EP 88: Emotional Eating & Body Acceptance with Kara Hackleman | Part 2

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Hello. Welcome back to the Think Happy podcast. If you are here right now, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you have already listened to part one of my conversation with Cara. If not, hit the pause button and go listen to last week's episode. Today, we will be picking right back up where we left off last week. We actually get to cover one of the topics I was the most excited to talk to with Cara about, and that is body acceptance. I feel like it's a topic that every single one of us can relate to. Guys, our bodies are amazing, so truly amazing. And I do not think that we give ourselves enough credit for how awesome our bodies really are. I mean, they never stop working for us. They never take a break, never take a day off, and they tell us so much if we just tune in. Body acceptance is one of those things where I feel like you never get to cross the finish line and you never get to just check it off your list and be done with it. No, it takes consistent, ongoing effort. And for me personally, I have yo yo'd with body acceptance, which is why I was so looking forward to chatting with Cara about it.

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Before we roll with part two, let me first tell you that Think Happy is doing a big time Christmas and July celebration. I just wrapped up a week of free one on one mini coaching sessions.

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They were so much fun. If you did not get a chance to snag one, do not worry I will offer them again. I'm not exactly sure when, but I'm having so much fun with the free sessions. They will definitely be back. But now we are gearing up for the 30 % off Christmas and July sale on my group program called Becoming Your Best You. So becoming Your Best You will be 30 % off from July 13th through the 20th. BYBY is an eight week group program that has been designed to take you from some, overwhelmed, stressed, running in circles, unproductive with your time, distracted and on empty, to take you from those and to bring you to being in control of your life, being in control of everything on your to do list, having a plan for each day, to consistently having enough time for yourself, and to being in the driver's seat of your own life. In the words of my client, Sarah, through becoming your best you, I have been able to work on myself in ways that I would have never imagined. I am a better person, mother, wife, and professional. So inside of BY BY, you will learn how to identify time you waste, how to identify this unproductive time in your life, and how to reallocate that time back to yourself.

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You will learn time management practices that you can start incorporating immediately so you can start optimizing your time. You'll learn how to manage and prioritize tasks. You'll learn how to identify tasks that can be delegated, and you'll learn how to build a routine that is sustainable and fosters being your best you. Inside the program are more than 15 self paced educational videos. You get access to weekly live group coaching calls with myself, and you also get access to daily communication with me and the other group members to provide you with ongoing support and guidance throughout the program. To jump into BY BY with the Christmas and July discount with the 30 % off, DM me the words BY BY Christmas, and I will get you all set up. And with that being said, without further ado, let's get into the second half of my conversation with Cara. Enjoy.

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So, do you ever see any instances or scenarios, and it's okay if your answer is no, when waiting until a certain day or a certain milestone might actually be a good tactic for someone?

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Yes, absolutely. When I talk about figuring out if my program is good for you or not, that's part of that because sometimes it's just not the right time.

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And so that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. It just might mean something else is more important. But we're coming off the heels of COVID, right?

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Yeah. Covid would not have been a great time to lose weight while you are actively at home sick with a fever, can barely breathe.

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Exactly. Yeah. It's not the time to worry about it when you're sick or when your body is using all its energy to heal itself. Flatline, not a good time, right? When women are pregnant, we can take excellent care of ourselves. We don't necessarily need the weight loss component of it. And so it's still a great time to do this. We're just going to go about it, making sure that you're taking great care of yourself, not necessarily with the goal of losing weight.

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A lot of times it happens together, depending on where the person starts at. But those would be some of them. And another one. If you are clinically depressed, not a good time to have weight loss as your main goal. Weight loss is just figuring things out. If you're already not figuring out your mental health, it's just going to be evidence of how hard something is. One more area you're not good enough in or that's not going right in your life, that newer thing, it'll just pile on to your already emotional situation. If you are an anorexic or bulimic and you are not at a place where you've gotten help for that, it's not time to diet. You work on the health of your relationship with food and your body, and that requires a mental health expert.

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Those are the ones that are coming up for right now that I can think of.

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Yeah. No, but that's good to know. That's really good to know.

