Body Image: Changing Your Life Without Changing Your Body

Happy New Year, Shallow Squad! Matt and Tara are freshly recovered from the holidays and excited to bring you something really special: their first guest! Joining your usual hosts for this episode is Dr. Stephanie Waitt, a licenced professional counselor who specializes in addressing anxiety, eating disorders and sexual childhood trauma. Besides her clinical work, Stephanie—or “Dr. Steph,” as she’s known—posts a series of blogs and YouTube videos discussing mental health subjects in a fun, frank and accessible manner.

In the course of this interview, Dr. Steph helps you understand how eating disorders develop, discusses a healthy way to talk to your kids about healthy eating, and reveals how New Year’s resolutions as they’re typically approached can actually be stressful or even harmful to one’s mental health.

 

Episode Highlights:

Why Matt compared Tara’s own beloved daughter to an animalThe line between living a healthy lifestyle and accepting yourself for who you areHow might you know if you have body image issues?Why are we seeing an increase in eating disorders?Retraining our brains to give ourselves the unconditional love we already give to othersHow even the best and supposedly healthiest intentions can lead to eating disordersMatt and Tara’s special plea for you to not bring your little kids to a lovely restaurant

 

Quotes:

“We’re much better with audio than we are with the video.”

“Health has become this prescription, where people are handed like ‘Do these five things to be a healthy person’.”

“How much value and worth are you getting out of your appearance?”

“We’re allowed to live life and have fun and go to parties and go to dinners with friends and not really care what we look like.”

“You’re so much more than what you eat and how you move your body.”

“How we eat and how we try to manage our weight and our food behavior is really how we manage the anxiety and the depression we experience.”

“We’re gonna work to reprogram some of those messages.”

“You can celebrate New Year’s Eve, drink all the champagne you want and then do absolutely nothing different the next day!” 

“I had to get a lot of education in this field to learn what I was struggling with.”

“Health isn’t about feeling miserable.”

“We can’t be addicted to food. We need food.”

“We can’t taste food without having emotion.”

“Weight doesn’t equal health.”

 

Links:

Texoma Speciality Counseling - https://www.texomaspecialtycounseling.com/counseling-services/

Stephanie’s 2019 Wish for You - https://youtu.be/BiDn4FX7Gdk

Dr. Steph’s blog - https://www.texomaspecialtycounseling.com/blog/

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