Well with Arielle Lorre - 70: How I Radically Transformed My Approach to Wellness & Found True Peace + Listener Q&A

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

In this episode I reflect on what practices radically transformed my life when it comes to everything from sobriety to happiness, inner peace, body image and my approach to health and wellness. I also talk how to stay consistent without being rigid, what workouts I’m loving right now, how I’m prepping food to stay healthy and how I’m managing my time between school, work and life. I also do a rapid fire Q&A with your questions at the end, tell you why I ate a plate of bacon before I got married and how I really feel about shredding for the wedding. Yup, it’s random! www.functionofbeauty.com/BLONDE for 20% off your first order! Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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without your rice-adviseur or SunnyCars. The following podcast is a dear media production. Hey, welcome to the Blond Files podcast. I'm your host, Ariel Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in

between, no topic is off limits. I know there is so much information out there, so I'm here to help you navigate it all and live your best life. Thanks for listening. Let's get into it. Okay. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show.

welcome to a solo episode today. I have been meaning to do one of these for a while now. I think I haven't done one in a couple months. And I've been kind of all over the place with what I wanted to focus this episode on. But in the spirit of my recent birthday and some of the podcasts that I've done recently and some of your questions, I'm feeling kind of reflective, kind of spiritual. So I'm going to just go back and talk about like life lessons and growth and what the key to finding peace with my body and with myself over the years has really been. I think we know that I can tend to digress. So we'll see.

But whenever I ask you guys over on Instagram what you want to hear a solo about, the answers are usually around like sobriety, gut and hormonal health, body image. and diet and exercise and self-love. And I think, and I could be wrong, but I think people want to hear the magic solutions to each of these areas. So like how to eat and how to move for optimal physical results, how to have the perfect microbiomes and perfect hormones

and how to love ourselves. and how to love ourselves and love what we see in the mirror. With the caveat being that what we see in the mirror must look good from that diet and exercise we were just talking about. So I just want to say that I get it. I totally get it. For years, I looked to other people to find the answers. And I realized the irony here because I'm a quote-unquote influencer, right?

My literal job is to share my life on the internet and people may or may not be persuaded to take certain actions based off what they see. But I just, I just want to save you guys from going down the rabbit hole that I went down when it came to my health and really my happiness. I was looking forward in all the wrong places when I was newly sober. And by newly sober, I mean my first couple of years. I always attribute this to my having been kind of checked out for 10 years. So when I got sober, I had no clue what it meant to be healthy. I had no clue how to be content. I didn't know how to be intuitive when it came to my life. So I found my inspiration elsewhere, mainly on the internet. And you guys know my story probably with how my Instagram account even

came to fruition and what the focus was in the beginning and how I got to where I am now. But the condensed version was I found an online workout program. I did said workout program and obsessively tracked my progress and before and afters and I cut out certain food groups. I reincorporated those food groups, but I tracked macros, and then I cut macros, and simultaneously, I had gut and hormonal issues going on. I got really thin, really lean. I hit a wall, and I had to stop, like, fully stop. That's kind of the bread and butter of the story. So it was advised to me when I hit that wall to just reduce the intensity of my workouts, I really had so many issues going on and I was so drained of energy that I couldn't even do that.

There was no reducing. There was only stopping for me. And this is where my real transformation started. So they say that sometimes things have to fall apart to come together. And that's been my life experience over and over and over again. I always say that I'm a rock bottom girl. I need to hit rock bottom with whatever I'm dealing with to learn my lesson and be motivated and willing to make changes. It happened with my sobriety. It happened with my health in this instance. It's happened numerous times in the last few years with everything

from work to stress to school, to relationships. And I hopefully will get. get to that later. But really in retrospect, my life since getting sober is just a series of surrenders over and over again. And those surrenders are what ultimately bring me peace. And this is why. Surrendering doesn't mean giving up. Surrendering for me is turning over my control to the universe or my higher power or God or whatever you believe in, whatever you want to call it, don't get caught up in semantics. It's just turning over the outcome. The absolute key to my happiness is living fully in the present moment, minute to minute, accepting that moment as it is. And that doesn't mean that I can't take certain actions towards certain things that I want to achieve or

