The WHY behind the In Our Skin podcast

From episode 1 of In Our Skin listen on Apple or Spotify.

Before we begin. I want to talk to you about why this podcast is here. This podcast is a culmination of 15 years of experience working as a therapist, supporting people who've struggled with their self view, body image and the way they engage with food.

In season one of In Our Skin, we're going to focus greatly on how our relationship with food plays into our view of our body and our view of ourselves.

I want to help you see where change is possible not only in relationship to food but in the way you see your body and the way that you feel and the skin that you're in.

As you move through this podcast, we're going to be exploring how our relationship with food developed. So much of what we've learned and absorbed over time might not be working for us anymore. We might not still actually feel that it is real and true for us, but without really looking at it, we might not even be questioning it. So much of what we learned about what is right or wrong, good or bad might not actually be serving us anymore.

I want to help you zoom out to see for yourself if the way that you engage with food, the way you think about food and your body. Is really aligned with the way that you want to live? So that we can begin to change and rectify. This is a complicated one for many of us. We'll be diving into the struggles that so many of us face, the highs and the lows, and we'll be on this ride together.

Over the years I've worked with people who have struggled with chronic dieting, restriction, overeating, binging, purging over exercise. And some of the more subversive: Weighing, calculating and using apps. The list could go on and on. The false sense of control that comes with adding and subtracting calculating and containing oneself. Today we actually see “wellness” replacing “diets”, or more often, diets under the guise of wellness, further adding to the confusion. Our feeds are full of examples of how to live, how to look, how to be. So much fodder for our comparing minds.

What you will learn here will not only apply to your relationship with food and your body, but to your life as a whole, because that's what it's all about. Your life as a whole. When we are struggling with food we're struggling in our relationship with ourselves and this bleeds into every area of our lives.

My hope is that listening might inspire some change in the way you're looking at things. That you might spend less time and energy on the things that aren't serving you so that you can put that time and energy toward more deserving dentures. So that you might feel more free.

With this podcast, I hope that you take away what you need to get the change you want for yourself. Starting from wherever you are right now in this moment. Now this isn't a replacement for therapy think of it as a supplement, a resource along your journey.

You may have found your way here, feeling alone. What I've learned firsthand is that we are all more alike than we are different. The women in the groups I've worked with have been so often surprised to hear their own struggles described by another. I say this to remind and reinforce that there are women out there right now who have felt what you have felt and struggled like you have struggled, and who have made the changes that you are unsure you can make. It is possible.

I made this podcast because this is the hard stuff of life.

It can be hard to talk about and harder to navigate. Not feeling comfortable in our bodies is a painful experience. It can leave us feeling different, less than, frustrated, stuck, anxious and depressed.

Have you ever felt that you're not good enough? Have you ever felt like a failure because you just can't seem to change in the way you think that you need to. Do you ever feel like you are inept or maybe that you're not worthy, that there's something wrong with you because you just can't seem to get out from underneath the struggle. I can tell you that there's not been one single woman who has walked into my office who couldn't relate. So often, that same woman feels like there is something that is wrong with her body and she also can often think of some woman in her mind who is really nailing it. Who's figured it all out. But I can tell you this: If we asked that woman, she would list the things that she's struggling with, the things that she feels like she's not doing quite right. The thing she could do better. The thing she could change. None of us are immune.

Have you ever thought that if you changed your body, you would finally be happy?

Or rather that your happiness hinges on your body changing? Do you think you ever look at others whose bodies are the way you believe yours should be and assume that they are happy? I want you to ask yourself that. Notice that without even recognizing it, sometimes we adopt a way of being; thinking that if we are like someone else, if we just do what they do or cook, like they cook or dress like they dress or get to be the same size that they are. That we will have whatever happiness we assume them to have.

It's not a bad thing. It's not something to judge ourselves for. It actually happens so subconsciously we rarely recognize that we're doing it. You might feel a pang of jealousy. You might actually hate that person, but sit with it. Notice. You might just be projecting something onto them. And it's something that will help you learn as you go. It will help you learn about yourself. It will show you what you really want for yourself and it will also tell you a lot about the lies you've been telling yourself about what you need to do and how you need to do it. Maybe there's another way.

