Ep #39: The Hard Truth About Self Love

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who is midlife and plus sized and you want to start running but don’t know how, or if it’s even possible, you’re in the right place. Using proven strategies and real-life experience, certified running and life coach Jill Angie shares how you can learn to run in the body you have right now.

Hey, rebels, you are listening to episode number 39 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today we are talking about the not so pretty side of body positivity and self-love. Why? Well, because when someone tells you to start loving yourself, it’s not always easy. Especially if you’ve been beating yourself up for years.

So we’re going to dive in and break it all down this week so you can stop the beatings and start down the path to acceptance

and dare I say it, love. And real quick, today’s episode is sponsored by Stitch Fix. Stitch Fix is an online personal styling service that finds you clothes you love in sizes that actually fit you. And I have been obsessed with them lately.

Later in today’s episode, I’m going to give you a quick update on my experience from the past couple of weeks. So this week though, we’re going to kick off the show with a great quote. And it is: “Other people’s opinions are none of your business.”

Now, I was inspired to share this quote after I got a great email question from Sheryl. Here’s what she wrote. “Jill, I love your podcasts. Believe it or not, I am finding them extremely helpful during my last eight weeks on Ironman training. I had a training ride yesterday where I had another little quit that made me lose confidence and feel bad about myself. I listened to How to Stop Quitting, and it really help me put it in perspective and move forward. But also realize how all those little quits add up. My question now, I have several important group rides coming up where I will no doubt be one of the slowest riders. I really need to get familiar with the course and be mentally and physically prepared for it, but I am so embarrassed about my speed. How to shut that shit down and do what I need to do to be ready for this race?”

Okay, so first of all, Sheryl, oh my god, Ironman training, that’s so badass. You are amazing, sister. We are all cheering you on and I know you’re going to kick ass on race day. And Ironman training is no joke. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the distances, it’s a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and a marathon, which is yet another 26.2miles.

My ex-husband was an Ironman, there were some weekends where he would get up in the morning to go out for his brick workout and I wouldn’t see him again for like, 12 hours. So I really want to congratulate you, Sheryl, and I want you to congratulate yourself on taking on this challenge, for stepping up to do the training, and I want you to remember that most people will never, ever, ever do something as fierce as training for an Iron distance. For real. Forget completing the race itself, right? The training is the real achievement here. And you’re doing it, so let’s just stop and applaud that level of badassery right there.

Now, on to your question, I really have only one thing to say about your riding speed, and that is, so what? So what if you’re the slowest one there? Somebody has to be the slowest, yes? Why is it not okay for it to be you? And I want to talk about this in terms of the coaching model that I used in episode 33, How to Coach Yourself.

So your circumstance here is that you have a few group rides planned – I’m sorry, several group rides planned in the future. And your thoughts about that circumstance are as follows: first, these are important rides. Second, I will no doubt be one of the slowest riders there, and third, my speed is embarrassing.

Now, I really want you to take a moment and understand that all of those statements, even the one about these rides being important are actually just optional thoughts. They are your opinion, nothing else. They are not facts.

The fact is you have these rides scheduled. Everything else is a thought. Even the thought that these are important rides, okay? So you get to decide right now how you want to think and feel about them in advance.

So when you think the thought, “I no doubt will be one of the slowest riders there,” or you think, “My speed is embarrassing,” how do you feel? What is the emotion? And I suspect it is something along the lines of shame, embarrassment, fear, discouragement, right? And when you feel these emotions, how do you show up to these rides? My guess is that you maybe tell people in advance, “I’m going to be the slowest one,” or you apologize in advance for not being where you think you should be in the training, or you say things like, “Gosh, I hope I finish this ride.”

You basically fail or quit on yourself in advance, and the result is that you don’t perform the way you want and you prove yourself right. So I want you to decide in advance how you’re going to think about these rides. Because you have unlimited thoughts available to you. You can choose anything you want. So choosing ones that create feelings of confidence, strength, empowerment, and pride are going to give you a totally different result.

