INTRODUCTION: Hello there, and welcome to this week's episode of midlife A F. The New Year episode. In this episode I'm going to talk about the New Year.
New Beginnings. I'm going to talk about self compassion. Integration. And I'm not going to talk about punishment, restriction. I'm not going to talk about changing. I'm going to talk about revealing. I'm going to talk about opening. Discovering. And maybe we can come into this new year without a sense of lack and in a sense of abundance. Bountifulness. Plentifulness. Over to me
MAIN EPISODE: Everybody, welcome to Midlife AF New Year episode. I think it's probably quite necessary that I stop singing. Sorry. Ah, so here we are, it's the new year period. It's the time when everybody decides that they are not up to scratch, and they're going to bloody well sort themselves out. Well, I am going to come with a different perspective. Just something to get us thinking about another way. I think in this world, we are told in every direction, that there is something wrong with us, mainly in order to sell us stuff. Because that's how it all works.
She says thinking that she's got a grip on how it all works.
Not at all. But what I do know is that from a very young age, I started to construct a personality based on the feedback I had from society and other people that I was not, in and of myself, okay. And when I speak to women who have taken alcohol out of their lives, what I find more and more is that we all agree that there is an essence of us that got stuck somewhere. When we started creating all this rigidity, constraint, constriction you know, our anxiety, our desire to please, our armour of protection. And for me, and I will talk more on this but because I have been on such a journey with this through my life a lot of that revolved around body image. The thin ideal to the point where I was bulimic, anorexic, and only ever received praise for being so. Every time I couldn't cope, that was my coping mechanism. Because I thought if I was thin I would be acceptable. I still wasn't acceptable even when I was thin. It didn't bring me all the things I thought it would bring me. But I still struggle. And I've been on a three year journey with intuitive eating, and I'm training to be an intuitive eating counselor. But I'm still not there with it all yet around my self-worth as a woman in a larger body than society deems is acceptable. Or perhaps in my own fat phobic brain, that ideal that I feel is acceptable. And it's a struggle for me. But I feel I'm so passionate about the powers that be, the industry behind making women feel that they are not enough as they are, we already have so much of it just from our societal conditioning, expectations of us as women, in our relationships, and even in the work relationships, you know, the expectation of what the woman does, and how the man behaves. It's hard for someone, and I'm sure like many of you, who was brought up thinking we could have it all in there was a real thing called feminists and somehow it was connected to drinking Pints of Lager and getting your tits out.
But yeah, so the diet industry, fat phobia is something that makes me so angry and sad. And watching people being manipulated by it constantly. And talking about other people's bodies. I know recently, there's a woman I really admire in the coaching space, and she lost a lot of weight. And I'd always loved her because she was sort of normal looking. And she talked about things like you know, don't wait until you're, you know, thin enough to be in all these things. Just do it. You'll never be thin enough. There's no such thing as thin enough. And I know I'm probably gonna get all the words here wrong. And I will be rightly corrected by the people who know more about this than I do. But what I do know is that we are being manipulated. And what I do know is in the same way that we're being manipulated to think we need alcohol, because of the profit that gets made from people being addicted to alcohol, and the way that it keeps us small, and the way that it keeps us submissive in that we drink 100 percent to allow us to put up with shit in our lives. It's unacceptable. And we drink to allow the pain of being a woman in this world to not cut us deeply. And we drink so that we can ignore how fucking tired we are. How exhausted, how depleted, how depressed, how sad, how frustrated we are. How disappointed we are. And this eating thing is part of the same. When I see women commenting on other women's bodies and when I comment in social media and say you know, let's stop going on about menopause belly and accept the fact that women in menopause put weight on. It's part of the process, stop trying to profiteer out of women's desire to make themselves thin because that's what they've been told will make them loveable - it doesn't make us lovable. Nothing fucking makes us lovable. The only person that can make us lovable is us. And I'm saying that from a person who's so much in progress with all this shit. Like I went for three years without dieting. I didn't haven't looked at the scale. And then about six months ago all got too much and I went back on a meal plan. And I'm so frustrated with myself because I don't believe in diet culture. I'm a passionate advocate for not punishing ourselves, starving ourselves. Exercising ourselves to fit into what society deems we should be. It's no wonder women are getting all this stress related illness. No wonder we are full of autoimmune diseases, we have just much much higher instances of alzheimers and dementia.
