The Midlife Feast
The Midlife Feast
#154 - How to Appreciate Your Changing Menopause Body with Dr. Charlotte Ord
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Our bodies change in midlife and menopause, and many times in ways that feel confusing or frustrating. But what if those changes aren’t a problem to fix, but an invitation to reconnect with ourselves?
In this conversation, Dr. Charlotte Ord, psychologist and body image expert shares a refreshing take on body appreciation. It’s not about pretending to love every wrinkle or roll. It’s about noticing what your body does for you, and learning to meet it with care, not criticism.
We also explore a powerful question: Who benefits when we hate our bodies? The answer reveals just how deeply diet culture and the wellness industry profit from our insecurities.
Dr. Ord offers simple, grounding practices to help you feel more at home in your body, including media literacy tips and ways to gently shift your focus toward gratitude and self-trust.
Connect with Dr. Charlotte
The Website: https://www.charlotteord.com
Instagram: @drcharlotteord
📚Grab the Book: Body Confident You, Body Confident Kid
Like what you learned? Check out these other episodes!
- Why You Need to Put Capacity, Self-Compassion, & Self-Care on the Menu
- The Problem with Perfectionism with Alana Van Der Sluys
- What Every Woman Needs to Know About Body Image in Midlife with Summer Innanen
- The Body Acceptance Mistake That’s Keeping You Stuck in the Suck
Ditch the “I’ll be good today” loop in 5 days with the Midlife Morning Makeover Email Challenge! ☀️ Head to menopausenutritionist.ca/morningmakeover
Click here to hang out with me on YouTube!
Looking for more about midlife, menopause nutrition, and intuitive eating? Click here to grab one of my free guides and learn what I've got "on the menu" including my 1:1 and group programs. https://www.menopausenutritionist.ca/links
Hi and welcome to the Midlife Feast, the podcast for women who are hungry for more in this season of life.
Jenn Salib Huber:I'm your host, dr Jenn Salib-Huber. I'm an intuitive eating dietitian and naturopathic doctor and I help women manage menopause without dieting and food rules. Come to my table, listen and learn from me trusted guest experts in women's health and interviews with women just like you. Each episode brings to the table juicy conversations designed to help you feast on midlife. And if you're looking for more information about menopause, nutrition and intuitive eating, check out the Midlife Feast Community, my monthly membership that combines my no-nonsense approach that you all love to nutrition with community, so that you can learn from me and others who can relate to the cheers and challenges of midlife. If your body feels like a stranger and you don't recognize who you see in the mirror and your inner critic is really loud telling you that your body is the problem, this episode is for you.
Jenn Salib Huber:Welcome to this week's episode of the Midlife Feast. In a world that's constantly telling women to shrink and change and fix their bodies, especially as we get older, it can feel really radical to say I'm okay. But body appreciation, which is what we're talking about today, isn't about pretending to love every wrinkle, every roll. It's about reconnecting with the body that you have today. Today, I'm joined by Dr Charlotte Ord, a counseling psychologist and author, who's here to help us untangle the messy mix of body image, digital influence and the language that we use every day that can either lift us up or pull us down. We talk about why appreciating your body doesn't mean loving it all the time, and why being dissatisfied with your body is part of the problem. The influence of media, especially digital literacy, and how it can improve your self-esteem, and why rethinking how we talk to ourselves, especially in those bad body image or bad body thought moments, is so powerful. So, whether you're in the thick of perimenopause, feeling like your body is changing faster than you can keep up with, or if you're just tired of the internal tug of war, this conversation will help you feel a little more grounded and a lot more empowered.
Jenn Salib Huber:Hi and welcome to the podcast, dr Charlotte. Hi, thank you for having me. So, as I mentioned in the introduction, thank you for having me. So, as I mentioned in the introduction, one of the things that I love introducing to people is the idea of body appreciation. It's often something they haven't heard before and it's often something that we're not used to doing either. So, like appreciating our body, it's very different than liking it, it's very different than loving it, and I would love to, I'd love to get your take on what is body appreciation.
Dr Charlotte Ord:So for me, body appreciation is about focusing on what our bodies can do for us rather than simply what they look like, but it's also very much about acceptance accepting the things that it can do and the things we do appreciate about it, but also its flaws and the fact that none of us are perfect, and that's okay.
Jenn Salib Huber:Yeah, so why is it important? And maybe kind of, how does it relate to body image?