take actions in that moment to guide myself in a certain direction, right? But I have to let go of my expectations and surrender the outcome. When I do this, you guys, there's literally zero struggle in my life. And this is really an ancient principle that so many spiritual practices are built upon, this idea of living in the present, accepting the present, and not focusing on outcomes, it's also part of the foundational principles of recovery, but it takes a while to really grow into and practice this day in, day out. And for me, like I was saying before, I had to get uncomfortable enough over and over and over again to finally say, like, F it. All I can do is the next thing I'm going to do in this moment. And I can do things to plan for another moment, but I'm not living there. I'm not

living in that future. I'm, I'm right here, right now. Have you guys ever seen an advertisement for a hair product or read about it in a magazine or saw an influencer or celebrity swear by it only to try it yourself and be totally disappointed? Like this shampoo or hair product that you thought would be the one, the one to give you that lush, perfect, healthy, main, and then you try it and it turns out it's just like all the rest, because same, and I'm here to tell you, there is a solution. So function of beauty is hair care that is specifically formulated for you. No matter your hair type, they create shampoo, conditioner, and treatments to fit all your unique needs.

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Hi, I'm Claire Mazur and I'm Erica Serulo. We're the co-host of a podcast called A Thing or Two. Comes out every Monday and the basic premise is this. We share all the stuff we think more people should know about. So that's apps, recipes, books, the nationwide Hagen-Daz vanilla bean shortage that nobody else was talking about. No one. No one. Our preferred vacuum brands of which we have multiples and critical explorations of our unique approaches to paper towel usage. Listen, we think you're going to like it.

A lot of people do. And who's to say you'll be any different? Listen and subscribe wherever it is. You listen and subscribe to podcasts. So there we go. My first tangent of the day. Maybe you are thinking, okay, how did we go from body image and nutrition and exercise to this?

I guess I'm wondering the same thing, but I'm going to tie it all together. So this is super relevant because when I was forced to stop, to stop counting macros, stop doing the high intensity exercise I was doing, stop taking progress pictures, all of it. I couldn't focus on external things anymore to control and manage how I was feeling inside. Because doing all of those things was really to control and manage not only my body, but to control and manage how I felt about myself. And the ironic thing is that I thought if I had a certain body, abs and all, I'd feel a certain way. But you know what? I felt like shit.

I felt like shit. Not just physically, but mentally. I didn't see what I actually looked like in the mirror. I just saw things I wanted to change. and I was so worried that if I ate the wrong thing or I missed a workout that it would all come undone. But I was really using diet and exercise to control how I felt on the inside. And I was just waiting for that day when I was lean enough to finally love my reflection, I guess. So when I stopped doing all that, I had to find ways to deal with my emotions and deal with myself.

and luckily I had a strong foundation in recovery and I had so many tools from that and tools to deal with my emotions, tools to deal with myself. But I really want to acknowledge this here because I get messages daily from people who want a flatter stomach or want leaner legs and essentially want to change their bodies, which I totally understand by the way. And I really encourage you if you're one of those people who is dissatisfied with your body to explore why. What is your reason? How do you feel emotionally? What's really going on inside? If you're not in recovery and maybe don't have these tools that I speak of, try meditating, which I'll get to, or even just journaling about it. Look, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be in shape, but I really think most of us kind of like

teeter on the line of an unhealthy preoccupation with it. And why wouldn't we? We're constantly inundated with perfection everywhere we look these days. So if you want to change something about yourself, try to get down to your why. Nothing beats pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. And truly, you might be shocked at what you learn when you just write things down, just let it flow. I had no idea that my identity and self-esteem was wrapped up in my body until I got to writing. And the key to freedom with all of this, I really believe, begins with awareness. Anyway, also, it was suggested to me that I had a little problemo with stress. And so I really had to address that. And that's when I began experimenting with meditation. And I did guided meditations on apps like Insight Timer and Ananda. And it was all nice and