If you've been trying to live your life by the rules or through diets, punishing yourself and exercising rather than enjoying the movement, trying to find the solution to what feels like a problem and seeing your body or yourself as a whole, as the root cause, I'm glad you're here.

If you've been trying to contain and control the struggles and chaos in your life with food or feeling that food is creating the chaos, I'm glad you're here.

I know that many people arriving here might already believe that change isn't possible for them. That they've tried, failed, felt like a failure so many times that now it's chipped away at their belief in the possibility. Stay here and listen.

If you're someone who's embracing change and feels lit up by the possibility of something new for yourself, you belong here too. My hope is that you find solace strategy and support and listening, and that maybe you feel like I'm here with you.

I want you to understand yourself better, to understand why you make sense, how all of these challenges make sense, and that none of this means anything about who you are. I want you to understand that the struggle does not have to define you. It is not who you are and this does not have to be a forever struggle. You can actually get to a place that is less stressful, less self-defeating, more chill, more confident. This struggle does not define you. It might be taking up a lot of real estate in your head right now, but it is not who you are.

 I want to help you understand how to make change that can really last. As women, we could certainly use a collective healing for our relationships with our bodies. And so let's start with you and me. The big picture: Women tend to suffer and struggle in silence when it comes to food body and the relationship with themselves. Yet, I think we can all relate to these struggles. It doesn't matter what life looks like from the outside on the inside, the struggle is the same. It can come in various forms, but the common denominator is the struggle.

We might try to cope through the perfectionistic approach of doing and overdoing, or we might feel constantly debilitated when everything can't be just right. Some of us will be prone to high stress, always going; slowing down feeling impossible or intolerable. Others are apt to shut down under stress, feeling like it's hopeless to manage it all, feeling like there's something wrong with them because they can't.

And for each, what we eat or don't eat, how much we eat or don't allow ourselves to eat, is likely an attempt to assuage (whether subconscious or all to conscious) the havoc that is wreaking our minds as we constantly overthink eating. This then adds fuel to the fire we are trying to put out. Said differently: Many of us are coping through food.

If you have managed not to cope with food, the unfortunate reality is that you are likely to still be struggling with your body. This is just the story of women in our world right now. The research keeps showing us that the age at which girls begin feeling at odds with their bodies is getting younger and younger.

So whether the struggle is with food, in particular, what most of us have in common is a struggle with simply not feeling good enough. Not right in some way, wrong and another. Too many of us are out there self-questioning, feeling unsure or insecure about ourselves in the world.

And so it goes.

Really, each of us is just trying to ride the waves of our emotion, to calm the ebbs and flows of our nervous systems, to quiet our racing minds. We're trying to manage the state of our relationships, our families, our jobs, our finances... And we aren't given the tools to manage. We aren't taught about how to cope. We're taught how to add and subtract, not how to self-regulate.

The good news is that we're resourceful and we figure it out. The bad news is that sometimes the ways that we resource end up doing more harm than good over time. Food is a resource. At times it might have been all we could come up with to cope if we were lucky enough not to have food scarcity. It might have been right there all the time when the people and our lives weren't, or when no one knew what we were struggling with. We will explore this more this season.

As you listen, my hope is that you'll begin to see the patterns in your life with more and more clarity so that you can understand what's happening and why. So that you can begin to feel better equipped to change those patterns. While you're listening, you'll also start to pick up new ideas for ways to change and how to change in ways that are actually lasting and effective for you. I say this because it's based on research. I'll share with you the strategies that have helped so many before you, so that you can identify the simplest, most accessible ways that you can begin.

What I know after 15 years of work in the eating disorder field is that change does take time, but change can happen. What took so many years of our life to develop into the patterns that we are in today, can be undone. New learning can happen in much shorter periods of time than that spent in the old. While I will not promise you 30 days or any particular timeframe, I will tell you that it is possible.

