Self Love After Weight Gain with Elizabeth DiAlto

Have you bought into the lie that thinner is better? Or that weight gain is in any way related to your self-worth?

I just had my first photoshoot since 2020. It was my first photoshoot since the pandemic and my first photoshoot at my heaviest weight. I was curious how I would feel during the photoshoot and I was also a little worried about how I might feel once I got the photos back (would I like the photos or would I feel uncomfortable with the parts of me that didn’t look “good” in certain lighting or at “unflattering” angles since my weight gain?).

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To my happy surprise, I felt confident and sexy during the shoot and when I looked at the photos afterward, I LOVED them. I felt like a proud mama recognizing all the hard work I had accomplished in self-love and embodiment work; seeing my true self shine through in the photos and loving her.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing more about this photoshoot and all of the work I’ve done to truly love myself, my whole self weight gain included, in the hopes that you will join me and feel empowered in your body at every shape and size.

If you have ever struggled with the lie that you had to be a certain dress size in order to be “sexy,” if you’ve been hurt by people’s unsolicited comments on your body, if you have been hurt by diet culture or fatphobia or maybe you just don’t know how to love your body regardless of your size, sign up for my FREE training on how to Unconsume Yourself, so that you can recover your energy, time, power and peace.

Listen to episode 389 now!

In episode 389 of the Embodied Podcast we discuss:

[3:26] The weight I’ve gained since 2020
[5:18] Feeling like a proud mama when I received the photos back from my most recent photoshoot
[6:12] Letting go of old programming, and why I love growing older
[7:30] The 5 components of self-love work and how I create the frameworks for my courses
[8:13] How I’ve grown to love myself more, regardless of the weight that I’ve gained
[11:03] Being in a relationship with a narcissistic man and how that taught me to love my body more
[11:49] Why I transitioned out of the fitness world and into the work of embodiment
[16:17] Setting boundaries around what I would allow people to say (good and bad) about my body
[20:07] What real beauty feels like and the factors that play into attraction
[21:14} Get the details on my FREE Unconsume Yourself training
{22:56} Responding to IG comments from people who struggle to feel comfortable and confident, specially in their bodies
[28:38] The real reason you feel bad about yourself and the shape/size of your body

Resources mentioned by Elizabeth in the episode:

Quotes from this Week’s Episode of the Embodied Podcast:

“Boundaries are absolutely a function and an expression of self-love, specifically self-respect.” [07:42:72]
“A really helpful practice for me has been to set the boundary, that my body is not up for comments, not with people in my personal life, and certainly not with people online.” [16:17:66]
“If someone is really going to judge me, or make a comment to me about my body, in any kind of derogatory way, they are just so not my people.” [23:52:03]
“If you’re going to point your arrows at something, stop pointing them at yourself, stop blaming yourself, stop shaming yourself (which I know is easier said than done), and let’s point them at your programming and conditioning.” ‘[29:50:45]

How was this episode for you?

Was this episode helpful for you today? I’d love to know what quote or lesson touched your soul. Let me know in the comments below OR share the episode on Instagram, tag me your stories @elizabethdialto, or send me a DM!

About the Embodied Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto

Since 2013 I’ve been developing a body of work that helps women embody self-love, healing, and wholeness. We do this by focusing on the four levels of consciousness – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

In practical terms, this looks like exploring tools and practices to help you tune into the deep wisdom of the body and the knowing of the heart, which I believe are gateways to our souls. Then we cultivate a new relationship with our minds that allows the mind to serve this wisdom and knowledge and soul connection, rather than override it, which is what many of us were taught.

If you’ve been doing self-help or spiritual development work for a while, these are the types of foundational things that often people overlook in pursuit of fancier concepts that often aren’t practical or sustainable. Here, we will focus on building these strong foundations so you can honestly and thoroughly embody self-love. If you’re feeling it, subscribe to the show, and leave us a review wherever you listen from. You can also keep up with show updates and community discussion on Instagram here.

