I also talk about how we can move away from the stages of grief model to other models that may be more useful for moving forward.

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Summer:
This is eat the rules, a podcast about body image self worth, anti dieting and intersectional feminism. I am your host. Summer innanen, a professionally trained coach specializing in body image self worth and confidence, and the best selling author of body image remix, if you’re ready to break free of societal standards and stop living behind the number on your scale, then you have come to the right place. Welcome to the show.

This episode of eat the rules is brought to you by you on fire. You on fire is the online group coaching program that I run that gives you a step by step way of building up your self worth beyond your appearance with personalized coaching from me, incredible community support and lifetime access to the program so that you can get free from body shame and live life on your own terms. Get details on what’s included and sign up for the next cycle at summer innanen.com forward slash you on fire. I’d love to have you in that group.

This is episode 307, and this episode is all about body grief and how we can form a better relationship with our body by understanding body grief, I’m going to talk about the different ways we might experience body grief, whether we can actually overcome it, why it’s so hard to grieve our former body or the fantasy of our ideal body, The factors that determine how we process this grief and how we can move away from the Stages of Grief model to other models that may be more useful towards helping us move forward. You can find the links mentioned at summer innanen.com forward slash 307.

I want to give a shout out to vogin and P who left this review, been listening to summer for a few months now, and she has helped me so much. Love how she discusses how we got here as women are worth being based on appearance historically, helps me understand why my own mother cares so much about her weight. Now that I have a daughter of my own, I’m very motivated to break this hellish cycle. Thank you so much, summer. Thank you so much, and I totally understand that, and yes, it’s so true. When we can reconcile, why? Maybe our parents passed along these messages, it makes it a little bit easier to forgive. Move forward and yeah, and understand our own relationship with our body.

You can support this show via ko fi. So if you go to KO fi.com forward slash summer innanen, you can make a monthly contribution for as little as $5 you can help to keep this podcast on the air for the rest of the season, and you’ll also get access to my mini course conquering negative BodyTalk. If you have benefited from this podcast, I’d really appreciate you supporting it and helping to keep it alive for the rest of this year, if you haven’t already done so, you can also subscribe to the show or leave a review, which costs no money to you. You can search for eat the rules, click ratings and reviews and click to leave a review. And then there’s other free resources at my website, including the 10 day body confidence makeover or the body image coaching roadmap for professionals. So if you’re a professional who helps people who may also have body image struggles. You can find all of those@theboimagecoach.com they’re also always linked in the show notes, as well as in the information for each episode.

This past summer, I was doing my grief counseling course, and as I was going through it, I was thinking about body grief and the experience of body grief, and how some of these things that I’m learning about counseling people through grief, and how people experience grief, how we can relate that to the grief that we might feel when we stop dieting, and when we realize like this may be the body that I have I may never be in a smaller body. And so I wanted to share some of those things with you today, because I found it to be super interesting and just different perspectives that I hadn’t really considered before that might help you in your own process. Because I think that moving through that grief can be something that can be a big step for for people, and some people, it’s a lot easier, and that’s something we’re going to talk about, how it really is individual, but, yeah, I’m going to share those perspectives with you. So we’re going to talk about what body grief is, how we might experience it. Do we really overcome it? What’s so hard about grieving our ideal body? Quote, unquote, and some different perspectives that are different from the Stages of Grief model that might be more helpful when we’re talking about body image concerns.

Let’s start with body grief. So there’s a lot of different ways that we can experience grief in our life. I think when we hear the word grief, we think about the loss of a person, the loss of a pet, a divorce, the end of a friendship, an illness that might change our ability. So there’s we experience grief in many different ways. It’s not just the loss of a person and body grief. Is one of those ways we might experience it. And so what that means is that when you decide, okay, I’m not going to diet anymore, or you realize diets don’t work any anymore, you kind of go through this phase where you’re like, Oh, well, that means I’m never going to have that smaller body that I wanted, or I’m never going to go back to that smaller body that I had. And this also happens with aging. So you know, you’re going to look at yourself in the mirror and be like, Oh, I’m never going to, you know, look the same way I did 10 years ago anymore. You see a picture of yourself and you think, oh, gosh, like I’ve really aged in the last five years. That’s me speaking for myself there. And so you go through these periods of of grief, when our bodies, when our bodies change, but it can be particularly distressing and poignant when you stop dieting, because it’s not just the body that we’re letting go of, but it’s the hopes and dreams we had attached to it. So it’s like all this the kind of perfect life we had associated with this ideal body. So we sort of thought like, if I can lose weight, then you know, everyone’s going to validate me. It’s going to be so much easier for me to go out to social events. And we have this like, vision of this perfect life that’s going to be attached to it. And so we’re not just grieving the body. It’s all this stuff that we’ve attached to it. And it’s really normal to experience that, that grief around the loss of this body. I know it can seem kind of silly, like you might say to yourself, like, Oh, this is so silly. It’s not like I lost a person, but it can be a really profound and distressing experience for some people. And we’ll talk about why.

