Why does healing your body image sometimes feel like going backwards?

Body image healing is not linear. It follows a spiral pattern where old feelings of disgust or negative self-perception resurface even after progress. This is called oscillation, and it is a normal and necessary part of healing. Each time difficult feelings return, you have an opportunity to practice new skills like emotional processing and self-compassion. The spiral gets smaller over time as your capacity and resilience grow. What feels like going backwards is actually where the deepest skill-building happens.

Transcript 

[00:00:02] Stephanie: Welcome to It’s Beyond the Food Podcast, my sister. I’m your host, Stephanie Dosier, clinical nutritionist, non diet cognitive behavior coach, and your guide on this journey beyond the food. And today we are in a Coach Corner episode and the question I am answering today is one I have heard live.

[00:00:25] Yesterday in the first session of the groundwork where I work with a small group of health professional that are wanting me to help them do their personal work, moving from intellectualization of intuitive eating and body image and weight neutral health to actually feeling it, doing it to the next level in their own life. And that’s what groundwork is about. It’s the personal workspace where I coach at a high level, all these wonderful women that I work with. And one of the discussion point that we had yesterday in the first session was a question, and I wanna share it with you and I wanna share my answer that I did to group because all the women in that group yet had a big light bulb moment when I shared that with them. So I’m like, I made a note, I gotta share this on this podcast. So one of the conversation points was, why does it feel like I’m not moving forward in my relationship with my body. Why does it feel like I keep taking step back? Like for every step forward I take two step back.

[00:01:40] Now, if you’ve ever had this feeling, and it cannot, it doesn’t only have to be with your body, it can also be with your relationship to food. And I’ll give a few example in the podcast here on how that can show up in relationship to food, or even if you see that in your clients. The episode is for you and I’m gonna teach you two things, the concept of oscillation and also the concept of the spiral of healing. Now, before we dive into those two coaching concept, if you want to access a full coach corner library and have me teach you on intuitive eating and body image, but in a short bite-size format, I want you to go grab the coach corner vault. And it’s a library of actually Instagram live that I’ve done over the year, answering question that I had in my DM where I teach all kinds of bite size concept around going beyond the food. So coach Corner Vault, it’s also in the show note. It’s there for you to move you forward in your learning.

[00:03:00] Let’s dive into the oscillation of body image.

[00:03:03] So one of my reminder on the question, one of my client yesterday was saying, I feel like I’m never far enough for every step forward. I keep taking a step back and this is why I’m here in this program working with you so that you can coach me and it’s a question that I hear and I see a lot, and I want to teach you this concept of oscillation. Some of you may have heard it around the Healing Spiral and also I have an analogy called the Onion, right? These are three different ways of talking about the concept of taking a step back to take a step forward.

[00:03:47] Now the challenge that our human brain has with the concept of taking a step back to take a step forward is that healing like anything else we do in life should be linear, right? It should go in the straight line. It should start from the bottom and move straight line to the top. That when you quote, put the energy, you invest your resources on a part of your life you want to change, it should go in that progressive way, straight line forward. So therefore, when we have a down, when the arrow stopped progressing in a straight line, we think quote, something went wrong.

[00:04:22] So for an example, if, if you, if, let’s think in term of relationship to food, and I was giving that example to my student yesterday. Very often people come into our world. When I say our world, the world of a non diet approach to health globally. It could be in fitness, it can be in nutrition, it could be in health behavior. People come to you because they’re like, okay, I’m done with this whole like dieting and restricting food and over exercising. I see you, you being the professional listening to me. I see you, you do things differently. I know that this whole diet culture stuff doesn’t know where I wanna work with you, so we do it differently, right?

[00:05:27] And then you go into, let’s take the example of food you’ll use the intuitive eating process. Which is a framework to help people with disordered eating behavior into a intuitive eating, eating behavior where you rely on your internal cues, hunger, full satisfaction to drive your decision around food. And it’s an entire process of 10 steps you need to take with your client. So many of you will enter this process with your client. And typically the stepping back happens when we remove the food rules or we bring back into your client’s food environment the food that they were formally restricting because they quote unquote wasn’t healthy or they were quote unquote out of control around.

[00:06:21] So I’ll take the example of a classic chocolate chips. Right situation. People will bring that back into their life, into their house, and then things were going well until the food wasn’t in their house. But as soon as you bring back in their environment, they have the quote, overeating, binge eating desire towards that food. And then part of the intuitive eating process is to actually follow those cues, right? Follow the desire to eat that food. So they’ll eat it and then they’ll quote, lose control as they say, and then they’ll come into your next session and say, I don’t know what happened. Like I step back to my old behavior. Sound familiar, right?

