Make Peace with Your Body & Find Your Voice

Your body has carried you through every single chapter of your life — the heartbreaks, the sleepless nights, the laughter, the milestones. And yet, so often, we treat it like it’s never enough. Today’s episode is about laying down the sword, stopping the battle with ourselves, and choosing acceptance, gratitude, and grace instead.

🎯 Your Takeaways Today:

1. Do one small act to show your body appreciation — rest, move, or nourish it without guilt.
2. Give one silenced thought a voice today — speak it out loud without apology.

📲 Send this to someone who needs to make peace, someone who needs to hear they are enough, right now, as they are. 💛

Transcript

Hey friends, welcome to the show. Whether this is your very first time here or you’ve been walking this journey with me for a while, I'm so glad you're here. I know you have a hundred things pulling at your time and your energy, so thank you for choosing this space. Thank you for pressing play. Thank you for giving yourself this moment. Today we’re talking about our bodies and our minds and how we have a love hate relationship with both. So if you’re wondering, How do I make peace with who I am, physically, emotionally, mentally? And like many of us, how do I make peace with myself after what seems like years of being at odds with myself, maybe even feeling like you’re at war with yourself? Well this is the episode for you.

If those questions sound familiar, then you're in the right place. Because today, we're talking about something so many of us have wrestled with for most of our lives: our bodies, our thoughts, and how much energy we've spent trying to shrink, silence, or change both. And as I share many times, I get my ideas and thoughts for podcasts from those around me and I asked a friend what would she like to hear about and her suggestion was about how to stop worrying about your body, size, shape, weight, and instead appreciating what it does for you. About how throughout her life she has had a love hate relationship with her body, when she was younger it was how she thought she looked, in high school trying to be super thin, in her 30s trying to be super fit but was never happy with how she looked. And then even on her wedding day as she had worked so hard to get to a certain shape and how everyone was commenting about how beautiful she looked yet she didn’t see it. And I was at that wedding and I can’t even imagine how anyone could not see her beauty. But she said now how as she has gotten older, while even though she is facing some possible surgery to help with chronic pain and nerve issues, and she feels her body failing her at times, she now appreciates and sees her body as one that allows her to be present with her grandkids, to care for her mother in law, to enjoy spending time with friends. And now how she picks and chooses how she will spend her time, how she will use her energy, how she will make sure she has time to self care physically and mentally. And as she was sharing this, I thought, many of us are in those different stages of life... maybe you’re overly critical of your looks as a teen, maybe you’ve changed after having kids, maybe you’re in menopause and feeling like an alien has taken you over, or maybe you’re aging and feeling let down by your body. Wherever you’re at, let’s talk this thru and share some insights.

So let’s think back, really think way back, to when you first started being aware of your body. For most of us, that awareness came early. Maybe it was in school. Maybe it was looking in a mirror, watching a commercial, overhearing someone comment on someone else’s weight or looks. And suddenly, you realized: Oh… people are looking at me. Judging me. Comparing me. And then it begins, the worry, the comparison, the negative self talk. I can remember at 14 crying myself to sleep so many nights and praying that I would just wake up pretty.

We spend our teenage years criticizing every inch of ourselves. We look at our stomachs, our thighs, our faces in pictures, our skin, our hair, our height. And the voice in our heads is almost never kind. It says things like: You’d be more confident if you looked different. You’d be more loved. You’d be more worthy. Then we get older. Some of us become parents. Some of us enter the workforce. And we think maybe, just maybe, we’ll stop obsessing about our bodies without those teens pressures. That we’ll outgrow the insecurity as we age into adulthood. But for many, it only gets louder. We have new pressures, new expectations, new standards we feel we’re supposed to meet. 

We women talk about “getting our bodies back” after babies and we expect it to bounce back within weeks even though it took months to adjust to growing a baby. We apologize for how we look if we gain a little weight. We push ourselves through intense workouts not because they feel good, but because we feel we have to change, that we are not good enough. All the while, every day our bodies are showing up for us. Carrying us through every single day. Have you ever stopped to think about that?

Every day, without your permission, your body is doing incredible things. Your heart is beating. Your lungs are breathing. Your immune system is working to protect you. Your muscles and bones are holding you upright, walking you through life. And if you’re lucky enough to be healthy right now, that’s a privilege so many people wish they had but at the same time if you are lucky enough to be without pain, without illness, we rarely notice or appreciate our bodies until something goes wrong. We take it for granted until there’s pain, illness, injury.

We treat our bodies like projects, like problems to fix, a fixer upper instead of recognizing them as the very home we live in that is already fully equipped with everything you need to live a full and peaceful life. You don’t have to “love” your body every single day to start being kind to it. You can be neutral but let’s not be hateful and critical of it. You can simply appreciate what it does and where it’s gotten you so far. And I know that there are many who have much more difficult decisions to make with your bodies including those that their bodies are betraying them. Maybe you are not well, maybe you have a chronic illness, maybe you are are needing to transition and I can imagine how patronizing it must sound saying to just appreciate your bodies. But even more so those bodies and thoughts will require enormous strength to keep moving forward during those difficult times and I’m talking about appreciating that strength that your mind and body has given to have come this far.

