? Would you have ever said, “I think I have an eating disorder, or I think I’m doing things with food that feel unhelpful?”

Jamie Magdic: I do remember 15, 16, 17, there were some moments I confided in a few different people. I remember telling a close friend of mine, a cousin of mine, and my sister at different points, probably from 14 to 18. I was expressing, “This isn’t normal. Something’s going on.” That was the extent of it as far as me consciously being aware and being afraid of saying something. But I think at that time, too, there’s a lot of confusion around, what is health and wellbeing, and the necessary managing food in your body that you are told you need to do and that you hear, or that my parents were doing. So it was a confusing thing.

I definitely also, though, if a trusted person were to ask me, I probably would have said, “This doesn’t feel normal, but I don’t know how to stop doing this, or maybe I don’t want to stop doing this.”

I think you had a two-parter question. Oh, when I started being conscious of that and helping myself out of it or understanding it was something I wanted to help myself out of – yeah, I would say I had what would be all-important but what was a diagnosable eating disorder from probably 13-14 up until maybe 22 years of age. Once I hit 22, I think other things started to settle as far as different events in my life that were traumatic. I feel like I maybe didn’t need to cope with really big emotions anymore.

I still had disordered eating and tendencies and a lot of body image issues and got into a place of – and my eating disorder definitely morphed into different types, but I got into a place of maybe chronic dieting or trying to find the version of ‘healthy eating’ that was the most ‘pure’ or whatever. That stage. So I feel like I was in that place for a while, feeling a lot better, and that also probably didn’t prompt me to move forward or really work through it at that time because it felt more normal and less unsettling. But still, again, causing me a lot of distress.

I happened upon – it was before I became a dietitian when I understood this, but I was going to school to be a dietitian, which was a process over three or four years. It was my second bachelor’s. I was doing a lot of work outside of my schoolwork, and I came across a few different podcasts. probably Christy Harrison’s podcast was one of them, a couple other intuitive eating podcasts, and it made a lot of sense to me. I think your podcast as well was one of them that I started listening to. So just a few that really stood out and started changing my way of thinking and had me dive a little bit deeper into my relationship with food and body and just myself and coping and emotions and therapy.

Oh, and also, when I was thinking about working with clients, really going to school and hearing things from others about how they would practice with their clients and knowing I wanted to, right off the bat, be in private practice – when I would hear other students or dietitians in the field speaking about food and body, it really also prompted me to think about how I would be safely practising with clients or what I believe and what my philosophies are. And I just couldn’t get down and agree with this disordered eating and this healthism and this superiority.

I think that also discouraged me, and this was a second degree, so it started to scare me a little because I thought, “Oh my goodness, I’m almost done with this second degree and I don’t know if I really want to be telling people how to eat or telling them I know more about food and their body than they do.”

Very fortunately, I found these other philosophies that I aligned with greatly and wanted to share and help others with. So yes, that would be the other thing that forced me to look at my relationship with food and body: thinking about how I wanted to help others when I became a dietitian.

Chris Sandel: Nice. That’s so lovely to hear, because I think for so many people who do have a history of disordered eating or an eating disorder, going into dietetics can be a real recipe for disaster because it legitimizes so many of the disordered behaviours and patterns of thinking and all of that. So for you to have it be a lot more jarring and the reflection being “Hey, I don’t want to do this” as opposed to it legitimizing what you were doing before, I think that’s a really useful and helpful and lovely recognition that you had.

Jamie Magdic: Thanks, yeah. And thank goodness, too, for me practising in a safe way, because you do see a lot of people with really good intentions but just are not aware of the disordered patterns or see how that might be a problem or are able to have something that forces them to look at it, and then they are practising that and spreading that disordered eating mentality and that idea that you can’t trust food, you can’t trust your body, there’s a superior way of eating, “I know best” kind of philosophy that I was seeing providers practise with. I feel fortunate.

00:18:11

Key aspects that helped her in recovery

Chris Sandel: Is there anything else you want to add in terms of things when you reflect that really helped you move forward in terms of your own recovery?

Jamie Magdic: I would say in addition to learning more about my relationship with food, I really learned more about my relationship with my body, and that is something that is just so complex and large. When I think about what I worked on when I think about working with body image, it really had a lot to down with my relationship with myself. A lot of self-compassion work and understanding what that is and how I treat myself in a lot of different aspects of my relationship with myself. I would say that was probably a huge catalyst in my relationship with food and why I’m so passionate about talking about body image right away and really looking to understand what that is for yourself. I feel it’s a very important part of people’s nutrition journey, how that impacts.

So I would say just the idea of self-compassion really hit me hard. I also became a mom at that point, a stepmom to a six-year-old, and I think some new life events as well prompted me to want to reflect and grow and look at things a little bit outside of myself as well and how I wanted to teach her about food and body image. Again, processing with you in real time, I would say those were the big catalysts for me.

Chris Sandel: We’re going to definitely get into more of this as we go through chatting about body image. But I think the thing off the bat with hearing this in terms of self-compassion or being a role model for someone else, often when people think of body image work, it’s like “I need to take selfies” or “I need to be loving these certain parts of my body and overcome some of my struggles around that stuff.”

And it’s not that that can’t be a part of body image work, but actually, I think body image work is a lot deeper than that and is a lot more to do with self-concept, it’s a lot more to do with how you spend your time. As you talked about there in terms of looking after this young human and how you wanted to be a role model for them – probably connects to the values of “What do I truly value in life?” That kind of work. So I want this conversation, as we’re going to demonstrate, that body image work is a lot broader than most people think about.

Jamie Magdic: Yeah, absolutely. In a really great way. I think it’s really hard to put body image and body image work into this neat box because it is so complex, and it does really encompass so many different pieces of people’s lives. I think that’s what drew me to it – not only seeing that for myself, but seeing that with clients and how each individual and the complexity of their body image journey and what makes up body image, and all you can do around that, and how it propels people forward really excited me.

And I really like a good challenge. [laughs] So not having a lot of body image resources out there, with it being a very difficult conversation to have with folks in session, it was something that I had a huge passion for and still have a huge passion for. Understanding what that is and how we can have that conversation, its entirety, with that individual to really get them to that solid place with understanding their relationship with their body and having an intuitive, compassionate relationship with their body.

00:22:10

What is body image?

Chris Sandel: I know you’ve written a workbook all around body image, and I’m going to pull some of the concepts as part of that out and we can then have a conversation about it. I know you’ve just started with this is a huge, broad topic that includes lots of different things, and my first question is: How do you define body image? How do you put it into a little box? [laughs] But if you were to define it and if there is a definition that you use in the book, what do you use?

Jamie Magdic: That is funny, because I love having this conversation, and sometimes it’s so difficult for me to have this conversation because it is so complex. I’m like, how do you even begin talking about this? I love working one-on-one because then right away I can have them guide me to what we need to start working on.

But if I would say how you would define body image, I’m pulling it apart, and I can pull that open and describe it – but just if I were to say for myself when I think about body image, I would say just your relationship to your body. I think it’s super helpful to view it as a relationship. The relationship between you and your body. And that encompasses so much: how you relate to the world, individuals, yourself, how you see your body, how you feel about your body, how you take care of your body.

And when we start to pick those apart, there’s so much within that as well when it comes to self-image, self-worth, self-confidence, the different parts of you if we’re talking IFS, how you take care of yourself and how you speak to yourself, how you feed yourself, how you view weight and size and bodies and health. So as you can see, I’m already starting to describe body image and it’s very hard for me.

I would just say your relationship with your body, and that is so different for every individual as well. Hopefully that answer made sense. [laughs]

Chris Sandel: It did. I feel the same in that there isn’t a nice, concise – unless you completely strip it down to ‘it’s the relationship you have with your body’. And as part of that relationship, there are all these other component parts that you talked about. It can be the aesthetics, but it can also be the sensations and the feelings. It can be how you talk to yourself. It can be your history in terms of experiences that have happened. It can be the meaning that you attach to all those different experiences. It can be how you move and use your body.