[00:07:04] Or body image work will say, quote, people will say, I had equal bad body image day, as if it wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed because they think about food because they engage in the work with you and they were doing the fill my hunger, like monitor my fullness, choose satisfying food. I wasn’t supposed to quote, overeat the chocolate or the chips like that wasn’t supposed to happen. That means something went wrong because that’s the old symptom coming back. Same thing with the bad body image day. So people will see that as a problem. For me in my world and most likely in yours, these are not problem. These are learnings.

[00:07:52] What happens is the, what I call the oscillation. If you think body image in term of bad body image day, the good to the bad day, that oscillation the ups and down of healing is actually the most healing phases of your journey. Because in the phase where you, the symptoms are reappearing is the moment where you actually build the skillset that you didn’t have before, and that’s actually where you build the capacity you didn’t have before in order for you to have a learning environment to practice the skillset practice.

[00:08:43] Feeling whatever feeling you’re feeling, because that’s really what this is about. By the way. When you have a bad body image day, quote unquote, it’s about you being with the feeling of discomfort. It’s about you re-experiencing the feeling of most often in disgust, right? You look at yourself in the mirror and you’re overwhelmed with the disgust. People will think that’s a problem. Hey, I’ve been working on my body image and I’m doing the body neutrality framework, and all of a sudden I look at myself in the mirror yesterday and I feel disgust again. Problem. No, it’s an opportunity. It’s the space where you get to practice riding the wave of your emotion.

[00:09:28] It’s where you get to practice meeting yourself with self-compassion. And at first, riding the wave of the discuss, meeting yourself with self-compassion for having a bad body image day is awkward. It’s choppy. It’s not easy. It’s like all the things. It requires a lot of effort. It requires a lot of mental effort. It require a lot of physical effort. To stay and look at your body and feel the disgust, it’s draining. It’s not easy. But in the moment where you stay with that disgust, with the bad body image, today, you build the skillset of feeling your emotion globally. Your practice feeling and experiencing, discuss, naming it, labeling it. And identifying with it without letting it spiral yourself back down. It’s just a moment in time where because of how you look at yourself in the mirror, old thoughts came into your brain that created the old disgust feeling that you’ve been so acquainted for, but now you have new skill sets.

[00:10:52] Which is what we do with our client. We teach them the skillset of riding the wave and feeling our emotion and like doing the processing of the emotion so that when it happened, now I can practice riding the wave, right? I can practice meeting that moment, that oscillation of my body image to be in a quote, bad body image day. And meet myself with self-compassion, right?

[00:11:22] One of the script I often give to my client is this one, right? It makes total sense for me to experience quote, if they use the term a bad body image day, because I spent 20 years deeply entrenched in the relationship to my body of hate. So I’m only two months into this journey of body image. It makes total sense for me to re-experience something that was so normal for me. Hands on your heart, meeting yourself with that understanding that compassion.

[00:12:00] Right. One of the most with every oscillation of body image, with every oscillation of rebellious eating behavior, however people describe it, be it binge, it, overeating, you know, it’s just a label. It’s just a string of word put together. Use the language that your client is using. If they’re binging, if they’re overeating, really irrelevant to me when they’re re-experiencing that, saying that the biggest learning there is how they meet themselves, right? With self-compassion, I always say curiosity versus judgment. When you are in a relationship, when you build through the oscillation, the relationship of curiosity with yourself, right? When you are having symptoms, when you’re having old pattern, old behavior, and you can meet them with curiosity. That’s when your life change.

[00:12:56] Because for most of us, the knee-jerk reaction of symptoms resurfacing is not curiosity, right? It is full on what the he, what’s the problem? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? We have this core relationship to ourselves of judgment, and that oscillation, that repetitive comeback of the symptoms is the space where you get to redesign a relationship to yourself of curiosity instead of judgment. True self-compassion, processing your feeling.

[00:13:44] So for me. The pattern that my client was describing in the discussion segment of our session yesterday, first of all, totally normal. I’m like, oh, okay. She’s like, yeah, but something’s wrong. I’m like, no, nothing is, nothing’s wrong, right? It is. If you think about the healing spiral, and you guys can go Google that after this podcast, but you will see like healing. When we think of the body, not in a diet culture way, when we think of the human being as a complex, mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical body, we often describe healing as this big spiral, right? Where we keep coming back to the same point, but the spiral is getting smaller. Because that’s what happened.

