I’m currently taking Kara Loewentheil’s Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching, which is incredible. I’m learning so much and she’s just amazing. Now, some of you may remember she was a guest on this podcast about four years ago. We talked about body image and how to stop hating what you look like in race photos.
This conversation was one of my favorites on the podcast, so I’ve decided to bring it back for today’s episode. It was a long time ago, so even if you’ve heard this before, you need to hear it again. Body image isn’t something that we miraculously shift overnight, rather something we need to dismantle and rebuild constantly.
If you love the race but hate the photos of yourself crossing the finish line, you’re in the right place. Tune in this week to hear from master certified life coach, feminist rockstar, and all-round badass Kara Loewentheil. She teaches women how to undo the effects of the patriarchy in their brains to overcome anxiety and self-doubt and create true authentic confidence from the inside, which is a real game-changer when it comes to body image.
Big things are afoot over here at Not Your Average Runner. The Rebel Runner Roadmap is changing her name! It starts with the next class, which is open for registration on March 30th and it’s still going to have all of the awesome content and community that I know you love. Only now, she’s going to be called Up and Running, because that’s what you’re going to be when you join this program.
What You’ll Learn From This Episode:
- Why it’s important for women to work on loving their bodies rather than changing their bodies.
- How confirmation bias works when you look critically at a photo of yourself.
- Why changing your body in order to like yourself more doesn’t work in the long term.
- Kara’s thoughts on how we choose photos for our online dating profiles.
- Why we are prone to believing our negative thoughts about our body.
- How, as women, we’re conditioned to believe how we look is more important than our achievements.
- Kara’s 3 steps to practice so you can improve your body image without losing a single pound.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
- If you have any questions you’d like answered on the show, email me at podcast@notyouraveragerunner.com
- Join the Not Your Average Runner Private Facebook Community
- Not Your Average Runner Instagram
- Kara Loewentheil: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Podcast
- Grab Kara’s Confidence Cheat Sheet!
- Kara’s Membership Community: The Clutch
- Ep #55: How to Love Your Race Photos with Kara Loewentheil
Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who has never felt athletic but you still dream about becoming a runner, you are in the right place. I’m Jill Angie, a certified running and life coach, and I teach women how to start running, feel confident, and change their lives. And now I want to help you.
Hello runners, how are you doing this week? So this spring I’m taking a feminist coaching certification program with Kara Loewentheil of Unfuck your Brain and it is just, well, it’s just so awesome. I can’t even begin to tell you how awesome it is. I’m learning a ton and I can’t wait to share everything with you.
And Kara Loewentheil was actually a guest on the Not Your Average Runner Podcast about four years ago and during that conversation we talked about body image and learning how to stop hating what you look like in race photos. Now, it was a great conversation, one of my favorites, and I thought, you know what? I’m going to bring that back to you again today. I don’t know, I just think there’s somebody out there who needs to hear this again and needs to hear it today.
And also because body image isn’t just something that we miraculously can shift overnight, like snapping our fingers, boom, body image in on point, right? The way you view your body is something you have developed over decades of messaging from other people and it takes time to dismantle that thinking so you can replace it with something else. So even if you’ve listened to this interview in the past, I want you to listen to it again today because you’re going to take something new away from it, okay?
Now, if you don’t know Kara you are in for a treat. She is a master certified life coach, host of the Unfuck Your Brain podcast, and several years ago she did what every Jewish parent dreams of for their child, she left her legal career running a think tank to become a life coach.
But now she teaches feminist women how to undo the effects of the patriarchy in their brains to overcome anxiety and self-doubt and create true authentic confidence from the inside. She is a feminist rock star, all around badass coach, and you are going to love our discussion. Especially if you are someone who loves the race but hates the finish line photos.
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Jill: Hey everyone, so I’m here with Kara Loewentheil and I’m just so fucking excited to have her on the show. She’s one of my favorite coaches on the planet because she coached me when I was first divorced and starting to date again.
And I always say she talked me off the screaming edge because I was totally freaking out about getting back into the dating pool at age 49, after 12 years of marriage. And she really helped me out immensely and kind of got my brain in shape to get back into dating.