Dr Charlotte Ord:Sure. So I think it's a really fundamental part of body image, and the reason that it's important is because we're so conditioned to bash our bodies and to find fault with them, and when we only look at our bodies through this lens of how they compare to this bodily ideal, most of us find ourselves lacking, which is such a disservice to our bodies, because our bodies are the only one we'll ever have. They're our home. They enable us to do so many incredible things live, love, experience and all of that gets missed. And I think the more you're able to focus on what you do appreciate about your body and its function, what it can do for you, the more at peace you tend to be with it. And that underpins quality of life for me, because if you're not happy in your body, whatever size or whatever appearance you have, then it's really hard to to be at peace in the world, because you're constantly worrying about how other people think about you, how your body's going to be received, what you think about you. So it's really quite fundamental for me.
Jenn Salib Huber:Yeah, and I'd love to kind of give a scenario that often comes up in midlife conversations, where our bodies change in midlife. Bodies change across the human spectrum, but they do tend to change a little bit more around midlife. We go through this redistribution. You know there's lots of people who experience changes in body size and shape and function and, as a result, it feels, for many people, like their bodies are betraying them. It feels like these changes are happening to them and it really sets up this relationship with your body that feels like you're in a war. And so when I talk to people and we're talking about well, okay, and I introduced this concept of body appreciation it's often met with understandable resistance. How can I appreciate this body that is betraying me? How can I appreciate this body that's noting me? How can I appreciate this body that's not playing by the rules anymore? I'm doing all the right things and nothing is working. I'm sure that that's something that you've heard as well.
Dr Charlotte Ord:Absolutely, and it resonates so much with the conversations I have with so many of my clients. And I think it's really important that we go back to where this belief that our body should never change has come from. Because it is as you said, it's so normal for bodies to change across our lifespan, but that is never normalized. Bodily changes, even day-to-day, aren't normalized. So when people experience bloating or water retention, we tend to see that as a bad thing or our body's not conforming or doing what they're supposed to do, when of course, that's the most natural thing in the world. And it's the same thing when we get to midlife and say, fat distribution happens and we lose skin tone. All those things are so normal.
Dr Charlotte Ord:But because we're taught that if we just work hard enough, just buy the right products, just do the right exercises, just eat the right products, just do the right exercises, just eat the right thing, then we can sustain this youthful body. It's complete bs. And so I think we need to really, rather than than sort of getting into this battle with our own bodies, we need to go back to where we form the belief that we, our body, shouldn't change, and start to really be critical about whether that, how that serves us and whether that really sounds true. Because I think when you go back and understand where those myths have come from and who benefits from us believing that our bodies aren't okay when they change, then we start to question it and, you know, we shift our our anger towards those very oppressive systems rather than our bodies, which are just doing what bodies are supposed to do, which is change, evolve, develop across across our lives and it's such a powerful question to ask who benefits from me hating my body?
Jenn Salib Huber:Such a powerful question because the answer is never us, we don't benefit. We don't benefit, you know. It's not just the oppressive systems that benefit, it's the wellness culture and the diet industry and all the people who want to maintain that narrative that you can control something that you can't really control in a way that you've been led to believe.
Dr Charlotte Ord:Yeah, absolutely, because people who feel ashamed of their body and very dissatisfied buy more stuff. They have a perceived problem that needs to be fixed and they're presented. We are presented with all of these supposed solutions to our problem, which we then invest in and when they don't work, we blame ourselves, and that you know. It's an incredible business model, but it's so unethical and so wrong because it puts us in a position of war with our bodies when we really don't need to be.
Jenn Salib Huber:So you mentioned dissatisfaction and I'd like to expand on that. When I mentioned to people that it's our dissatisfaction with our bodies that we need to work on, that's a really hard concept to get initial buy-in for because they're like no, no, no, I just need to get my body to a size or shape that I like, and it's the belief that if I like what my body looks like, then I'll feel better in and about my body. But the body dissatisfaction is key, especially with body appreciation. So can you talk to us about how those two things are linked?
Dr Charlotte Ord:Yeah.
Dr Charlotte Ord:So just thinking about it from the perspective of where this dissatisfaction comes from and the idea that in order to feel better, I must change my body, and that's very much rooted in diet culture and the revering of a thin ideal and this idea that to be healthy, to be acceptable, we have to be a certain shape, and so if you subscribe to that and use that as your guide, of course, the only way you're going to feel better is by changing your body shape.
Dr Charlotte Ord:So I think, in order for people to to start to be able to see this through a different lens, we really need to understand where that has come from and realize that actually, just because the mainstream narrative is that we need to change our weight or shape doesn't mean that actually that is the way to feel better about your body. And we only have to look at our own experiences of dieting and often excessive exercise and all those things and just look at the workability of that. Has that helped you feel more satisfied or has that ultimately led you just to feel like a complete failure, like most of us? Because that's the trajectory that most of us go on when we go on diets, um, and so it's really about kind of focusing on you know where this has come from, and is it about changing my body, or is it about changing my mindset and learning to see things from a different perspective? And that's for me that actually the most sustainable and successful way of changing how you feel about your body and therefore improving your body image.
