September 16, 2023 • 28 mins
OUTWEIGH: In this eye-opening episode of Outweigh, we take a deep dive into the untold truths about the "Cost of Skinny."
Leanne reflects on a pivotal moment in her own life, a major spine surgery at just 25 years old, which she endearingly calls the "Cost of Skinny." It's a powerful reminder of how the relentless pursuit of an idealized body image can lead to devastating consequences.
For years, Leanne was fixated on attaining a 'skinny,' 'lean,' 'toned,' or 'hot' body, drowning out the critical signals her body was sending her. Ignoring the screams for self-care, she pushed herself to the brink until her body couldn't take it anymore.
But that wasn't the only cost she paid. The "Diet Mentality" she had embraced for decades had inflicted additional invisible wounds:
★ A Food Prison: Constantly toggling between restrictive eating and carefree indulgence, caught in a cycle of obsession and guilt over every morsel of food.
★ A Body Prison: Feeling trapped in a body that didn't align with her true self, hiding behind oversized clothes, and allowing her body to dictate her life.
★ A Shame Prison: Carrying the burden of shame for struggling with food and body image, believing she was fundamentally flawed.
★ A 'Fat Head': A self-image tainted by negative self-perception, no matter how much weight she lost or how successful she became.
Leanne knows that her experience is far from unique. Every woman stuck on the diet and weight loss roller coaster is unknowingly paying their own "Cost of Skinny." In this episode, we dissect the ins and outs of how to break free from this destructive cycle, providing insights and strategies to help you avoid your own "Cost of Skinny" and embark on a journey toward self-acceptance, self-care, and genuine well-being.
HOST: Leanne Ellington // @leanneellington // StresslessEating.com
To learn more about re-wiring your brain to heal from the all-or-nothing diet mentality for good....but WITHOUT restricting yourself, punishing your body, (and definitely WITHOUT ever having to use words like macros, low-carb, or calorie burn) check out Leanne's FREE Stressless Eating Webinar @ www.StresslessEating.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I won't let my body out be outwait everything that
I'm made done, won't spend my life trying to change.
I'm learning love who I am, aga strong, I feel free.
I know every part of me. It's beautiful and that
will always out way if you feel it, but you
(00:24):
are She'll some love to the vio. I get there,
say go day and did you and die out way,
Happy Saturday, Outway. I'm Leahne Ellington and I'm the author
and creator of stressle Seating and I'm here for another
solo episode this week. And you know, a couple of
(00:45):
months ago here on Outweigh, I did an episode called
Learned from My Mistakes where I just shared what I
wish I knew then that I know now, you know,
not just as a woman who healed from her own
disordered eating, but unbeknownst to me, I was actually teaching
disordered eating to others when I was in the fitness industry,
because I was perpetuating that eat less move more, you know,
(01:08):
no pain, no gain mentality that I learned. Now I
had to go do the work on myself and reconcile
any shame from that. And now I know that I
just I didn't know what I didn't know, and I
was just teaching what I had learned and what is still,
unfortunately the thought process still being taught in the mainstream. Now,
that was all what seems like a lifetime ago, and
(01:30):
now I see the greater purpose in all of it.
But first off, feel free to go back and check
out that episode called Learn from My Mistakes. And the
reason I'm even bringing that up is because in that
episode I talked about this idea of the cost of
skinny as I now call it, and it's something that
comes up all the time in the work that I'm
(01:51):
doing with women, and why I wanted to do an
episode about that specifically and dig a little bit deeper
because man, I wish I knew about this when I
was at the height of my own struggles and disorder.
So in that episode I shared how you know, rewind
it's probably fifteen years ago now, So in two thousand
(02:11):
and seven, two thousand and eight something like that, my
anesthesiologist had me counting backwards from one hundred as the
surgical team was getting ready to go in and microscopically
remove the calcified hardened disk fluid that had been sitting
on my nerves of my lumbar spine for the past
eighteen months or that it had been at that point.
(02:32):
And it's a procedure that I now endearingly call the
cost of skinny, and I lovingly call it that because
at the time, and who I was at the time
was so focused on getting skinny or lean or toned
or hot or whatever words I was, you know, allowing
to rule my brain at the time, I didn't pay
(02:53):
attention to or tune into what my body needed and
what it was screaming at me to do. And if
only I had listened to the screams from my body
to slow down and chill out and actually take care
of it, maybe it could have all been avoided. But
who I was at the time, again, she didn't care.
(03:16):
I just wanted to be skinny and beautiful or whatever
vision I had in my mind of the thing that
would make me happy, and no back pain or injury
or pesky flare up was going to stop me until
it finally did stop me. And it didn't just stop me,
It landed me on an operating table at Cleveland Metro
(03:37):
for major spine surgery at the ripe old age of
twenty five. So now picture this, Okay, If you take
a girl, a woman who already feels unworthy and unlovable
and undesirable because all she's ever known is seeing herself
through what I now lovingly call the fat goggles of
her self image, and now you throw on the story
(03:58):
that she is also now damaged goods or broken because
of her body, you can only imagine how low my
inner world got at that point too. But that was
just the tip of the iceberg, and it certainly was
not the only cost of skinny. And so when I
started looking back at my life, I realized that decades
(04:20):
of the diet mentality, which was really just disordered eating
disguised as what I thought was just being healthy. And
then of course all the self loathing that came alongside
my disordered eating and my relationship with food in my body, well,
all of that had a cost that I didn't even
know to look for, and that I definitely didn't know
(04:41):
that I should try to avoid. So I was trapped
inside of a food prison that had me chained to
the handcuffs of restriction and obsession and control and obsessing
over every morsel of food that touched my lips or
when I couldn't possibly take it any longer, because who
can re strict that long veering over to the opposite
(05:02):
side of that so carefree abandonment, eating everything in sight
feeding my air quotes sugar addictions, which I now realize
I wasn't actually addicted to sugar. I had just practiced
the thoughts and beliefs and behaviors of somebody that was,
you know, kind of had a drug like pole to sugar.
