Body Peace Collective Erin Palmer

Marin Smith is a certified yoga, meditation, and fitness instructor who feels strongly about helping women know that they matter and that the size and shape of your body have no effect on your value. In this episode, Marin talks about what motivated her to explore intuitive eating and establish a good relationship with her own body. She talks about the things she still does daily to make peace with her body and to maintain a good relationship with food. We cover how important finding your own Body Peace community is and how our journey with body peace and intuitive eating has shifted and evolved over time. She's full of good information and did I mention, she's one of my best friends?

Relearning to listen to your body and her signals can be challenging. It can especially start to feel murky and confusing when you are trying to differentiate between what your body "needs" and the emotions that may be driving your cravings. This episode dives into emotional eating and how it's not as big of a problem as the diet industry makes it out to be. We also talk about when emotional eating *can* become a problem and what you can do to be present and intentional as you learn to trust yourself with intuitive eating.

Body positivity is good! Or is it? In this episode, we discuss some of the ways that the body positivity movement has been hijacked by diet culture and what we can do to see past the misinformation and call it out. We talk about how focusing on our bodies--even focusing on the things we love--can actually lead to self-objectification and we outline a few steps that can help us to take our body and our experiences back.



The quote by John Berger comes from his essay Ways of Seeing.

The book referenced in the podcast is More Than a Body: Your Body is an Instrument, Not an Ornament by Lindsay Kite Ph.D. and Lexie Kite Ph.D.

If you have been dieting for years and years, the idea of accepting your body as it is can feel terrifying. Are you giving up on being healthy? Are you totally letting yourself go? Are you just going to stop progressing in all areas of your life if you just allow yourself to love yourself as you are?

In this episode we talk about a few reasons why accepting our body can feel so scary and we discuss how we can reframe those thoughts to help us move forward with self-compassion, resilience, and courage.

Bodies change. They were never meant to stay the same. But for some reason, we work so hard to keep them from changing even though the majority of our evidence proves that our efforts are futile. We do skin treatments, botox and other fillers, and we keep our high school jeans in an effort to motivate us back to our "ideal weight."

But what would happen if you just leaned into the idea that bodies are always changing and that could be a good thing?

On the podcast today we talk about our changing bodies and I share with you some hard lessons I learned as I struggled to make peace with my body. We also outline three simple principles that you can apply to making peace with a body that is, and will always be, adapting, evolving, and changing.

Social media is a polarizing subject: is it good? is it bad? 
There are several studies that show the negative effects of social media on our body image, our self-confidence, and our happiness. At the same time, there is so much good that can be found on social media. Connection with friends and family who live far away, awareness and involvement regarding important social issues and movements, and an opportunity to bring exposure and ideas and that we otherwise wouldn't come in contact with are all reasons social media can be good!
If we place all the blame on social media for our body image issues and poor self-esteem, then we give social media all our power. We essentially become victims and we are way too inherently powerful to sit in that space for too long. 
In this episode we dive into the nitty-gritty of WHY social media can be both good and bad and HOW we can make it work for us. I outline specific things that you can do to navigate your relationship with social media and we work on getting really clear about what role social media plays in your life.