Episode 126: Love Your Body

Episode Summary

As humans, we have all been given a body so that we can have this earth life experience, and yet, most of us have lots of thoughts that make our body wrong.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Every thought you think is optional and the thoughts you think about your body are no exception.

You can love your body! Without changing it at all! You just need to question the thoughts that make your body wrong and then purposefully choose how you want to think about your body. In today’s episode I’m sharing ways to challenge your current thoughts about beauty and your critical thoughts about your body and giving you the tools to love your body exactly as it is.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it, but every result in your life is 100% because of the thought you think. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome.

Hello, podcast universe! Welcome to episode 126 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price, and I want to welcome you to the podcast today. I am so excited to be here, and excited about our subject. I had this thought as I was preparing that I'm like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I just talked about this, and maybe they're like sick of hearing about how to love your body. And I, like, went back and looked through the archives. And it turns out like the last time I had an episode specifically targeted at body image, and how to think about your body was episode 28. So, just the other day, right? Like nearly 100 episodes ago, so it's about time, we are going to do it. We're going to talk today about loving our body.

But before we do that, I just wanted to do a little plug here. Speaking of love, I have a free course that I offer on my website, and it's all about how God feels about you, it's called "How God Really Feels About You, Three Secrets To Feeling His Love." And so, if you ever have moments of doubt about how God feels about you, if you worry ever about his feelings about you, his disappointment, his disapproval, I think this course will really help you. It's a free course, it's offered on my website, you can find that at aprilpricecoaching.com, and if you scroll to the bottom, there's a place there where you can click and get the free course. So, I just encourage you for those of you that are maybe questioning about God's love for you, I think it can be really valuable, so I wanted to let you know about that.

So, today onto our episode, we're going to be talking about loving our body, how to love our body. And it was the other day I was reading a book by Debbie Ford, and this sentence right at the beginning caught my attention. And in there, she wrote, "I had suffered for so many years trying to be a better person. And this just hit me because like, this is how I feel like I've spent my whole life like suffering, trying to be a better person." And I'm going to talk more about that in a general way, and like the way we try to like, approach self-improvement on another podcast, but it really made me think today about, like how many of us are suffering for years trying to have a better body, right? Like we have suffered for so many years, trying to change our body, have a better body, have better help, have better like physique, have a better like number on the scale. Like we just go through so much suffering trying to like as we think that our body should be better than it is.

3:27
And today I really want to talk about that, about how this always puts us in opposition and in conflict with our own body. We're in a fight with ourselves, and it's really, really painful. And so, I want to talk about how we love our body and specifically, like we're going to talk about the relationship between you and your body. But I just want you to know that these principles, of course, apply to any relationship that we have. But today we're going to focus our thoughts specifically on our body and the way that we think about our body. So, I recently did a whole workshop on this idea for my clients in my group program. Every month, I do a bonus workshop on a specific topic, so listen, if you are not in my group coaching program, you totally should be, it's so awesome. And one of the things that we do is we have a monthly workshop that is like specific to like things that I see people struggling with. And this month our topic was all about loving our body.

And so, I'm going to use some of the ideas that we talked about in there and share them with you. But if you want to do that, the deep, intense work of changing the relationship you have with yourself in all the areas of your life, you should be in my coaching program. I'm telling you, okay? So, I want to start today by asking you to think about your body, okay? When you think about your body, you look at yourself in the mirror, you get dressed, when you think about yourself, look at yourself, what is the primary emotion you have? What do you feel most often when you think about your body? As I kind of like asked myself that I think like more often than not, I'm generally thinking like it's adequate, which is just sort of interesting, right? Like if I could feel any feeling about my body, why am I choosing, why am I choosing, like, adequate? Like I could choose amazed every time I look at myself, I could choose like love, I could choose fascination, I could choose like wonder every time I looked at myself.

