Bob and Oprah

The Escape Diet Prison podcast has had 2 celebrities as points of discussion lately, here and here, and apparently they have been pretty popular.  And shockingly (no really- I am surprised) one of them was actually controversial.

People who know me in real life do understand that I am not a person who goes in for controversy.  I don't like conflict, I even get a little antsy during something that is supposed to be "fun" like a football game.  I just don't like it.  

So it was a surprise to me when I found out that MANY people messaged Anne-Sophie about our Bob Harper discussion.  Some people felt we were being unkind, thin-shaming and the like.  **needlescratchmoment**

Seriously??

Let's step back to the Oprah episode for a moment.  It was a very popular episode apparently- I want you to know that I have no knowledge of numbers or comments because I am not in any form an owner of the podcast.  Which is a-ok, dandy and fine with me!  I just know that was one a lot of people listened to.  We discussed ideas about whether Oprah should be trying to become something she is not, why the wealthiest woman in the US and a talented entrepreneur should try to be changing her body and most of all why she is using her popularity for financial gain.  None of us are particular Oprah fans, but we have no overt problem with her, in fact have varying degrees of admiration for her success in business, etc.  We did talk about why someone who is as successful as she is feels the need to change herself- could be construed possibly as somewhat controversial, but as far as I know there were few or no people saying we were picking on Oprah.

Fast forward to Bob Harper.  Here we discussed how different it would be (and Oprah's name was  brought up) if someone heavy would have had this heart attack, how the media and others would not have blamed genetics, how this man- as he makes his living to look a certain way as a trainer- most likely over exercises and (as Leila discussed- a man as tall as he is to only weigh what he does) this guy restricts his food.  He is not a teenager anymore(52?), people tend to put on natural weight as they age, their hormones are not the same...... There was little to no discussion in the media reports that thin at any cost might have been partially responsible for his health issues.  HIS ACTIONS MIGHT HAVE HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT!!  And we are scolded for possible thin-shaming and other more mysterious things that are not easily identifiable.  We were being mean.  Um, no.

I (and I assume we) have no bad feelings for the person that is Bob.  He is most likely a nice person, but Bob is on a bad tv show.  A tv show that fat shames others.  A tv show that starved and over-exercised contestants, one that encouraged them to eat less food than the calories they burned....  a tv show that one blogger pointed out- if the producers did this to animals they would have been shut down by animal rights activists so fast their heads would have spun. (this was paraphrasing but the spirit is the same).  How is it that its ok to in essence torture people and it is ok for our entertainment?

So it is ok that we called out Oprah but not Bob?  Why is that?  Could it be that we were destroying ideas (that are LIES )so deeply embedded in our culture that people feel threatened by it?  Were we discussing things that hit so close to home in a person's journey that they lashed out so they didn't have to do that body image work, or feel that feeling, or know that what is presented as the truth in our culture is one of the biggest fallacies in our world??  If you feel uncomfortable about this- think about why?  Oprah is heavy, a woman, a woman of color, and beloved by many.  Bob Harper is thin, a male, a white male, and is probably seen as an authority figure of some sort.  It challenges much of what we believe in our core to be correct.  That a guy who looks like he does- he cannot be held accountable for his genetics, and yet it is just fine for Oprah to "fix" the one thing that to some peoples eyes needs fixing.  That it is fine for Bob to diet and over exercise however he deems necessary to look a certain way, and yet, by the lack of response to our discussion, people feel that it is ok for Oprah to adhere to wanting to attain a certain look. STILL!!!  She STILL isn't quite right?!?! These are some of the deepest issues of our western world and it pisses people off when those "truths" are challenged. Thin privilege does not like to be questioned. And when it comes to it- how they look are not what is important about either of these two people.

We are better than this.  

Time to realize how our culture judges people- by the most shallow of requirements.  Time to really improve the quality of your life in meaningful ways- how our bodies look is not meaningful.  What is in your heart and soul, what you do to enrich your life and that of your loved ones, your service to others and what you stand for are far more deep and authentic.  Step out of your comfort zone for a moment and do that hard thing.  Believing what most people find unbelievable- that you are not  your body.  You are so much more than your shell.  You are already more than good enough.

Daffodils and waterbottles- self care and balance

Self-care and balance was the subject of the last podcast that we (Leila had to miss this one- *sadness*) recorded and it is something that I have been thinking about ever since.  I was fortunate to have a little time to listen to us while I actually went for a walk- outside!  and in the SUN today and I wanted to develop the ideas I was trying to say in this episode.