Jenn Salib Huber:And an example that I see all the time and that lots of chronic dieters or professional dieters will relate to on the dissatisfaction piece, is that if you don't acknowledge or work on changing your body dissatisfaction, even if you do lose weight, you will not feel like you've arrived. It will then just get transferred to five more pounds, 10 more pounds or another part of your body or another part of your appearance, because that dissatisfaction is being driven by the constant comparison to other bodies. So if you cannot learn to feel comfortable in the body that you have because it's the only one you're getting, you can't trade it in for a new model then that body dissatisfaction script is going to just continue to show up. And so that's where I love the body appreciation as kind of the interrupter. But before we talk a little bit more about that, how does body appreciation differ from body positivity, say, which might be a term that people are more familiar with?
Dr Charlotte Ord:Sure. So for me, body appreciation is about acknowledging the things that you do like about your body and accepting the parts that you wish were different but are unchangeable, and it makes space for those days where you don't feel that great in your body. It's not about feeling like you love your body every single day and it's the best thing ever, because actually that's just completely unrealistic for most of us. And the other thing is that body positivity that term, I think, has been very much hijacked by diet culture and wellness culture, so in itself it's become a little bit toxic, whereas body appreciation is really about focusing on all the things as I said earlier earlier that your body can do for you and really shining a light on that.
Dr Charlotte Ord:Because if we approach our body, our aesthetic, with appreciation, it's very hard then at the same time to feel really hateful towards it, which is the trap that a lot of people fall into when they are seeing it only through a lens of how does my body compare to this ideal? And you know what you were saying earlier about the the kind of it's really about the fragility of our body image resting solely on how much we wear, what we look like, because not only is that very unsustainable? You know, weight loss is often very unsustainable, but we not only compare ourselves to other people, but also how we used to be or how our body has been, and so if you're only happy with a certain size, it's very fragile ground and, you know, not not particularly healthy really, because our bodies do change, whether whether we like it or not.
Jenn Salib Huber:Fragile is such a great word to describe it, because that's exactly what it is. If you only like your body when you like what it looks like, that's an impossible standard to maintain. Yeah, so, and that really ties in nicely with body neutrality, which I describe as like this safe place to land island of I don't have to like or love my body to feel okay, to be kind to it, to respect it, to treat it with kindness and respect. How does body neutrality and body appreciation fit together?
Dr Charlotte Ord:I think body appreciation helps us to have that much more grounded view of our bodies. And, as you say, neutrality is about, not about loving our bodies or feeling positive about it all the time, but accepting that there are fluctuations in how we feel. I think for everybody, you know that's not a consistent thing. We'll have days where we feel okay about it and days where we feel less okay about it. But it's just, it's finding a place of peace and I love that expression you use but a safe place to land it, land it's.
Dr Charlotte Ord:You know, the more we're able to keep shifting our focus from what we look like, all the things that we don't particularly like, to okay, but actually my body's allowed me to hug my daughter or spend time with my friends today or smell those flowers or spend time in my garden, then we're able to maintain in a very controlled way that sense of peace and neutrality. And I think when we feel like we have that sort of empowerment that we actually can control how we feel about our bodies by controlling our focus, it creates a sense of peace and um and and that's freeing, because it enables you then to go and focus on other things, because actually most of us will not get to the end of our lives thinking about what we look like or how we felt about our bodies, but what we did with our lives. And for me, body neutrality enables us to do that. It enables us to focus on the things that really matter.
Jenn Salib Huber:Yeah, I describe it too, as if you're. If you're having a bad hair day, you want to be able to just put on a hat and still go about your day. You don't want to feel trapped in your house trying to get your hair to look exactly the way that you want it to look, and you know. But a lot of people will feel trapped, sometimes not being able to leave the house because they can't find something that looks good or is what they're expecting to see in the mirror, or they can't. You know, stop thinking about what other people are going to think. And really that is so limiting and it is so fragile too. If you have to feel like you love every outfit and that you love how every piece of clothing fits all the time, it takes up so much of your life maintaining that standard that you're actually missing out on the life that you're trying to live.
Dr Charlotte Ord:Yeah, and this is such one of the really insidious things about diet culture is that it encourages self-worth to be so tightly tied to what we look like in our appearance and how we compare to this societal thin ideal.
