Episode 4: Do You Truly LOVE Your Body?

Hey everyone, I’m your host Bella Hilton from Studio Fertility, and welcome to the podcast today! And today I am truly excited because it is nearly CHRISTMAS! And I just ADORE Christmas. And it isn’t for presents or any religious connotations. I think I just like the whole ritual of it and the time to just have a holiday – reflect on the year that has been and time to head into a new one refreshed and revitalised. It’s kind of the time to just really reset the clock.

But also I think it is the little things I love like putting up the Christmas tree, the decorations, the childhood memories when you pull out that thing you made when you were 3 for your Mum as an ornament and the excitement of it. Great movies and stories of love and family and hope.

It’s really time to look back – and if you have had a tough year – just to let it all go and really pat yourself on the back and say ‘fuck you did a good job – it’s been a rollercoaster, it’s been difficult but you are here, you have MADE IT, you have most certainly GROWN, many other people would have crumbled, but not you. Good job girl!

But because it’s nearly Christmas time – well for some some it will bring us joy and downtime. But For others it might bring a whole new set of challenges as you will have to field questions from good meaning relatives about ‘where your baby is?’ And remember there is no right or wrong answer to any of these things. But if you struggle with those kind of questions then I would suggest you pre-plan your answers. Remember, babies are a joyous thing and mostly, people just want to be excited for you. They are NOT trying to victimise you in any way and when you come at it from that perspective – that this person isn’t trying to victimise me or be mean, they just want to be excited about a potential baby – well it usually takes the heat off. And look, even if they are trying to be mean, I usually don’t take offence either because that person is probably suffering so badly in their life and I don’t know what they are going through to find it necessary to have a dig at my situation.

So if your immediate thought is ‘this person wants to be excited for me?’ How would you then respond? What would be different in what you would say and feel in that moment?

So, what are some answers you can give? It depends on how candid you want to be with people. For some of you the journey is quite private.

Their are many people I did NOT share my journey with. I kept it small and intimate. You know, it was me, my husband and my sister. But that was the extent of the support network I needed. For others of you it is different and you need to bring more people into your support network.

But I digress, so what are the possible questions and answers:

Do you want to have a baby or are you going to have a baby soon?
We’d love too, we’ll see what happens. Or I’d love to be a Mum, when it is right for us. Sometimes it isn’t that easy but we are still hopeful.

When are you going to have a baby?

If you want to be cheeky? You might say – When I get pregnant? or When it’s the right for us. or more candid -We had some setbacks this year but we are hoping that 2020 is our year. I’d love to get pregnant in 2020.

If it triggers you, just keep it short and sweet. People usually don’t have anywhere to go if you are welcoming the idea of having a baby. But you also do not owe them a full long winded explanation.

And of course, if you are have been more candid and they know what you are going through and they are giving you well-meaning but misguided advice via way of ‘so and so went on holiday and it just happened or have you thought about egg donors or surrogacy’.

You might say something like “I love you and I know you love me and want me to have my baby – but today, I really just want to relax and enjoy christmas because it has been a tough year.

And then change the subject.

Honestly, I used to put a big smile on my face, stare them fair in the eye (not to stare someone down but actually to truly connect with that person) and say We’d love to have a baby, we’ll see what happens. I didn’t make it about them being mean or buy into the pain of what a hard year it has been or the miscarriages I had, I made it about the truth – that I welcomed a future with a baby in it. And I swear to you, i never got anyone ask me any follow up questions.

Because I think when you are putting out that energy of ‘oh goodness, don’t ask me questions’ – the universe hears – ASK ME QUESTIONS! You know it’s true. When you take your power back and don’t care if people ask you that or not – you get those questions far less.

Anyway, just be prepared with your answers, it’s so much easier than fumbling on the spot with ‘oh goodness, how much do i want to tell this person, I don’t want to go into it, I feel shit now, now I’m having a crappy Christmas.’ Or just generally feeling rattled. And if you do get rattled, Then take a moment to breath and change your focus.

Anyway, that was just a short aside for Christmas time and coping with the silly season questions!