And so, the first thing I want you to notice is the feeling you have when you think about your body, or when you look at your body, and I want you to notice that that feeling is not caused by your body. Meh, is not caused by my body, it is caused by my thoughts about my body, right? Like, I could choose different thoughts, and have a completely different feeling, it is always our thoughts. I know you think it's your body, I know you think with this body, you have to have this emotion and that is not true, okay? It is always our thoughts, how you feel about your body is created by your thoughts, not your body, okay? Love is a feeling, if we were trying to love our body like that is a feeling created by our thoughts. Like whatever the object of our love, never creates our love, it's just our thoughts about it. So, when we don't really understand this, and we think that the body itself is creating the feeling, then we go to work trying to transform and change the body in order to change the feeling. And this is just like it's just never works right? Like, we'll go and we'll make all this effort trying to change what our body looks like, what it weighs, what its eyebrows look like, what its eyelashes look like, like all the things we try and go and change all those things to try to change the feeling.

And it's just a never ending hamster wheel that we get on because you have to remember that the thing never creates feelings. The circumstance, the body, the health, the shape, the size, the weight, all of that never creates the feeling. So, you are welcome to change anything you want about your body, it's your body, it's your life. You get to live in your body. You get to experience this Earth life in your body, and you get to change anything you want. But if you are changing it to change your feelings, it is just never going to work, okay? Change all you want, but not to change your feelings. You change your feelings by the way you think about it.

Now, a lot of us are trying to like, you're like, yeah, I know I'm trying to change my thoughts and to change my thoughts, I have to change my body, okay? But you're like, that's the easiest way to change, my thought is to change what my body looks like, but I want you to know that that's not true, okay? Your thought is independent of what you look like, and we know this because like, we can change our body in a lot of ways, and our thoughts and feelings continue to stay the same. The way you think about your body is a choice, you see it as like required dependent on like what your body looks like, but it is a choice and you have to start to recognize that that every day I'm choosing to think this thought, I'm choosing to think my body is wrong in some way. I'm choosing to think my body should be different in some way, and that is creating my feeling. And if I don't change that thought, no matter how much I change my body, that that feeling is not going to change, okay?

8:40
The second thing that I want to talk about then is your thoughts about your body, where did those thoughts come from, right? Where are your thoughts about the acceptability of your body? Where did they come from when you were born, and you were a small child? You did not ever think your body was wrong, right? You just like stared at your body in wonder, like you just like could not get enough of yourself. You put your toes and your hands and everything in your mouth. You were just like loving on your body. You loved being in a body. You loved everything about your body, right? And over time, you acquired thoughts that your body was not right in some way. We have a lot of thoughts about our bodies that have been given to us by the world. We don't ever just wake up like we not just born into the world with disgust for our bodies, we have inherited many thoughts about it.

And of course, we have a brain that's designed to notice our problems. And so like, we hear these thoughts and then our brains like, oh, that might be a problem, right? And then we decide to believe these thoughts about our body, okay? Like I'll just give you an example that over time, body image has changed, right? The things that were once thought beautiful are different now, like beauty standards change over time, and it's because beauty standards are always just the thought, right? The idea that like, let's say, for example, like right now, eyelashes, like long eyelashes, like really the thing, right? Like there's a thought out there in the world that if your eyelashes are longer, or thicker, or darker, they are better, that this is more acceptable. This is more ideal.

