October 28, 2024 • 13 mins
I’ve been wanting to share my thoughts on self-care and body wellness for a long time, but I kept overthinking how to put my voice out there. Instead of waiting for the perfect time or platform, I’m taking my own advice and I’m starting now, right where I am.
So… Welcome to the Motivated with Meg podcast! 🌈
In this first episode, I dive into my own struggles with body image, how shifting my diet philosophy helped me find true health and self-compassion, and breaking free from diet culture…all based on my personal journey.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re not enough or struggled with guilt around food, this episode is for you. Let’s explore how small, mindful changes can make all the difference. I’m excited for you to listen!
Topics Covered
- My mission, and why you should tune in to this podcast
- My struggles with body image and extreme dieting during college
- How diet culture creates unrealistic body expectations
- What happens when you focus too much on weight loss?
- Why health is not “one size fits all” and the importance of experimenting
- How self-compassion and small experiments helped me discover what works for me
- Sneak peek: upcoming experiments around eating, movement, and more!
Follow @motivatedwithmegpodcast Follow @meaghanmcelroen
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Have you ever felt like no matter how hard you try, it's just never enough?
Well, what if I told you that you already are enough?
That, well, it's great to try things and have goals, that whether or not you reach thosegoals doesn't determine if you're worthy of love, your own love or love from somebody
(00:24):
else.
Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Motivated with Meg.
I'm Megan and I'm here to remind you that you are enough exactly as you are.
You deserve to feel good about yourself right now.
No need to wait until you've lost weight, become someone else's version of ideal.
My goal with this podcast is to motivate you to focus on what you can control when itcomes to your self care routine, your eating habits, exercise habits, and so much more.
(00:53):
And learn to be kinder to yourself along that journey.
I'll be motivating you to try out small,
health-focused experiments to see how they fit your lifestyle while also shining a lighton diet culture to help you remember to love yourself now, to stop hating on your body,
because it hasn't done anything to hurt you.
(01:14):
It's not against you.
It's there trying to keep you alive at all times.
And we want to learn to work with it, not against it.
We want to learn to love it, not hate it.
Why?
Because, well, because I've been there, right?
I've been there, I've hated on my body.
I've had internal battles with my habitual self, guilt tripping myself, shaming myself foreating foods I like, but had labeled off limits in my brain.
(01:41):
I had this skewed belief that a healthy woman had to look a specific way, which includedlike a thigh gap and 24 inch waist when I was in college.
And so, you know, instead of taking care of my health, I was just striving towards thisgoal I created in my head to have a thigh gap and a 24 inch waist.
And where did that come from?
I honestly don't know exactly, it would be media, ads, society, movies, music videos,people around me in my life, just interacting with the world and society the way it's set
(02:13):
up.
Women are really, our bodies are in the limelight.
It's always about how we look and our size.
And while it's getting better in 2024, and there's a lot more...
awareness around healthy at every size and being more than your body, it's still reallyprevalent and I think it's important to talk about it.
(02:34):
And so this podcast is not just hyper-focused on body image or eating habits or exercise,but it's just all of those things, right?
Really looking at what health is, really looking at how we can have health from the insideout, from a place of loving ourselves versus hating on ourselves until we get to a number
on the scale or get to a certain look.
(02:54):
So I just know for myself, especially in college, I remember that there was just thisconstant hyper fixation when it came to my body, the number on the scale, how active I was
being, and the amount of calories I was eating.
And this lasted for years, and there was a lot of shame and guilt tripping around it,right?
A lot of internal suffering for myself in my own head.
(03:14):
And even after I became a personal trainer, it continued.
I honestly think that becoming a personal trainer put more pressure on me because I didn'thave the mindset, the mental health there around body image and taking care of myself,
right?
I was young and as a personal trainer in the fitness world, I was, you know, just fallinginto these groups that were hyper-focused on weight loss because I thought that's what was
(03:35):
important for health.
And they would try to do those through extreme workouts and cutting out calories.
And I thought that was the right way because that's what I was trained and everybody elsewas doing around me.