So I’m totally in agreement with you in that, yeah, there are lots of different parts connected to this, and that means that when we’re thinking about doing body image work, it’s doing all of these different areas, or exploring all these different areas. And for some people, some of these we don’t really need to touch. If this isn’t a real pain point for someone, or this is actually something that feels pretty straight forward, this isn’t where we need to put a ton of attention. But there are these other areas where it does feel like self-compassion is a really big thing that is missing, so we need to put some focus there.

Jamie Magdic: Yes. You said that so beautifully. I very much agree with that. I think it’s very hard to describe in a definition what your relationship with your body looks like because it’s very similar to saying “What is a romantic relationship? What is a parenting relationship?” There’s so much that comes into play when describing that.

I think it’s so individualised and it’s so complex, but I also think it’s very important to, as a provider and with working with folks, have a concrete framework of all of the different things to explore so we don’t have any stone left unturned, so there’s no missing part, so there’s a lot of guidance in how to explore it in a safe way, without rushing too much ahead, where we have education. So I do believe also in a concrete framework, and that’s where this programme and journal come in with all the work that I’ve done with clients.

But as you mentioned, some folks sit for a long time in one section of body image work, really needing to explore that and get comfortable with that. Some people need to keep coming back to the same part of body image work. And then some people skip over certain parts and don’t need certain parts. And I find that’s very similar with food, when you start working on your relationship with food. You might think, “Wow, I have all these fear foods” and you start experimenting and working with some rules, and then you jump over and you don’t need to work on the other things if you naturally understand them. Or some people really, really need to focus on each aspect for quite some time. It’s really different for every individual.

Chris Sandel: For sure.

00:27:05

Brain science: neuroplasticity related to body image

One of the things you talk about in the book is connected to brain science and body image. What is it that you’re talking about and sharing there?

Jamie Magdic: I think that’s part of the introduction or the toolkit. I have the course toolkit, what to use and what to remember and what to come back to when you are working through body image and food.

When I think of neuroplasticity, people’s habits, beliefs, behaviours – people have these ideas and thoughts that are so ingrained. The definition of neuroplasticity is that your brain can change, you can create new neural pathways to create new beliefs and new behaviours. I think that’s what makes body image work so incredibly hard as well, one of the things, is that people have these really reinforced thoughts that they reinforce with behaviours that are then also reinforced by the rest of the world and diet culture that tell them certain things about what body image work is and what they should be doing to ‘take care of their body’, if they can trust food, if they can trust their body.

They have these really strong thoughts that become beliefs that impact them, and I think it’s really hard for people to look at because they are sitting with these old pathways, needing to go against them and create new ones – which is huge, because that feels like a very comfortable place, even though it might be causing us a lot of distress. So it takes a lot of patience, time, bravery, courage, and support to start rebuilding those pathways, because rebuilding that means challenging your belief systems, really going against some thoughts that feel like they are protecting you, and trying really scary behaviours that you have convinced yourself are not right and the wrong thing to do. So it takes someone being really ready to do that work. It’s tough.

Chris Sandel: I agree with that. I think one of the things when I was thinking about what you said there in terms of the way we have ingrained belief around body image – for a lot of people, the message that they received is “I will have better body image if I am in a thinner body or I have a body that matches more up to society’s standards of beauty” or whatever it may be. That means that the only way they’ve tried to have that improve is by dieting, is by exercise, is by restriction, etc.

So when you’re trying to say, actually, body image is a lot broader than that, and actually, by keeping up this focus and fixation with “I need to reduce my size” or “I need to have this be a particular way for me to feel confident”, it really keeps you stuck in that narrow band and actually is perpetuating the uncomfortableness that you’re feeling around that. It’s then getting someone to really understand that and starting to explore other alternatives, because it can feel like “What you’re telling me doesn’t make sense. This is the one and only thing that is ever going to make an improvement in terms of how I feel in my body.” Yeah, I agree with you.

Jamie Magdic: Yeah, that’s super frustrating to me, because I think it does keep people stuck for so long, and it’s really hard for people to come across an opportunity to maybe look at what they’re doing and look at what they’re being sold and told by diet culture and what body image work is. Because that is what most people are going to see when it comes to “Hey, how can we feel better about our body?” Manipulating your body, manipulating food, dieting, changing your body, losing weight, whatever way they want to change their body to feel better about body image.

And that’s just going to bring you deeper and deeper into a tougher, more anxiety-provoking, less intuitive relationship with food and body. But it’s what people see everywhere, so going against that I think is very difficult. And I think using shame in that regard and using this idea that you cannot trust your body, you cannot trust food – of course people are going to not want to give up the idea that dieting is the thing that is going to ultimately save you and get you to a place where you can feel comfortable around food and you can trust your body and you can feel comfortable in your body. It’s hard to walk away from that.

So that’s one of the first things I start to do with clients, and actually that’s a huge part of the beginning of the workbook and programme. And even before people start to come into it, really starting to challenge these things and seeing that that’s a possibility for them right now to start to be ready to open up their mind to these new concepts that could be pretty new and scary to folks.

Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think the part that can also be tricky is that often there was this honeymoon period where that did work, whether that was “I was losing weight, it felt really easy, I felt really good, I got lots of praise” and there was this window where it felt really easy. It could be 10 years, 20 years since then, and yet we still come back to that.

Or there can be situations where “Just because I’ve been told something for so long, it seems illogical that something else could be true.” I’m thinking of conversations I’ve had with people where they can recognise that “When I was in a smaller body, I was more isolated. I had more anxiety. I was less confident. I wasn’t seeing people in the way that I was. I wasn’t able to go to parties in the way I am now. I didn’t have the freedom I have now.” And yet there is still the feeling that “I don’t want to put on any more weight than this. Life is going to get worse if I put on more weight than this” – when every increase since they were at that lower place has led to a better quality of life. There is still this fear and this uncertainty and this cognitive dissonance around the fact that “This doesn’t make sense to me. It can’t be that way.”

Jamie Magdic: Absolutely. People can have a lot of evidence and experience, which I really try and have people look at, because they have to come to it themselves – which is, if this way is the ultimate way that would have worked for you, losing that weight or being a certain size or this diet, then we wouldn’t be here right now. We wouldn’t still be struggling. We wouldn’t be more anxious. We wouldn’t be trying our next diet.

I think another really, really tough part of it is that even though 96-98% of diets fail, even though they see that experience, they also very much hear and are marketed to this idea – we want to be accepted in our world. We want to be loved, so when we’re hearing messages that tell us “to be loved, to be accepted, to get whatever you’re desiring in life, this is an important piece of it”, it’s really hard to let go of that idea.

I think people feel like when they’re letting go of diets, from the conversations that I’ve had with clients and for me, they’re also letting go of the opportunity to feel comfortable in their body, to be able to have maybe a relationship with someone that they are interested in or go after certain goals or have a certain lifestyle. I think they feel like they’re giving that up, too, which is very scary.

00:35:13

The importance of building trust with yourself

I think that ultimately, there’s something you said there that stuck out – that cognitive dissonance, when people are feeling like they’re logically able to understand that that wasn’t a better place to be. I think that it’s so important – I’ll probably use this a lot today, but when it comes to trust, when we speak of trust we have with ourselves, it’s so important to really have a solid, whole trust with ourselves, and keep growing that and diving into understanding that. I think that is the same when it comes to our relationship with food and body.

I think when you’re able to build that and have that trust with yourself, trust with what you want, trust with what feels good with your relationship with food and body, I think it’s really hard to turn that corner – after you’ve turned that corner and you have that trust, I think it’s hard to turn back and start sliding backwards because you’ve experienced it and you know.