And now we’re good friends and I also need to tell you, if you’re not listening to her podcast, Unfuck Your Brain, you should be. So Kara, welcome to the show.
Kara: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Jill: I’m so excited about this. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. So here’s what I want to do to get started. I would love for you to just kind of talk a little bit about yourself, what you do, how you got to where you are, what do people need to know about you?
Kara: That’s a huge question. I can tell people what I do, I don’t know about how I got to where I am. That’s like, a metaphysical conversation. I am a confidence coach for feminist women. So I basically teach women how to undo all of the fucked up stuff that patriarchy and socialization does to our brains. And so I sort of show them where a lot of their self-critical, self-limiting beliefs are coming from and I teach them how to change them.
Jill: Yes, this is so good. People are going to love today’s show. So one of the things I most love about your work is how you help women really learn to not just accept their bodies but actively love their bodies without having to change anything about themselves. So can you talk a little more about your own journey and why it is so important for women to do this work on themselves?
Kara: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the reason it’s important to do this work is that if you try to change your body in order to like it more, it’s really not going to work. Like yes, occasionally you will feel a little more confident because your thoughts about yourself will have changed.
So people think, well, I lost weight and so I feel more confident or I got a breast lift and so I feel more confident. But really what happens is that their thoughts change. Now they’re thinking oh, I look good, my breasts look high, whatever the thing is that makes them feel confident.
The problem with that is that if your brain is in the habit of looking for things that aren’t good about you, you can mollify it sometimes by changing one circumstance, but it’s just going to find something else. So you’re going to be happy about how your rack looks for, you know, 10 days, and then you’re going to start focusing on your thighs.
Your brain is just going to move to like, another body part, or your brain’s going to tell you like, okay, well now you’re thin but now this excess skin is a problem or now you’re flabby or now you should be taller. Whatever your brain is going to tell you. So changing the circumstance just doesn’t work for body image and you just end up having to keep trying to change yourself.
And I think women are socialized, we all think that improving our bodies is a lifelong project we’re all supposed to be working on at all times. Like, we retire from work but you never retire from trying to lose weight and change your body. So we think this is like, a lifelong task.
And the problem with trying to lose weight or change your body in order to change your thoughts is number one, you’re just adding an unnecessary step. You’re doing all this work to change the circumstance, when really all you need to change is your thoughts.
So you can actually love your body exactly the way it is and it’s not like, despite its flaws. They aren’t flaws, that’s just a subjective interpretation. There are places in the world where your body type, whatever it is, is the most valued and prized. All of our ideas about what bodies are supposed to look like are just social construction, it’s just social conditioning.
There are societies where women are told to be as thin as possible and there are societies where women are told to be as fat as possible. The whole gamut of what bodies can look like is acceptable in different places. So when you take back the authority over what definition you’re going to use for beauty, that work, the mental work is actually what’s going to change your life and you can do that without changing your body at all.
Jill: I could not love that more. So good. Because really, don’t you think we’re taught to look externally for validation that we’re attractive, that we’re worthy?
Kara: Yeah.
Jill: We are never taught to look within ourselves for that.
Kara: How would you know if you’re acceptable? That’s clearly not the answer. No. Like, some random guy you met on Tinder last week has to be in charge of that determination.
Jill: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s one of the frustrating things it was for me a little bit about getting back into the dating pool was just this like, I was really outsourcing all of my worthiness and all of my feelings about myself to strangers on the internet. Completely unqualified.
Kara: Well, one thing we know about strangers on the internet is that they really take things seriously, put a lot of thought into them. That’s why the comments section in any internet article is just a wonderful play land of brilliance.
Jill: Everybody’s got an opinion. So just kind of like, moving forward from learning how to change your thoughts, like, that really is the key to all of it and I talk about this on my podcast, you talk about it on your podcast all the time about how our thoughts are always the problem. Like, whatever problem we have. It’s always our thinking about it. It’s never the size of your ass.
Kara: No.
Jill: It’s always your opinion about your ass. So I mean, the main reason I really wanted to talk to you today about this was because so many of my listeners really struggle with body image, specifically how to learn to love what they look like in race photos. And the reason I think it’s so important to do this work, and I think race photos are a great place to start is because so a lot of my listeners will put all this time and effort into training for a race, and maybe it’s like a half marathon. So they’ve been training for months.