And along the way, I developed some really unhelpful, disordered eating habits andnegative self-talk about my body.
And really started comparing my body to other women around me.
And it sucked.
I never felt great about myself, no matter what I was doing, no matter if I was stickingto a program and eating healthy or not.
(04:01):
there was just always something.
I was always focused on the negatives, the things I wasn't doing well enough, right?
Never feeling enough versus focusing on the things I was.
that were going well, right?
Even if it was two steps forward and one step back, there's still one step forward and I'mstill making progress.
But it was hard to focus on that.
I was always just in the negative for myself.
Anyway, eventually I got fed up with myself, with how angry and mean I was towards myself,with my eating habits, everything and how it was affecting my day-to-day life and making
(04:30):
it hard to go out with friends and order food and have dessert without feeling guilty.
Or skipping a meal later on because I ate this food with my friends so now I have to goand starve myself and not eat to make up for those calories.
Whatever my brain was telling me at the time.
And it just was, you it just got to the point where I just didn't want to do that anymore.
And I was like, I don't know what to do.
And so I just, you know, thank you Google, just started Googling stuff.
(04:52):
And I came across health coaching and there was a health coaching certification thatresonated with me and I decided to sign up.
And that was the beginning for me when it comes to shifting my personal diet philosophy,which has been a game changer in how I show up in the world and how I take care of myself.
And by shifting my diet philosophy, by letting go of diet mentality,
(05:14):
I've been able to take care of myself from this place, this internal place of being kind,kind words to myself, loving myself and not guilt tripping myself or feeling shameful for
the foods I eat.
So if you couldn't tell from everything I just said that my old diet philosophy was thatdieting, really there was no philosophy.
I wasn't thinking, I was just mindlessly hopping from one diet to another.
(05:36):
as long as it promised quick weight loss, As long as it promised me what I was hopingwould bring happiness, I would sign up, I'd pay the money and I would stick to it.
It didn't matter what it said to do.
It could tell me to cut out really healthy foods and I would follow it if it was promisingme what I wanted, which was quick weight loss because I thought that to be healthy and
wanted in the world, I had to be this 24 inch waist thigh gap girl.
(05:58):
And so I was tossing money out the window 99.9 % of the time because most of these arethese cookie cutter diets that really
They usually don't work, they're not sustainable.
And so my diet philosophy now, years later, is that the vast majority of diets andrestrictive eating habits are not sustainable or healthy in the long run.
Well, of course, some medical conditions call for a strict diet.
(06:20):
A strict diet highly focused on weight loss alone often leads to more harm than good.
So now, years after being free from my overly controlling diet mentality, I began coachingothers and noticing a common theme when I coach people.
So many women, and it's not just women, men too of course, but I'm a woman and I talkmostly with women about this stuff, and most of the women I speak with talk negatively
(06:43):
about their body or their eating in some way, shape, or form during the conversation.
And I don't even know if they're aware of it half the time.
I pick up on it, I'm just really attuned to it at this point.
And this just, makes me so sad and like annoyed at the way our world is set up because
all of them all of them are beautiful humans Okay, beautiful amazing humans with talentand they are just so hyper focused on their looks and their body that they don't show up
(07:06):
in the world with their talent because they think they have to look a certain way to beaccepted with their talent and So just want to remind you that you are so much more than
your body You're already enough and you're worthy of your own love and self-care Right.
I think it's so important to say that and just remember that
(07:27):
Your body is here to help you and it's not against you.
You know, for a long time with my diet philosophy I just hated my body and I just thoughtit was always rebelling against me and it wouldn't work for me and why I won't do this for
me.
Versus like loving my body and seeing that it's, you know, it's doing its best to keep mein homeostasis and keep me alive and that is its job and I'm putting a lot of pressure on
it to look a certain way versus do its job which is keep me alive, functioning.
(07:49):
That is, you know, a little bit about me and my story when it comes to, you know, eatinghabits and exercise.
I would also over exercise.
I would like skip meals and just go try to burn calories all the time.