fine and different things work for different people. So I'm not like putting any other form of meditation down. But I guess I just felt like all I was doing was kind of relaxing and listening to somebody else for a few minutes out of my day rather than listening to my head. And around this time, I started noticing that a lot of people around me and a lot of people I admired were proponents of transcendental meditation. And I'm not going to go too much into TM because next week's episode is all about this, but I will touch on it. I was a TM skeptic, as I know many of you are, because whenever I talk about it on Instagram, I get the comments about TM being a cult and TM being ridiculous because you have to pay for it. So I get it. I scoffed at it, in fact, pointing to those things. I pointed to the fact that

you have to pay. I mean, God forbid, we have to pay to be taught something nowadays, right? We're so entitled. And, you know, the fact that, like, who has time to meditate twice a day and all these famous people do it? And it seems like a cult, like Scientology or something and blah, blah, blah. Really, I was just intimidated by it. So for those who don't know, TM is taught by certified TM teachers, and this is to protect the purity of it. So that it's not. pass down like a game of telephone. But you'll hear more about that on next week's episode. But anyway, you're given your own mantra and you meditate twice a day in silence repeating this mantra in your head. That's it. It's the only meditation that I know of that has tons of research

supporting its benefits in peer-reviewed journals. It produces a certain type of brainwave that's not produced at any other time. It allows you to reach the depth of the depth of of your mind and the depths of relaxation. And in my experience, you can see this absolute truth of your life. And it is so freaking effortless. So I started doing TM two years ago and you guys, it changed my life just on the second day of my lessons. It was crazy. It profoundly reduced my anxiety and my stress, both in my mind and in my body. And it improved my sleep and, like, It made me kind of inexplicably happy. So I know it sounds like a panacea and it kind of was, but it gave me the gift of being able to be fully present in the moment, to fully tune into my body and to fully accept myself and my life.

And this is the key to all of this for me. So with this, all of a sudden I was able to approach life differently. I could recognize what I need when it comes to movement because I'm so in tune with my energy levels on any given day. And I'm also very aware of like hunger versus desire. So at Cartoll, who some of you probably know is like my spiritual guru crush, he talks about people who struggle with overeating or binge eating. And he talks about having awareness around desire. So meditating brought awareness to everything I do, and that has enabled me to make certain decisions that benefit me. And you guys, if you accept yourself in this moment, like radical acceptance,

the actions you take will be done from a place of love rather than a place of punishment. So if you don't meditate or if this all sounds a little too good to be true, or if this sounds like BS, I promise you. I've talked about it before, but slowing down and bringing awareness and mindfulness into our lives, especially when it comes to things like diet and exercise, really makes it pretty effortless. So there's an app by an addiction expert. His name is Dr. Judson Brewer. I believe he's a professor at Brown. And it's really the first of its kind. It's called Eat Right Now, and it helps you to learn mindfulness around eating. It's not a diet app. It's to help cultivate awareness. And it's an amazing place to start. And you can listen to him on Armchair Expert Podcast, which is where I learned about it and where I learn a lot of things. This is not an ad. This is just genuinely something that I found to be really helpful. And I definitely recommend it for anyone struggling with binging and craving and anyone who feels like they just eat kind of unconsciously. Everyone wants to eat intuitively, right?