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Outside of that, I started my business in an October month, and everybody kept saying, Oh, I'll start in January. And I was like, Why is that magic hold month or something? You've always like... How did I say it? It was so sarcastic. I think I said something like, so every New Year's resolution has always just happened because it started in January. And they were like, No, no, no. And so there's not a great better time. And all the people that started with me started in October. And what was beautiful, we went through real life. We went through all of the holidays and all of the events, all of the pumpkin spice and all the things. And they learned how to lose weight while living real life. So I think real life is when it's absolutely the perfect time. It gives you examples. One of the things I do with my weight loss clients in my coaching setting, we make sure you stop overeating. So we address that first. Make a plan and we make sure that you stick to your plan and that you don't over eat that physical hunger we talked about. And it's not because I think those are like the best two things.

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But what happens is, since I'm a coach, I coach on what is not necessarily working. It's going to force anything that's not working to come to the surface when you are not over eating and you're making a plan. So I know real quick, if you overate, we get to figure out why did you over eat? If you're not sticking to your plan, why are you not sticking to your plan? Where everything else just sounds like, oh, this was what I needed to do. Well, this is what you said you would do and you didn't do it. So let's figure out, are you making your plan too hard? Are you thinking things are too hard? How can we make it more doable? How can we make it simpler so that you can keep doing it? So it automatically brings up. So I love doing this with life.

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Yeah, for sure. Well, because if you're able to learn those skills, whenever life throws you other lemons, or maybe life gets easy for a little while, you're already going to feel equally equipped to handle it.

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Definitely. That equipped is the biggest part.

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Yeah. So all of this leads me to the topic that I have been most excited to talk to you about, and that is body acceptance. So for me personally, this is an area in my own life that takes constant work. And I will be the first to say that I am far from perfect and still have lots to work or lots to do when it comes to loving and accepting my physical body. So I want to start this final topic that we have together. Why is body acceptance so important?

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Okay, this will get me emotional because that part is what I see the hardest part for people. That's why they think they want to lose weight so that their body is acceptable.

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To other people. And really, we just need it to be acceptable to us. So when we talk about body acceptance, it's not so that you can say my body is better than Kaitlyn's body or vice versa. Said, it's so that we can say, mine is good.

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And. Yours is good. And so that we can just have acceptance, not one's better than the other. So the thoughts that people come to me with are, I am not good enough. I am not acceptable enough. And oh, my gosh, if they're not married, they'll think that they absolutely are not worthy enough to even look for a dating partner, let alone exist in the world. And I know that sounds harsh and really big and grandios type of words, but that's exactly what's going on in their head. And you asked about, is there a better time to start? Well, they'll think that it's like hiring a housekeeper. They think they need to clean house before the housekeeper comes. I need to lose some of my weight before I hire because in their head, they're going to think I'm going to think that they're just too much that they should have lost some of the time. And so with that, we talk about just normalizing all bodies first. That's one of the best first places to start. And if you look at advertisements and just look at your advertisements over the years, I told you that about the 150 pounds or less and the size 8.

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And if you look at advertisements then, it was these super cinched in waist. And then things changed. And then I don't remember if it was late 80s or early 90s. It was people that looked like they had starved themselves twiggy. Twigs and they look like they might have a drug addiction because they have no fat or muscle on their body. They're just bones. We talked about thigh gaps. And like our society are advertising what's been marketed to us, that has been what's been normalized. Now it's starting. I think the one I remember is the Dove commercials that started with all bodies. And it had beautiful women who were also all sizes. Even Victoria's Secrets has finally got on the bandwagon with this. I went in the store the other day and it had all the different shapes of models. And that advertising, it's so beautiful to see. And so to see a body that may be on one of their boards looks like my body, it helped me normalize that. And so we finally are getting that. So I would like to say, keep normalizing bodies. You did not think anything about it that you couldn't wrap your arms around your grandmother.