Anyways, I’m getting into the weeds. [laughs] Sometimes I think when I talk, I’m really high level instead of breaking down the little things. Hopefully that makes sense.

Chris Sandel: It does. And definitely I want to talk about the body trust piece, because it is really important. I guess one of the other things that came to mind when hearing you speak there, I think a lot of the time, for many people, it can be the trigger of being around other people. That can be other people in real life, it can be other people on Instagram or social media. One of the things that I’ve noticed from having conversations with people is their mind instantly goes to these stories about what is happening in someone’s life. Someone who has the ‘better’ body, there’s all of this story that is attached to that about what relationships they’re having, what sex they’re having, what amount of money they’re making, what a fantastic time they’re having in their life, etc.

What I’ve noticed – and this is something I will say to clients regularly – because I’ve been doing this work for so long, when I see someone whose body matches up to society’s standards, I’m not instantly going to, “Wow, they must have the most amazing life.” My thought pattern is, “I wonder what is really going on with that person. I wonder how happy they truly are. I wonder what they’re having to do to keep that up. Is that where their body naturally truly wants to be, or are they having to do a lot of things to have that occur?”

Just recognising, “What is the story I’m creating connected to this person that I’m imagining or this person that has triggered something for me?” Because we are meaning-making machines and we’re always creating some kind of meaning or story connected to something, and that will have a big impact on our own expectations and whether we’re meeting those expectations or not. It has an impact on how we’re experiencing it.

Jamie Magdic: Absolutely. I always get very curious about that as well. One conversation I like to have with clients right away when we’re talking about body image is, again, some of that education they have not received. Like when it comes to the science and research behind body image, there are 10 components that impact someone’s relationship with their body where we can put people into categories of having a good relationship with their body versus a poor or stressful relationship with their body. Of those 10 components, not one of them is what people’s bodies look like.

I always use this idea. I have a twin sister, and her relationship with her body was way different. And we’re twins; we have the same body. When we are just logically thinking about, why does one person have a good relationship with their body versus another? Why can one have such a poor relationship with their body when another person who’s the same size / shape has a wonderful relationship with it? – that’s because it truly is not dependent on what your body looks like.

So breaking that part and giving some of the science and research behind what actually makes up body image, and then bringing their experience into it, because I think, as you mentioned already, when you can bring your experience and really look at it and sit with, “When I was at this size, when I was manipulating in this way, was it actually better? Did it actually bring me what I wanted it to bring me?”

Again, not to get too in the weeds here, but as well when you’re talking about that comparison and sitting with other people and being triggered in that way or always creating these stories, I think that’s why, again, really going to that body trust – when you have such a solid relationship of trust with yourself and what you know you want and that being unwavering, it’s very hard to be swayed by other people. I think that’s where you can build a lot of resilience when it comes to being out in the world and being part of diet culture.

00:40:46

What is body trust?

Chris Sandel: You’ve mentioned body trust a number of times, so let’s dive into this a little more. When you think about body trust, what does that mean? But also, if you’re trying to help someone to build that or you’re suggesting ways for someone to build their body trust, how should people be going about this? And I know I’m asking a huge question.

Jamie Magdic: You’re asking a huge question, but I like it. But I also hope I don’t confuse people.

When I think of body trust – and I’m opening up my workbook here, because before I even dive into body trust with people, I talk about – oh yeah, see here. I’m looking at the Table of Contents in the workbook right now. I go into body hate and body shame. When I’m thinking of body trust, the reason I mention other things that come before that is because people have to be open to the idea that they can trust their body, which means they need to explore the idea of maybe letting go or sitting with body hate and body shame and starting to tolerate their body enough to open up the doors to allowing body respect and body trust to manifest and start to build in their life.

I introduce body trust and body respect together, and I think those are the doors that open up what everyone is actually looking for when they think about body image, which is starting to feel comfortable and confident and like their body and be able to do X, Y, and Z in their life without fearing what people are going to think about what their body looks like or how they’re going to feel in their body when they go out and do these things.

Ultimately, we want to get there. We want to help people get there, and it’s going to look different for everyone. Everyone’s journey and destination is going to look different. But in order to get there – and this is a lot of the work that I’ve done through working with eating disorders that our practice does, and we dive into – is starting to build that idea of body respect and body trust.

What I view body trust as is getting to a place where we used to be before diet culture came in, before weight and size became good or bad or shameful, or we started hearing others’ beliefs. I view that as like a garden. It was when our garden was not – there weren’t toxic things thrown in our garden or someone planting in our garden that we didn’t ask for. It’s our clean slate prior to that.

Because I believe, and I think everyone would agree, that we’re born with body trust. We’re not born with this duty in our life to have to manage and manipulate food and our body and always be in control and have it take us away from life. So getting back to that place. And sometimes people can’t remember that place of body trust when they were a kid or young adult where they listened to their body, they didn’t think much about it, they thought “What feels good? How much do I want to eat? What do I want to eat? How do I want to move?” They just didn’t think about it much because they had that trust before they’d been told good/bad, “you can’t trust these things.”

So when you’re able to get back to that place, it’s so intuitive, it’s so easy. I’ve found for myself and for clients that when bringing them to the place where they can trust where their body’s supposed to be with their size, that their body is taking care of them, that they can trust food and have all types of food and be around all types of food and all different types of environments and eating in all different types of ways, not needing to eat in this routine way, but finding what feels good for them – when they get to that place, I love getting to that place with clients because then they’re able to feel what they used to feel again, which just feels so grounding and solid and intuitive that it’s really, really hard then to believe anything different, because it’s coming from an intuitive, compassionate place, and you truly feel like “I am in control. I don’t need to be in control. I don’t want to be in control. I have an awareness, an acceptance, and did all the deep work to really understand and believe that I trust my body. I trust food. I trust me around food. I trust me around movement.” It’s just an unwavering place, which I love getting people to.

Anyways, does that answer?

Chris Sandel: That answers the question. The thing that I take most from what you said there is that body trust is a verb. I think what can often happen is it feels like “If I do enough journalling, I’m going to get to this place of body trust” or “If I have this insight from listening to this podcast between the two of us, then I’m going to have this feeling of body trust.” And actually, body trust is a lot more of “I did lots of things, and I did it over a period of time, and I realised that I can now trust my body through having these different experiences. Yes, it was scary going to the pool the first time, and then I did it 5 times, 10 times, 20 times. And yeah, there can still be some anticipation anxiety, but I know I can get through that.”

And the same with going to this place to eat food or going on this holiday or doing this activity. “I did it again and again, and by doing that, I showed myself that I can do these things. It’s not how my eating disorder or my unhelpful thoughts are leading me to believe. It’s gone very differently.”

Jamie Magdic: Yes, absolutely. I’m really glad you named that. I was describing a place you can be, but to get there, yes, it takes a lot of practices to build up that body trust. You do have to build that back up. You do have to practise taking away these things that are built on distrust and disrespect and then bring in the new things, which is foods and bringing different foods back in – and as you mentioned, different body image exposures. Getting to the beach or wearing whatever, having that experience with your body that might be more vulnerable. And you have to do these things over and over and over again and build those experiences, absolutely. It’s tough work but really wonderful work.

Chris Sandel: I also think it can be useful to have certain conversations where there are these ‘aha’ moments where people frame things differently or see things in a different way. I think one of the things that people get stuck with is “What are people going to think? And how would I deal with the fact that someone made a comment or someone didn’t like what I was wearing or had something that was not very nice to say or nice to think?” or something along those lines. And this feeling of “I would never be able to tolerate that.”

