57. Real Talk About Your Midlife Body Image

0:00 I was sitting at lunch one day with some friends, and the conversation turned to our bodies, as it often does. We're all in our 50s. And one of my friends said, you know, if I hadn't grown up with such terrible messages to me about my body, that would have helped. And I just kind of waited for her to explain what she meant. And she said, My grandfather called me Chrisco. And listener, let me tell you, this is not a large woman. Her grandfather called her Chrisco. What? There are so many instances where messages that either weren't fair, weren't right, or were downright cruel have just absorbed themselves into our brains about our bodies.

0:50 So let's talk about it. Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time. Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and, oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast. This is an issue, or maybe not an issue, a topic that is near and dear to my heart.

1:36 And that is because I am, I guess I'm like five, seven, and three quarters. I'm not short for a woman. I'm not super tall, but I've been this height since I was, I don't know, in seventh or eighth grade. And let me tell you, when you become tall suddenly in middle school as a girl, maybe now it's better. But back when I was in middle school, it was awkward. I felt like a giant elephant. And it made me so uncomfortable.

2:16 So I let that seep into my self-definition because our brains hold memories, right? Of course, you maybe have heard it called core memories. Our brains hold beliefs, what we think about how the world works, what we expect in various situations, what we believe. And then our brains sort of work to shape our own personal experiences and observations to fit those beliefs and to align with those memories. And so seeping into my core belief about myself was that I was this sort of huge person.

3:02 And while I did weigh more than I do now at various points in my life, uh part way through college and when my kids were young, I was never a huge person. And it was never anything that should have created this crazy image that I had of myself inside my head. And I used to always want to date people who are a lot taller than me so that I could feel smaller. Now, doesn't everything sort of ironically turn out though to teach us lessons? Because my husband is exactly the same height as me, and that's totally fine.

3:45 I learned that this belief about the fact that I was sort of huge and gangling and Amazonian was in there, and I learned how to get rid of it. I'm searching for the right terminology there. I learned how to update it. I learned how to update how I felt about myself. And that's height. That's kind of a simple one because really there's no bad height. You might be less happy about being shorter. You might be less happy or less comfortable about being taller, but there's no, I'm doing air quotes, bad height.

4:27 When we start talking about features and weight and all that stuff, then wow, do we go into quite a rabbit hole of places where we can criticize ourselves? So, real talk. Where does all this self-criticism come from? I was not kidding at the beginning of this episode that I know not just one person, not just one person, multiple people who grew up with people in their lives telling them that they were too fat, or telling them they needed to lose weight, or telling them they shouldn't be eating a second helping of something, in a mean way, not just in a oh, I'm trying to be subtle and I'm still trying to be nice, and maybe this is actually helpful advice kind of way, in a mean way.

5:26 And if that is you, I am sorry. That never should have happened to you. None of us ever should be saying to another person that they are ugly or they are out of shape or they are too fat or they should stop eating so much or whatever it is. What? No, we don't get to do that. Now, if they ask us for help, different story, right? So, where do some of the hangups we have about our bodies come from? Some of it is that old junk that is in your head.

6:07 There is always in everyone's brain, you've heard me say this, there is a voice talking to you in your brain. It's you, it's thoughts running through your brain, and those thoughts are formed by your subconscious brain with all the stored beliefs, memories, and understandings about the world that it has, and looking out onto what you're experiencing now and making judgments. And so that voice, those thoughts, are often quite, quite mean. And I've said to multiple people, and people have said this to me, always a good reminder, would you speak to somebody else the way you speak to yourself?

6:52 The answer is no. The answer is always no. Oh my goodness, we are horrible to ourselves. And a lot of it, when we're talking about our bodies or our weight, or our hair, or our least favorite features, a lot of that gets formed in the teenage years. Because, you know, I'm always talking about midlife being such a period of change. Well, if we go back for a ways, teenage years, you know it, are such a period of change, and particularly physically. Your body is maturing, things are changing, and not everybody goes through that process at the same time. So I think as I look back, that my height at the time probably was even harder for me because remember how all the boys in middle school are all shorter?

7:41 It was very obvious. So we create these mental scripts where we hold on to them and we tell ourselves over and over what's wrong. What's wrong with us? What's wrong with us? Now, it doesn't help. Number two, where does this stuff come from? It doesn't help that now it's even easier everywhere you look to see someone that you might be tempted to compare yourself to. When we were growing up, it was about magazines and TV shows, right? Models on the cover of the magazines, and there were always people saying, Why can't this be real women?