But it's really hard to just start. And I think this is a great step. Anyway, now, of course, I can look back and see how, in hindsight, being forced to stop everything that I was doing and find a different approach and look inward, you know, at the time that felt like such a punishment. And now I can see it as such a gift. And it really, really shifted my entire approach to life, but also my entire approach to wellness and, you know, everyone wants the secret sauce when it comes to body image and achieving

a certain look and I get it. And I also want to be clear that you can have goals and you can want to eat healthy and work out, but I'm telling you in my experience, the real results come when you can go within, you can find contentment outside of all of that. You can find contentment deep inside of yourself and it just changes everything. I don't want to invalidate the experience of people who need to or want to legitimately, sorry, lose weight for the right reasons. I just, I really believe that you can't leave out that internal piece of it. And I have talked to so many people who have gone through this and everybody comes to the same conclusion. But I guess I'll shift here because the question I often get is how can I live in the present and be happy and accepting

of the now and also create healthy habits outside of that. So I know that it can take time to go from like whatever your starting point is to being able to wake up and tune into your body and figure out what type of movement you want to do for the day and just kind of have this intuition. And, you know, obviously doing some sort of exercise or eating healthy even when you don't feel like it can be rewarding and can help create shifts that really impact our lives. I guess it just comes down again to the motivation and the intention behind it. Am I doing this for self-care? Am I doing this to feel good? Am I doing this because it's enhancing my life in some way? Or am I doing this out of fear or out of punishment. You can want to get in shape or tone up or create healthier habits and do it from

a well-intentioned place and that will make the difference between whether your actions are sustainable or not. I have to admit, I totally fell off track the last few weeks with exercise because I was starting homework at like 6 a.m. and doing it all day and then switching gears to do work work and then going back to homework and then it was time to go to sleep. And sure enough, I hit rock bottom and had to come back to all of this stuff that I'm talking about. So here's how I'm living in the present and not being rigid, but also making sure I do things that are good for me. So I'm carving out like 45 minutes to an hour each morning and committing to like a 20 minute formal workout of some sort, whether that's Melissa Wood or Pilates by Amanda or something else. I also really like

Ramey's workouts, but those are a little bit longer. And then maybe a walk. Or I can do like a longer workout if I have time. Break it up however I want. I can figure out what I feel aligned with in the morning, but at least I have that time carved out and I know I'm going to do something. If I don't carve the time out and I don't feel like I want to do anything, I'm not going to do anything. But But sometimes it's just about showing up and then figuring out, like, in the moment, what I want to do. So I'm not telling myself, okay, body, you're going to do 30 minutes of hit and you're going to do it whether you like it or not. No, maybe that works for some people, but definitely not me. All you have to do is go back and listen to Elisa Viti's episode from a few weeks ago where she talks about just how much our bodies change and fluctuate throughout the month to unlawful.

understand why this may not be the best approach. So anyway, when I have the time blocked off, I can just go into it like, I'm going to move. And what that looks like depends on how well I slept and how much energy I have and how stressed I am, et cetera. So if you're struggling with finding the motivation or just struggling with sticking to a program or something, I would highly recommend trying this. Just block off however much time you can afford in your calendar. and just tell yourself, like, this is my time to show up to move and, and just commit to that part. And then in that moment, you can figure it out. And, you know, it doesn't have to be like this huge intense workout every time. And it's so much more rewarding when you can kind of like

intuitively get down to what your body is really craving. Sometimes I do like a really intense workout. And then other times the best I can do is like an eight minute Melissa Wood arm. and then I go take my dog for a walk. But I stick to my commitment and I feel good because I showed up. And I think that's why this method is so effective. The showing up part is rewarding and reinforcing because no matter what, we feel better having shown up than not and making that commitment to ourselves, regardless of how much we work out. So we want to show up the next day and the next day and so on. Speaking of time blocking, A lot of people have asked about how I'm handling having a lot of different things on my plate. And just for reference, as you know, I'm back in school.