Somebody just made that up, okay? Like that wasn't a thought five years ago, right? Somebody just made up the thought, this is better, and we went along with it. So, I don't know if I've told you this story before, but I remember hearing there was an awards show with Julia Roberts, and she was like they were doing a montage of her, of her movies, right? She was getting like a lifetime achievement award or something. They were doing a montage of her movies, and when she got up to accept the award, she's like, Oh my gosh! Somebody get that girl a pair of tweezers, right? Like, they had shown these movies from the 80s and 90s when, like, we weren't tweezing our eyebrows like we do now. And she was just like, Oh my gosh, look at those eyebrows. Like our thoughts about eyebrows changed, right? And then we went through like early 2000s and nobody had any eyebrows at all. There was like one tiny line like,

I have these family pictures and I'm not saying I knew what was fashionable, or beautiful because I am not on the cutting edge of any of that. But I have these family pictures where I just have like one little line high brow, right? And it's because like our thoughts about eyebrows changed. And now, of course, like they've changed again. And I only bring that up to to let you know, like, it's all just thoughts. It's all just thoughts, and we get to choose what we believe, and you just need to be really aware that you've been given a lot of thoughts by other people about what your body should look like, and those thoughts might be like wrong?

11:54
Well, I don't know if they're wrong or they're right, but they are just a thought. They are just an opinion, and you don't have to believe them if they make your body wrong, okay? Your brain already has a built in tendency to notice what's wrong with itself. And so, when it sees this, like when it gets this input from the outside world, then like it doubles down on the things that are wrong with you, okay? And quite frankly, like the beauty industry and the weight loss industry, they're like huge money, and they're the whole they they operate and they make money by making some aspect of you wrong, right? They have to point out that something's wrong so that you will exchange your money for their product, which I'm not, you know, knocking that. What I'm saying is like, they have to point out that it's wrong and then your brain is programmed to agree with it. And so, you as the consumer, you as the human, you have to manage that and be in charge of it and decide what you want to believe. It's all optional, is what I'm offering to you, okay?

So, we have been given a lot of thoughts about what is beautiful, and I really want to encourage you to question all of those. Beauty itself is a thought, and we have to question our ideas of what is beautiful. Like if we like in a very like simple way, like two people can look at the same painting, the same piece of art, someone can find it beautiful, and somebody can find it like, really offensive, right? Like it is in the eye of the beholder. Like that's what that means is like, it is a thought. I decide what's beautiful, and I just want you to know that what you're presented with all the time is like a standard of what's beautiful that is like, for the most part, racist and fat phobic and like youth is better.

Like all these ideas are presented to you all the time about what is beautiful, and I want you to know that your brain has a bias to like the appearance of things that it sees a lot of, right? That's why like children like their mothers face, right? Because that is like the image that they see so much of, and their brain has a bias to believe that's beautiful. And so anyway, like, you have to recognize that you're seeing images all the time of a certain standard of beauty that, like you may, or may not fit into, and then your brain makes you not beautiful.

14:24
So, I'll just give you a little example of this. So, I think I promised you last week I would never talk about my house renovation again, just have one quick example. Okay so, I noticed that like as I went to make decisions on my house, I had this thought like, I don't know what's beautiful, I don't know what's popular, I don't know what's like the best. And so, I like looked to the outside sources to like, tell me what things should look like, and what was beautiful, and what looked good, right? And so I started following all of these IG channels, Instagram channels where there were like decorators, and they would like show me image after image of what was ideal, what was beautiful, all that kind of stuff, right? And I noticed that the more I saw these images, the more my dissatisfaction with my stuff increased, right? Because I saw pictures, more, and more pictures of what was desirable by other people.

And like my brain started to see that as beautiful, and see the bias like, like the appearance of that, it started looking around at my furniture as like less than, my furniture is like not so great. My furniture is like maybe kind of ugly, maybe out of date. All these things, like my dissatisfaction, increased, right? And I just realized like, I have to like, stop like introducing these images to my brain because the dissatisfaction with my own life is increasing, right? They're all just thoughts. When my brain sees that image my brain is processing is like, that is better, and what I have is less. And so, you really want to be aware of the images that you are feeding your brain, the thoughts you are giving your brain through image right? It's thought isn't just word, right? Like we we translate thought through sight as well through image. And so, it's really important that you like be aware of that because like there are scientific studies that show that what you see, and view on a regular basis literally changes what your brain sees as beautiful, what your brain likes, and it changes how your brain sees yourself.