And again, it just caused a lot of internal struggle, a lot of disordered eating habits.
And one of the main goals of this podcast is to motivate anybody listening who struggleswith this, who resonates with what I said to remember that you're already enough and that
(08:12):
there's other ways to go about your health.
It's OK if you want to lose weight and it doesn't need to come from this place ofdeprivation or like
jumping from one diet to another because that really doesn't work.
So who am I and what exactly is this podcast going to be about?
I'm a certified health coach, certified yoga instructor, certified personal trainer andlicensed veterinary technician.
(08:33):
I also went through a certification for breathing.
I like to accumulate certifications.
I don't know what that is, but beyond the labels, cause I'm way more than just thoselabels.
I'm just a human like you.
And I found that experimenting with small healthy habit change, I found it to be superhelpful.
And that's why I'm creating the podcast.
And that's why every episode will focus on a key concept.
(08:54):
We'll discuss that concept and then I'll offer you a small experiment or challenge thatyou can do for the entire week until the next episode.
And so these are, you know, within different aspects of wellness from eating and exerciseto emotional wellbeing and mindfulness.
So the idea is to tickle your curiosity, to take the blinders off and be equipped to takeaction, to empower you.
(09:17):
to feel like you can move your self-care needle forward in the areas of your life thatwill help you feel amazing right now, not when you've lost the weight.
So I wanna create a space where you feel empowered to do those things.
While there will be an episode breaking down diet culture and diet mentality in seasonone, the eating experiment coming up very soon, I do wanna take a moment right now and
(09:41):
just talk about diet culture on this very first episode.
Because I did just talk about my own dieting history.
I think it's important to take a moment and just talk about the fact that diet culture iseverywhere and it really can affect you, especially if we don't bring awareness to it,
right?
That's why I all this internal struggling and this guilt tripping and shaming and thedisordered eatings because I wasn't even aware of the diet culture around me.
(10:02):
And so what is diet culture?
Put simply, diet culture promotes the idea that thinness equals health and happiness,pushing restrictive diets and rapid weight loss as the ultimate goals.
However,
This approach is often unsustainable for several reasons.
So I'm just going to go over a few reasons because I don't want to take all the time onthis episode to talk about diet culture.
(10:23):
We're going to do that in a different episode.
But you know, diet culture really focuses on a restrictive mindset, encouraging all ornothing thinking and categorizes foods as good or bad, which leads that feeling of guilt
and shame.
Most of the diet culture diets out there promote short-term results, right?
The thing I loved and wanted to be promised, you'll get, ooh, lose 20 pounds in sevendays.
(10:45):
What?
Okay.
That kind of quick fix promise, it really doesn't offer you a long-term solution.
It's usually not teaching you how to take care of yourself.
It's just telling you to starve yourself and do a lot of cardio.
And that's what creates what is referred to as a yo-yo diet, right?
Kind of just kind of going through this dieting cycle.
They also cause physical and emotional strain as I went over with my internal guilttripping.
(11:08):
We often ignore our needs, right?
So diet culture promotes one size fits all solution, neglecting the fact that each personhas a unique nutritional need, different areas of their life, different ages.
Some women are in menopause, other women are not, and that's going to matter when it comesto how much you're exercising and what you're eating.
And then all those put together make it so that these things aren't sustainable, right?
(11:29):
The deprivation and restriction
in most diets makes it very difficult for people to stick to them.
And then we blame ourselves, like we're just not good enough, versus blaming the structureof the dieting that we were doing as being too restrictive and depriving.
And it's actually the diet's fault, not yours.
It's not that you didn't have enough willpower, right?
It's that that diet was restrictive to the extent that it wasn't sustainable.
(11:53):
So the goal is to flip that internal conversation from guilt and shame to self-compassionand joy.
From this place,
You can create healthy habits and routines that allow you to feel amazing and enjoy lifewithout the deprivation of diet, shame, and guilt.
I invite you to join me in the upcoming episodes as we continue to set a foundation forthe seasons to come.
(12:13):
In this season zero, right, this first season, we're gonna have a few more episodes oflaying that foundation about how we're gonna go do these experiments.