And I'll tell you why this summer was intense. I took two summer classes, so it doesn't sound like much. But the classes were six weeks instead of a typical semester. So that was already a lot of work condensed down into a short amount of time. And then on top of that, one of my classes was a math class, a very accelerated math class. not the worst thing in the world, but it was 362 topics to learn in six weeks. And it's basically self-taught. And I have not taken math in like 15 years. So it was a lot to catch up on in a short amount of time. It was a shitload of homework and four exams and then add on the podcast

and Instagram work and my blog and newsletter, et cetera, et cetera, and my recovery program and all of it. And it was like very, very overwhelming. And I know that. And I know that. And I know that this is something a lot of people can relate to because we all have a lot on our plates, whether that's school, work, our families, maybe unemployment and the stress that comes with that, whatever it is. And on top of that, we are just living in a time of collective uncertainty and anxiety and tension. And I keep coming back to this. But the best way that I know how to handle this is to get really granular and just accept the moment, be in the moment, try not to pay attention to the noise, stay out of toxic places like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram can be toxic, a lot of cable

news, you know, it can really clutter our minds. And I know myself, I get super agitated when I'm putting too much energy or getting that energy back from those places. So just do the next right thing you have to do, then the next thing, then the next. And so that's what I try to do. But for organization, I found that like getting a whiteboard calendar, blocking off my days, like I mentioned, is really helpful so that I can schedule in important things like that hour in the morning. I can schedule in my meditation. When I'm going to be doing homework, when I'm doing work, work, this is important when I'm not doing any work, super important. So I know it's all organized. And then I can come back to the now. I can come back to the present moment. I don't have to worry about getting things

done because I know it'll happen. So if you're struggling with stress and organization and staying in the moment and all of that, this is a great way to kind of set boundaries and guidelines for yourself, this blocking of time. And then you can get really granular with it and just do what needs to be done in that moment. So I have things like Zoom meetings and phone calls scheduled in my phone so I don't miss anything, but the whiteboard is great because I'm a very visual person and I love to see it all laid out in front of me. And then, of course, there is the satisfaction of erasing something when it's done. I hope you all listened to last week's episode with Dr. Ellen Vora. She really got me with that piece about a scarcity mindset. I am fully that person whose default is

like there's not enough time. Don't ask me to do anything for you because don't you know how busy I am? Like must be nice to get to watch a movie tonight, Chuck. You know, I just, my default is like resentment and scarcity. Like, poor me, crime me a river. But that attitude derives from me not being in the now. It's me living in the future where I have catastrophized some outcome that's probably not going to happen. It's me having to be perfect. You know, whatever that says about me. I'm sure there's a lot there. Fear and people pleasing and people pleasing is just dishonesty and trying to get people to like you. It's all of that. So as they say in recovery, it's a thousand forms of self running riot. It's just me, me, me. And that's just like ego. But anyway, I am going into territory that I don't think I should go into today. Maybe another day. But yeah, So dealing with stress has been letting go of outcomes, doing what I can in the moment, taking care of my mind through meditation, scheduling in free time, which is just as important as productive time, being organized, all of that. I guess I'll touch on nutrition because it is a big piece to all of this. And here's why.

If I am not nourishing myself and I'm like eating breakfast, then not eating until 3 p.m., then suddenly I'm starving. I'm going to inhale everything in the kitchen. that I'm going to feel awful. And I can't tell you exactly what to eat to feel fueled and satiated and nourished all the time. We're all different and we all have different preferences and all of that. But these are some of the staples I always have. And as always, it's best for me to be prepared so that I just don't have to worry about it. And I know that there's something there.

So I always have like buckwheat for cream of buckwheat. cereal, which is really just water and buckwheat, which is like oats. And then I add vanilla protein powder to it. I love, I think it's Truvani. So, so good, vanilla plant based. And then I add some fruits and hemp and chia seeds and nuts and berries and that's breakfast. Or I'll have eggs and sourdough. Dr. B really got me going on a sourdough kick. And then I just buy vegetables in bulk, like a lot. And I roast them and saute them and I store them. And I store them. And I store them. And then I have them to incorporate into my meals for a few days or make a meal just out of the vegetables. So I like kale, butternut squash.