One of the examples that I will often use is that I want you to reflect on your life and I want you to think, are there certain areas in your life that you couldn’t care less if someone thought differently than you do? So if I said, “What if your favourite band?” or “What is your favourite film?” or “Where is your favourite place to go on holiday?”, if someone said, “I really dislike that music”, you’re not going to stop listening to that band. You’re going to feel like, “That’s great. You can not like that thing. I feel really confident in this.” So there are already many places in your life where you are okay with people feeling differently than you do, and that you’re not having to get every person in the world to love your favourite band before it’s okay for you to listen to it.

I know this can sound a little trivial, but I think it’s really important to recognise that “Hey, I’m already able to do this in many other realms, and the reason I’m not able to do this here isn’t because I have to change the world. It’s because I just need to change how I think about this thing. And if I think about this thing differently and feel differently, doesn’t really matter what the rest of the world is thinking about this.”

Jamie Magdic: Right, absolutely. I don’t think it’s trivial at all. I think it’s a really good question to ask and get curious about, “Why do I not care if someone calls me short, but I have such a reaction to if someone’s commenting about my body?” It really tells you, “This is something I need to look at and explore my relationship with that myself.” I think it really helps for people to have that awareness. I think that’s a really good question to ask and get curious about, absolutely.

00:49:58

What is inner positivity?

Chris Sandel: And then in terms of – you talk about inner positivity. What is inner positivity?

Jamie Magdic: Inner positivity, I think that comes along a little bit later in my work with people. At the end, you’re looking at the end of the programme, which is positive acceptance, beauty, and body compassion. I think those are hard concepts for people to – not wrap their head around; I think that’s where they want to go. Opening up the idea that that is somewhere where they can go is hard to do when they haven’t been in a place of respect and trust.

So when I talk about inner positivity, self-compassion – I’ll just speak to self-compassion – that is actually one of the 10 components that has been researched that impact people’s relationship with their body. Really what it says, how positive people are about themselves and in life versus people who tend to be a little bit more negative about themselves, about life. That is one of the components that impact people’s relationship with their body. Without going to that specific page and speaking to that, inner positivity, just how you are navigating life, your relationship with yourself, from a place of being more positive, hopeful, seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty. Those things impact your relationship with your body.

Having that view of yourself, too, of “What makes me ‘me’ is my body, but also my qualities and my strengths and my quirks” is part of inner positivity, is part of that positive acceptance. That also impacts your relationship with your body as one of the components of body image.

Chris Sandel: That makes complete sense, because really, how you’re viewing yourself and your life has an impact on body image. It’s so common that when someone has body image struggles, it’s not that everything else in their life is going really, really well and they just have body image struggles. Because even if on paper, everything in their life appears to be going very well, if I was to ask them about that, it wouldn’t be how they would think about it. From their perspective, their relationship’s not as great as it should be, or “I’ve got this job that everyone thinks is a great job, but I feel like I’m the imposter there. I don’t think I’m good enough, I feel like I’m falling behind”, etc.

What I’ll typically notice when someone’s struggling with body image, it’s really a reflection of how they’re thinking about so many other components of their life. And in a lot of ways it mirrors that. As life gets ‘worse’, body image gets ‘worse’. And as life improves, body image isn’t quite as much a struggle as it was. Because what often happens is how someone feels about their body is just a proxy for how they’re feeling about their life.

Jamie Magdic: Oh yeah, and in their coping. I would say that really mirrors my journey with my relationship with food and body, how life was going and how I was looking at life and the different hardships I was going through, the different trials I was going through. That makes all the sense.

I think that with that inner positivity, something that I think is so – are you showing yourself compassion or are you shaming yourself? I think it makes all the difference, and it’s so important, and I think there’s a lot of misconceptions around self-compassion, almost it being self-indulgent or like letting yourself off the hook, when self-compassion is understanding that we all suffer and this is shared in life, and how we take care of ourselves around the suffering and can be our own cheerleader – which means taking care of ourselves. It means coming from a place of “How can I be a friend to myself?”

And again, going into the weeds, that was a huge part of my journey, and I’ve listened to a few different podcasts – and I do not know this individual, but they were talking about how disordered eating and eating disorders, they believe, is a disorder of shame and a disorder of lack of self-compassion. I have seen with my work with clients and why it’s such a huge part of my programme and workbook as well, self-compassion I think is integral. It’s such an important part.

When you’re going through the whole process, when you’re going through the struggles of “I’m trying to stop binging and I just had a binge” – how are we reacting to that? What is your tendency? Are you then shaming that? Are you getting curious and taking care of yourself because you just had a hard moment? How are you responding to that? I think that a lot of my folks who are really struggling really struggle with being kind to themselves, and I think it really reinforces that cycle and keeps them stuck in the disordered eating and the body shame and having negative body image.

Chris Sandel: Yeah, I totally agree. The first session when working with people, I bring in self-compassion. Or at least after the first session, there is an exercise they do connected to self-compassion so that we can have a conversation around it because it is so integral. Self-compassion is hugely important for everyone, but if you’re going through recovery, you are going to be coming up against stuff. And how you react to that, how you speak to yourself, how you care for yourself is going to have a really big impact on what happens.

00:56:00

Myths around self-compassion

And I also agree with you; I think there’s a lot of myths around what self-compassion means. There’s a big difference between self-criticism and – I think there’s this feeling that “If I’m not critical of myself, I’m never going to hold myself accountable. I’m never going to have any kind of self-awareness. I’m just going to bumble through life and make a mess everywhere and not care” – it almost feels like this slight narcissist is how we think about what self-compassion is.

And really disagreeing with that. You can have very, very high self-awareness of “Hey, I really messed up in that conversation I just had with my friend. I can’t believe that I said that. That didn’t go the way that I would like it to go. And I’m going to make amends to this.” That’s self-compassion. We don’t then have to be telling ourselves that we’re worthless or we’re such a (fill in the blank). You can be “My God, I wish I’d done that differently, and I’m going to hold myself accountable and I’m going to make amends and deal with this.” You don’t have to bring in self-criticism.

So I think being aware of that, because I think it feels like there’s these two alternatives that people have in their mind where actually neither of those are really what self-compassion is about.

Jamie Magdic: That shame holds them more accountable and almost is more productive, when in reality it is absolutely less productive and less helpful. I mean, even when you think of an intimate relationship with someone, if there is someone who is feeling a lot of shame, they are going to have a hard time looking at that and then making the changes that might be necessary that they might need to look at, versus someone who has compassion, understands “Hey, I’m human, I’m going to make mistakes”, can look at that from that place, do the necessary self-awareness, and make those changes that, again, come from an intuitive, grounded place.

I think shame is just so destructive, and I think there’s a ton of – as you were chatting, I’m trying to find the five top misconceptions around self-compassion because I thought that might be helpful to bring up. But I’m sure people probably know what we’re talking about, and we kind of hit on it.

Chris Sandel: For sure. I think sometimes the argument is “Well, self-criticism has been really successful, and it has propelled me to be able to get along in life and to get this job or to get this thing.” And it’s not that it hasn’t helped you to get there; is that the best way to do it? How has your experience been when doing it in that manner? You can have two people who are just as successful; one has done it with being very kind and self-compassionate to themselves, and the other has done it through self-criticism. And I know which one I want to pick. I know which has been a more enjoyable experience going through it. I know who’s in a better, happier, more enjoyable place right now.

So it’s not that it can’t get you there. It’s just, is this the tool you really want to be using?

Jamie Magdic: Right, absolutely. What journey feels better? What journey do you want to be part of? I think that is the whole idea of when you’re asking, “Does self-criticism actually work? Does it work in a way that aligns with you, and does it work in the long run?” Very similar to diets. Okay, it’s ‘working’ temporarily, but what else is it bringing to your life that is going to cause you distress? Where are you going to be when you get there? It’s very limiting. I very much agree with you.

01:00:11

What is body attunement?