They have been enduring like, two and three and four hour really grueling workouts just so that they can feel really good and really proud and be prepared. And so then they cross the finish line and they feel amazing in that moment, and then a week later they see their race photos and they go right to can you look at the size of my stomach, I can’t believe the look on my face, and they go right to criticizing every little thing.
And then what happens is the experience that they had of doing this race and feeling so good, they see the race photos and immediately they’re just like, oh. They’re super disappointed. It colors their entire experience of the race a week later, even though during the race they felt great. And so I think it’s so important to do the work to learn to love those photos. So what would you say about that? Because it’s a big problem in the running community.
Kara: Yeah, I’m sure. I mean, I have a whole episode about how to love any photos of yourself because this is a problem in general, women with photos. So I mean, there’s a couple of things I work with my clients on when we’re working on photos. I mean, number one is if you have negative thoughts about your body, you are always looking for evidence of those. So you are literally going to see something different in the photo than what someone else would see.
There’s a confirmation bias, classic psyche experiment that I’ve experienced as the like, person who didn’t know what’s going on, so I know it’s true, where you are shown a video and you’re told to count how many dribbles happen and you count and most people get it about right, maybe they’re off by one or two. But what no one notices is that in the middle, a man dressed in a gorilla suit walks across the screen.
So I have like, been the person who took that study not knowing, and I did not see it. It’s so powerful how your brain filters out what you are not looking for. So one of the things to remember is that when you look at a photo, what you think you’re seeing it objectively, you’re like, oh, my brain is accurately interpreting the light and shadows and size cues and whatever in this photo. But you’re 100% not.
So what you see in the photo and however “bad” you think it looks, you’re not even seeing a reality. You’re seeing a like, pre-created image of yourself that your brain has created based on all your negative thoughts about your body.
So like, literally, if you have a lot of thoughts about your stomach being too big, your stomach is going to look bigger to you in the photo than it would to someone else. And you’re not even going to be aware that that’s happening so you’re going to think that you’re just objectively evaluating it. But your brain is actually playing a trick on you. So that’s one thing.
And the other thing that I teach is that even if a photo were – even if you were objectively observing it, a photo is just one lens snapped of you at one time. We are surrounded by lenses. Our eyes are lenses, our cat’s eyes are lenses, our loved ones’ eyes are lenses. These are all just different lenses that take in light and create a visual image on the retina.
And so what a camera snaps at any given moment is just one shot of you and from one particular vantage point, and one perspective, and one height, with one light coming in that exact way in that exact moment. Like, it’s just one of a million different ways that you could look at any given moment to anyone observing. We think like, oh, the photo is the true of how we look. But it’s only one of many possible snapshots of you and your brain isn’t even analyzing it objectively.
Jill: Yeah, for sure. And it really reminding me of a conversation we had two years ago when you and I were coaching and I remember saying, oh, is it – you had the greatest response too. I was like, “Is it like, falsification if I only put my favorite pictures of myself up on Tinder? Is it false advertising because I’m like, I don’t look like that in real life?” And you’re like, “Well, you do. You look like all of those photos in real life.”
I can’t even remember exactly how you put it but so imagine I’m asking you that question right now, and I know there’s a lot of you listening that are dating and, first of all, if you’re 49 years old, you can still go on Tinder and find the love of your life. Just A, done. You guys have met Andy. But also, I think dating is a great way for you to kind of meet yourself and do a lot of work on yourself as is race photos.
But if I were asking you right now, hey, I feel like I should put – I know what it was. I said, “I think I should put more realistic photos on Tinder so that guys know what they’re getting into,” or whatever. And so respond to that as if we were having that conversation.
Kara: Okay, I don’t remember what I said two years ago, but it’s probably the same thing.
Jill: It was brilliant. It changed everything for me.
Kara: Okay, no pressure. I just need to remember whatever it was. So I mean, I do always say your photos should be generally representational. Don’t take a photo from 30 feet in the air looking down on you and then be like, here, I’m two inches high and only have a face and no body. You do want to show what you really look like.