Cancer. We drink. You know, there's so much stress being a woman. And to me, it's not about how we can make ourselves smaller? How can we and we, and there's this whole big bullshit about thin is healthy. It's not healthy. I wasn't healthy when I was anorexic and eating one sandwich a day.
But I looked thin. Don't we think that in our 50s if we want a piece of cake, we should have a piece of fucking cake.
Anyway, so I'm here to offer an alternative. And very much part of intuitive eating and very much part of my compassion and training in our coaching and counseling. We know that moving our body makes us feel good. I didn't move my body today because I was feeling like an achy, old wreck. We also know that sometimes lying on our ass makes us feel good. We know that. That's the key. We know. We know. I know. If I get up and swim in the sea. I feel amazing. I know if I don't, I don't feel as good. Sometimes I don't want to, so I don't. I know that for water, walk an hour a day. And listening to my podcasts with all the things that I love to learn about makes me feel really good. Sometimes I don't have time to do that. And that's okay. When I was drinking I used to get up every morning and run. I used to run 10k Three times a week. And on the weekend I'd run 15/20 km. I was so hungover. On the weekends, I would at least have been drinking a bottle of wine to myself, if not two. During the week, I'm not sure it depends whether I'd be drinking or not. Some weeks I was, some weeks I wasn't. But running. And you know if that feels good to you, great do it. I know that for menopause, one of the things I want to start doing is lifting heavy weights, because I know that's really, really good for increasing bone density and all the issues that you get around osteoporosis. I don't know all the science behind it. But I've read enough, I'm fascinated by the perimenopause and menopause and how ignored it is by science because it doesn't pay money.
Fat old ladies are not where the money's at. That's not the career of a successful doctor.
And that's why no one knows anything about menopause and we're stumbling around in the dark. You know, not knowing that joint aches is and can be caused by perimenopause hair loss that the reason it makes you know, alcohol has a much more of an impact on us, is because of our hormonal changes that anxiety goes through the route that our seamlessness goes through the roof and those things are exacerbated by alcohol. But there's so many symptoms of perimenopause. I mean, my biggest one, and I still don't know whether it's ADHD or perimenopause, is memory loss and brain fog. And I'm, you know, experimenting with all these ADHD meds and stuff to see what is and what isn't. And I still don't know. But for me, and I just want to take this back, is - what about if there was nothing wrong with you? What about if you were a person who was in pain? Who had been suffering, and had been using some coping mechanisms? To help you manage that? And what if alcohol was an addictive substance to anybody made of blood, skin and bone?
And what if there was nothing wrong with you for being addicted to an addictive substance? And what if you didn't need to change? What if you didn't need to punish yourself into anything?
What if you needed to love yourself better? What if you needed to treat yourself like the precious essence of a human? That stopped being who you really were back when you were small?
And what if you took a picture of that little girl? Or boy, or whatever gender you choose? What if you took that picture? And you looked at it? And what if you
went on an exploration this year? To discover that amazing essence and who she is. If she has you to stand by her in her awkwardness, as she sasses out who is good for her? And who's hurting her? As she works out how could she make this life a life that works for her rather than against her? What if you made it your mission not to abandon yourself this year. Not to anybody. Not to anything. Not to any diet, any exercise regime. But just to loving you. Move because you want to move, move because it feels so fucking good. Be mindful because it helps you focus, it helps you feel that high that you were chasing for so long. Be mindful because it helps you detach from your anxiety from the control from trying to be all the things that never really mattered anyway.
Nurture yourself. Have the fucking piece of cake but most of the time give yourself yummy things that are going to make you grow and thrive and feel good. What if it was the year of loving you, and what if everything and every decision we make we sit at the centre, because when we love ourselves we show the people around us how they can treat us and we show our kids how they can be treated too.
