Every year, my friends and I come together to celebrate the new year in the Hudson Valley. There are eight of us in total, and this four-family sleepover is my very favorite event of the year. With delicious food, lots of downtime, and a chance to sit and talk for hours, it’s a perfect way to start each year feeling refreshed.
As kids have entered into the equation — there are now six between us! — things have gotten a bit trickier. But we’ve continued to hold onto this tradition of gathering around the table, telling stories, and eating and drinking good food and wine.
I know this year will be no different. The music may compete with the low hum of white noise coming in through dueling baby monitors, but we’ll be too busy enjoying a gourmet dinner to mind.
Chris Kresser: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. I’m Chris Kresser. Today, we’re going to answer a question from Pam. Let’s give it a listen.
Pam: I had a question after listening to your recent podcast on chronic fatigue and the underlying symptoms. What are your thoughts on emotional baggage, for lack of a better term, and its impact on attracting disease or allowing disease. I have a practitioner that I see that feels like your childhood scars and emotional issues that you’ve carried forward up to this point in life, and sometimes energetic ancestral imprints that have been left on you from previous relatives, can have an impact on your health. I was wondering if you had a thought about that, and if so, how you suggest going about rectifying those types of things.
Chris Kresser: Thanks so much for that question, Pam. It’s a really interesting topic, and the more I do this work, the more I feel that lifestyle, behavior, emotions, psychological, and even spiritual factors play a crucial role and sometimes maybe even a more important role than commonly recognized factors like diet, exercise, and sleep in determining our health.
Diet, exercise, and sleep are, of course, still very important and often the most important factors, but they are more obvious and they’re more likely to be scrutinized. In some ways, they’re easier to change. Maybe sleep is a little bit of an exception, but most people are able to make changes in their diet and even their physical activity routine without making significant changes to who they are as a person and making changes in other areas like social support, how we relate to ourselves and the world around us, or how we relate to other people. These can really require pretty deep investigation, they require a lot of awareness, and they’re not the kind of changes that can be easily made overnight. I think there’s a lot more focus on diet and exercise because they are certainly very important but also because they are areas where it’s a little bit easier for people to make quick changes.
What if the mind and body aren’t really separate?
An ancient concept backed by modern research
But the idea that emotions play a role in health and disease is very old. In traditional Chinese medicine, for example, they have organ systems and each of the organ systems is associated with a particular emotion. The kidneys are associated with fear, the liver system is associated with anger, the lungs are associated with anxiety, and the spleen is associated with pensiveness or over thinking. The idea is that too much of any of these emotions damages the respective organ system that is associated with that emotion. For example, you hear about students developing what’s called spleen qi deficiency in traditional Chinese medicine because they’re overusing their cognitive faculty, or perhaps someone that has a lot of unresolved anger develops a condition called liver qi stagnation.
Regardless of what you think about this traditional Chinese view, modern research has also uncovered a link between emotions and disease. This is primarily expressed in the scientific literature in terms of stress. But stress is a really general term that could include, of course, emotions like grief, anger, anxiety, frustration, and worry. Most people, if you just stop them on the street and you ask them if emotions contribute to health and disease, they would say “yes” without even thinking about it.
Most of us have had some personal experience that backs this up, whether we became ill after a particularly traumatic emotional event in our life or perhaps after taking care of an aging parent, a sick child, or something like that. Most of us have experienced this to some degree or another. If we think about the more modern scientific research, we know that, for example, caregivers tend to be a population that is extremely affected by stress, and when researchers want to study the impact of stress on human physiology, they will often study caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients because it is known that this population is just under extreme stress and the long-term effects of all of the emotional stress involved in caring for someone with Alzheimer’s is extreme and severe.
How do we define emotion?
