Challenging Shame-Based Narratives: How Shame will NEVER get you to Sustainable Health and Wellness

Can you imagine a world where we approach health and wellness not through shame and self-loathing, but with self-compassion and respect? We're here to shine a light on just that. We unravel the damaging role of shame as a motivator in the diet industry, exploring the insidious ways diet culture and weight loss ads prey on our insecurities and fears. Instead, we advocate for a sustainable, respectful, and compassionate relationship with our food and bodies.

We dig into the reasons why shame is an ineffective—often destructive—motivator. It breeds negativity and self-doubt, ultimately eroding our trust in ourselves and causing unnecessary psychological stress. And, while it's true, shame can influence behavior change, it's far from conducive to forming lasting, healthy habits. So, we're here to challenge the shame-based narratives and propose an alternative: a supportive, community-focused approach to health and wellness that promotes self-compassion instead of self-judgment. Join us on this enlightening journey toward a healthier relationship with food and body.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Okay, today we are going to talk about how shame is the worst motivator and shame is so often used in what people believe would be the antidotes to helping their relationship with food and body. So many times when people are trying to feel better about their body or to have a better relationship with food and understand food and trust food, they unintentionally are picking things that are never going to work. Because when we use shame through diets, restriction, distrusting behaviors, external people or things telling you how to do something that you need to do internally and listen to intuition with all of these things are built on distrust, shame and disrespect, and shame is the worst motivator and shame will never get you to a respectful, self-compassionate relationship with food. So let's dive in without further ado. Shame being the worst motivator, here we go. So first of all, I just want to say of course you see shame tactics all around in diet culture, in these weight loss ads. Right, it's everywhere. It's nearly impossible to scroll through social media, watch television or read a magazine without encountering advertisements for weight loss, for nutrition products to help solve your problems, built on shame, literally these ads. Their whole thing is to pick out ways in which you feel shame or you don't feel good about something, and to hit on that pain point so that you buy this product. So these ads promise these quick fixes, the answer, the cure all, and this lure of a healthier relationship with food and body, a healthier lifestyle. However, they use shame as a motivator, not only to purchase their product, but also shame is built into their product Hating your body, making you think you need a different one, telling you your body and the way you eat is not good enough, right, shame? They capitalize on people's insecurities and they play off your fears and they play off your self doubt.

Speaker 1: 2:36

But I want to explore today the reasons why shame is a very bad motivator. It will never be able to get you to where you want to go, where you have a peaceful, trusting, respectful relationship with food and body, because it doesn't lead to growth, it doesn't lead to something sustainable, it doesn't lead to something we can use long term and make you feel good too, because shame, shame is there, right, so let's talk about it. So, first of all, shame leads to short term focus. Shame can initially provide some initial motivation, but it often leads to a short lived, unsustainable efforts to change behaviors, to develop a healthy relationship with these things. So it's very much built on short term focus, where it captures your attention around what you are feeling shameful about in the moment or the shame that they pull out without talking about and giving solutions and helping you to understand where we want to go long term and why we want to go there and what we must do to get there. So that short term focus is, of course, we need something that is going to be sustainable, something that we can rely on to continue to build a healthy relationship with food and body that focuses on our holistic well-being, and that's something that we can find internally built on respect. So we want to keep going, we want to keep growing, we want to sustain this, we want to feel good in it, so we want to continue. So it's a very bad motivator because it's short term focus.

Speaker 1: 4:36

I'm going to give an example of this. So let's say that there's a teacher and that teacher, often in the classroom, uses shame as a tactic to get kids motivated to maybe do better, perform better, get better test grades, whatever it might be. And so this teacher decides to start comparing the students and calling people out for doing poorly, saying hey, you don't want to be like this person. Look at these test scores. They're you know whatever not smart. It's hard to even say this example because that would be so cruel and awful, but anyways, let's say they use that Of course that kid. It's not going to motivate that child. It's going to make them feel extremely unworthy, embarrassed, not capable, and so they might try really hard to avoid that embarrassment. You know, for the next class, but there's, or for you know the next few. They just want to avoid hearing that again and being put in that situation again.

Speaker 1: 5:37

However, that's not going to help that child to be able to understand the material better or want to understand the material better long run become learn skills in school. It's going to just cause them to feel super insecure, motivated for a while and then lose motivation because they're also feeling really crappy about it. They're probably anxious when they're trying to do better. It's just there's not built on success, right. So the same goes with our relationship with food and body. When we are trying to move into having a better relationship with food but it is shamed, based of feelings like we can't trust ourselves, we are, we don't deserve to have certain foods, our body's not good enough, it's going to feel. Whatever we're doing built on shame is going to feel really crappy and cause us to eventually give up, quote unquote and quote unquote, fail, because it feels miserable to using these, to use these shameful behaviors and to also be constantly motivated with shame in our brain, like. What we need is a compassionate approach, is an intuitive approach, because when it feels good and it's built on what feels good and respecting ourselves and having compassion, that's something we're absolutely going to want to keep up and it's going to be easy to keep up with. Okay, All right.