So, I'll just give you a little example. So, one of my sisters experienced an eating disorder when she was young, and when she got out of treatment and, you know, was doing the recovery work, she was very conscious of this. And severely limited all of her visual input like she got rid of her television, she wouldn't go to the grocery store and walk past the magazines like she really limited that because it was like so triggering for her brain to see that other image, and then use it to make herself wrong. And so, you just have to like, really think about like, what are the images that I'm using all the time, and that my brain is then using to make myself wrong. And you need to be really like aware of that, that like those are all presenting thoughts to you and you get to decide what you want to like think about that. But also, you can even just like limit the amount of like outside thoughts that you're getting about yourself.

So, don't be afraid to like unfollow those accounts, and or at least the accounts that you're using against yourself that every time you get on there, you feel bad about yourself. That is a signal like, you don't need that input, okay? And of course, that's an A-line thing. Like, I'm adjusting your circumstance line so that you don't have to manage your brain. But I think like we need all the help we can get. Managing our thoughts about our body like that takes a lot of effort, and maybe we don't want to, like, make it extra hard by introducing more and more thoughts that are totally optional that we don't have to be seeing all the time.

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So, I also just want you to know that like because beauty is a thought like you can change your mind about what is beautiful. Like, again, one more house story, you guys are not going to believe me right when I say I'm not going to share anymore. We painted this house this color, and when it first went up on the walls, like literally like they painted the entire house, every room, all the walls, I walked in the house and I was like, I don't like it, I don't like it. But the paint is on the walls, my brains like no it's not beautiful. I can't love this. I don't like it, right? And I was like, but listen, we are not changing it now, like, it's on the walls. And so, I just decided, listen, like is a feeling, which means I get to think about it any way I want. And I can like this. Like my ideas of beauty are mine, I get to choose what I think is beautiful. I can think this paint color is beautiful the other day. Like, I really worked on it, I worked on it actually with my coach. Like, I want to think this is beautiful.

The other day I walked to my kitchen. I'm like, I don't know why I didn't like this. Like, I love it so much. It's just become natural now. Like, I'm like, that is beautiful. I decided it was beautiful. And did you know you can do that with your own body? You can decide. I totally think this is beautiful, right? I'll give you a couple of little examples about my actual body, okay? So, I used to like, have this thought that like my ankles were too thick, which is just a thought I decided. And I actually had this rule that I couldn't wear shoes with straps around the ankles because like then it would like draw attention to my ankles, and everybody in the world would know my ankles are too big. This is so hilarious to me.

Anyway, like a couple of like maybe a year ago or something, I was shopping and I really wanted to buy these shoes with straps around the ankles, and I was like, oh, I can't do that. Like, my ankles are too thick. And I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, that is just the thought. First of all, my ankles are too thick is a thought, and that might not be true. And secondly. Thick ankles not being beautiful is just a thought that might not be true, either. I bought the dang shoes and they looked so good, and I'm like, why did I ever think this wasn't beautiful? I get to decide it is. And I mean, I think that's a radical idea, but I really want you to know that you can think you are beautiful. You can think your body is amazing. You can think like your ankles, your hips, your breasts, all of it, perfect, gorgeous! Like, ideal beauty. You get to decide that.

Okay, I'll just give you one more example. Most of you have maybe you've never seen a picture of me, right? Like you just hear my voice, but I have wide set eyes, and for many years I had people who had asked me, literally, what are you? And I'm like, What? And they're like, What are you like? I've never seen a face like yours, I know you're not Asian, and I don't think you're Pacific Islander, but I cannot figure out what your face is. I don't know what you are, right? And people would offer me this thought, and all I could like my brain grab that thought, and it has told me for so long, you are so weird looking. You are so weird looking. I was like my default thought. You are weird looking. And I just decided, You know what? I decide what's beautiful, and I can even decide that. Like my face, my wide set eyes are beautiful. That they are exotic, that nobody, right, looks like me, except my family. I look exactly like my mother. All the mothers that I came from, and my cousins, and my sisters. Like I can love, and I can think that is beautiful, and I can just decide, like there's nothing more beautiful than the face of my mother's on my face.