But I digress. But I was still using food to
comfort or distract or numb myself, and then of course
(05:25):
the cascade of guilt and shame and self loathing that
would follow suit. Right, So that was my food prison
cost of skinny. But I was also trapped inside of
a body prison where I felt like I was walking
around in a body that didn't reflect the woman that
I really was, like the outsides didn't match the insides,
but that I felt powerless to change. And I was
(05:45):
a prisoner of wearing you know what I called my
fat clothes, which was, you know, I would cover my
body with cardigans, and I would refuse to wear shorts
or tank tops or you know, God forbid be seen
in a bathing suit, and even when it was ninety
five degrees outside, I was, I was wearing that card again,
and you know, but not to mention allowing my body
to be the barrier that kept me from doing what
(06:07):
I wanted to do and feeling how I wanted to feel.
And showing up is the version of myself that I
really was, but I just couldn't access her. So that
was my body prison cost of skinny. Then I was
also trapped in a shame prison where I was just
outright ashamed that after decades on this planet, I was
still struggling with food, and I was still struggling with
(06:30):
my body, and I was still on this up and
down roller coaster, and you know, to boot, I felt
like a fraud, like if anyone ever found me out,
they would see how crazy or broken I really was.
And there was the shame that followed me around every
single day because of the identity I had created about
my struggles, that you know, I was my body and
(06:53):
that I was my air quotes, addictions, and that I
was a failure. So that was the shame prison and
cost of skinny. But then of course I was trapped
inside what I now lovingly call my fat head that
really no matter how much weight I lost or how
successful I became, my self image saw me through the
(07:13):
goggles that saw me as fat or unlovable or a
failure or embarrassing or you know, that I would just
never be enough or skinny enough, successful enough enough, period.
Right again, these were just the goggles that I was
seeing myself through because I didn't know to even transform them.
And so all of this left me in a prison
(07:35):
of pain and disconnection and loneliness. Right And it wasn't
just physical pain. It was mental, emotional, spiritual pain, all
of it. And in those moments of clarity, that's when
I realized, like, whoa, this is not just happening to me. Okay,
every woman that feels stuck on that obsessive diet and
weight loss roller coaster, or that's stuck in her own
(07:57):
food and body and shame prison, she's paying her our
own cost of skinny as well. And that roller coaster
has major costs. Okay. There's you know, the cost of
constantly weighing and measuring and calculating, and the cost of
stressing and guessing and obsessing, and of course the second
guessing that comes off the back of that. There's the
(08:17):
cost of all the judgment and the self criticism and
the self loathing and the shame. And there's the cost
of valuing yourself based on how much you ate or
how much you didn't eat that day, or how much
you weigh or don't weigh. And the cost of living
in a prison. So again I shared the multiple prisons
that I was living in. But there's you know, maybe
(08:37):
it's a body prison, a food prison, a prison that
you just don't know how to get out of, even
if you don't have words to put around it. So
fast forward to a couple of years after my surgery.
So fast forward to a couple of years after my surgery.
I finally found the courage to admit and really act
(08:59):
on the truth that I discovered off the back of
major spine surgery and all the soul searching that I
had done. And that's when, thankfully I realized, like I
didn't want to be a fitness expert or a health
nut or obsessed with my body and every morsel of
food that touched my lips. And I'll be the first
to admit like I tried on all those roles. I
(09:20):
think I was honestly trying to find meaning and purpose
in all of those roles. But either way, all of
those things left me either you know, I was either
living in a life and in a body that made
me unhappy, or I was living in a body that
kind of pleased me but in a way that left
me really unhappy. Like I was always having to choose
either or, And so I went from majorly feeling out
(09:43):
of control of my body and dependencies and kind of
this like drug like pull to sugar and food and
you know, complete disregard for my body. And then I
flipped switches and I went to the opposite and it
was just major restriction and control and punishing my body
and convincing myself to do the things that I thought
I needed to do, to never go back to my
(10:04):
old ways, because again, like I knew that I had
never deep down healed something more so I was kind
of covering it up with short term actions, but the
old stuff never went away. I just pushed it aside
and locked it up and worked my butt off to
stay the course until I don't know, I think it
was kind of a moment of awareness. And I think
if anybody is listening to this that's had their own,
(10:25):
you probably know what I mean. It's kind of hard
to describe what happens in the moment because thoughts happened
really quickly, But basically I got to that point where
I was just like, I can't do this anymore. If
I keep practicing these habits and this way of living
and being, I'm gonna bring it with me into my
forties and my fifties and my sixties. And my brain
(10:45):
just kept future pacing me from there, and that it
scared the crap out of me. Okay, So I literally
just stopped that conversation, and then a number of factors
led me to have the insight and foresight to know
I needed a toe totally different conversation, like a new conversation,
because obviously I'd been speaking the whole eat less move
more obsessed over my body conversation forever. So the first
(11:08):
thing I did is I just started asking myself better questions, right,
And I was like, what if I just started listening
to my body, because keep in mind, I was ignoring it, right,
And what if I started listening to my brain because
again I had numbed it out and tuned it out.
And what if I just started listening to my heart
because again, I was shoving down feelings and eating my feelings.
(11:29):
So those three questions were like pretty revelatory to me, right,
And when I started asking myself those questions my body,
of course, my body I got answers right. Sometimes they
weren't very pretty answers, but I got the answers, And
essentially my body was like, Leanne, you are friggin lucky, right,
all this beating up and abusing of your body, You're
(11:51):
pretty lucky that spine surgery and feeling like a sugar
attic were the worst of it because you've been choosing
you know, weight loss or words like skinny over vitality
and health and freedom for far too long, and I'm
feeling it. So that's what my body said to me.
It didn't hold back right, And my brain was like,
you know what, you're maxed out and you're overworked and
(12:11):
you're overtrained and you're overscheduled, and on top of that,
you're starving me a lot of the time, and then
you're gluttonously overstuffing me, and then you furiously worry about it,
and it's almost like again, I knew I had it
handled for a little while, but in the back of
my mind, like I knew I couldn't do it forever.