Speaker 1: 7:05

So the next one why is shame a bad motivator for sustainable growth? Negative self image, of course, negative. All that negative self talk and everything built on shame is going to give us a really negative self view and a negative view of our experiences and our journey. This continued exposure to the shame based messages that are pulling you into the diet and that are leading you in the diet are going to erode the trust in yourself. It's going to erode yourself, esteem, your self worth and your personal growth when we are in these diets or in this disorder needing and we are using shame to motivate us to have a healthier relationship with food, saying things like you are to this. This is ugly. This part of your body is ugly. We need to change it so we are more worthy, so we are better, so we can be proud of ourselves, so we can like ourselves. Whatever it might be that and I'm sure you can come up with a lot more of what you are currently experiencing.

Speaker 1: 8:14

When you are using shame, that negative self talk, what happens is you're just going to become more distrustful. Whether or not you change your body, it's not going to be good enough. Your self worth is still going to be so confusing and in the garbage and low because it is built on this measure that actually is this just crappy measure. That is not something that will ever give us a feeling of self-confidence, of trust in food, of a healthy relationship with our body that we are friends with right, because it's built on the wrong blocks. It's built on the wrong foundation. Our foundation is flawed and we cannot move to a healthier, happier relationship with food and body where it's trusting and respectful if it's built from the ground up with shame, built on shame. If you're speaking negatively and putting your body down and your relationship with food down now and you use that in order to try and get to a healthier and happier, kinder relationship with food and body. When you think you got there with some kind of diet that you're currently doing okay at, or if you're able to change your body, it's not going to be good enough, it's not going to be compassionate in this new body or this new way you do when you're doing food and again going back to the other one, it's a short-term focus and you're going to lose that sustainability. It's just built on the wrong things.

Speaker 1: 9:54

Next reason that shame is an unsustainable motivation motivator Psychological stress. You are stressing yourself out mentally but also physically by using shame tactics, by using shameful messaging, shameful self-talk, shameful diets built in shame and restriction. You're not going to feel good mentally, but also physically from what you're doing to your body and that stress. When we're stressed, it's not going to lead us to any place good or any place sustainable. It's going to actually bring a lot of excess baggage with that shame that is going to hold us back from our goals. So it's going to lead to a lot of like a stress response, lead to emotional leading, being led by emotions and distrust right. So using unhealthy coping with food and body can really undermine our long-term health goals. Health is holistic and if we are, we have to consider our mental health in this picture as well and our emotional health. And if shame is leading, of course, what happens to those right?

Speaker 1: 11:09

Next, shame really leads to avoidance behavior, and avoidance is the opposite of what we want to be doing. When it comes to looking at your relationship with food and body, we need to be open and able to look at things and to explore. By avoiding, you are not going to be looking at the right things or looking at things at all that need to be addressed those roots right, the roots of the growth and development and that tree that we want to grow for our relationship with food and body. We have to start at the roots, and if you are not willing to look at the roots, then you have an unsustainable thing here. So avoidance behavior often happens when things are built on shame.

Speaker 1: 12:02

When shame is the motivator, people avoid seeking help professionally due to this fear of judgment. That makes it difficult to access appropriate resources for sustained growth. It causes people to avoid looking internally, to do some body image work, to see what's underlying that, to look at their past and what might be hindering their relationship with food, what they might be afraid of, what's holding them back from moving forward, what might unconsciously be keeping them feeling safe or what they might be using as a form of control. You have to raise awareness in this journey. You have to be able to look at things. So if you are using shame, you will avoid, because shame feels awful and no one wants to feel awful like that. So we have to. So very, very often people avoid and shame is going to continue. Keeping you avoiding, keeping you in these quote-unquote quick fixes where you don't have to go into that place of looking at these hard things and kind of piggybacking off of the avoidance behavior.

Speaker 1: 13:21

Shame also is not sustainable because often time, shame focuses on the symptoms and not the causes. Right, again, it's not looking at the roots, which would be the causes, the reasons, what it's built on. It looks at the symptoms. So let's get a little bit more into this. To explain this, shame-based approaches often target symptoms like let's look at your weight, let's look at what's happening with the scale, let's look at your muscle mass, whatever it might be Right, rather than actually addressing underlying causes like what is causing you to eat the way you do, what is causing you to feel fearful around those foods? What is causing you to put your body in this place of stress, unable to take care of you? What is causing this super you to feel super uncomfortable with your relationship with your body and with body image? Why, what is causing you to hop on the scale every two hours? What is causing you to feel like you can't trust your relationship with food Right? So this focus on the symptoms and not the causes will keep you very stuck, because it's not until you actually address the foundation, those roots, that you can get to a place where you have sustainable, lasting understanding, holistic picture of your relationship with food and body.