But how does emotion really contribute to disease? To me, that’s one of the most interesting questions, and I think in order to answer it, we need to define what emotion really is. If you look in a dictionary, emotion is defined as a natural instinct of the mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others. That’s kind of a technical definition, but we can say unequivocally that emotions are associated with sensations in our body. Again, everybody knows this. It’s not something we need research to show, but there is plenty of research that does show it. In some cases, the emotion may precede the sensation that we feel in our body. For example, if you see a snake, you then feel fear and then you experience a whole bunch of sensations that are related to that fear—your heartbeat increases, your muscles tense so that you can run away or deal with the threat. Not surprisingly, some recent research has shown that we all have the same bodily sensations associated with particular feelings regardless of culture or language, and that makes sense because these emotions or sensations primarily evolved as survival mechanisms.
But in some cases, the sensation may actually precede the emotion and the thought. An example here might be that we show up at the office and a co-worker is wearing a strong scent or perfume that makes you feel ill, and you then initially feel that sensation of being unwell in the body, then you experience an emotion of anger, then a whole bunch of thoughts about how inconsiderate the co-worker is, and then more sensations and more emotions, etc. The reality is that the connection between sensations, emotions, and thought isn’t really linear in most cases, but the key point is that emotions can and do produce real psychological changes. If an emotion is chronic, for example, chronic sadness, fear, anxiety, or anger, then the sensations and thus the physiological effects of those emotions will also be experienced chronically in the body, and it’s really not difficult to understand how that could contribute to disease.
Can early trauma affect health later in life?
So, what about the idea that we store emotions and that they cause symptoms and illness later in our life? This definitely falls outside of our conventional understanding of the body, but that doesn’t mean we can rule it out. Based on what we just talked about so far, it’s at least plausible that strong emotions could produce a lasting response in the body, and there is some support for this in the literature. For example, we know that traumatic events that happen in utero or in early childhood can permanently downregulate the HPA axis and effect the production of hormones like cortisol for the rest of that child’s life. Something that happened when a baby was in the womb actually impacts hormone production for the rest of that baby’s life. You can talk about that in different ways, but the language that modern science uses to explain that doesn’t involve using terms like storing emotion or trauma in the body, but you could certainly look at it that way, as essentially an emotionally traumatic event that had lifelong impacts.
I think there may very well be other cases where somebody experiences a severe trauma early on, and that trauma affects the body in other ways that modern science doesn’t currently understand. Maybe that person develops a cancer later in life, maybe they develop an autoimmune disease, or maybe they develop some other condition, but it’s not clear to them or certainly to their doctor that the emotionally traumatic event that happened earlier in their life was a predisposing factor to them developing that condition.
Now, I should say at this point, I’m a little bit wary of any explanation that tries to oversimplify things. In the examples that I just used where people had an emotionally traumatic event that then manifested as a disease or a condition later in life, for every person that did have something like that, there could be people that had a traumatic event and didn’t manifest a disease like that later in life. We are very, very complex beings. There are multiple factors that affect our susceptibility to disease, including genetics, epigenetic expression, environmental factors like diet, physical activity, sleep, stress, and of course, emotions among many, many others that are both understood currently and have a lot of research behind them and others that are perhaps not as well understood.
Even if it is true that emotional experiences manifest in our body both in real time currently as we’re experiencing them and then possibly later on in life, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we’ll always have the ability to identify those emotional traumas and release them unless we escape the influence of them through some kind of work, whatever that work may be. I’m not saying it’s not possible, it very well may be. I’m just a little bit of wary of explanations that make this too simple. Because in my experience, there are so many factors that affect these processes of health and disease, and some of those factors we have control over and some of them we don’t.
Is there a separation between mind and body?
Okay, there’s another interesting part of this to me, which is the relationship between modern science and our understanding of the body and emotions. I’m a big believer of modern sciences. Anyone who has been listening to this podcast and follows my work knows, but I hope I’ve also made it clear that I believe that modern science can’t explain everything, and in fact, it’s changing all the time.