So when I got really real, that's what my brain
was saying to me. When I started asking the questions
(12:33):
and being okay with the answers, even though I didn't
like the answers, I was just like, you know what,
this is the data, this is what's happening. Like I'm
not going to live in a non reality anymore. And
that's when my heart again, like I finally my heart
was just like she was done, to be honest, but
you know, my heart was just saying, like I'm done
thinking and worrying and obsessing over my body and my
weight and food and exercise, and I'm done pumping myself
(12:57):
up and trying to be a good example to other people.
And really, I think I was trying to be perfect.
I was aiming for this perfectionism. And what my heart
wanted was just to live and enjoy food and enjoy
my body and enjoy the fruits of my labor. And
I wanted to just be free, you know, and where
what I wanted to wear, and do what I wanted
(13:18):
to do, and be who I wanted to be. But
you know, with permission and freedom and choice, and not
obligation any longer, because I was so used to just
like doing things because I thought I air quotes needed to,
and also because I felt stuck, really I felt really stuck,
and also because I was afraid of what would happen
if I stopped trying to control and restrict myself, Like
(13:40):
my heart was like, I want my life back, you know.
And so what happened, And again this was many years
and it was a series of different things. But if
I'm going to kind of oversimplify it or give you
the cliff notes version, what happened next was I started
to get to know my body for the first time ever.
I started to look at it and touch it and
feel it. And I started listening to my body and
(14:01):
listening to my hunger and my cravings, and listening to
my pains and frustrations and listening to my desires. And
then I started tuning into that like tuning into my body,
my hungers, my pains, my frustrations, my desires, and created
my actions and life around that. And then I focused
on influencing all of those things in the direction that
(14:22):
I wanted them to go, like who I truly wanted
to be instead of just riding the waves of momentum
that I felt stuck in or the direction that I
just had been going in for so many years. And
what I discovered seemed so counterintuitive and was pretty much
the opposite of what you learn in the weight loss
in the diet world and dare I say the air
(14:43):
quotes health world. But what I found was that my
body needed less work, not more, Like it was a
smarter not harder thing, right. And I found that my
body needed more food, not less. I was like, oh
my gosh, Like when I eat more, my body can
actually fuel is fuel to do the things I want
wanted to do, and I can I can move more
and I can do all these things like it was
(15:04):
just it was again so counterintuitive. But I found that
my heart and my mind needed more care and less punishment,
like I was so hard on myself, right. But I
also found that my motivation and my mojo needed less
convincing and coercing and persuading and more fun, like more
going with the flow and doing things that I enjoyed.
(15:24):
And I found that my sanity needed less control and
more choice and freedom. And again, if you're still on
that control fence of whether you think you wanted or not,
please go back and listen to last week's episode. But
I also found that I needed less judgment and criticism
and more understanding. Like I kind of got the memo
that I was never going to be able to judge
and criticize and shame my way to self love. Right,
(15:47):
So that's kind of what I what I just described
is kind of what started the journey that I went on.
And so I just started giving myself permission, you know,
to meet myself and my body where it was. And
I started attending to and serving my body what it needed.
And again this is goes beyond the scope of this conversation,
but I'm just kind of giving you the general theme here.
And I started, you know, paying attention to things like
(16:09):
caring for my joints and caring for my brain. And
I started using food, you know, for pleasure, not as
like a coping mechanism, but like actually enjoying food and
giving myself permission to enjoy it rather than think that
that was a sin, you know, but also using food
as kind of like medicine and for a vitality. And
I started using movement kind of as a drug and
(16:30):
a therapy and my health care and insurance policy. And
I started seeking out ways to have more fun and
enjoyment in life. And I started seeking knowledge and understanding
where I lacked acceptance and compassion. And this might one
might sound interesting, but I started to get to know
my fat and accepting my fat and influencing my fat.
(16:53):
And I know that sounds really weird, and we are
actually going to have a future series of episodes all
about that. Yes, the truth about your fat, which will
make so much more sense when you hear it. But
bottom line, you know, I started asking myself such better questions,
and I started asking myself, you know, how I want
to feel and basing my decisions on that. And I
(17:14):
started looking for my own answers like a discovery process,
rather than looking for someone to give them to me
or air quotes save me, like I felt like I
was always looking for somebody to save me, and really
it was saved me for myself, right, But I started
looking for ways to make myself happy as opposed to
skinny and healthy, as opposed to skinny, and like vital
(17:36):
and able bodied and pain free instead of skinny, right,
And so it was just such a different, a different
paradigm but also like, really the big theme was I simplified,
and I removed, and I lightened, and I eased my
journey right, and I gave myself what I require and
what I desire and made it fun and enjoyable. And
(17:56):
so I call that stressless living and stressless eating and
stressless moving and stressless living. Because life is going to
have stress. That is a given. Life is going to
have stress, that is a given. But at least you
(18:16):
can remove the stress from all the things that you
might be adding stress to yourself or stress to your life.
So really stressing less about food and stressing less about
your body, and stressing less in your head and less
in your heart and just make the journey lighter. And
unbeknownst to me, this discovery would turn into the process
that I teach my clients. How I talk about ditching
(18:39):
the weight of the weight. That's really how that all started.
But that's another story for another day. But really, like,
what is the fun in having a body that looks
a certain way if you hate what you have to
do or who you have to be, or how you
have to feel to get there. So here's the result.
And again I'm not saying this coming from some high
mountain of like, oh my god, gosh, look at me.
(19:00):
I have no struggles in my life, and I'm so
happy and healthy and free and all these things. It's
not like that, right, But I kind of just wanted
to give you an example of, like what does a
new paradigm and a new sense of air quotes health
look like. And so for me, I am pretty much
at my you know, I call it my happy weight
all year long. And for me, I'm not looking to
compare myself to some Instagram model or the weight that
(19:23):
some people were in high school. Right. I now move
towards words like strong and pain free and able bodied.