Chris Sandel: Then in terms of body attunement, I know this is another piece that you talk about connected to body image. Talk about this.

Jamie Magdic: Body attunement, the ability to be attuned to your body’s needs, wants, desires, feelings. That gets super clouded and really hard to be able to do when you have all these external rules and you have all this distrust around food and you’re following external advice. Being attuned to your body is essentially a huge component of intuitive eating and body trust. And that is being able to uncloud and really assess these external rules, diets, advice, so that you can come back to yourself and learn how to reconnect with your body without all that noise. Or maybe that noise is still there, but you’re working to instead not listen to that noise and listen to your body and understand what your cues are.

So many people are so disconnected from their cues or how they even feel in their body. This goes beyond hunger and fullness cues; it also comes down to your attunement with how emotions feel in your body, and how you exist in your body and how you sit in your body. So attunement I think is huge. Day to day, hour to hour, you are checking in with your body, and that is informing you about how to take care of it, and how building off of those experiences also teaches you what may be routines and consistencies and regularity and structure that you do want to put in that come from a place of attunement as well.

That’s how I would describe attunement. That’s how I work with attunement. It’s a nice place to be.

Chris Sandel: With the attunement piece, is a lot of this around – if I’m thinking about from an emotion standpoint, attunement can be just being able to recognise and label what that emotion is, because before I could maybe label three emotions, but now, by spending more time becoming aware of these things, there’s a lot more emotions that I can recognise. Because if I’m able to recognise different emotions, I’m able to recognise what could be the solution to that different emotion. If what I’m feeling is loneliness, I need more social connection. But if I’m feeling anxiety, I need something different to this. Or if I’m feeling jealousy, I can deal with this in a different way.

Giving you more of a gateway to start to explore these things as opposed to “Anything that comes up that’s negative, I have to use the blunt instrument of restriction or exercise.”

Jamie Magdic: Yeah, absolutely. I think you named that very well. It’s the ability to get very curious with what’s coming up as far as your emotions, I would say even your thoughts. When working with attunement, there’s a few things that pop up that I think are important.

One of those things is self-care and a self-care assessment. Beyond feeling uncomfortable, do you know what emotions are coming up behind that? And then in turn, do you know how to take care of that emotion apart from using your disordered eating behaviours or apart from shaming yourself or hopping on and off the scale? Learning about, what do I need and what feels good for me around all these specific emotions?

I think being in tune not only with your emotions, but around, as I mentioned, hunger and fullness, but also movement. “What feels good for my body? Does my body feel good moving in this way? Does it feel good moving at all today? What am I actually experiencing in my body if I were to stop, I guess, avoiding it or coping in these unhelpful ways?”

I think there’s a variety of ways to explore attunement that are helpful. Even when I just think of binge eating, right off the bat, I really like clients to get in tune to not only how they’re feeling during the binge, but how they’re feeling after, what they’re saying to themselves, how shame might be playing a role in that, what might be the trigger to binge, what feelings they may be having underneath that that they can take care of themselves in other ways. So yeah, I think attunement is just another form of building body trust, getting to know yourself as well. Yeah, another large topic.

01:05:35

Self-compassion + managing expectations around binge eating

Chris Sandel: Sure. Just in terms of that last piece there in terms of, “Okay, we’ve had a binge; what’s going on afterwards? How am I speaking to myself? What was the chain of events leading up to this? What was happening an hour before? What was happening a couple hours before? What’s been happening yesterday, this whole week?” Starting to understand this, and very much from a “Let’s get curious. Okay, so this thing happened. Let’s explore this.”

Removing the judgment piece with it and coming to “So this thing’s happened. Let’s explore how this occurred.” And again, not from a judgment place, but an “Okay, let’s look at what happened. Maybe this could be connected to where you are in your cycle, or I can see that you haven’t slept so well for the last three days, or I can see that you were working overtime at your job.” What are some of the things that could be an explanation for why this thing has occurred, so that we can start to figure out what needs to be happening so it doesn’t occur again.

And this is not to then demonise the binge. In a lot of ways, it’s often “You needed that food to come in, and you needed that food to come in before this event, and your body got to a point that this was the only way that it was coming in because you hadn’t been recognising the signs. So what could we be doing next time in advance of this happening so that your body’s not requesting this food in this manner?”

Jamie Magdic: Absolutely. You’re speaking very compassionately to yourself. That’s really productive for you in how you’re speaking right now versus if you were to be shaming the binge, shaming yourself even before you get into the binge because you’re having thoughts of binging, and then shaming yourself throughout it and shaming yourself after, which totally shuts the door to having that mindful curiosity and having that awareness.

I think that is so, so essential. That’s one of the things in the toolkit that we talk about right off the bat before diving into things: building non-judgmental, mindful curiosity. Because it’s so important to be able to even have the opportunity to look at what you’re experiencing. Learn more about it, understand it more, and to then help bring you to the place where you want to go or solve what you want to solve. Yeah, absolutely. You just speaking compassionately is a great example of when we’re talking about the importance of self-compassion. It comes into every piece of this.

And I find I love working with binge eating. I think that one thing that I see that you are demonstrating and that you’re speaking to is when we start to challenge the binges, bringing back in all food, normalise regular eating patterns, what I find people get so stuck on is that shame – them saying “It should look like this” and judging their experience. Like “Oh, I binged on donuts and I brought donuts in every day this week and I’m still binging” rather than getting curious and having that self-compassion for themselves. It gets them stuck. So I think that’s a huge part of working with binge eating, is really understanding how deep that shame goes and bringing them to a place of self-compassion. Because I think it really fuels continued binge eating.

Chris Sandel: Yes, definitely. The worse that you feel about it, the more of a big deal that you make it out to be, the more compensating that is then made afterwards, the more that just becomes a vicious cycle.

Look, I’m not living in some la-la land that I’m like, “Oh, it’s really wonderful, you must’ve had the most enjoyable time when doing this.” Yes, I understand that there are painful emotions connected to this, that there can be unhelpful thoughts that arise. It’s recognising that those things are there, and what are ways that we can then truly support you so that this starts to become something that’s happening less and less, until it’s something that’s not happening at all?

And as you said, in the beginning, as people are bringing in more foods and they’re bringing in more of that variety and more of that freedom, often there will be more binges to start with. This is connected to the fact that this stuff has been off-limits for so long and now it’s becoming available and there is a much higher amount of novelty connected to this. There can be a lot more of feeling like “I’ve crossed some invisible threshold of how much I was allowed” and that then perpetuates a binge taking off. So there are lots of reasons why.

I’m always a big one for managing expectations. Like, this is likely to occur in the beginning, and this is completely normal, and that’s fine. I think being able to talk about all of these different components is really helpful.

Jamie Magdic: Absolutely, I think setting up expectations is huge. In body image work, too, talking about body image work, “This is what the journey looks like. We want to get really real on your intentions. Here are the different paths. Here’s where we might visit” I think is really important for people. Because it’s very scary. So I think helping people manage expectations and also maybe having a little bit of framework and understanding can help them to do the very scary thing.

When we’re talking about binge eating, it’s a very scary thing to do, and a lot of times those fears are confirmed when you’re like, “See? I don’t have control over this food.” So before even bringing that food in, setting that expectation of “You’re going to feel very out of control. We have to just keep going.” I think that’s why support is really helpful so people don’t confirm that and then go back to the other ways that are unhelpful in how they’re taking care of binge eating, which is to take that food out. So yeah, I agree.

Chris Sandel: I also think, one, I want to validate someone’s experience and what they went through, but two, I don’t want to get connected to the eating disorder line of thinking, which I think can so often happen with someone seeing a therapist about something who isn’t necessarily trained in body image. They’re like, “Maybe you shouldn’t have had that third piece of pizza” or “Maybe you shouldn’t have had those donuts.” It’s then colluding with the eating disorder thoughts.

