Can I let you in on a secret?............................................................................... {you are ready}...........................................................
Emily Brown is an Intuitive Eating Counselor, Body Image Activist, and
Yoga Teacher working and living in Laramie, WY. She graduated from the
Nutrition Therapy Institute of Colorado and, a few years later, the
Institute for the Psychology of Eating. She has been involved with the
body positivity movement for over 7 years. She spends her days
writing and teaching and enjoys as much time as possible exploring the
outdoors with her husband, Heath, and her children Bloom 5, Anjali 4,
and their foster daughter Sierra, 16.
Tell me about your
journey to where you stand today on your relationship with your body.
I grew up in a pretty typical American family: middle class,
evangelical Christian, between Colorado and South Dakota. On one of my parent’s
sides, there was a very appearance-based understanding of the world. My
grandparents would keep appearances and make sure they were showing the world the
version of themselves they wanted to be seen as. They would body-check me and
my sister and comment on our body size, etc. I internalized all this in a very
strong way, to the point that at the age of 8 I remember going into a
restaurant and scanning the room to see what the “cool” kids were ordering and
then ordering the same thing. I wanted to be cool but that meant being
perceived as cool.
When I was in high school I started to question things that
I had taken for granted. I would read books about what it meant to be a strong
woman and I had to reconcile what I read with some of the realities I grew up
with, like women in our church not being allowed to be pastors. I kept running
into this message that to be heard as a woman you have to look a certain way.
You have to be thin and beautiful.
In college I was completely immersed into this view and
started studying to become a nutrition therapist. I saw my obsessive eating and
regimented exercising as equivalent to healthy: I got up at 6am to run 6 miles,
I counted the calories content in everything I ate, I had this “perfect body”
and this “healthy life” and I couldn’t see how consumed I was by it. My family
and friends glorified my lifestyle and supported it. I had the body size that
fit the expected standard of beauty, but I had no time or energy to devote to
love, society, and creating change.
So, at some point, the realization hit me: I was imprisoned
by this mind. I was in a dressing room with my mother trying on dresses for a
wedding, and as I put one gown on it hung on my bones. I saw my mom’s face in
the mirror and froze. I have never been diagnosed or hospitalized for an eating
disorder, but I was a coat hanger and I didn’t see it until I saw it on my
mother’s eyes. I was lifeless.
I wrote my final project for my degree in “Disordered
Eating”, and that is when my healing process started. In retrospect, my
struggle with body is a struggle to gain my place as a woman in the society we
live in.
How did yoga enter your
life?
My beginning with yoga was a rigorous, sweaty program in a
room full of mirrors, that didn’t particularly promoted body positivity or
supported my healing process. I wanted to be fit. I went through a teacher
training and my interest in the healing aspects of yoga spiked. You see, you
don’t have to know intentionally what yoga is doing to help you along the path
of healing and loving your body for it to happen. It happens, very subtly.
It must work, because
now you run BodyLove, a program to empower women to love their body. Can you
talk about it and when it started?
I created the program 7 years after the realization that my
life needed to change. I attended the Institute for the Psychology of Eating,
which offers a holistic, mind-body oriented program that is geared to
understanding our relationship with our world and everything around us rather
than focusing on what we eat as an isolated paradigm, and that’s where it started.
I used to offer the BodyLove program in person but this was
limiting how widespread my message could be. I traveled across the state one
summer, putting on the program in a weekend format, but that was not
sustainable either energetically or financially. Now it is a six-week, online
format. Every week you get a lecture on a different topic, like how our systems
responds to our beliefs about food, how we digest and process food, how are
thoughts affected, etc. You also get a yoga video and a group coaching call,
where you can ask questions and share experiences.
BodyLove is a part of the Body Positivity movement, which is
a movement that strives to have a positive view of our own bodies and love them
as they are. But we are so attached to what we think we know about food and its
relationship with our body and its health, that many people don’t know where to
start. Before we can have a positive view of ourselves, there are many things
that need to be unlearned, and that we have to untie ourselves from. The
majority of the messages about food and health that are reaching us through
mainstream media are not scientifically backed up, but there are people behind
them who have a financial interest in us believing these messages. For example,
we believe that being “overweight” is dangerous and unhealthy. However, many
studies have proved that although it is true that “obesity” can be correlated
to some diseases, there are other diseases that “obesity” actually protects you
from.
Why the quotation marks?
These are terms society uses to refer to weight, but they
are misleading. A new study was recently released about the BMI and how people
that are labeled as "overweight" and even "obese" are
living longer, healthier lives than those of "normal" weight. Now
that seems off! Why would we call people “overweight” when they are actually
healthy? I would like to use a word like “fat” simply as a descriptor without
any negative connotation. The same way we use “tall” or mention someones brown
hair. There are actually people who are trying to reclaim the word "fat". It will
take a lot of work to untie that word from what most people mean when they say
it...
So does BodyLove help
people accept their body regardless of their size?
