The Lazy Genius Podcast - #218 - Let’s Talk About the Body, Part Two

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Last week was Let’s Talk About the Body, Part One, and I highly encourage you to listen to it if you haven’t already. I’m laying out ten principles to think about when it comes to your body and other people’s bodies; five were last week. Five are this week. As a reminder, last week’s principles were one, the body is amazing; two, there is no normal body; three, there isn’t a hierarchy of bodies; four, bodies don’t have to be healthy in order to count; and five, there are privileged bodies. Ready for the next five? Let’s jump in. Helpful Companion Links Here’s a list of resources that informed my own research and knowledge of body neutrality. My episode on Your Body Is Not Flawed Kate Kennedy from @bethereinfive Get the Latest Lazy Letter in your inbox every month The Body by Bill Bryson Do Less by Kate Northrup Period Power by Maisie Hill The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor Sarah of @thebirdspapaya is one of the most powerful voices I’ve encountered around thinking about our bodies Try Softer by Aundi Kobler The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary McBride Download a transcript of this episode. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there, you're listening to The Lacey Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today's episode 218. Let's Talk About Your Body, Part 2. Can you guess what last week's episode was? I am sure you can. Last week it was, let's talk about the body, part one. And I highly encourage you to listen to that if you haven't already. I'm laying out 10 principles to think. about when it comes to your body and other people's bodies. Five were last week. Five are this week. As a reminder, last week's principles were, one, the body is amazing. Two, there is no normal body. Three, there isn't a hierarchy of bodies. Four, bodies don't have to be healthy in order to count. And five, there are privileged bodies. Let's jump into the next five. Number six, Body neutrality is better than body positivity. Body neutrality is better than body positivity. Okay, hear me out.

Here we go. Body positivity is very positive. It really is. If you have talked junk about your own body, which I am very certain you have, you've experienced the body negativity that has been so very pervasive, especially for women, in recent years. I remember being in college and every single magazine had something about losing weight or getting a flat stomach or getting bikini ready or how to get sculpted arms and whatever

else. It was so obvious that my body was very flawed based on all these things I was saying. There was so much of my body that needed fixing. Side note, maybe a good companion episode to this one is the episode, Your Body is not flawed because it is not. We're often told it is, but it's not. It's getting better culturally, which is lovely. It used to be we were told that constantly. thankfully that language is shifting but it's still in our psyches for some of us really really deep we are conditioned to see what's wrong about our bodies instead of what's good which is why body positivity is positive like it's great i want us to be positive about our bodies but i think there needs to be a third option and that is body neutrality there are a lot of great voices and teachers in this

so I am not the revolutionary here. I am just a student. But the idea is to see all bodies as good bodies. A body is a body is a body. We don't have to give it a grade as good or as bad. We don't have to force ourselves into false positivity when our pants don't fit anymore. And it takes a little extra mental effort to jump that cultural hurdle of our body suddenly being bad because it got bigger. right sometimes that's hard to get past there's just a lot of freedom though and seeing bodies neutrally you don't like have to psych yourself up to love your body and everything about it all the time it can just be a body like a marvelous amazing body that is yours and it's good no matter how bloated or sprained or sick or thin it is it's just there and it's great and you can live your life

I think that's why I went on like a mini rant in last month's issue of the latest Lacey letter. I thought I would share a little bit with you real quick. Now is the time of year when we're told to wear the shorts and wear the swimsuit. And I wholeheartedly support both of those statements. It's way too hot in North Carolina to not wear shorts. What I am ready to move away from is the bravery of the moms who do those things. I'd say moms, by the way, because I was talking about being a pool mom, so that's why I talk about moms.

Or maybe I'm tired of carried the mantle of confidence when I just want to be regular and wear my suit and no one give me a medal for it. The shape of one's body is neutral. There shouldn't be morality or value statements or even you go girls attached to it. Not in the end anyway. I'm ready for all of us to be in our bodies as they are without it being part of our statement of faith or something. I just want to be a person and wear my swimsuit and no one care. As Kate Kennedy often says, oh my gosh, I quote Kate Kennedy in last week's episode. It would be nice if women were just allowed to exist.