And then in season one, the eating experiment will...
be exploring and experimenting with eating habits to see what feels good to youpersonally.
And that's it for today.
I'd love to leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Sydney Banks.
(12:36):
If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alonewould change the world.
So let's keep that in mind as we go about season zero, experimenting and noticing what weexperience with those experiments.
Try not to be afraid of your experience and just see what comes up for you.
(12:57):
Thank you so much for listening.
Until next time, be kind and be yourself.
Everyone else is already taken.
Have you ever felt like no matter how hard you try, it's just never enough?
Well, what if I told you that you already are enough?
That, well, it's great to try things and have goals, that whether or not you reach thosegoals doesn't determine if you're worthy of love, your own love or love from somebody
(00:24):
else.
Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Motivated with Meg.
I'm Megan and I'm here to remind you that you are enough exactly as you are.
You deserve to feel good about yourself right now.
No need to wait until you've lost weight, become someone else's version of ideal.
My goal with this podcast is to motivate you to focus on what you can control when itcomes to your self care routine, your eating habits, exercise habits, and so much more.
(00:53):
And learn to be kinder to yourself along that journey.
I'll be motivating you to try out small,
health-focused experiments to see how they fit your lifestyle while also shining a lighton diet culture to help you remember to love yourself now, to stop hating on your body,
because it hasn't done anything to hurt you.
(01:14):
It's not against you.
It's there trying to keep you alive at all times.
And we want to learn to work with it, not against it.
We want to learn to love it, not hate it.
Why?
Because, well, because I've been there, right?
I've been there, I've hated on my body.
I've had internal battles with my habitual self, guilt tripping myself, shaming myself foreating foods I like, but had labeled off limits in my brain.
(01:41):
I had this skewed belief that a healthy woman had to look a specific way, which includedlike a thigh gap and 24 inch waist when I was in college.
And so, you know, instead of taking care of my health, I was just striving towards thisgoal I created in my head to have a thigh gap and a 24 inch waist.
And where did that come from?
I honestly don't know exactly, it would be media, ads, society, movies, music videos,people around me in my life, just interacting with the world and society the way it's set
(02:13):
up.
Women are really, our bodies are in the limelight.
It's always about how we look and our size.
And while it's getting better in 2024, and there's a lot more...
awareness around healthy at every size and being more than your body, it's still reallyprevalent and I think it's important to talk about it.
(02:34):
And so this podcast is not just hyper-focused on body image or eating habits or exercise,but it's just all of those things, right?
Really looking at what health is, really looking at how we can have health from the insideout, from a place of loving ourselves versus hating on ourselves until we get to a number
on the scale or get to a certain look.
(02:54):
So I just know for myself, especially in college, I remember that there was just thisconstant hyper fixation when it came to my body, the number on the scale, how active I was
being, and the amount of calories I was eating.
And this lasted for years, and there was a lot of shame and guilt tripping around it,right?
A lot of internal suffering for myself in my own head.
(03:14):
And even after I became a personal trainer, it continued.
I honestly think that becoming a personal trainer put more pressure on me because I didn'thave the mindset, the mental health there around body image and taking care of myself,
right?
I was young and as a personal trainer in the fitness world, I was, you know, just fallinginto these groups that were hyper-focused on weight loss because I thought that's what was
(03:35):
important for health.
And they would try to do those through extreme workouts and cutting out calories.
And I thought that was the right way because that's what I was trained and everybody elsewas doing around me.
And along the way, I developed some really unhelpful, disordered eating habits andnegative self-talk about my body.
And really started comparing my body to other women around me.
And it sucked.
I never felt great about myself, no matter what I was doing, no matter if I was stickingto a program and eating healthy or not.
(04:01):
there was just always something.
I was always focused on the negatives, the things I wasn't doing well enough, right?
Never feeling enough versus focusing on the things I was.
that were going well, right?
Even if it was two steps forward and one step back, there's still one step forward and I'mstill making progress.
But it was hard to focus on that.
