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Welcome to the Therapy for a Black Girls podcasts, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr joy Hard and Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. To get more information, visit the website at Therapy for Black Girls dot com. And while I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey y'all, Happy New year. Thanks so much for joining me for session eighty nine of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. It feels like it's been a minute since we've chatted, but I definitely enjoyed my time off and feel refreshed for twenty nineteen. In our last session, we talked all about making goals for the new year, and I'm sure that many of you have made goals related to your health and taking better care of your body, so I thought it was only right to have our first session this year be all about how you can have a more InSync relationship with your body. Our guest today is Ivy Felicia, who is known as the Body Relationship Coach. Ivy is a certified holistic wellness coach and body image expert who resides in the Washington, d C. Metro area. She helps women feel confident in their skin and at peace with their body at any size, shape, or stage of life. Her specialized approach to holistic wellness and self care teaches women to release external standards of worth by strengthening the internal connection with their body and fortifying love for themselves. Ivy and I chatted about some of the issues that get in the way of us being at peace with our bodies, some of the cultural pieces that are important when we're discussing black women's bodies, tips for helping you to focus more on health than wait, the way that diet culture pervades our society, and of course, she shares all of her favorite resources in case you want to dig in more. If you hear something that really resonates with you while listening, please make sure to share it with us on social media using the hashtag tv G in session. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ivy. Thank you for having me, Dr Joy. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to chat with you as well. And I love your platform because it's all about accepting the bodies that we have, right, And so I want to kind of just start by kind of getting some of your thoughts about what kinds of things do you think get in the way of us actually accept thing and loving our bodies as they are. Oh wow, my favorite question. Let's just got from the beginning. Yeah, So as soon as you ask that question, the first thing that popped into my head with the media, because especially you know today where everything so visual. You know, we're constantly consuming visual content, and I think that we don't really understand the impact of how seeing all these images constantly and consistently all day feed into how we feel about ourselves and our body. And so, what are some of the messages that you think that we are kind of getting from the media that's out there. Well, definitely perfection. We're definitely getting that message of perfection. You know, we constantly see people who we follow or we are, who we consider to be inspirational or maybe we aspire to be like them, or or we just find interesting. And when we see those people constantly changing their look or changing their body. I think we don't pay attention to the fact that that sort of subconsciously becomes a part of, you know, how we look at ourselves. If you expose yourself to that enough, sometimes it becomes a part of your belief system without you even realizing. So definitely perfection in the area of body of aesthetics, but also when it comes to health and well being. You know, as an American culture, we are obsessed with sort of like avoiding death through perfection of health. That we're always focused on health. And but the ironic thing is that America is also sort of obsessed with the consumption of food. We have sort of this like the psychotomy of two different messages that we're getting, and sometimes we don't realize that it puts us under this feeling of pressure and drives to yeah, consume, consume, consume, but also you start to feel guilty about that consumption and the way it shows up in your body. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know that I had ever thought about the obsession with health that we have and like this whole fear of dying. Yeah, I don't know that I had ever really kind of thought about it in that way. But you're right. I mean, and of course you know we want to take good care of ourselves. I mean, our body is a right important But but because you know, we don't do really well talking about death, we're always you know, trying to avoid it and it makes us really anxious. We don't think about like the kinds of things that we may be subconsciously consuming because of our fear of like talking about it. Yeah. Absolutely, And like you said, I'm all for whellness. That's part of what I do, right, So I believe in taking care of our bodies. But like you said, we sort of have this anxiety around health because we're inundated with messages about extreme exercise and you know, organic and this and that, and we're always getting these messages about sort of putting our health, taking it to the next level. Always we're not really satisfied with what we do. We always feel like we're not doing enough, and then that sort of translates into this message of we are not enough. Yes, and we definitely have talked about that several times on the podcast, like this whole idea of being enough and is there ever aligned at which you're going to be okay with your efforts? Right, right, So I wonder, I mean, do you think that there is a way that you can kind of be an active participant in like social media and our media today in a