So yes, I want to validate that this was uncomfortable for you to go through – and this is what happens as part of the recovery journey, and you’re not doing anything wrong, and this is all normal. No, we don’t need you to start restricting again and take all these foods out of the house or all of that type of advice that is often given with good intentions, but it is misguided.

Jamie Magdic: It totally is. It’s like, “Let’s be an intuitive eater up until this point. Then we have a rule. Then we have a limit.” Theres’ so much of that, and that’s where I feel like people get stuck in this pseudo-recovery, which is really something I am super passionate about and why I talk about full trust. I don’t want you to need me, to need my programmes, to need to continue to see me, need any of my rules that I put in place, because you have your own internal compass if you get to that full trust.

When talking about binge eating, one person always comes to mind because they worked so hard and they had such a distrust with this specific food. It was donuts. Many people who don’t know disordered eating / eating disorder work or body image work would have been afraid themselves, like “Ooh, yeah, you’re losing even more control. You’re eating even more donuts. You’re having even more binges. We’ve had X amount of donuts every single day for every single meal” and would have pulled away because they don’t have trust in that person’s body and in their capacity to get to a place where they can listen to their intuition and work through those things.

So I think about, if we don’t get to that – if I stopped with that client and we got to a place where this person kind of trusted donuts and had a better relationship but didn’t have another box – it’s scary, but box after box, for as many days as we needed to – they would’ve never been able to be like, “Oh my gosh, these are just donuts and I can take them or leave them and I’ll have them when I want, and now I understand the pull to it because I went through that scary process.”

But when you’re working with a provider who doesn’t trust that themselves, it can be very confusing and it can get people stuck in this “I have less rules but I still have rules”, and that still doesn’t feel free. I was stuck in that pseudo-recovery place for a long time. It still is very disheartening. I have a lot of thoughts about that.

Chris Sandel: I feel the same way in regard to recovery with body image connected to weight and weight gain. There’s some point where someone’s like, “Maybe this is too much” and at that point the provider is needing to be like “No, what you’re doing is actually correct. Your body knows what it is doing here.” And it’s not that we can’t look at different things of what may be contributing, or is there something we need to be taking into consideration. But I think what can often happen is “You’ve gone over some threshold; we need to start backpedaling and do something different.”

That’s just very unhelpful in terms of filling someone with all this feeling of distrust and “Maybe I’m the one that this isn’t going to work for” and “See? This is what I thought from the beginning” and “Why did I get started with this?” That then becomes really unhelpful, versus someone being able to say, “What you are doing is actually the right thing. Your body does know what it’s doing here.”

Jamie Magdic: Right. It’s the right thing, your body’s going to figure it out, you’re going to figure it out, and of course it’s scary. And how can we take care of you around it, and how can we create a little bit more structure where we’re dipping our toe in the water, not jumping straight in, and then you’re like “I never want to get back in that water again”? Creating that structure and safety at the same time but continuing to keep moving forward, absolutely.

01:16:45

What is body tolerance?

Chris Sandel: Another thing that you talk about is body tolerance. When you’re thinking of body tolerance, what is this?

Jamie Magdic: When I speak to body tolerance, it’s just that. It’s the ability to tolerate your body, to sit with those really distressing thoughts around body image, around food with your behaviours, and getting to a place where it’s within your window of tolerance, where you can continue to move forward and navigate it while having the ability to tolerate it so you can move forward. Because if you don’t have that body tolerance and we can’t get to that place, it’s really hard to make change.

This looks different for everyone, but body tolerance is often the place where people are starting. We’re introducing maybe some ideas; they have come to me and they know what they’re doing isn’t working, but they also know and feel that “I cannot tolerate my body. I hate my body.” So we have to work to get to a place where we work together to come up with a plan or just understand, how can we maybe get to a place where we are tolerating how we’re feeling with our body and taking care of ourselves around that while we’re letting go of these behaviours and ideas that we know, and you know and you’ve come to understand do not work for you, enough to have that window of tolerance to be able to explore new behaviours and new thoughts, beliefs, and education where we’re not getting hyper- or hypo-aroused where we are then unable to do the work necessary to move forward?

So body tolerance for almost every client is where we start needing to sit, whether with their distressing body image thoughts and feelings within their body.

Chris Sandel: From a practical standpoint, if someone was saying “Hey, I’m having a lot of body distress, I’m wanting some help to learn some body tolerance”, what are some of the ways that you would go about that? And obviously it’s collaborative, but if you were to say “These are a couple of things that I would suggest or people could try”, what would they be?

Jamie Magdic: A few things. When I think of body tolerance, I think of this metaphor – I forgot where I heard this, but where if you are sitting with these really distressing thoughts and feelings around body image and it’s like this wall in the room, usually what people are trying to do is because it’s so distressing, they’re staring at the wall and they’re trying to push the wall away, and they’re putting all their energy and effort into that wall.

I try to describe it as, okay, that wall is in the room; we are going to look the other way, focus on other things. So taking focus off of that. That is a lot of distress tolerance. It might be we’re covering the mirrors in our house. We are – and this might be hard to do initially – getting rid of the scale. Whenever we go to body check, whether we are checking in a mirror, on the scale, in clothes, with our hands around our body, we are trying to lessen that. We’re trying to lessen the distress and then finding ways that are helpful for you to cope, whether that is a mantra that really is something you believe – not like something outlandish that they can’t jive with, like “My body is okay where it’s at.” A lot of people don’t feel that way. But “Good is to take care of myself in this way.” Whatever it might be, whatever mantra sticks with them.

So trying to decrease the amount of distress that comes up and use some other coping, whether that is doing some breathwork, noticing the five senses, like five things around the room of a certain colour, that practice. There’s a lot of therapeutic practices there. Some grounding techniques might be like lighting a candle. These are things to put your focus elsewhere, to calm your nervous system. Those are some things I would say.

I could also go to that part of the workbook to see what I have there. But a lot of distress tolerance, and there’s some distracting in there that’s really helpful. And I wouldn’t say distraction is helpful in your journey, but at certain points, like in the body tolerance phase, it is helpful to do a bit of distraction as well.

01:21:30

ACT + IFS therapy techniques as part of Jamie’s work

Chris Sandel: Nice. Do you use acceptance and commitment therapy? Is that something that’s part of your practice or the way you work?

Jamie Magdic: Yes, absolutely.

Chris Sandel: Cool. When I’m hearing you talk about that, there’s a lot of things from acceptance and commitment therapy that would be really helpful in those moments, whether that is using something like the various different diffusion techniques in terms of dealing with the unhelpful thoughts that are coming up or using something like dropping the anchor, which is, as you talked about, coming back into that present moment so that you are noticing things around the room, you are noticing your breath, you are noticing things that you can smell, you’re coming back into this present moment.

I think one of the things I would add with this – and I think actually the metaphor around the pushing of the wall is probably a good one – is that a lot of the distress is actually around the resistance piece. It’s the “Why is this thing happening to me? Am I going to be able to tolerate this? What happens if this is still here in 15 minutes? This feels too much.” It’s all of the stuff that is added on top of the experience that someone is going through.

So when someone says, “It was really uncomfortable”, okay, let’s talk about the thing that was uncomfortable. Can we focus on that actual sensation within the body? What often happens is there is that initial sensation and then there is all of this suffering that is layered on top of that. A lot of what acceptance and commitment therapy is about is, how do we stay with the actual present discomfort and not get all hooked up in all of the thoughts and the struggle and the suffering that is layered on top of that?

And yes, that is a practice and there are different techniques for doing that, but if I’m thinking about, how does someone genuinely build up that tolerance, that is one of the ways.

Jamie Magdic: Yes, absolutely. I think in addition to acceptance and commitment therapy, what I find very helpful is internal family systems work. Part of that body tolerance phase and work that I do with clients, right before to right after, we talk about body shame and body hate, and that’s where we bring in the introduction of parts work.