Transcript for Episode 389 “Self Love After Weight Gain“:

– Hello, everybody. Welcome to episode number 389 of the Embodied Podcast. We are just getting closer and closer to 400 episodes. I’m so excited about that.

Today we’re talking about self-love after weight gain. Self-love is one of the top things we talk about here on the podcast. I did a whole series two years ago, almost two years ago in 2020, when I first released the Embodied Self Love Course. And that course has been iterated, and I’m now about to run a self-love immersion, using that framework. So a couple hundred people have used that framework with me, over the last two years since I created it in 2020. And really, I created it in 2017, when I gave my untamed self-love talk at the national conference for the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, in 2017.

So I refined it and revised it for the self-love course. And then since I’ve been running the self-love course for the last few years, I’ve now refined it and revised it again. And those of you who know me and have worked with me know I’m always doing that. I’m always creating things, and as I use them with people, I refine and revise because we go deeper and deeper. So I’m excited.

The reason I’m doing the self-love instead of releasing the self-love course this year, releasing it as an immersion, is so I could do deeper work with anyone who wants to do that self-love work. ‘Cause the course itself, was just three little modules. And earlier this year when I started my Sacred Embodiment Specialist Training, we spent the first six weeks in the self-love framework, and we could have spent so much longer. And so I was inspired to create something where we could go much deeper, and spent a lot more time with it, like a whole month on each part of the framework. Including the bonus part, which is boundaries.

So if you’re watching this on YouTube, I just got a standup desk. So I’m rocking back and forth here. If it’s distracting to you, I don’t know what to tell you. It would feel so good to be standing up, instead of sitting down. Some of you probably have standup desks and you get it. And if you’re listening, you are not having to worry about that. So let us come back. I’m gonna focus, I have my notes here with me. We’re talking about self-love after weight gain today, and I’m not gonna use a lot of numbers. I’m just gonna give you one number. I’m gonna tell you how much weight I gained during the pandemic in a little while. But I just wanna mention that for anyone who is recovering from eating disorders or anything like that. I know some people don’t have a great relationship with numbers. So I am gonna mention that. So I just wanted to give you a heads up that that’s coming.

I’m also gonna share some stories from my recent photo shoot, and some stories from my past around gaining weight, and a boyfriend, a particular boyfriend being critical of my body, and how I loved myself through that and more. I’m also gonna share, some of your answers to a question that I asked on Instagram earlier today because I knew I was gonna be recording this episode. I asked people who struggled to feel comfortable and confident, specifically because of their bodies, to share what thoughts, programming and conditioning I can help with. So I got a lot of responses. I’m not gonna be able to do this like a Q and A and answer all these questions, but I’m gonna mention them and I’ll make a few comments here and there. So let’s get into it.

I wanna start out by talking about the photo shoot I did about a month ago. The time this episode goes live, It will be a little over a month ago. Like five weeks ago. And it was my first photo shoot since 2020, after gaining 25 pounds during the pandemic. And before the shoot, I was wondering if during the shoot I’d feel weird or self-conscious at all, but I didn’t, which was really cool and really fun. I felt great. And I will talk more about what contributed to why I felt so great in a little while. But after the photo shoot I wondered, and I was actually a little nervous if I might feel differently, when the pictures actually came. So if you’re a person who’s ever gained weight and you’ve seen pictures of yourself, you get used to being in your body, or actually let me not say you.

Let me not put that on other people ’cause that really might not be your experience. I have spent a lot of intentional time getting used to being in a bigger body, and honoring being in a bigger body. But I still have had, ’cause this is not my first weight gain. I’ve been gradually gaining weight over the last eight years or so. And if you’ve ever gained weight and then seeing a picture of yourself, sometimes the pictures could be a little more shocking than anything else. And so I was anticipating perhaps having that feeling of seeing pictures and being like, “Ooh, is that really what I look like?”

