My Food & Body Story (& how yoga helped me through it)
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Liz, who struggled to feel good enough in her body…
This is a small, shortened piece of my forever evolving food and body journey. As I continue to gain clarity and insight, I will edit this post to reflect any relevant or helpful information that arises.
For me, this is an important piece of my self-actualization. I’m not going to shy aware from sharing. I want my community to understand the perspective I teach from and the personal roots that got me to this moment.
my path to yoga is deeply intertwined with my relationship to my body
I believe many movement instructors share a similar story: our path to teaching yoga/barre/fitness/exercise/training/etc is a one that weaves through the murky waters of body shame and disordered eating.
Diet culture sets us up to believe that skinny = magic, and that if we were all 20 pounds lighter, all our inner turmoil would cease to exist. Many of us know logically this to be totally untrue, but what about somatically?
Do our bodies know the truth after being over or under fed for so long?
What about those subconscious (or very conscious) bias’ that equate a thin body as a “more healthy” body?
I could go on and on, but if this concept if a fresh one for you, I recommend listening to The Love of Yoga Podcast with Amber Karnes, Episode 13: Making Peace with Your Body, which weaves together the toxic nature of diet culture and the harm inflicted on larger bodies within the medical industrial complex and ways dominant yoga culture devalues bigger bodies.
Before you read any further, if you’re personally dealing with an eating disorder and/or struggle with body image and outsourcing your power to diet culture, please know there are incredible resources to support you to escape this cycle, beyond traditional talk therapy.
My personal recommendation is always Ali Shapiro. She has been health coaching on food and body for over a decade and has created several effective programs and group support for all levels of folks. She has a great podcast, Insatiable, which I cannot recommend enough if you need 300+ evidence based, thoughtful conversation to better understand: diet/food culture, nutrition, metabolism, eating psychology, healthy habits, emotional triggers, aging bodies, fitness… the list goes on. I personally went through Why Am I Eating This Now and Truce with Food. If you want to check out my social media highlight reel of my learns and takeaways, check that out here. (You’ll be directed back to Instagram)
If you have limited time, screw my story, go help yourself first. If you want it all — keep reading, I’m glad you’re here, of course.
For me, my path to yoga is deeply intertwined with my relationship to my body and the way I have battled with emotional eating and not feeling “good enough” or “too much” my whole life. (Boom: my personal story arc.)
I see my body in a completely different way than how I did from age 8–28. Today, I would say I have deep reverence for my human form, my forever home, my physicality, my blood, my muscles — all of it!
I am 32, in the best shape and space of my life — physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. But before I fully understood the gross and more subtle layers of my incredible body, and the wisdom each of them hold, I was in a surface level battle with what I saw in the mirror. That’s what I’ll be talking about in this blog post.
I share this story to help relate to others who are dealing with or recovering from disordered eating or distorted body image. I write this to lovingly invite you to imagine a day, a week, a year from now that YOU ARE FREE from that prison. This mental battle is so emotionally exhausting, some days debilitating, and some years all consuming. I know it very well. The amount of energy and attention I have wasted on self-loathing, judging myself (and others) is painful to think about.
Ultimately, I hope this post simply ignites you to imagine a life where your precious attention is devoted to loving yourself and the life you desire. I’m not perfect, and some days, past thought patterns creep in — but overall, I feel LIBERATED from the chains of chasing a different body than the one I was given, and feeling energetically deprived due to unstable eating patterns.
To set the stage, growing up, I labeled myself as a fat girl, and that’s being kind.
Today, I would say to that teenager, she was perfect and lovely and a joy to be around and definitely NOT FAT. But I didn’t feel that way when I was a little girl growing into her body. I felt shame about my “thunder thighs” and many other parts of me that didn’t meet the conventional beauty standards in early 2000. Sorry my b — I didn’t know it’s all a capitalistic whiteness hunger games manipulating my developing mind. In high school, I was focused on passing exams, playing soccer, popularity, and praying a boy would notice me.
Rather than accept my body and affirm myself, like I practice today, I really struggled to love who I was for the first third of my life and searched outside myself for validation.
