385 Holly Worton ~ How Your Adventures Can Revolutionize Your Relationship With Your Body

Transcript 

Holly: Hello adventurers and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 385. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today I am going to talk about how outdoors adventures can revolutionise your relationship with your body. This is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately, especially when I go on some of my longer runs, just really reflecting how my own relationship with my body has changed in the last few years but especially the last few months. So I wanted to share my story and give you some ideas of some ways that you can change your perception of your body and change your relationship with your body, based on the things that you do with it.

But before I get into today’s episode, I wanted to mention a podcast that I was recently a guest on: I was a guest on Joanna Penn’s the Creative Penn podcast and this is a podcast that I have been listening to…ah it was probably one of the first podcasts that I started listening to about eight years ago, I think. So it was such a pleasure and such an honour to be a guest on this podcast and we talked about business mindset and pivoting our career, so if you would like to take a look at that you can go to HollyWorton.com/Penn and that will redirect you to Joanna Penn’s website and you can listen to the episode. It was a really, really, really, enjoyable conversation which we recorded back in August. I think things have changed for the both of us since then so it was really interesting to hear it go live and recall the conversation and I really, really, enjoyed it. So head over to HollyWorton.com/Penn and you can listen to it there.

I also wanted to give a big thank you to new patron Casandra, thank you so much for your support and just as a quick reminder if you get value from this episode I would love for you to join me on Patreon, if you head over to Patreon.com/HollyWorton you can me join me there. You can support me from just $1 a month and you get exclusive access to stuff that I don’t share for free anywhere else, like free copies of my eBooks depending on what tier you sign up on. So thank you very much for joining me.

Let’s get into the episode.

So I have had, I guess, kind of a complicated relationship with my body. I grew up not in an athletic family, I was never really encouraged to participate in sports and I was never really good at sports. As a kid growing up I really hated PE, it was the worst time of day for me in school, I dreaded it and I always kind of grew up with the beliefs that I was given that looks were important. So my relationship with my body was always kind of that it should look good, and I never really thought about health and fitness and that kind of thing, until much later in my life. Luckily I never had a problem with weight so I didn’t have the added stress of having these beliefs that looks are super important and having issues with weight, that didn’t happen until much later.

So I kind of grew up thinking that everything was okay, I didn’t realise that there was a problem with these beliefs and like I said I wasn’t athletic at all, I hated PE so much. I have always said that if hell exists (I don’t believe in hell, but if it does exist) it involves volleyball, I hated volleyball! And now that I am grown up and I have autism diagnosis I think probably my fear of flying balls comes from my autism, I don’t know, but I am terrified of flying balls, I hate sports that involve balls in the air, and most of PE was ball sports which I hated. So anyway, thought I wasn’t sporty, thought I just kind of got the smart gene but not the sporty gene and really struggled with that. I just felt so bad about myself, every PE class, a lot of my friends were athletic and a lot of them did swimming and basketball but I just didn’t, I was so athletically awkward {laughing} and just terrible.

And now that I think about it in retrospect it makes me really angry because I feel like all those years of PE and elementary school and junior high school, not one PE teacher (or physical ed. whatever you call it), said, ‘you know what no you are not sporty but if you try and if you practice and if you put in the time you will get better’. No one told me that in all those years! So I literally thought that I just wasn’t athletic and I was never going to be. I didn’t have the mindset that I could change that because I don’t know it didn’t occur to me and no one told me. I feel like phys ed teachers, that’s their job, I feel like their job isn’t just to make you run around a field and play ball sports, it should be to encourage the kids that aren’t athletic to give it a try or try to like it {laughing}, I don’t know, anyway this is something I could rant on for a while because it makes me really angry!