Our current medical model is based on a philosophical underpinning of Cartesian dualism, which is the mechanistic view of the body as a sum of its individual parts, and it’s really not holistic in any way. However, modern physics has taught us that the parts that we perceived to be separate are in fact part of an interconnected whole of atoms and even subatomic particles. Even more strangely, these particles can exist simultaneously as both particles and waste. We could really go off on a tangent here and I love physics and quantum physics and I’m kind of a geek about this stuff. I like to read about in my spare time. But without going too deep on this, for those of us who are not aficionados of this topic, my point is that a medical model that is based not on Cartesian dualism but on a more current understanding of quantum physics would likely see no separation between thoughts, emotions, and the physical body because they’re all made of the same stuff.
We have this phrase that you see all the time, the “mind-body connection.” To a certain extent, I appreciate that we’re seeing more about this because it indicates at least an increasing awareness of the importance of what is meant by saying “mind-body connection” but even to use the term “mind-body connection” is misleading because it creates the idea that there’s a separate mind and a separate body that are then connected. I think that’s inaccurate and even kind of a dangerous way of looking at it. The traditional Chinese medical physicians knew this and they didn’t have an idea of the mind as being separate from the body. I mentioned earlier that they have different emotions and thought states that are associated with each organ system, so within that structure is a view of the mind, body, and emotions essentially being one, not separate and not even connected. To say that they’re connected really misses the point.
I think as our understanding of the nature of reality really is what we’re talking about here, which includes as the human body has changed and evolved, eventually our conception of medicine, health, and disease will change and evolve along with it. Unfortunately, that process turned out to take decades if not hundreds of years based on what we’ve seen historically. It could be a while, and it may not happen in our lifetime, but we can now look at all of what we understand about physics and matter including the matter that’s in our bodies, our thoughts and emotions, and see that there is a lot less distinction between these things than we might have previously thought.
All of this suggests that even though with our current conventional medical paradigm, we may not understand the mechanisms behind how emotion could contribute to disease. There is already, even within that paradigm, quite a lot of research that supports that connection. As our understanding of both the nature of reality and human nature evolves, I think medicine is going to look very different in a hundred years than it does today. It’s best to keep an open mind. I will say also anecdotally as a clinician, I have seen big transformations in patients when working with emotions in whatever modality they are working on them with, whether it’s a psychotherapist, in some cases, people using ethnobotany or plant medicine, and other methods to get in touch with emotions that they may not normally have access to. I’ve seen very big shifts and transformations in people that are taking the time to explore these aspects of health.
My personal experience with emotions and healing
Many of you may also know that this was also a big part of my own healing process. When I got sick, I spent the first few years really deeply exploring diet, herbs, supplements and all of the typical things that we think of when we become sick. But after doing that really extensively, leaving no stone unturned, as is my way, and not making the kind of progress that I was hoping to make, I began to consider other possibilities or other avenues of exploration. I actually ended up moving to Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and living there for two years.
For those of you who are not aware of Esalen and its history, it’s a retreat center that’s focused on increasing awareness, spiritual and personal growth, and it’s got a very interesting and colorful history going back to the ’70s. There are a couple of books about it. It’s kind of a fascinating place, but I moved with there with the intention of really exploring the emotional and psychospiritual aspects of my illness, seeing if through doing that, I could make progress that I hadn’t made with just looking exclusively at the physical realm. Looking back on it now, I think all of that was important for me. Diet was a huge key as, of course, you know. A Paleo-type of diet was one of the big keys for me, but that emotional and psychospiritual work that I did at Esalen was also a very big key to my recovery, and my understanding of what was contributing to illness. The more I do the work that I do with patients, the more that I see that as an important part of the process for anybody that’s dealing with a chronic illness or anyone who wants to optimize their health.
Pam, thank you so much for asking this question. I think it’s really important to turn our attention to these aspects of health because they don’t get as much air time as they should especially for people who have already explored the finer points of diet and they’ve got their physical activity and their sleep dialed in, and they’re still experiencing illness. I think it’s really worth exploring the emotions, psychology, and even the spiritual roots of illness in an effort to expand our horizons and make progress that we may not be able to make purely by looking at the more commonly explored factors.
