In this episode I talk about our thoughts about our bodies. Where our negative mindset comes from and how we can use our bodies to develop love for ourself.
You are listening to the modern Mormon episode 21. Hey there, I'm kami Satterlee. And I'm the modern Mormon. I'm an Advanced Certified Life coach who's dropped the all or nothing approach to life, and religion. I can't wait to show you how. I've got you, girl. Let's go Hello beautiful souls. It is 2022 I feel like I almost need some type of girl power, motivating music for this intro to the topic today. Today's topic, your body. And this is such an important topic to me. And I think it's because as women, we are naturally just taught and preconditioned to just hate ourselves, right? If we hate ourselves, then we'll end up spending money and buying, you know, nice clothes, makeup, facial injections, getting all the things that earrings that I mean, you name it, to try and better ourselves, right? So society wants us to spend money to try and fix ourselves. And that's why this topic is so important to me is because typically, when we're talking about not liking ourselves, it's more external, right? It's what we see. And so our bodies end up taking the biggest beating. And that is why it is so important. And such good work when we do our work in our brain work on our bodies, and our deep thoughts about our bodies, because if we can really tackle that, then we can tackle anything, right. So when I first started doing this work on my body, my thoughts about my body and my self image, I didn't truly believe that I would get to a place of fully loving and accepting myself 100% I thought I would just kind of ease and lighten up the negative thoughts that I currently had, I just didn't think that it would be a full loving and acceptance. Like the way I love my children. For example, through this process of awareness and acceptance, I eventually just came to love myself, I had so many aha moments, that began to just open up my mind and the possibility that maybe I could love this body of mine. And as I started doing that work, and it started to do that I realized, oh my gosh, this is changing everything in my life. So the way we view our body has been shaped and molded by society, patriarchy, or environments, socially the way we were raised in our families like so many things. We've gathered these thoughts, these little bits and pieces along the way that our brain has considered truths. The more that we believe something, the more it becomes a truth in our in our head. So that stuck, and then we began to label ourselves and label our bodies as just this is the way it is the way we view our body has so much power and potential, it has the potential to completely destroy us, and our quality of life, or it has the power to empower us to do more. And to really show our capabilities and our strengths and life. For years, I always thought that my body was something for someone else to like or dislike, like I always felt a disconnect between myself and my body. On one hand, I was super open and raw and real where I vocalized and flaunted kind of my flaws. Sometimes that came out of insecurity. But I felt like for the most part, I just I was okay with who I was inside. But on the other hand, the humiliation I felt about my body. That was something that nobody could know about. That was my deepest, darkest secret. That was the one that made me overly confident in other areas. Because I was compensating for this self loathing that I felt every time I looked in the mirror. I talked about my senior year and how I had an eating disorder. And that was the ultimate secret that was triggered. Basically, by being left at prom by a guy I hardly knew. So long story short, I was the new girl at school, I had just moved to Utah, my senior year. I didn't know anybody, this guy asked me to prom. And then when we got there, he kind of just ditched me, and went and hung out with his group of friends and a bunch of girls and danced and I was just kind of left alone. It was the ultimate humiliation to me. As I didn't feel like in my last school, I would ever have that same, you know, experience. And being a young and insecure girl, I instantly made it mean something about my looks. Because at that point, I had thought that people think you're attractive and they want to spend time with you if you're hot. And for some reason, I looked around and I instantly said oh, I'm not good enough at this school. I have new rules that I need to play by because my brain instantly saw outward appearances. And I saw girls that were twigs all around me and I was a curvy girl. I had big boobs I had but I mean I was curvy. And I just realized oh that must not be making the cut. That's not attractive. I need to lose weight is instantly what my brain thought so my infatuation became lose the weight to be desired, lose the weight to have friends lose the weight to get a boyfriend. So after becoming a mother later on and watching my body change and perform during pregnancy, I began to gain some new thoughts about my body I was super impressed with everything that it went through and everything it did to bring my princess into the world. So my focus then became on moving my body. So challenging my body trying to build muscle within that body and carve out this like certain look through my actions versus the inaction of not eating that I had done previously. So looking back on it, I can see why I did what I did, and the thoughts I had. And the thoughts I didn't have throughout my whole life, I can see how I formed these opinions and these thoughts based off of the things that I was exposed to at the time, whether that was culturally, you know, with the women around me and what they were doing, were they always on diets were they always working out, like everything became about my body and that it needed to be something someone else liked. And so all of that shaped and molded me into the actions that I took the results that I got, and all the suffering and heartache that I experienced for years, and that I feel