Your Summer Body

Today we’re diving into your thoughts about your summer body.

Are you unhappy with your body image? If so, you’re not alone. Body image isn’t something we just came up with ourselves. It’s something that’s been conditioned by society.

We’ve been told in many ways that our bodies are unacceptable as they are, that we should be ashamed of them, and that they need fixing especially during the summer.

We’ve been conditioned that there is a one size fits all mold that we’re supposed to morph our bodies into and that the way our body looks is more important than everything else.

In today’s episode, I’m talking about body image and some different ways to think about your body.

If you don’t currently have a life coach, I would be so honored to be yours. I’m currently offering 1:1 private coaching. If you’re ready to take this work to the 10X level, click here to check it out!

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER:

• Where the idea of having a HOT SUMMER BODY came from
• Seasonal Body Dissatisfaction
• Why it’s so hard to stop thinking negatively about your body
• 3 new thoughts to think about your body

FEATURED ON THE SHOW:

• Summer Coaching Sale! 
• I Feel Pretty Movie
• Would you do me a favor? Please leave a review on your preferred podcast platform — it helps me reach more and more people. Thank you!
• I’d love to hear from you with any questions or insights. Leave me a message on Instagram @ajoyfulyou or email me at rachael@ajoyfulyou.com
• Follow me on Instagram for more
• Website

TRANSCRIPT:

This is The Joyful You Podcast, episode 90, Your Summer Body.

Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.

On this show, I talk all about the tools you need to build faith in yourself, cultivate a healthy relationship with food, your mind, and your life.

I’m your host, Rachael Collins.

As a certified life coach, it is my mission to show you how to work with your body, manage your mind, process your emotions, improve your relationships, and create supportive habits so you can live well, feel well, and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self, a joyful you.

Hello there.

My family and I just got back from a little trip to the lake, and it was so much fun.

We spent the day playing on the beach and riding jet skis and paddleboarding all around the lake.

And the house that we rented had a pool, so I spent a lot of time in my swimsuit, and my brain had all kinds of thoughts about my body.

And I’m guessing yours probably does too.

So that is what I want to talk about today.

Your summer body, my summer body.

Our summer body.

I was looking through some of my old Instagram posts because I remembered a post that I wrote that I wanted to talk about on this episode.

But while I was looking for them, I ran across an old post of mine.

I was in a swimsuit, and the caption said, I used to dread swimsuit season.

Then I lost 50 pounds, and I still dread swimsuit season.

And then the post went on to say, your body image, aka the thoughts that you have about your body, will be the same at all sizes.

You won’t magically love your body once you lose X amount of pounds.

So it’s not the size, the shape, or the weight of your body.

It is our thoughts about our body.

And body image isn’t just something that we came up with all by ourselves.

It’s something that we have been conditioned by society as a society.

In fact, all over social media right now is this idea about our bodies.

It’s what we’re seeing in our feet or most of us are seeing in our feet about this need to have a summer body.

Or we need to work on our hot summer body.

Do you have a hot summer body?

All this stuff about having a hot summer body.

Actually, I saw a meme the other day that said, how is everyone’s summer body coming along?

Mine’s looking like I have a great personality, which goes right along with society’s conditioning that somehow having a great personality isn’t as desirable as having a hot summer body, whatever a hot summer body means to you.

And that’s another thing.

We all have different opinions about what a hot summer body looks like.

I was listening to a webinar of a weight loss coach, and one woman got in there, and she posted a comment about how the particular coaches in this program didn’t look like they should be coaching people on weight loss.

And the woman running the webinar said, our body goals are all different.

There is no one size fits all mold that we’re supposed to fit into.

But that is what we’ve all been conditioned to believe, right?

That there’s just this one hot summer body, and we all need to fit into it.

So let’s talk about these, and then I want to give you some different ways that you can choose to think about your summer body, and even just your body in general, because it’s not just summer time that we have body image issues, right?

It’s year round.

But when we’re in a bathing suit, they seem to come up a lot more than when we’re in sweats and sweaters and jackets, and we’re wearing all the layers.

Okay, so do you know where this idea of having a hot summer body even comes from?

I didn’t know about this until I started researching this topic, and I found out that it started in the 1960s.

That seems like forever ago, right?

That was like what, 60 years ago?

Crazy.

It started in the 1960s from an ad campaign by a chain of weight loss salons.

I’m not even sure what a weight loss salon is.

Maybe it was the term back then for a weight loss clinic.

I’m not sure.

Anyway, this chain of weight loss salons was called Slenderella, right, Slenderella.

And they had this ad campaign that read, Summer’s wonderful fun is for those who look young, high firm busts, hand span waist, trim firm hips, slender graceful legs, a bikini body.

And the company went on from this ad, slogan, I guess we would call it, and they promised a woman that they could have a bikini body ready for summer.

That is where it started.

We have changed the slogan a bit from bikini body to hot summer body, but the implication is still the same.