But today I wanted to come on here and talk to you about your body because how you feel about your body can be blocker to conceiving your baby and we will go into depth today. After all, I advocate for a mind-body connection. Because the power of the mind and the power of your emotions can and do affect your body. And similarly your body can affect your mind and emotions. Anyone who has experienced PMS will know what I’m talking about here. The chemical cocktail flowing through your veins can cause the most loving, educated women to start thinking fatalistically and negatively and cause them to feel horrible.

And conception and pregnancy beyond a mental, emotional and spiritual experience is also a very real physical experience. And we can’t escape that fact. For us women, we are going through daily hormonal changes. And our bodies go through lots of physical changes – I mean volume of your blood increases and adds weight to your body by 1.2kg or about 2.6 pounds during pregnancy. That’s nuts.

So my point here is, We are everything, mental, emotional, spiritual and physical. These can’t be separated. As much as we might try at times.

So you can’t be hating your body and expecting a positive outcome for conceiving.

So I’m just going to tell you about an experiment that I’ve read about many times. Some have done this experiment scientifically and some haven’t and yet the results are the same.

And I’m going to call it the plant experiment. Have you ever heard of this before? You may have but stay with me here.

I even saw on Youtube recently one done by Ikea. And results are the same every time I have come across it.

If you take two plants, within close proximity to each other, usually in separate pot plants but so they are under the same conditions, similar soil, they are fed and watered the same and at the beginning of the experiment they look roughly the same – same size, same shape, same health.

Now one plant is bullied – basically people either stand their and think bad thoughts about it or say mean things to the plant. Or it might be put on a tape on loop for the plant. Are your leaves even real? That green looks hideous on you? I’ve never seen a fat plant before but YOU ARE FAT! You get the idea. And all of those sound really amusing when we are talking about a plant.

Now the other plant is given positive energy and love and compliments – you are so beautiful, you’re family must be so proud of you. You are such strong plant. Your leaves are the most beautiful colour I’ve ever seen. You look like you are well nourished and plentiful.

Now what do you think happens? Of course, the plant that gets bullied – well it’s leaves start to wilt and droop, it stops really growing or thriving. It starts to look sad and mangy. It’s colour starts to fade, some die. It starts to look like a plant you just want to throw out and start again and go oops – I don’t really have a green thumb.

Now, what do you think happens to the plant that is given compliments and is fed positive energy and intention. It thrives, it stands up tall and strong, it grows much bigger than the other plant. It looks super healthy and vibrant and green etc etc.

So, these plants are fed the same – watered and any nutrients added to the soil are the same. But they are not nurtured the same way on an energetic or mental level. I know it is funny to talk about mentality with a plant but when ti comes down to it our thoughts and beliefs – our mental game – is energy and energy we are putting out into the world or towards ourselves.

Or how about this, have you ever heard that newborn babies can die if they aren’t shown and given love? And when you are a baby – how do you think they experience love and nurturing? Through touch and contact and energy.

In an article by psychology today it says:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/born-love/201003/touching-empathy

Babies who are not held, nuzzled, and hugged enough can stop growing, and if the situation lasts long enough, even die.

Researchers discovered this when trying to figure out why some orphanages had infant mortality rates around 30-40%.

Or how about this article by parenting for brain

When children are deprived of physical contact, their bodies stop growing despite normal intake of nutrients. These children suffer from failure-to-thrive. This growth deficiency can be improved when nurturing touches and hugs are provided5–7.

Hugging triggers the release of oxytocin, also known as the love hormone. This feel-good hormone has many important effects on our bodies. One of them is growth stimulation.

So basically, love and nurturing keep our bodies in good health and affect our bodies on a chemical and then cellular level.

So, we came here to talk about YOUR BODY and your physical health – so my question to you is do you even like your body or are you bullying it and depriving it of love?

Do you trust your body to do what it is supposed to do to conceive and nurture a child in your womb for 9 months?

Or, do you hate your body, feel like your body is letting you down and are angry with your body about not conceiving?

Have you hated your body for a long time? There are many women in society today who are constantly trying to lose weight or don’t like the shape of something – maybe the size and shape of their breasts or their bums?