I hope this has been helpful and I would love to continue the discussion, so if you have any thoughts or ideas about this, head over to the website chriskresser.com and leave a comment on the blog post because it’s a really interesting topic and I would love to explore it further with you.
Okay. That’s it for now. Thanks everybody for listening. Please keep sending your questions in to chriskresser.com/podcastquestion and I will talk to you soon.
As the calendar draws toward the close of another year, I’m inclined to take stock of where the Primal vision stands. Are people slowly warming to the idea of Primal eating (and living), or are we merely seeing inconsequential, lateral shifts within the same old confines of conventional grain-based, saturated fat-averse, dietary “wisdom”?
All right, all right. It’s fair to say that, without examining the numbers, the majority of people are still stuck in their same detrimental ways. But are the cracks in CW I noted a few years ago deepening and expanding? If we look closely enough, could there be a bit of whole-food common sense shining in there? Or is it just some refracted marketing gloss that catches the right angle from time to time? Or just wishful, starry-eyed delusion?
All good questions with their own claim on truth. Still, are there any substantive takeaways from 2016? And how are things shaping up for the next year at that? Let’s take a brief look.
2016 in Review: Where did Grok fit in?
Last month, Google released its report on 2016 Food Trends. (PDF) With its window into public curiosity, it gives us a refreshing take on how the (Internet-connected) world views food, highlighting popular interests rather than dietitian recommendations. And while I’m always a little hesitant to jump into the brain of your average calorie-counting consumer, it’s useful to get an overall idea of what people are thinking with regards to food.
For one, it appears “gluten-free” is dropping in the charts. With Google reporting a decline in searches for “Gluten Free Cupcakes” and “Wheat Free Bread,” it appears that perhaps the average Joe/Jane has lost interest—at least in non-gluten bake goods. (Somehow I’m not too optimistic that they’re being replaced with the likes of Primal stew and Big A$$ salads.)
There was also a significant decline in interest for classic “healthy” examples of kale chips, quinoa, and agave nectar (sorry, there’s no such thing as guilt-free).
But enough of the “has-beens”…. What about the up-and-comings of the great Google food query?
It appears that the world’s love affair with pasta, bread and rice continues to flourish. Of the 7 Sustained Risers of the 2016 Google food search, 3 fit the pasta category (ramen, rigatoni and linguine), 2 relate to wheat and baked goods (empanadas, bundt cakes), and 1 was a rice-heavy (but admittedly delicious) Korean dish (bibimbap). I have to say that, minus the bibimbap, I’m a little disappointed.
Uncured bacon was a slightly promising trend. I wouldn’t have put that at the top of the concern list, but maybe beggars can’t be choosers.
Still, credit to Internet searchers everywhere, there were some genuine bright spots. According to Google, the new rising stars of the food world include turmeric, jackfruit and cauliflower rice. I’ve shared my thoughts on turmeric recently. I hear jackfruit is a superfood contender—and a sustainable food source to boot. Cauliflower rice has long been a staple for many in the Primal/paleo and low-carb crowds.
So, a few wins here, and a few losses there. I like to think that we all got something out of the trendy gluten-free stint though. While searches might be down, I don’t think there’s any going back to total denial at this point. And from where I’m sitting, the market has been changed by gluten-free “fadism”—for the better. (Just don’t fall for the gluten-free sugar.)
The “experts’” crystal ball…Hints for 2017?
Despite some of the aforementioned dietary pivoting, Americans will plunge into 2017 with a bit more food know-how under their belts. While the “gluten-free” movement may appear to be losing some steam, there’s undeniably a growing recognition of food as medicine.
The final query in that grouping was “health food stores near me,” suggesting that more people are actively seeking out sources for nutrient-dense, minimally-processed foods. Who knows? Maybe a few of them stumbled on Thrive…or PRIMAL KITCHEN™ in the process.