way that doesn't allow you to kind of be absorbing, like unhealthy messages about your body. Sure, it's something that I talked about often, and that question comes up often to One of the things that I always recommend is that you curate your timeline. And sometimes that's hard to do with the way that social media is now because you can follow people, but you know, things kind of still show up in your timeline that don't necessarily align with your efforts. But you can really go through your timeline and do what's called the purge and and take out people who are sort of making you feel bad about yourself. And the first thing I say is adding people who look like you. And most of the time, as humans, we tend to do the opposite, right. We follow people that we want to look like that they don't look anything like, and so then we're constantly seeing because we think it's motivating. Right, I'm going to follow this person, this is going to be my body goals, or we get into relationship goes, all these other things, and so we're constantly feeding those images to ourselves and then we're unhappy all the time and we wonder why. Right. So it's a lot more healthy for your body image if you follow people who have a body type similar to you, you know, following other black women who look like you, or other women of color who look like you. Even maybe some women who are challenged by the same things that you are, if you have a chronic illness, or maybe you're differently able when it comes to to your body, different things maybe that you're living with. It actually helps you to follow people who are going through the same experiences because it helps to create compassion by following those people rather than following people who are the exact opposite of you. That's a great point. Ivan. So what are some of the ways that you think black women in particular or challenged by accepting our bodies? Oh? Wow, Well, I feel like it kind of comes back to what we were saying before, is that, you know, we're always kind of fed this message of you're you're not enough, and just how we are naturally as black women, we're sort of taught that everything about us that's natural is wrong. Right, So, you know, our hair, our skin tone, the shape of our bodies, our features on our face. So it's a lot to constantly get those messages that the way you are born, like the way you came into the world is wrong, which is another way of sort of getting these subconscious messages that you need to change or you're not enough. And so I think that it really helps to again going back to following people who look like you naturally look like you, just so you can learn how to start accepting yourself just as you are. Yeah, And I often think it is an interesting, um, you know, and there's always lots of conversations around like the features and things that are typical of black women become popular of course when they are not on black women, Um, and how that also sets up an interesting I think tension for black women because it's like I'm not appreciated for what I look like, but if somebody else looks like this, then they are appreciated, right, Yeah, So I think it kind of leaves us sometimes in a place of not being quite sure how to feel about our bodies. Absolutely, absolutely, and that's why sort of, um, if we can kind of get that concept that we've already we already have that magic, right, And I know it's kind of clichade who say black or magic, but we really do and we see that in the way. It's just like you say that other cultures and other people are are trying to emulate who we are, so that self acceptance and self love can start at home with you know, accepting ourselves and also accepting other sisters, you know when we see them, you know, being okay with complimenting them and receiving compliments back to Yeah, So we are recording this interview in December, but it will be out in January, so there will be lots of talking there already is around like New Year's resolutions, and you know, for some people that always include something about like trying to lose weight or health. What kinds of tempts do you have for people who you know, want to maybe do some things to be healthier or feel more accepting of their body, but want to do it in a way that's actually going to be effective. So I actually a coach wellness and health, and I like to refer to wellness because health has so someone's trauma around it for so many people. I like to approach monness from a weight neutral perspective and not being that you don't have to use the scale, uh, take measures, your size, of your genes, like all these other things to monitor whether you're healthy or not, because it's not actually a direct correlation to health your body size, and so it's actually much better to focus on your well being by doing what you know works for you as as far as your body and not necessarily aspired to be a certain size or weight or anything like that. So that can look like, you know, when you're eating or when you're practicing your body movement, doing things that you enjoy and things that you love, and not necessarily being obsessed with whether or not it's going to burn off x amount of calories or fit. You know, if you've done it for two weeks and nothing has changed on the scale, that can be very disheartening and very stressful, and then that can actually lead to us actually feeling more anxiety about our body image in our relationship with our bodies. So if we approach it from a place of compassion, practicing wellness because you know, it's good for us, that makes us feel good, It helps us to thrive, It helps us to be better, you know, wise, mothers, sisters, business owners all of those things rather than focusing on this again, this idea of perfection around how you look. Yeah, I know