#301: Body Image: For You, Your Clients and Your Business with Stephanie Dodier

Michelle:
All right. Hey there, health coaches, thank you for joining us today. I am so glad you're here. I think this is a really important conversation. It's one that, gosh, over the years has become more to me, it has become so obvious that it's more and more important that we talk about, I am sure that you've noticed along your journey, whatever it's been to bring you to health coaching. That body image is an issue that comes up all the time. It comes up with our clients. I'm sure at least once or twice you might've considered your own body as you show up as a health coach. And we hear all the time from coaches, how can I be a health coach if I'm still struggling with my weight and sentiments of that ilk? So if you're here live, and I know several of you are as we record this episode, tell us in the chat, have you ever had that thought or even a whiff of that thought? I know there's this running theme in our work that goes from how we help others, how we approach our own business. And today we're joined by my friend Stephanie Dodier to discuss. And Steph, thanks for being here.

Stephanie:
I'm so excited. I'm always very excited about talking about body image to people who don't normally coach body image because I think it's a game changing topic either today or six months in your business. It will change everything for you.

Michelle:
Well, no, you've been on the show before, so if you guys want to look back in the archives, you can see other shows that Stephanie have done together. But for our new listeners, why don't you go ahead and just introduce yourself briefly and your expertise in this area.

Stephanie:
Absolutely. My expertise is because I'm fat. I am a fat woman who had to maneuver through the standard of society and make a choice. Will I continue to deprive myself and go through this crazy diet in order to fit the thin ideal? Or will I actually learn to eat differently in a way that respect my body and let my body do what it needs to do to be healthy? And that resulted in me being fat and I have to navigate this world in this fat body. And that's where my expertise in body image comes from. Combine that with my being a clinical nutritionist and how the relationship to food comes into play with body image. It's my favorite topic of conversation.

Michelle:
Perfect. Thank you for that. And I'm seeing we have a lot of enthusiasm in the chat right now. Some of our coaches saying yes for themselves and current clients going through it. Ellen's saying not about her body image, but maybe about her internal health struggles that don't necessarily show. We're going to talk a little bit about that. Francine says Absolutely yes. I mean this is coming up for everybody. So yours is an interesting story, right? Because I think the people who tend to get into health coaching and nutrition by and large are people in small bodies. Would you agree?

Stephanie:
I would agree because it's the majority of people in this world as well. Plus when you live in a small body, you're automatically considered more wise when it comes to health and food just because of the size of your body, irrelevant of your credential, just because of the way you look. People assume you know more about this topic.

Michelle:
Got it. Yeah, it's so interesting to me, and we've talked about this. My entry into health coaching had to do with fainting episodes. It had nothing to do with weight or whatnot. But yeah, there was no barrier to becoming a health coach. I am in a smaller body and I always have been. And yeah, I can roll with that. But as I was thinking, as health coaches, we must be, I'm interested in your opinion, aren't we a little bit predisposed to having body image issues in the first place?

Stephanie:
Well, it's interesting because it's actually research done in that question. So there's a study done in 2012 specifically around dietetic. Students will think it's the same thing as health coaches and 77% of dietetic students across 19 university were having disordered eating behavior and body image concerns. So that study wasn't done with health coaches, but based on my experience of coaching one-on-one health coaches and in the non diet coaching certification, I can tell you absolutely 77% of us struggle with body image and disordered eating behavior. So yeah, it's absolutely common because we go, and I know for you perhaps it's not the case, but for me, I went and got my degree in nutrition because I wanted to finally find the solution to, in my case, my body size issue. That was the primary motivating factor for some people it may be health, but it was like you go into that in an attempt to heal yourself to some degree.

Michelle:
Yeah, exactly. And we hear a lot of health coaches have done the diet circuit and are now trying to get off that and it's tricky. And then we have other coaches who I guess you learn more and you read more and you follow more people and maybe even become more entrenched in it.