But I didn’t feel that way either when those pictures came. Actually, I loved them so much. I love them so much. And even the ones where the lighting is not flattering, the angle is not doing me any favors, and also even pictures where you could really see my extra rolls, my extra cellulite now. And I didn’t care. I was unfazed by any of that. And what I felt really was like a proud mom, looking at her daughter thinking, there’s my girl. And the reason I felt that way is actually because of this body change. Because obviously with the cultural programming and conditioning, and as well those of you who don’t know my story, I grew up in a family of women on both sides, who always, always, always, talking about dieting, or on a diet, or talking about weight loss. And so I have that conditioning pretty deep, that thinner is better conditioning. And I’ve spent so many years on hooking from that. Looking at my own internalized fat phobia. So to not feel the hooks of any of that stuff when I was looking at these pictures, as I’m in the biggest body I’ve ever been in, it just felt so good. And I was so proud of myself.

So that’s where that like, there’s my girl. My own inner parent of myself was very proud of the other part of me that I have been parenting. And it really just made me think about how much I love getting older, less so because of age itself, more so because as more time goes by, the more I’m able to embody and express my wild soul. And let all these old stories and all the soul programming go. And I like to imagine and pray of course that God is willing, that many decades from now I guess I’ll look back on this time, and smile in hindsight about how I was truly just getting started. And how everything up until now despite feeling like lifetimes already, was really just a warm up.

So if I am blessed to live a long, long life, I have a feeling that’s what it’s gonna feel like. But this experience, the experience of the photo shoot especially, was a deeply affirming of my own self-love journey, that I’ve been doing for years. Obviously that’s how I created the framework, or maybe that’s not obvious. But a lot of the frameworks I create, are reverse engineered from my own healing processes, as well as things that emerge in working with clients over the years. So specifically though during the pandemic when I was so isolated, when I was still in California, doing that self-love work was like next level. And if you’re not familiar with the framework, there’s five components to it. Self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-trust and self-respect.

And in the program in the immersion end in the course, I also add on boundaries because boundaries are absolutely, a function and an expression of self-love. Specifically, self-respect. And self-acceptance and self-respect really were the biggest factors. So this might really sound strange to some of you, but over the years, the more weight I’ve gained, the more I have fallen in love with myself. And the love doesn’t necessarily have to do with the weight. I’m just mentioning that there’s a correlation there.

But there is a factor that’s important to note, and it’s not again, not the weight itself, but this idea, that I was supposed to be upset about it. That I rebelled against. So I’m not saying I fell in love with having a bigger body. What I was falling in love with, was that I was not letting myself get fucked up and twisted, around gaining weight. I decided I was gonna love myself no matter what. I was not gonna feel bad about myself because I weighed more, or I needed to buy bigger clothes because honestly, I’m still the same person. No matter how much weight I gained I was still me.

And in fact, growing and evolving even more, becoming more wise, becoming more loving. So there’s literally in every way more to love about me, now than ever before. So yeah, I was gaining weight, but like I said I was becoming more myself, which means embodying more of my soul, which always just feels so freaking good. And I was doing healing work. Letting go of old shit and trauma, facing codependency, emotional abuse, complex PTSD, growing a business, becoming more mystical, deepening my relationship with God and with grace. So there was just so much more to be proud of myself, than any level of upsetness I could possibly be about gaining weight. Everything that was blooming and blossoming and emerging and happening in my life as the result of my own personal, healing work that I was doing on myself, which is so much more rewarding. It just literally didn’t make any sense to me to be upset or stressed about gaining weight. Which again I know, that might not be relatable to some people and that’s okay because I’m not sharing this, to say that you should feel the way I feel. I’m never saying that. I’m just sharing my own experience.

And I also wanna acknowledge that it certainly was weird and uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong about that. But I looked at it as always a reason, an invitation to love myself more, and to love myself anyway. And I really just refused to feel badly about it. And I want to also mention that I don’t have a history of eating disorders or anything like that. I just again, grew up around women obsessed with diets and weight loss. So that conditioning and programming was in my psyche, but I didn’t have any real compulsions or anything like that around it. And I just wanna acknowledge that because if any of you grew up overweight, were shamed by friends and family, or have had a history with eating disorders, my experience might be ringing very differently than something you’ve experienced, and I don’t want you to feel bad or wrong about that. We’re all entitled to having our own experience.

