Honor your Body -

Today I’m speaking with Kyra Wackett, a mental health therapist who works with people in
regards to shame, negative self-talk and anxiety, and is here to help us navigate loving ourselves and ensuring we raise children who love themselves as well. Her company is called Adversity Rising, where she helps to empower you to live on purpose. Today, we are speaking about self-love and how to honor our body, talking about the foods our children are eating and how to speak to them about the foods they eat in a neutral way. She also speaks about she works with families to help navigate how we should all be speaking to our children.

Adversity Rising is helping to provide support in the most accessible way. Her focus is on addressing shame, negative self-talk and anxiety. Everything routes to that even as we get into our conversation today to talk about eating disorders. So much of this is rooted in the shame-based living and the cultures that were internalized shame narratives. There’s such a deep depth of that there. I would say everything that you see whether you’re seeing the word shame or not, it’s all kind of connected to or tethered to that group point.

Finding Ways to Love Ourselves

We are a culture of instant gratification and urgency. Self-love has gotten wrapped up into how do I feel better? I call them Band Aid solutions. What are the things that are going to make me feel better right now. If we can’t feel it right now, then we stop doing it. This is kind of the reason why we have New Year’s resolutions. There’s probably a lot of people that set something and are feeling as though they failed. It’s this idea of if I don’t get it right, right away, then I should just stop. It’s something that we call in therapy all or nothing thinking. This is the idea that I have to be perfect, or I don’t do it.

Self-love and self-care are practices.

A practice means it’s something that we show up to every day.

Some days, that might be:

-taking an hour and engaging in some sort of behavior or activity that’s really helpful

-two minutes of an affirmation

-three minutes of journaling

-or even just simply going to bed when you’re tired

-nurturing your body and just showing it the love of listening to it when it’s talking to you

What happens, I think is everybody wants it to be boiled down to here’s how you do it.

How we feel about our body is meant to change. When we talk about body positivity and loving our body, it’s the same as self-esteem, it ebbs and flows. We all have days where we feel like the worst mom on the planet. And then the next day we have a rock star mom moment. Yet most days are somewhere in between, they’re in the gray.

When it comes to our body, most days, you’re not going to feel like this is great. What I like to think about is, how do we make space to not just be in a state of constantly shaming our body to invite it to show up as it is and honor our body and what it’s doing for us.

Eating Disorders and Self Love

I had developed an eating disorder early in my college years and I remember that when I was struggling, I had a lot of trauma. A lot of internalized narratives about what I should look like. Friends of mine all had very small bodies and I then looked a certain way. I presented as white, but found out later that I was Middle Eastern, which is why I didn’t look like these other girls. We have been conditioned to believe what a great body looks like, and we need to understand that so that we can have self-compassion. It may feel hard to love my body, but I get to choose to love it anyway.

Also, how often are we talking about foods in a good or bad way? How often are we talking about shaming? Are we shaming ourselves for what we ate or didn’t eat or saying we can’t eat that or we shouldn’t eat this. Or are we talking about our weight, or our size? Our kids pick up on that and are paying attention to this. What we know is one of the predominant risk factors for developing an eating disorder or severe disordered eating and body image to stress has a lot to do with family culture and norms. If you have somebody in your life that experienced an eating disorder or severe dieting, you’re at risk.

What is beautiful changes

We’re taught beliefs and are indoctrinated with what’s right, these ladder systems that are built that all of us are climbing up for success, for beauty, for value. They change all the time, it’s a moving target. One of the big things to decide is, do you want to continue playing a game that’s rigged, that leaves you feeling like crap every day.

When we talk to our kids, they’re starting to understand the world in this way. But it’s hard to get them to see that because their world is based on this element of comparison and being conditioned to want to fit in because everybody wants to belong. But we confuse it with fitting in, and fitting in is how do I conform.
We need to recognize that fitting in changes all the time on the outside and our experience of our body
changes all the time on the inside. Think about how you could feel great or even neutral in your body and then you eat a meal and suddenly you hate your body. Or you felt really good and then you put on a pair of pants that no longer fit the way that you remember them fitting. And suddenly you go down a spiral of Hating Your Body. Look how rapidly that changed. The only thing that changed was whether or
not you had a pair of pants on or not. But suddenly now your body is worse than it was before
because this one pair of pants doesn’t fit. So it’s important for us to focus on honoring our body and what it is doing for us even if we are disappointed by certain things.

Our Children and Self Love

We need to shift the terminology we use when speaking about food. We should not be giving food a value that it doesn’t need to have? It’s purely fuel for consumption and energy. When it comes to the body, then can we talk about our body in a way that is flexible. There are days that I have really bad body image days, so when I talk to her about my body, I might say I’m feeling a little uncomfortable in my body. But it’s allowing me to be here with you. Some days, we just don’t feel great in our body.

I suggest to talk to them about their experience in their body. What did they notice in their body? We need to make it normal that sometimes we may not feel great in our body but that shouldn’t define the experience of their body or to define their worth as a person because of that experience.

When it comes to our children eating certain types of foods, instead of focusing on the food being bad, instead ask them why they are grabbing said food and are they getting what they need from it. If the answer is yes, than you may have to let it be; but if not then you can discuss further how by adding certain types of food with more nutritional value it might get them the result they are looking for. The goal is to help to empower the child to make certain choices for themselves.