Right now, what else? Carrots, eggplants, spaghetti squash. I add pumpkin seeds to that nutritional yeast, all of that good stuff. And I can make a meal out of that any time. And I'll add like tahini, maybe some protein if I'm feeling it, you know, make it more nutrient dense because vegetables are. not really, I mean, vegetables are great, but I need to have more density to my meals than that. So this way, I always have something healthy to turn to when I feel hungry. And I also like to make a big salad with apple cider vinegar dressing, which is really good for the gut. So having all of

this on hand makes me less likely to snack through the day and really eat to support my body, have energy, be in a good mood. I mean, blood sugar crashes make me super irritable. I don't know about you. And of course, my body responds by not being bloated and having the energy to work out and all of that good stuff. So nutrition is one of the things I get asked about most often, and I really, really can't emphasize enough how important it is to have all the nourishing foods on hand and how important it is to be prepared so that you're making good rational decisions rather than making impulsive, unconscious decisions based off of like hangar and blood sugar crashes. And meal delivery is a great way to do this too if you can't shop or cook.

And you know I love my Sakara. So that's also a good option. The solution is going to be different for everybody. And some people might do really well with a rigid structured approach, but that is just not where I thrive. I have also experienced over and over again. that what worked for me last year, even last month, for sure, doesn't work for me now. And we're constantly changing. And so the real key here is tuning into ourselves to connect to that intuition, to be able to give ourselves what we need in the moment. And sometimes I miss the mark,

but it's just so much less of a struggle than constantly trying to force myself into something like I used to do. And I also have to mention. and that when we can connect to something deeper within ourselves and something spiritual, we get fulfilled on such a deep level. And external things just really don't have much consequence. Story, after I've been like diving super deep into my meditation and spirituality and all of that this past week, I mean, I try to be consistent with it. But ever since recording the episode on TM, I'm like on fire for it again. and feeling the amazing benefits of that. But I'm also noticing how these external things that sometimes give me pleasure and validation are not doing that. Like you might have seen on Instagram,

my birthday was at the beginning of this week and my husband gave me this beautiful watch that I'd always wanted. And I will admit there are times in my life where sometimes that would have like really given me a boost. And I was so. bummed because I was like, man, I mean, I love it. I can appreciate it. But I was like, damn it, it doesn't make me feel good. That sucks. And I was talking about it with my therapist. And I was like, you know, I guess I'm just like really fulfilled on like a really deep internal level where like the really good stuff and the external, you know, kind of material stuff and the bad stuff. I don't I don't really want to call it bad. But, you know, the stress and and fear.

uncertainties of right now. Those aren't really getting me either. So I'm going to totally switch gears here and do a little Q&A from Instagram. And I always ask my guests to do rapid fire when we do a Q&A and it's so hard. There's nothing rapid fire about me, but I'm going to see if I can do it. So let's see. My biggest take from my last birthday to this one, let go. That's it. Let go. how to begin to cultivate a spiritual practice and fill the void, meditation. And I would also add, let helping other people, whether it's in your relationships or your work, wherever, let that be your focus. Even if you work in an office job or you're not even going into an office right now,

as I don't think anybody is, whatever your situation is, ask yourself, how can I be helpful for everyone today. And just try that, trust me. Skincare routine, I'm doing a complete overhaul skincare boot camp right now. So I'll do a more in-depth update on this when things calm down because I am purge city over here. Going back to school, how I feel about it now and advice for someone considering it. I would say if it's consistently been on your mind, just do it. Don't wait. It's daunting. I am right now, but it's also exciting. Managing money, this is a whole other episode, and so many people ask me about it, so I won't go too much into it. I'm an obsessive saver. That's all I will say. How I switched from macros to intuitive eating. Go back and listen to

