Ep. #414: Stop Telling Me to Love My Body

Welcome to the Not Your Average Runner podcast. I’m Jill Angie, a certified running coach, and your running BFF here to help you start running. Feel confident and love the journey no matter your size. Now, if you’ve ever felt like you just weren’t meant to be a runner, think again. I believe that running is for all bodies, even yours.

This podcast is your warmup buddy, giving you tips, motivation, and the support you need to lace up and get moving. I’ve helped thousands of women become runners, and now I wanna help you. Let’s go.

Hi friends and welcome back to the Not Your Average Runner show. Today’s episode is gonna be a little spicy, maybe a little personal, uh, but something I think a lot of, you’re gonna feel deep in your bones and that’s ’cause we’re talking about body love and all of the people that are telling us you have to love your body.

’cause honestly, I’m fucking tired of it. For years, the message has been shoved down our throats. Honestly, I have been part of that message. And what we’ve been hearing is just love yourself. Love yourself exactly as you are. Love your body exactly as it is, and on paper. Okay? Yeah, it sounds great. Who wouldn’t wanna love their body?

But let’s be real. If you have spent decades being told your body is wrong, it’s too big, it’s too slow, it’s too saggy, it’s too much, it’s not enough, right? You don’t just flip a switch and suddenly love what you see in the mirror. It takes. It takes time and it takes work. And I have been doing the work for a long time, and even I don’t wake up every morning in a state of bliss over my reflection far from it.

Some days I feel neutral, some days I feel frustrated. I look in the mirror and I think, who is this? Old woman looking back at me. Um, some days I feel proud though, and some days I feel like crap. And that is the truth of it. All right, so instead of trying to force this performative love your body thing, I wanna talk today about a different, more honest approach, and that is respect and neutrality and partnership.

So. Why does love your body feel like gaslighting sometimes? Well, because it is, so let’s, let’s start with that. When you have been through a lifetime of diet culture, like. Decades of Weight Watchers points and low fat snack wells and all of that crap, and doctors who told you to lose weight when you came in with an ear infection, right?

When that is your experience being told to just love your body really can feel like gaslighting. You’re like, wait a second. Do you even understand what it’s like to have my experience to have every message you’ve ever received? Basically be, uh, your body is wrong. And then somebody is like, well, just love it.

What’s the problem? Just love your body. It dismisses the very real layered and complicated relationship that most women have with their bodies, and honestly, it can create even more shame. Because then you’re thinking, oh, not only is my body wrong, but now I’m wrong because I don’t love it even though it’s wrong.

Right? So effed up. So what I wanna do today is shift the target a little bit, and that’s because I want us to look more at respect. Respect is different from love. Respect is accessible even on the tough days. May be barely accessible on the tough days, but it’s there. Right? Respect means, uh, I may not love my thighs, but I respect that they carry me through my life.

I may not love my belly, but I respect that it does digests my food. It keeps me alive. It has been with me through every season of life. It’s always been there. My belly and respect takes the pressure off. It says I don’t have to fake a feeling that I don’t believe. I can still choose to take care of myself because my body deserves respect.

So here is a simple question that you can ask yourself, and that is. If I respected my body today, how would I treat it? And maybe it means going for a walk or taking a nap instead of pushing a hard workout, pushing through exhaustion. Maybe it means eating lunch early so you don’t get hangry. Uh, maybe it means buying jeans that actually fit your ass today instead of trying to squeeze into the ones that don’t fit.

Respect is a daily practice, just like love, but respect. Is one that builds that kind of trust between you and your body. And this is powerful, right? When you feel that trust with your body, like, Hey, I don’t love you, but I know you’ve got my back. That is a beautiful feeling. So, okay, we talked about respect.

Let’s talk a little bit about neutrality. Body neutrality says I don’t have to love it. I don’t have to eat it. It just is. Okay. And honestly, that can be the most freeing place of all because when you’re neutral, you stop making your body the main character of your life. And that’s what we do, right? When we are obsessed with what size we are, how big our thighs are, or whether our arms jiggle or whatever.

You’re making your body the main character of your life instead of everything else about you. Which is way more interesting and important. So when you’re neutral, your body becomes the vehicle and not the storyline. You can get dressed without spiraling in front of a mirror. You can show up to dinner without calculating how you’re gonna look sitting in a chair like, are my thighs spilling over the side?

Is my back fat? Sticking out the back, right? You can move your body because it feels good to do so and not because you’re trying to earn your dinner. So neutrality is a reset button. It lets you zoom all the way out and say, all right, this is the body I have today. How do I wanna live my life with it? In that space, you get to focus on joy and connection and just living and stop focusing so much on how you look.