End of the newsletter excerpt. Side note, if you would like to get rants such as this in your inbox, click the link in the show notes or go to the lazy genius collective.com slash join. Okay, but that's what body neutrality is. Just being able to exist. like let's all just exist in our bodies. Number seven, hormones. Who, you guys.

Hormones should not be ignored. Okay, if you are a woman, hormones are a major part, major part of how your body operates and processes information and moves in the world. In the last episode, I mentioned Bill Bryson's book, The Body, and I want to read to you how he defines hormones. It's so fantastic. Okay.

Bill says, hormones are the bicycle couriers of the body, delivering chemical messages all around the teeming metropolis that is you. They are defined as any substance that is produced in one part of the body and causes an action somewhere else. But beyond that, they are not easy to characterize. They come in different sizes, have different chemistries, go to different places, have different effects when they get there. Some are proteins, some are steroids, some are from a group called amines. Aminus, I don't know. They are linked by their purpose, not their chemistry. Our understanding of them is far from complete. And much of what we do know is surprisingly recent. Okay, so that surprisingly recent part, Kate Northrop wrote a book called Do Less. And then Maisie Hill wrote a book called Period Power. I've read both of them. And they would both tell you in their books to notice the power of the patriarchy in that lack of research and knowledge regarding hormones because women weren't in the medical and research fields like and female hormones weren't they weren't studied in detail so it's very recent isn't that the wildest thing but our hormones are a big part of our bodies how they

function how we view our bodies and how we view the world this is this is where a little bit of that body neutrality comes into so when I am ovulating, which is a phrase I never really expected to say on the podcast. But when I'm ovulating, my stomach is always significantly bigger than when I'm not. Like I have to wear a different pair of jeans. I have to wear a different size of jeans. But understanding my hormones and seeing my body in a loving but neutral way, it helps me look at that change in my stomach as just part of my body doing its thing, right? It's not bad or good. It just is. I'm just ovulating. And when I ovulate my hormones and organs and whatever's going on down there, it makes my stomach bigger. So rather than

beating myself up, because I have to wear a pair of jeans in a bigger size, because size equals worth, I just stay comfortable and I wear the pants that fit my body during that time, like totally neutral. Hormones just doing their thing. It's also good to pay attention to what hormones do to your moods and your energies. Every period book I have read, which I've read several, map the cycle, your cycle out in different ways. They like classify it and categorize in different ways. All of them are very helpful. But the one that I resonated with the most that just made a lot of sense to me in my brain was from Kate Northrop's book, Dules. She talks about the cycle in seasons. So the week that you bleed is like winter. It's a great time to rest and reflect if you

think about traditional winter. The week after you bleed is like spring. That's when you probably have more creative energy and new ideas and you're like awakening to everything. The third week is when you ovulate and that's like summer. You're open to the world. You're open to people. You're probably pretty fun to be around. It's where most of us like have more of our charisma. And just if, you know, if you're me, you wear bigger pants. So you can be more comfortable and enjoy yourself. And then the fourth week before your period is like autumn. You're winding down. You're kind of finishing up projects. You might be kind of like isolated. or going inward a little bit. Somewhere in that autumn season is also where you might hold on to

like less than helpful patterns in your work and your relationships and particularly in how kind you are to yourself. Autumn, ironically, it's funny because autumn is a lot of people's favorite season in reality, right? Like the leaves and the latties and stuff. But in hormones, not so much. And that's really good to know like it's neutral it's neutral information the number of times i'm able to catch myself and notice those patterns especially when i'm in autumn is amazingly helpful when i'm in autumn i am weirdly conspiratorial like everyone hates me no one really wants to be my friend everyone that i know is waiting with their lists of all the ways that i have failed them it's like very dire but paying attention to my hormones in this way in this very kind neutral

way is helping me be kinder to my body, right? I know when I need to rest. I know when it's good for me to schedule interviews and hang out with people. I do that in summer, right? I know when to wear the bigger pants without it being like a jumping off point for throwing out all the ice cream in the house. I would never do that anyway. Ice cream is my favorite. Sushi, pizza, and ice cream and a good Caesar salad. I think, and in-season blackberries, if I had only those things, I would be very content. This is not a favorite foods episode, so we will move on. The point is pay attention to your hormones. Aw isn't something we need to travel for.