8:22 It, you know, no one actually looks like that. It's gotten a thousand times more impactful at this point. Because now, not only do we have magazines and TV, we have social media. And social media, and in fact, I'm gonna put a link to the episode of Mind Your Midlife where I was talking about comparison, the comparison trap we fall into, because this is this is the crux of it. Social media can be a good thing, it can be great for us to be able to keep up with our friends from different periods of life and to share pictures and stories easily in a way that we maybe would never get around to doing otherwise.

9:04 And you have to be careful what you're looking at and who you follow because there are a lot of filters and there's a lot of AI now, and there's a lot of people who spend their entire day making themselves ready to look like they just rolled out of bed on social media. So we fall into the trap of comparing ourselves, and and definitely go listen to that episode because it really is a trap, and most of what we're looking at isn't really real, or at the very least, those people don't look like that every day, all day.

10:20 Everybody rolls out of bed at one point or another looking like a mess. It just is a thing. We also, number three, are dealing with the change. I'm trying, I'm I'm sighing because I'm trying to think how to say this. The change of our kind of self-identity at this point. So many of us as women, not all of us, I'm generalizing, have created an identity for ourselves about the roles we play. Maybe it's high-powered businesswoman, maybe it's some type of professional leader, maybe it's mom, maybe it's wife, maybe it's uh head of the volunteer organizations everywhere, maybe it's TV personality.

11:07 Those roles, many of them, not all of them obviously, are starting to shift and change at this point in our lives. And our appearance is starting to shift and change, as it should in little ways. And sometimes it feels like we're kind of losing this identity that we had. Now, that's not really true. You never lose that identity. Even if you retire, you still were a high-powered professional, whatever you were. But these are things we tell ourselves. It's a mindset thing. Now, number four, and I kind of was alluding it to alluding to it just now, that we're our bodies could be changing.

11:49 It's a real thing that there are physical and hormonal changes that happen in perimenopause and menopause. And there definitely are ways to mitigate some of the challenges. Over and over on this podcast, we have talked about HRT, we have talked about how to get better sleep, we have talked about how to move our bodies. There are so many things that we can do so that our bodies are still strong and our bodies are still active and we still feel good. And at the same time, our hormones, even if you are treating them with hormone replacement therapy, are gonna go up and down.

12:31 There's fluctuations, there's potentially stress because uh things could be stressful. Aging parents, kids, retirement, finances. You know, we've talked about it. I don't need to list out what could be stressful. Hormones can go up and down, and that can cause fatigue, but also some of these changes can cause things like bloating or appetite changes. And now we look at ourselves in the mirror and our bodies look different. Maybe our body shape changes a little bit. Where fat is stored changes. You need obviously some fat in your body, but it might start being stored more around your waist where it wasn't before.

13:12 None of these things are forget it, you know, I'm never gonna have a waste and I'm always gonna be 30 pounds heavier. None of these things are inevitable, and at the same time, they are real. So what once worked for you in terms of how you eat or how you move, how you exercise, might not work the same way anymore. And that can feel frustrating, it can feel scary, it can feel like you don't have any control. Now, I think I'm on number five. I don't know, I think I've sort of lost my numbering system here, but all of these are really gonna be related to each other. So, number five, we're gonna take this idea of comparison a little bit further and say that there's a lot of cultural pressure for women in their 40s, 50s, 60s to still be trying to be young.

14:07 And I read an article not that long ago, I can't remember where I read it, but it was saying stop calling skincare anti-aging. And it's not just skincare, you know, there's so many anti-aging things out there. And I use anti-aging skincare, although, interestingly enough, the one I use isn't called anti-aging anymore, so I guess the company got on board already. But it's a good point. Why are we calling something anti-aging? Aging is what happens when we spend more years alive on the earth. And somehow we've made it a negative thing.

14:48 So I like that people are noticing that. I like that maybe we're saying aging healthfully or aging well, or you know, whatever term you might want to use, but that anti-aging concept is really ingrained. It's ingrained in the culture, it's ingrained in you, it's ingrained in me. And the way we're represented as women over 40 can be a little bit troubling, you know, and we still get or we get the she still looks great for her age kind of thing. And I had one guest on the podcast who once said, and we're not prey any longer.