Speaker 1: 15:03

Focusing on these symptoms and focusing on these quote-unquote short-term solutions that actually don't work, they're promoted in these shame-based ways and they do not address those root causes of what you're experiencing with your relationship with food, with your health, with your relationship with body, and it just leads to reoccurring problems, being stuck in that hamster wheel. That shame also leads to a loss of intrinsic motivation. So the next one why it's not sustainable is it causes you to lose intrinsic motivation. Individuals who are motivated by shame lose sight of what they really want or they might not even know, right, because they're so bombarded with shame that they might not know why they really want it, what they really want, and lose track of or not understand what's motivating them internally, right? Feeling better, feeling more trusting, feeling more intuitive, feeling like they can let go of their those food and body image thoughts, their health, right, their well-being, their mental health. And when you don't have those intrinsic value-based motivations, it makes long-term change way less likely, right?

Speaker 1: 16:21

Kind of like when you think of your relationship with movement, when you are punishing yourself and using shame-based movement motivators, right? So if it's like I hate to run but I make myself go to the gym at 4 am every day and go running, that's gonna be. It's going to be very hard to continue moving and have a good relationship with movement, absolutely. But if you are someone who has had their relationship with movement, it's not built on shame but built on feeling good and celebrating your body. It's based on you make decisions for movement in the moment, with how you're feeling. If you ask yourself do I need a rest today or do I feel like moving my body? How much energy do I have? How do I feel after swimming? What's my favorite type of movement and does that and just listens to their body and has fun with it and celebrates it, that person's going to swim forever because they feel great in it and they have the right intrinsic motivation, built on not shame but compassion, which is the theme of this.

Speaker 1: 17:30

All we need the right building blocks. We need to build our behaviors. Our relationship with food and body needs to be built on compassion, respect and intuition. Because if it's built on shame, distrust, disrespect, others' expectations, others telling you what to do, that is very short lived and it's not going to lead you to where you want to go. It's going to lead you to needing to solve it in a different way and the problem never going away. If there's one message you get out of everything here, that's it. Shame is also very unsustainable as a motivator because it leads to a lot of dissatisfaction. People who embark on their journeys motivated by shame may never truly be satisfied, like I mentioned earlier, with their progress and it just perpetuates a cycle of negative self perception and a negative cycle of just reoccurring diets, reoccurring disordered eating built on distrust. So it's going to lead to dissatisfaction and obviously we want a motivator that is going to lead us to feel satisfied.

Speaker 1: 18:43

And lastly, shame creates unhealthy habits. This one is an obvious with everything we have discussed so far today. But shame can drive individuals to have very unhealthy habits, and I see it all the time. Shame can drive individuals to adopt unhealthy, sustainable practices continuing to be more extreme in their diets, develop eating disorders, have excessive unhealthy relationships with exercise, and it can all, of course, harm their physical and mental health, making them more confused about what to do with food, feeling more shameful with their body, their body never feeling good enough and uptick in how much they body check all of that. So shame is going to create unhealthy shame is going to create unhealthy habits.

Speaker 1: 19:34

If we go back to that example of the child in the classroom, right, maybe that child is now going to go home and, in order to do better in school, they're going to have, they're going to start shaming themselves and have this, develop, this negative self-talk. Maybe they stop going out with friends because they need they feel they need to spend all their time at home studying, so their social life is impacted. Maybe they're in their room and just spending hours at their desk trying to learn. Maybe then also, too, they stop liking learning, right, there's just so much that can happen. That is negative, negative results of shame in any situation, right? So, all in all, what I want you to take away today is the idea around that foundation. Right, think about what happens and what has been happening.

Speaker 1: 20:40

If you are building a house built on an unsteady, negative foundation, right, what's going to happen is building on this foundation. You are going to have that foundation. That foundation is going to impact every aspect of what's put on that foundation. So, if shame is at that foundation, everything is going to be run through or associated with that shame, with that negative self-talk, with that distrust, with that disrespect, and so, really, we need to take down that building and rebuild the foundation first. That foundation needs to happen first, it needs to be considered first, and that's what I want you to do today.

Speaker 1: 21:30

I want you to consider the foundation that you are using to move forward with your relationship with food and body and ask yourself where do I want to go? And if where you want to go is a healthier, happier, more trusting, respectful relationship with food and body, where you know you feel like you understand how to eat and you respect your body, you can trust it and you don't feel anxious. You don't have to hop on the scale and you can be free to do what you want to do and you have self-confidence and you don't let body image hold you back. Right, if that's where you want to go, I want you to ask yourself is what I'm doing rooted in shame? Are my behaviors rooted in shame? Is my solution rooted in shame? And get really honest with yourself. Is that path ever going to work? Has it worked for you in the past?

Speaker 1: 22:25

As always, I'm sending you a ton of hugs, a ton of compassion. I'm so glad you're here with me. If you have found this helpful. It helps me out a lot in order to get this podcast out there, so people can get more help and more support. And so, if you find this helpful, please subscribe, download the episodes, give me a five star rating if you agree with that, and so we can help more people find bites and body love so they can heal a relationship with food and body, be part of this community and feel less alone. Okay, until next time. Thank you so much for being here.