like most women can relate to because they have in one way or another experience the same thing. Perfectionism plays a huge role in this and I feel growing up in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the generation that I grew up in the verbage of things within the church really shaped the thoughts I had about myself, unworthy, disobedient unclean, your role in quotes, as a daughter of God or a mother. When you think about those things, it ties a lot of it to, you know, expectations, expectations of other people of God, and then of yourself, and you have these high standards that you just cannot live up to. So I was not living up to those standards. And in an effort to control that I changed my focus towards my body in a way to have control over something that I felt completely out of control of. So I find this with a lot of women, our bodies are our way of controlling our life's life's that we feel so out of control in the reason we want to die at lose weight workout, or we want someone to tell us exactly how to do it, counting macros, or getting on a specific program, we're constantly clicking on things like lose 10 pounds in a month, it's something to control us something that we can follow and feel in control of because we feel so out of control in our minds. And because we feel in a way out of control. And we think if we just do everything in this program and do everything that this person tells me to do, we will get the result that we want. Now if you follow the program to perfection, you will get a result of weight loss. However, if you do not change your brain, before you start the program, during the program, or after you lose that weight, you actually will not get the result that you truly want. Because what you truly want is to love your body, what you truly want is to feel like you are enough. This is why anytime I am coaching somebody and they say you know I really want to lose weight, it is so important to understand why you want to lose weight, and to tell yourself the truth about why you're trying to lose weight. Because if you don't do that, you will constantly be left with these unfulfilled emotions because you're expecting something else to happen. We think that the body is what creates our emotion. But we understand when we really break it down that our thoughts about our body create our emotion. So regardless, if you're changing your body, whether it's getting bigger or smaller, or whatever it is, it will not create the emotion and the feeling that you have inside. And the only way that we create that is with our thinking. This is why when we start goals to lose weight, and we don't have a why behind it. And we don't have the true self love behind it. We can start the program and we can do everything the program says. But then we'll have a day sometimes where we'll give into our urges and our cravings. And then we end up eating everything in the kitchen if you're anything like me. And then once that happens, we kind of just give up on everything. And it's not just that give up part but it is we don't realize that the after effects of that is then our thoughts become Oh, you couldn't even do this program, you have no self control. Why are you so disgusting? When it comes to food? Why are you so lazy when it comes to working out? Okay, so then we add these new thoughts onto our old existing thoughts. And now we've taken our worth and our doubt about ourselves to a deeper level. And we've included more negative emotions, more layering. And then we also just add shame onto that. Like if we can't stick to a program. We think it's because there's something wrong with us. So the chances of succeeding and hitting our goals become less and less each time. And if we're tying our self worth to that we just continually think less and less about ourselves. And we're also tying our ability to be attractive or our ability to be liked and loved by whether or not we are, you know, the perfect body or not. So then we'll never measure up we'll constantly feel like we are not enough. Our brain will store The evidence of us feeling from the last time during our efforts and moments of weakness. And think about that, the next time that we try to hit that goal. This all seriously blew my mind the first time that I learned it, and I thought about it for many years, and how I've been so stuck in these patterns. I mean, truly, I probably from like, when I was eight years old, as a little girl, I started looking at my body and started seeing what society says acceptable. And then I started believing in order to be attractive, I had to look a certain way. And then I started dieting and working out and covering up and, or exposing more in an effort to feel beautiful and worthy. I see this perfectionism come out. Also, when I'm coaching women within the LDS church, I am not one who wears garments, but I do coach a lot of women on their thoughts about garments, and that they think it's not sexy, they're not cute. I can understand them being hot. And some of those, you know, things that are facts, but these thought that they're not sexy and cute are coming from a mindset that sexy and cute are a certain thing, right? We just believe that it just is or it isn't. But remember, those are a mindset, confidence, sexiness that's coming from somebody's thoughts about who they are inside, not about what they're wearing, or not wearing as far as garment wise. And it's so interesting, when we do a deep dive into this, you know, to have all of those perfectionism thoughts come out where I'm supposed to wear these garments. But I don't want to because they're not hot. I'm supposed to wear these garments, you know, for protection and in my marriage, but my husband doesn't think they're hot, okay, it's this kind of like back and forth pole that causes women to just constantly feel stuck, and not enough. And what I find in this coaching is that we start to detach from ourselves, in order to people please someone else or fit a certain standard that our brain has considered truth. The option of thinking garments are