Are your post-holiday struggles with food and body image leaving you feeling lost and guilty? I’m Crystal, your host and intuitive eating dietitian, and today I'll be sharing my personal journey, along with practical tips to help you lift the shame. I'll be your guide as we navigate these struggles, highlight the power of self-compassion, and understand the importance of prioritizing self-care. We'll also chat about the benefits of seeking support and connection to effectively manage food guilt and body shame.
Ready to break free from the cycle of binging and restricting, especially during the holiday season? We'll unveil strategies and benefits of adopting a more automatic approach to feeding ourselves to ensure you're getting enough to eat. We're also going to address the overlooked issue of under eating and its relation to feeling out of control around food. Together, we'll reflect on our eating experiences, pinpointing physical or emotional triggers that might lead to overeating. By the end of our time together, you'll be equipped with invaluable insights to ditch diet culture, heal your relationship with food and body, and raise intuitive eaters confidently. So, let's embark on this healing journey together!
Questions about today's episode or do you have topic requests for future episodes? Please send your feedback via email to hello@crystalkarges.com or connect with Crystal on Instagram.
Are your post-holiday struggles with food and body image leaving you feeling lost and guilty? I’m Crystal, your host and intuitive eating dietitian, and today I'll be sharing my personal journey, along with practical tips to help you lift the shame. I'll be your guide as we navigate these struggles, highlight the power of self-compassion, and understand the importance of prioritizing self-care. We'll also chat about the benefits of seeking support and connection to effectively manage food guilt and body shame.
Ready to break free from the cycle of binging and restricting, especially during the holiday season? We'll unveil strategies and benefits of adopting a more automatic approach to feeding ourselves to ensure you're getting enough to eat. We're also going to address the overlooked issue of under eating and its relation to feeling out of control around food. Together, we'll reflect on our eating experiences, pinpointing physical or emotional triggers that might lead to overeating. By the end of our time together, you'll be equipped with invaluable insights to ditch diet culture, heal your relationship with food and body, and raise intuitive eaters confidently. So, let's embark on this healing journey together!
Questions about today's episode or do you have topic requests for future episodes? Please send your feedback via email to hello@crystalkarges.com or connect with Crystal on Instagram.
Hey there, mama, you're listening to the Lift the Shame podcast. I'm your host, crystal, mama of Five and your family's intuitive eating dietitian, here to help you cut through the diet culture clutter so you can enjoy freedom with food as a family. I'm on a mission to help you end the generational legacy of diet culture in your home so you can experience motherhood free from food guilt and body shame. Listen in weekly for guidance on how you can ditch diet culture, heal your relationship with food in your body and confidently raise intuitive eaters. Let's dive in and lift the shame together. Hey, mama, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1:I so appreciate you tuning in and at the time of this recording we are post Thanksgiving here in the US and I know that the holiday season can bring up so many mixed emotions, especially around food and your body, and I have very vivid memories of the holiday season when I was struggling with an eating disorder and just how difficult those times were, and the holiday season seemed to be the pinnacle of my struggles around food, the self-loathing I had towards myself and my body, and it just was really difficult to even connect with people that I loved in my life during the holidays and as a mother now in recovery, it's a gift to be able to make memories with my kids around the holidays and to not have food and body shame eat up so much of my mental space. However, if you find yourself post Thanksgiving or post holidays struggling in the wake of a chaotic relationship with food or how you're feeling in your body, I just want you to know that you are not alone and I just want to speak some encouragement to you today. If you find yourself in a situation where you are regretting what you ate or how much you ate, or you're feeling terrible about yourself or your body, I know what that feels like and I know what the default response might be to that. Especially if you have struggled in your relationship with food or if you find yourself relapsing in an eating disorder. It's really easy to fall into this destructive cycle of behaviors that can quite honestly make it worse and prolong the agony that you're feeling with food and in your own body, and it can really just set such a heavy cloud over the holiday season and I don't want that to rub the moments and the memories that you do want to cherish and hold onto you during this time. I know that the holidays alone come with their own stressors.
