Love the Body You Have: Begin to appreciate what and who you see in the mirror.

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What is your actual experience with social media?

Not just what you post, but what you see.

Your feed.

The comments.

The conversations.

The direct messages.

The people you follow.

The standards you are exposed to over and over again.

In this episode, I’m building on the conversation around comparison and competition by looking at how social media can amplify both.

There is a time and a place for comparison.

There is a time and a place for competition.

But social media can make it feel like that time and place is all the time.

You are constantly being shown other people, other lifestyles, other bodies, other accomplishments, other opinions, and other standards.

And it is easy to start measuring yourself against all of it.

I also talk about the common idea that people only post their highlight reels.

Sometimes that is true.

Sometimes people really are sharing parts of their actual life.

But the more important question is not whether what they are posting is completely real, curated, exaggerated, or somewhere in between.

The more useful question is how you respond to it.

What do you think when you see it?

What do you feel?

Does it make you question yourself?

Does it make you feel behind?

Does it make you feel like you need to compete?

Does it change the standards you are using to judge your own life?

There is no right answer here.

There is just your experience.

And the more clearly you understand how social media affects the way you compare yourself and compete with others, the better chance you have of deciding what kind of relationship you actually want to have with it.

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We live in a world that makes comparison incredibly easy.

We compare how we look.

We compare what we have accomplished.

We compare how we perform.

We compare where we are in life to where somebody else appears to be.

In this episode, I’m asking you to get curious about who or what you are comparing yourself to and why.

Who are you competing against?

What are you trying to prove?

What do you think that comparison says about you?

And if you keep asking yourself why, what do you find underneath the first answer?

I talk about using a simple “why” exercise to go a few layers deeper. You may start with one obvious answer and end up somewhere completely different after asking yourself why a few more times.

The important part is trying to observe instead of immediately judging yourself.

That can be difficult because comparison is already a form of judgment.

But there is still value in understanding the pattern.

I also talk about the fact that comparison and competition are not automatically bad.

There can be a time and a place for both.

Competition can be motivating.

Comparison can sometimes give you useful context.

The problem starts when either one becomes the thing that determines your worth.

You do not need to look like somebody else, perform like somebody else, or live like somebody else in order to be enough.

There is room for other people to win.

There is room for you to win too.

And most of the time, you are running your own race anyway.

So notice where comparison shows up.

Notice who you are competing with.

And most importantly, get curious about why.

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What is your inner dialogue actually like?

In this episode, I’m talking about the thoughts that show up when you look in the mirror and how quickly one thought can turn into a whole chain of thoughts before you even realize what happened.

Maybe you notice the first thought.

Maybe you do not catch it until you are seven or eight thoughts deep and wondering how you got there.

That matters.

What is your inner dialogue like on a good day?

What is it like on a bad day?

How does the way you think about what you see in the mirror affect the way you talk to who you see in the mirror?

And how much can that impact the rest of your day?

For some people, one difficult moment in front of the mirror can carry into everything that comes after it.

The same thing can happen with the scale.

If the number is not what you hoped for, does that change the way you see your body?

Does it change the way you see yourself as a person?

I also talk about why leading with more kindness toward yourself makes sense, even though it is not always easy.

You spend more time with yourself than anyone else.

But you also have a lifetime of thoughts, messages, experiences, and beliefs that may have shaped the way you talk to yourself now.

That is why I keep coming back to the idea of deciding how you want to see yourself, then reinforcing that choice with your thoughts and actions.

You already know how to reinforce a belief.

The question is whether the belief you are reinforcing is helping you.

So pay attention to your inner dialogue.

Notice what is already working.

Notice what needs to change.

And start practicing the way you want to talk to yourself moving forward.

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Last time, we talked about getting clear on how you see yourself right now.

The next question is, how would you like to see yourself?

In this episode, I’m talking about why that question is worth coming back to again and again.

How you see yourself today and how you want to see yourself are both moving targets. They may shift a little from day to day, and sometimes they may shift a lot.

That is okay.

The important part is knowing where you are and having some sense of where you want to go.

You can be completely honest about what you want, even if it feels unrealistic from where you are right now.

You do not need to already believe you are there.

You just need to know the direction.

That is where the mirror exercise can become more useful.

When you stand in front of the mirror for fifteen, thirty, or sixty seconds, you are not just trying to force yourself to feel differently.

You are practicing a new way of seeing yourself.

You are reinforcing it with your thoughts.

You are reinforcing it with your actions.

And when the old way of seeing yourself shows back up, which it will, you can practice redirecting yourself toward the way you are trying to see yourself now.

You are not going to do that perfectly.

That is not the goal.

The goal is to keep practicing.

Where are you now?

Where do you want to go?

And what would it look like to keep moving in

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What do you actually see when you look in the mirror?

Do your eyes immediately go to one particular area?

What thoughts come up?

What do you feel?

And what do you say to yourself?

In this episode, I’m talking about why getting completely clear on where you are right now matters before you try to change the way you see yourself.

That means being honest.

Do not sugarcoat it.

Write down what you notice, even if some of it surprises you.

The point is not to judge yourself for what comes up. The point is to understand the current pattern.

Because if you do not like the way you feel about what and who you see in the mirror, you can work on changing it.

But first, you need to know what is actually there.

I also talk about why understanding how you got to this point can be important. There are often years of experiences, comments, expectations, insecurities, and outside messages behind the way we see ourselves.

That is also where having a productive working relationship with the right therapist can help.

You do not need to have all of this figured out immediately.

You just need to start noticing.

Where are you right now?

How did you get here?

And can you look at that honestly without turning it into another reason to judge yourself?

That last part takes practice.

But it is worth practicing.

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What if some of the thoughts and feelings you have around food also show up in the way you think about your body?

In this episode, I introduce a term I like to call body noise.

You may already be familiar with the phrase food noise, which is often used to describe the constant thoughts, feelings, and mental chatter someone experiences around food. My interest here is not in giving you another rigid definition. It is in helping you notice whether some of those same patterns also exist around your body.

Do guilt, shame, anxiety, criticism, or constant mental commentary show up when you think about food?

Do any of those same thoughts or feelings show up when you look at your body?

Maybe there is a lot of overlap. Maybe there is very little. Either answer gives you useful information.

I talk about why labels can be helpful when they give us language to recognize a pattern, but why I become much more cautious when someone else starts telling you exactly what those thoughts mean or exactly how you are supposed to respond to them.

I want you to notice first.

Define your experience for yourself.

And while you are doing that, remember that you are surrounded by messaging designed to influence how you feel about food, fitness, appearance, and yourself. This is not simply about trying harder or having more willpower.

I also come back to the idea I want to stick much more than the phrase body noise.

Love the body you have.

That means appreciating what you see in the mirror, but it also means going underneath the surface and learning to appreciate who you see.

You do not have to do that perfectly.

The goal is to make self appreciation the place you return to more often, notice when old thoughts show up, and practice redirecting yourself without judging the fact that those thoughts appeared in the first place.

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Where did your ideas about body image actually begin?

In this episode, I’m asking you to think back to the earliest messages you remember about what an attractive body was supposed to look like, what was considered desirable, and how those ideas were presented to you.

For most of us, it was probably not just one thing.

It may have been what we saw in media, what we heard at home, what people around us talked about, what brands and companies promoted, or what was implied even when nobody said anything directly.

And those standards have probably changed more than once throughout your life.

That matters because it shows us that a lot of what we think of as “normal” or “ideal” was never fixed in the first place. The target keeps moving.

I talk about why understanding where these beliefs started can help you see the rules of the game more clearly. A lot of marketing works by convincing you that there is something wrong with you, then offering you the thing that is supposed to fix it.

That is one of the reasons I keep coming back to the opposite approach.

You are enough right now.

And if you have spent years being hypercritical of your body or feeling self-conscious about how you look, then changing that default takes intention and practice.

That is why I like simple actions like standing in front of a mirror for fifteen, thirty, or sixty seconds and deliberately building yourself up.

You are not going to erase decades of messaging overnight.

But you can start creating a new default.

You can choose how you want to see yourself, practice reinforcing that choice, and slowly change the relationship you have with the person looking back at you.

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Are you waiting to really start living until after your body changes?

Maybe there is something you want to do, somewhere you want to go, something you want to wear, or some version of life you keep telling yourself you will step into once you reach a certain goal.

In this episode, I’m talking about why I do not want you to put your life on hold while you wait for your body to change.

One of the biggest problems with tying your life to a future body goal is that the change itself may not feel the way you expect it to. If you have spent months or years building up the idea that everything will feel easier, better, or more complete once you reach a certain weight or look a certain way, the reality can be disappointing.

That is why I keep coming back to building a forever active lifestyle around your actual preferences.

How do you like to eat most days? How many meals work for you? What kinds of workouts or movement do you enjoy? What can you realistically and consistently do right now?

Start there.

When your eating, exercise, and lifestyle habits are built around what works for you, you can make progress without making your entire life wait for the result.

At the same time, I know “just live your life now” can sound simple when there may be a much deeper emotional reason behind why you are waiting.

That part matters too.

So ask yourself what you are waiting to do, why you believe your body has to change first, and what one step you could take toward that life now.

Time is valuable.

You do not have to wait for a different body to start using it.

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What story are you telling yourself about your body right now?

And once you start thinking about that, how much of that story is really about your body, and how much of it is about how you see yourself as a person?

In this episode, I’m continuing the conversation around body image, self image, and the way those two things can become intertwined.

We all tell ourselves stories. We decide what something means, how we are going to see it, and then we reinforce that belief with the thoughts we keep choosing and the actions we keep taking.

That can work against us, but it can also work for us.

I talk about why I believe we sometimes need to decide first how we want to see ourselves, then look for ways to reinforce that decision. We do not always wait for proof before we form a belief. A lot of the time, we form the belief first and then notice the things that support it.

That is especially important when it comes to body image and self worth.

If the story you are telling yourself about your body is negative, limiting, or tied too closely to your worth as a person, the first step is not judging yourself for it. The first step is noticing it clearly.

What do you see when you look at yourself?

What meaning have you attached to what you see?

And what story are you reinforcing every time you think about your body?

You can change that story, but first you need to understand the one you are already telling.

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How you see your body and how you see yourself as a person can become deeply connected.

I think the goal is not to pretend those two things have nothing to do with each other. It is to understand where they overlap, where they are different, and where they may have become tangled together over time.

In this episode, I talk about learning to appreciate what you see in the mirror while also remembering that your appearance does not have to become your entire identity.

I share more of my own experience living with cerebral palsy. I am proud of my body, proud of what it allows me to do, and proud of the things that make me different. At the same time, there are real moments of frustration. There are times when my brain and body do not communicate the way I want them to, or when simply moving through day-to-day life requires more energy than I would like.

Those feelings can exist together.

Appreciating yourself does not mean you have to love every single thing about your body every second of every day. You can be thankful for your body and still get frustrated with it. You can appreciate what makes you different and still have moments where those differences feel difficult.

The important part is understanding that what you see on the outside is only one part of who you are.

As you journal on this episode, think about how much of your appearance has become connected to your identity. How do you feel about your body? How do you feel about yourself as a person? Where do those answers overlap, and where are they completely separate?

There is no universal right answer here.

The goal is to understand your answer.