 We will look at how our brains work, the role neurochemicals play in our decision making and behavior, and how to improve our chances of them working in our favor. I'll help you understand the things that trigger and cue our mind and emotion for behavior. We will explore culture and upbringing. What makes us, us and what we've picked up along the way that might not be ours. The things we observed, learned, or came to believe that no longer serve us. We'll look at takeaways from brain science, such as how neural pathways in our brain are built and how they can be changed. We'll dive into emotion, how we experience feelings, how we cope and how we can learn to self-regulate in new ways. I'll help you understand your nervous system to take a new perspective on stress and how you're managing it.

It's my hope that season one of In our Skin will give you a new foundation to stand on, new understanding of yourself and what makes you tick, newfound hope, and some tips to move you closer to living the way you want to live in the skin you are in.

What I won't do is tell you how to eat.

This podcast isn't about changing your body. It's about changing the way you feel in your life.

I will say this: I also at times, work with people who have a healthy desire to change, meaning that their health has been compromised. So body change, isn't always in the bad box, but I'll tell you why diets are. And remember people aren't calling diets “diets” out there. Diets today are much more covert. Today's diets are disguised as wellness pursuits. If it's restrictive, meaning it has you cut foods out, it's a diet. Believe me. I know that there are so many arguments that can be made for dietary changes that are good, and again, not all are bad, but when restricted, our minds and bodies are affected and they'll respond.

Stay with me on this.

I think at this point we've all heard criticisms of diet culture, but I wouldn't be surprised if you've never heard why diets are in the bad box when it comes to diets. Research over time has gathered and grown and it has continued to move in a direction that shows us that diets are working against us. What we used to see in research was that diets resulted in a return to our original weight within a year. But research is now showing us something different.

Research is showing us that people will not only gain the weight back, but they'll gain 25% more within that year.

Why in the world would this be? When we restrict we are having to not think about something. Has anyone ever told you not to think about something? When we are doing this, we're inherently putting that thing at the forefront of our mind, at least for a period of time. We are mentally trying not to think about it, which causes us to think about it. Thoughts of what to eat and what not to eat. Take up so much more mental real estate than when we simply allow ourselves to choose freely or said differently when we no longer believe that we have to over control or that foods are good or bad, we spend less time perseverating thinking about and becoming preoccupied with those foods.

So dieting inherently leads us to preoccupation with food. When we attach an appraisal to food, for example, that carbohydrates are bad, we're telling our brain that carbohydrates are a problem. Our minds take that more as a threat. Whatever our mind views as a threat, it will scan for, and in doing so, it will make us even more aware of the presence of this thing. This means that we become hyperaware of the things that we are to avoid.

This awareness of the problem, in this example of carbohydrates, ends up bringing it to the front and center of our mind. Where we might not have noticed those things before, we are now seeing them everywhere. In this case, carbohydrates will begin to elicit stress not only when we see them, but when we think of them.

Anything that we have told our mind is a problem elicits stress.

We'll cover this more in episodes to come, but mental clarity goes out the window during diets. Physically, diets deplete us and pairing this with the emotional effects of restriction, we might even have a heightened sense of that depletion leading to yet another pattern of preoccupation in our minds: Thinking about when we can eat and what we can eat or what not to eat all over again, just like a broken record. While physically weight might change, this could be water or muscle. The reality is that metabolism is actually probably slowing down when we diet.

Our bodies don't know the difference between diets and starvation, and the line is more fine than one might think. Our bodies are built to respond to a caloric deficit with conservation. This means slowed metabolic rate.

This also comes with increased hunger hormone to try to motivate us to get food, that's right…More hunger cues.

Basically, this puts us in a state of stress. Now, couple this with trying to control food (when food is likely the way we cope with stress emotionally) and you see that this is a lose lose situation. Most of us end up feeling agitated, depressed, and anxious.

Do those states of mind and body set you up for eating more? For most the answer is yes.