And yes, I have curves and hips and thighs, and
I'm not some stick figure model, but I love those curves,
and I appreciate my body for what it can do
and how it supports me. And I do live a
lifestyle based on freedom and permission and choice, but I
(19:45):
feel like I'm the one influencing my body and my life,
not the other way around. I don't feel like my
body like controls me anymore. And I live, you know,
for the most part, pain free every day, which is
not how I used to live. So that in itself
a miracle and a grace from God. But when I
do have flare ups, like all active humans do from
time to time, I know exactly what to do to
(20:07):
take care of them, and I eat however I feel
like eating, and oftentimes my body craves nutrient dense foods,
which of course I prepare deliciously, but sometimes my body
tells me it's time for a cheeseburger and a warm
browndie Sunday, right, And so bottom line, I now know
how to eat to keep my body looking, moving and
(20:28):
feeling happy. And notice again I didn't say skinny because
I no longer chase words like skinny. I chase healthy
and I chase happy, and my language and focus is
totally different. And yeah, I've completely changed my relationship with
food and my body and with myself and in turn
increase my confidence, self esteem and body image. Another way
(20:51):
of saying it, I refused to keep paying the cost
of skinny even one day longer. And as you can
probably imagine, this was not this overnight thing. And you
know it did take commitment and dedication, but not to
a better, leaner or fitter body. No, that was the
old conversation I needed to commit to a more powerful,
(21:12):
confident and free version of me. And so you're gonna
hear me talk about experimentation and building the experiment mentality
in future episodes, but to just briefly touch on it now,
that's essentially how I did it, and that's how I
walk all of my clients through. I essentially took myself
on one big, fat experiment and I'm still experimenting, right,
(21:32):
and I teach the experiment mentality, and I truly am
like a mad scientist. And of course I love to
share the why behind the what behind what I do
so that you can understand things and really benefit from
from my madness. But that's exactly what I do and
kind of what the purpose of how I like to
show up here on this podcast is to be honest,
and you know, I essentially peel back the curtain and
(21:53):
show you exactly how I live my life and my
thought processes and how I think about food and how
I think about movement and how I live my life really,
but also how I've learned to love myself along the way,
because you know, again, shame and self loathing and self
criticism were my emotional home for the majority of my life,
and sometimes it's not always rainbows and roses. You know,
(22:13):
I'm definitely committed to sharing all of that too, you know,
the good, the bad, the ugly. But also there's seasons,
you know, there's seasons when things are status quo and
I'm just treading water and I'm just maintaining where i
am without having a goal in mind. And then sometimes,
you know, honestly, sometimes I'm living there, like just in
the treading water place of it for months on end
(22:33):
at a time. But then, of course, yeah, there are
times when I have the urge to kind of bump
it up a notch or set some goals, but I'm
no longer using those goals as something that I need
to achieve to feel worthy or lovable, and I no
longer punish or restrict or shame myself to get there, right,
And when I do set goals, I simply do it
with the same principles of freedom that I live and
(22:54):
teach every day. And my healing has to stay front
and center at the forefront of everything, right, because my
happy and whole and healed self is my number one priority,
even if that means I attain goals a bit slower
and truthfully, Like in comparison to kind of you know,
society standards, I set like sixteen month goals, you know,
(23:16):
because I want to do them in the slowest, smooth,
smoothest fast fashion, because my healing is so important and
I have to protect it. And so that means like
no restriction and punishment and drive myself crazy control stuff anymore.
Like to me, that's just a losing game. And so
I do have my routines, but just like you, I
don't always do all that I can do, and I
(23:38):
too can fall into those you know slumps where I
feel I feel unmotivated or maybe a bit flat. And
so again, you're never gonna hear me shouting at you
from you know, some high pedestal. And this isn't me
saying like, oh, that whole struggle thing that was so
twenty fourteen, you know, like I've evolved and I'm past that,
been there, done that. No, that's not what I'm saying
at all. I'm still here doing it. Let's say that, right, Like,
(24:00):
I still get challenged and I still have my own stuff,
but now I have the tools to handle it when
it does come, because it does, and I promise you
it always will, and I really want to emphasize that,
like I think there is a lot of kind of
self help out there that's like, oh, once you have
the golden ticket and you manage your mind, and you
manage your brain, like you're just gonna be happy as
(24:21):
a you know, kid in a candy store all the time.
Of course I use a candy analogy, but I digress,
and it's like, no, like life is going to happen
to you. Like I feel sadness, I feel shame, I
feel fear, I feel all the feels that all of
humanity feels, but I don't let it drive me down
the rabbit hole any longer. Or when I do notice
myself going down the rabbit hole, I have the tools
(24:43):
to bring me back. But I also know that I
feel better when I do certain things regularly and consistently
and make my own self care priority. Numero uno. So
you know, as I share my thoughts and insights and
wisdom and tools and resources with all of you lovely listeners,
And I was about to say lovely ladies, but I
know there's a couple of gentlemen out there too that
(25:03):
listen to Outweigh, So hello to you too. Gentlemen out there.
But just know that I am officially double dog daring
you to create your own big fat experiment in your
own life. And I know I get it. Like, even
though this idea of slowing down for a bit and
going on your own big fat experiment and healing your
(25:24):
relationship with food and healing your relationship with your body
and healing your brain, I get it. It's not as
sexy as losing a bunch of weight really quickly, like
a lot of people on Instagram are trying to sell you.
But now you are blatantly aware that there's a major
cost not to not healing, right, because not only do
(25:44):
you stay stuck in that shame prison and that up
and down roller coaster, but the problems just get worse
and the costs keep getting higher. So I really want
you to think, like, what is your cost of skinny?