Balance in life is "possible" but what exactly is that?  What does this- in the present day's popular vernacular- even look like? I think the answer to that is an individual's idea of balance.  For me- being an optimist that I am- balance means that I am happy, that the irritations of the day leave me immediately after the situation has resolved itself, that I am happy to talk to people when I see them and I am happy to be alone when I get home as well.  I think happy is at my center of balance.

What could this look like to other people?  Could your balance mean literally that the bad times during the day are balanced by things going sort of ok- that your generally pessimistic outlook on life is balanced by a few things that don't suck?  I know people like that.  Are you an introvert and your balance in life is being largely left alone because you work in a somewhat solitary job, and you have a small family and limited social life, but enjoy being out and about in a limited fashion?  Perhaps you are fairly extroverted and you are on the phone with your friends frequently, and have a public workplace, then need to spend time with others in the evening and chit chat on text until you go to bed? What does balance mean to you?  I am not criticizing these ways of looking at life, merely thinking of people I know and trying to see from their point of view and imagining what could be a balanced life.  I, of course, only barely touched the surface of this, but the amazing differences in people would lead to different definitions of what balance is.

In our case, we were discussing the balance between real life and healing and I have to imagine that everyone processes this differently as well. I have to imagine not everyone can do this, but,  I personally went cold turkey when I began my healing and escaping from diet prison.  I quit weighing, dieting, and embracing diet culture really quickly, in literally a day.  I decided to stop and I did.  This does mean that I floundered around for quite a while, because after more than a couple decades of thinking that following diets and shrinking myself was the only way to self fulfillment, it took a lot of time and a lot of self care and body image work to change the way I saw myself.  There was not a lot of balance during the first few years of healing, there was a lot more feeling free, though.  It was outstanding to just eat what I wanted.  It took a lot longer to come to terms with the exercise component but I did.  It is so nice to really not care what I have for any given meal.  I don't care what my macros look like, don't think about if I have had more than 2 pieces of bread in a day, feel no concerns when I pick up a second cookie if it will feel good in my tummy.

Freedom gave me the space in my mind to work on my body image and my self worth.  I said in the podcast that I still have feelings that I am not doing enough, that I don't deserve to take rest time, or have down days.  (The self worth work goes on, but it is much easier to identify that there is something that needs to be turned and examined.)  So there surely was not a lot of balance during my early recovery period, there was just a lot of time given to my inner work.  I did a lot of guided meditations, I journaled, I had group and private coaching.  The meditations included visualizations and breathing work. I was religious in working on these things, doing the assignments and writing prompts from the group coaching, listening to the "tapes", finding new things to read and people to follow on social feeds.  And then I found I didn't have the NEED to listen to my morning meditation.  Didn't HAVE to journal for pages and pages every day....  that is when the balance began to happen.

I was trying to convey in the podcast that I think the balance of healing and real life happen in ebbs and flow.  We have cycles of nature, cycles of energy, and I think cycles of balance and imbalance.  I think the balance in our life happen when we can handle the things that are bringing us to our knees or making us not sleep at night or rest like a giant ball in your chest that take up all the space you usually have for patience, and breath, and love, and compassion.  When we know what authentic self-care tools we have to use and where we can go when we are in crisis.  The balance comes in knowing that we can find our way out of this and it does not involve trying to control life and people and situations and love by making ourself LOOK different or a certain way or a eat a different way because if I lose weight everything will be right again, because it is sort of magical because all the people on tv and the internet say our life will be perfect if we shrink and take up less space and become less than what we are.  whew.  No- that won't work at all, dieting won't work at all.

Self-care tools at their finest frequently don't cost anything.  They don't involve having someone do something fancy or luxurious for you.  While having the pedicure or massage or buying the shoes or the daffodils or taking that bath in the good bubbles might be momentarily amazing, these are the lesser self care practices.  These don't bring to your mind the things that affected your outlook on life from your childhood, or the friends that betrayed your, or the trauma you suffered, nor really do they help you see them from where you are living now, from your present point of view.  They don't let you really decide that the mean girl in your mind is really not speaking the truth.  The lesser self care practices don't cause the sublimation of healing happen in your mind and change your go to responses to stress.