So, it wasn’t until my late 20s, I don’t remember what years it was, that I started running. What happened was I gained 5lbs {laughing} and I had never gained weight before, I just thought my body was just naturally slim and always would be. That was not the case, I had a very stressful business at the time, and a very sedentary role in the business, I was just sitting at my computer for long hours and gained 5lbs, which was not that big of a deal, but it really woke me up. I remember emailing one of my friends from High School, one of my sporty friends, and being like: Amy I gained some weight, what do I do, I don’t know what to do? And she said, ‘you go out and you buy a pair of running shoes and you run’. And I thought: I don’t know but okay. So I went out and bought my running shoes and started running. She said, ‘you go out for half-an-hour, if you can’t run for the half-an-hour do what you can, run for two minutes, walk for two minutes, run for two minutes, walk for two minutes… until you get up to half-an hour’. And at the beginning I couldn’t run for more than a minute or two and it was really painful, and it was really hot where I lived because I was living in South East Mexico at the time, so I had to run really early in the morning because it was really hot and humid. But I did it and I got better, and better, and better and then I signed up for a marathon and then about six months after I started running I did the marathon which I DNF’d (I did not finish it) and that kind of set me up for some bad beliefs about my athletic ability, but I had started my journey(!) I realised that I could be athletic and I could do sporty things with my body. So that was good and a huge shift for me, I learned something very important.

Then I hit my mid-30s and my thyroid got messed up and I gained a lot of weight and really struggled to lose it, I tried just about everything and nothing worked and I really started to feel (I don’t know!) abandoned by my body, obviously not, it was still there, but it was like it was mistreating me, it gained weight and I had no energy. It was the combination of the weight gain and the low energy that felt so awful. And I felt like my body was limiting me and it wasn’t letting me do all the things that I wanted to do and I was just really miserable and I had lost all hope. And then I discovered intermittent fasting which I have been doing for about two-and-a-half years now, and anybody who has ever talked to me in real life about this knows just how much I love intermittent fasting. If you ever even remotely expressed interest in intermittent fasting I probably bought you a copy of Dr Jason Fung’s book, The Complete Guide to Fasting, because I bought so many people a copy of that book. I will link to that in the show notes, because if you are interested in fasting you need a copy of that book, it will tell you everything you need to know about intermittent fasting. I also have a really thorough blog post that talks about my fasting journey, which I will link to as well in the show notes, but get yourself that book if you are interested.

Anyway, I started fasting and I originally did it because I wanted to lose weight but I gained my energy back, I received the beautiful gift of energy, fasting releases more Adrenalin which gives you energy and makes you feel like a normal human being. Now, for the first couple of weeks after I started fasting I went the opposite way, I was bouncing off the walls with energy, I was all over the place and I remember Agustin looking at me one day and saying, ‘I don’t even know who you are anymore, what is this, who is this person?’ {laughing} but it really changed my life. So when I say fasting changed my life, it wasn’t because of the pathetic reason of losing weight, it was the energy and Wwen I got my energy back I could do the things that I wanted to do.

And then this year we had Covid and I got back into running. I had forgotten how much I loved running! And I remember telling Agustin years ago, ‘don’t ever let me forgot how much I love running!’. And he has tried, he has tried so hard to tell me and I just wouldn’t listen to him. There was a point where I had quit running and time had gone on and he would say, ‘well remember you love running’, and I would be like, ‘I hate running, I don’t want to do it’.

And then it just completely shifted this year, now that I am getting back into longer distances and working my way up every week, Monday I did 24k, it has just completely revolutionised my relationship with my body. And I realise this about two or three months ago when I had a call with my fasting coach, who I will also link to in the show notes, I did 12 months with her, 12 sessions, and started in December last year,, and just had my last session with her this week, and about three months ago I said to her, ‘you know, my goals are changing, yes I still want to lose more weight, but what is more important to me is the fitness stuff, the running stuff’,  and because I am running more and exercising more I decided to change the fasting protocol that I was following. I was doing alternate day fasting and now I am back to OMAD (which is one meal a day) and I said to her, ‘I would like to lose weight but really the higher priority is my running’.

And when I said that to her, I realised what a huge shift that had been in my mindset, because for so many years it was like, I gained this weight and I just wanted to lose the weight, I just wanted to get back to where I was. I wanted to get back to that number, the number that had been my weight for most of my life, I liked that number, and I wanted that number. But now there was something more important, it was running, it was this activity where my body takes me fun places.