And what if your solution did not live in another
diet or trying to keto or weight watchers for the
(26:04):
umpteenth time your problems away, or trying to punish, your
criticize or judge yourself to a smaller figure, Right, what
if the solution wasn't you know down there as I'm
pointing at your body and it's actually up here as
I'm pointing to your mind and in your brain. What
if instead of committing to another food or body focused
solution or another short term fix, you got really curious
(26:28):
about your cost of skinny and what's keeping you there
and what's not working. What if that was the first
step taking intelligent action, addressing the causes of your struggles,
rewiring your brain, and moving in the direction of freedom
and health and happiness. When focusing strictly on your body
(26:49):
or your weight or food typically takes you away from
freedom and health and happiness. Right. And the sad truth is,
and I hate to say this, but most people won't
do this right, will go start looking for the next
plan and the next game of control myself and the
next action item. But those that do, those that explore
this line of questioning that I'm sharing, and you know,
(27:11):
really stop that definition of insanity, which we all know
is doing the same things over and over again and
expecting different results. You're going to find that your journey
to healing and to finally ending the suffering and struggling
can finally be again. So that is all for this
week's episode of Outweigh and if you want to hear
more about the process of rewiring your own brain and
(27:33):
self image when it comes to food and your body,
then head on over to Stressless Eating dot com and
sign up to watch the Stressless Eating webinar, where I'll
walk you through the exact five step game plan that
I teach my clients to use to heal themselves from
that all or nothing diet mentality for good, but without
restricting themselves or punishing their bodies, and definitely without ever
(27:56):
having to use words like macros low carb or ca
llerie Byrne and so I have laid it all out
there for you in five easy steps over at Stresslessating
dot com. So I'm Leanne Ellington signing out for this
episode of Outweigh and we will be back next week. Bye.
I won't let my body out be outwait everything that
I'm made done, won't spend my life trying to change.
I'm learning love who I am, aga strong, I feel free.
I know every part of me. It's beautiful and that
will always out way if you feel it, but you
(00:24):
are She'll some love to the vio. I get there,
say go day and did you and die out way,
Happy Saturday, Outway. I'm Leahne Ellington and I'm the author
and creator of stressle Seating and I'm here for another
solo episode this week. And you know, a couple of
(00:45):
months ago here on Outweigh, I did an episode called
Learned from My Mistakes where I just shared what I
wish I knew then that I know now, you know,
not just as a woman who healed from her own
disordered eating, but unbeknownst to me, I was actually teaching
disordered eating to others when I was in the fitness industry,
because I was perpetuating that eat less move more, you know,
(01:08):
no pain, no gain mentality that I learned. Now I
had to go do the work on myself and reconcile
any shame from that. And now I know that I
just I didn't know what I didn't know, and I
was just teaching what I had learned and what is still,
unfortunately the thought process still being taught in the mainstream. Now,
that was all what seems like a lifetime ago, and
(01:30):
now I see the greater purpose in all of it.
But first off, feel free to go back and check
out that episode called Learn from My Mistakes. And the
reason I'm even bringing that up is because in that
episode I talked about this idea of the cost of
skinny as I now call it, and it's something that
comes up all the time in the work that I'm
(01:51):
doing with women, and why I wanted to do an
episode about that specifically and dig a little bit deeper
because man, I wish I knew about this when I
was at the height of my own struggles and disorder.
So in that episode I shared how you know, rewind
it's probably fifteen years ago now, So in two thousand
(02:11):
and seven, two thousand and eight something like that, my
anesthesiologist had me counting backwards from one hundred as the
surgical team was getting ready to go in and microscopically
remove the calcified hardened disk fluid that had been sitting
on my nerves of my lumbar spine for the past
eighteen months or that it had been at that point.
(02:32):
And it's a procedure that I now endearingly call the
cost of skinny, and I lovingly call it that because
at the time, and who I was at the time
was so focused on getting skinny or lean or toned
or hot or whatever words I was, you know, allowing
to rule my brain at the time, I didn't pay
(02:53):
attention to or tune into what my body needed and
what it was screaming at me to do. And if
only I had listened to the screams from my body
to slow down and chill out and actually take care
of it, maybe it could have all been avoided. But
who I was at the time, again, she didn't care.
(03:16):
I just wanted to be skinny and beautiful or whatever
vision I had in my mind of the thing that
would make me happy, and no back pain or injury
or pesky flare up was going to stop me until
it finally did stop me. And it didn't just stop me,
It landed me on an operating table at Cleveland Metro
(03:37):
for major spine surgery at the ripe old age of
twenty five. So now picture this, Okay, If you take
a girl, a woman who already feels unworthy and unlovable
and undesirable because all she's ever known is seeing herself
through what I now lovingly call the fat goggles of
her self image, and now you throw on the story
(03:58):
that she is also now damaged goods or broken because
of her body, you can only imagine how low my
inner world got at that point too. But that was
just the tip of the iceberg, and it certainly was
not the only cost of skinny. And so when I
started looking back at my life, I realized that decades
(04:20):
of the diet mentality, which was really just disordered eating
disguised as what I thought was just being healthy. And
then of course all the self loathing that came alongside
my disordered eating and my relationship with food in my body, well,
all of that had a cost that I didn't even
know to look for, and that I definitely didn't know
(04:41):
that I should try to avoid. So I was trapped
inside of a food prison that had me chained to
the handcuffs of restriction and obsession and control and obsessing
over every morsel of food that touched my lips or
when I couldn't possibly take it any longer, because who
can re strict that long veering over to the opposite
(05:02):
side of that so carefree abandonment, eating everything in sight
feeding my air quotes sugar addictions, which I now realize
I wasn't actually addicted to sugar. I had just practiced
the thoughts and beliefs and behaviors of somebody that was,
you know, kind of had a drug like pole to sugar.
But I digress. But I was still using food to
comfort or distract or numb myself, and then of course
(05:25):
the cascade of guilt and shame and self loathing that
would follow suit. Right, So that was my food prison
cost of skinny. But I was also trapped inside of
a body prison where I felt like I was walking
around in a body that didn't reflect the woman that
I really was, like the outsides didn't match the insides,
but that I felt powerless to change. And I was
(05:45):
a prisoner of wearing you know what I called my
fat clothes, which was, you know, I would cover my
body with cardigans, and I would refuse to wear shorts
or tank tops or you know, God forbid be seen
in a bathing suit, and even when it was ninety
five degrees outside, I was, I was wearing that card again,
and you know, but not to mention allowing my body
to be the barrier that kept me from doing what
(06:07):
I wanted to do and feeling how I wanted to feel.
And showing up is the version of myself that I
really was, but I just couldn't access her. So that
was my body prison cost of skinny. Then I was
also trapped in a shame prison where I was just
outright ashamed that after decades on this planet, I was
still struggling with food, and I was still struggling with
(06:30):
my body, and I was still on this up and
down roller coaster, and you know, to boot, I felt
like a fraud, like if anyone ever found me out,
they would see how crazy or broken I really was.