So first of all, damn it girl, you’re training for a fucking Ironman, right? You could just put that thought on repeat in your head during your ride and you’ll be all set. Just repeat to yourself, “I’m training for a fucking Ironman, I’m training for a fucking Ironman.” Right? You think that thought over and over again and you’re going to feel amazing.

Or you could think to yourself, “This is hard but I’m doing it because I’m a badass.” Being embarrassed about your speed and talking about how embarrassed you are about your speed, whether you’re saying it out loud or whether you’re saying it over and over again in your head is not super helpful to you, right? It’s leading to all those little quits that you talked about in your letter.

And the little quits are actually keeping you slow. They’re just reinforcing your shitty thoughts, which is preventing you from really showing up and training your ass off, okay? So I also want to point out, you don’t know if you’re going to be the slowest person at that ride. You can’t predict the future. You have no idea who’s going to show up to ride and somebody could show up that is your pace, that is slower than you, right?

But even if you are the absolute slowest person there, who cares? Really, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you show up for yourself, you give your best effort, and you do the work of getting familiar with the course. That’s why you’re there. It’s not a competition, there’s no medal for first place on a training ride, okay? So your job is to get familiar with the course, get mentally prepared, show up, do your best. That is your focus.

If you were riding this route all by yourself, your speed wouldn’t matter, right? It is the presence of other people that is creating all of this drama for you, or you’re creating all this drama for yourself because of the other people that are there. You can’t be embarrassed about something when you’re not concerned about somebody else’s opinion. Embarrassment does not exist in a vacuum.

So here’s what I want you to do. Stay in your own lane. Both literally and figuratively. Other people’s opinions are none of your damn business. None of your damn business. I can’t stress that enough. Even if these people keep their opinions to themselves, which I’m sure they will, even worrying about what they might be thinking and not saying, it’s still none of your business.

So you get to decide how you want to feel during your ride. So decide that now, then create thoughts for yourself that are going to make you feel that way. This will lead to you taking the actions that you want, which are training consistently instead of quitting on yourself. Showing up for yourself instead of hiding.

I believe in you mama, I know you can do this. So I want you to keep us updated on how it goes and I cannot wait to see finish line pictures of you at that Ironman.

Alright, real quick before we dive into this week’s main topic, I want to talk about Stitch Fix. Now, everyone likes the idea of having something new to wear, maybe you’re trying a new trend, but finding clothes that you love in styles that you love, that also fit you and your budget can be really tough. So what’s the easy solution to style that fits just right? It’s Stitch Fix.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that I used this service a few years ago but I was right at the edge of the size range they offered at the time so it didn’t work for me. But now their sizes go up to a 24 and a 3X, they also have maternity, they also have petites, so I went ahead and – I’m not pregnant. Don’t know why I mentioned maternity there. I’m not pregnant. But in case you are, Stitch Fix has maternity.

So anyway, I signed up again and I’ve already gotten three boxes and the first box, talked about that a few episodes ago. It was super cute, I kept everything. The second box was all tops, so I actually made a request of my stylist because I’m on video every day and I wanted a little bit of variety to go with my pajama bottoms that nobody sees.

So I ended up keeping – I got a bunch of five tops, I ended up keeping only one of them because they weren’t quite my style. So what I did was I wrote a quick note to my stylist, which is super easy to do when you return anything you don’t like, and just a side note in general, the whole website is easy to use. So I wrote to my stylist and I told her I wanted some edgier, more modern stuff, and I said, “Think Universal Standard,” which is one of my favorite brands and by the way, Stitch Fix does carry them.

And the next box was absolute perfection. I loved everything in it and I even wore one of the outfits, which was camo skinny crops and a really fun black tank top. I wore them to the Beyoncé and Jay-Z concert last week. I was so excited about them, so you can actually check out my Instagram if you want to see that outfit.

And here’s the deal: in case you’re not familiar with how Stitch Fix works, it is super easy. You do it all online. Takes maybe five to 10 minutes to set up. You don’t even need to call anybody. You just do it all like on their website. And then you tell Stitch Fix where to send your first box and when to send it.