Speaker 1:Right, it's dealing with family that we haven't seen in a long time navigating, feeding our kids, getting comments from family and friends about how we're feeding our kids or the way that we look or the way that our kids look. I mean, there's so much to navigate and deal with and on top of that, if you find that food and body image just feels very tumultuous during this time of year, I know that it can feel like this season is a marable and you just want to get to the other side as quickly as you can. But rather than getting stuck in this place, I'm hoping I can just share some encouragement with you, my friend, again, as someone who has been there and understands how challenging this time can be, especially as you are navigating, healing your own relationship with food and your body. I also know that, as a parent, you want to be able to model behaviors that your children can emulate, and it's difficult to do that when you find yourself struggling yourself, especially with food and body image. These are the things that we're so desperate to change for our children so that they can have a more positive experience and especially not have to deal with the struggles that we may have dealt with in the past or that are currently dealing with, and I just want you to know that there is hope. Even if you find yourself still struggling, even if you find yourself still defaulting to behaviors that you wished were not part of your life anymore, that doesn't mean that there isn't hope for you or for your children. And so, my friend, I just want to share these little nuggets of encouragement that I've learned on my own path and journey that I'm hoping might be helpful to you if you've found yourself in regret or shame post-holiday meals, and this might be triggered from maybe feeling like you were out of control around food at a holiday meal, perhaps, or maybe felt like you overdid it, maybe felt like you ate past a point of comfortable fullness or satiation, to the point that you felt discomfort in your own body.
Speaker 1:Or maybe this is the result of eating fear foods that you swore to yourself you would never eat, or things that are labeled as bad to you in your mind. Therefore, you may feel some guilt or shame for things that you've eaten. Maybe you've had a tricky relationship with exercise and the holidays are throwing off your normal exercise routine, and that may be creating some distress for you. If you've not been able to work out in the way that you wanted to, or maybe are feeling like you have to compensate for the things that you've eaten, you may also be weighed down with some of this guilt and shame as well, and while we can't go back and change those situations or the things that may have happened, I do believe that we can decide how we want to move forward and be proactive in caring for ourselves in a compassionate way, and this can help break those negative cycles of food guilt and body shame, especially those that are associated with holiday eating. So let's dive into this.
Speaker 1:I have three tips for you today that I hope can be of some help for you if you have found yourself in this precarious situation post holiday meal. So first tip here is to lead with compassion and have compassion towards yourself. That definitely may not be your default response. I remember clearly that that was not mine and that my inner critic was so harsh that that was something that really triggered the self punishing behaviors that followed after an eating episode that felt destructive to me, and that inner critic can be so painful to coexist with, and I just want to give you some encouragement to be able to shift that narrative slightly, to be aware of the thoughts that are coming up and not necessarily try to change them or fight them, but just to view yourself more compassionately. And something that helps me with that is to just look at the situation and look at my humanness and be aware of all the different factors that may have contributed to how I felt about eating at that time or how I felt about my body.
Speaker 1:Something else that has also been helpful for me as a parent is to try to see myself through the lens of my children, which can be hard to do too. I think as parents we're especially hard on ourselves and, more recently, through some of the healing work that I've been doing, learning to see my younger self or my inner child can also be helpful too. To see myself in a more compassionate lens. And when we can shift out of that critical narrative that so often is connected with to multuous eating episodes, it can start to empower us to really be able to take care of ourselves and take that next right step to do something more beneficial than falling into this destructive cycle or pattern.
Speaker 1:It's really difficult to make conscious decisions to take care of yourself in a gentle, loving way, when you're coming at it through a very harsh critical lens and going back to a parenting example, because, again, I think when we can look at it through the lens of how we parent our children, we can learn a new way to parent ourselves. And one thing that I heard is when we are learning to deal with our child to maybe having a difficult time maybe they're having a tantrum or a meltdown or just really struggling in their big feelings and their big emotions. This is also a situation where it's important to analyze what is my inner narrative telling me about my child, and something that we can do to make a switch to become more compassionate to our child is to understand that our child is not difficult, but rather that our child is having a difficult time. That subtle shift can help us remove guilt or blame or shame from the person to the event or the circumstances or the experience and allow us to move in more compassionately. And I think that it's so subtle, but if we can learn to do that for ourselves too, again it can better empower us to then take that next right step in taking care of ourselves during these hard situations.