And there was the shame that followed me around every
single day because of the identity I had created about
my struggles, that you know, I was my body and
(06:53):
that I was my air quotes, addictions, and that I
was a failure. So that was the shame prison and
cost of skinny. But then of course I was trapped
inside what I now lovingly call my fat head that
really no matter how much weight I lost or how
successful I became, my self image saw me through the
(07:13):
goggles that saw me as fat or unlovable or a
failure or embarrassing or you know, that I would just
never be enough or skinny enough, successful enough enough, period.
Right again, these were just the goggles that I was
seeing myself through because I didn't know to even transform them.
And so all of this left me in a prison
(07:35):
of pain and disconnection and loneliness. Right And it wasn't
just physical pain. It was mental, emotional, spiritual pain, all
of it. And in those moments of clarity, that's when
I realized, like, whoa, this is not just happening to me. Okay,
every woman that feels stuck on that obsessive diet and
weight loss roller coaster, or that's stuck in her own
(07:57):
food and body and shame prison, she's paying her our
own cost of skinny as well. And that roller coaster
has major costs. Okay. There's you know, the cost of
constantly weighing and measuring and calculating, and the cost of
stressing and guessing and obsessing, and of course the second
guessing that comes off the back of that. There's the
(08:17):
cost of all the judgment and the self criticism and
the self loathing and the shame. And there's the cost
of valuing yourself based on how much you ate or
how much you didn't eat that day, or how much
you weigh or don't weigh. And the cost of living
in a prison. So again I shared the multiple prisons
that I was living in. But there's you know, maybe
(08:37):
it's a body prison, a food prison, a prison that
you just don't know how to get out of, even
if you don't have words to put around it. So
fast forward to a couple of years after my surgery.
So fast forward to a couple of years after my surgery.
I finally found the courage to admit and really act
(08:59):
on the truth that I discovered off the back of
major spine surgery and all the soul searching that I
had done. And that's when, thankfully I realized, like I
didn't want to be a fitness expert or a health
nut or obsessed with my body and every morsel of
food that touched my lips. And I'll be the first
to admit like I tried on all those roles. I
(09:20):
think I was honestly trying to find meaning and purpose
in all of those roles. But either way, all of
those things left me either you know, I was either
living in a life and in a body that made
me unhappy, or I was living in a body that
kind of pleased me but in a way that left
me really unhappy. Like I was always having to choose
either or, And so I went from majorly feeling out
(09:43):
of control of my body and dependencies and kind of
this like drug like pull to sugar and food and
you know, complete disregard for my body. And then I
flipped switches and I went to the opposite and it
was just major restriction and control and punishing my body
and convincing myself to do the things that I thought
I needed to do, to never go back to my
(10:04):
old ways, because again, like I knew that I had
never deep down healed something more so I was kind
of covering it up with short term actions, but the
old stuff never went away. I just pushed it aside
and locked it up and worked my butt off to
stay the course until I don't know, I think it
was kind of a moment of awareness. And I think
if anybody is listening to this that's had their own,
(10:25):
you probably know what I mean. It's kind of hard
to describe what happens in the moment because thoughts happened
really quickly, But basically I got to that point where
I was just like, I can't do this anymore. If
I keep practicing these habits and this way of living
and being, I'm gonna bring it with me into my
forties and my fifties and my sixties. And my brain
(10:45):
just kept future pacing me from there, and that it
scared the crap out of me. Okay, So I literally
just stopped that conversation, and then a number of factors
led me to have the insight and foresight to know
I needed a toe totally different conversation, like a new conversation,
because obviously I'd been speaking the whole eat less move
more obsessed over my body conversation forever. So the first
(11:08):
thing I did is I just started asking myself better questions, right,
And I was like, what if I just started listening
to my body, because keep in mind, I was ignoring it, right,
And what if I started listening to my brain because
again I had numbed it out and tuned it out.
And what if I just started listening to my heart
because again, I was shoving down feelings and eating my feelings.
(11:29):
So those three questions were like pretty revelatory to me, right,
And when I started asking myself those questions my body,
of course, my body I got answers right. Sometimes they
weren't very pretty answers, but I got the answers, And
essentially my body was like, Leanne, you are friggin lucky, right,
all this beating up and abusing of your body, You're
(11:51):
pretty lucky that spine surgery and feeling like a sugar
attic were the worst of it because you've been choosing
you know, weight loss or words like skinny over vitality
and health and freedom for far too long, and I'm
feeling it. So that's what my body said to me.
It didn't hold back right, And my brain was like,
you know what, you're maxed out and you're overworked and
(12:11):
you're overtrained and you're overscheduled, and on top of that,
you're starving me a lot of the time, and then
you're gluttonously overstuffing me, and then you furiously worry about it,
and it's almost like again, I knew I had it
handled for a little while, but in the back of
my mind, like I knew I couldn't do it forever.
So when I got really real, that's what my brain
was saying to me. When I started asking the questions
(12:33):
and being okay with the answers, even though I didn't
like the answers, I was just like, you know what,
this is the data, this is what's happening. Like I'm
not going to live in a non reality anymore. And
that's when my heart again, like I finally my heart
was just like she was done, to be honest, but
you know, my heart was just saying, like I'm done
thinking and worrying and obsessing over my body and my
weight and food and exercise, and I'm done pumping myself
(12:57):
up and trying to be a good example to other people.
And really, I think I was trying to be perfect.
I was aiming for this perfectionism. And what my heart
wanted was just to live and enjoy food and enjoy
my body and enjoy the fruits of my labor. And
I wanted to just be free, you know, and where
what I wanted to wear, and do what I wanted
(13:18):
to do, and be who I wanted to be. But
you know, with permission and freedom and choice, and not
obligation any longer, because I was so used to just
like doing things because I thought I air quotes needed to,
and also because I felt stuck, really I felt really stuck,
and also because I was afraid of what would happen
if I stopped trying to control and restrict myself, Like
(13:40):
my heart was like, I want my life back, you know.