I think it is important to remember that the key is to take
the focus off body size. People sometimes think they are being “body positive”
when they push messages like “Curvy is beautiful” or glorify any one body size over another. Those messages still
bring the attention back to the size. Size is not relevant per se, although our
society may disagree. Through BodyLove I invite people to look away from size
and standards for what a body is expected to look like, and instead connect to
it through its functionality. I want the participants of the program to untie
themselves from the idea of good food and bad food, or that there is a way we
should or shouldn’t eat, because they are for the most part making those
decisions from a place that has internalized confusing messages and “facts”
that are not supported by science. My intention is to shift participant’s to a
trust relationship with their bodies, so they stop listening to all the voices
outside themselves and start listening to what’s coming from within: hunger
cues, fullness cues, everything that has been gifted to you that can help keep
you healthy and alive. It’s about food,
but it’s much more than that.
Our western lifestyle is, for the most part, full of stress.
And as women, we keep hearing the message that to matter we have to look a
certain way and have a certain lifestyle; we feel like if we want to be healthy
we need to eat a certain way, “what, when, how, how much do I eat?”, we need to
exercise more, we need to go to the gym 5 days a week, we need to be on top of
our weight, “what’s my BMI?”…. Our obsession with “health” adds more stress and
hormonal imbalance to an already stressful life. It keeps us in the
fight/flight response, and under these conditions our bodies don’t digest food.
The body needs to preserve energy to defend itself from what it perceives as the
danger that is stressing us out. If we were really concerned with body health
in our society, and not merely its appearance, we would be talking about
stress, and its effects. Stress would be mainstream. But it’s not. And so ideas
and facts that can help with that problem aren’t mainstream either.
I follow you on
Facebook and something that shocked me was finding that some people have had
negative responses to some of the things you say. Talk to me about that
When I decided to turn my own healing journey into a program
to help others, I thought that my message was the least controversial message
in the world: who is going to argue with teaching women to love themselves?
Well, apparently, a lot of people. Including other women. Let’s back up for a
minute. I have been very intentional about not including conversations
regarding weight loss in my program. I could have. I would have sold a lot more
if I had, because weight is what the mainstream media is selling, that is what
people are used to hearing about, that is what people have been taught to fight
against. I didn’t want my message to get diluted. My message is simple:
Whatever your body
is, whatever you struggle with, right now you are loveable, right now you
deserve to love yourself, you are worthy, you have something to offer, you are
enough.
In the last couple of months I realized that some people not
only think that message is controversial, they violently attack it. They fight
the idea of telling people that it’s okay to be how they are, if they are
“overweight”, because it seems to go against what they know: “if I am
“overweight”, I am unhealthy; how can I love my body if it is unhealthy?”. They
don’t even question the preconceived notions about food, health, and body size,
and where these notions come from.
How does this “pushback”
make you feel?
At first it was hard to be on the receiving end. But more
and more it is turning to be a positive measure of being on the right track.
You see, I am realizing that I am an activist, fighting for social justice. I
am not big, I have a body that fits the expected standard of beauty, and I
still had to battle these messages and how they affected my life. So I have
decided to become a voice and an ally for people who are not only being
discriminated against due to their bodies being bigger than the norm, but they
are also internalizing that discrimination and what they say about them as
people: they also believe they are lazy, they also believe they are ugly, they
are being shamed by an entire society based on something that they may not have
any control over. After generations of unhealthy dieting, the 3rd or
4th generation has a much harder time regulating weight. But the way
this person looks is not saying anything about his or her health.
I guess whenever you want to radically change the system,
you will find haters. But haters are a good sign: it means you have something
to say that make people think and challenge what they thought was true. They
keep you in track, and I have to be prepared to the notion that the bigger my
activism gets, the more voices I’ll hear against it. That’s a good thing. At
first I used to ask myself: “Do I want to be an activist? Do I want my life to
be disrupted in this way? Do I have the courage to fight this fight?”. I left
that question open but the more I follow this path were I am still healing and
I am also empowering others to heal I find more signs and people and messages
that tell me: “Yes! This is what you are in for and this is your path”.
What kind of
influence do you think one person can have? Do you feel like you can change the
world?
I have come to terms with the fact that a change like this
is slow, and I will never see the effects of it on a global scale. The shift
won’t happen in my lifetime or my children’s lifetime. It will take
generations. But I notice the changes in my own life and those around me. I
have gone from having a circle of friends were all our conversations revolved
around food and weight and what our bodies look like to now, 12 years later, being
part of a loving and supportive group of women where, if the conversation was
to start revolving around those topics, there would be blank looks around.
Because of the shift I have made in myself, the people that I attract into my
life have shifted. My children are growing in a community of friends whose moms
will never have something to say about the way their kids’ bodies look. I know
I can’t protect them from it, but in these formative years at least, they are
not exposed to that message daily. So my shift is creating a ripple that is not
just about body and food, but about creating a community that shares my values.
And I see it with the women who take my program too. They are each creating a
ripple around them.
We are in the beginning of this revolution. Right now it
takes a lot of courage and gumption to stand to the current state of affairs
and step out of the mold. I have tremendous empathy and compassion for the
women who have gone through the BodyLove program and are out there, in another
state, all on their own riding that ripple and creating a community for
themselves and their children in which to walk their path to healing. It will
get better and easier generation after generation. It has to start somewhere.
And it already has.
Intrigued? Interested? Join Emily on March 2nd for a FREE teleclass. For more information, click here.
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