Let’s talk about how we might experience grief. The experience of body grief is influenced by individual and social factors. I mean, our body image is influenced by individual and social factors, so it makes sense that body grief would be too but grief in general is just info. Just influenced by individual and social factors, and so individually, our experience might with body grief might be influenced by our past. So let’s just say that when you were a kid, you experienced a lot of bullying around your body. So kids bullied you because of your body size, and that was a really traumatic, difficult experience for you. And therefore the idea of gaining weight or being in a larger body might feel particularly troublesome for you because you’ve had this past experience that was so hard for you, you know it might influence feelings of inadequacy or self consciousness or sadness or frustration, and so it’s influenced by our individual experiences that we’ve had before in our body. And it’s also influenced by social factors too, so things like weight discrimination, racism, ableism, ageism, etc, etc, depending on your identity and the forms of oppression that you experience that may also influence the body grief that you experience, for example, if your body has changed and now things are less accessible. So for example, you can’t find clothes in the stores that you used to shop in, or you can’t find clothes in stores that only carry straight sizes, then you may have a different experience. There may be, like, a greater sense of grief, because you’re losing access to certain things in our in our culture, because of weight discrimination, or your experience at the doctor changes, or you realize that, like this is just what your experience at the doctor is going to be because of weight discrimination.

And so the the feelings of grief are going to be tied to those individual and social factors that we experience. And the grief that we experience doesn’t just show up in our emotions, it can show up in our thoughts. So just thinking, you know, like, I can’t accept this body, I cannot. I just cannot, or everybody’s going to be judging me. It can show up in social changes. So it might impact interpersonal relationships, like it might change how you interact in in public, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that later. But if you are no longer the person who’s dieting, or you’re no longer known as like the fit one, quote, unquote, then that might change some of your relationships. Or if you are, if you’ve lost straight size privilege, then that might change how you how your interactions go with certain people, and then spiritually, the body grief that we have. It may make us rethink our identity. If our identity was always attached to our appearance, then there’s this sort of like, shift that we go through where we think, like, I don’t even know who I am anymore, like, my my identity was always tied to my appearance. So the grief is not just the emotions. It’s kind of in all these changes that might be happening as a result of of our body us coming coming to this conclusion that, like, Okay, I can’t lose weight anymore, and what I’ve learned about grief that I wanted to share with you is that it’s a highly individual experience, and it’s not only influenced by our individual and social factors, but also by our personality and attachment styles. And the attachment style piece of it is super, super interesting. I’m going to do that in a different part. Webcast, because I’m going to talk about body image and attachment styles, because there is a connection between those things. For those of you that want to geek out on that, because I also think it gives you a better perspective of like, why we might have the feelings that we have about our body. But what this means is that for some people, it might not be a big deal. They might be able to accept their body a lot more easily, whereas for others, it might feel a lot harder. And so if that’s you, there’s not something wrong with you. Like, if you feel like you’re kind of stuck and you’re like, really struggling, and you’re just like, I can’t I just can’t let go of this body that I used to have. I just, I just feel like I need to lose weight. Or these feelings are like, I’m just so frustrated and I’m feeling really sad that this is my current body know that you’re not alone and that there’s a lot of different factors that might be influencing why this is more challenging for you. It’s also important to note that some people will experience this more emotionally, and some people are going to experience this more cognitively.

And that’s, I think, a big thing for me that shifted my perspective, in that I’ve always encouraged people to kind of go the more emotional route. And that doesn’t always work with some the way that some people some people’s brains work, and that’s okay. So some people might benefit more from talking about their the way that they’re feeling and their thoughts, whereas other people might benefit more from, like, really feeling those feelings. And both of those are are okay, and it’s about understanding, like, which one is going to be more beneficial for you. And maybe you don’t even need to talk about it. Maybe you’re just fine, and that’s okay too, and, and so I want people to understand from this is that it’s just so individual, and we can’t make this like, cookie cutter analogy or solution to body grief because of all of these factors. But I think understanding these factors, then we can map out like, okay, let’s figure out why this experience makes sense for you. And then we can figure out, Okay, what’s going to be the best way to help you adapt to and and move through this grief, and even that statement moved through I’m hesitating to say it because, because of this next point that I want to make. And something else I’ve learned is that grief is not really something that we need to overcome. Rather, it’s more of an adaptive process.