And so what happened, And again this was many years
and it was a series of different things. But if
I'm going to kind of oversimplify it or give you
the cliff notes version, what happened next was I started
to get to know my body for the first time ever.
I started to look at it and touch it and
feel it. And I started listening to my body and
(14:01):
listening to my hunger and my cravings, and listening to
my pains and frustrations and listening to my desires. And
then I started tuning into that like tuning into my body,
my hungers, my pains, my frustrations, my desires, and created
my actions and life around that. And then I focused
on influencing all of those things in the direction that
(14:22):
I wanted them to go, like who I truly wanted
to be instead of just riding the waves of momentum
that I felt stuck in or the direction that I
just had been going in for so many years. And
what I discovered seemed so counterintuitive and was pretty much
the opposite of what you learn in the weight loss
in the diet world and dare I say the air
(14:43):
quotes health world. But what I found was that my
body needed less work, not more, Like it was a
smarter not harder thing, right. And I found that my
body needed more food, not less. I was like, oh
my gosh, Like when I eat more, my body can
actually fuel is fuel to do the things I want
wanted to do, and I can I can move more
and I can do all these things like it was
(15:04):
just it was again so counterintuitive. But I found that
my heart and my mind needed more care and less punishment,
like I was so hard on myself, right. But I
also found that my motivation and my mojo needed less
convincing and coercing and persuading and more fun, like more
going with the flow and doing things that I enjoyed.
(15:24):
And I found that my sanity needed less control and
more choice and freedom. And again, if you're still on
that control fence of whether you think you wanted or not,
please go back and listen to last week's episode. But
I also found that I needed less judgment and criticism
and more understanding. Like I kind of got the memo
that I was never going to be able to judge
and criticize and shame my way to self love. Right,
(15:47):
So that's kind of what I what I just described
is kind of what started the journey that I went on.
And so I just started giving myself permission, you know,
to meet myself and my body where it was. And
I started attending to and serving my body what it needed.
And again this is goes beyond the scope of this conversation,
but I'm just kind of giving you the general theme here.
And I started, you know, paying attention to things like
(16:09):
caring for my joints and caring for my brain. And
I started using food, you know, for pleasure, not as
like a coping mechanism, but like actually enjoying food and
giving myself permission to enjoy it rather than think that
that was a sin, you know, but also using food
as kind of like medicine and for a vitality. And
I started using movement kind of as a drug and
(16:30):
a therapy and my health care and insurance policy. And
I started seeking out ways to have more fun and
enjoyment in life. And I started seeking knowledge and understanding
where I lacked acceptance and compassion. And this might one
might sound interesting, but I started to get to know
my fat and accepting my fat and influencing my fat.
(16:53):
And I know that sounds really weird, and we are
actually going to have a future series of episodes all
about that. Yes, the truth about your fat, which will
make so much more sense when you hear it. But
bottom line, you know, I started asking myself such better questions,
and I started asking myself, you know, how I want
to feel and basing my decisions on that. And I
(17:14):
started looking for my own answers like a discovery process,
rather than looking for someone to give them to me
or air quotes save me, like I felt like I
was always looking for somebody to save me, and really
it was saved me for myself, right, But I started
looking for ways to make myself happy as opposed to
skinny and healthy, as opposed to skinny, and like vital
(17:36):
and able bodied and pain free instead of skinny, right,
And so it was just such a different, a different
paradigm but also like, really the big theme was I simplified,
and I removed, and I lightened, and I eased my
journey right, and I gave myself what I require and
what I desire and made it fun and enjoyable. And
(17:56):
so I call that stressless living and stressless eating and
stressless moving and stressless living. Because life is going to
have stress. That is a given. Life is going to
have stress, that is a given. But at least you
(18:16):
can remove the stress from all the things that you
might be adding stress to yourself or stress to your life.
So really stressing less about food and stressing less about
your body, and stressing less in your head and less
in your heart and just make the journey lighter. And
unbeknownst to me, this discovery would turn into the process
that I teach my clients. How I talk about ditching
(18:39):
the weight of the weight. That's really how that all started.
But that's another story for another day. But really, like,
what is the fun in having a body that looks
a certain way if you hate what you have to
do or who you have to be, or how you
have to feel to get there. So here's the result.
And again I'm not saying this coming from some high
mountain of like, oh my god, gosh, look at me.
(19:00):
I have no struggles in my life, and I'm so
happy and healthy and free and all these things. It's
not like that, right, But I kind of just wanted
to give you an example of, like what does a
new paradigm and a new sense of air quotes health
look like. And so for me, I am pretty much
at my you know, I call it my happy weight
all year long. And for me, I'm not looking to
compare myself to some Instagram model or the weight that
(19:23):
some people were in high school. Right. I now move
towards words like strong and pain free and able bodied.