Dr Charlotte Ord:And you know, to this societal thin ideal, and you know beauty ideal, it's not just about size, but also about appearance, and when we only see ourselves and our worth as what we look like or a reflection in the mirror, it's just such a disservice to who we are. And so, for me, part of body image work and improving your body image and feeling more appreciative is also about recognising all of your other strengths and shining lights on that All your strengths, all of your talents, all of your personality attributes, so that the focus isn't just on this one small part of who you are. Which is this fairly unchangeable aesthetic. Which is this fairly unchangeable aesthetic? Because, as we know from all the research, actually weight isn't nearly as controllable as even the medical industry would like us to believe, and we found that the more people try to control their weight, the less control they actually have over it and the worse their health outcomes as well.
Jenn Salib Huber:So it's Because weight is not a behavior right, the less control they actually have over it and the worse their health outcomes as well. So, yeah, cause weight is not a behavior right, we can't. We can't choose what we weigh. We can choose what time we go to bed, we can choose the foods that we're putting on our plate with lots of caveats, cause not everybody has access to all foods and things like that. Yeah, we can choose whether and how we move our bodies, we can choose whether we meditate or do yoga, but we can't choose the number on the scale and it's a trap.
Jenn Salib Huber:The diet cycle, the diet trap, the idea that we can control it very predictable series of events that keeps you stuck chasing something that you probably will not achieve in the way that you've been led to believe, goes hand in hand with feeling like there's something wrong with your body and that fixing one fixes the other. So I want to talk a little practically speaking. So, let's say somebody's listening, they've never heard of body appreciation. This is an entirely new concept, but they're curious. How does someone get started? What are a couple of tips for beginners if somebody is wanting to learn more about body appreciation?
Dr Charlotte Ord:Okay. So there's a few things that I'd suggest. Firstly, to take a pause, perhaps at the end of each day, and just notice what your body has enabled you to do that day, so that you're intentionally shifting your focus from what you look like to what does this amazing body enable me to do, and that automatically starts to build a habit of taking hold of your attention and the lens through which you view your body. Another thing that I like to do is to encourage people to choose three things that you're grateful for around your body each day, and they can be the smallest thing. Like you know, even this morning, thank you, body for allowing me to brush my teeth, thank you for allowing me to send a message to my friend, thank you, and so on.
Dr Charlotte Ord:So, again, you're really taking control of where you place your attention and you're expressing gratitude, and when we do that, it's very hard to feel very at war at the same time, and another thing that I really encourage people to do is to focus on self-care. So what can I do to practice a behavior of treating my body with respect and kindness? Because, for me, improving your body image isn't about losing weight or changing your shape. It's about establishing a practice of kindness, compassion and respect, and if you can treat your body the way you would treat something else that you care about, you are creating an atmosphere of love and care, and that's not to do with what you look like, it's a behavior and that can really strongly influence how we feel about our bodies.
Jenn Salib Huber:And it's so much easier to take care of something that you appreciate Absolutely.
Dr Charlotte Ord:We tend to take care of the things that we like.
Jenn Salib Huber:Yeah, it just made me think of an example from my own life that I think people in midlife can relate to. Anybody who knows me knows I have problematic knees. I have hypermobility. I've had many surgeries since a teenager. It's a lifelong issue. But as I've gotten into midlife I've also layered on some of the midlife knee stuff and so when my knees are hurting or injured or something like that, I still focus on appreciating them and it makes me want to take care of them more, versus feeling mad or frustrated that you know one is stiff or one is sore and wanting to punish it the next day by, you know, by making it do this crazy workout or something to make it stronger. So being able to appreciate when they are working well but also appreciate what they can do even when they're having a bad day, it allows me to really treat that whole concept of how do I take care of my body with more compassion and kindness. So appreciation is almost like a gateway drug, absolutely.
Dr Charlotte Ord:Yeah, and it's so strongly linked in with acceptance, as you were talking, the kind of principles of acceptance and commitment. Therapy came to mind, and one of the premises of that model of psychotherapy is making space for the painful stuff, the painful sensations, thoughts, feelings that we experience. Now we're very much conditioned to be very resistant to pain. Let's get rid of pain, let's cover it up, let's move away from it, whether physical or emotional. And that gets us into real trouble psychologically, because if we cannot make space for difficult thoughts and feelings, what we tend to do is get into battles with them, and that leads us to avoidant behavior, like dieting, like body bashing. That actually just perpetuates the issue. It never, it never gets rid of those painful thoughts and feelings because they keep on coming back up.