But the photo where you look the best is as true as the photo where you look the “worst.” And worst and best are subjective. But right now, I could like, crouch under you and take a picture only up looking at your chin and we would just see your nostrils and your chin. That would be a real photo of you but nobody looks at you from that perspective and that’s not what you need to put on a dating site. Or in a race photo, right?
So I don’t know, this doesn’t feel as brilliant to me as whatever I apparently said two years ago so I don’t know what I said.
Jill: It was good. It was in vein of what you just told me.
Kara: The wisdom is lost for the ages, we’re never going to get it back. But none of those photos are more or less real than others, and we always think it’s like, we want to show people the worst so that we don’t have to worry that they might see it, right? But that’s just such a scarcity way of thinking and it just assumes and implies that that’s what they’re going to see is the worst.
Whereas if someone is attracted to you, what they see is the best, right? They see you the way you see you when you think you look the best and probably they think you look even better than that.
Jill: And honestly like, our photos, like you said, it’s just one angle. And so two dimensional is so much less powerful. When you see somebody in three dimensions, you see they’re constantly moving and changing and so it’s not like people show up and pose in the exact same way that they – we don’t stand…
Kara: People’s energy impacts what they’re like in person. People always think I’m like, 5’9. I’m 5’2.
Jill: You have a very tall personality.
Kara: I have a very tall personality apparently and everyone thinks I’m tall. Doesn’t matter that I’m clearly not. It’s like, the energy we put out is so much more important.
I think the other thing about race photos is like, if you look at a photo of a marathon winner winning the marathon, she also looks crazy. She’s all red in the face and like, can see the muscles going, right? The way you look when you just finished, when you’re running in a marathon is not the same way a like, airbrushed fitness model looks when she’s posing in a gym after an hour and a half of makeup and she hasn’t sweated yet. The comparison is totally a lot like, unreasonable.
Jill: Yeah, for sure. You wouldn’t expect to look your best. And here’s the thing like, defining a race photo – like, you could actually say, hey, I do look my best when I’ve just finished a marathon.
Kara: That’s what I like, yeah, exactly.
Jill: Yeah, because look how powerful I am, that’s pretty fucking awesome what I just did. That is me at my best and this is what I look like.
Kara: Right, totally.
Jill: Visual is so like, irrelevant to the accomplishment and what was just completed. So here’s the thing, I tell my listeners and I tell my clients all the time like, just be aware that there’s going to be photographers on the race course and when you see one, smile and wave. Like, that’s literally what I do for every single race photo and I usually have some like, doofy smile on my face, which is fine. Because I know like, it’s capturing that moment of like, I’m excited to be there, whatever.
But the more I think about it I think the more important it is for them to capture what really happened rather than you pretending. If it’s at mile 10 of a half marathon and you’re like, when is this thing going to be over, do you really want a picture of you smiling and waving like everything’s great?
Or do you want to capture the reality of that moment, which was like, yeah, like, you were struggling and you know, you get to see this is what true determination looks like, rather than some insane grin, which is seriously – and I always do thumbs up. I don’t consciously do it. I have so many pictures of myself…
Kara: Everything’s great. It’s fine.
Jill: No, it’s just ridiculous.
Kara: So what I really love about that is that it gets to this distinction between the external and the internal. What is your body for? Women are taught that our bodies are for other people to look at and enjoy or judge. That’s the whole point of having a female body, is that you have a decorative object to spend your whole life working on so that other people will like it. That’s what we’re taught.
And so running a marathon is the opposite of that. You’re doing that to see what your body can do and your mind. It’s obviously mind and body but like, you’re being in your body, you’re living in it. What’s amazing about running a marathon is not that it makes you look like a model because there’s a reason that model shoots aren’t while they’re running marathons, right?
The whole point of running a marathon is that you are experiencing your body. You’re embodied in your body, you’re doing something for yourself, hopefully. Hopefully you’re not running it just to like, burn calories so that somebody else likes your body. So when you’re worried about how you look in a photo and that’s what you’re focusing on, that’s – we’re trained to do that, to think that that’s what matters, as opposed to being like, “Holy shit, look at that strong beating heart and set of lungs and quads that just helped me run 13 miles,” that’s insane. So we’re like, focusing on how it looks versus what does it feel like to live in that body. Your body is not an object, it’s a home. It’s an animal that you live in.