And so I know that’s referring more to like, when we lose a person in our life, and if you’ve ever lost someone really close to you, then you can, you can probably relate to that. It’s almost like, how do you build your life around that, versus how do you overcome it? Like, when my my dad died, it’s like, I never overcome that loss, like there’s still always grief there, but it’s, how can I build my life around that and create a new relationship with Him in the afterlife? And so it’s same thing with with our body grief. I think, I think that we need to move away from this idea that we just like overcome, and it’s like, how do we adapt? How do we make our life as good as possible, knowing that there might always be a part of us that’s kind of missing that former body that we always that we had, or wishing that we were smaller, because life is easier, like, let’s be honest, if you’re socially acceptable attractive, then things, things are a little bit easier, you know? And so I feel like this perspective is especially important as we get older, because we’re all going to lose, you know, we’re all going to lose our some of our abilities. We’re all going to go through the aging process. Our world is not built to accommodate all bodies, so how do we adapt to that so that we can create a positive life for ourselves and have compassion for the part of us that maybe is still experiencing that grief. So maybe that reframe is helpful for you. I don’t know. Let me know.

Let’s talk about why it’s so challenging to grieve our ideal body. I wanted to talk about this because I think a lot of people feel like I should just be able to get over this, like it’s just, it’s a body, it’s not like I lost, you know, a person. And the reason why this is so challenging is because it’s not something that’s really recognized in our culture as a common grief experience. It’s not something that a lot of people understand unless you’ve gone through this yourself. And the other thing that’s more challenging is that it might not feel safe to talk about it, since many people might start offering you advice on how to fix it via weight loss. So you might be talking to a friend and being like, yeah, like, I’m just, you know, I’m just really struggling. I just wish that I was thinner like I was before. And your friend might be like, well, you should just try these new supplements, or you should just go and take weight loss drugs, you know. And so that’s not helpful at all, right? And so sometimes we might feel like, well, I can’t even talk about it because it’s not a safe thing to talk about with most of the people in my life. We might also feel embarrassed to talk about it, because culturally, we’re made to feel like we failed if we’ve gained weight or we can’t lose weight. And so I think that’s another huge piece. It’s like, it’s there’s a sense of failure around that, and sense of like, shame and humiliation. And that we haven’t succeeded at weight loss, when the reality is that 95% of people don’t, they gain the weight back, plus more. But for some reason, we still, you know, it’s still really hard to reckon with that.

And then the other piece to consider is that we’re also dealing with this loss of control. So it’s not just the body that we’re missing, but it’s like, it’s this idea that, like, we don’t have control, and so that can be really difficult for some people, especially if dieting was your go to coping mechanism, because you’re losing that now. So whereas before, you were able to kind of, like, cope with your emotions by dieting or make yourself feel better by thinking about, like, cutting food or exercising more when that’s gone, you’re also reckoning with this loss of control, which is part of that grief process, and so it’s a lot. And so that’s why grieving your ideal body, quote, unquote, can be tough, and that is why getting support from someone who understands this and having community support is key, because when you’re around other people who get it, that can be really, really comforting and helpful. Let’s talk about some different ways to think about adapting to this grief. You’re likely familiar with the Stages of Grief model, which was created in, I believe, 1969 by someone named Kubler Ross and they identified five stages of grief, and this was this was five stages in facing death and in being confronted with significant loss. And the stages were denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And they said that individuals can fluctuate from one to another and back.

And what’s really interesting is like one of the very first things I learned in my grief counseling course is that the five stages are not science based, and they don’t apply to most people. And yet, I think that that’s what most people think of when they think about the stages of grief. And it’s like my perspective is, if this resonates with you, if you find those stages helpful, cool, use it great. But I’ve learned a couple of different ways of working with grief that I wanted to share, because I think that they could be more helpful towards helping us have a better relationship with our body as we move forward. The first model is called the dual process model, and it really just suggests that we oscillate between actively feeling the grief and tending to our everyday life. And I like this because this makes sense to me, because when I’m working with people, that’s that’s how I see it. It’s like sometimes that grief is going to be there, and sometimes we have to feel those feelings, and then sometimes we need to be tending to our everyday life and looking at how we can move forward. And this might look different in a situation where you’ve lost a loved one when but with our body, this might look like you seeing a picture of your former body like let’s say you get a memory on Facebook, and you start to feel sadness or panic or frustration, and so you allow yourself to feel those feelings, and simultaneously, you also spend time adjusting to living life in the body you have now. So you also might spend time trying to work on feeling better in pictures in the body that you have now. So you’re actively working on that adaptation, okay, this is my body. How can I adapt to it? And that’s a lot of the work that I do with people, is that adaptation. It’s like, okay, this is your body. How do we adapt to it simultaneously? When those feelings come up. We process those, and we look at those. And the more that we do that, the easier that that can be as well.