I was always just in the negative for myself.
Anyway, eventually I got fed up with myself, with how angry and mean I was towards myself,with my eating habits, everything and how it was affecting my day-to-day life and making
(04:30):
it hard to go out with friends and order food and have dessert without feeling guilty.
Or skipping a meal later on because I ate this food with my friends so now I have to goand starve myself and not eat to make up for those calories.
Whatever my brain was telling me at the time.
And it just was, you it just got to the point where I just didn't want to do that anymore.
And I was like, I don't know what to do.
And so I just, you know, thank you Google, just started Googling stuff.
(04:52):
And I came across health coaching and there was a health coaching certification thatresonated with me and I decided to sign up.
And that was the beginning for me when it comes to shifting my personal diet philosophy,which has been a game changer in how I show up in the world and how I take care of myself.
And by shifting my diet philosophy, by letting go of diet mentality,
(05:14):
I've been able to take care of myself from this place, this internal place of being kind,kind words to myself, loving myself and not guilt tripping myself or feeling shameful for
the foods I eat.
So if you couldn't tell from everything I just said that my old diet philosophy was thatdieting, really there was no philosophy.
I wasn't thinking, I was just mindlessly hopping from one diet to another.
(05:36):
as long as it promised quick weight loss, As long as it promised me what I was hopingwould bring happiness, I would sign up, I'd pay the money and I would stick to it.
It didn't matter what it said to do.
It could tell me to cut out really healthy foods and I would follow it if it was promisingme what I wanted, which was quick weight loss because I thought that to be healthy and
wanted in the world, I had to be this 24 inch waist thigh gap girl.
(05:58):
And so I was tossing money out the window 99.9 % of the time because most of these arethese cookie cutter diets that really
They usually don't work, they're not sustainable.
And so my diet philosophy now, years later, is that the vast majority of diets andrestrictive eating habits are not sustainable or healthy in the long run.
Well, of course, some medical conditions call for a strict diet.
(06:20):
A strict diet highly focused on weight loss alone often leads to more harm than good.
So now, years after being free from my overly controlling diet mentality, I began coachingothers and noticing a common theme when I coach people.
So many women, and it's not just women, men too of course, but I'm a woman and I talkmostly with women about this stuff, and most of the women I speak with talk negatively
(06:43):
about their body or their eating in some way, shape, or form during the conversation.
And I don't even know if they're aware of it half the time.
I pick up on it, I'm just really attuned to it at this point.
And this just, makes me so sad and like annoyed at the way our world is set up because
all of them all of them are beautiful humans Okay, beautiful amazing humans with talentand they are just so hyper focused on their looks and their body that they don't show up
(07:06):
in the world with their talent because they think they have to look a certain way to beaccepted with their talent and So just want to remind you that you are so much more than
your body You're already enough and you're worthy of your own love and self-care Right.
I think it's so important to say that and just remember that
(07:27):
Your body is here to help you and it's not against you.
You know, for a long time with my diet philosophy I just hated my body and I just thoughtit was always rebelling against me and it wouldn't work for me and why I won't do this for
me.
Versus like loving my body and seeing that it's, you know, it's doing its best to keep mein homeostasis and keep me alive and that is its job and I'm putting a lot of pressure on
it to look a certain way versus do its job which is keep me alive, functioning.
(07:49):
That is, you know, a little bit about me and my story when it comes to, you know, eatinghabits and exercise.
I would also over exercise.
I would like skip meals and just go try to burn calories all the time.
And again, it just caused a lot of internal struggle, a lot of disordered eating habits.
And one of the main goals of this podcast is to motivate anybody listening who struggleswith this, who resonates with what I said to remember that you're already enough and that
(08:12):
there's other ways to go about your health.
It's OK if you want to lose weight and it doesn't need to come from this place ofdeprivation or like
jumping from one diet to another because that really doesn't work.
So who am I and what exactly is this podcast going to be about?
I'm a certified health coach, certified yoga instructor, certified personal trainer andlicensed veterinary technician.
(08:33):
I also went through a certification for breathing.