And I imagine that having core wounds attached to weight, would’ve made my experience quite different. This wasn’t the first time by the way that I refused to comply with the cultural idea that thinner is better, and that I should be upset or in a panic or doing something about it, if I was gaining weight. Back in 2014, I was in a relationship with a man who later after we broke up, I would realize was a very narcissistic person. It’s not my job, I’m not a psychologist. I’m not going to diagnose someone. But after I got out of that relationship so many people were like, “Oh my God, thank God.” And gave me their opinions about how narcissistic this person was. So earlier in our relationship, I was transitioning early on in our relationship. I was transitioning from the fitness industry, into doing embodiment work, like what I do now. And my relationship to exercise was changing big time. I had been a person who since college had been working out four to six days a week, pretty much. And suddenly I needed a major break. I was having a whole reckoning around values and integrity, fitness and health, fat phobia, diet culture, and how I personally had participated in all of it, when I worked in the fitness industry.

So I was really transmuting a lot of that. And this man though at the time, loves the idea of being with a woman who was really fit. And when I stopped being as fit as when we first met, he started to criticize my body. And obviously at that time I had not done the healing work then that I have done now, because he wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds now saying some of the shit he said to me back then. But then it was still in my system to tolerate stuff like that. And so I did for quite a while.

And I remember the first time he made a critical comment to me about my body. We were at a conference in Los Angeles and we were at the pool. So I was in a bikini. And by the way, and this is a testament to deep healing work. I don’t even remember what he said. I couldn’t tell you. And I know some of you can probably relate to having very traumatizing experiences, where you can remember word for word, what someone said to you, what they were wearing, what you were wearing, who was there, how it felt like. I literally don’t even remember what he said, but what I do remember is afterwards. Standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, I was by myself at this point. We were in this hotel, and I did feel like the wind had gotten knocked out of me. It was very disorienting. I was like, “What the fuck just happened?” But I looked in the mirror, and I was looking at myself even though my heart hurt because what he said was so mean, I didn’t agree with it. I was looking at myself in the mirror and I was like, “He can have his own opinion, but I love you.”

And that’s when I really started talking to my body. And this was kind of me parenting, nurturing, mothering, loving on myself in a new way. So I’m not a person who’s gonna tell everyone that you should be grateful for all the really shitty things that happened to you. But for me personally, I actually am quite grateful both for that man and that experience, ’cause I feel like that was an initiation for me, into this deeper self-love, because that’s what happened for me. The more he would criticize me which it increased over time, the more I would drop into my own self-love. And it was very much a choice for me. I was like, “Nope, if he’s gonna be shitty, “I’m gonna be loving to myself.” Not necessarily towards him. I didn’t have that kind of patience or grace back then yet.

So what this began to instill in me, that I had to work through after. And again, I didn’t have any kind of a self-loathing, I wasn’t upset with myself, but I did leave that relationship with self-consciousness, about other people’s thoughts and opinions about my body. And I wanna be clear about that, because I wasn’t self-conscious in that I cared what they thought. I was just self-conscious in that I didn’t wanna hear what anyone had to say about my body. And I didn’t want to deal with other people’s thoughts, opinions, and feelings about my body. I thought that was very irritating. That as a woman, when your body changes in any way, shape or form, you lost weight, you gained weight, whatever happens, that people feel like they need to comment about it. And I know by the way, people don’t just do that to women, but it happens to women I would say more, and in a different way. And so I found that agitating.

But it was a great practice for me as I shared my journey of my body changing, which you know I always eventually share what I’ve gone through, what I’ve been through, as I get to the other side of it. What was a really helpful practice for me was to set that boundary, that my body was not up for comments. Not with people in my personal life, certainly not with people online when I was posting about it or talking about it. And my boundary was, if people wanted to engage with the experience I was talking about, that was invited. If someone wanted to share their own experience with what I was sharing or something similar, that was more than welcome. But comments about my body were not, and not even positive ones by the way. Because that’s just not what sharing the journey was about.