Jill: I love this. It’s not an object, it’s a home. That’s just such an important thing to remember that yeah, our bodies are not decorations, our bodies are not – our bodies are beautiful and amazing, but this whole concept of like, we need to look a certain way, it drives me to absolute distraction because I just think to myself like, who’s deciding this?
Kara: It’s totally culture constructed, and what you see is that sociologically, whatever is difficult to obtain in a given society becomes valued by the elites. So when you lived in a time when there wasn’t enough food and societies where women were encouraged to become fat are societies where there’s not really enough food to go around. So having a lot of food is an elite status symbol and so becoming fat is more difficult and so that is valued as a beauty ideal.
We now live in a world where we have a lot of access to food and processed food, becoming fat is very easy. And so being super thin is considered the ideal, right? So it’s completely a social, hierarchical construction. Whatever is difficult, the elites take on as a symbol of their eliteness because they have the money or the time or whatever, the resources to devote to this inane project of changing their body to be this difficult thing, and so that becomes super valued.
Jill: Yeah, and then the rest of us don’t even know, like we don’t even consciously understand what’s happening. We just think, oh, that’s just how it’s supposed to be.
Kara: Right, that’s just what it is. That’s just what pretty is. Everybody knows.
Jill: It’s fascinating. I have so many good friends that every May or June it’s like, oh yay, it’s pool season, and just this year I suggested, “Hey, let’s have a pool party at my apartment building,” and you guys, if you’re listening to this, yes, I am talking about you. I’m totally calling my friends out. But I suggested, “Hey, let’s do our monthly get together at the pool at my building,” and everybody’s like, “Oh, only if I don’t have to wear a bathing suit. Nobody needs to see that.”
Kara: Only if I come to the pool but not wear a bathing suit.
Jill: I know, I’m like, fuck that shit. I’m like, I’m going to wear a bikini and you know what, like, I’m probably the fattest person in my apartment building and I show up in that bikini and I’m like, you can look or not look, I really don’t care. It’s my body and I am like, very pleased with how it looks.
But it’s like, that has come from like, years and years of working really hard to deliberately change that. So I’m going to suggest to listeners like, if body image is a thing for you, if you’re really not happy with how you look, let’s start small, let’s just work on race photos.
So I mean, we’ve kind of talked to it, but like, do you have maybe like, one to three steps that somebody could practice so that when they see the race photo they can start turning the ship around?
Kara: Yeah. So number one, I think you can do this even before you look at it because you’ve looked at other ones before so you know what your brain usually does. So number one is get acquainted with what are the thoughts you’re having.
Most of us just look at a photo, we feel a rush of shame, and then we look away from it and we don’t ever really look at what those thoughts are. So look at a photo on purpose and write down all the thoughts that come up is number one so you really know what’s in there. And then I really recommend using for body image work for me, I really had to do a lot of neutral thoughts.
I do believe when I see a race picture of someone, I think, “Oh my god, their body is so strong and amazing,” but I don’t expect someone to go automatically from, “Oh my god, my stomach is so flabby and disgusting,” to, “Oh my god, my body is so strong and amazing,” right? It’s like, too positive. So you need a neutral thought.
And I really like neutral thoughts that just acknowledge that it is a human body. Like, I have a stomach, there are a lot of stomachs in the world that look like mine. I have a stomach and I ran a marathon with it. Whatever the thought is, come up with some really neutral thoughts. I did a lot of looking in the mirror and being like, that’s a human stomach. That’s a human stomach. Other people have stomachs like this.
Like just really neutral thoughts. And then I practiced ahead of time. So before you look at your next race photo, decide ahead of time what you’re going to think. Don’t wait to see it and then be like, oh weird, my new thought didn’t kick in. You have to do it on purpose.
So decide ahead of time what you’re going to think when you look at the photo before the email ever shows up or however they get sent to you, and then practice that thought a bunch before it comes and then you’re going to be more prepared.
Jill: I love that. And so deciding ahead of time what you’re going to think about it regardless. Like if it looks the way you think it should look, maybe your job’s a little easier, right? But still, deciding ahead of time.
Kara: But it’s not going to because if you have negative body image than no photo looks the way you think it should look unless it’s like, taken from 30 feet in the air.