the body episode. I think it was in June, or May or June. What led me to get sober? Go back and listen to. I'm Ariel and I'm an alcoholic. That's from April. How do I ignore other people's negativity? I just don't have the tolerance for it in my life. And if I get like activated by someone, I try to just pray for their peace and happiness. It sounds so woo-woo, but it works. Career advice says to always be authentically you and it will work out. Is this true? Well, I've kind of forged my own path career-wise, but yes, in my experience, it's so important. Otherwise, you're going to burn out from living a lie. How to tell people you don't drink without making it weird. I think the weird thing is people expecting everyone to want to drink. It's 2020. There are so

many reasons for not wanting to do it. But you could just say you're taking a break. No explanation needed. Or you just don't feel like it. I mean, really, it's nobody's business. Why? And I think that people feel self-conscious and think that other people care more than they actually do. If somebody is weirded out that you don't drink, that's their own shit. Have I done body tightening? No, I've never done anything neck down. Advice I'd give my 20-year-old self. I always joke, put down the blow and pick up a passion.

But that's the truth. I would also add, meditate, find yourself, help other people, find your calling. Go to school. My experience with wellness, it's always changing. I am always evolving. It's not concrete. It's not a final place. It's how I approach my life daily.

What it means to truly be healthy. I would say making decisions out of support and love for myself. Sorry, I'm going through my Instagram story responses. How to feel good about flaws. stay off the internet and get out in the real world and focus on what I'm doing for other people versus ruminating on it. Going back to school as a non-traditional student, that's just a nice way of calling me old. It's totally different. It's totally different in a good way. My mind is still sharp and I absorb information because I actually care now and I have a work ethic as an

adult, which I did not have when I was younger and just trying to get through school so that I could go party. As a young sober person, how to find relationships with people outside of AA? I would say find like-minded people that share similar interests, whether that's through like a yoga or Pilates class, a book club, cooking classes, whatever your things are. Obviously it's hard now, but just find people that you can be yourself with. Okay, I'm going to do one more. I had tips for prepping for wedding, food stress, mental health, and tips leading up to the big day. Well, I can't really do this one rapid fire. And maybe I should do a whole marriage and wedding episode because I do get a lot of questions around this.

But I can tell you wholeheartedly, I do not remember, nor do I care what my body looked like when I got married. It was actually the least important part of the day for me. So true story, my big bridal breakfast was actually a plate of bacon. I was nervous and I was running around and I had family in town because we got married in Manhattan. And they all went to breakfast near our apartment. So I like ran out to meet them before hair and makeup and I was just like, I was just nervous. It's weird. I and I've heard a lot of people say this. I was not nervous at all at any point of it. And then. the night before I started having a panic attack. And I don't think that's ominous. I've heard other happily married people say that that happened to them. And I think the nerves for me were more like, I don't know. I just, I don't like, this is going to sound ironic, I don't like having all eyes on me, having all the attention. And it just, I don't know. It was just stressful. But anyway, so I nervous ate a ton of bacon. So anyway, I digress. There's already so many emotions going

into freaking marriage and a wedding, I really think you can just ruin the experience with obsessing over how you look. Like, you're going to look beautiful no matter what. It is such a magical day and that just emanates and brides are all beautiful. Like, I don't know. I just feel like, I know it's a thing. People want to look as perfect as possible. I just don't see it leading anywhere but misery. As I've talked about, like a broken record, when I've reached my goal body in the past, It didn't even feel like it when I had it. It felt like I needed to fix more. So I would suggest doing everything I talked about in this episode, get in tune with

yourself, get present, slow down, nourish yourself with real food, find some movement you love, and just embrace everything leading up to and including the big day because it is so, so special. So, I don't know, I got a loose drapey wedding dress and I ate all the pasta and it was the best day of my life. Food for thought, pun intended. All right, that's it for today. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you liked it, and if you like the show in general, please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes a long way, and it's actually the best way to support the show. Also, if you want to see more about each episode, you can head over

to The Blonde Files podcast on Instagram. I'm always posting about each episode there or over on my personal page at Ariel Laurie.