sexy is there, the option of feeling like you're attractive, regardless of what the scale says, is there and it is as much of an option as what you're currently thinking. Our brain just has such a hard time with that, because we have thought these beliefs for so long that they feel right to us. My body used to be such a hot topic of conversation between my husband and I, it was like I would sit and complain to him about it, but then secretly be seeking validation that I was hot. Like, I can't love me, but I'm going to expect you to love me. I personally think I look gross in the mirror. But I want you to tell me how sexy I am. I want to turn the lights off when we have sex. But I expect you to have all eyes on me at all times. What do you know what is sexy you guys is when I finally shut the hell up. But was sexy was when I didn't give a damn what my husband thought about my body. When my body was the last thing on my mind in the day when my goals and my potential became my focus. And I started viewing myself and the world around me as being whole and good and full of purpose and power versus empty and draining and never measuring up. I started to feel that love and acceptance and sexiness for myself when I became less interested in turning heads. And I became more interested in turning souls and becoming somebody amazing helping others become somebody amazing. When I think about my past and kind of my self image back in the day, everything was about starting over. My famous line that I acquired from being a child was the diet starts tomorrow, knowing damn well it would fail. By the end of the week, I'll start eating better tomorrow, I'll start losing weight on day one of the month, I need a reason to get in shape. So once we would book a trip, I would start a diet or some type of workout program because I have to have motivation. Or I would start like a 90 day program exactly 90 days from my trip and pinpoint it to end exactly when we would leave on the trip. Like it was never about health. It was never about how I felt inside. It didn't matter how I felt inside about my body, my body had to look a certain way for other people to view me as acceptable. Most of the time, I would start and not finish. But the times that I did manage to finish there was an excitement of completion in the process. But then there was still a feeling of not good enough. And then I was also mad at myself for having that emotion because it threatened a life of never achieving true happiness. In my brain. I would see happy people that claim to be happy and love their body and feel confident in their bodies. They would have these perfect bodies and I was so furious that no matter how hard I hustled and killed myself, I was not gaining that happiness. I remember the first time I completed p90x, I was so excited. I was on cloud nine. I loved my body. I had just lost weight gained a bunch of muscle after having a baby and I was so excited. I had my husband go in the backyard and take some after pictures for me. And I remember looking at the pictures and being so angry. All I saw was a saggy stomach, no definition. I saw weird stuff like, I hate my face shape my foreheads too big. Why can't my boobs produce enough cleavage. I mean, it was nonstop. My major one was that I'm shaped like a box, my waist did not squeeze in like other women's. And for years, that was my biggest struggle, I would lose weight, and I would build muscle. But no matter what I did, I didn't have that teeny waist that I saw in all these pictures. Little did I know that that was my actual body shape. Something that could not be changed, no matter how much I worked out, or how little I ate. In my poor, socialized and overly influenced brain. This had never occurred to me that, oh, this is something that can't be changed. This is something I should just accept. I had spent years hating myself binge eating food, throwing up food obsessively working out massive amounts of unnecessary cardio diet after diet program after program hours of staring at models and women that I thought had the perfect bodies, years of trying to feel fulfilled and sexy by being a tease towards men and desiring their attention, their validation. And assuming that although my body wasn't great, it was okay. And good enough for them. If they gave me the time of day that I spent years that I could have connected with my husband versus disconnecting because of my negative body image, and how that affected not just our sex life, but moments that could have been pure joy and excitement and fun. We're left with me on the sidelines, because I didn't want to get in a swimsuit, or I didn't want to participate in fear that my body would jiggle, or I would look unacceptable. What are your current thoughts about your body? Are those thoughts preventing you from moments of enjoying and having fun? And how has your thoughts about your body impacted your life? For me, personally, I feel my thoughts about my body has impacted my life more than anything else. This is why weight loss coaches make so much money because all of us women think that we want to lose weight, we all think that, you know, we would be better if something was different. But what we really want is to just love our bodies. So how do we do that? There's lots of ways to heal your mindset towards your body. But today, I'm just going to teach you the first three steps that I believe have made the greatest impact in my relationship with my body. So the first is awareness, awareness of the way you're speaking towards your body, what you're saying throughout the day, what you say, when you look in the mirror, look at your expectations of your body, that's always a fun one. Because we typically have so many expectations of our body, but we don't take accountability for our part and how we speak to our body. In order to fuel our body move our body or any of it, we just simply hate it. And then we're mad at it when it doesn't look and perform the way that we want it to. So after examining your thoughts about your body, and if there are a lot of