Stephanie:
And I want to think about it a little bit differently. I want to think about it for people who live in what I call normal sized body, like a thin body that perhaps the reason why you don't identify with body image issue is you've never been judged by society, you've never been out of your privilege. So you think I don't have body image issue because your body matched the standard. What would happen if you gain weight? Would you then those body image issue would come up or even health shame issue because that's the other parallel I deal a lot with health coaches is healthism. We do have body image, but we do have also people who think I have to be healthy. It's my responsibility to be healthy, my body has to function healthily in order to be worthy individuals. So once you get sick, once you get put on weight, then the issue of how you assign word to your body really comes up. So I just want to question this. Yes.

Michelle:
The reality.The good or bad.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Michelle:
That was a big moment for me. It was right when I started my school to become a health coach and one of my mentors in the program, we went out to eat and she ordered a big burger and fries and I was shocked. I was just really shocked. And she was like, food is not morally good or bad. And I was like, what? Because at the time I'm a vegan. I had a lot of thoughts about that, but this is a really interesting thing for us to wrap our heads around. It's not morally good or bad and our health, whether we're in good health or semi good health or not so good health or how it's showing up mentally, physically, emotionally, it's not morally good or bad.

Stephanie:
And I think that's wellness culture by the way. I want to make sure everybody understand there's diet culture that values people based on their body size, but there's also wellness culture. Now this may shock some people. Wellness culture is that same type of belief system that values an individual based on their health status or their personal effort and investment in being healthy. So I just saw a video on Instagram reel of a, I think it was a nutritionist who was shaming people for not adhering to their meal plan and buying organic food and buying the supplement. You should invest all the possibility of your resource in being healthy. And I think for us it's a real trigger because that's what we sell also in our business. So how do we manipulate or go around selling this but not co-opting moral value around health? Very interesting topic.

Michelle:
Very interesting. So that taps into the next thing I wanted to ask you about. So at first, it's ourselves, right? And how did we get here and what are we carrying around? And then how does this start to impact our work with clients? We hear, I'm just going to let you run with this one. We hear a lot, my client has more energy. My client is feeling so much better in her relationships and at work and that she had this weird rash and that rash on her skin cleared up, but she's so upset and I feel like I failed because she hasn't lost the weight.

Stephanie:
So the first thing I want to say, I'm going to tackle this a bit from a technical perspective. When we say people have change in their symptoms, more energy, feel better, rash cleanup, are we making that statement from a short-term observation window of two weeks or a year, two year? Are we actually looking at this with long term? Is it something that just happened to change or we have an observation window that's long? That would be the number one thing. Number two thing, when people work with us, I'm going to just say this and I think many people will acknowledge this. They are all in, they change their mindset. They think about their emotion differently. They adhere to everything a hundred percent. They're all in. They move more. They do a lot of things more on a very short window that they work with us. Is that sustainable? Long-term? Will the rash come back when they're no longer not investing all their resources? When they're putting that back into a scale that's actually manageable for the rest of their life, will the rash come back with the energy drop?
The third thing I want to talk about specifically around women and energy, why do we want to have so much more energy? I want us to think about that from a completely different angle. Why is it that we want to have more energy? Why is it that we want to have a tone body? Why is it that we want to have a smaller body? And this is where I think coaching goes to the next level when we're not only looking at the habit of eating, but we're also looking at the habit of thinking why do we want those things? And they're interesting. Most clients in health coaching are women and women are told you got to work harder. You got to be more productive. You got to be selfless. Work for every, make sure you have enough energy for everybody else. Why do we support that? Why do we not get our client to instead question why is it you don't have energy beyond the food? Why is it? Do you have two jobs? Do you have three kids and a partner that doesn't help you? Can we take our coaching to the next level instead of trying to get them more energy, try to remove things off their lists to do so they can have more energy without having to be constrained to eatin g just these food at these times and be very complexify around their eating habits. What do you think about that?

Michelle:
Right? This is a bigger conversation than Did you get your protein today, Karen?
Stephanie:
Yes, Karen, yeah. Well, did you get your protein and then did you get these particular form of protein and this particular organic? Can we make it simple for women to actually take care of themselves? Can we simplify the process?
Michelle:
This is why so much of when I still had my private practice, so much of my coaching that started as are you getting these vegetables and this protein and whatever moving your body really shifted a lot more into feminist issues. And that's where our conversations always go, don't they, Steph?

