S1 E19 Repairing Your Relationship with Food and Your Body with Intuitive Eating

Jane Ballard (00:03.246)
Hey guys, welcome. Thank you for joining me today. This is Jane. Amanda couldn't make it today. She is working at her new position as a recovery coach. But I thought I would hop on here and address a topic that is near and dear to my heart, especially as an advocate for women's mental health. And that topic is body image and disordered eating.

You know, we hear a lot about body image. And when you think about it, every single human has a body image. We all have a concept of how we view this body that we're going through life in, and we have emotions about it. And sometimes there are positive emotions, pleasant emotions, and sometimes they're unpleasant, and that is totally normal. So...

Body image is something that's very fluid. It's not fixed. You don't have a good body image or a bad body image necessarily. It's something that fluctuates throughout life and throughout stages of development. And that is completely normal. So what is a body image? I think that is the first thing to think through just how would we define a body image. To me, a body image is a...

set of ideas that create a internalized construct, a set of thoughts, beliefs, and emotions directed towards our own bodies. And we hear a lot about body positivity and loving yourself. And I think that's the right path, but for some people that feels impossible. Loving...

their own body feels impossible, it's complex and it's complicated. And there could be years of thinking patterns that lead to feelings of not being enough or feelings of dislike for yourself. So the first thing I wanna talk about here is if you want to work on improving your relationship with your body and your body image, the first place to start is aiming for body neutrality. Maybe you don't.

Jane Ballard (02:23.362)
love your body. Maybe it feels like you're never going to love your body. However, are you willing

Jane Ballard (02:41.764)
it's possible to...

Jane Ballard (02:47.452)
let go of criticism and dislike for your body and come to a place of feeling neutral. Maybe you don't love your body, but you also don't hate it. Can you feel neutral about it? And can you look at it more in terms of its function and what it provides for you, rather than focusing solely on the way it appears and then critiquing and picking apart that appearance and comparing it to

the appearances of other people.

So second of all, where does body image come from? I think that is something that we don't think through very much. We don't take the time to think through like, why do I feel this way about this body, this mostly healthy body that I've been gifted that gets me through this life? Why do I feel this way about it? And I think that the answer is

It's a little bit of nature and it's a little bit of nurture. You know, some of it has to do with our temperament that we were born with and kind of the stance that we take towards ourselves and the world. A little bit of that's born in, but a lot of it is learned as well by observing those in our family of origin, as small children, our caregivers, our siblings, our close friends, the people we went to school with. You know, how did they speak about

their own bodies. How did they speak about the bodies of other people, either in a positive or a negative way? What was spoken highly of? I can remember, you know, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and I grew up in a time when thinner was better. There were the waifs, the models that were super, super tall and super, super thin, and they were on the cover of Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and they were very visible.

Jane Ballard (04:50.748)
And in addition to that, I grew up with women in my family who had a history of dieting. And the stance for most women that I knew who were older than me growing up was that thin was best and the thinner the better. And if you weren't thin, you should restrict food and exercise in order to become thin.

and

I don't know, when I look back and think about my young self, I kind of feel sad for her. That rather than just enjoying this little childlike body that, you know, allowed me to do gymnastics and run around outside and have a good time, instead of enjoying that, I was at times looking at my body and wishing it looked different or feeling ashamed that it didn't look like.

somebody else's that I thought maybe was more acceptable. I can remember in, I guess this was, I think this was seventh grade, maybe sixth grade. No, seventh grade. I was, I used to be a gymnast and so I took gymnastics and I can remember going on Thanksgiving break and then coming back and we had gymnastics that Monday evening and I was just.

struggling my body, you know, sometimes you just work out and your body feels like concrete. I was having one of those days and I remember my coach came up to me and said, Jane, uh, did you have a little bit too much turkey over Thanksgiving? I was like, what? Excuse me? Too much turkey? No, I did not. Maybe I had too much pie. I don't know. No, I was 12 or 13. I had a wonderful time with my family and