Speaker 1:It might look like shifting out of this narrative of I'm a failure, I messed up, I screwed up, I'm terrible too, I'm having a hard time, I'm having a difficult day. This experience was really hard for me and again that subtle shift can start to separate us just slightly from that shame and blame, just enough so that it's kind of like it cracks the door open, just a little bit enough that we can start to look at ourselves more gently and start to parent ourselves in a more loving and caring way. I know and remember firsthand how triggering that critical narrative was, and once you get stuck in it, it's really hard to get out of it and it just spirals into the next thing. It's like that damaging narrative leads to those negative behaviors that are associated with the same narrative. Like, if you feel like I'm a failure or I screwed up in some way, chances are you're more likely to now engage in behaviors that are connected with that narrative and that are proving that narrative to you. Or maybe you feel like you have to punish yourself in some way and that's where these destructive eating disorder cycles can just take off.
Speaker 1:And so I want you to just think about what is some way that you can view yourself in a more compassionate lens, especially through all that you may have been through in the last few days or over the course of this holiday season. I know it's difficult. There's a lot going on and, rather than putting all the onus and the blame on you or carrying this weight of shame on yourself, if you can start to just remove yourself ever so slightly by seeing yourself as human, as someone who is struggling or having a difficult time, versus feeling like you, yourself are the difficult one that can start to allow you the opportunity and the freedom to choose differently in terms of your next right step. And this brings me to tip number two, which is caring for yourself. So how do you actually care for yourself If you've had a difficult meal or a difficult eating experience and all you can think about is how much you hate your body or how much you loathe yourself or how terrible that you're feeling in your body?
Speaker 1:You may be thinking about behaviors that can temporarily alleviate some of that discomfort that you're feeling, and more often than not, these behaviors tend to create more harm than good, especially if they are associated with your eating disorder or perhaps any form of disordered eating. In the moment, it might feel like this is a solution for removing the discomfort that I'm feeling in myself or in my body, but over the long run, it's likely creating more destruction and continuing the vicious cycle that you might find yourself in. A common one that I tend to see during the holiday season, and one that I remember struggling with myself, is this binge restrict cycle, and it's so vicious and it's so harmful, where it can be so difficult to know how to eat all of these foods that were previously off limits or that you never allowed yourself to eat. And suddenly, when there's all of this access and all of this food available to you, it can be really difficult and challenging to know how do I eat this in a normal way, and this can lead to binge eating or binge type of eating episodes where you find yourself eating in a manner that feels out of control, or maybe eating beyond your comfort level, or eating to a point where you feel sick. This can be something really difficult to sit with and manage and something that diet culture, in particular, promotes.
Speaker 1:As a solution to this is to somehow compensate for everything that you've eaten during the holidays and we see this all the time where it's like all right, let's start this new fast. Let's start this detox or this cleanse. I mean, there's no limit to the solutions that diet culture can come up with and it's essentially just putting you in this restrictive cycle again. Or you might feel like, oh, I don't need to eat as much today because of everything that I ate in the last three days, or I'll just get by with coffee this morning or coffee all day, and, before you know it, you find yourself in this vicious restrictive binge type of eating cycle, which can be so harmful and detrimental, especially over the long run and most definitely during the holiday season, when you find yourself teetering between these two extremes.