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You would still try to see if you could get your hands all the way around her, and maybe she was more to hug on, and you couldn't. But that didn't mean anything was wrong with her. And you just did not think that she needed to lose weight. That was a normal body to you. So it's this part we do in ourselves. We are supposed to be this. And some of it is listening to social media and listening to advertising. But start with all bodies are normal, all of them. And so nobody's body is better or worse. We are all equal as in our worth of our body. Anything outside of that is preference. And so I like to say hair color because that one usually feels fairly neutral to people.

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And I've had about every color hair under the sun because when I got bored, that's what we did was I colored my hair.

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That's awesome.

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But even fact, I've never colored my hair. Not even a highlight.

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Really? This might not land for you, but it's acceptable to color your hair, right?

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Oh, absolutely. And people don't think anything about it. And it's just a preference. Whether you have short hair or long hair, it's just a preference. And so whatever shape, whether you're athletic or whether you're a more round, robust, voluptuous, or whether you're a thinner and you're just straight line thin, whatever your body shape is, they are all normal. And if you want to change it, that's your preference. That's the part I'm talking about is your preference, how you adorn it, if you decide you want muscles, those things. That body positivity movement, it confuses people. They think that they're supposed to just adore every part of their body. And there's parts of my body that are not my favorite, but that doesn't mean anything's wrong with them. And that took a lot of coaching to get me to that place. It did not come easily to say that. And since you love personal stories, when I first started losing weight, I was hyper focused on bodies, hyper focused. And so in that hyper focus, I would have looked at your body, I would have looked at other people's bodies, and I would be picking them apart for what was good and what was bad, categorizing all of it.

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That was probably the most beneficial thing to get me past this hump because I felt so guilty for criticizing... And nobody knew I was doing this. This is like thoughts were in my head.

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Yeah, all inside your head.

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But I am criticizing people's bodies, their shapes and all the things. And I'm making assumptions that they probably over eat or whatever. And so I felt so guilty that those were the thoughts about other people. And that was such a saving grace for me. And so I would not want to ever think those thoughts about another person. They're not loving, they're not kind, they're not useful at all. And so I stopped doing that immediately. I will not criticize other people's bodies. And that opened the door that if their bodies weren't designed to be criticized, probably mine wasn't either.

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I love that. Wow. I posted something on Instagram not too long ago, and it's just a little quote that I saw on Pinterest, and it landed with me. And it is, being a kind person means being kind to you also.

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Oh, I saw that. Yes.

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Yeah. And it's just so true. We're often the last ones that we forget to be kind ind to and that we forget that we should be giving ourselves the same love and benefit of the doubt that we give to other people. One of the exercises that I do in my membership with my coaching clients is you take a photo of a small child. And if you have one of you, it's even better, especially if it's one that you thought, Oh, that's such a cute little picture. And then anything that you're trying to think about yourself right now today, you look at that picture, would you ever dream of saying that to her?

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Oh. Wow.

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Or if you're a mom, put your picture of your kids on your desk, and anytime you go to say something hurtful or hateful about yourself, you have to turn and look at that picture and say it to your kids. And if it doesn't pass that filter test, then stop saying it to yourself.

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Exactly. Wow. That's good.

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So I'm going to put myself in our listeners shoes right now. So I guess I have two questions. So the first is, if I'm a listener and I feel far away from where I would like to be with body acceptance, what do you have to say to this listener? And do you have any tips or suggestions for her?

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On body acceptance, the first place to start with this would be to look outside of yourself. Because if I say, Think happy thoughts, and you've never practiced happy thoughts before, it's going to feel like you're all thumbs and you have no ability to figure it out. And you'll just sit there and find all your faults. So with that person, I would say start outside of yourself and start looking at that gratitude part. What can I be grateful for in this world? What can I be grateful for about other people? What can I specifically appreciate about Kaitlyn and her body? What can I appreciate about this person? And so as I said, that really great awareness of how I was critiquing other people, this was what my I don't want to call it a punishment, but my way to counterbalance that thinking because you still have thoughts that come up. So instead, anytime I had a thought, I would stop and I would find something that I appreciated about the other person, something that I liked or that if I was going to compliment, I could have complimented them on. And I did that outside of me.