If you want to have fun in the summer, then you need to look a certain way.

That’s essentially what having a hot summer body means.

You have to be physically acceptable in order to be seen and to be out and to be doing activities in the summer.

The other interesting thing that I learned is that researchers are now noticing that there is something that exists out there called seasonal body dissatisfaction, which means that in the spring and the summer, everybody’s hating their bodies and everybody’s hating what they look like because their brain is telling them, Oh no, we are not going to be accepted because we don’t look a certain way.

We don’t have a bikini body.

We don’t have a hot summer body.

And because we don’t, we are not going to have any fun this summer.

We are going to have to sit out because we are not bikini ready and our body doesn’t fit this certain criteria that society has set for us.

The diet industry really starts marketing this campaign clear back in March.

They bring on the shame for not having a hot summer body in the hopes that we will sign up for whatever it is that they are shelling out.

But here’s what I want you to know.

The shame that we feel is not coming from our body.

The shame is coming from our thoughts that we have about our body.

It’s coming from the thoughts that we aren’t acceptable, that our body isn’t acceptable.

And unless we change those thoughts, the shame and the dislike is never going to go away no matter how much work we do.

I still had shame about my body, and I had just lost 50 pounds.

So it’s not our bodies and what they look like or how much they weigh or how curvy or muscly or not they are.

It is simply our thoughts about our body.

Another post that I did on Instagram that I went back to find is a letter board.

And on it, I wrote, Bad body image is not healed by weight loss.

It’s healed by changing your thoughts about your body.

And that is so, so true.

It has nothing to do with our body at all and everything to do with the thoughts that we have about it.

Let me explain to you how this works.

It’s all due to our brain.

And the way that our brain works is that it uses our eyes and our ears to take in information.

So we’re getting information from all the images that we see on social media, the images that we see in movies, the images we see in magazines, all the ads that we see, the billboards that we see.

We’re getting all of this information from all over the place.

And our brain is taking it all in and it’s interpreting it, and it’s measuring us against all this information.

So no matter how much work you put in, your brain is still out there measuring you against whatever the new ideal is at the time.

And the way that our brain works is it’s always looking for and finding what is wrong.

That is just what our brain does.

It finds all the places that we’re lacking.

And then we feel inadequate, we feel unacceptable, and we feel ashamed.

And when we feel this way, what do we want to do?

We want to hide.

We don’t want to put on a bathing suit.

We do not want to swim with our kids.

We want to just think even more negative thoughts about ourselves.

We want to punish ourselves by starving ourselves or going on another diet or beaming ourselves up with negative self-talk or self-punishment.

We are mean to ourselves and this seriously hurts our relationship with ourselves and with our body because we are diminishing ourselves down to nothing but an image.

We live in a world where image is regarded above all else.

So we are not going to be able to magically wave our wands and remove all the negative thoughts about our body.

But what we can do is we can decide what we do with these thoughts.

We can decide if we’re going to believe them or not.

We get to decide if we’re going to hold on to these thoughts and allow them to make us sit out and miss out on all the experiences of life and making memories with our kids and with our families.

It really all comes down to our thoughts.

The way that we choose to think about our body and the thoughts that we allow to live on in our mind.

That’s what it all comes down to.

Now we’ve already established that our brain is going to find all the things that are wrong.

It’s just our brain’s job.

It thinks it is keeping us safe.

So, sure, our brain is going to offer us thoughts that our body is unacceptable.

But here’s the deal.

We do not have to take it.

We do not have to believe it.

We do not have to accept it.

Just because our brain offers it to us, we can still say, No, thank you.

I’m going to pass on that.

So today, what I want to do is I want to give you a few thoughts about your body that you may want to choose to think instead.

Okay, so the first one is there are just bodies.

That’s the thought.

There are just bodies.

There aren’t summer bodies.

There aren’t bikini bodies.

There are just bodies.

And because we’re human, all bodies are imperfect.

They just are.

Jodie Moore often shares that her favorite thought about bodies is that bodies are just funny.

They’re just funny looking.

They all look a little weird.

And I love that because it’s true.

Bodies all look a little weird.

They are all imperfect because we are human, and that is just how God created our bodies to be.

All right, the second thought that I want to offer you is that you can use your body any way you want in any season you want.

Now, our body is what allows us to experience life, and you can do whatever experiences in life that you want.

You can also wear and dress your body however you want.

You do not have to wait until you are a certain size, somebody made up, in order to wear short shorts or in order to put on a bikini or in order to wear a tank top or a summer dress, you get to choose to wear whatever you want.

And you don’t have to wait until you are a certain size in order to go boating or in order to go to the pool with your kids or in order to go hiking or in order to jump out of an airplane.

You can do whatever you want.

Whatever life experiences you want, you get to choose that.

Okay, here’s one more post that I thought of.

I reposted a post a few years back on Instagram, and it said, How to have a smoking hot body.