your whole platform is about, you know, making sure that you're approaching this from a holistic kind of a place. So can you say more about that? Absolutely, because wellness is not just physical. Again, that's marketed to us from society. That whole obsession with health is just about physical, right, what you eat and exercise, and we forget about all the other components. So I believe that wellness is mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual, and a lot of times, um, we neglect the other parts, right, we just focus on um, the physical, and we forget about our mental and emotional well being. And of course you know this a platform like this, we're focusing on our mental well being, but a lot of times we don't pay attention to those things. I really truly believe that all the facets of wellness, of holistic wellness, are interdependent. So, for an example, how you are feeling physically will affect your emotional and mental well being over time, and vice versa. You know, if you're feeling stressed, anxiety, lots of fear, those things will show up in your physical well being. So what holistic wellness is is learning how to take care of all of you as a woman, and not just the things that are aesthetically pleasing to society, right, because we're not just here to be aesthetically pleasing to others. We're actually here to rife as whole being. Yeah. Absolutely, And I do think, I mean, I agree with you that all of those domains are dependent on one another. I mean because in a previous episode when we talk to Lisa Savage about emotional eating, right and how that can be connected, Um, you know to your emotions. Of course you're stressed and so you're like snacking more, you know, doing those kinds of things. So it really is important to be paying attention to all of those areas of our lives. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, And I think that the more you realize that you can pay attention to the different components of wellness, it actually becomes a little bit easier because you don't put so much weight on one thing. You know, if you know that you're practicing self care, if you know that you're you know, you're taking care of reath and keeping up with your therapists or you know, journaling or what are ever, the other things are that help you take care of your emotional, mental, spiritual well being and not just your physical. You might feel a little bit more successful. But if you're only focused thing on oh what did I eat today or did I run to to UM two miles today, you know, you might not feel successful because you're only focusing on two things. So this kind of broadens the scope of how you can take care of yourself. Yeah, so I the earlier you also mentioned, UM, just the idea that there's a lot of trauma around health. UM, and I've seen you talk about before and others about just some of the challenges that people have in finding like medical professionals who are sensitive and understand some of the challenges that you may be coming in with. Can you say more about that, and like any tips that you may have for finding like a medical professional who is sensitive to understanding that health is at every size and you know who will be able to work with you in a way that's compassionate. Yes, I really love this question because I actually find that this comes up a lot UM and working with larger body women of color. Unfortunately, a lot of women are avoiding going to the doctors and avoiding getting the care that they need because they do have sort of this anxiety or trauma. And so sometimes that can show up as you know, you go to a doctor and they immediately body shamed you, or they only focus on your side and your weight and they don't do thorough testing and thorough treatment of you as a as a whole person right there, only focused on your weight, and so that kind of makes you feel anxious or maybe body shame, and then you're avoiding the doctors because you don't want to have sort of that negative interaction. So what I would recommend is if you do it have those experiences, the first thing you can do is of course switch providers, you know, if that's possible, because it's not going to be beneficial for you to continue going to a provider that you don't feel comfortable with. Because again, wellness is not just your physical health. So if you're going to a provider that it's harming your mental or emotional well being, then that's not healthy for you. What I recommend is sort of interviewing your your medical providers, you know, talking to them about the things that you know about yourself. If you have certain health challenges, um, maybe that's around how you feel about your size, or maybe you have a chronic illness or UM, different things that you struggle with, you know, go to a provider and say, these are the things that I live with. You know, are you knowledgeable? Are you comfortable with working with me around these different things? And and most of the time they'll they don't answer you and tell you yes or no. And then choosing a provider based on those things, not just because they showed up on your health insurance list or whatever, but really advocating for yourself. And that's one of the things I try to help women at particularly women of size and women who live with chronic illness. I try to help them learn how to advocate for themselves when it comes to their wellness, because you do deserve to be treated with dignity and respect and not an important part of wellness. Yeah, it always sends me to hear these stories abeys about like how many people have had like traumatic experiences in the space that was supposed to be healing, in the space that you know, you were supposed to be taken care of um. And I'm always shocked by like how many physicians like will continue to kind of preach this idea about like losing weight and diet, even though there's so much research that supports that diets never work. Um, you know, so I'm just thinking there has to be a better way for people, for physicians and medical professionals that kind of get on board with the idea of helping people to maybe make changes in their lives in a way that's not shaming. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and especially like you're saying, if it's making people, you know, I feel anxiety to the point where they're not going to the doctor at all, because then that's sort of like a self fulfilling prophecy where now you do have bad poor health because you're not going to the doctors and getting treatment, or you're not you know, staying up to date on your hast or knowing maybe things that you could have caught earlier because you're avoiding the doctor. So yeah, definitely practice advocating for yourself. And if you can't do it, because some some people just don't have that ability to speak up, or maybe it's too much hurt or trauma around it, then find a professional or a friend or someone who can help you. You know, I've recommended to people before take someone to the doctor with you that you trust. You know, that can sort of be your backbone when you go into the doctor's office. Sometimes it helps not to go by yourself. Yeah, So you had a recent post I mean that I absolutely loved about. Um, how many before and after pictures are you going to have to take before you okay with your now? Because really, when it boils down to it, like that's all we have, Like you may have goals and all of this stuff, but all you have is the body that you currently have. And so I know a lot of what you talked about also is body peace. Can you talk more about what that looks like in like some strategies for people to become more compassionate and okay with their bodies. Yeah. Absolutely. So. When I first started out working with people around body image, I used to use the terminology body love, and body love became like really trendy over over time because it sounds good, right, oh, love your body. Um, But what I found from clients that I was working with and sort of getting feedback was that they were actually, you know, women were feeling just as much pressure to love their bodies as they did to be skinny. So it's sort of like, Okay, there's all this pressure that I've got to be beautiful and skinny and you know, esthetically desirable and all of those things. And now I go to body positivity and they're pressuring me to love my body. But what happens to those of us who don't love our bodies, you know who we just sort of feel okay with our body, or maybe we don't love our nose or hair or heights or skin tone or whatever. And so that is where I introduced the concept of body peace, which is sort of telling women that it's okay if you don't love your body. What body piece means is that you can just move into a state of neutrality where you're not sort of waging war against your body or trying to change it, or feeling all of this shame and negative energy around it, and you're not feeling this pressure to be perfect either, but you're just accepting yourself as you are and learning practices to sort of help you be in that space of neutrality where when you look in the mirror, you say, you know, I I accept who I am even if I don't love it. I'm okay with who I am. And the reason that's important is because again the mental and emotional effects of constantly waging war on ourselves by trying to be perfect or trying to make ourselves love our body when we don't. Got you, are there other like tips that would help, like other exercises that maybe you suggest for some of your clients to kind of get more okay with feeling okay about the Yeah, the first thing I tell people is learning how to tune out external definitions of beauty. So learning to tune out you know, society, maybe friends and family or potential partner people, your data, all those different messages that we get from external sources about what we should look like, and gradually learning how to turn almost like a radio where you're turning down the dial on those external messages. And then if you think about turning up the dial on your internal voice, which is learning how to tune into yourself, right, So not paying so much attention to what society says you should look like or other people say you should look like, and learning to tune more into yourself and create a connection with your body from a space of compassion and acceptance. And when you get to that place, you're not sort of constantly at war with your body because society is always going to be changing the standards of what beauty is right, so you're always better be sort of let around by this proverbial carrot of perfection. But if you learn to tune into yourself and say, you know what, I'm okay with myself, I'm okay with with you know, being at peace, I'm okay with not changing myself, and then when you're focused on those messages more, that helps you get to a space of body peace. So that is quite a word you have spoken iavy around the idea that like there's always a new thing we should look like, be like you know all of this, because it just kind of makes me think about like the whole idea around our hair. Right like years ago all of our hair was expected to be straight, and now you know, more people are natural, and so it's like, okay, you have to be natural now, but only one kind of natural is okay. And you know, so you're right, like the finish line is always moving, and so if you're always like running behind this like line that's all it is changing, you're gonna exhaust yourself. M hmm. And a lot of times I work work when I work with clients. The first thing they tell me is I don't know, And I like to