#365: Stop Letting The Scale Define You

0:00This is The Made for Living Well Podcast, hosted by Alexa Shur, the place to create a life well lived. Welcome back to The Made for Living Well Podcasts, as always my name is Alexa, and I'm so glad that you're here and joining us in this new podcast series called Health Illusions. I know that we're almost partway through it, but we still have so much left to talk about. And before we continue on with the series, I wanted to take a minute and talk about my reckoning with the scale. I felt like after last week's podcast on talking about body weight and body composition and why it matters. I wanted you to see my entire journey of going from really not looking and not caring to understanding it in a new way. And I know the journey with the scale, especially for anyone who's been traumatized by it, and maybe not even traumatized by it, but really been hurt by it and overwhelmed by it.

1:06And at one point, maybe made your weight a metric of your worth, this topic is kind of sensitive and it's hard. It's hard to grasp. It's hard to understand. It's hard to move forward. And rather than giving you just set points on how to do that, because honestly, I don't even think set points on how to get over the scale exist. I wanted to share my own experience, which is more like a reckoning than it is this step by step process that I went through. And I really didn't have an intention of having an a reckoning with the scale. But I started and I think in the last podcast, I really started to understand body weight in a way that made sense based on like how I interact and show up in life. Not a metric of my worth or my value or how loved or unlovable I was or how desirable I might have been to my husband.

2:10Like really when I was able to move beyond that and I didn't necessarily move beyond that, I think what I first did was just understand that my body composition was depicting how I showed up and experienced life. And while I went through a whole journey of my body weight shifting, which I understood and respected, I also got myself to a place where I just kind of became complacent with it. Like I just surrendered to it rather than choosing to do something about it and for it really not necessarily to fix a problem but to create a better future. That's when I started to realize how powerful the scale could be and helping me to create and foster that capacity and resilience and strength in my own life. That was really for living life. Now, I feel like I'm talking in these like big platitudes. So let me understand and just kind of step back for a minute.

3:16So my journey with the scale started like most peoples when you have this understanding that your weight might be a problem or that your weight matters. We just aren't great at understanding why it matters, especially if you started in your younger years like I did. Now, I can't ever say that I was incredibly obsessive with the scale. I think I had been exposed to enough people and exposed to enough people with eating disorders to realize how damaging that could be. And it wasn't necessarily just how damaging I think I was scared that I might also be someone that could easily create an obsession and an eating disorder that I probably swung to the other side just out of response to that. Like I saw what it could do. So I was going to stay over here. And I know I consciously made those choices. I had friends with eating disorders in school and you know everyone was kind of obsessed with their weight. It was the 90s where skinny was everything. And this was again, it was an impactful understanding of I understood my body weight. I had kind of struggled with my body weight in middle school and lost some weight in high school, but I was never really obsessive about the scale.

4:30In some ways, I got into the health space to make a body weight in a relevant conversation because I had witnessed so many people I loved being so overwhelmed by whatever number was on the scale that it literally seemed to single handedly decide their joy. Right. Like kind of everything was writing on that number, their moods, how they interacted with others, how lovable they were, their actions, it seemed to be hinged on this number on the scale. And I hated that. Like I hated how much power the scale had. At the same time, I also wanted to be a certain number. So it was kind of like this, this weird inner dialogue, which again was a lot of fuel and motivation for why even went to nutrition school to begin with. I wanted the scale to be irrelevant. I wanted people just to be healthy and not care or even need to understand what weight they were because they were just healthy.

5:32And again, I think that there's some value in that it's using the scale without being used by the scale. And I think that's like the clearest depiction that I can give you of what and how the scale can be used. And what's unfortunate is is that we have a lot of tools in the health space that we use to help us get a picture of health, which the scale is actually one of them. But we don't seem to have this like moral code with, right? Like think about your blood pressure. I don't know anyone who's like, oh, I got my blood pressure taken and it was high. That must mean I'm unlovable or I'm not desirable. No, right? It just is the same thing with a body temperature or blood values. There are just pictures and images, snapshots of what your body might be going through. But the scale on the other hand has really just been clothed in this idea that that number is determining how you look and beauty is obviously a metric of love in our culture and our standards.

6:35And I'm not saying that again, body structure doesn't matter if you listen to the last week's podcast, I very much tell you why it does matter and that the scale is important and understanding and helping us to achieve this state or this highest expression of health. But like blood pressure, that's where the scale should fall. Like it should just be a tool that we can use. Now again, going back to my own story, I very much understand that that is not at all how most people use the scale. It's not how I use the scale. Now again, I didn't necessarily have an obsession with the scale, but I always knew I was never the weight that I wanted to be. So it was like every time I stepped on the scale, it was never enough. Even though I'm not sure that losing weight would have been healthier, I think it would have led to more problems. And this is the spiral a lot of people get in. You might not even understand what number you want to be at, but you just know the number that you are at is not good.