15:30 And I thought that was such a startling way to think about it. But also, maybe that's upsetting if she's saying we're not desirable anymore, and I don't agree with that. So there's just a lot of stuff going on in terms of cultural views of women in midlife, and if we take that in and if we hold on to it in our heads, then we're gonna judge ourselves. And then number six, maybe, let's say, I should follow my original list, shouldn't I? Let's dive deeper into the emotions around things that might be changing in our lives. If you are going through a major relationship change, maybe empty nest, your kids are now out on their own.

16:17 If you unfortunately might be losing a marriage or a relationship like that, maybe even a career change. Sometimes when we feel sort of untethered from the way life used to be, it makes us question, it makes us be a little insecure even about our appearance. And obviously, one thing is not related to the other, but we do it anyway. It might be that as your parents are getting older and they're really not doing well, you are feeling older. Sometimes I like, not sometimes, I prefer seasoned to older, but sometimes we have to use it to be clear.

17:02 You're feeling more seasoned, you're maybe feeling kind of ancient as you go through that, or maybe you have had some loss in your life. And I'll tell you, grief can really, it can really bring you down and it can make you more self-judgmental, or maybe you're eating more because you're upset and there are real physical changes. All of those things happen with emotions and life transitions. So some of what I've listed out is, yeah, there really could be a change in your body as you go through your 40s, 50s, and 60s. And some of what I've listed out is that we are turning around our interpretation of what the world expects from us, and we're aiming it towards ourselves as a weapon, and we're telling ourselves that we're too heavy or we can't be stylish anymore, or we're our skin is too saggy and wrinkly, or whatever.

18:06 And I just want you to take in for a minute that for every time you tell yourself something like that that is so self-critical and so negative, and I do it, I'm not perfect, I do it. Every time you do that, somebody else out there in your life is thinking about how great you have it because of insert some sort of physical trait of yours. Your gorgeous hair, your beautiful skin, your waist that they think they don't have anymore, your height, your whatever. It's all relative. Somebody is wishing that they had what you have.

18:49 If we could just be kind to ourselves when it comes to bodies and body image, it would make such a difference. Now, am I taking that so far as to say, just sit on the couch and eat bonbons all day because you want to be kind to your body? Well, of course not. You also want to move your body, you also want to fuel your body with healthy food. And goodness, I spoke with Erica Shannon about movement. I spoke with Adrian last week about intermittent fasting. There's so many things we can do, and we have to choose things at this phase of life that feel good to us, that help us just be able every day to look ourselves in the mirror and notice something good.

19:43 And so I am getting ready on the private podcast to do a four-part mini-series starting this coming week about body image. And we are going to talk about how we got here, a deep dive into what I've just been talking about, and then what can we do? How to recognize and understand what's going on in your head, how to start shifting what you see in the mirror, and practical tips like maybe how to be happier with your pictures. Aren't we all guilty of goodness ripping ourselves apart in pictures? And then if you really want to work productively towards creating a body you love, how to start doing that.

20:29 So make sure that you either head to Apple Podcasts and click to subscribe to the private episodes, or go to CherylpFisher.com slash bonus episodes. Make sure you subscribe. You will not want to miss this series. Here's what I want to say is the thing to remember about this episode. Your body has carried you through 40 or 50 years with flying colors. And I don't care if you've had some major health challenges along the way. You are here and you have been on this earth for 40 or 50 or 60 years, and there's some stress for your body involved in that.

21:13 So, number one, thank your body. Appreciate that you're here. Appreciate the just incredible functions that keep us alive every day. It's unbelievable what our bodies can do. And then remember that when we have challenges with how we look at ourselves in midlife, it's not just the physical appearance, it might be that your kind of self-identity is changing, that you feel like your power in your life is changing. It's not your body that is the issue, potentially.

21:54 It's that we want to change how we see ourselves. We want to figure out how to kind of it's a bit of a cheesy statement, but I'm gonna say it how to embrace our power at this point in life. And I want you to pick one or two features on your body that you love, and I want you to notice them when you look in the mirror. Practice. It's like a glimmer, but for body image. Practice. Okay, I will see you on the mindset deep dive. Make sure you subscribe, and also make sure you hit follow wherever it is you're listening to this, because next week is very cool.

22:36 I have a joint episode coming up with the Wake Women podcast. I am a Wake Forest grad, so that's how that came about. And we are talking to a woman who will help you feel empowered, I promise. I will see you then. In the meantime, keep remembering that midlife is your time to take just a little bit better care of yourself. On the outside and on the inside. Just a little bit better care makes a huge difference.