Jane Ballard (06:48.656)
And I can't, I really honestly can't remember what I said to her. And then she said, you know, maybe just try to cut out cokes, maybe don't drink cokes for a few weeks and try to lose about three pounds. And I do remember saying this, I said, I don't drink cokes. And I think that was the end of the conversation, but that was 32 years ago. And I still remember it. And pretty soon after that, I began to struggle with periods of

restricting and losing weight. And then, you know, in intuitive eating, Evelyn Tribbley who wrote intuitive eating talks about primal hunger. And that if you continually override your interoceptive awareness and your cues of hunger that your body is sending you, when you continually shut down those messages and override them, eventually, primal hunger is going to take over.

your body is going to think you're starving and you will eat. You will lose the ability to restrict any longer for the most part. There are people who don't and, and that's typically how anorexia develops. But, but most people primal hunger will take over and they will eat a large amount of food and then typically feel very sick and full and ashamed and like something is wrong with them. And so,

It's just a really detrimental cycle that when I look back, I feel sad that I didn't have more guidance and I'm certainly not blaming my mother or my grandmother or any of the other people. They were also women struggling with their body images and probably didn't have guidance or access to resources at that time to help them reframe how they viewed their bodies and their worth as a human.

For me, I grew up in a part of the country and in a culture where, unfortunately, you know, at that time, I really grew up thinking, okay, one day, once I get through college, you know, I'm gonna meet my husband, my future husband in college, and then we're gonna get married afterwards, and I'm gonna go ahead and get a degree just in case, because...

Jane Ballard (09:09.372)
you know, I might need it someday, but I'll probably have children pretty soon after that, and I'll be a stay at home mom. And, you know, as a result, yes, I need to make good grades and I need to be successful, but another equally important thing is making sure that I find a husband and that I am, you know, somebody that a person would potentially want to date and eventually marry. And,

Unfortunately, a lot of that has to do with what you look like. And so it was just ingrained in me from as long as I can remember that your body size and what you look like is very important.

Jane Ballard (09:53.856)
So, circling back, body image, where does it come from? It's complex. One thing to think through is what are the emotions surrounding body image? Most of the women that I work with in my practice and really that I know personally and myself, I think that when we're looking at a body image that is...

Jane Ballard (10:20.316)
not healthy or out of balance, I don't wanna pathologize it, but a body image that's really struggling, I think the number one emotion there is shame. And when you think about shame, shame occurs as a result of feeling unacceptable and feeling like you're going to be shunned from your community or from your circle of friends or from whatever people group that you're wanting to be a part of. And shame...

You know, shame is, it gets a bad rap. It's a highly damaging emotion and it doesn't feel good. But from an evolutionary perspective, shame actually serves a purpose. It is part of why we have survived as a species. We experience shame, you know, back in days when humans lived in tribes and were hunter gatherer societies.

being part of a tribe and being surrounded by other humans was essential to living, was essential to surviving. And if you did something that was unacceptable, you would be thrown out of your tribe and exposed to the elements. You would not have food or shelter or protection from, I don't know, wild animals, storms, et cetera. And so shame is this unpleasant emotion and maybe the idea of doing something

You know, just thinking about doing that and being exposed can elicit this feeling of shame. And that could be a deterrent to humans behaving in societally unacceptable ways that would get them kicked out of the tribe. So that's a roundabout way of saying that shame, I guess, does serve a purpose. And maybe even today, it serves a purpose to some degree, but for the most part, I think it's really damaging, especially when we're thinking about our relationship to our bodies and our relationship to food.

and how that forms in very young children. So, okay, what do we do about this? What do we do about these narratives that were kind of ingrained in us from a very, very early age? I think my microphone might have just cut out. Hope y'all can still hear me.

Jane Ballard (12:38.624)
Um, let me check my mic.