I know I have talked in my books, and probably on this podcast about how, when I am walking a long-distance trail, or when I go on a hike, sometimes I find myself smiling to myself because I am just so happy. I am out in nature, I am on the trails, I am seeing beautiful things, and without even thinking about it, I am just smiling to myself. And I have been catching myself doing that on my longer runs. I am a slow runner, so when I run 24k that takes me over three hours, three hours and a bit. So I am out on trails, I am seeing new trails, I thought I had walked all the trails in my area, not so, I am discovering new trails. And because I am running rather than walking and going faster, so I am going further and I am getting to see new things and more things, I have been feeling myself smiling on my runs, because I am enjoying them so much and my runs are bringing me such joy. And I have realised that my relationship with my body has moved from an aesthetic focus to a functional focus and of course this didn’t happen over night, it was a result of all these different things that I have been doing with my body, dating back to 2015 when I walked the South Downs Way for the first time and had a really rough time with it. That was so hard and that was probably the start of this mindset shift because I realised that my feet could take me to really beautiful places and could take me on really exciting adventures, more exciting than just a day hike.

So this shift from a focus on aesthetics to a focus on function, and adventure, has been really huge for me. I feel like I am finally at a point where I appreciate my body. I hate saying that because it is like I have been doing all these beautiful runs and walks and kickboxing and all the stuff that I do, and of course my body has allowed me to do all those things, and I am grateful for that, because not everyone has the function of their body, I know that. I know that, I have always known that and yet I still took it for granted. And now I feel like I really appreciate all the places that my body takes me and all of the adventures that my body allows me to have and I really, really, appreciate it and I am really, really, grateful for it.

I don’t know where you are in your journey with your body, and your relationship with your body, but I think a lot of people, and I think a lot of women in particular, really don’t have a great relationship with their body. Media, film, televisions, magazines, all that stuff, shows super thin people doing amazing things and being happy with all the products that they are selling and all the things that are doing in their fictional world. I think that is one of the reasons why it is so engrained in us this focus on aesthetics (and there is nothing wrong with wanting to look good, I still want to lose some weight, I want to look good, I think I look okay, but I want to look better), I do have aesthetic goals for my body,  but I think the fact that I shifted more to functional goals has made me much kinder to myself.

So, I wanted to share some ideas with you about how, if you want, to shift your focus and shift your relationship with your body, how you might be able to do that. I think one of the ways is to start by seeing the opportunities, thinking about all the opportunities that you could do with your body. So for me it is running, it is backpacking, it is camping, it is walking long distance trails, it is kickboxing, those are all the things that I love most, in terms of adventures and stuff that my body allows me to do. So think about what you want to do, maybe it is dance, maybe it is hiking, maybe it is running, maybe it is something else. What are all the activities that you would love to do with your body? Make a note of those, write those down in your journal, brainstorm all of the things that you would love to do with your body.

Then see how you can take better care of your body. So for me that looked like, in 2015 I quit high heels. I think that people who know me today would find this hard to believe, because I don’t wear heels any more, but for a long time, especially when I lived in Argentina, I wore high heels every day and I used to wear really high heels and people would always say to me, ‘how do you walk in those heels?’, and I would be like, ‘oh, they are so comfortable’, because I would always buy really good quality heels and I was used to wearing them everyday. But when I walked the South Downs Way my feet hurt so badly, because I was wearing a big backpack and I wasn’t used to walking with so much weight on my body, not just the physical weight of my body but also the backpack and my feet hurt so badly and I realised how important my feet were to me, since I didn’t want to mess them up any more by wearing heels and so I quit heels. Since then I have been buying more kind of foot-shaped shoes like Vivo Barefoot shoes, which I love and even my running shoes, I wear ultras, which are more foot shaped, and I have just been investing more money into foot-friendly shoes. So that is one thing that helped me to care for my body because I realised that my feet were the things that would take me places.

Giving myself permission to sleep in when needed, I have never been a morning person but I have always felt that kind of guilt, because you hear so many people, ‘successful people get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and they have a morning routine and then they get started by 6 o’clock doing all their stuff’. And my brain just doesn’t function in the morning, my brain functions really well starting at about 11 o’clock although I don’t sleep in until 11. And I think giving myself permission to sleep in when I needed to recover has been a really important gift to my body. I remember talking to my kickboxing trainer earlier this year I think it was about how exhausted I am at the end of the advanced courses that we do, the advanced gradings. And I was like, ‘I am barely standing on my feet at the end of those’, and he was like, ‘well you need to increase your fitness levels’. And I said, ‘well I don’t know how to do that, because I feel like I barely have time to recover’, and he said, ‘the cheapest form of recovery is sleep’. And I thought: oh, I guess I can allow myself to sleep more. So when I feel like my alarm goes off in the morning and I need to sleep some more, because I have had a big workout the day before, or an extra long run, I give myself permission to sleep in an extra half hour or an hour and honestly that has really, really, helped with my recovery and it has really helped me to care for my body, because I don’t want to burn out, I have been there and I don’t want to do that.