Without giving too much explanation – I’m sure you’re aware of what parts work is –

Chris Sandel: I am, but I haven’t talked about it very much on the podcast. And I don’t actually use internal family systems myself; it’s something I’m aware of. I think Dick Schwartz is fantastic. There’s an incredible podcast – I’m not the biggest Tim Ferriss fan; I like some parts of Tim Ferriss and not other parts of Tim Ferriss. But there’s a really great interview that he did with Dick Schwartz, who invented internal family systems, where Tim actually has a session with him. I think it’s probably one of the best demonstrations of what it is, what it can look like, how it works. I will put that in the show notes, and I highly recommend that people check that out.

Jamie Magdic: It’s so amazing.

Chris Sandel: Spend a couple of minutes talking about what it is.

Jamie Magdic: Yeah, I’m going to explain it a little just because I feel like this is so important when you’re talking about body tolerance. If people are like “Oh man, I’m having a really hard time tolerating my body”, a lot of times I think it’s because we have a really hard time not looking at that wall and trying to push it because it’s this huge wall that is very much impacting us that we really want away.

So when I think of body shame and body hate being that wall – so we’re trying to tolerate our body, but we have this part of us that really hates our body and feels a lot of shame, and that brings us a lot of discomfort – when it comes to parts work – and Kelly Ulmer, she’s a therapist, she/her, does an interview in my programme, and she talks a lot about the role of body shame in parts work. She’s an IFS therapist. We’re actually all getting trained at Side By Side in IFS so we can use it. It’s amazing. It’s so helpful because we need to be able to sit with that.

01:26:01

Parts work in IFS therapy

So parts work is this idea, this philosophy, that you have lots of different parts of yourself. You have your self part that you are born with; it’s the curious, compassionate, creative, courageous part of yourself. And then there’s these other parts that pop up to protect your system, and they all work together.

The parts that pop up throughout your life and your experiences are firefighters and managers. Those are binging and restriction and shaming your body and hopping on the scale, controlling food, purging, exercise, all of that. It comes up to protect these exiled parts, which are those parts that are really hard to look at that we work on in therapy. Thoughts of “I am not good enough”, those thoughts and feelings of shame and guilt and abandonment that we push away that these firefighters / managers take care of.

And a lot of times, we get stuck in these firefighters and manager parts and then we need to get back to our self part.

The idea behind a really important piece of this is that there are no bad parts. There are no bad parts of us. They’re all trying to help and serve us. So when we look at body hate and body shame, this is a part of us that really needs to be heard and understood, and it is not going to give up without a fight because it has reasons to be there, to protect us from these exiled parts. So we really want to get curious about it.

Another way I would say with body tolerance that I have found helpful – and I found it helpful in a lot of my life – is by letting that part exist and get curious about it. A lot of times that allows it to step aside. If we were sitting in a lot of body hate and we wanted to get to more body tolerance, we can – and I’m doing a super watered down version, explanation – but we can get curious and say, “Hmm, what are you trying to tell me?” When you’re saying “Hey, don’t forget, you hate your body, we need to change it, this is so shameful” – when I don’t want to look at you for a second and let you speak and lead, what are you trying to tell me?

By getting curious and opening up to it to let it speak to you and maybe say “Hey, I’m protecting you from feeling those feelings of abandonment or feeling not good enough or feeling like you can’t get those things in your life you might want to get” – whatever it’s telling you, we can then have a conversation back and forth, and I’ll be on the same side and look at it compassionately and even communicate back with it and say, “I hear you, I see you. You’re an important part. You’re not going anywhere. You can pop up at any point in this process to come back and remind me of these important things. But right now, what do you need to be able to step aside so we can let the self part guide us?”

And maybe be a little bit more curious about what it might be like to tolerate our body and open ourselves up to new ideas of body respect and body trust. I think that allows for that part, that important part that we can’t push away, that we don’t want to get rid of – we just don’t want it to be leading – it allows it to sit there in the room and for us to feel like it’s heard and understood.

There’s a lot to that, but I find that idea so helpful for clients because they feel a strong pull to that body hate, and of course they do; it’s trying to serve a purpose. So we want to let them know it’s going to be there. We can get curious while we explore these other parts of ourselves, too. And it can happen at any point.

Chris Sandel: I think what often happens, it’s either you get sucked in with the body hate, so you then believe “I need to do all of these things”, or you then get judgmental of yourself for the fact that “I do have this body hate, and why can’t I just appreciate this body I have and this life I have?” Then there’s all of that to where whatever way you cut it, it feels like you’re doing the wrong thing.

So yeah, I like that idea. And I often talk about this connected to eating disorder thoughts. People can get so angry about, “Why am I still having these thoughts? Why are these coming up?” My response is always, they’re trying to keep you safe. This is something that you’ve done for a really long time, so your brain is saying, “Hey, remember we do this thing? This keeps you safe.”

And even if it doesn’t actually keep you safe, that’s at least the way it is interpreted for your brain. So like some small child who is really demanding and saying, “Hey, I need this from you”, it’s not that you then start shouting at the child and saying “No you don’t” – you can comfort the child and also say, “We need to do this or we’re going to do this a different way.”

I do think the way that people frame things and imagine things really has a lot of power, or can have a lot of power to it. There’s a really lovely example of just how much words can impact on the way that we think about it. They did this experiment – I think it’s German speakers and Spanish speakers, and they took words in those languages where in one language they would feminine and in other languages they would be masculine and then asked them to describe that object.

One of the objects they used was a bridge. In one dialect it’s masculine, in one it’s feminine. The way that they described it matched up to the masculine or feminine. So it would be ‘sleek’ or ‘beautiful’ or ‘gorgeous’, or it would be ‘strong’ or ‘solid’. This has a really big impact. All of these little things have a really big impact on us.

So if we imagine that part of ourselves in one way versus another way, it’ll have an impact on how we relate to that part, or how big and powerful we think of that part as being versus how tender that part could be.

Jamie Magdic: Absolutely. Language is so important, and we spoke to that multiple times within this time together as far as, how are you speaking to yourself when it comes to the binge? How are you speaking to yourself when it comes to the eating disorder? And you named that. I think it’s really unhelpful to actually name the eating disorder part as something that you don’t like and shaming that eating disorder part, because it’s part of the team. We have to get to know it. We have to understand it. We have to make sure the role that it serves, it understands it can let go of that role because we have something else we can now use that’s going to be much better for the whole system and that part can stop doing the heavy lifting. So we’re all on the same team.

That is understanding that we’re in the water and we don’t know how to swim. We have to grab onto that raft, and that raft is the eating disorder. That is okay. What we can do is maybe let go of it for a second, that raft or log, swim a little on our own, and come back to it. Then maybe swim a little bit more and come back to it until we learn how to swim without that.

That’s how I like to view it. We’re all working together. There’s a reason we have this log or we’ve created this raft and this part of us, and we can show it kindness and understanding while we’re working to swim on our own or have that self part guide us. I think that is a very important framework, and there’s a lot of research behind it, too, speaking to internal family systems, and in that way, there being no bad parts, rather than externalizing the eating disorder, demonising it. It has negative effects and impacts on people’s recovery.

Chris Sandel: it also can get in the way of someone understanding, why is this thing still going on? The take on this is “This is doing absolutely nothing for my life. It is serving absolutely no purpose.” I’m going to disagree with that. There could be a way better way of getting all of these things, but it is doing something for you. it is giving you a sense of control. It is giving you a way of avoiding something that is uncomfortable. And even if these things don’t feel like they’re conscious, underneath, it is doing something for you.