Jill: That’s a good point.
Kara: So if you have trouble with race photos, it’s very unlikely that you’re just going to magically get a race photo that your brain doesn’t have a problem with because, back to the beginning, you’ve primed your brain to look for problems in race photos. If your thought is, I always look terrible in race photos, guess what? Every race photo will look terrible to you.
Jill: Do you have any suggestions on how to prime your brain to look for the opposite of the negative?
Kara: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s like, level two after you’ve gotten some neutral thoughts in there. But I still would probably decide ahead of time like, what is positive about me running a race. Like, my legs are strong, my lungs did an amazing job, my knees felt good. Whatever it is, look for the things about you that you think are positive about having the experience of the race and think about those when you look at the photo.
Oh, there are my knees that did really well, there’s my ribcage that held my lungs that did amazing. And you can extend that also to the external of your body also, but I really recommend going through neutral before you go straight to positive on the physical body image stuff.
Jill: Yeah, because don’t you think when people try to go straight to the positive, their brain just argues with them?
Kara: Yeah, they just don’t believe it so they don’t get any emotional payoff and then they think that changing your thoughts doesn’t work. If I tried to do an advanced calculus problem and I was like, well, this doesn’t work. Calculus does not work. Well, it’s like, I didn’t learn any of this shit that I needed to learn to do it. So of course it didn’t work.
Jill: Yeah, I love that. So it’s just a practice and you start small and you build and you build and you build.
Kara: Yeah, and body image I think is a daily practice. Don’t just wait for your race photos. You want to be working on this over time and over time it’ll get easier and it’ll become more natural. But women are inundated with messaging about body image stuff, so I really think it takes a lot of consistent work in the beginning.
And I would also suggest that your followers, the only kind of cleanse I ever recommend, do an Instagram cleanse where you get rid of – people are of two minds on this. I don’t believe that circumstances cause our feelings. I think we can always do thought work. But there’s also studies showing that looking at images of women your size or bigger promotes body satisfaction. And looking at images of women in fashion magazines promotes body dissatisfaction.
So people will like, rate their body image and it’s always lower after they’ve looked at traditional women’s magazines. And since Instagram is now flooded with basically people who are like, professional models or bloggers or fitspiration whatever, I don’t think it’s helpful to be constantly stimulating yourself with that. And so what I really recommend is unfollowing most of those kinds of people and following people your size or larger who do the sport that you do or other sports.
So if your Instagram feed every day is full of like badass plus size athletes, you’re going to start seeing the beauty in them and then you’ll start seeing it in yourself. And sometimes even now if I look in the mirror with an outfit, I’m like, oh, this isn’t the silhouette that I usually pick that I think is the most flattering or whatever, I literally will be like, okay, but imagine a cute fashion blogger that was your size wearing this. You would think she looks so perky and cute. And I’m like, oh yeah, I could think that about myself too.
So giving yourself these other visual images will accustom your eye to seeing that’s what it should look like. That’s what it looks like when somebody runs a race, that’s what it looks like when somebody does the shotput or whatever they’re doing. Your default idea of how big a body should be will change without you even doing anything.
Jill: And it really does work too because you and I talked about this years ago and it was at least two years ago, and I started – I did exactly what you suggested and I did find within probably about six months that if I saw like, a really thin person – not that there’s anything wrong with being really thin, but when I would see the occasional Instagram model that was really, really thin, my brain would be like, “Oh, that looks kind of weird.”
Because the reason that we think that looks normal is because we’re overexposed to it. So if you just overexpose yourself to something different, you just literally are reprogramming your brain. You’re taking advantage of your brain’s tendency to just become comfortable with what it sees all the time. But it works. It absolutely works.
Kara: And it doesn’t take that long. Because I have crazy news for you: this was only a year ago we did this.
Jill: Was it really?
Kara: Yes. It was not the summer that just happened obviously, but the one before.
Jill: Oh my god, it’s only been a year. It feels like it’s been forever.
Kara: It’s only been like, 15 months.
Jill: Wow, all right, well, that’s kind of awesome. So you guys, do it right now. Go and please, actually, this is a great segue because I want to make sure that everybody knows how they can follow you. So first of all, follow her Instagram and by the way, you posted a picture of the two of us on Instagram and I was like, she really is short. I’m like…
Kara: And I was wearing my heels in that photo too.