Another thing is eating the foods that I know my body likes, about two-and-a-half years ago I started eating keto and I am not eating strict keto any more, but I do eat mostly high fat and low carb and that is something that has also been really important in how I care for my body. My body has never liked carbs, it never felt good after bread, and rice, and pasta and all that stuff, but that stuff is addictive and so I let myself eat it, but when I started keto I realised how much my body loved fat and how much better I felt. So, eating the foods that I know my body likes have also helped me to care better for my body and also helps me be fat-adapted so that I can run fasted and do exercise fasted.

Another thing is to listen to your body and people always used to say this to me ‘listen to your body, that will help you know what to do and how to treat it’, and I always felt really disconnected from my body. Then, last year, or the year before, I got an Oura ring, it is a fitbit for your sleep. It is a ring that goes on your finger, obviously, and it monitors your body temperature and your HRV (heart rate variation) and it gives you data about how to improve your sleep and how to improve your readiness and that is one thing that has really helped me to tune into my body. A lot of times I will wake up and I will be due for a run, and I kind of feel like crap, and I think, what shall I do? I have a run in the calendar, I really need to run today, I really don’t have times in my calendar later on this week and the weather is crappy later in the week. So what do I do? I should run, what do I do?’ And I feel like having the external data, it is not perfect, but I feel like having that extra data helps me to trust what I was already feeling but I didn’t want to acknowledge. So when my Aura ring, it has an app, when the app says that my readiness is not good, then I tune into my body and I think, maybe I should take it easy today. And this is something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago, I had a long run in the calendar, and a long hike to train for my ultra in the same week and I couldn’t do either, because I just did not feel great all week and I ended up bumping the run from Monday to Tuesday, to Wednesday, to Thursday, to Friday, to Saturday, to Sunday and it just never happened. I just wasn’t feeling well, so I did shorter things, I did runs, I did lighter stuff and I rested, but it was having that tech data that helped me to give myself permission because so often I do listen to my body but then my head wants to override that and be like, ‘well, but we have to stay on track with our goals, we have to do this run, we have to do this week’. So having that data has really helped me to pay attention to my body and not override what I am actually feeling.

And then, value your body. Value all the things it allows you to do. If you have functional legs, like your body takes you places, maybe you are not doing 24k runs or half-marathons or whatever but your body does take you places probably, value what it allows you to do. And even if you are on a weight loss journey, value your non-scale victories, I was obsessed with weighing myself, because I was fasting and I really wanted to stay on schedule and looking at my weight really helped, because I could see how it was changing every week. And then about the same time that I started getting this mindset shift from aesthetics to function I just quit weighing myself, I started forgetting and then I just didn’t care anymore, I can’t remember the last time that I weighed myself. But looking at those non-scale victories is important, I ran 24k this week, that was great, I haven’t run that much in years, that was great! And then I did 35k walk a couple of weeks ago, that was amazing. Value the thing that your body allows you to do.  Value even the non-tangible things like energy, fasting is a lifestyle thing for me now, I don’t think I will ever go back to three meals a day or three big meals and two small meals, all the little things that the different diets that people tell you to do. Fasting has given me so much energy and I am so grateful for that, I love it, so that is my lifestyle now. So value things like energy.

Next mindset work, I am always talking about doing mindset work and I have been working on and off with (have mentioned her a couple of times now) Jane Talbot who is an NLP practitioner and we have been doing values solicitation, we have been doing timeline work and it has really helped me with my relationship with my body, it has helped me with my relationship with my fitness goals and it has really helped.

