Are you happy with your body? or are you comparing yourself to images on social media?

Yeah, well, you just mentioned all these different phases in which you mentioned, you know, menopause, perimenopause, puberty.

Every time we hit a new phase in life, I personally, my theory is that it just gives us more fuel for the flame of finding something incorrect, wrong about our bodies and trying to change it.

And it might be funny to hear this from a weight loss coach.

I really do think that body positivity helps someone find a lower weight if that's what they truly want but to your point the fact that every few years we're then prompted by another life change to look at our bodies negatively to me that says so much about what society is teaching us to do what our brains have slowly been trained to look out for with all those negatives and the point that I want to make here is that when you look at that critically and when you start to turn that around, you can actually make healthy changes to your body way easier with way more curiosity and calmness.

And in my opinion, you keep those changes more sustainably long term when you do everything with more of a positive view towards yourself.

I mean, I have to say I don't think social media

helps.

Just a general sort of meander through social media.

There are so many images, particularly this time of year, we've got, I'm on my holiday, I've got my pina colada and my sun hat on and my beautiful body and everything.

That's okay.

And, you know, I'm not trying to be negative about people who have, some people are naturally slim.

You know, we've all got a friend, no matter what she eats or drinks, she just doesn't put on an out, doesn't even think about her weight, her body shape.

The rest of us mere mortals, when you go to like look to get some new clothes for the summer, particularly you're looking for like bikinis or swim costumes, summer clothes, bearing arms, bearing legs, maybe bearing a bit more flesh than you normally would throughout the year.

It's tricky.

It is very, very tricky.

So I really don't think social media helps.

Absolutely not.

To me, it brings up a constant comparison.

So the human brain is already primed to look out for negatives because evolutionarily that protected us from getting eaten by a tiger that we saw on the planes because it was different than everything else that we saw on the planes.

So our brains are primed to look for what's different and what's negative.

So when we're constantly bombarded, and I see this on my social media too, every image brings up our brain's tendency to make a negative comparison with ourselves.

And it's trying to keep us safe in its old fashioned way.

I don't know, in my view, the social media is just a crazy ramp up of everything that existed before it.

So the magazines, TV, it's just that the volume at which we hear it and the frequency at which we're looking at it every single day makes it feel so much worse and so much harder to get rid of.

Have you ever purposefully deleted your Instagram from your phone or a social media app from your daily use?