And the thing is if I don’t wanna hear negative comments, I shouldn’t wanna hear positive comments either. And I’m less rigid about that now by the way. If people wanna compliment me, I just say thank you, instead of making a big deal about how that’s not the point of the conversation. But under no circumstances would I ever tolerate negative comments about my body. And what’s wild. I was thinking about this. I actually literally since leaving that relationship in 2016, so this is like almost six years ago. I’ve only gotten one negative comment about my body from one random person on the internet since. I don’t remember what, it was a woman. Oh, she just said something like, “You look much fatter than you used to be.” And my response was just a simple, “yikes, how rude fat phobic and presumptuous of you “to leave this comment.” Because in her comment was also telling me that I could just diet and exercise, and take care of that. And I was like, “Thanks bitch I used to be.” So here’s what’s funny. In my brain, my inner Staten Island wanted to be like, thanks bitch used to be a personal trainer. If I wanted to do that, that’s absolutely what I would’ve been doing. But instead I was just like, “Yikes, how rude fat phobic and presumptuous of you, to leave this comment.” Because I don’t need to lash out at people even though they’re super fucking rude.

Quick break in the show everybody, to direct your attention towards three new things that I have for you. The first is some free morning and evening Sacred Embodiment Rituals. If you go to untameyourself.com/rituals, you can get your gorgeous hands on those rituals. It is a 33 page eBook with some prayers, some playlist recommendations, serpent meditation, an energetic attunement to the frequency of love using the imagery of a rose. It’s just really juicy. So you definitely wanna check that out. As well you can now drop in and take an embodiment class with me, every single week at the Serpent and Rose Studio. So if you wanna check out the schedule, go to untameyourself.com/studio for that. And if you live here in or around Miami, I am teaching twice a month locally in Miami. So make sure you check the schedule for Miami classes. And then last but not least, if you are looking for a grown up, grounded, sensual, supportive, inclusive container, and community to do your healing and transformation and growth work in, make sure you check out the Wild Soul Sacred Body Community. That is my yearlong container for all of that. And you can visit that at untameyourself.com/wssb, as in, Wild Soul Sacred Body. All that stuff can also be found at the show notes page, or at the link in my bio on the Instagram profile. So now you know, everything we got going on. Back to the episode.

So I wanna go back to the recent photo shoot. A few weeks after that, I was part of a film shoot, for a docu-series a friend of mine is creating about healing journeys. And again, I wondered, I’m like, well, damn, all right. Photo shoot went well, love the photos, whatever, totally accepting, my voluptuous body. Feeling like a goddess up in here. But I wonder if it’ll be different on video. Like am I gonna feel self-conscious about being on camera, and all this stuff. And I just didn’t. I felt really great, I felt really comfortable because I felt me. And I keep saying that, but feeling more me than ever, just feels so much better to me, than any shape or size my body could possibly take on. I don’t need to lead with my looks, the way I did when I was a personal trainer. That was a whole thing back in the day. I felt like I had to be a walking business card for my work, when I was a personal trainer and a fitness instructor. And that’s what I’ve realized since, is that one of the reasons I had to get out of the fitness industry was so I could actually get into my deeper life, my more mystical life.

So I didn’t feel like my body had to be my business card. And now I’ve cultivated this wisdom, this joy, this love within, this grace that I feel within me and around me all the time. This super, luscious, loving, magical experience of inhabiting my body, and being like an instrument and a channel for that love and that grace of the divine. And to me that is so much more beautiful, than my flat abs, or my chiseled arms, of my 20s ever were. To me this now, this feels like real beauty. This feels like sacred beauty. This feels like real sacred love. This feels like radiance and reverence. And what I am interested in now is shining that from the inside out. And that resonating as beauty with the right people, rather than people who were attracted to me before, because of how I looked.