7:35And so it kind of creates this like never ending vicious cycle of chasing something that's never going to be enough anyways. And so again, I kind of existed as I wasn't at the number that I wanted to be, which I think a more accurate description of that if in hindsight, it's always easier to see is it wasn't necessarily the number that bothered me. It was how I actually looked in the mirror. That's what bothered me. It wasn't the number. It was the structure, the composition in which I had no understanding of at the time was what I actually wanted to shift. And if I had known that then and how to shift it, it would have made a world of difference because what I wanted more than a number on the scale was I wanted to look fit and trim and ripped and healthy. And all the things I thought that I wasn't. And that's again why a number is just an idea. It's just a snapshot. It's not the whole story. But again, at the time, I just thought a number would create all of those things. And even though I could reduce the number, I still wasn't achieving the body composition that I wanted.

8:44So I assumed that I just needed to reach a lower and lower weight. Which I think is where a lot of people end up, right? They think achieving a lower weight is the answer to get what they want, which is to look a certain way. But looking a certain way isn't actually a metric of necessarily the number as much as it is the composition. Again, go back and listen to last week's episode. But you can see images of this online, right? You'll have someone who has a picture of themselves when they're at 135 pounds. And then they'll put a picture when they're at 155 pounds. And they look so much stronger and even more vibrant at the heavier weight. But at the same time, they almost look leaner, even though they weigh more. And this is where the scale can, like this conversation can mess people up, right? Like because you can't really understand it until you see it. And I think some of those images are important to help you recognize that the number is not a great depiction of what you want.

9:45Because what you want is the structure. Now, I'm not going to teach today. I'm telling you a story. So, to continue on with this, I did what I considered a relatively great job of maintaining my status quo weight. Even when I had children, even through birth, it was kind of like I just didn't really ever gain weight. Now, again, not healthy. And if I had to go back in time, this was very, very unhealthy for me to gain 12, 15 pounds when you're nine months pregnant. And thinking that that was like, oh, I'm just healthy, right? So again, getting wrapped up in the number and how much weight or you are gaining or aren't gaining is really not a good depiction of health. I think what happened in that time, though, was that while I was trying to be relatively, what do I want to say, unaffected by the scale?

10:51I wanted to kind of rebel against it. What ended up happening was I ended up getting really, really sick. And it felt like it happened immediately and really quickly that I gained 30 pounds. Now, the thing with body weight is it doesn't happen quickly, not in the form of body fat. It actually takes quite a bit of energy, stored energy in order to actually store a pound of body fat. I like to think about it as like the days are long, but the years are short. You don't really notice day by day how much weight you could gain because it's so little on a daily basis, but over the course of a year, it feels like it happens very quickly. That's kind of the state that I was in. It felt like it happened all of the sudden, even though my body was working through it daily, long before I even recognized it was a problem, partially because I just wasn't supplying the resources and the energy my body needed to thrive.

11:52So when I got sick, it got scared and it started self-protecting and one form of self-protection is always to gain body fat. It's to store body weight. Even when people go through stressful situations and they lose weight, often that's a loss of muscle mass or a loss of structure that then gets converted into body fat. Most people conserve body fat in any kind of stressful situation, if not store it. I was the store type. I was the one that was putting it on and in the process, obviously body fat also produces inflammation. So I had two-fold. I was gaining body fat, but I was also increasing my body weight and inflammation. Regardless, it was devastating on some way, how someone who was in the health space, who was doing all of the right things, could end up here. I was living the life that I was preaching and it got me into a worse state.

12:52And that alone was, I feel like a big point in my journey, that again was devastating, that caused years of really trying to process through that and reckon with it. But in the process of that, I think I got to this place of I obviously don't know what I'm doing. My body is obviously a massive problem and so I'm just going to quit to get all together. And I mentioned this on the first podcast. I was just going to quit health and I tried to quit health and I think I did. I quit a lot of the old versions of health. It was the moment of recognizing what I had been living is not health. I just didn't know what it was. At the same time, I decided the best case scenario was to don't look, don't know. Like, forget the scale. I don't even care about it. Body weight is, it does not determine my worth. And I think that was all really healthy process, even though there was some unhealthy parts of it.