So tell me right now what you dislike about your body – or maybe grab your journal and write it down for yourself – do you hate how much you weigh, your saddle bags, bags under your eyes, your crooked nose or teeth, your pot belly, or maybe you never felt pretty enough.

Do you beat up on yourself every time you pass a mirror?

I know I used to thanks to years of ballet training and a society that didn’t welcome my more muscular structure.

How LONG have you hated your body for? Just since you have been trying to conceive or much longer than that?

And look maybe you are listening and thinking – hey I love my body – well, great – good for you.

But do you hate your eggs or your lining or have you always resented getting a period or being too small or too tall or coming last in running races and not being sporty or being a women in some way?

And if you do love your body – How do you experience that in your world? Do you eat healthily and exercise just the right amount for yourself.

Do you listen to your body and what it is trying to tell you?

Do you embrace compliments or batter them away like they couldn’t possibly be about you?

Basically what i am getting at here is – how are you bullying your body right now and not loving and nurturing it?

Here are some MORE examples of how you may be hating on your body right now.

You might be trying to chase down the magic bullet and asking yourself things like – Do I do naturopathy, change my diet, do castor oil packs, track my temperature, do IVF. Those are all physical things by the way.

But in the end when it comes to answering the question of what you will do, you need to do what is right for you and feels good for you and tap into your intuition. We actually need to slow down and work out what is going to work for us. We actually need to slow down and LISTEN to our bodies.

But instead what most of us do is get into feeling even more crazy and googling more options and building up this never ending list of things to do and try! Which is exhausting and Makes us feel absolutely nuts! Again – this isn’t loving your body – you aren’t even slowing down long enough to listen to it.

And it’s totally okay to try things – I’d expect you to! But notice how it makes you feel. For example, I was having a lot of issues where i was just feeling completely exhausted all the time and my naturopath gave me this powder to take to give me more energy. And it worked to a certain degree but I also noticed that it stressed my body and pushed it. Like it was an override switch instead of fixing the core problem. I’d always start to get just slightly under the weather whenever I took it like that afternoon or the next day. Now, how did I know that it was stressing my body out – I can’t really tell you – it was my intuition and listening to that part that I can’t really put words on and trusting it.

So if you aren’t really listening to your body and trusting it – are you really loving it?

It can be hard at first to start to listen to your body and your intuition again though, when you’ve probably shut it off for a long time, and when the crazy has been dialled up on our emotional, mental and spiritual states, because we really want our baby! Let’s face it, half the time we dont’ know if we are Arthur or Martha when we are so down and out, let alone able to dial into our intuition to know what feels right to do.

I remember when I heard for the first time that we had actual fertilised embryos – that they had come together and actually created life. I think I said something like “SEE, I knew if you took ME out of the equation then things would work better”.

But for a successful outcome if we think we can take ourselves out of the equation and just reduce it to the physical process either naturally or through IVF then we are cutting out 3/4s of the stuff that goes into these miracles.

So, when it comes to our mental health, we want to take care of it, when it comes to our emotional health, when it comes to our spiritual health we want to take care of it and we want to take care of it and when it comes to our physical health – we also want to take care of it. So the physical is important. It’s just not all of it. AND it doesn’t need to be perfect,

You can’t take a million supplements if you are hating it, you can’t do a gym program that really depletes you, you can’t go on a fertility diet if you are just railing against it internally. All of the elements of mental, emotional, spiritual and physical need to be aligned.

So how do we start to love ourselves and our bodies more? Well some of them will be totally obvious. Like, yeah I think I’m fat or my lining isn’t thick enough and I hate it or eggs aren’t great so I’m resenting them. Those ones are easy to identify and start to turn the tapes around into something more empowering even if it is – hey body, I know you are just doing your best! Let’s do this together.

But also you love your body and listen to it by listening to your emotions.

Are you feeling good (mainly) on a daily basis emotionally and dealing with other emotions when you need to fully? Or are you stuffing them down? Have you dealt with any past traumas fully or are you still harbouring guilt about something?

Do you do things in your day and life that feed your energy and light you up? Do you take care of yourself and say no when you need to? Do you stand up for yourself?

What are those negative tapes going on in your head that are on a constant loop that may not be supporting your emotional, mental, spiritual and physical health.