Writing in  journal/notebook/scrap paper, meditation in whatever form works for you, movement that is healing and not punishing, breathing purposefully and rhythmically are things that are authentic forms of self care.  Moments that you find during your day- only 30 seconds or a minute- to truly give yourself positive reinforcement in some way are incredibly effective.  In my case, the water bottle filling, when I breathe slowly to relax myself is far superior to the beautiful little bouquet of daffodils I bought myself last week.  The flowers were lovely and I adore them, but they didn't quite do the trick to rescue me from my acute distress.  Coaching, visualization, time to actually relax and giving myself permission to be put aside things that just didn't need doing are what got me out of my funk.  I never could write out a sentence that said the last two weeks I have felt like a total disaster, a failure, a shipwreck and I can't sleep or relax  because.......  I kind of don't really know.  I do know that facing all the issues that were adding up and making myself stop several times a day to hold my hand on my heart and breathe into it was the thing that broke the cycle and has me back in balance.  Every time I face the demons and can bring myself back to balance without being on a diet or blaming my body for the situation brings me another day of peace.  

Take the time to find your own authentic self care and think about what balance means to you.  We are more than worth it.

Feeding our real hungers

I have had a really hard few weeks here, and fortunately for me I have tools that I can use to get me through those times.  I have really good friends that I can talk to,  I have self care practices that I know will make me feel better and thank heaven I have coaching that will help me when I know that I need more support than usual.

Self care comes in many forms

Fortunately for me, I am able to "go there"when I am asked to speak- as part of a recovery technique- as a different part of me.  Not from my brain, but from a body part or something that lives inside of me, or the younger me or the scared me, etc.  You get the picture- I am totally able to immerse myself in another reality to get at thoughts or feelings or perceptions that are holding me back or making me, frankly, feel really bad about myself.

Today I had a very effective coaching session- I know they are effective when I feel drained and exhausted, though peaceful afterwards- that helped me identify what my stressors are at this point in time.  Funny thing, when you no longer use food and dieting to sublimate your internal problems, they like to bubble up to the surface like lava from a volcano.  Sometimes maybe not that dramatic, but sometimes it is.

And it really is that way- I have no diet to keep my mind occupied, no calorie counting to be preoccupied with, hours of exercise that would be distracting me from the issues at hand.  I may also be less adept at rolling with the crap that life throws at me (ahem, we will just pretend that age has nothing to do with it) for one reason or another.   It could be I am overwhelmed- see the next post that will be coming out soon- or it could be that I am not honoring my hungers.

I am definitely not talking about my food hunger, because seriously, I don't mess with that anymore.  If I am hungry I figure out what I want and have it.  I am talking about my other hungers....  My needs for creativity, for rest, for purposefully meeting my own needs.  And that has been neglected a bit lately.

I have become overwhelmed with feelings of literally running just ahead of a beast that wants to envelop me in its grasp.  At work I zoom from one task to another, from one student to another, from one building to another- all the while feeling like I am not serving any of them to my ability.  I never feel like I am doing enough. After work I go to the stage and do play things, and again, I never feel like we are getting enough done.   At home, I sit in paralysis.  Literally I, some nights, plop on the couch and barely get up.

I have been really feeling the need to do art- I can picture things that I want to create in my head. I am absolutely itching to oil paint again, I need to get my hands into subject matter and media that I want to do, not what I want my kids at school to do.  When you are an art teacher you rarely do your own work because you just don't have the time when you are teaching and you do not have the will when you are home.  But the feeling is there- I need to honor my need for creativity soon.  I need to purposefully and intentionally walk outside for a little while every day for my own sanity.  I need to let myself rest when I feel I need it.  And I really need to find a way to be in the moment, in my body and not in my head through out the day.

These things are my self care, my genuine modes of providing myself with the things I need to be able to be my best self.  I know I need them to do my best at my life's work.  I have bought myself daffodils, I had a pedicure, I made some brownies- all of which make me happy and brighten my day, but they are not the soul satisfying things that I need to be better.  Creativity energizes me, walking calms me and rest restores my mind.  I will be honoring my true needs- I know that I need to satisfy these hungers as much as I need to satisfy my students', friend's and family's needs. Or more.

Controlling my body's size and shape will not help fill these needs.  Restricting or bingeing on food will not truly make me feel like a whole person again.... Honoring my true needs is the most authentic thing I can do- I am more than worth it.  And so are you.