You can actually subscribe and have them send like, regularly, either weekly or monthly or quarterly, or you can just go in and request one whenever you want. It’s really flexible. And like I said before, they carry a really wide range of sizes. Sizes zero through 24, XS through 3X, maternity and petites, and I think they are offering men’s stuff now too. So if you and your significant other want to uplevel your style, go check out the men’s stuff too.

And here’s the great part. Because you give them details about your body proportions, including your height and your weight, and just like whether you’re top heavy or bottom heavy or whatever you’re built like, your stylist actually knows exactly which brands are going to fit you right and every single piece I’ve received so far has been spot on from that perspective.

So to get started with your own fix, you’re just going to go to stitchfix.com/selflove. Tell them your sizes, what styles you like and how much you want to spend. You’ll be paired with your very own personal stylist who will take that information and handpick five amazing items to send your way.

It’s all delivered right to your home. You try everything on, pay only for what you love, and return the rest. And seriously, it is so much fun to get that box in the mail. Everything is packed really nicely in tissue paper. Super fancy. It’s fun to open it up and see what’s inside. It’s like Christmas basically.

So shipping, exchanges, and returns are always free, and there is – like I said, there’s no subscription required. You can sign up to receive shipments on a scheduled basis, or you can get your fix whenever you want. I actually got three right in a row, one week right after another, and now I’m on a monthly schedule because I kind of sort of plumped up my wardrobe a little bit and so now I’m just like, I want to get monthly infusions.

So if you’re ready to up your style game with Stitch Fix, get started today and get 25% off when you keep all five items in your box. Go to stitchfix.com/selflove. That’s stitchfix.com/selflove and that’s going to give you 25% off.

Alright, okay rebels, it is time to talk body positivity and self-love. And it’s going to be another tough love episode a little bit, but self-love, we’re not going to be talking about the rainbows and daisies kind of it. Today we’re going to talk about the raw truth of learning how to stop criticizing yourself because that shit ain’t easy.

Your inner mean girl, the one who says things to you like, “You can’t show off those arms in public. They’re too fat,” or, “You have no business calling yourself a runner because you have to take walk breaks every minute.” You know who your inner mean girl is, right?

She is the voice of every single person in your life that has helped shape who you are today, right? Your parents, your teachers, your friends, your siblings, your ex-boyfriends, your ex-girlfriends, the bullies in your middle school, every TV show you’ve ever watched, every issue of People magazine that had, “They lost half their body weight, learn how they did it” on the cover, right?

When you’re little and you’re just learning about the world, you absorb the thoughts and beliefs of all the people around you. And if those people are thinking kind of awful, awful stuff like fat is bad or fat is unattractive, you’re going to take all those beliefs on and assume they’re true because you don’t know any better at that age. You haven’t quite learned that you can choose your own beliefs.

Now, I just want to share a little bit about the beliefs that I learned when I was young in case you can relate. Now, my mom was amazing and she loved the hell out of me. She did the best possible, the best she could possibly do for me, and I grew up feeling very loved and very lucky to have my parents and my family.

But my mom believed that being fat was an indicator of how worthy a person she was. That’s how she believed about herself. So she learned that from her mom, who coincidentally was very overweight. But she believed it really hard about herself. So she didn’t teach it to me in words so much, at least when I was younger, but more by her actions. Because she was constantly commenting on her own body.

She was constantly criticizing herself, her appearance, her body. Just everything. She even like – she would criticize her hair to the point that I was like, “God, why is your hair such a problem?” But what she did mostly was she tracked everything she ate and she wrote the calories down on the refrigerator. For real.

This was the 70s, there were no tracking apps, there was no MyFitnessPal. She just kept a pad of paper on the counter and each day she would tape a blank piece – this was before Post-It notes. She would take a blank piece of paper on the refrigerator and then every time she ate something, every time she drank a glass of water, every time she had a cup of coffee, put anything in her mouth, she would write it down and the calories.

And so I was old enough to see what she was doing and I really started to internalize the message that eating more than 1200 calories a day was something to be really ashamed of. And here’s the kicker though: at the same time, in our house, we didn’t talk about feelings at all. Food was the only way I knew to deal with – how to deal with things that were going on in my life.