And yes, I have curves and hips and thighs, and
I'm not some stick figure model, but I love those curves,
and I appreciate my body for what it can do
and how it supports me. And I do live a
lifestyle based on freedom and permission and choice, but I
(19:45):
feel like I'm the one influencing my body and my life,
not the other way around. I don't feel like my
body like controls me anymore. And I live, you know,
for the most part, pain free every day, which is
not how I used to live. So that in itself
a miracle and a grace from God. But when I
do have flare ups, like all active humans do from
time to time, I know exactly what to do to
(20:07):
take care of them, and I eat however I feel
like eating, and oftentimes my body craves nutrient dense foods,
which of course I prepare deliciously, but sometimes my body
tells me it's time for a cheeseburger and a warm
browndie Sunday, right, And so bottom line, I now know
how to eat to keep my body looking, moving and
(20:28):
feeling happy. And notice again I didn't say skinny because
I no longer chase words like skinny. I chase healthy
and I chase happy, and my language and focus is
totally different. And yeah, I've completely changed my relationship with
food and my body and with myself and in turn
increase my confidence, self esteem and body image. Another way
(20:51):
of saying it, I refused to keep paying the cost
of skinny even one day longer. And as you can
probably imagine, this was not this overnight thing. And you
know it did take commitment and dedication, but not to
a better, leaner or fitter body. No, that was the
old conversation I needed to commit to a more powerful,
(21:12):
confident and free version of me. And so you're gonna
hear me talk about experimentation and building the experiment mentality
in future episodes, but to just briefly touch on it now,
that's essentially how I did it, and that's how I
walk all of my clients through. I essentially took myself
on one big, fat experiment and I'm still experimenting, right,
(21:32):
and I teach the experiment mentality, and I truly am
like a mad scientist. And of course I love to
share the why behind the what behind what I do
so that you can understand things and really benefit from
from my madness. But that's exactly what I do and
kind of what the purpose of how I like to
show up here on this podcast is to be honest,
and you know, I essentially peel back the curtain and
(21:53):
show you exactly how I live my life and my
thought processes and how I think about food and how
I think about movement and how I live my life really,
but also how I've learned to love myself along the way,
because you know, again, shame and self loathing and self
criticism were my emotional home for the majority of my life,
and sometimes it's not always rainbows and roses. You know,
(22:13):
I'm definitely committed to sharing all of that too, you know,
the good, the bad, the ugly. But also there's seasons,
you know, there's seasons when things are status quo and
I'm just treading water and I'm just maintaining where i
am without having a goal in mind. And then sometimes,
you know, honestly, sometimes I'm living there, like just in
the treading water place of it for months on end
(22:33):
at a time. But then, of course, yeah, there are
times when I have the urge to kind of bump
it up a notch or set some goals, but I'm
no longer using those goals as something that I need
to achieve to feel worthy or lovable, and I no
longer punish or restrict or shame myself to get there, right,
And when I do set goals, I simply do it
with the same principles of freedom that I live and
(22:54):
teach every day. And my healing has to stay front
and center at the forefront of everything, right, because my
happy and whole and healed self is my number one priority,
even if that means I attain goals a bit slower
and truthfully, Like in comparison to kind of you know,
society standards, I set like sixteen month goals, you know,
(23:16):
because I want to do them in the slowest, smooth,
smoothest fast fashion, because my healing is so important and
I have to protect it. And so that means like
no restriction and punishment and drive myself crazy control stuff anymore.
Like to me, that's just a losing game. And so
I do have my routines, but just like you, I
don't always do all that I can do, and I
(23:38):
too can fall into those you know slumps where I
feel I feel unmotivated or maybe a bit flat. And
so again, you're never gonna hear me shouting at you
from you know, some high pedestal. And this isn't me
saying like, oh, that whole struggle thing that was so
twenty fourteen, you know, like I've evolved and I'm past that,
been there, done that. No, that's not what I'm saying
at all. I'm still here doing it. Let's say that, right, Like,
(24:00):
I still get challenged and I still have my own stuff,
but now I have the tools to handle it when
it does come, because it does, and I promise you
it always will, and I really want to emphasize that,
like I think there is a lot of kind of
self help out there that's like, oh, once you have
the golden ticket and you manage your mind, and you
manage your brain, like you're just gonna be happy as
(24:21):
a you know, kid in a candy store all the time.
Of course I use a candy analogy, but I digress,
and it's like, no, like life is going to happen
to you. Like I feel sadness, I feel shame, I
feel fear, I feel all the feels that all of
humanity feels, but I don't let it drive me down
the rabbit hole any longer. Or when I do notice
myself going down the rabbit hole, I have the tools
(24:43):
to bring me back. But I also know that I
feel better when I do certain things regularly and consistently
and make my own self care priority. Numero uno. So
you know, as I share my thoughts and insights and
wisdom and tools and resources with all of you lovely listeners,
And I was about to say lovely ladies, but I
know there's a couple of gentlemen out there too that
(25:03):
listen to Outweigh, So hello to you too. Gentlemen out there.
But just know that I am officially double dog daring
you to create your own big fat experiment in your
own life. And I know I get it. Like, even
though this idea of slowing down for a bit and
going on your own big fat experiment and healing your
(25:24):
relationship with food and healing your relationship with your body
and healing your brain, I get it. It's not as
sexy as losing a bunch of weight really quickly, like
a lot of people on Instagram are trying to sell you.
But now you are blatantly aware that there's a major
cost not to not healing, right, because not only do
(25:44):
you stay stuck in that shame prison and that up
and down roller coaster, but the problems just get worse
and the costs keep getting higher. So I really want
you to think, like, what is your cost of skinny?
And what if your solution did not live in another
diet or trying to keto or weight watchers for the
(26:04):
umpteenth time your problems away, or trying to punish, your
criticize or judge yourself to a smaller figure, Right, what
if the solution wasn't you know down there as I'm
pointing at your body and it's actually up here as
I'm pointing to your mind and in your brain. What
if instead of committing to another food or body focused
solution or another short term fix, you got really curious
(26:28):
about your cost of skinny and what's keeping you there
and what's not working. What if that was the first
step taking intelligent action, addressing the causes of your struggles,
rewiring your brain, and moving in the direction of freedom
and health and happiness. When focusing strictly on your body
(26:49):
or your weight or food typically takes you away from
freedom and health and happiness. Right. And the sad truth is,
and I hate to say this, but most people won't
do this right, will go start looking for the next
plan and the next game of control myself and the
next action item. But those that do, those that explore
this line of questioning that I'm sharing, and you know,
(27:11):
really stop that definition of insanity, which we all know
is doing the same things over and over again and
expecting different results. You're going to find that your journey
to healing and to finally ending the suffering and struggling
can finally be again. So that is all for this
week's episode of Outweigh and if you want to hear
more about the process of rewiring your own brain and
(27:33):
self image when it comes to food and your body,
then head on over to Stressless Eating dot com and
sign up to watch the Stressless Eating webinar, where I'll
walk you through the exact five step game plan that
I teach my clients to use to heal themselves from
that all or nothing diet mentality for good, but without
restricting themselves or punishing their bodies, and definitely without ever
(27:56):
having to use words like macros low carb or ca
llerie Byrne and so I have laid it all out
there for you in five easy steps over at Stresslessating
dot com. So I'm Leanne Ellington signing out for this
episode of Outweigh and we will be back next week. Bye.
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
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