Now, once we’ve got through respect and neutrality, I want you to start thinking about making your body a partner. Not an enemy. And this one’s a little personal because, well, it’s all personal, but this one, uh, for years I treated my body like the enemy. Like it was something to punish with dieting, something that had let me down, something I had to beat into submission with workouts.

Basically, I treated my body as a problem to fix, and that never worked. It literally created more resentment and more problems to fix. And the shift for me came when I started treating my body more like a partner. Like, alright, brain, body, we’re in this together. Right? We don’t, the brain doesn’t get another body.

Body doesn’t get another brain. We, this is it. This is it for us, right? And when I started listening more to my body and paying attention to what it was trying to tell me. Instead of trying to tell it what it needed, I started resting when I needed to rest. I started moving in ways that felt more joyful and um, and just relaxing and enjoyable.

Instead of punishing, uh, I stopped feeling guilty about what I was eating. That’s amazing. Um, and I noticed something huge. I didn’t need to love my body to work with my body because your body, like I said, your body is not a problem to fix. It is not something to punish. It is your partner in this one wild and precious life.

You get one body. And if you spend all your time hating it or feeling guilty, ’cause you’re not loving it, you’re missing out on the experience of life. When you start acting like a team, even if you don’t love it yet, even if you never love it, you just respect it and give it some neutrality in your life, you get to move differently and live differently.

Okay, let’s bring it home with a few practical things that you can do this week. Let’s do a respect check-in. First, just ask yourself, what is one way I can show respect for my body today? Right. Not love, just respect. Start using neutral language at least some of the time, right? So you still might think, oh, I hate my arms, or I wish my arms were different.

But give some airtime to these are my arms and they do X, Y, and Z for me. Right? Give, give both sides. Some airtime so that it’s not the constant, I hate my arms, I hate my this, I hate my that. Think about your body and your mind as a partnership and use that mindset when you’re making a decision about food or movement or rest or anything, right?

What would support me and my body as a team right now, and sometimes it might be movement, and sometimes it might be having a salad for dinner, and sometimes it might be, you know what? Right now the team needs a cupcake and that’s okay. Okay. So it doesn’t need to be all one sided. It doesn’t need to be, everything has to be healthy ’cause, uh, because to respect my body, I need to be healthy all the time, right?

Respect your body, but also be realistic and treat. It as a partnership. And then finally, limit the noise in your life, right? Your social media noise, the conversations you’re having with the people around you. If body love posts are triggering you, or body shaming posts are triggering you mute ’em.

Unfollow. Do what you need to do. Fill your space with people who talk respectfully about their bodies and instead of. That one friend who’s always complaining about certain body parts, and you’re just like, for God’s sake, they’re just your arms. Relax. Right? Right. Mute those people if you can, or limit your exposure so that you don’t have that constant negativity coming into your brain all the time externally, because you’re working on yourself, right?

And so you’ve gotta like help curate. What you are hearing and seeing to the best of your ability. So here’s what I want you to take away. You don’t have to love your body to start respecting it. You don’t have to plaster affirmation, affirmations on your mirror if they feel fake, and you sure as hell don’t have to let anyone tell you how you should feel.

About the skin that you’re in, love might come. That’s great. It might not also fine. Neutrality might be the sweet spot for you. Respect is always possible, but at the end of the day, it is your relationship with your body and nobody else gets to dictate it. So next time somebody tells you to just love your body.

You can flip them off if you want. It’s my favorite. My, actually, my latest, favorite thing is instead of flipping people off, I just give them a thumbs down and say, boo, that’s super fun, but. In all seriousness, the next time somebody tells you to just love your body, just smile and nod and you get to think to yourself, I’m gonna relate to my body in a way that actually works for me.

Thank you very much. You don’t even have to say it out loud, just move on with your day. Now, if you are ready to practice that kind of respect through movement. I created something to help. It’s called the Midlife Movement Makeover, and it is a 30 day reset for women who are done with starting over and just wanna move their bodies in ways to feel good and not punishing.

Okay. You can grab your copy for just $29 right now. I will drop the link in the show notes, but also you can go to not your average runner.com/midlife. That is not your average runner.com/midlife. And that is it for today, my friend. Go out there this week and practice one act of respect towards your body.

Feed it when it’s hungry. Rest it. When it’s tired, move it because it feels good. That’s the real path to confidence and I’ll see you next week.

MWAH.

Real quick before you go, I’ve got a fun challenge for you. Take my exerciser personality quiz to find out exactly what kind of exerciser you are and how to make running feel easier and more enjoyable.

Just head over to not your average runner.com/quiz to take it and get your results. That’s not your average runner.com/quiz.