This newfound food research fanaticism may or may not guide people towards a more Primal way of eating. To get a glimpse of the not too distant edible future, I’ve skimmed some of the more notable predictions for 2017 floating around the net. Here’s a small taste:
Plant-based protein will be all the rage.
Apparently 2016 was the International Year of Pulses. Who knew? It certainly did see a return of the legume back to the kitchen table—even among the Primal and paleo circles. Personally, I’ve got no beef with legumes. I’ll throw them in for taste and texture sometimes. That said, I wouldn’t ever depend on them for my protein base. Sure, there’s nutrition there, in some more than others, but let’s be honest, too—the carb count hasn’t changed.
Brace yourself for an onslaught of beans in the coming months, people.
(Good) fats may catch a welcome reprieve.
At last, a prediction to truly get excited about! After a casual 4-plus decades of hating on fat of any kind, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has grudgingly admitted that certain fatty foods may in fact not be the devil incarnate. Avocado, almonds and salmon all get the thumbs-up from these dietary sticklers, which may herald a new golden age for the fat-starved masses. Grok’s nodding in approval.
But don’t be fooled: most dietary bigwigs are still convinced that fat is the enemy. A skim (pun intended) through the 2015 Dietary Guidelines reveals an immovability with regard to saturated fats, and I don’t think a year has done much to budge them. Note that we’re still getting the same old recommendations for “fat-free or low-fat dairy, including milk, yogurt, cheese, and/or fortified soy beverages.” Here I was thinking we’d finally hit a home run.
Progress: We’ll take it where we can get it.
Despite the apparent dietary see-sawing, maybe it’s not too much to suggest there’s less disagreement when it comes to what constitutes healthy eating. Those who are willing to do the research agree that low/moderate carbs and high fat are good, as long as it’s healthy fat. The rising stars of 2016 showed that nutrient density is quickly becoming a benchmark for healthy eating, along with the growing notion that maybe eating so much sugar isn’t the best decision ever.
If ancestral logic isn’t getting the credit, it’s perhaps because we remain uncomfortable looking to our uncivilized past for direction. As a tech-savvy consumer society, most people prefer to believe sources for dietary wisdom are situated in cutting edge science rather than innate sense. We’re more inclined to trust “progress” than history.
Still, if popular interests and, brace yourselves, conventional wisdom are indeed inching toward ancestral principles (even as they disown them by name), the overall direction perhaps creates new entry points for more folks to discover a larger picture of health in the Primal Blueprint or paleo models.
And, btw, let’s not overcomplicate things.
All said, it’s refreshing to see an increase in people actually showing some degree of consciousness regarding the ingredients in their food. Yet, it’s also frustrating to discover that most people still believe being healthy is hard. Among the commentary and observations offered with the report is the notion that “to eat healthy, you have to pay a lot of attention.” To me, we walk a fine line with these kinds of statements and may actually deter people from trying to get healthy in the first place.
People think that eating healthy is complicated, that the rules change all the time, and the mainstream media chronically perpetuates this misconception.
That’s the beauty of ancestral logic. The Primal Blueprint diet is, at its core, very simple. Healthy fats, fresh produce, high-quality meats. It’s not rocket science, and that’s why it works. Perhaps 2017 will see a continuing shift towards dietary simplicity. For the sake of public health, I certainly hope so. I’m ready to do my part.
Thanks for stopping by everyone. Is there anything food-related that’s made a big difference to your life in 2016? What are your predictions for popular food trends in 2017?
We all know that to get dinner on the table tonight we’ll need ingredients and a recipe. We’ll also need some way to cook it and something to eat it with. We’ll need some time, too, be it five minutes for a salad or two hours for a braise. And we’ll probably need some way to clean it all up and store any leftovers.
What we don’t realize we need to make dinner tonight, though, is a story. And yet, on some level, we do. We need stories to assure us, to inspire us, to make us laugh, and to inform us. We need to be reminded that this act of feeding ourselves and our loved ones, however ordinary and routine, is also an enormous gift, never to be taken lightly. Our stories, like our cooking, are what make us human.