If you were close to me growing up, you probably knew I struggled with feeling not pretty enough in my body, and knew dieting and food were a constant day to day struggle. I binged food and used A LOT OF sugar to soothe my inner emotional turmoil and cope with typical teen anxiety!
This is a self sabotaging habit many people can relate to — using food and beverage to ignore — while having“fun” (screwing your blood sugar and sleep) along the way.
I’m 32, and I will shamlessly admit, I still use food and drink to ignore or cope — but to an extent. It’s few and far between compared to back then. More importantly, most of the time, I am fully aware of what I’m avoiding. I actively choose to deal this way (usually if its past 10pm) and look at the issue later. I’m not perfect!
The moral of this story, FOOD = COMFORT.
This was my constant nervous system/blood sugar/trigger wrecking cycle:
restrict food/follow super strict diet rules to feel in control of what I consume,
workout excessively to lose weight and find sense of worth/achievment from sticking to a regiment,
stress/binge eat when real life vulnerability strikes,
restrict/workout cycle starts again.
Yoga found me during a time in my life when I was entrenched in a battle with my body image and deeply absorbed in the cycle above. I was 23.
I was deep in my exercise addiction stage. I hated my curves. I ran 5+ miles a day and did multiple HIIT workouts to stay obsessively slim. My body began to ache for proper stretching. So I went on YouTube and started doing yoga at night to chill the fuck out a little. My yoga practice began as my workout recovery, and then I found power yoga and HIIT yoga and in the beginning of my journey, yoga was just another workout that had muscle recovery benefits and stretching feels good.
Shout out: Yoga By Candace was my go-to yoga girlie who also ran a holistic health blog and talked about her journey with Lyme disease and healing through food. Her commitment to health, fitness and her business will always inspire me. I went to Thailand with her for a month in 2018 to receive my first 200-hour yoga teacher training in vinyasa and restorative yoga.
When I got back from Thailand, I started teaching yoga right away in several studios.
Working in yoga/barre/spin studios and teaching movement in front of lots of people made the negative narrative I had about my body and “what it should look like” or how “toned I should be” or “what will students think if I gain weight” or of course, the teacher to teacher comparison game, another mental mountain to manage.
I was 28 years old, teaching 10+ classes a week, (including spin), and excessively exercising — I reached this paradoxical plane where I was convinced I was in the best physical shape of my life, but ignoring that my mental health was at its worse.
When the pandemic brought yoga studio life to a halt, I was forced inside to deal with this issue head on. It was during all those daily Covid walks, I found Ali Shapiro.
Thanks to Ali’s podcast and emotional eating program, I have a healthier relationship to my body and a balanced approach to my movement practice. I used to do really intense workouts like long distance running, kickboxing, cardio and kettlebells. While I was toned, my natural mood was angry and reactive. I learned I had naturally high cortisol levels and doing these workouts only elevated them.
Yoga mellowed my mood and got some serotonine flowing to help me feel aligned and connected to the real me.
Finding the best balance of exercise for my body and eating for my proper metabolism changed everything. Once I got curious about those factors, better understanding my personal binge eating patterns/triggers helped me start to sift through inner child wounds, body image trauma from high school, and allowed me lean into vulnerability as something to be explored, not ignored. How I think about my body still goes through it’s ups and downs, and I’m still nourishing a very sweet relationship with her.
I approach my movement practice much more holistically. I make sure it nourishes me physically and energetically. I treat movement as medicine. I believe our movement practices have the ability to get us closer to the most authentic versions of ourselves through the healing the nervous system and shifting energy around our bodies to gain clarity.
In regards to food, I still binge on occasion (usually ice cream, chocolate or wine). But, I enjoy the treats and I’m not sitting there hating myself for every bite, like in the past. I LEAN INTO the love, comfort and nourishment I feel from the sensory experience of sweet comfort food. I work to not shame myself for days or let it become a multi day binge, the way I used to. I practice self care, I tend to my body and get good sleep. I drink water. And then I get curious about these questions:
What was the trigger,
What made me feel so vulnerable?
What brought me back to little Liz?
What piece of this story resonated with you? What feels familiar? Was there any clarity that came through?
I’d love to know your thoughts when you’re ready to share.
You can find me on Instagram or contact me directly through my website here.