Stephanie:
But that's where I think they need to go globally as an industry. They need to go there. And even if I'm a man coaching man, my conversation needs to go about toxic masculinity. Why is it that you need to prove yourself with the size of your biceps instead of processing your emotion? Oh, because a man doesn't cry. Can we have that conversation instead? To me, that's what makes my business so successful is because I go beyond the food. Yeah, we talk about the food, but we talk about what really creates the habit around food. I'm just going to say this. If you go into the science of habits, like your habits around food, an example, and you look at neuroscience and you say, what impacts or how do we create a habit? It has nothing to do. People with the amount of intellectual information you have can have read all the study about healthy nutrition and still have terrible habits because habits are not created from intellectual information. They're created by the way you feel and your feelings are created by the way you think. So if you truly want to change a client's health habit for the rest of their life, not temporarily for the rest of their life, your conversation has nothing to do about the food but has to do about how they feel about food and how they think about food.

Michelle:
I bet we have questions out there. So if you guys are watching and you're like, but what about this client? How about when this happens ahead and throw those in the chat. I'm seeing Kathy saying, I love this next level of coaching. It really is. I mean the way you just put that, I think everybody just went, oh my God, why am I spending half a session talking about whatever macros? Really the conversation needs to be about universal childcare, healthcare, just all the issues that keep women running themselves ragged.

Stephanie:
And that's where body image comes. And that's where I have to say to everyone, I've been in this health business for 10 years, but the first three years after graduation, I was doing the traditional nutrition practice and I kept hearing the same damn thing just like me. But Stephanie, I need to lose weight. Yes, but I need to be more toned, increase my muscle mass. I need to, and I'm like, when I digged with the client, it was never about the food. It was about their body looks and the acceptance of their partner. I'm like, I didn't choose this second career to just put a bandaid on everything. I spent 15 years in the corporate world doing that. If I truly want to impact the world, actually need to solve the problem. And that's when body image predominantly came in for me is because that's what solves the actual problem.

Michelle:
So it sounds like take home message for us working with our clients is we have to be careful that our own body image preconceived ideas, what we have deemed important. We're not putting that on our clients and being aware that they'r e coming to us. I mean pretty much all women are going to carry some of this

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Michelle:
With heir own.

Stephanie:
Well, you can only take your client as far as you've taken yourself. That's just like, let's take this philosophy, which means in the case of what really drives the food behavior, if you are still controlling your food, in hope of maintaining your body, not gaining weight or losing weight, you will pass that on to your clients. There's just no other ways. So in order for you to have the real conversation to help your client with body image, you first need to help yourself.

Michelle:
You want to hear that?

Stephanie:
And again, I want to invite all the people who think, the people who identify and were raised as a woman who think I don't have a body image issue. I really invite you to dig that up. You may just have had the privilege of never having been challenge about your body, but you do carry the body image. So there's an assessment that I have created. It's the non-diet client assessment. Okay? You go to, I'm going to make sure I'm giving you the right link. I am well known for not doing that, stephaniedodier.com/clientassessment all in one word.

Michelle:
Okay, dropping that link right here in the chat for our Facebook users and we'll put that in the show notes, stephaniedodier.com/clientassessment so you guys can check that out. And this is something our coaches can use for themselves, use for their clients.

Stephanie:
First use on yourself. I say my only rule I have about giving you this for free is I want you to do it on yourself first. Don't go out and use that with anyone unless you've actually done it on yourself and figure out, do I have disordered eating behavior? Do I have body image challenges and do I have mindset that are coming from the patriarchy and diet culture mindset? In French we say, but Monster is in my head about confidence, for example. Do I think confidently all the mindset stuff we carry around as a coach, we should be doing that work on ourselves first and I'll keep going. That will impact the success of your business.

Michelle:
Yes, and I want to talk about that. But real quick, tell me at the end of this assessment, will we get a score or something?
Stephanie:
Yes, you get a score. So if you think about body image...

Michelle:
I think it be very interesting if we all did the assessment and then inside our Facebook group, right under this video, tell us about your score. How'd you feel about this? Was it that surprising? Because we could do it for ourselves, but it would make really good fodder for further conversation.

