Going on Girls With Anxiety Podcast: My journey with body and food anxieties and becoming gentle with myself.

Last week I had the opportunity to join my friends Heike and Neg on their podcast ‘Girls with Anxiety’. Each week they open up about living with anxiety and touch on different topics and parts of your life that cause it. On this episode we got into my journey with body and food anxieties and getting to a place where I could be gentle with myself.

When Heike asked me to come in and talk about my history with food and body anxiety I was happy to share but nervous about what I had to offer to this conversation.

Nearly approaching 5 years since recovering from my eating disorders I really haven’t opened up about that part of my life much. The first time I did I shared what it was like having eating disorders for over two years. I shared about the struggles, the frustration, the isolation and how I had kept it a secret for so long. It felt great to get it off my chest and have such a great response but I kind of left I at that. I never really went into how those eating disorders spiraled because of the anxiety. When you have anxiety and can identify certain triggers you can work on avoiding them. But having anxiety about your body and food is really difficult because you can’t avoid your body. You cant avoid food. So how do you work on that?

This time around opening up about my journey and talking about the anxiety I had about my body, the anxiety I had trying to control calories and working out, it was a different feeling. This conversation felt like something that more people could relate to in some way or another.

I feel like so many women can relate to not feeling comfortable in their bodies. To having insecurities about how they look and having anxiety stemming from their physical appearance, if they work out enough or not and the guilt around certain food.

I know I still do. But what I try to focus on the most now is how that anxiety serves me. How does it help you to spend so much of your time being negative to yourself? How does it help you to fixate on the calories of something you ate? How does it help you to miss out on time with loved ones to obsess over working out? How does it help you to step on a scale and let the number dictate your mood?

When I was able to recover from my eating disorder it was because I finally realized that the way my body looked didn’t bring real joy to my life. The people who loved me, the opportunities in my life, the memories I was making, they didn’t go away because I gained weight. The parts of my life that were good and there for me were still good regardless of how my body looked. And, the parts about my life that were hard didn’t go away because I had what I thought was a perfect skinny body.

When you think that achieving your goal weight or being able to wear a certain outfit is the thing that will complete your life you’re going about finding happiness in the wrong way. Your motivations are off because being happy isn’t just from one thing. A lot goes into who you are beyond your physical appearance and it is important to give those things your attention too.

Focus on the things you have that make you happy outside of yourself. We put a lot of pressure on being able to make ourselves happy. And I think that it is an important skill but it’s not a complete perspective. It’s okay to lean on people. It’s okay to need someone else to make you laugh and to give you love and to be a source of your joy. I think it can free you from a lot of the pressure we feel to look a certain way. I know that leaning on my husband and family and friends and just enjoying little moments is what helps me stop the negative self dialogue I can have.

In the podcast I share my story and how I really try to be gentle with myself now. It has taken a lot of time for me to be where I am in my relationship with my body. It isn’t that I am necessarily confident in my body, I definitely have insecurities about how I look and my size, but I am a lot kinder to it. We all have bodies, we all have insecurities and having had my “perfect” body I know that those insecurities don’t disappear when you look different. And that has to be reason enough to stop focusing on those so much.

I hope people can take something from my experience and listening to the podcast. I know first hand the help that sharing can bring and how opening up to relate with people helps lighten our personal burdens. We get into some sensitive content on the podcast so I just want to include a little trigger warning for anyone who wants to listen about eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia and obsessive behavior.

Here’s a link to the podcast I hope you enjoy!

Keep following along with GWA for weekly podcasts. These girls are so caring and funny and really put themselves out there for the sake of connecting with people who have anxiety and building a community.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/girls-w-anxiety-podcast/id1459539041