Number one, have a body.

Number two, go to Arizona in the summer.

Number three, walk from Target to your car in the parking lot.

Now you have a hot, a smoking hot body.

A hot body does not equal a certain weight.

It is a feeling that is created by your thoughts about your body.

So if you want a smoking hot, summer bikini body, all you have to do is choose it.

Choose to think about yourself and your body in smoking hot ways.

Thought number three that I want to offer you is, no one really cares what you look like, especially not your kids.

How does that one feel?

All your kids really want is you.

All they want is their mom.

I heard an Instagram story where this woman was talking about these terrible shorts that her mom would wear.

But every time her mom would put on these shorts, she knew that they were going to go and have a good time doing something.

And she was like, you know what?

I don’t know if my mom had cellulite, and I don’t know if my mom was overweight, and I don’t know if my mom had varicose veins.

It didn’t matter to me.

All I knew is that when my mom put on those shorts, we were going to go have fun.

And her point in the story was to wear the shorts.

Put on the bathing suit.

Your kids don’t care what you look like.

Your husband doesn’t care what you look like.

Your friends, they don’t either, for that matter.

They just want those experiences with you.

Don’t let the thoughts about your body keep you from fully experiencing life.

Nobody really cares what you look like, so you shouldn’t either.

Don’t miss out on making memories with your family.

Okay, the last thought that I want to leave you is that you are so much more than a body.

Our body is the vehicle that we have been given to experience this earth life in.

And sure, we need to take care of our bodies just like we need to take care of our cars, our vehicles, or else they fall apart, right?

We only get one body after all.

But we are missing out on so much if we’re only concentrating on the visual experience of a body.

We don’t just look at our kids and be like, you know why I love you?

Because you have a cute body.

You know why I love you?

Because you’re skinny.

We do not think that at all, like that never goes through our mind.

The reason that we love our kids is for their personality, is for the things that they do, the things that comes out from the spirit that is living inside of their body.

And sure, our body is how we experience life.

Our body is how our spirit shows itself and how our spirit goes through this life and has these life experiences, right?

The size and the shape of our body says nothing about what kind of a person we are.

It says nothing about who we are on the inside.

That’s the real us.

It says nothing about if we are good or bad or what kind of life we get to live, whether that’s good or bad.

The shape and size and weight of our body has nothing to do with our value at all.

We are so much more than just a body.

We are.

Okay, lastly, I want to leave you with this.

Body image is hard.

And I’m not going to sit here and sugarcoat it and say it’s not.

Like I said, our society is deeply caught up in what we think bodies should look like.

It is all over.

Everywhere we turn, we have someone telling us what the ideal body looks like, what the ideal makeup looks like, what the ideal gene size is.

But we don’t have to believe and follow what society tells us.

We can choose a higher way.

We do not have to choose to just go with the flow.

We can swim against the current if we choose to.

And that’s not always easy.

It’s not.

And our brain is constantly looking out for what’s wrong.

So we’ve got that piece too, right?

Our brain is always going to be like, Oh my gosh, have you seen the size of your thighs?

Oh my gosh, girl.

Like our brain is always going to offer that to us.

But we do not have to dwell on it.

We do not have to take it in and be like, Oh my gosh, yeah, you’re so right.

I probably better just wear sweats all summer long.

We don’t have to do that.

We get to choose how we want to think about our body.

If we are having negative body thoughts, we can choose to show up anyway.

I think a lot about the movie I Feel Pretty with Amy Schumer, and it starts off with her hating her body, kind of hiding herself, feeling really insecure about herself, and then she hits her head.

And when she wakes up, she sees herself completely different.

She still has the same body, but now when she looks in the mirror, she sees herself as sexy.

She sees herself as skinny.

She sees herself as pretty and as a great catch for a guy.

We don’t have to hit our head to have this experience for ourselves.

We do it simply by changing the way that we think about and view our body.

We do it by carefully and intentionally choosing the thoughts that our brain is offering us about our body.

Just because you think it doesn’t mean it’s true.

It is all a choice.

Every single thought about your body is made up.

Did you know that?

Every single thought about your body is just made up anyway.

So choose whichever made up thought you want to think.

We could go to I feel pretty Amy Schuller thoughts.

And it doesn’t matter if we’re overweight.

We can still look in the mirror and be like, Oh my gosh, I am looking sexy today.

Where is that bikini?

I’m putting it on.

We get to choose however we want to think.

Remember, I am here cheering you on.

I love you.

Thank you for listening, and I will see you next week.

Thank you for listening to The Joyful You Podcast.

If you’d like additional support, click the link in the show notes, and let’s chat about how we can work together to get you to your goal.

If this episode was helpful to you, make sure to subscribe and please share it.

The most helpful thing you can do in return is to go leave a review.

If you want to hang out on social media, you can find me on Instagram, at A Joyful You or on my website, ajoyfulyou.com.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS