Ep. 2- Weight Loss and Wellness Transcript
[00:00:00] In today's episode, I go over some of the myths associated with weight loss and neurodivergent women. The ways that centering weight loss is actually harmful for your sustainable health
and how and when to successfully incorporate weight loss into your wellness journey.
Weight loss does not actually equal wellness,
especially for neurodivergent women who have been experiencing burnout and chronic illness. It's very common as one of the experiences of medical gas lighting to go to your doctor and for them to tell you that you just need to lose weight.
When in reality pursuing weight loss can be one of the worst things that you do for your healing.
When I started in health coaching about a [00:01:00] decade ago, I initially got started because for me, health was about energy. And it was about functionality and it was about genuine healing and having the ability to move through your life in the way that felt right for you and not being limited by your
health.
But at that time, health coaching was almost synonymous with weight loss and fitness and your physical appearance.
I started health coaching, because I myself had come back from this place of significant illness and injury.
To a place of strength and energy and functionality.
And for me, that journey of wellness before I started coaching was so healing, not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally, and I recognized that there was
A [00:02:00] huge component of trauma healing that was happening for me in that process, and I wanted so much to share that experience with others and to support and facilitate that experience for them.
The company that I was working with at the time was very much in that mainstream health coaching approach of, it's all about the way you look. It's about a number on the scale. It's about fitness, it's about weight loss. And my health coaching business was not very successful
Because of. Multiple reasons. One of them being that I felt a lot of pressure to market in the way I was being told to market my business, which was marketing towards weight loss and marketing towards physical fitness and appearance.
Now, after about a decade in the coaching industry, [00:03:00] moving through creativity coaching. High performance coaching, executive functioning coaching.
I've circled back around
to wellness coaching because in all of those other areas of coaching, especially in working with neurodivergent women, I've recognized that when you don't have a strong foundation of physical wellness that there is a direct correlation between your level of physical wellness and your ability to access and utilize these different forms of coaching.
I've also recognized that as neurodivergent women, we have very unique needs and obstacles when it comes to our physical wellness, including trouble regulating, remembering to eat consistently. Or drink water or not recognizing when we need to go to the bathroom or struggling to go to sleep at a time that is going to be helpful and supportive for us.[00:04:00]
All of these things that in a lot of the wellness world, it's just kind of taken for granted. And so it's assumed that if you're not doing those things, that it's an intentional choice. And I saw this in a lot of the different kinds of coaching that I did because I was working with neurotypical coaches.
The mainstream coaching is very harmful for neurodivergent women
because it makes assumptions about what you are able to do, and if you are not able to do those. Or you attempt to do what they're telling you to do and get a completely different result. It's very much put on the shoulders of the client. It's very much, oh, well you must have done something wrong, or You must not want it enough, or you're not working hard enough.
And it's a very toxic reinforcement of a lot of the messages that neurodivergent women have had their entire lives, [00:05:00] which are not true.
And this idea that if you just lose weight, that you will get better is one of those ideas. Now, I'm not saying that losing weight is always unhealthy. There are certain circumstances where losing weight is going to improve your quality of life,
but there is a complex relationship between the pursuit of losing weight and the rest of your wellness. And a lot of wellness coaches, a lot of medical professionals are having trouble looking at the holistic picture of a person and how the different things they're experiencing, including being a neurodivergent human, are interacting with and influencing each other.
I'm currently in almost the biggest body I've ever had, and yet I have the most energy and functionality that I've had [00:06:00] in five years.
And when I think back to the times in my life where I had the most societally acceptable body, where I was the thinnest, there is an undercurrent of either being extremely unwell. Or this anxiety feeling, this nonstop anxiety all of the time, and this pressure to maintain that physical appearance no matter what it costs.
And that pressure is just so deeply ingrained in our society that. It's difficult for most people to separate that from wellness. Thinness is not wellness. Weight loss is not wellness.
I wanted to share a few ways that centering weight loss in your wellness journey, in your healing journey is actually going to harm and actively work against [00:07:00] your long-term healing journey, and also probably your short-term healing journey.
Now, keeping in mind that the way that I approach things is nervous system based because almost every single neuro divergent woman I've ever met. Is experiencing some level of autonomic nervous system dysfunction. So if you are experiencing burnout, if you're experiencing chronic illness, if you're experiencing brain fog, fatigue, executive functioning issues, all of these things are signs of the autonomic nervous system dysfunctioning, and that it has been for a very long time, probably the majority of your life.
The brain body disconnect, that's another really strong sign of autonomic nervous system dysfunction.
So when I am coaching and I am supporting people through their own healing, wellness, experience.
Instead of centering their journey around something like weight loss, I always center around nervous system healing.
And pursuing weight loss as it's taught to us currently directly works [00:08:00] against that. So the first thing is that if you are centering weight loss instead of nervous system healing, you're going to prioritize actions that are one unsustainable, and two, are actually working against your nervous system healing.
you may discover, or maybe you have already discovered that there are certain medications that are supportive for your overall wellness and health, and a side effect of those is gaining weight.
So if losing weight becomes the central focus of your health journey, you could either choose to compromise the medication that's helping you because it is causing you to gain weight,
or it could trigger some obsession around the things that mainstream health coaching or mainstream health and weight loss advice recommends, which are things that are going to be working against what you need to be healing.
So this might be things like reducing the [00:09:00] amount of calories that you're taking in or forcing yourself to wake up really early so that you can exercise or working out too hard or too intensely. All of these things work directly against what your nervous system currently needs to heal.
There's also a very high rate of eating disorders within the community of neurodivergent women. I was reading a study recently, and something like over 50% of the girls in a facility for eating disorders we're also neurodivergent.
And because we know the significant rate of undiagnosis or misdiagnosis, I would venture to say that that percentage is actually much higher.
Now, this can be driven by the pressure to mask the feeling of needing control in order to feel [00:10:00] safe. It can be driven by obsession, limerence,
trauma.
There are many reasons that neurodivergent women end up in either disordered eating or eating disorders,
and much of the culture around weight loss would feed into and magnify those issues rather than helping to heal your connection with your body and with food.
Simply by putting the focus on weight loss instead of wellness,
it's actually triggering a lot of deeply held beliefs and a lot of wounds around shame, around worth, around societal pressure and appearance. Obsession with weight and specific bodies in our culture
stems from colonization and racist roots. Not to mention the intense ableism [00:11:00] surrounding all of that,
but that's a conversation for a different day. For right now, it's enough to know that when you are focusing on weight loss, that it is triggering a lot of those harmful beliefs, which will interfere with your ability to hear and see what your body needs and respond to that, and it triggers a lot of shame,
getting stuck in a shame cycle is the fastest way to shut down growth and progress
If you've gotten to where you are in your life by pushing yourself, then centering weight loss is going to keep you in that cycle of
pushing and achievement
instead of rewiring your nervous system with a healthier, more sustainable, more authentic way of approaching and engaging with the world.
pursuing weight loss can be a way to [00:12:00] ignore or write off the underlying issues if your focus is on weight loss, and that becomes the magic bullet of, if I just lose weight, I will be fine. Losing weight can become a scapegoat to avoid more uncomfortable experiences and emotions that are part of the healing process. Then you are not giving your body the awareness and understanding and support that it needs to heal.
When weight loss is a priority, it also tends to drive massive changes in how you eat, how you exercise your routines for the day.
And while change is important for developing a foundation of sustainable health and wellness.
When you try to change everything at once, it requires a lot of willpower, which many neurodivergent women who are in [00:13:00] burnout, who are in chronic illness, who are in autonomic nervous system dysfunction, don't have a lot of willpower left because they're using it to maintain the status quo and to get through the day.
It is a finite resource. Once it's gone, it's gone. And so you might get all excited about this weight loss plan and think that this is the option for you decide you're going to commit, start it, make all these changes,
and then you crash. Then you end up feeling worse than you did before. It turns into a lot of self blame. It turns into perpetuating shame cycles and further pushing you into burnout.
Not to mention the toll that that can take on your nervous system. If you are in a place where you need a high level of familiarity and comfort in order to feel safe in your body and in order to function, changing all of those things at once, even if it's well intentioned, even if they're things that for someone [00:14:00] else, would be a good choice.
Is going to seriously trigger and negatively impact your nervous system.
And if you do succeed in significant rapid weight loss, it can actually overwhelm your system with the toxins that are being released from the fat that you're losing. Which can then trigger significant burnout or chronic illness.
I had a client who had lost a significant amount of weight. But instead of increasing her functionality, instead of increasing her energy and her ability to do things, it had actually sent her into. Significant burnout and chronic illness to the point where she was having trouble even taking care of herself and doing the things that you need to after your stomach stapled in order to get the nutrition and hydration that you need.
And she was just falling apart because releasing all of that fat at once, which stores various toxins, [00:15:00] if you are an autonomic nervous system dysfunction, your body cannot process those the way that a healthy body would be able to.
Many people who go through the process of healing their autonomic nervous system and building a foundation of health and wellness that's sustainable do lose some weight,
and there are multiple reasons for that. One could be if you have really high cortisol for a long time. And then suddenly your body is no longer producing significant amounts of cortisol. It is able to stop collecting and holding on to extra fat.
Another could definitely be if you are healing certain traumas that you've experienced, which is part of the process, then the need to hold extra fat as a defense mechanism, as a shield, as a protective layer disappears, and with it, your body is able to release some of that fat.
Can [00:16:00] weight loss be a part of your overall long-term healing journey? Yes, it can. It can happen naturally through those other factors, and it can also be something that you intentionally work on
much later in your journey.
When you're starting out on that healing journey, and for the majority of that journey.
Trying to prioritize weight loss is going to pull you out of where you need to be putting your attention and focus, and it's going to reinforce a lot of the habits, patterns, thought processes, deeply held beliefs that made you sick in the first place. Once you get to a place in your journey where you're able to decouple your weight loss from your worth, from the pressure from society and your appearance from shame, once it becomes something that is much more neutral, [00:17:00] then it's something that you can incorporate without letting it override.
The healthy patterns and habits and beliefs that you have been working so hard to build.
Wellness is not weight loss. Wellness is having a foundation of health in all of the areas of your life that support you in creating and living your most authentic and aligned life.
If that sounds good to you,
Then you can start by learning how to listen to your body.
And there's a link in the notes for a mini course that will teach you how to do just that.