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So, I just want to like offer you that like you look at yourself every day, why not enjoy that? Why not choose to think it's beautiful? Why not choose to think you are gorgeous, like you get to decide, and I just think you might as well look at it, right? It's like the paint. Like, I figured it out, like, I'm going to look at this every day. I should start thinking it's beautiful because like, I'm going to have the experience of enjoying it every time I look at it instead of not.

All right, so the last thing that I want to offer you here as you think about your thoughts, is to really think about the morality that we have around health and beauty. So, because the diet and beauty industries make so much money by making us wrong, there's also this kind of idea that like, you are better if you know you look a certain way that there's some sort of like moral superiority to being thinner, to being more beautiful to being white, you're somehow better and a better person, more virtuous person if you have this certain like look, right? Especially when it comes to like like weight, for sure, right? Like, we have so much judgment in our minds about weight, and like you like, actually like moral superiority, about living your life at a certain weight. And I think you just really need to be aware that you are never better, healthiest and better. Thinner isn't better. Skinny isn't better. White isn't better. All of that is nonsense. All of that is a lie.

And like, if you're ever using your appearance to like, establish your moral superiority or inferiority, you're just buying into that lie. So, you want to question any idea that makes you think you are a better or worse person because of the way you look, right? Or because of the way that you are living your life, it's just impossible. You cannot be better. You cannot be worse. And none of those things can change that, okay?

The last thing that I want to give you to help you love your body is I want to introduce the idea to you. Give you the thought that your body is always right. So, our brains default, of course, is to make our body wrong, and I want to offer you that it's kind of like revolutionary to think about everything in your body being right. The truth is, your body looks exactly the way it does because of like biology, because of the rules of nature, the rules of the universe.

So, let me give you an example. The other day, I was like Face-Timing my daughter, who's on her mission. And like, I decided there's no more difficult thought exercise than like looking at your face on a FaceTime camera. You're just like, Wait a minute. Like, when did like half my face like, end up in my neck, right? Just like I don't understand, how do I look so old? I kept looking at my neck as I was talking to her. It is like, when did my neck get so old? And my brain wanted to say, like, that is wrong. And I had this moment where I was like, No, my neck is exactly right. I have lived on this planet for 47 years. This is what gravity does to necks like this is. This is exactly right. It's like our body always responds to the exact conditions that it is under right. It knows what to do.

26:09
So, let me give you one more example and see if I can, like, bring this home. I've been watching this show called Alone, which is like, this survival show on Netflix, I think anyway, so they put these like 10 people out in the Arctic, and they have to survive out there in the winter for 100 days. And they're like given like 10 survival supplies, and they have to find all their food and they have to, like, survive for 100 days. I like I'm watching them and they're just like, so desperate for calories, right? Like they're constantly like, tallying in their mind how many calories they brought in and how many are going out, and they're just constantly like, I'm using too many calories, I'm using too many calories, and their body is adjusting right as it should.

When I have more calories going out and I'm burning all these calories, and I'm bringing very few in, my body starts to, like, lose weight. It starts to like, eat all the fat stores. And after that it starts to eat the muscle like they get to the point where they're so weak, it's hard to walk and they're stumbling around because like their body is like, we need fuel, so just starts using the muscles, right? And it's just like so interesting to watch like bodies know what to do, given the conditions that they're under. They always are right, right? Like, I don't have enough calories, this is right, I lose weight, and my muscles don't work anymore. If I have too many calories, my body is like, okay perfect, I'll store this for later, right? It's always exactly right. Given the calorie input I've given it calories I've expended, it's always exactly right. Given the hormones right, the women lost weight or, you know, their bodies were affected at different rates than the men's. And like, given my sex, given my age, given my input given, like given all the biological factors, my body is exactly what it should be, right? Given my genetics, given all of it.