Stephanie:
Yeah, let's talk about us and let's see what our score is. And I think I'm still into your group. I'm still there, so we probably can have that conversation there.

Michelle:
Yeah, that's fantastic. All right, well, we've got the link up for everyone. Again, if you're listening to this via podcast, it's stephaniedodier.com/clientassessment. We will put that in the show notes at healthcoachpower.com/podcast. But before we leave today, I wanted to make sure we talk about what you just mentioned, the impact of all this body image stuff that we're all carrying around on our business. How on earth is this potentially impacting the growth of our business? And I mentioned earlier if you feel like you can't be a health coach because you're still overweight or you can't possibly show up in the world because you yourself are not perfect. I mean I think that's the most obvious level, but I'm sure you have much more to say about that.

Stephanie:
Well, I'm going to ask you this. You strictly coach business, now you're an expert at business. What is the number one complaint that you get from your coaches when you think about how do people, what's the roadblock?

Michelle:
They don't like to ask for money?

Stephanie:
Yeah, self-doubt,

Michelle:
Tons of self-doubt,

Stephanie:
Like confidence. I'm not confident enough to just show up on social media and boom, do a live and do stories without makeup and just not looking. We're laughing. But this is the reality of, I want to say 70% of business and entrepreneur, they just don't feel confident. They doubt their decision. And as a woman, the reason that we doubt is because we don't trust ourselves. We don't trust ourselves to make the decision. We don't trust what we're going to say. And it makes total sense. When you think about trust being a feeling, and I'm looking at myself in the camera, I'm looking at my body, feelings are in our body. So if we want to create confidence, we want to create trust, we need to be able to be comfortable being in our body. Otherwise, we will have what we call imposter syndrome. We will fake it until you make it because who you are is your body.
You create confidence by being in your body. When you hate your body, they're sure in hell, you cannot be confident. And that if you look at the behavior and the reaction around them, it's restrained marketing effort or marketing effort that takes too much energy and then you end up not doing it because you got to put a full face of makeup on. You got to have the right angle, the right light instead of just like boom, doing alive and talking about your offer. Wouldn't you like to just be able to do that and trust what you say? Body image is often where the roadblock is,

Michelle:
And I think it's obvious when we're going to do something on video. A lot of that I don't feel comfortable on the camera. I don't want to speak on video. Yeah, I got to put on my makeup. I need my ring light, I need all the things. But even if let's say you're writing a blog post, it's just we are fighting a tide of you're not good enough. No matter what you do, you're never going to be good enough, strong enough, smart enough, pretty enough, thin enough, right? We are size six enough, whatever. We've been just fighting that tide our whole lives. And I think it's really hard to be like, yeah, I have something to say and I'm going to loud

Stephanie:
And I'm going to say it
Michelle:
Loud for everyone to hear. I am enough.

Stephanie:
But think about that. Can you say, I am good enough of a health coach while you look at yourself in the mirror and think, I'm ugly, I'm too fat, I don't look good, I don't look sexy. There's just that. It's trying to go right and you think left. There's just a constant resistance of you embodying. I'm a rockstar. I rock at this job. I am an awesome health coach. Meanwhile, I have a hundred thoughts a day that I look shitty, that I'm too fat, that I'm not looking good enough. It's just it's constant resistance and effort and leads to you thriving the way you should

Michelle:
And that leads to your business not thriving the way that it should financially. So how's that for root causes, you guys? How's that? We all love to look at a good root cause
Stephanie:
And I want to talk about a little bit about solution. If we have time,

Michelle:
Go for it.

Stephanie:
When we think about body image, the number one I see professional do is thinking it's going to be too hard. I have to love my body. There's just no way I can come from years if not decades, of hatred, of despise, of not being able to loving my body. If that's what you're thinking, which is most of the people I work with, that's the problem. We are not here to love our body. Our body is not something to be loved. It's something to be respected. It's something to be cared for. Here's my number one intentional thought when it comes to body. My body is the vehicle by which I experience life, not a sign of my worth, not a sign of my moral value. You could replace my body with my health.
So when you think about how am I going to heal my body image, I want you to think about body neutrality over body love. I want you to really look into all the teaching, all the societal programming as a woman that you've been exposed to, that your body is a sign of your work. It's your duty to be beautiful and to look young and to look pretty and instead saying, my body is the vehicle for me to experience life just like any other people in this world, just like men for an example, are they're not expected to be beautiful. They're just like, my body is the vehicle by which I experience food. I experience beauty. I experience like good food, experience, senses and touches. That's the role of your body. So it's not about loving your body, it's about becoming body neutral.