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And so it helped keep that normalizing of bodies. And I was accepting things that maybe I would have thought were unacceptable by society standards first. And then I started in with myself. So I learned to really appreciate other people and their bodies and all the parts of them. And really, what happens is you'll notice this shift and it always happens every single time. You don't think it has anything to do with the other, but you eventually stop critiquing and you don't even have opinions about the body. You just start noticing, like, Kaitlyn has got such a great smile, or she's so sweet and caring all the time, or she really is always there to ask me if I'm okay. She is very attentive. And we start looking at personality traits and instead of our body traits. I said when you were a kid and you wanted to put your arms around your grandma and just love her so much, you weren't thinking about if her waist was 6 inches thinner, I could put my arms and then she would be great. You thought, she loves me so much and all of that thinking. So when we switch that to acceptance and normalizing others and then eventually ourselves, it brings on that personality trait.

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So I would start with clients and myself because I was my first client.

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To bring this back to us because that's the point. It's like, if we can do it for others, that's great. But learning to do it for ourselves is where we are able to grow in any direction. So as we do it for ourselves, sometimes you have to start with neutral things like, my heart is an amazing thing that it just beats and I don't have to think about it. That is totally out of my control, but yet it's super amazing.

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Or eventually moving into like, I am a super helpful person. I can usually tell when people need help and I'm quick to offer it. Or I like my hair. And then when you start looking at yourself in the mirror, and I do suggest you have a full length mirror. So many people have mirrors that are shoulders up. And it's not a full length mirror so that you can criticize yourself, but to find that you have a normal body that's not just floating shoulders and heads. And so how I said, stop overeating and/or make sure you write a plan so we can see when you don't follow the plan or when you do over eat. The body mirror thing, it's that same thing. If you never have the opportunity to look at your body, you won't know what your thoughts are about your body. And so intentionally, there's a section in my membership with the clients that we do mirror work. And so you might look at the mirror and you just find things that you like about your body. Or there's a picture that's in my marketing all the time, and I'm standing there, I have this tape measure around me, and there's the space between me and the tape measure.

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And on that particular day, I had this challenge for myself that if I said anything negative about my body, I had to counterbalance it with two positive things.

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Oh, I like that.

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And I was feeling pretty hard pressed to find two positive things that day. And so I take body measurements. So with my coaching clients, I want to make sure that you're getting lots of data so you're not pinning it all on the scale. So we do new measurements the first of each month. And so that particular day I had taken my measurements. Well, my scale was not down, my measurements were not down, and I was feeling like a failure, even though I have this measuring tape around me and I could almost put two of me in that measuring tape. And so because I had just measured myself for the data, I was like, I wonder what my first measurement was. And I went and I looked at it. And so I was able to take that bad day feeling terrible and see how much space there used to be between what my waist used to be and what it was. And so a lot of that stuff, just getting used to talking to yourself differently, looking at your body differently, not accepting answers that are critical of yourself without counterbalancing it with my stomach. I have lost over 60 pounds, Kaitlin, and my stomach did not tighten all the way back up.

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And so if I had only lost weight because I had this whole dream of what my body was going to look like at the end, I would be disappointed. When I look at my stomach, if it's a day that I've not managing my thoughts, I might be like, look at all that loose skin. And then I might even call it fat, where it's not fat. I have rock hard abs under loose skin. And so we talk about being moms, and those are our stripes that prove us as a mother and things like that. Just normalizing your body, counterbalancing the criticisms in your head.

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Yeah.

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Finding what you appreciate. The counterbalance, I think, is really important because as humans, we're not perfect. And I think it would be silly to expect ourselves to never have a negative thought about our own selves again. But if you know how to counterbalance when you do have those negative thoughts about yourself, that's really where you could possibly start seeing the needle move on your mental growth and your meet the way you're viewing yourself.

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It's not necessarily positive negative all the time when you're just trying to neutralize it. Sometimes it just becomes preference. I would prefer my stomach to be flatter, but like your tree analogy, 40 years ago, I did not start with where I am now. And so now the next best thing is I have some softer skin on my stomach and tight abs underneath. So it's the next best thing. And it reminds me of my entire journey.