And think of the illnesses you've already had and have moved thru. The heartbreaks you physically and mentally survived. The sleepless nights your body endured for whatever crisis you were dealing with. The way your body adapted when you were sick, stressed, pregnant, aging, recovering. It kept showing up, even when you were mentally checked out or emotionally drained. Your lungs kept breathing, your heart kept beating, you legs kept walking you to work or to school...andmaybe you didn’t treat your body so well but itkept going and didn’t abandon you, even when you may have abandoned it. That alone is worth a moment of gratitude. 

But it's not just our bodies, is it? It’s also the thoughts. The inner dialogue. The mental gymnastics we perform every day, worrying how we’re perceived. The conversations we don’t have. The truths we swallow. The silence we sit in, not because we don’t have something to say, but because we’re afraid of how what we might say will be received. We spend so much time shaping our personalities around what’s comfortable for others. We don’t voice opinions because we fear rejection. We don’t set boundaries because we don’t want to seem difficult. We don’t say no because we want to be liked. We don’t speak our truths because we don’t want to be seen as “too much”. We change our moods based on how others are acting. We silence ourselves to keep the peace, even when it's at the expense of our own peace.

And then years pass, and we’re left wondering who we really are, and if anyone actually knows us at all. But something happens as we get older. If we’re lucky… we start to care a little less about what others think and more about how we feel. We start to unlearn the rules we were taught about how we “should” look or act or speak. If you want to learn more about unlearning, check out episode 5. We begin to question: Why am I trying so hard to meet standards that were never mine to begin with? And little by little, we start to reclaim our relationship with ourselves. That’s one of the things I really love about getting older now that I’m officially a senior person. I swear I feel like I’m 60 going on 35 but I’m so glad I have my 60 year old mind. When I was chatting about this episode theme, another friend of mine said she was talking to a younger colleague at work who was worried about how she looked and her weight and my friend told her, in 10 years from now you are going to be wishing you looked like this so stop worrying about it and let it go.

As we get older and begin to see our bodies for their life source instead of their Instagram source, we stop punishing our bodies and start nourishing them. We stop silencing our thoughts and start expressing them. We start seeing value in ourselves not because of how we look or how agreeable we are, but because we exist, and that’s enough. There is so much peace on the other side of that shift.
There is freedom in not obsessing over every inch of yourself. There is joy in being able to eat a meal and enjoy it, really enjoy the tastes without guilt. There is confidence in saying, “This is how I feel,” without feeling the need to apologize.

And there’s something beautiful about realizing that you can love your body while it's changing, and it will keep changing. On average your cells renew every 7 years...you red blood cells every 120 days, your natural hair fuzz every 6 years, your entire skeleton is thought to renew itself every 10 years, but those tiny cells in your gut, renew in about a week. You are constantly shedding hair, shedding skin, and if your post menopausal like me, I swear I find a new 2 inch black hair randomly on my inner thigh somewhere overnight. Ok...maybe not overnight but I swear all of a sudden I notice them, just one lonely random hair. And my body has changed obviously...I see my skin starting to sag, I have a bit of a poochy belly but rather than focus on that, I do more strength training now so I focus on how strong my legs are, how toned my back is. That is what will carry me thru the next 10, 20, 30 years...not a tiny waist.

So think about if you could change one thing, what would change in your life if you started appreciating your body today, not when it loses weight or gets stronger, but right now, as it is? What would happen if you honored your thoughts and questioned them, where they come from, why they are repeating? What kind of peace would you create if you stopped looking at your body and mind as problems to fix, and instead started treating them as partners to work with? Because the truth is you have survived 100% of your worst days and I know that because you are here and you are listening to continue to grow and learn. Your body and your thoughts got you here.

So let this be the season where you stop waiting for permission to love yourself and instead be thankful that you made it here this far and know that you have chosen to listen to help move yourself forward. Let this be the season you stop shrinking your body or your truth to fit into someone else’s comfort zone and live loud and proud. Let this be the time where you make peace not just with where you are, but how you are and with everything that got you here. You don’t need to do anything drastic. You don’t need a makeover. You don’t need a rebrand. You just need acceptance, compassion, and the courage to be yourself, to love yourself, loudly, softly, messily, truthfully.

Before we go, I want to leave you with some questions to help you reflect: 

How have you been treating your body lately? Not just how it looks, but how it feels? How are you caring for yourself and what one self care will you do today? 
What thoughts have you been silencing out of fear of rejection, fear of not being accepted? Is it time to let those thoughts breathe and to give them a voice?
 
As a take away today, do one small thing to show your body that you appreciate it. Maybe it’s resting when you’re tired. Maybe it’s moving because it feels good, not because you “have to.” Maybe it’s speaking a thought out loud that you’ve been keeping inside for too long. Whatever it is, let it come from a place of grace and kindness. Let it come from a place of finally recognizing that your body and your mind have never been the enemy. It’s those should haves, those supposed tos, those thoughts that come from outside that seep in and get weaponized. Mel Robbins has said many times, just put down the sword. Stop arming for battle with yourself, just lay it down and surrender. 

If this episode spoke to you, if it sparked something in you, send it to someone else who you know is struggling with their body image, their thoughts, their lessening of themselves. You know someone, you probably know a few someones so if this helped, please share this so they too can being the journey of surrender and acceptance.

You deserve peace, you deserve to take up all the space you need, you deserve to honor your amazing body and the thoughts that have carried you through every chapter of your story, you deserve to live loud and proud. Let this be your next chapter, your next beginning so that you can rewrite your story with self love, growth and gratitude, little by little and peace by peace.