Speaker 1:And one of the best things that you can do to help prevent yourself from getting stuck into that vicious cycle is learning to care for yourself in very practical and tangible ways post eating episode. So if you feel like I overdid it, I ate too much, I ate too many of the things that I didn't want to eat, wherever you find yourself, in order to really prevent yourself from moving into that restrictive eating cycle, it's really important, as part of your next right step, to take care of yourself by feeding yourself and I don't mean coffee, I know this is a big one that can come up a lot, but coffee is not a meal and it's not going to sustain you, and you will find yourself hungry again, which more often than not can lead to overeating or binge type eating episodes at a later time. And so really just taking that next right step by feeding yourself and feeding yourself enough food is going to be really important. This can be more challenging to do if you feel dissociated from your body in any way, and this is something that I see a lot as part of eating disorders. This is, in many ways, an essential function of an eating disorder, in that we can dissociate from what feels unsafe and what feels uncomfortable in our own body, and so it can be really easy to want to escape into those patterns because what you're feeling in your body may feel too unsafe. This might mean that it's hard to gauge whether you're actually hungry or not in your body, and this can be especially true if you're kind of on the other side of a holiday eating experience, where maybe there was a lot of grazing all day and just maybe you're out of sorts in terms of your normal eating routine. It can be really difficult to gauge again whether or not.
Speaker 1:You need to eat, and so sometimes it can actually be helpful to shift into a more automatic way of feeding yourself in order to ensure that you're getting enough and that you're not restricting during the day, either intentionally or unintentionally. I mean, I know as parents just as it is in general taking care of kids, navigating through all the different things that are coming up this holiday season it can be really challenging to just get enough to eat period, and let alone if there is this hidden idea that your body needs to be punished for what you ate in previous days or that you somehow need to compensate for that eating experience. It's going to be really difficult to get enough to eat, and under eating or not getting enough to eat is one of the main reasons or culprits for feeling out of control around food or feeling obsessive about food or feeling like I can't stop thinking about food or I don't know how to stop eating when I start eating. One of the main causes of that is under eating in general, and I know so many parents that I talk to you often tell me there's no way I'm not getting enough to eat, and when I really sit down and look at what you're eating throughout the day. I guarantee there are likely some gaps in there. This may be especially true if you're feeling any negativity in your body or dissatisfaction in your body, or maybe you feel like you need to change your body.
Speaker 1:Sometimes this creates subconscious restraint around food, where you're literally not allowing yourself to eat what you need because you feel like you don't have permission to do so. It's such a vicious vicious cycle and I just want to encourage you to think about how can I just feed myself adequately and totally give yourself permission to do that in a more automated, mechanical way in order to ensure that you are in fact getting enough to eat. And again, this can look like trying to, or aiming to, eat every two to three hours or trying not to go longer than four hours without eating, if your children are eating regularly throughout the day and you're involved in that feeding process, trying to time eating a snack when your kids are eating a snack, or trying to sit down and eat something substantial. And I think it's important too that when you're eating that you're looking at intentionally combining the main macronutrients that our body needs in order to help promote satiety. So this is not a time to skimp out on fats or carbs or protein, because, again, when we are missing key macronutrients, we never arrive to that place of satiation, which makes us more likely to overeat later on.
Speaker 1:And if you really feel stuck on what to feed yourself which I know can be really common, if you've been following external rules or guidelines about how to eat or what to eat, if you've been on a dieting bandwagon for years, or if you're healing from an eating disorder, it can be really hard to know what should I eat, how should I feed myself? And I just want you to know. I've got you. I've got some ideas to get you started. I have a snack guide for kids and adults to you. I'll include it in the show notes for you. They can help get you started because you want to again feed yourself in a way that is nourishing and giving your body the nutrients that it needs to feel satiated, so that you can move on and not continue to think about food.
Speaker 1:Constantly thinking about food or finding yourself obsessing about what am I gonna eat or thinking about the next meal that is often an indicator or a sign of under eating as well, so just keep that in mind too. If you find yourself thinking about food and it's taking up the majority of your mental space. This likely means that you're not getting enough to eat, and we want to help break you away from this vicious cycle of binging or restricting. And again, this is very common following holiday meals, where you may have feel like you overdid it or you overate, and now you have to compensate for that. And I just want to encourage you to think about how can I shift out of this cycle and narrative and care for myself in a more loving and compassionate way by continuing to feed myself, even if everything in your brain and your body is telling you that you don't deserve it. You need to burn it off. You need to punish yourself again.