Michelle:
Body neutral, and that is a different goal,

Stephanie:
Totally different goal.

Michelle:
I have to love myself and say crazy things that I don't believe into the mirror.

Stephanie:
Yeah, well, exactly. So when I started my body image journey today, I can post a photo of me in a bathing suit. This is like six years of me accepting myself. When I started, it wasn't about me being able to love my cellulite on my tie in my belly rolls. It was about thinking my body is a tool for me to experience my life. So then I need to feed it enough food. I need to start thinking, oh, I'm hungry. My body needs to eat right when I eat. So I'll give you another example. How do we think about which foods are good and bad for you? First of all, there's no good and bad food intrinsically, they're how they make you feel. Well, for me, black beans is the death of my digestive system, like gas and bloating to the tent level.
It's healthy, but it's terrible for my body doesn't like it. So me trying to eat black bean brownies not to eat carbs was just like I was doing it because I was supposed to not because it made me feel good. So what are the foods that are making you feel good in order for you to be able to use your body to experience your life? When we think about physical exercise, how many of us have been programmed to think I exercise to maintain or lose weight? Like most of us? Well, what if we thought about exercise so I can be as strong as I can to live a long active life? Today, I used to exercise for 15, 20 years to lose weight, and today I exercise so I can hike when I travel so I can go for 20 kilometer in the crazy European Coggle Stone Street and be able to tough it out and enjoy the whole event. That's why I work out because I want to give my body the muscle strain that it needs to be able to carry me into what I want to do. So it's shifting the belief of the different element that makes up health.

Michelle:
So asking our clients this, why does it matter? They want to be toned. Well, who cares if you're toned? Why does it matter? You want to lose 10 pounds? Why does it matter? Challenging some of those thoughts I think can really be a first step. They're going to have answers like that. Well, it doesn't totally matter if my arms are toned, but it's real nice if I could carry the groceries in easily from the car.

Stephanie:
The five bags of grocery at once, so I can just do one ride, right? Instead of four trips. When you think about, talk to me, Stephanie, about application and coaching. That's what I hear. Your question is, well, when we think about coaching is asking the bigger question. So why is it that you want to heat healthy? Who's ever asked that to a client? Just like, okay, why is it that it's important to you? And then I can tell you if I'm having done that thousands of times, there's a dead silence. Well, because I have to. And it's like, yeah, you don't really have to do you want to? And then they get lost. They're completely lost because they never thought of it as a choice. They thought of it as held behavior as obligation, moral obligation that they have to do it. And because they can, they're failure. So it's shifting to bigger question about emotion, about feelings, about action. The reason why we want to do things is having those big deeper conversation with our clients.

Michelle:
Stephanie, I want to thank you for talking so much sense today. As always, everyone's head, this went a couple of times. I really appreciate you, and again, I want to be able to have a conversation in the Facebook group about this. So everyone listening, make sure you head over to stephaniedodier.com/clientassessment. And then yeah, head over to our Facebook group. You can look for this video and we'll look for this discussion to continue. Like I said, it has only become more and more necessary to talk about this the longer I'm in the business. Here's the dirty little secret of health coaching you guys. It's not about the food. It's never about the food.

Stephanie:
And I think I just want to add this in conclusion, it will become a bigger, more often requested conversation because it's becoming a public conversation of body acceptance. We're more accepting as a society of body size of races, of colors, of language, of abilities, and then people hear that message in the mainstream and then they come to health coaching and they want to continue to have these value presented with their health of acceptance and diversity.

Michelle:
Thank you so much for joining us today, Stephanie.

Stephanie:
Have a good day.

Michelle:
Thanks everyone. We'll see you next time.