And when I say attracted, I don’t mean necessarily physically like romantically, sexually or anything like that. There’s so many factors that go into attraction. Like what magnetizes us to people. And for some people depending on their consciousness and their values, it is gonna be based on more shallow physical material things. And so for me, that’s just not the thing that I want to be attractive about me anymore. Whereas back in the day I was quite attached to that. So if you’re listening to this in real time and you’re like, nodding your head or you’re relating, or you’re sitting there like, man I would like to get some of that. I wanna feel that, I wanna figure out how to have this experience or something like it, that’s appropriate for me. Check out my free unconsume yourself training that’s happening right now. That is available through June 8th. You can find that at untameyourself.com/detox.

And that’s because it is really a life detox, it’s a mental and an emotional detox. So great. And in that training, I will get more specifically into what I had to detox, in my thoughts and in my emotions to get to the place where I am now. So the other thing that I wanted to share in this episode was those responses on Instagram. So let me pop over there. I’m gonna do another episode by the way.

Next week I’m gonna be talking more about, what’s in unconsume yourself, and just giving a highlight for anyone who might not have a chance to go through the whole thing. And then the week after that, I’m gonna talk about self-love in 2022. And that is gonna be more about loving ourselves, not necessarily in relation to weight gain or anything like that, but related to, we’ve all gone through two plus years of a freaking global pandemic. All kinds of cultural revolutions or war, an insurrection in the white. So many things have happened, that have really messed with a lot of people’s internal systems, nervous systems, relationships, careers, so much change, so much transition, so much loss, so much grief. So I’m gonna talk about loving ourselves through in, with, and around, all that stuff two weeks from now. So that will be episode number 391. So keep an eye out for that.

But I wanna share because you all are so beautiful and I’m sure some of you are listening. I’m not gonna use anyone’s name. Your privacy is always super important to me. But the question that I asked on Instagram was, what thoughts, programming, and conditioning can I help you with most, if you’re someone who struggles with feeling comfortable and confident specifically because of your body. And so here’s what people shared. “Internalized judgment, no one even needs to say anything “to me.” “It just happens in my head.” “Help with feeling desirable, not being good enough.” “Any and all things related to the belly, “especially ones that aren’t mainstream beautiful.” “Used to have a business around weight loss. “But now back to the weight before the weight loss. “Feeling like such a loser now, “and hate to see people that know me from that business.” I wanna chime in on that for a second, because as a person who used to be a fitness professional, I had some of that self consciousness for a little while.

But again, walking into, bumping into people who knew me when I was like the super fit chick in New York City, is like, if someone is really gonna judge me, or make a comment to me or about me, about my body in any kind of derogatory way, they’re just so not my person. And again, if this person is listening or anyone who can relate to something like this, and you’re listening in real time, take the unconsume yourself training, it’s free. And I’m really gonna get into, especially in the second workshop, there’s three free workshops in the uncosume yourself training. I’m really gonna get into dealing with the mental and the emotional turmoil, that we literally put ourselves through. That we could absolutely do something about, and some strategies for what to do about those things.

Someone said “Had to love myself with a lot of loose skin after weight loss.” “Resistance to dating because I believe “that I’m less desirable when overweight.” “Identity, very different body, “same person/expression, but it doesn’t feel like it.”

Someone said “Need help with self forgiveness and compassion “and patience.” “Feeling I deserve to feel good.” “Shaming guilt like I did something badly to myself “and what will others think of me.” “Accepting that new clothes will need to be bought “and to stop hoping you’ll shed the pounds.” I get that. And I’m sure some of you can relate to this. Keeping the clothes that you someday wanna fit back into. And the thing is maybe you might, but also, I will say one of the things that was so cathartic about my photo shoot was, I actually had to get a bunch of clothes. And I’m not a big shopper, I kind of hate shopping. I’m an incredible bargain shopper. But I really took my time to get stuff that fit me. I didn’t do that like, let me buy it in the size I hope to be someday. I was just like, “Nope, this is me now. “I’m gonna buy this thing that fits me now.” Because I knew I would feel much more radiant if I felt comfortable. If I brought things that felt good to me, that I loved the colors, that I was excited to put on my body. And that just felt so much more honoring to me.