negative thoughts, you know, this is such good awareness to see, because the next step is appreciation. And that's just kind of seeing the opposite side. In what ways has my body shown up for me, in what ways has it done everything that it was designed to do? So I'm in the process of healing my gut, I have some autoimmune issues going on. And there's been times that I've kind of eaten off my protocol. So over Thanksgiving, I had dairy, and lots of dairy, lots of gluten and dairy. And I noticed that when I had these things, this is when I start to see a lot of skin issues. So over Thanksgiving, I had dairy, and I know what dairy does to my body. But I had it anyway. And then following that my face broke out and these teeny tiny is it's like all over the place. And it is insane when it happens. And the old me would get so frustrated and say things like why does this have to happen to me, it's so disgusting. Whatever it is, that type of mindset leaves no room for accountability. It's a lot of blame, it's a lot of victimizing in it basically doesn't have me take action and do what I need to do to heal my body. So this time instead, I said, Thank you, buddy, I looked in the mirror, and I was like you're doing exactly what you're supposed to do. And as cheesy as it sounds, I actually really do this. And I said, you're telling me that we don't do well with dairy. And I felt appreciation for my body responding the way that it did. And then I imagined that if it didn't respond, and I didn't have zits, and I didn't have psoriasis and skin issues and reactions, I would continue to just eat dairy and it would continue to cause more unknown issues and potential diseases. So my body is actually doing me a favor. How is your body showing up for you? How is it doing everything it said it would do? So the third step is redirection. When you notice your brain is going to these negative thoughts about your body, I want you to simply redirect it to a neutral thought that you kind of have pre planned intentionally. So for example, one of the simple ones is I have a body. If you get even more specific, it's better but it's nice to just point out these little things. So these are my thighs. Another example sounds like you're just stating the obvious but What you're doing is cutting out the negative description, the deep lie that you've been telling yourself again and again, your brain unconsciously says these things about your body and thinks that they're just facts. So for every negative thought it takes for positive thoughts to overpower that one negative thought. So think about how descriptive you are, when you look at yourself in the mirror, and the things that you've said for years about your body that you dislike. In order to counteract this, in order to improve it, we need to simply stop the action of saying these things about our body, adding those negative description, type of words. This is why I'm not a fan of just throwing out affirmations. Because if you truly don't believe them, it's not going to work. If you don't change the underlying thought, or stop the action of the negative thinking your brain, it's just going to resort to those old thoughts, again, telling your brain we don't talk about our body that way is how we stop that process. So you'll walk in the mirror, and you'll say, Oh, my thighs are so big. And then you'll stop and you'll say, Nope, we're not going there. And then you will intentionally say, these are my thighs. The more that you practice this, the more that your brain will intentionally start going straight to these are my thighs instead of these thighs are so big, or whatever you say. If we can start with the first three steps, then building upon those steps and incorporating positive thoughts and loving thoughts about our bodies are going to just kind of follow. Once we do that, then we can start to truly love our bodies. And then when we truly love our body, we will want to take care of our body. The result from loving your body can be weight loss, healthier food options, exercising, it can be all the goals you thought you needed initially when you did not like your body. But when it's coming from a place of loving your body, the chances of you hitting those goals are higher. And the effects of the mistakes in the process. Do not destroy your self confidence in your body image. They just become learning opportunities and areas for growth. Suddenly, you won't need to change your body in order to love your body. You will want to change your body in order to see what you're capable of. You will want to change your body in order to prevent disease prevent being unhealthy, you will understand how you feel when you eat certain foods, you will start to recognize emotions over external things, it will be easier to say no to junk food because you know that that doesn't feel good. That doesn't cause you to get up in the morning and get all the things done in the day that you want. You feel sluggish, you feel tired, it has other effects. And you'll be able to notice those things when your brain isn't so overly clouded with negative emotion that you're not good enough. So start today, go stand in the mirror and tell your body that it's always been good enough, that it's always showing up for you that the fact that you're alive and standing there is incredible. It might not sound true, it might not feel authentic. But just look at that girl and see what comes up. Then start taking these three steps that will eventually connect your spirit and your mind with your body where you can work together in building and accomplishing all the dreams and purposes that you truly desire. If you have a goal to share to lose weight, make sure that you're fueling those actions with love. Your body is doing exactly what it's supposed to. Its only job is to house your spirit. All the rest is just a bonus. If you're ready to drop the all or nothing in your life, then I would be honored to be your life coach. Head over to the modern mormon.com To start your journey in becoming the confident authentic and best version of you