Asha Gomez’s aloo tiki, also known as potato croquettes, are the low-effort, high-impact item on our South Indian New Year’s Eve menu. Chances are high they’ll be the favorite on everyone’s list.
You can make the mashed potatoes ahead and even pre-shape the patties, sticking them in the oven before guests arrive in order to serve them hot (although that’s not to say they aren’t delightful at room temperature). Serve these with a favorite mint chutney or sour cream, or go sans sauce. They’re filled with enough flavor to go stag at your party without blinking an eye.
Breakfast is one of those meals that can easily become routine. From cold cereal to smoothies, many people grab their breakfast and head out the door before they’re even fully awake. Clearly we need some inspiration here. Maybe baked croque-monsieur casserole will perk up your morning, or granola cooked overnight in the slow cooker. Better yet, why not fill your freezer (like a boss) with breakfast burritos or the fixings for a slow-cooker breakfast bake?
Here are these recipes and a few more that we think will offer a better breakfast for a better morning.
I recently spent no less than 45 minutes scrolling through in an Instagram rabbit hole of beautiful young women who had made “amazing body transformations!” As I moved from one post to the next, I found myself wishing I was more shredded, or thinner, or as happy as these smiling women seemed to be about their brand new bodies.
I’m a body positive advocate and body image coach, and I love and accept my body, but that in no way makes me immune to triggers. This particular trigger was a super popular fitness professional’s account where women who follow her guides showcase their weight loss and are celebrated for “finally having abs.” This fitness pro herself is beautiful and very lean, and despite the fact that I have zero issue with her, her programs, or even her Instagram account, I found myself hitting “unfollow” after I realized I’d spent the better part of an hour thinking about how to get leaner again.
It has been estimated that in our modern culture, the average person views anywhere from 500 to 5000 advertisements every day—and that estimate doesn’t even include social media posts and blogs. The vast majority of these advertisements rely on portraying “ideal” situations, places, bodies, and lives, in an effort to make you want what they’re offering.
You can love yourself unconditionally, inside and out.
These simple, actionable steps will help you start living more fully and authentically, today.
Aspirational advertising may be a pretty effective marketing strategy, but as far as you, your self-esteem, and your personal satisfaction are concerned, it’s disastrous. Regularly viewing images of “ideal” (read: Photoshopped, fake, or otherwise unrealistic) lives and bodies, inevitably leads to comparing yourself unfavorably, and both your self-esteem and satisfaction rating plummet. When it comes to your body image, being in the habit of viewing so many “perfect” bodies makes it nearly impossible to look at your own body and say: “Yep, this is just right.” 1,2,3
The problem is that no matter how smart and self-aware we are, it can be very hard to outsmart the effect that seeing these images has on the brain.
Research has shown that we subconsciously prefer the body types we see most often, which is in part why women feel worse about themselves after flipping through a fashion magazine.4 The brain responds to what we see, and in our advertising-clutter culture, we are constantly blasted with images mostly depicting society’s current “ideal” standard of beauty: tall, thin, perfectly toned, white women with perky breasts and flawless skin, which represents… well, almost nobody.
This is why the rejection of retouching and the fight for greater inclusivity and body diversity in media, marketing, magazines, and movies is so important. The human brain tends to prefer whatever we see most often, and right now what we see most often are female bodies that have very little in common with the majority of actual female bodies.5,6
The good news is that while we can’t outsmart the effect that these images can have on us, we do have some control over which ones we see. A lot of the factors that go into negative self-image are admittedly out of our control, because we live in a society that tends to hold women to impossible ideals and over-values youth and sex appeal. But when it comes to what we visually and mentally consume, often we have more of a choice than we realize.