Speaker 1:Start by viewing yourself compassionately and moving into this step of figuring out how can I care for myself by nourishing myself and eating and feeding my body what it needs. You deserve it. You don't have to earn it. It is an inherent right to feed yourself and feeding and eating enough is the most valid form of self-care. And, mama, I promise you that your kids are watching that and they are seeing that and they learn through modeling and this will be such a powerful message that you are sending to them that they also are inherently worthy and deserving of that nourishment too. Even if it was a bad day, even if you feel like you messed up, your body still deserves to be nourished. So the last tip that I want to leave you is to simply get curious. So I leave this for the end, because I think it's really important to address first the narrative that is going on and to caring for ourselves in an appropriate way, and once you've had some time to do that, I think then we can look back and reflect on the experience that we had so that we can learn from it.
Speaker 1:And this is the thing that I think is so important to understand about eating. Eating is such an experiential process and it's true for us, it's true for our children too and sometimes, as part of normal eating, we overeat, and when I started to learn this in my own recovery journey, it really helped me to start to take care of myself in a more meaningful way, because you're coming at it through this curious lens, like asking yourself why did I overeat at this meal? What was going on, or why did I feel out of control? Why couldn't I stop eating this dish? We want to ask some of these questions, but simply from a curious place, so that we can learn. When we learn from these eating experiences, it helps us in future eating experiences, and our kids are the same way.
Speaker 1:If we immediately shame or shun an eating experience simply because it didn't go the way that we wanted to, it makes it really difficult to learn from that experience. But when we can look at it curiously, there's so much wisdom that we can find from our bodies, from our eating experiences and the many different eating experiences that we will have over the course of our lifetime. And so I would just encourage you to ask yourself these questions, especially if this is something that felt particularly distressing for you. Yes, sometimes we occasionally overeat, but if you found yourself in this place of feeling out of control or dealing with immense guilt or shame afterwards, or feeling distressed in your body, it may have been more than just simply overeating. There may be some other things there that you can learn from or learn about. So a couple of things to just keep in mind when you're asking yourself or reflecting on these eating experiences are were there any physical or emotional triggers that may have been part of this eating experience? So let me explain here a little bit.
Speaker 1:We talked a little bit about the physical triggers and how under-eating is one of the most common physical triggers for overeating or feeling out of control with eating, and so this is something that you can reflect on or just ask yourself am I eating enough, especially during this holiday season, when the baseline of chaos has been raised? You really want to consider that. Am I taking the necessary time over the course of my day to make sure that I'm eating enough, that I'm taking care of my body's basic physical needs? And, more likely than not, you may not be eating enough, and so this is an important thing to reflect on to help you in future eating experiences, so that maybe next time before you have that holiday meal, or next time before you're going to have this special family gathering where you're sharing a meal together, think about what is your MO on those days. Do you tend to restrict and kind of save up for that big meal? Are you just so busy attending to everyone else's needs that your needs just go to the wayside? These types of things can help us understand what we might need to do to care for ourselves physically so that your eating experiences don't feel chaotic and overwhelming.