It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality. of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Number eight, the body is not separate from who you are. Okay, there is a weird paradox. A lot of us carry with this one. We let our bodies determine our worth. If our bodies are not ideal, if we're not crossing that finish line, we think we're supposed to cross with our bodies, we beat ourselves up and think we're not really

worthy and we miss out. We let our perception of our bodies impact our whole life. But also at the same time, hence the paradox, we're completely separate from our bodies. We don't breathe thoughtfully. We don't listen when our headaches or our neck pain or our heart rates are trying to tell us something. We can be very detached from our bodies. But it's all connected. Your body, your mind, your feelings, your soul, they're all connected. When we divorce our bodies or other people's bodies from their humanity, it's not great. I want to give you another, I quoted Sonny Renee Taylor a couple times in the last episode. She wrote a book called The Body is Not an Apology. She says this about fat bodies in her book. The body is not an apology. Making fat familiar means bearing

witness to fat bodies enjoy, pleasure, desire, nature, rest, love, movement, and nourishment. Making fat familiar means bearing witness to fat bodies enjoy, pleasure, desire, nature, rest, love, movement, and nourishment. I think that is just exceedingly beautiful. If we detach, detach the body from those things, from joy and pleasure, and rest and nourishment. We are either living in half measures ourselves or we are not bearing witness to the humanity in the bodies that we have been conditioned

to think are not normal. If we see a body as not normal that doesn't have that privilege that we talked about in the last episode, we're divorcing that person's humanity from them because we're dismissing their body, which means we're dismissing them. We're dismissing their humanity.

The body is not separate from who you are. You can and should embrace your own body and the bodies of others as amazing, good, neutral, and integrated into a person's very being. Number nine, your body is not something to fix. One of my favorite teachers about this is Sarah Landry. she is known on Instagram as the bird's papaya most of her posts are giving us permission to not fix our bodies that they are good as they are she she's kind of run the gamut she has experienced disordered eating she's had four children three of them like over a decade ago and then a new

baby in just the last few months she has been it's it's like an understatement to say that she's been an encouragement to me but she has been like such a powerful encouragement to me both in her words and in her pictures that she puts on Instagram. She shows her body fully in lots of seasons, honoring it each time. There is no fixing. There's only living. Like it makes me want to cry just thinking about it. A lot of what I've said in this episode and in last weeks, it fits under this point pretty broadly.

But I want to say this specifically. Your body is not something to fix. because it isn't flawed. Again, there's an entire episode dedicated to that idea. I told you that last week that there's an episode called The Body's Not Flod. But if you can stop thinking that your body is something to fix, even when it's sick, even when it doesn't function ideally, even when it is changing faster than you're able to process the change, it doesn't mean you have to assume a posture of fixing.

you can be kind to your body and honor your body while still taking small steps to nurture it in a direction that matters to you. But when you dismiss it, when you dismiss your body is something separate that needs to be fixed. You're dismissing your own humanity. You're setting yourself up to delay kindness to yourself because you're just not there yet. And that's not okay. And it's also just not true. And finally, number 10, your body can become a safe place. This one is likely really tricky for some of you, especially people who have experienced some sort of trauma. In a couple of months, we're going to have an episode with Andi Culber, who wrote the book, Try Softer, which I highly recommend. Like, you don't, don't wait for the episode, just like, go get the

book now. The book is for anyone who's ever thought. about therapy or who has also been in it. She's a therapist. It is an essential read for being a person in my opinion. I'm really excited to share my conversation with Andi. That'll be in August. But she speaks to the processing of trauma in our bodies in really kind, informative ways. So I am not an expert in this at all. So I would just like to point you to her. But the point here is that some of you don't see your bodies as a safe place. If you have experienced disordered eating, abuse, discrimination, or something like that, your bodies are very much not safe. They have been at the center of very real trauma. Or maybe when you listened to my episode on intuitive eating,