help empower women and tell them you do know. You do know what feels good for you. Now. You might have been not tuned into that for a really long time, and it might take you a while to work on turning down those external messages before you can get to that space of really hearing your inner voice. But it's there, and you do know. You know what lights you up, what makes you feel good when you wear your hair a certain way, or when you dress a certain way, or when you maybe practice yoga or when you journal. You know, all these different practices that make you feel good. Start taking an inventory of what lights you up and focus on those things more and focus on those external messages left it. So, I mean, can you talk a little bit about what are some of the ways that diet culture kind of pervades our society without us even knowing? Oh wow, in this short interview, Well, I mean, diet culture, it's just it's all it's all around us, right. So it's definitely the idea of of not being enough or being too much. Definitely the concept of um accomplishing something quickly. Right, So when you think of diet culture, they sort of send you this message like, you know, lose twenty five pounds in two days. You know. Um, that that that concept. And so even when I work with people around body peace, you know, or learning how to work on their body image, they want instant results. Right, So we don't realize how diet culture has sort of programmed does to feel like if we don't have results and major results in a short amount of time, that we're failing. Right. So even if that goes, when it comes to your career or work or other things that you're working on, you're looking for some sort of quick evidence or quick fix in order to feel like you're accomplishing something. And that sort of rooted in diet culture, where we have to alter ourselves in a major way quickly so that we can say we've accomplished something or we're doing better, and so other people can sort of praise us. And um, if you think of how that mindset kind of impact you know, not just your job, but maybe your relationships or your interactions with other or your mental well being, it's sort of it's always underlying. Yeah, it really is pervasive. I mean, and I think you're right, in terms of like the whole quick fix, and we see that kind of permeating through other areas of our lives, right, like people wanting a promotion after they've been at a job like two weeks, or just kind of like thinking that everything will come quickly when you know that most things in life do not happen in that way. M It's sort of that diet pill mentality, right, if you just take these pills, you don't really have to work or or you know, be patient with your body or learn your body needs or or you know, um developed consistency. It's just take these pills or you know, do X, Y and Z and you'll get this really fast result. Yeah, And I think the other thing that just came to mind is that it really kind of works against you having an actual relationship with your body because it's like, Okay, yeah, the numbers on the scale may go down quickly, but you don't ever really get at like what may have, you know, cause you to maybe be doing more emotional eating or like what led you to this place in your life in the first place. Like if you're just taking some pills to lose weight quickly, what is really your relationship? Like with your body. Yeah, absolutely, And I'm glad you brought that up, because another thing is that we don't even think about a relationship with our body, right It's sort of something to be subdued or controlled or punished. You know, those are sort of the words that we even see when well, we think about exercise and health. It's like beat it into shape or where you know, all of these things that are like sort of very very abusive language when it comes to our body and not very sub of view here compassionate or loving or patient language from diet culture. So at what point do UM women typically like seek your services IVY? Like would would be the impetus for somebody come into your website saying, hey, I think I want to work with IVY. Uh? Well, usually if a woman UM, I definitely specialize in women who are living with chronic illness UM and helping them learn how to find body peace while navigating the world with while living with the chronic illness. I also work with women of size who are sort of learning how to make peace with being a woman of size and finding body confidence UM and noting litigating the world as in a larger body, and also women of any size and shape who say, you know, like I was saying earlier, that they don't want to be constantly controlled by society's definition of beauty or or acceptance, and they want to learn how to accept their bodies. Um, any of those women would be perfect for reaching out and contacting me and we can talk. Got you. So what kinds of things do you think we can all be doing ivan to be more respectful of people with different body shape, sizes, all of those things. Well, definitely, the first thing I would say is making the decision, right because and that sounds like really simple, but sort of making the decision and making the commitment to developing a more compassion and accepting relationship with your body, because everything around us is sort of teaching us that we should be at war with our body, right, So making that decision that I don't want to constantly be at odds with my body. I do want to be at peace. And then once you make that decision, look at your life and sort of things, find the things that don't align with that decision. You know, um, who are you surrounding yourself with? What type of media are you um consuming? What type of people are you allowing to speak into your life, and then also what type of practices and behaviors