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And I cannot be upset with that.

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Absolutely not. I'm applauding you. This has been so fun. Okay, so as we start wrapping up, I'm trying to think which of these questions I want to ask you first. Okay, this is what I want to do. Can you tell us a little bit more about the free five day course that you had mentioned earlier in our conversation?

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Oh, yeah. So it's real easy. You're going to go to the website, coachingkara.com. You'll put this in the show notes, coachingkara.com/free course, all lowercase. It's just a free quick start. So I want you to get some quick wins. I want you to be able to jump in and just get some quick wins. We're going to focus on your water, your sleep, making a plan. And that's where I really explain the hunger queues of the body.

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Amazing.

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So that is what it is. And so you do those things. Gosh, I did that for months before I ever hired a life coach. And it does. It gives you such quick wins to just get started and be like, it's accomplishable. And the nice thing is it's not a diet. Like water and sleep, hello. That's pretty healthy for us, right? We already write grocery lists, so writing down what we're going to have isn't a big deal. And feeding ourselves when we're hungry and only however much our body is asking for, those are all healthy habits. It's not a diet. So that's what the free course is. It gives you such better explanations than what I just threw at you right there. But that's what that free course is going to offer. It's a great starting place to get you getting some great wins and setting you up with healthy habits.

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Yeah. Awesome. And yes, I will absolutely put it in the show notes so listeners can go check that out. Now, second to last question, and this is my favorite question of all time. I ask every guest that comes on the show, do you have a happiness or life hack that you use in your life that the listeners might want to incorporate into their own lives? And it doesn't necessarily... Sorry, I just hit the microphone. Sorry, everyone. It doesn't necessarily have to even do with anything that we've talked about today? Or it could, whatever you want.

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Oh, gosh, there's so many. I'm trying to... Can I have two?

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Yes, absolutely.

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I do not eat food when I'm sad very often anymore. And so I looked for an alternative thing that was very loving and comforting to myself. And so my happy is a wonderful bubble bath. And so when you really wish you could just be wrapped in your mom's arms again and loved through any situation, I think it's the most loving, caring act for me to have just this beautiful bubble bath time. I'll put music on. Sometimes I feel like I'll light candles if I want or whatever. And I just try to get as much of my body down in the bubbles and in the water and just try to sink to the bottom of the tub with my lower back. It feels great. It feels so loving and kind to myself. And then the second one is I love to laugh or be inspired or whatever. So I have a calendar that gives me days of the week that's really fun to hear little stories or to get some you go girls. And then the other thing that I have is I hope it's okay that I give this plug. It's a free app called I am.

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It's an affirmations app. And since I was not able to start with those words that were amazing and loving and all that happiness for myself, it would speak those words to me. So it would just pop up on my phone and it would give me some little phrase. And sometimes I would be like, oh, thank you. That's so sweet. And so I would read those throughout the day. Those would probably be my two big things that even now, outside of weight loss, I still love that hot bubble bath. Sometimes I use it as a reward. Sometimes it's just my happy place. And then those words, the jokes, and the funnies, and the calendar, and all those things.

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Those are so good.

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Now I'm craving a bubble bath. All right, Cara. Well, last but not least, where can we connect with you? Where can we find you?

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Yes, just go to the website, coachingKara.com. If you want the free course, that's on that website. My name is Kara with a K, so Coaching Kara. It was a funny joke because I feel like I've always coaching myself, too. So coachingcara. Com, I coach you and I coach myself. I love it. It has the free course. All of my socials are on there, all kinds of great resources. I have a podcast that you're going to be on next. I can't wait. And so, yeah, that would be some great information.

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Wonderful. Well, thank you again for your time. Thank you for hanging out with us in the Think Happy community. And my friends, I will be back in your ears next week with another episode of the Think.

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Happy podcast. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of the Think Happy podcast. I would so appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review. And if you just can't get enough, find me on Instagram @thinkhappyco. That's C O, and online at thinkhappy co. Com. I'll be back in your ears next week with another episode of the Think Happy Podcast.