I believe that when it comes to our health and happiness, what we put into our minds is just as important as what we put into our mouths. In most circumstances, being surrounded by unhealthy food doesn’t mean you need to eat it, right? If you’re committed to feeling good and eating well, planning ahead help ensure that you have healthy food available to eat instead. The same goes for what we consume visually and mentally. There may be ample opportunities available to view thin, toned, “beautiful” white women with perfect skin, laughing while eating salads, but that doesn’t mean we need to view them.
If you’re struggling to love and embrace your body, I encourage you to go on a visual consumption diet, scrupulously removing anything from your life that doesn’t actively help you improve the way you feel about your body. Think of it like this: If it’s not helping you get better, it is likely making things worse, or at the very least, keeping you in the same mental space. Approach absolutely everything you consume through a critical lens, asking yourself, “Does this help me love my body more?” If the answer is anything other than “hell yes!” get rid of it.
This might seem really extreme, but so is going through life hating your body.
Though the research indicates that this type of “diet” can significantly improve body image and self-esteem, personally, when I first started limiting my visual consumption, I really struggled to give up certain things I considered pleasures. Things like reading fashion magazines and beauty blogs. I didn’t really stop until I realized that even though I did get a certain amount of pleasure from the creativity and beauty of these products, I left each experience feeling worse about myself, and wanting to buy products that would help “fix” or improve me in some way. Ultimately, I decided that the fleeting pleasure wasn’t worth the lasting sense of unease.
To take it one step further, I encourage you to actively surround yourself with visual information and resources that help normalize and validate who you are and what you’re about.
When we don’t regularly see ourselves represented in our immediate surroundings or the mass media, it can leave us with the (completely untrue) sense that we are alone, weird, or even wrong for simply being us.
These days I make it a point to live my life surrounded only by activities, people, places, and social media accounts that fuel my self-acceptance and self-love, rather than those that steal from it.
Give yourself the gift of filling your environment with the qualities you embody by building a reservoir of images and opinions that support, validate, and celebrate you. You wouldn’t build a circle of friends who reject you, right? Don’t build a circle of information and images that reject you either. Instead, consciously build a circle of support, validation, and celebration for who you are. If you’re a curvy lady who lifts weights for example, you might follow every member of the women’s olympic weightlifting team on Instagram. If you’re a female gamer, you might want to join a Facebook group for women who are self-professed nerds or geeks, who think gaming is awesome.
Become the curator of your own personal art gallery, only your gallery is your mind. Be discerning and hold yourself to high standards; let your excellent taste show through. Allow in only those exhibits that will move you, support you, challenge you, lift you up, and push you in the direction you want to go.
If you want to move in the direction of learning how to love and embrace your body, fill your gallery with whatever helps you do that and be uncompromising in your willingness to remove anything that doesn’t help. You only have so many walls in your gallery, you know? If you’re trying to tackle something as important and difficult as loving and embracing your body, it’s wise to not waste any of your wall space.
How To Go On A Visual Consumption Diet
If you’re wondering what going on a visual consumption diet might look like, here are some examples:
Unfollow social media accounts that make you feel even slightly less-than. This isn’t about judging anyone else, it’s about being your own advocate and listening to how you When it came to the fitness professional I mentioned at the beginning of this article, for example, I discovered that she triggered me into wishing I had my abs back. That’s just not something I’m interested in pursuing right now, so away she went.
Fill your social media and blog/news feeds with body diversity and body positivity. Seriously, there are so many amazing accounts and sources out there with women just rockin’ what they’ve got. Explore, follow them, follow their friends, and see how you feel. Always view each account or resource through the lens of what’s important to you: “Is this actively helping me love and embrace myself?” If the answer is not a resounding “yes!” then it’s got to go.
Fill your working and living spaces with images that inspire you to you love yourself. Print out photos of your heros and supporters, and display them so that you’re constantly surrounded by people who champion and accept you. Imagine how it would feel to walk into your office space and instantly be surrounded by Joan of Arc, Amelia Earhart, your adoring niece, your mom, your best friend, and that college professor who believed in you so much that you finally started believing in yourself. Consume what these people have to offer instead of visuals that don’t align with who you are and where you want your life to take you. You’ll find it a heck of a lot easier to believe that you are enough.