are you doing that are sort of um, you know, abusive to your body and to yourself that aren't really aligning with the ideas of body acceptance or body peace. Yeah. And I think it's also kind of going back to our earlier conversation about social media important to kind of be paying attention to, like the messages that you're sharing about things on social media and some of the attacks. I what describe it as, you know, like when we see like a larger sized woman in the news or something, you immediately see people talking about like, well, what about our health and all this stuff? Um, you know, so everybody turns into like this researcher around like when you have no idea of like what that woman's history is or any of those things. So I think, you know, also being mindful of like how some of that stuff comes up and we just put it out there in ways that can be really hurtful to people. Yeah. One thing I recently said to someone is if you don't take anything else away from this interview, is remember this that you cannot tell anything about a person by looking at their body. Nothing, right, And so most of the time, like you said, we make assumption about a person's health or their well being, or maybe they're their financial status. We make all sorts of assumptions when we meet a person when we see their body. But you really don't know anything about a person. So the best thing you can do is to put aside those assumptions and if you want to get to know that person, you can. But not only is it harmful to um, you know, people who are in a marginalized body, like particularly people of size, or maybe a person with chronic illness or things like that. And hows us all when we judge people by that, you know, even ourselves because then we're sort of subjected to that when we go out into the world too, particularly as women of color. M hmm. Yeah. And I think sometimes you don't realize how you being super judgment of other people really turns back on yourself also because you're usually holding yourself to that kind of a standard as well. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. So what are some of your favorite resources, Ivy? What kinds of books are websites and things do you find yourself kind of frequently recommending? Um? So definitely, if if you want for those of you who are social media savvy and you want to look up social media UM following UM Haze, which is Health at Every Size, there's a book about about that. Actually this outwritten by Linda Bacon, and she sort of debunks the myth that health and size are are connected. That's really good place to start UM for people who maybe haven't heard of that concept before, or maybe UM are sort of confused about that, that's a good place to start and really good information about that. Also, if you follow the hashtag no Body Shame on social media, you'll find a lot of body image experts and a lot of body image activists who are doing the work around helping people not to live their lives and body shame or to focus on just body image and to actually, you know, go deeper when it comes to your relationship with your body. And one book that I recommend to a lot of women UM is The Beauty Myths, which sort of UM talks about how society and media and all of that UM have an impact on how we feel about our bodies based on the way that we look nice. And where can people find you? Ivy, What is your website as well as any social media handles you want to share um sure. The website is me My Body and the Love dot com. And on Instagram, I am I am I Bey Felicia, and so that's f E L I C I A. So it's I am I be Felicia on Instagram and all of my other informations on the website perfect. Of course, we will add all of that to the show notes. Thank you so much for chatting with us today, Ivy. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I'm so glad Ivy was able to share her expertise with us today. To learn more about her and her new wellness program that she's offering called Waitless Wellness, head on over to Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash Session eighty nine. Please make sure to share your takeaways from the episode with us on Twitter or in your i G stories using the hashtag tv G in session, and text the episode to two friends you think would really enjoy it. Remember that if you're searching for a therapist in your area, check out our directory at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash directory. We've recently made some updates that all all you to search the directory by zip code and insurance, and it gives you information about therapists who provide virtual therapy, so if you're looking for someone, this will be a great place to start. Don't forget that you can grab your TVG sweatshirts, t shirts, mugs, and a copy of our guided break up journal all in our store at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash shop. This month, in the Yellow Couch Collective, which is the community design for anyone wanting to dig deeper into the topics discussed here, we'll be reading Self Compassion by Dr Kristin Neff. So if you know that you need to be a little more loving and kind to yourself, join us at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash y c C to dig into the book and discuss ways we can practice it more regularly in our lives. I'm sure many of you watch the docuseries Surviving r Kelly this past week, and I've heard your request to do an episode or around the content. I just want to let you know that I hear you, and I am working on bringing you several episodes so that we can continue the important conversation of keeping black women and girls safe from abuse. So stay tuned. Thank you all so much for joining me agive this week. I look forward to continue in this conversation with you all real soon Take good care,