Like my developing body or the fact that I was getting bullied at school. Just everything. So here I was getting the message that overeating is bad, it’s something to be ashamed of, but simultaneously, I didn’t have the tools to deal with my life and food was the only thing, overeating was the only thing I knew how to do to deal with my feelings.

And so that’s kind of when my inner mean girl was born. I didn’t know there was any other way to believe. I knew being fat was bad and I also knew I had this overwhelming desire to overeat, which created an environment of shame that I pretty much stewed in, I would say, for the next 30 years, right? From middle school onward.

I hated my body so much because it represented everything I thought that was wrong with me. Every time I looked in the mirror and saw how fat I was and by the way, I mean, I look back at pictures of myself in high school and I wasn’t fat at all. I looked amazing. Like, god, I would love to have those boobs again, right?

But feeling fat has nothing to do with the size of your body and everything to do with what’s going on in our brain. So every time I looked in the mirror, I would see a fat girl, it reinforced that I was a terrible person and that I didn’t deserve to be loved, so I would eat to deal with those feelings. I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I just silently beat myself up about it year after year after year.

And I went through life like that until I was in my late 30s and early 40s and it really, really sucked. And then I kind of discovered yoga. I started working with a personal trainer that started to teach me like, hey, you don’t have to hate your body so much, and then I found the coaching model, the one I talked about in episode 33, and everything started to change.

I woke up one morning and I loved myself, I looked in the mirror, I thought about how beautiful I was, and it’s been unicorns and hummingbirds ever since. No. Not quite. That’s not how it works.

So yes, I discovered the coaching model and yes, it has changed everything for me. But it did not happen in a big flash of light, okay? Self-love, body size positivity, that all – that shit takes work, okay? Hard work. You can’t undo decades of programming overnight and sometimes that work, it feels kind of shitty. It gets worse before it gets better.

Learning to love yourself is hard. It’s hard. It doesn’t feel great at first. And if you don’t know that about the process, well, you might even use it as another reason to beat yourself up for not being good enough, right? For me, most of my self-flagellation was around what I looked like because I thought my exterior appearance was an indicator of how good of a person I was.

So for you, it might be something totally different. But it’s all a version of I have to look a certain way or I have to do certain things, or I have to achieve certain accomplishments or I’m not good enough. And I mean, that’s bullshit, right? We know this intellectually, but whatever your version of it is, you’ve been practicing thinking that way for a really long time. So changing it just takes work.

But here’s the worst part. When we’re used to beating ourselves up all the time and then we decide to start learning how to love our bodies because we see it all over Instagram, you hear me say it in the podcast, learn to love yourself, learn to love yourself, so we decide, okay I’m going to learn to love myself, and then we find out that’s kind of hard. Then it just becomes one more thing to beat yourself up about, one more failure and the cycle continues.

So I’m here to tell you self-love is hard effing work. It is not for the faint of heart. I want you to think about like turning around a cruise ship or a tractor-trailer. You can’t just crank the wheel around hard and hit the gas. You’ll capsize. You’ll jackknife. The load of Target sweatshirts in the back of your truck are going to spill all over the highway.

You have to really commit to it. You have to go all in and then be willing for it to take more than a minute to turn the ship around. You got to be willing to suck at it for a while. It’s really a lot like running. You don’t wake up one day being able to run like a gazelle. You don’t just decide, oh, I’m going to run, and then boom, you’re able to run a marathon, right?

No, you start out with 20 seconds of running and then you walk. And you repeat and you repeat, and eventually you can do 30 seconds of running, and then maybe a minute. It takes time, it takes effort. It takes consistency and a willingness for it not to be easy. It doesn’t come easy.

So turning around years of self-critical habits, it takes time and effort. But the end result is totally worth it. And the other thing I should point out is there really is no end game. There are going to be days when you’re like, I love myself, I’m so in love with myself I can hardly stand it, right? And you might wake up the next day and look in the mirror and be like, ugh, right?