Dr Charlotte Ord:And so, the more you're able to practice noticing when physical or emotional pain shows up or thoughts show up and go ah, okay, there's that, there's that story about my body not being good enough, or there's that, you know, spark of anxiety about what someone else is going to think. What do I need right now? What's going to help me to take care of my body? How do I make myself feel more comfortable in this moment, so that you're not constantly being pulled around by whatever shows up organically through our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. And again, you know, the more confidence and resilience you have to your internal experiences like that, the more choice you have, because then you are actually in a position where you can choose to act in service of your values, like exactly like you were just saying when knee pain shows up for you, you're able to go okay, here's knee pain. How can I take care of my body, because I have a value of being kind and compassionate to myself and to my knees.
Jenn Salib Huber:It's a wonderful example and thank you for expanding on it. That's lovely information to kind of add to that conversation, especially for people who might be new to this and not able to see how it ties in. I'd like to talk a little bit, just towards the end, about the media. So the media of all kinds has always been and will probably always be problematic, and when we're talking about body dissatisfaction, one of the and the comparison piece of that it's comparing ourselves to the ideals that we see in media. You talk a lot about digital literacy for both adults and children, and that's a big part of kind of your work. Where does that fit into how we develop or work on body appreciation?
Dr Charlotte Ord:For most of us now we are very immersed in a digital world. It's hard to get away from it, and so trying to just remove it completely isn't feasible for most people. You know, most of us have an element of digital contact, for our work even, let alone social life, and for kids that's especially true. It's like the lifeblood of their social sort of connection, and so it's really important that we're able to approach the media landscape with critical awareness really important that we're able to approach the media landscape with critical awareness, and that enables us then to curate our online world so that it supports positive body image as opposed to completely destroying it.
Dr Charlotte Ord:Now, ways that you can do that is, again, to be really mindful about what media you're digesting and how it's impacting you, and a way that you can do that is to, for example, press pause as you're scrolling and just notice, take a particular image perhaps that doesn't make you feel good, or makes you feel like you're not good enough or your body doesn't fit, and be really curious about, firstly, is this a highlight reel or is this real life? Has this image been edited or filtered or doctored in some way, and how is this image serving me? Is it supporting me in my journey towards body appreciation, body acceptance, feeling more at peace in my body, or is it reiterating a very harmful and toxic message and industry that has really undermined my peace? And from there you've got information about whether this is someone you want to continue following or not, and so by doing that, you're making a choice about what's really healthy for you, what's helpful for you, and giving yourself permission to say, okay, I'm going to move away from that and I need to find, seek out more people that are going to reinforce my, my belief, my behavior, that actually my, my body is fine as it is.
Jenn Salib Huber:Yeah, and that's really like representation, right? So not just diversity, but also finding bodies that look like your body doing the things that you want to do, not just having a feed or watching movies or even television shows where you only see one body shape represented. Because we're human, you know we have this social comparison built into our brain, so you know that script is going to run, but if it's always comparing to one thing, you're never going to feel like you fit in.
Dr Charlotte Ord:Yes, and you know, we all have a self-image and an idealised self, and the distance between the two impacts our self-esteem. And if we only see bodies doing the things that we want to do and being appreciated in the way we want to be appreciated and accepted, then we have a very narrow or narrowly defined ideal of what we should be. And that's where, as you say, representation is so important, because if we see a wider range of bodies represented, if we see bodies just like mine doing what we want to do and being loved and accepted and cherished, then we close the gap between our self-view and our idealized self and we tend to feel quite good about ourselves. And that's where, especially for children, seeing kids in all different body shapes, of all ethnicities, disabled, you know, so on, is so important, because that is what helps to build their idealized self, and the less disparity they have between the way they see themselves and that idealized view, the more we support their self-esteem.
Jenn Salib Huber:This has been such an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for joining me. Where can people learn more about you and your work?
Dr Charlotte Ord:So I am on Instagram at DrCharlotteOrd. I'm on there daily. I try to share lots of evidence-based body image information, so do connect with me there. It'd be lovely to see you, and I have my new book out, as you mentioned earlier, which is called Body Confident you, body Confident Kid, and it's seven steps to help parents and caregivers feel better about their bodies so they can support their kids, and nothing theirs.
Jenn Salib Huber:So needed, so needed. So last question what do you think is the missing ingredient in midlife Curiosity? Oh, I love that.
Dr Charlotte Ord:Yes, definitely curiosity and really being curious about where our own beliefs around bodies have come from and whether they still serve us.
Jenn Salib Huber:Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me, thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Midlife Feast. For more non-diet, health, hormone and general midlife support, click the link in the show notes to learn how you can work and learn from me, and if you enjoyed this episode and found it helpful, please consider leaving a review or subscribing, because it helps other women just like you find us and feel supported in midlife.