Speaker 1:Another thing to ask yourself or consider is are there certain foods that were available to me that I felt out of control with, and, if so, that might be an indicator that you may need more exposure to those foods over the course of time? Now, I know that the holidays involve special dishes that can't necessarily be replicated on a day to day basis, but maybe if you found yourself feeling out of control with the desserts, that might be an indicator that you need more exposure to those types of foods, or that you may not be allowing yourself enough permission to eat the things that you are craving and that you actually enjoy. So this can be a great opportunity to learn what those things might be. I'll tell you a couple common ones that I see during this time of year. So definitely desserts, which we talked about, but the second one that I tend to see is around carbohydrates, where, during this time of our lives, carbohydrates are demonized, and this is something that we see with all the diets that diet culture is promoting right now right, keto, intermittent fasting, limit your carbs, don't eat as many carbs and so there's this general fear around eating carbohydrates, and even if you're not intentionally restricting them, you may not be getting enough of what you need, and they are our body's main macronutrient that we need the most of. And so if you found yourself going wild over the bread rolls or the carbohydrate rich dishes, this could also be indicative of you needing more exposure to those foods or just making sure you're getting enough of those things on the day to day basis. So how can you include more of those things, or the things that you enjoy every day, so that when you do see them at holiday meals it doesn't feel so novel? And if you've listened to any of our episodes on kids and sweets, you know this is the same principle that we apply with our children, especially around holidays. I'm a huge proponent of including things that our children are showing a high interest in, so that we can decrease that novelty and incorporate the power of habituation, which is when we see something over and over. Our bodies can trust that this is available to us and that really helps us learn how to self regulate it and takes out the scarcity factor of it, so that we can eat it in a manner that feels good in our bodies and doesn't feel chaotic. So if you found yourself having a difficult time eating certain foods at your recent family gathering or holiday meal. Ask yourself that question and see if you can come up with anything that maybe would be helpful to have more exposure to regularly, and when you can give yourself permission to do that, it really can create more positive eating experiences for you.
Speaker 1:Last thing to think about as part of this getting curious tip or phase is to also consider any emotional triggers that could have been present for you too. Look, family is hard and holiday seasons often involve the resurfacing of many difficult relationships, and it can be helpful to just consider what was going on in my environment or what was coming up for me emotionally that may have been a trigger for my eating experience at that time, and what I tend to find is that there are typically both physical and emotional triggers that are working together to kind of create the perfect storm for chaotic eating experiences. So I don't usually tend to see just one thing. I tend to see there's a couple of things going on here that made this eating experience challenging, and so these are things you want to reflect on and see what was going on that I can learn from in order to help myself in the future, and some environmental triggers we may not be able to eliminate right, especially during the holidays. This is a tough situation, but maybe there are things that you can do or put in place for yourself to help yourself in these situations. Maybe it's putting boundaries with certain family members who like to comment about bodies or their diets, or what they're eating or what they're not eating I mean, that's a whole nother topic in itself, right. Maybe it's establishing a boundary for yourself where you're limiting the amount of time that you allow yourself to be with certain family members or friends who are more triggering for you. These are some things to reflect on, and it can also be helpful, too, to just assess what are my coping skills that I default to.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we eat for emotional reasons, and that's not inherently a bad thing. We also want to consider do I have any other forms of support to help me when I'm feeling overwhelmed or stressed? Is there someone that I trust that I can talk to about this? Is there something that I can do for myself when I'm starting to feel overstimulated or overwhelmed by my environment? Can I go outside, can I take a breather, can I take a breath of fresh air or walk? These are some things just to consider in the overall picture of how you're caring for yourself, and this is why I just want to encourage you to look at any recent eating experiences that did feel really chaotic from a curious lens, because there's a lot that we can learn about ourselves, and there's a lot that we can learn about how to help ourselves in order to make eating a more pleasurable and enjoyable experience, which is what it should be. So I hope this gave you some things to think about.
Speaker 1:I also just want to put it out there that we have a free virtual support group for mothers and moms to be who are in eating disorder recovery. So if you are finding yourself struggling with an eating disorder, if you're in recovery or simply just trying to improve your relationship with food and your body, I want you to know that you're not alone. We have an amazing community called Lift the Shame. We meet monthly for our virtual support groups, and it's a wonderful and safe space to talk about some of the unique challenges that come up at this intersection. So I will also include the link to that in the show notes for you as well and, of course, if there's anything that I can do to help support you, if you want to share anything that came up for you.
Speaker 1:If you have any questions, feel free to email me. Hello at CrystalCargiscom. I would love to hear from you and just know how I can best support you during this holiday season. So, as always, mama, thank you so much for taking the time to join me for today's episode. I cannot wait to connect with you next week. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Lift the Shame podcast. For more tips and guidance on your motherhood journey, come connect with me on Instagram at CrystalCargis. Until next week, mama. I'll be cheering you on. Bye for now.