Basically while dieting, we are pulling ourselves back like a pendulum. When the diet is done, the pendulum swings. We're just trying to get back to feeling okay again; mentally, physically, and emotionally, our body wants us to restore the balance. Our mind, unfortunately, is unlikely to shift out of food preoccupation. That means that we are still thinking about food all the time; good foods, bad foods, and feeling like we are bad when we eat the bad ones, feeling worse about ourselves, feeling like a failure and before we know it, we are back to the old patterns made worse by the dieting beliefs in our heads.

This podcast might challenge a lot of the other things you've heard in other podcasts, and it's okay for you to use your own discernment and to do your own research along the way. I truly encourage that.

So no, this podcast is not about dieting or clean eating or eating the right way or the good foods. When I say this, I know a few things might happen for you dear listeners. For some, there's a feeling of deflation because there is desire for simplicity. The simplicity of “don't eat this, eat that” can be very appealing. I get that. I see you and I hear you, and it makes so much sense. We want simple, and we would like it right now. Please, and thank you.

Why? Well, we want to be happy and we want to be living our lives fully, right?

For all, too many a belief has developed that when I lose weight, I will be happy. And with this, there is also all too often a pattern of waiting to live fully. When I lose the weight, I'll buy the dress, get on the dating app, take the trip, or fill in the blank with your own version of the story. With this, the subconscious belief is that until the weight is lost, life will not and cannot be what I want it to be.

While this is an unfortunate set of circumstances that many women find themselves in, even more significant is the impact on a relationship with self.

For some, when they hear that this approach is not a diet, they will simply feel baffled because it won't seem that there is another way that you could possibly approach this problem. Controlling food, controlling themselves seems like the only reasonable approach for all too many of these people, it is not the food or the weight that they really feel is the problem. It is themself. That's the problem. Believing we innately lack the ability to contain and control puts people in a cycle that is self-sustaining: Trying to control, controlling fails to work, we feel like a failure, we feel like we need to control more, and so we go around and around, doing it again and again.

What if controlling and restricting aren't the way? What if that's like trimming the leaves of the weed rather than uprooting it? That's what we'll be talking about this season. So many women believe that it might be possible for someone out there, but that it's not possible for them. If you're in this camp, stay with me. This podcast is for you.

The good news is that I'm not going to try to tell you to white knuckle your way through hunger and suffering. Instead, I'll give you information to help you build new, understanding and some resources so that you can customize your own path, your journey yourself. Hopefully with the support of a kick ass therapist, a dietician, and a doctor.

As you're listening, I hope you feel like we're on this journey together because one of the things I've learned so clearly and potently in my life is that doing it alone is much less effective. Having community support, guidance, these are the things that really drive change. They help us to be more accountable to ourselves and others to stay focused on what is really important. They help us step back to see ourselves the way others see us, so that we aren't falling victim to self-judgment and our own biases all the time.

This allows us to pick up today and begin again instead of waiting for some new beginning next week, next month, or next year.

Every moment is an opportunity to begin again. I want to give this to you as a motto, so that as you're listening and when you're taking breaks in between that you might remember to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and do the next best thing for yourself.

Now is the best moment to begin again.

As you move through this season of the podcast, I hope that what you're listening to helps you build the inner resources you need to keep picking up and doing it again, to look back on the challenges with curiosity instead of judgment. To see the learning that comes with a struggle to begin to see why you make sense.

In our skin is devoted to helping you understand where the patterns in your relationship with food and your body developed, where they started, and how they changed and grew and morphed over time.

We will look at how difficult moments impacted us and how we coped with food when we didn't know what else to do. We will begin to look back and recognize that for most of us, these patterns started with the best of intentions, for relief, for soothing, to change the way we were feeling. To create the feelings we wanted to have instead, to get out of our heads.

We spend time looking back because it's what will help us be in the moment today with a little more self-understanding and self-compassion. This begins to free us of those self-perpetuating cycles of self-criticism and self-hate. It helps us overcome those patterns because we can see ourselves differently through new eyes, through a new lens, with new understanding.

Each week, I'm going to be breaking down useful concepts, skills, and resources that you can use to further your own journey to change. I hope you'll follow along. Share it with a friend, your therapist, create a crew, or join ours.

Thank you for reading (and listening) along. I’m glad you are here.