So how can you clean up your mindset? Start out by cleaning up anything in your social media that doesn’t make you feel good. So earlier this year I did a huge clean up on all of my social networks and unfollowed a bunch of stuff that I was no longer interested in and followed a bunch of nature-y stuff that made me feel great. If you are following anyone or anything on social media that doesn’t make you feel good, be that influencers, or products, or whatever, just unfollow that stuff and get it out of your field of vision and replace it with stuff that does make you feel good. I started following Runners World Magazine, people who do trail running, I love seeing where other people go on their runs. It inspires me for my own runs, so clean up your social media and fill it up with stuff that does make you feel good. If your fitness goals are hiking or camping or dance related or some other sport, I don’t know climbing, fill up your social media with that stuff because that will inspire you to do those things.

Next gratitude work, it is not something I do regularly and consistently, but it helps when I do it and whenever I feel I need to do it I do it, just writing down stuff that you are grateful for, generally in your life or specifically to your body, could be really useful to take the time in your journal to do ten things that you are grateful to your body for, what are ten things that your body allows you to do, write that down, ‘I am so grateful to my body because it allows me to do x’.

Forgiveness work, I have done a lot of forgiveness work, Ho’oponopono, with my body, because I feel like I didn’t have the greatest self talk for a long time and I feel like I was upset with my body and I feel like I just wasn’t very nice to it, so I have done a lot of Ho’oponopono to my body and to myself to forgive myself for not being nice to myself. Sports mindset, again you can work with a PSYCH-K® practitioner, or an NLP practitioner, or someone who works on programming your mindset and your beliefs at the subconscious level to help you with your sports and fitness and body mindset. A lot of times this all boils down to the belief that ‘I am good enough’, ‘my body is good enough’, and using those techniques to implant those beliefs in your subconscious. When you do that, that will make everything shift, it will make you make different decisions and it will give you a whole new outlook on things. Just having those two beliefs, ‘I am good enough’, and ‘my body is good enough’, that really, really, really, shifts things. And those are things that I have worked on over and over because there are different levels. So it is like I will work on it, get to a new level, then kind of get a new block in that area. So it is the kind of thing that you might need to work on over and over and that doesn’t mean you didn’t get it right the first time, it just means that there are different layers to this stuff.

Finally practical action, dream up all the new things that you could do with your body, dream up all the fun things that you old do with your body, all the adventures, pick one thing and do it, then do the next thing, work your way through your list. Exercise makes your body feel good. I am one of those people that as much as I love running, it is still hard to drag my body out of the house in the mornings for a run, like sometimes I just do not feel like getting out but I do it because I know how good Ia m going to feel while I am running and afterwards. This weekend I have my kickboxing winter course, we are doing a kind of modified version of it because of Covid, it is not going to be the full advanced grading, but it is going to be the thing that gives us credit towards our future grading. I am terrified, I am really not feeling ready to this and I am not looking forward to it, but I know how good I am going to feel afterwards, not just good physically but proud of myself for doing something that I was scared of and yeah, I am going to feel good, I always feel good after the advanced courses. So pick one thing and do it and then just work your way through the list, but take the practical action and do the fun things with your body, have the adventures with your body, that can mean whatever you want it to mean. Again, because I talk about kickboxing, running and hiking, that doesn’t mean that you have to do those things, do whatever you want, do whatever feels good.

So that was my rant for today! I hope you found that interesting and useful. I really hope that if you have an unhappy or unhealthy relationship with your body you can do some things to transform that relationship. I know what it feels like to not appreciate my body and just not value it and that is really crappy.

I wish you the best, as I always say in my emails happy trails, but trails may not be your thing, but the best of luck to you with your relationship with transforming your relationship with your body. I think this is our body, this is what we are living in for a lifetime, so why not be nice to it? Why not be kind to it? Why not value it? Why not be grateful for it? And why not forgive yourself for not being all of those lovely things in the past?

So that’s it. Please drop me a line and let me know what you thought of this week’s episode you can email me at: [email protected], or find me online and get in touch there. As always, I would love to hear any ideas you might have for future episodes, I add them to my list and then I pick them when it is time to say something about that topic.

Thank you for listening and remember to visit: HollyWorton.com/385 for the show notes on this episode, thank you.

Next week I have a guest, I will be speaking with Heather Waring, we are going to be talking about walking for self-development and self-care. Heather is a big fan of the Camino, a big fan of walking and specifically walking long distance trails, we had a great conversation about walking the Great Wall of China, the Camino and other trails, so tune in for that next week. Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening and have a fantastic day and, if trails are your thing, happy trails to you.