Jane Ballard (12:56.004)
Okay, so hopefully you can still hear me. Okay, what do we do about these narratives? I think that the first step is just taking a step back and thinking of it as I really wanna work on improving my relationship to food and my relationship to my body and why would I wanna do that? And I think the why is really your quality of life depends on it.

Christy Harrison, a registered dietitian who wrote Anti-Diet, she calls diet culture the life thief. And when you think about diet culture, in order to go on a diet and to resist biologically natural urges and cues, it takes a lot, a lot of energy and a lot of mental energy, lots of planning, counting, weighing, mental gymnastics. And...

when you spend all of that time focusing on what you're gonna eat and what movement you're gonna get in, maybe what workout you're gonna get in, there's not a lot left over for laughing, you know, having fun, laughing with your children or your friends or your significant other, connecting. You know, if you think about what is truly, what is truly, truly important to me in this

God willing, and looking back on this life, what am I gonna be grateful for? Is it gonna be that you lost 15 pounds or that you were a certain body size or that you were successful in cutting out sugar in 2024? I don't think so. I think it's going to be the love in your relationships and the time that you spent connecting

and investing in those relationships. And maybe the experiences, maybe traveling, maybe going to visit other cultures and getting curious and learning. There's so much more to life than the size and shape of this vessel that is carrying you through it. And really, how grateful are we that we have a body that's functioning? You know, I am so...

Jane Ballard (15:21.544)
fortunate to be in good health. You know, I'm in my mid forties and that's a time when people start aging and you know, I'm so grateful that I have a strong body and good mobility and you know, my body's not perfect and I've got some fine lines. And sometimes I complain about them and don't like them, but at the same time, I'm so grateful to be alive and to have the privilege of aging. And

And you know, I kind of want to see what happens. I want to see what I look like when I'm 80. I'm curious about that. And I think if we can bring an attitude of curiosity and playfulness to our bodies, that's half the battle. You know, let's not take this so seriously. Let's do the best we can to take care of these bodies, but because we want them to last for a long time and because we want to feel good, not because we need them to look in a way that...

look the way that society has prescribed for us to have them look. Let's not shrink ourselves or make ourselves small or judge our value based on size. That's just boring. There's so much more. There's so much more to life. That being said, please know that comes from a place of love and a place of solidarity that I've been in this, I've been stuck in diet culture. I've been stuck in...

compulsive exercise and ruminating about what my body looks like and when I'm going to get my next workout in. That's a very human experience and most of us have been there. And so please know that anything I say about this, it comes from a place of I've been there and

there's hope, you know, you're not alone, there's hope, and there is the possibility of freedom from those thoughts, those, that ruminating and that mental gymnastics. So I'm just gonna leave you with that. I want this to be an invitation to just take a step back and think about your body in a more neutral way.

Jane Ballard (17:41.48)
You know, our body does so much for us. It's just miraculous. We don't have to tell our heart to beat. We don't have to tell our lungs to inhale and exhale. We don't tell our bodies to digest our food. We don't tell our hair to grow. You know, it's amazing everything that our bodies do for us when we really think about it. And all of that is done without any effort other than, you know,

hydrating and sleeping and eating, you know, and we can even do a not very good job at that and our bodies will still do that. And so I think just we're so detached from that gift, that gift that life is. And when we really zoom back in on that and zoom out from our appearances.

there's freedom in that. Just there's freedom in that gratitude and that realization that just getting to be alive on this earth is a miraculous gift and getting a healthy body, wow. Yeah, it's just, it's amazing when you really think about it.

So I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Please get in touch. Feel free to DM me on Instagram at Jane W. Ballard or shoot me an email, jane at janewballard.com. And I would love to answer those questions in one of our upcoming episodes. And we've got a couple of episodes coming up to talk a little bit more about body image and diet culture and wellness and exercise culture. So.

Stay tuned and thank you so much for listening today.