Look at images of yourself! I know this one sounds a bit strange since so many women really don’t like seeing photos of themselves, but I encourage you to start taking a ton of photos and looking at yourself often! Remember, our brains start to prefer the bodies we see most often. Mercilessly delete the photos you don’t like, and keep an ever-growing stockpile of the ones you like. Selfies, body shots, candids, posed—whatever you like. Take them, store them, and look at them often.
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There’s nothing more heartbreaking than watching women exhaust themselves in the gym, desperate for results, only to end up spinning their wheels and not making the progress they want to make. That’s why we created our FREE handbook, Why You’re Training Hard And Not Seeing Results.
In this FREE Handbook, we detail why you’re probably not getting the results you desire, and how you can remedy it. The good news? It’s simpler than you might think! (And it doesn’t involve working harder!)
For now classes are 6pm and 640pm at 2840 Wildwood st in the Boise Cloggers studio.
Book your class NOW!
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Warrior Fit Testimonials
First, I want to say thank you for convincing me to do Tabata! I was struggling to lose weight and Finally I found something that helped! I really appreciate your coaching! - Craig T.
Ever since I was convinced to do Tabata I have seen huge results, I lost 6 pounds and gained energy in the first 3 weeks. I have been working out for 3 months before I decided to do Tabata and I struggled to lose weight.
At first I thought "How am I losing weight by bringing my heart rate up then cooling down then bringing it up again?" I don’t know how it works but it does!
Thank you!! - Theresa F.
The first day of Tabata, I wondered WHAT AM I DOING - I AM 56 !! Five weeks later I knew that it was what I needed. I learned that I could push myself well beyond my comfort zone and feel good later. I have a marked improvement in physical as well as emotional endurance. - Lyn C.
When I was first told about Tabata I was very excited from the word go, however that excitement stemmed from the fact that I had no clue what it meant. I missed the first week of class b/c I was traveling for work so when I came in during the 2nd week I had some making it up to do.
It was hard at first b/c my body wasn't used to working out at such a fast pace, but once I got into a rhythm I started to feel very good. These classes are no joke. If you stick with it you will leave there feeling stronger, healthier and overall better about yourself and what you've accomplished.
I would recommend these classes to anyone. Darrin is a great trainer and he'll keep you going with his energy.
- Jami L.
Warriors Fit Audio
Warrior Fit uses High Intensity Music to get ya Moooovin' So we can all "Get Our Sweat On"
The link below will give ya a freeee shot at Audible plus a couple audio books just to try it out and if you haven't used audio books on your commutes you are missing out. Get pumped up before you get to where you are going and exercise your mind. I use it Everyday. Go get yours now!
As the calendar draws toward the close of another year, I’m inclined to take stock of where the Primal vision stands. Are people slowly warming to the idea of Primal eating (and living), or are we merely seeing inconsequential, lateral shifts within the same old confines of conventional grain-based, saturated fat-averse, dietary “wisdom”?
I recently spent no less than 45 minutes scrolling through in an Instagram rabbit hole of beautiful young women who had made “amazing body transformations!” As I moved from one post to the next, I found myself wishing I was more shredded, or thinner, or as happy as these smiling women seemed to be about their brand new bodies.
Though the research indicates that this type of “diet” can significantly improve body image and self-esteem, personally, when I first started limiting my visual consumption, I really struggled to give up certain things I considered pleasures. Things like reading fashion magazines and beauty blogs. I didn’t really stop until I realized that even though I did get a certain amount of pleasure from the creativity and beauty of these products, I left each experience feeling worse about myself, and wanting to buy products that would help “fix” or improve me in some way. Ultimately, I decided that the fleeting pleasure wasn’t worth the lasting sense of unease.
For now classes are 6pm and 640pm at 2840 Wildwood st in the Boise Cloggers studio.
Book your class NOW!
click this ==>