Because when you take care of your emotional health, when you take care of your mental health, when you take care of your spiritual health – you more than likely take care of your physical health.

Now I’ve struggled for years to really like my body and i don’t think I’m unusual which is really quite sad. Which is why we have this positive body image movement these days.

I was called FAT by kids from as young as I can remember – like 3 years old. Because I can remember adults in my life saying to me ‘you’re not fat, you’re just solid.’

Then enter my brother who used to call me Fatso – like any good brother does who likes to tease his sister. He wasn’t being mean, we were just growing up together and teasing each other because he knew he could use it to get under my skin and I equally did similar things to him no doubt. We were and are actually a close family.

And you know what – I could send you a photo of me from any age and you would be like ‘she’s not fat’. No I wasn’t. But it’s not what my brain had started to believe from a very young age. I was conditioned to think that I was fat. And we have no filter when we are 3.

In reality, I was extremely tall – sometimes taller than kids who were 2 years older than me, strong and prone to muscle. I was athletic. I wasn’t fat.

But that side of me wasn’t nurtured. I didn’t nurture it. I just saw too big equals too fat. And i loved food so it must have been true right?

So the process of learning to love yourself and your body again can be multi-faceted.

You know, In order to love my body again, I had to change my thinking and my beliefs about my body and when I changed my beliefs about my body, it changed how I look after my physical health through nutrition and exercise and my relationship to those two things, it changed how I engaged in the world in so many ways.

In fact, it meant that I cut down on exercise to look after myself or worked out not as hard on occasion in order to look after myself. Because I used to go nuts at the gym.

And of course, it is so important on the fertility journey that you do love and nurture your physical body.

And I’m not talking about going on the strictest fertility diet you can find. You love your body by having some wine sometimes, you love your body by having a piece of bread and loving it, you love your body by not doing too much exercise or too little.

But mostly you love your body by starting to listen to it.

For example, if you love certain foods but when you have them they cause your body to react negatively, well then maybe you need to listen to your body and realise those foods aren’t for you.

Emotionally, if you feel so stressed out that you are starting to get sick, or your back is out or you feel emotionally fried – then go and get a massage, or get more rest or talk through your feelings with someone.

When we listen to our bodies, it often tells us how we need to take care of them and what we need in that moment to thrive.

But most of the time we are too busy doing – that we don’t stop to listen to what our bodies are saying to us.

So if you want to get more in touch with your body, firstly work out where the negative vibes are coming from and what you can do to turn them around because you may hate your body for not giving you your baby yet – but it is the ONLY body you have to work with, so try loving it instead and you will surprised with what you discover.

Some people like to meditate on it and set an intention for the mediation – i.e. what is my body telling me.

Some people like to just do more fun and nurturing things for themselves, get your nails done or get your hair done, have a massage or go into a sensory deprivation tank if you are on overload.

Spend a night snuggled up on the couch with your partner watching tv and get those touchy endorphins flowing.

And ask yourself daily – what do I need right now? And answer it too – I need more sleep, I need to exercise, I need more food/less food, I need to meditate, I need to talk to someone, I need to get away from it all, i need to say no, I need to say yes. And here is the kicker – follow through.

Whatever it is for you.

Notice what food makes you feel good and what food makes you feel crap. Are you eating too much of the food that makes you feel crappy?

Pay attention to how your supplements make you feel.

I mean, notice what clothes you wear – are you wearing clothes that make you feel good?

You get the idea, learn to love yourself and your body in everything that you do and if you don’t, work out how and why and change it.

And as we are coming up to Christmas you can apply these principles over Christmas too. Love your mental, spiritual, psychological and psychical bodies over the holiday period.

This may look like, eating as much as you like, or just the opposite – not eating until you are so stuffed you can’t move and fall asleep in the corner.

What is right for you, will be different for someone else. So nurture you and YOUR BODY.

Happy Holiday everyone!

I look forward to podcasting again with you all soon in the New Year, so we can really turn this up a notch and get you your miracle!

Remember babies are born from love not fear – show your baby how it is done now with self-love. 

And remember the Festive Holiday Season is a great time for Miracles to Happen! xx