Jill: And I was there for the picture, I didn’t even realize it until I saw like, the evidence.
Kara: That’s the thing about Zoom. I can seem as tall as I want on Zoom. You just see my…
Jill: You can, you can. And your camera’s up a little. Like, you must be sitting in a tall chair because it does look like your living room is like, below you.
Kara: Oh, I think I just have really low furniture. I’m not that – my chair is not tall. My feet reach the ground. I think it’s just, I don’t know. I live in a miniature dollhouse.
Jill: Oh my god, that’s awesome. How can people find you? Where’s the best place? Where should they start?
Kara: Yeah, listen to the podcast. It’s the Unf*ck Your Brain podcast. There’s an asterisk instead of the second u, so it’s Unf*ck Your Brain, or you just search my name. I’m not going to spell it for you, it’s so long but it’ll be on Jill’s…
Jill: It’ll be in the show notes.
Kara: There will probably be a post or show notes or something. Or you can go to www.unfckyourbrain.com and I think Jill will have my Instagram handle. You can find me on Instagram, all the places you normally find someone.
Jill: Of course. And you have like, some pretty like, fun stuff that you do with your clients.
Kara: I do. We have all the fun. Well, also, if you go to the website, there’s the free five-day confidence challenge you can do, which I think is a nice kickstart in the self-confidence and there’s a little bit of body image stuff in there as well I think.
And then the way I work with people is generally I have a six-month program called Unf*ck Your Brain, and we do the same kind of thought work about all the major areas in your life. So body image, relationships, work, yourself, your family and friends. We just kind of like, get in there and unfuck the whole thing.
Jill: Yeah, it’s so good because really, I mean, the thoughts that we have about ourselves tend to be the thoughts that we have about other, they sort of, I don’t know.
Kara: All the thoughts you think other people have about you are just your thoughts.
Jill: Thank you, that’s what I was trying to say. You just said it much better. Yeah. And so once you can start to unravel that it’s amazing like, it doesn’t just fix one part of your life. It unfucks all parts of your life pretty well.
Kara: Totally.
Jill: Yeah, all right. Well, is there anything else that you want the rebels to know?
Kara: It’s all in your brain. It really is. It really is, and all the things you are attributing to your body image, like things that you don’t think are going right in your life, or people you don’t think like you, or why dating is like this, or why your sex life is like that, or whatever it is that you think is caused by your body is really caused by your thoughts.
And I know that because when I stopped dieting I probably gained 30 or 40 pounds and my dating and sex life is better now at the biggest I’ve ever been than it ever was when I was more conventional, smaller size. Because my thought patterns and my confidence are different and how I show up is different.
And so I attract a much different caliber of person and I’m much better at sorting through and I show up in the relationship different and I’m not just constantly sabotaging myself to make the other shoe drop.
Jill: I love that so much. And we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
Kara: No. We only think it’s our body.
Jill: So okay, so everyone, if your brain is fucked, just go.
Kara: Just come to me.
Jill: Check out Kara’s podcast and she has some really good truth bombs that she drops on Instagram and of course she’s a rock star coach because I can speak from personal experience, probably the best coach I’ve ever hired.
Kara: Thank you.
Jill: All right, well thank you so much for joining us today, Kara, and yeah, this has been fun.
Kara: Thanks for having me.
Jill: All right.
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Thank you for listening today. And before you go, since the recording of this episode four years ago, Kara has actually created an entirely new program called The Clutch. And the clutch is an online feminist coaching community where you will learn how to create true authentic confidence in your own heart and mind, and bond with other badass women who are doing the same.
So you can learn more about this program at unfuckyourbrain.com/clutch, or just listen to Kara’s podcast, also called Unfuck your brain. Let your mind be blown and I will see you next week.
Oh, and one last thing, if you enjoyed listening to this episode you have to check out the Rebel Runner Roadmap. It’s a 30 day online program that will teach you exactly how to start running, stick with it, and become the runner you’ve always wanted to be. Head on over to rebelrunnerroadmap.com to join. I’d love to be a part of your journey.
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