I got a lot of messages like this. You were like, I can't trust my body to tell me what to eat. I just eat Oreos all the time. If that's your response, your body does not feel like a safe place. This idea of embodiment, being aware of our bodies, being in our bodies, it's a newer one for a lot of us. It might even feel a little bit, definitely might feel strange, maybe even a little dangerous to some people. How are we supposed to be safe in our own bodies? How are we supposed to trust our own bodies? That's a really hard question for a lot of people. I'm going to tell you about another book. There's so many. But I'm am so, I'm so excited about a book that's coming out by a woman that I adore named Hillary McBride.

She is a licensed therapist. She has a PhD. She's releasing a book called The Wisdom of Your Body. Comes out in October. I've been waiting for this book for over a year. It was delayed because of COVID. And I'm like, I just, I just want this book. But we don't have much longer. We don't have much longer to wait for it. But I wanted to read this sentence to you. This is just in the sales copy on like the Amazon page. It says this. Instead of the body being a problem to overcome, our bodies can be the very place where we feel most alive, the seat of our spirituality and our wisdom. So some of these 10 principles are more tangible. You know, they're easier to hold. This one, that the body can be a safe space,

is a bit more ambiguous and it will likely need some personal exploration. And again, I'm not the expert on this. I will put these links to these books in the show notes. But as a person who has been paying more attention to being in my body, to listening to it, trusting it, resting in it, not fighting against it, seeing it as good as being made good, it's a really worthwhile journey to begin. Okay, speaking of links, I will put a ton of links, a ton of them in the show notes to all the books that I've mentioned in both episodes. and some accounts I'm going to encourage you to follow, like some things that actually didn't even mention in the episodes. We might actually end up, as I say that, we might end up putting everything

in a blog post for you to reference. But I will offer as many resources as I can in the easiest way available. Your body's good. It's okay to not be positive about it all the time. Pay attention and honor your hormones. You're not brave for being over 120 pounds and wearing a bikini, you're worthy of existing in whatever way you need to exist. As Sonia Renee Taylor says, your body's not an apology. Your body's not an apology. And seriously, the body by Bill Bryson is fascinating. It's fascinating. So many books to read you guys. Okay. I just love, I love the power of books to broaden how we view the world and ourselves. It just makes me so happy. Okay. Before we go, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week, it's Brandon, who lives in Germany,

which is super fun. She shared her meal matrix, which it has alliteration, which I love, but it also has some great categories that I haven't really seen if you want to steal them. So I'm going to share them. As a reminder, if you're new around here, a meal matrix is basically a plug-in-play for your dinner choices, or breakfast or lunch, for that matter. It's whatever. But it's basically a category that limits your decisions. right? You still get to be flexible and creative if you want within it, but you're not at the mercy of like the entire internet. So Brandon's meal matrix is Mexican Monday, which I'm super into because that's like a loose interpretation of tacos, nachos, burritos, you can have soup and salad, all kinds of things.

I love that, Mexican Monday. So there's Mexican Monday and then testing Tuesday, which is so fun because that could be like an entirely new recipe or just testing to see if changing out this spice for that spice and a recipe that you already make will work, you know, that kind of thing. Whatever Wednesday. Whatever Wednesday, I guess that could be like room to make whatever, right? But it also has this like shrug mentality to it, which I'm into, like whatever, whatever Wednesday. Throwback Thursday. Would this be favorites?

Stuff you haven't had in a while, but like you used to eat a lot? I'm interested in that idea. Pizza Friday, a classic. snooze and Saturday. So maybe like super easy stuff. And then charcutory Sunday, you just put anything on a board and you have a meal. It's so great. This is such a great meal matrix, Brandon. I hope that you guys heard something that you want to use too. But congratulations, Brandon, on being the lazy genius of the week. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for listening, everyone. Until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra. I'll see you next week. felt like you were living just a B or B plus life, it's so dangerous to live that, more dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life, because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of

becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.