I like to accumulate certifications.
I don't know what that is, but beyond the labels, cause I'm way more than just thoselabels.
I'm just a human like you.
And I found that experimenting with small healthy habit change, I found it to be superhelpful.
And that's why I'm creating the podcast.
And that's why every episode will focus on a key concept.
(08:54):
We'll discuss that concept and then I'll offer you a small experiment or challenge thatyou can do for the entire week until the next episode.
And so these are, you know, within different aspects of wellness from eating and exerciseto emotional wellbeing and mindfulness.
So the idea is to tickle your curiosity, to take the blinders off and be equipped to takeaction, to empower you.
(09:17):
to feel like you can move your self-care needle forward in the areas of your life thatwill help you feel amazing right now, not when you've lost the weight.
So I wanna create a space where you feel empowered to do those things.
While there will be an episode breaking down diet culture and diet mentality in seasonone, the eating experiment coming up very soon, I do wanna take a moment right now and
(09:41):
just talk about diet culture on this very first episode.
Because I did just talk about my own dieting history.
I think it's important to take a moment and just talk about the fact that diet culture iseverywhere and it really can affect you, especially if we don't bring awareness to it,
right?
That's why I all this internal struggling and this guilt tripping and shaming and thedisordered eatings because I wasn't even aware of the diet culture around me.
(10:02):
And so what is diet culture?
Put simply, diet culture promotes the idea that thinness equals health and happiness,pushing restrictive diets and rapid weight loss as the ultimate goals.
However,
This approach is often unsustainable for several reasons.
So I'm just going to go over a few reasons because I don't want to take all the time onthis episode to talk about diet culture.
(10:23):
We're going to do that in a different episode.
But you know, diet culture really focuses on a restrictive mindset, encouraging all ornothing thinking and categorizes foods as good or bad, which leads that feeling of guilt
and shame.
Most of the diet culture diets out there promote short-term results, right?
The thing I loved and wanted to be promised, you'll get, ooh, lose 20 pounds in sevendays.
(10:45):
What?
Okay.
That kind of quick fix promise, it really doesn't offer you a long-term solution.
It's usually not teaching you how to take care of yourself.
It's just telling you to starve yourself and do a lot of cardio.
And that's what creates what is referred to as a yo-yo diet, right?
Kind of just kind of going through this dieting cycle.
They also cause physical and emotional strain as I went over with my internal guilttripping.
(11:08):
We often ignore our needs, right?
So diet culture promotes one size fits all solution, neglecting the fact that each personhas a unique nutritional need, different areas of their life, different ages.
Some women are in menopause, other women are not, and that's going to matter when it comesto how much you're exercising and what you're eating.
And then all those put together make it so that these things aren't sustainable, right?
(11:29):
The deprivation and restriction
in most diets makes it very difficult for people to stick to them.
And then we blame ourselves, like we're just not good enough, versus blaming the structureof the dieting that we were doing as being too restrictive and depriving.
And it's actually the diet's fault, not yours.
It's not that you didn't have enough willpower, right?
It's that that diet was restrictive to the extent that it wasn't sustainable.
(11:53):
So the goal is to flip that internal conversation from guilt and shame to self-compassionand joy.
From this place,
You can create healthy habits and routines that allow you to feel amazing and enjoy lifewithout the deprivation of diet, shame, and guilt.
I invite you to join me in the upcoming episodes as we continue to set a foundation forthe seasons to come.
(12:13):
In this season zero, right, this first season, we're gonna have a few more episodes oflaying that foundation about how we're gonna go do these experiments.
And then in season one, the eating experiment will...
be exploring and experimenting with eating habits to see what feels good to youpersonally.
And that's it for today.
I'd love to leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Sydney Banks.
(12:36):
If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alonewould change the world.
So let's keep that in mind as we go about season zero, experimenting and noticing what weexperience with those experiments.
Try not to be afraid of your experience and just see what comes up for you.
(12:57):
Thank you so much for listening.
Until next time, be kind and be yourself.
Everyone else is already taken.
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