So, what I want to offer you, which I think is a really empowering thought. We're always like, something's gone wrong, my body isn't performing the way I think it should. And bodies always do, gravity always does, genetics always do. Like your body is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, given all the factors. And what if I stopped making it wrong? Like, when I step on the scale, we're like, Oh, my body's wrong again, no my body is exactly right, given like the amount of water I had yesterday, and I'm like, where I am in my cycle, and a million other thing, what million other things. What if my body is always right? And I really think it's an empowering thought, because like when we make our body wrong, we feel so powerless. We're just like, I don't know, like my body's just like I'm a victim of my body. My body's always working against me, and I just love the thought that, like my body is always working for me. And like, if the clothes don't fit, what if my body is right, and the clothes are wrong, right? Like my body is always right? These clothes are just like the wrong size.

The clothes are wrong, but my body never is. And I think this is a really powerful way to think about our health, too. I have a good friend and her daughter has diabetes and, you know, her pancreas just doesn't work and like she could spend her whole life saying, like her pancreas is wrong. But in fact, it's exactly right when the pancreas, like, has these factors in it, it doesn't function the way that other people's pancreas is do. And it is exactly right, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, given all those conditions, right? And so if that's true, like and I like to believe that we were all given the body, we were given for a reason. Then there are lessons there in her body. Her body is exactly right for the lessons she needs. And I just love thinking about that. Like, what if I just stopped making my body wrong, and recognize like my body is exactly right now? If I want to change some of those conditions, and change my like the outcome that's happening in my body, I totally get to. But we don't have to make our body wrong, and in fact, it's a really powerless way to approach like changing anything in our life.

30:34
So, here at the end, I just want to offer you to just kind of recognize like how you feel about your body is how it is all created in your mind. It's all a choice. It's all a decision. And I think a lot of times we think like, oh my gosh, I wish I could just like, stop thinking about my body, and like, you know, think about something else like, why does this have to be such an ever present part of my life? And I do think like if you can get to love, and peace, and acceptance for your body, you will think about it less, and less, and you can use that time, and energy to think about other things. But I also want to offer you that it's okay if that's what your mind thinks about. Like, we all came to Earth to learn, to manage our mind. And so, if your mind is like fixated on your body, like, okay we'll use this, we'll use this moment to use our agency, and manage our mind. We'll use this moment to choose our thoughts and like, like be in charge of our brain with our spirit and I'm going to decide on purpose what I'm going to think about my body.

Like, I don't think you need to spend any more time, and energy thinking your body is wrong, like I think that's, you know, a waste of your time. However, I do think it's worth your time to develop the discipline over your brain. And choose thoughts that will create love for you, and if that discipline comes by exercising, you know, your agency, your ability to choose over the thoughts you bring gives you about your body, perfect! Let's use this, right? Like our life is going to present to us like again and again, like opportunities to exercise our agency to choose what we want to think instead of just believing our brain like automatically, and this is just one other area in which we can do that.

So, I want to invite you to choose love, I want to invite you to choose like to think about your body as right. To decide what's beautiful, to enjoy yourself, to delight in your body, to look in the mirror and choose the thoughts you want to think. That is not up to anybody else, and it's not even up to your body, it's up to you. It's up to the like, the choice that you make inside your own mind. And that is available to every single one of you, no matter what you look like. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome! I love you for listening, and I'll see you next week!

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. If you want to take the things I've talked about and apply them in your life so that you can love your Earth-life experience. Sign up for a free coaching session at aprilpricecoaching.com. This is where the real magic happens and your life starts to change forever as your coach. I'll show you that believing your life is 100% awesome is totally available to every one of us. The way things are is not the way things have to stay. And that, my friends is 100% awesome.