It’s a constant process of reinforcing, and they’re habits that you’ve engrained over years and years, it’s normal for them to pop up once in a while, even after you’ve kind of changed your way of thinking for the most part. So I want you to know that for sure. If you wake up one morning after doing all this work and you feel shitty about yourself just out of the blue, it’s okay. I want you to just be like, it makes sense, I’m really good at thinking that thought, it makes sense that it’s going to pop up into my head, but I’m just going to remember this is how I think now and then redirect yourself.

So here’s how I want you to get started with this whole process. Every day, I want you to do something called a thought download. Now, this is a technique that I learned from Brooke Castillo, who’s my own mentor. Now, you can check out episode 25 if you want to hear my interview with her. It’s really damn good. Or you can review episode 33 where I talk about the coaching model. But I’m just going to give you like, the summary here.

So she taught me this thought download method probably five or six years ago. 2012. So about six years ago. And it’s pretty amazing. Here’s what you do. Once a day, you just grab your journal or a blank piece of paper or open a Word doc on your computer, whatever you want to do, and you just write down every single thought and sentence in your mind. Plan to spend five or 10 minutes on that once a day.

I like to do it first thing in the morning but you really can do it any time that it’s most convenient. So you’re going to do it every day. Like, make it part of your routine. Then start looking at the things you’re saying to yourself, right? The opinions that you hold about your life. And know that they are all optional.

Even if it doesn’t feel possible to change them, just knowing that they’re your opinion and not a fact or a circumstance like we talked about in episode 33, facts or circumstances are data that everybody in the world would agree on. Knowing that the things you’re saying about yourself are really just opinions, that they’re optional is a game changer.

So commit to doing this for at least 30 days. And the reason I say that is because you can’t change what you’re not aware of, right? You need to see what’s in your brain before you can decide whether or not to replace it. And just like with running, if you go out and run once and you do 20 second intervals, like, if you don’t do that again for a month, it’s going to be like you’re starting all over again every single time, right? But if you do it three, four times a week, or in the case of the thought downloads, if you do it daily, it gets easier, it gets more useful, it gets more productive every single time. So you have to be consistent.

So I want you to commit to doing it daily for 30 days. And this is the hard sell. It’s not going to feel too great at first. You’re going to want to look the other way once you see what’s in your brain. You’re going to want to shut the door on all the negative self-talk and pretend that it’s not there. But the thing is it’s still there. Whether you pay attention to it or not, and like I said before, you can’t change what you’re not aware of. It takes practice.

I mean, I keep saying it’s just like any new skill, just like running, but it really, really is. So I want you to start out with 30 days in a row of thought downloads, and then just look inside your mind and be aware. Start contemplating what you could think instead. What thoughts would make you feel better about yourself?

Like, take a moment, practice those thoughts. Just like you do intervals when you’re running, you can practice a new thought process 30 seconds at a time. And then rest. And just be like, for 30 seconds I’m not going to beat myself up, I’m going to think this new thing, and then I can go back to beating myself up for a minute. Then I’m going to do 30 seconds again of practicing my new thought.

It’s not going to be easy. You’re going to suck at it. Be willing to suck at it. This is what we’re working really hard on this month in Run Your Best Life, and actually, every month. But we’re hitting it super hard in August and September in Run Your Best Life. And if you haven’t heard of Run Your Best Life or if you have and you’ve been like, what is this thing that she keeps talking about, I’m a life coach, I’m a running coach.

My goal is to help people elevate their lives through running. So Run Your Best Life is a coaching group that I manage where we use a lot of the tools that I teach in this podcast, including managing your mind so that you can stop being such an asshole to yourself. It’s been so life-changing for so many of my clients. They’re more consistent with their running, they’re able to shift their negative self-talk to a much nicer place, they basically get the fuck out of their own way.

So I highly recommend you give it a try for yourself. You can check it out at runyourbestlife.com. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop me an email.

Alright rebels, that is it for this week. Everything I mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com/39. And I’ll talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to www.notyouraveragerunner.com to download your free one-week jumpstart plan and get started running today.