“How to address health and fitness concerns without hating my body.” “Feeling good and even sexy when my body feels frumpy.” “Avoiding the mirror, avoiding photos.” “How to balance self-love with feeling so uncomfortable “in my bigger body.” So these are all, again, I’m sure some of you are like nodding your head and you can totally relate. And I’m not treating this like a Q and A but I wanted to share those things. And just a few more things that I wanna tap into to share with you all, for all the things that you shared.

First things first, the idea that a thinner body is healthier, is as a general rule inaccurate. There are plenty of people in larger bodies who if you ran all the tests and all the physicals and all the blood work and all the things, would test better. And by health markers, and I’m putting that in air quotes, be healthier than some people in thinner bodies, like contrary to a lot of even doctors y’all. Weight is not necessarily always detrimental to health. Sometimes it is, sometimes it can exacerbate existing health conditions and stuff like that. But it’s just not a hard and fast rule. It’s just not true all the time.

That’s just something that we’ve been largely indoctrinated into believing, so that we will get on the medicines, buy all the diet shit, buy all the supplements and do all these things. This is an industry. Like the pharmaceutical industry, the weight loss industry, the diet industry, the fitness industry. And I love the term, this is like a, you know what I’m thinking of, like an octopus. This is a whole ass industrial complex, but it’s like an octopus because it has all these arms to it. But that all feed back into the one central body, of making people feel shitty about their bodies, and especially women. Because one of the arms on the octopus for women is beauty. And the way women and men, and other genders get treated around that, especially depending on what gender you look like. If you fall into kind of like a cic gender, there’s all kinds of other stuff that comes along with that, that people will load on all kinds of assumptions, and doctrines, and things like that.

And so I share these things to just harp on and remind so many of you, that the reason you feel bad about yourself, because of the shape and size of your body, is because you were taught to. You were so programmed, and conditioned, and indoctrinated into that literally from the time you could breathe air. Because this is on TV, this is on magazines. Even my beloved “Golden Girls.” I love “The Golden Girls.” I’ve actually been rewatching it on Hulu lately, but “The Golden Girls” were fat phobic as fuck. It is so bad. I still love “The Golden Girls,” but I’m like, “Damn you guys are ruthless, absolutely ruthless.” There’s this whole episode where Blanche’s daughter, who she hasn’t seen in years, comes back from Europe and she’s overweight. And the whole fucking episode is about Blanche’s daughter being overweight. And I can’t believe. I was a little shocked to be quite honest. Although I shouldn’t have been because it was the 80s, and that’s what was going on back then. People were not coming into the consciousness, coming into the compassion, coming into the inclusivity. That is getting more into the mainstream now. Thank frigging god.

So I do wanna remind you all, it’s programming and it’s conditioning. If you’re gonna point your arrows at something, stop pointing them at yourself, stop blaming yourself, stop shaming yourself, which I know is easier said than done. And let’s point them at the programming and the conditioning. And again, if you need help with that, that is what this free unconsume yourself training is for. And for those of you who are interested in the self-love immersion, that’s really something, the self-love immersion. We’re gonna spend six months getting up in that. Programming and conditioning and replacing that shit, with love, and compassion, and self-acceptance, and trust, and respect, and finding all these other miraculous things. About you, about all of us, that make us so worthy, so amazing, and so lovable, other than whatever the fuck shape or size your body is. All right. I think I’m done for this one. I know I get quite passionate about that.

But if you’re listening to this, I wanna send you so much love. Thank you for listening. Share it up. This is probably a good one to talk about with your friends, and be real about shit. And by the way, as in all things, there might have been some things that I said, that you didn’t resonate with. That’s okay. Whatever you did resonate with, I’m so happy and so glad and I hope it helped you. Again, this is episode number 389. So the show notes will be at untameyourself.com/389, and make sure you come back next week. And tune in for more about what I talk about in unconsume yourself. What unconsuming yourself even means, how you can begin to unconsume yourself, either around this if this was a hot topic for you, or honestly it could be applied to anything in your life. Anything you’re feeling consumed, or overwhelmed, or distracted by. That’s it y’all. Will see you soon.

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