[00:14:40] The big oscillation in the beginning of healing your body image, they’re big, right? One day you feel on top of the world and then the next day it’s like you’re went right back into five years ago, right? When you were in the thick of your last diet and you like 10 outta 10 hated your body, right? That oscillation is major. If you think of a graph, right, it’s completely 100 at the top, minus 100 at the bottom. And then with more oscillation, more practice of skillset, of building capacity, of building nervous system, capacity of building that relationship of curiosity instead of judgment, the wave gets smaller. And the spiral in terms of the healing spiral gets smaller at the bottom right, the circumference of the circle gets smaller because with every oscillation you build your skillset, your resiliency, your capacity.

[00:15:28] So to my client, I’m like, man, this is totally normal. The problem is not the fact that you’re taking a step backward. The problem is your socialization to taking that step backward. It’s the way you’re meeting that, what you describe as a step backward, as a problem instead of a learning opportunity instead of a space where you can build your skillset, your capacity.

[00:16:14] And I wanna give you one more example of this we talked about earlier where a client come to us typically. Eight outta 10 clients will come into a non-diet space with food behavior. Then we discover that it’s really not about the food, it’s about their fear of weight gain or not losing weight or be, remain in the body where they’re in right now, that their body will change and then, then the, the layer of body image is there. And typically that’s where professional come into my world. They have worked with so many clients around food. They know it’s not about the food and they want skillset to build that space where they can coach people in their body image.

[00:17:00] But I’m the next step, like I’m one step more ahead of you, and when you come into my world, you come in for body image. But I’m like, I know it’s not about body image. I actually could start another company called Beyond Body Image. It’s not about body image, it’s about self-esteem. It’s about self-worth. It’s about the concept of self. Right. When we think about the next layer, like if you, again, the third analogy I give you guys is the onion, right? Yesterday I actually put a slide in front of the group of a red onion, like with every layer. And that’s what I was explaining to them. Your client come to you with food, you come to me about body image, but I have a surprise for you. There’s another layer that we really gonna get to, which is your concept of self, your relationship to self, your self worth, your self-esteem.

[00:18:04] And it were just like the light bulb went on in their head because all of them had said earlier in the session, well, I feel like I’m not good enough. I feel like I’m not skilled enough. I feel like I’m not trying hard enough. Right? This whole enoughness layer, that’s usually the layer I work with people because I’m a step ahead of them.

[00:18:28] So when you hit that oscillation. When you move through the spiral of healing, it is typically because you’re peeling the next layer of the onion, and a skilled coach will be able to identify and to name that next layer. So the oscillation of body image is 100% normal. It should be happening, and it’s an opportunity to learn, to build the practices, to have the experience of building the practice of the skillset so you can build the capacity so that you can be confident and meet anything that can happen with your body.

[00:19:15] Outside of your body. You will have the capacity, the knowing that no matter what happened externally, you’ll be able to handle the inner world ripple, right? That it is, that somebody makes a comment about your body, that you gain weight, that your body changes in some way. Think about aging. There’s this big revelation on Instagram right now where people are like, oh my God, like this, like aging is like the size of our body. Like there’s a culture of anti-aging. Hell, yes, there is, right? I’m right in the tick of it and 50, and I can tell you right now, I’m like smoothing, like sailing through it, not because I’m only 50, like I’m just beginning to age. But because I’ve got the skillset, I’ve got the capacity, I’ve got the resilience that I built throughout my oscillation of my body image.

[00:20:33] So now like, yeah, I have more wrinkle where you have more white hair. It’s not a problem. And whenever it is, whenever somebody comments on the fact that my hair are more white. I can feel the little discomfort, but I’m able to welcome it. I’m able to handle it. I’m able to make peace with it.

[00:20:43] So if I can close this episode, the oscillation of body image, the cold, bad body image, they are not evidence, a failure. Nothing has gone wrong. There are an opportunity to learn to build your skillset, your resiliency, so that you can face literally anything in front of you in the future. If you are health professionals listening to this and you wanna coach at that level of understanding the oscillation, the spiral, all the skills around emotional and nervous system capacity, that’s what we do inside of the non diet coaching certification. So I invite you to put your name on the wait list for the next cohort, which is gonna enroll in August of this year.

[00:21:34] And if you are at a stage where you say, Hey, you know what? I wanna focus more on my personal work, the next groundwork cohort will be in July of this year. Okay folks, I love you and I’ll see you in the next podcast episode.

[00:21:56] Wanna coach behaviors, not bodies. Learn the mindset tool and the method that create real changes. Join the wait list for the next cohort of the non diet coaching certification at stephaniedodier.com/waitlist. That’s where the real training begins, and I’ll see you on the other side, my sisters.