And that can be because of the state that you’re in, the fact that you are in this eating disorder state, because of being malnourished, because there hasn’t been enough energy coming in. That can be the thing that is underneath all this, driving why this is occurring. But in that state, this thing is doing something for you, and we can figure out what that is, we can explore that, and at the same time recognise there are other ways to be able to deal with this.

Jamie Magdic: Yes, absolutely. It is a resilient way of surviving, and absolutely, when I think of the development of eating disorders in certain situations, in certain environments, whether it’s an eating disorder or another form of coping, whether that’s becoming very avoidant – all of those things are very resilient things that people pick up when they don’t have the tools or means to take care of themselves in another way.

I think then people hang on to those patterns, so it’s important to understand how that developed, and like you said, find a better way when that is available. Because I also want to honour and recognise that some people are still in those situations and still in those places where it’s harder to let go of that than maybe for some folks who are no longer in that same situation where they have built up that resilience through coping with an eating disorder as well.

01:36:15

The importance of having positive peers + environment

Chris Sandel: For sure. One of the other pieces that you talk about in part of the book is having positive peers. What does this look like in reality?

Jamie Magdic: Your environment, of course, really shapes your relationship with food and body and your thoughts and beliefs. With relationship to peers, I forgot exactly what they spoke to, but in that section we have another therapist who talks about boundaries. Whenever you bring something up, Chris, I’m like, “There’s a million things to go into here.” [laughs]

But when it comes to relationship with peers, I think a couple tangible tools that people can look at and start working on is in your relationships, from your inner circle to your outer circle, how are they impacting your relationship with food and body, and how can we start to take care of that and change that? Whether that is – one of the things we like to do right away for body image with our clients is we start cleaning up their social media, because you are getting constant reminders or these messages about good bodies versus bad bodies. You only have maybe one type of body in your feed. A lot of diet culture in your feed.

So when you start to expand and rewire and let your mind see all of these other bodies, all these other ways of doing things, all these other beliefs, it’s extremely helpful. It can be very hard, though, for folks to start doing that as well. But from social media and what you’re bringing in and those relationships to your close relationships – your close relationships are really going to impact your relationship to your body.

Whether that is maybe needing to take a break from a relationship, cut out a relationship from your life, or create boundaries in that relationship and understand what those boundaries may be, that’s important. And that’s, again, one of the 10 components when it comes to relationship with your body: people with relationships with others who have good relationships to their body, that very much impacts their relationship with their body image. It’s a very real and impactful thing when it comes to body image, relationships. Small and large, close and not so close, they all have an impact, from social media to the people you’re living with.

So I think it’s really important to understand “How is this impacting my behaviours when I’m around this person, when I’m having this social media relationship with this person? How is that impacting my behaviours and my beliefs?” we like to do a little bit of clean-up and raise some awareness and make some boundaries around that.

Chris Sandel: Definitely. The quote that comes to mind – and I think this is talked about in a different context, but you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, or something to that accord. So if you’re spending a lot of time with people where living in a certain body shape or size or dieting is really important, that’s going to rub off on you, and that’s going to have an impact. And yeah, we can all be our own selves and we can care about the things we want to care about, but if that is then a huge focus of those people’s lives and it’s coming up a lot in their conversations, it’s coming up a lot in their values, in their judgments, all of those things, then yeah, it’s going to be harder to be around those people.

So yes, you can have boundaries and just say, “Hey, when we’re hanging out together, I don’t want to talk about this” – and you may find that you can genuinely do that, and that there are ways that you can be with that person where you have other overlapping interests and hobbies that have nothing to do with the dieting piece or have nothing to do with the body aesthetic changing piece that they’re into, and that can still continue on and you have a great relationship there.

And then there’ll be other times where the recognition is it’s just not going to work.

Jamie Magdic: Right. Yeah, you have the power and control over establishing and naming those boundaries, and the rest is up to them, whether they’re going to respect that. That is not in your court, and you can then decide, “Okay, based on how they’re responding to me expressing my boundaries, how now do I want to take care of myself? What do I want in this relationship moving forward?”

Chris Sandel: That’s not a permanent thing, or doesn’t necessarily have to be a permanent thing. I definitely find that for many clients, in the beginning, someone talking about their diet or this new exercise thing that they’ve started or the fact that they lost weight is just so triggering and so harmful for them. It sends them into a spiral. It causes so much distress to hear that. And then fast forward six months’ time, a year’s time, however long, they’re able to hear that and it just doesn’t have an impact in the same way.

The response to hearing that of “I’m so unfair, I’m missing out on the opportunity to do this. Why does everyone else get to do this and I don’t?” now becomes “My God, I am so thankful that is not me. I’m so happy this is not how I’m now spending my life.” So it may be that at some point in the future, you’re able to tolerate a lot more of those comments, and it just doesn’t bother you in the way that it used to, so that relationship now does start to work for you.

Jamie Magdic: Yeah, absolutely. And how cool is it – I love when people come to that place and they’re like, “Wow, I have so much trust and understanding around my relationship with food and body that I can just sit with it, and actually, I can have a conversation and maybe plant some positive seeds.”

But when you’re taking care of yourself, you absolutely need to put yourself first and put a pause if it’s triggering and going to cause you to go backwards or be distressed. So yeah, those absolutely can change, and you can absolutely bring those back into your life. Just might want to assess having a little bit of a pause in those.

Chris Sandel: For sure. Jamie, we have covered a ton as part of this conversation. Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you wanted me to ask you, or is there anything you want to add? I’ll get to website and social media and all that in a moment, but in terms of the topic of body image, is there anything we haven’t covered?

Jamie Magdic: I don’t think so. I think if I could say one last thing that I really would want people to get out of this, it’s regardless of how stuck and confused you feel when it comes to body image or how uncomfortable it feels, having a better relationship with your body is absolutely possible. I would not be doing this work if it did not feel like people can get there. So I would say just keep going. Don’t give up. Keep looking for additional resources. Don’t give up on yourself, because you can truly transform your relationship with body image and get the support you need in order to really feel free and comfortable, and then in turn, that impacts all aspects of your life and your relationship and your opportunities and the way you can bring more of your values into your life. I guess if you ever are feeling hopeless in that, you can get to better relationship with your body.

Chris Sandel: We are definitely on the same page with that. I totally agree with you. So where can people go if they want to find out more about you?

Jamie Magdic: @jamierd_ on Instagram. Jamie the Dietitian, I believe, is the website. Yes, it is, jamiethedietitian.com. The work I like to do with clients now, as I mentioned a few times, is the programme I have that helps people to work on all those aspects when it comes to their relationship with food and body, to leave no stone unturned and to really dive into all the things we talked about plus more that I’ve been developing for years so that people can get to that finish line and not be stuck in pseudo-recovery.

In addition, there’s the journal. People can find my journal. It’s kind of hard to find. If you go to the website first, then it will bring them to the journal on Amazon. It’s a 500-page journal. It goes along with my course, and it helps people navigate this, kind of self-paced, explore the different concepts. So yeah, those are a few places.

Chris Sandel: Cool. I will put all of those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for doing this and for being so gracious with all of this time. I really enjoyed this.

Jamie Magdic: Yeah, thank you so much. Tis was very fun. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Sandel: Awesome.

So that was my conversation with Jamie. If you liked what we covered as part of this episode, then I would highly suggest or recommend that you get her book. It’s called Food and Body Image Freedom Workbook and Journal. It’s available on Amazon. It’s probably available lots of other places; that was where I was able to find it. So yeah, if you benefitted from this conversation and you liked a lot of the areas that we touched on, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is covered in that book.

So that is for this week’s episode. As I mentioned at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients. If you’re wanting to fully recover and you’re wanting the support and the help and the guidance to make that a reality, I would love to help. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I can get the details over to you.

That’s it for this week. Have a wonderful week. I’ll catch you again soon. Take care!

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Here’s what we talk about in this podcast episode:

Intro