And so it was interesting to see, because I feel like that model makes a lot of sense. It’s it’s more about, you know, recognizing that there’s two different kind of, I don’t want to say steps, but like two different sort of phases. And we, we oscillate back and forth between the two of them, and some people might spend more time in attending to our everyday life part, and some people might spend more time in the actively feeling grief part. And working with someone can maybe help you balance that out a little more if what you’re doing is isn’t working for you and you’re feeling like you’re just either ignoring emotions or sitting in a state of distress all the time. The next model that I wanted to share, which is interesting, it’s called the task theory. It’s called Task theory, and it suggests that we go through four different tasks in no particular order, and we can go back and forth between these. The first one is acknowledging the reality of the loss, both intellectually and emotionally, and so that might in the in the case of of our body, this might look like, Okay, I can’t diet anymore, and this is my body, and this might be hard. And we’re kind of reckoning with that loss of control. We’re reckoning with the reality of like, okay, I’m not going to be that thinner body that I always wanted to be. The second task is processing the pain, so acknowledging the feelings that are coming up around that this third task is adjusting to our new world, and this means adjusting socially, internally and perhaps spiritually, so understanding, okay, what’s my identity now that I’m not the person who was always. Is like the attractive one, quote unquote, or the healthy one, quote unquote, or the younger one, quote unquote. Adjusting socially. So, you know, okay, maybe my social experiences are going to feel a little bit different, and I’m afraid of people judging me. How can I adjust to that? How can I work through that and internally, just coming to this conclusion of like, this is my body, and I want to be really compassionate with myself. I want to treat myself with kindness and respect. And the fourth task is to find an enduring connection with the deceased. Obviously, in this case, our body is not deceased, but we can think about, okay, how do we find a new connection and relationship with our body now. How can we connect with the body that we have now and show it respect? How can we start to become more embodied? So this might look like self care, embodiment or somatic work. How can I know that who I am is not tied to how I look? And so I again, I like this task theory.

I think I think I like these because I feel like this is what I do with when I’m working with people, and I was like, oh, yeah, this makes sense. This is what I do and so, but maybe it’s just a different way to think about it, right? We don’t have to go through certain stages or phases. We can, we can find what works for us. And there’s different models and there’s different theories, and to be honest, like, I think it’s just more individual about like, what’s resonating with you? What do you feel works for you? But if you feel like you’re kind of stuck in that in that stage or that state of, like, body grief, when you’re really missing it, hopefully you’ve taken away a new perspective from this, because I think that it certainly helps me kind of adopt new perspectives as someone who supports people with this. And then the last thing I wanted to mention is that we can also look for ways to find meaning. So in a lot of the work that I read in the grief counseling course, this idea of finding meaning in loss was really important. And so how do we find meaning in the fact that we’re not dieting anymore? And so for me, that meant doing the work I’m doing now. So I channeled that whole experience into helping others with similar struggles. Now for you, that might not be the case, but maybe it looks like learning about fat activism, looking at the political aspects of body liberation. Maybe it looks like raising your child to have a better relationship with their body, like, maybe that’s the meaning that you make from it. You’re like, Oh, now I can give my child a better relationship with their body or another, you know, little human in your life. Or it might just be that the meaning is like, Okay, I have this time and energy that I didn’t have before, that I’ve regained because I’m no longer dieting, and I can do that to do things that are more meaningful to me, or I can just be more present in the things that I’m already doing. And so I don’t think you can need to get caught up in like, finding that meaning, but that is maybe something down the road that you can consider and think like, Well, how do I make meaning out of this? Because that can be really helpful. And so the last thing that I want to mention is that we’re going to talk in a later episode about body image and attachment styles, and how our experience of body grief might be influenced by those attachment styles.

But for now, to summarize this episode, our experience with body grief is highly individual, and it can impact us socially, internally and spiritually. It can be really hard to experience this for some people, because it’s an isolating experience, and we’re made to feel like it’s our fault, and it’s not a linear path. We don’t necessarily overcome it. Rather, we want to adapt to it, and it involves not only experiencing the thoughts and emotions, but building our life in this here and now, body and so I hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you have any questions on that, definitely let me know I have another great episode that we talk about body grief as well, episode 244, with Hilary kanavy and Dina Sturtevant called reclaiming Body Trust. I’ll link to that in the show notes. They talk a lot about that in their book, reclaiming Body Trust, which is really great as well. I hope you enjoyed this one first body image series of the season, and I look forward to doing some more of these. Don’t forget, if you’ve benefited from this podcast, to support it via kofi. Go to KO fi.com. Forward slash summer innanen. Thank you so much for being here today and listening. You can find the show notes for this episode at summer innanen.com. Forward slash 307, I’ll talk to you soon. Rock on.

I’m Summer innanen, and I want to thank you for listening today. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook at summer innanen, and if you haven’t yet, go to Apple podcasts, search, eat the rules and subscribe, rate and review this show. I would be so grateful until next time. Rock on.