13:52I kind of moved into this, I'm going to say like the stereotypical body love movement, excuse me, where you just love yourself at any size and screw health, screw being on a skinny weight, but maybe it was just me. I don't want to put language to other people and stories and other people's heads that aren't true. I think I said that and I wanted to love myself at any size while also still being incredibly envious of the people who were always skinny or could who could always lose weight. Like, I felt like a fraud living in my own skin trying to teach health when I didn't feel like I was portraying it. And it was just this whole entire identity crisis. So in that process, I, again, had to make some decisions. Yes, I decided that the best case scenario was just to get rid of the scale altogether, not care. That I could pay attention to my body weight based on the side, like based on my clothes and how my clothes were fitting.

14:58Even though when the clothes didn't fit, I would complain, I would text my friends, we would kind of make jokes and enable each other and just like kind of move forward. I didn't really have a good plan or a good understanding, which is the start of any good plan, for maybe why my body was responding the way that it was and having any sort of respect for what that was. It wasn't until really years later that I started to dig into why do our bodies gain body fat? Outside of just eating it because there was one thing I knew for sure that I was not eating enough to actually store the fat that I had been storing. And this is where I started to learn about metabolism, which I've talked about numerous times on here, but it's also where I learned that there is a very real emotional component to body fat. It is not just insulating our bodies from outside physical forces, from stored energy. But there's a true emotional component like body fat is helping us to be insulated from these high electrical high voltage emotions like anger and frustration and rage and even things like sadness, right?

16:12Like they all have like an emotion is just an energetic response. Like that's why you can feel it throughout your body. It's not just a thought. You're actually creating a feeling and that feeling is an energetic electrical response that's happening between your brain and your body's different neurons. And one of the ways that your body protects yourselves from those sparks is body fat. So the more electrically charged emotions that you have, the more body fat you could store as a way to protect yourselves from that electrical charge, as a way to insulate yourself from really feeling that it's kind of a numbing effect. Again, your body's always establishing or reaching for that state of neutrality of just just that calm ease and whenever we get outside of that and we stay there for prolonged periods of time, your body's going to work to protect that. And one way some bodies protect you is again stored body fat. We especially see this more in women who are or who have a stronger survival response.

17:17I don't want to say stronger survival response, but a more particular survival response because we obviously grow children and that's a really taxing energy conserving state that we need to get ourselves into. Anyways, so I started to do research, which again, I'll link some of the posts and even previous podcasts that I've done on understanding respecting body fat, why my body chose to do this. And I had to get myself into this place of, okay, my body didn't do this without reason. It didn't do this to hurt me. It didn't do this to ruin my life. And also start going through the process of recognizing that even when I wasn't at a healthy weight, I had to learn to love myself because hating myself well and anyone who attempt this, it never works. I had lived my younger years, even though I was at a healthy body weight, hating myself well, beating my body into submission, assuming that I had to achieve a state to be desired, to be loved, to be seen.

18:24And my husband's going to come on after the podcast and we're going to talk a little bit about a male's perspective of women's looks. He doesn't know this yet and he's listening. He's probably getting nervous. But some of the conversations that we had to have that actually helped me see it in a different way to help me see love and desirability and attraction differently. And that actually was really helpful for me as it shifted my own view. But ultimately it's really not about anyone else. It's really about your relationship with you and how you view you. That's what's going to change. I think you're demeanor and your actions more than anything. We too often try to make it about everyone else when really it's just a metric of how you view yourself. Anyways, we'll talk about that after the show. But in the process of really starting to learn to understand my feelings to understand how body fat was there to serve me to understand and respect what my body had done to protect me, even if it was protecting me from myself, which it was.

19:37And really getting away from trying to chase all of these external things that were probably my root cause. I just had to get back to you regardless of whatever caused this and trying to chase something that didn't make me, me, my emotions, my thoughts, my ideas, my problem. And start to take some responsibility for myself. That's that's really ultimately what led to this reckoning with the scale was this concept and this idea that nothing outside of me was going to create the answers that I was looking for. I had to choose that for myself. I had to choose how I was going to view the scale. I had to choose how I was going to view my weight. I had to choose how I was going to love myself and all of that was a depiction of what I thought about everything else. So anyways, moving on, I had gained weight. It had been probably eight years since I had done that. And in the last few years, I really started to view it differently. I started to view my weight not necessarily as a problem as much as is this helping me to live in the way that I really want to live.

21:01And in some ways, I think there was a freedom there like I was able to eat pretty much whatever I wanted go to our bad. I did have a strong libido. I did feel like I was kind of thriving in a lot of ways of just finding joy in life again. And I think this was really important in the process of then taking the next step of, okay, now it's time to actually start to implement things because there were also things that while I was getting all of those things like more joy and more freedom and flexibility and just like the ability to be present in life, I also wasn't able to do some of the things that I really wanted to do. I had, before I crashed and burned, I had been a runner. I probably didn't use running and the healthiest of ways. But there was also a lot of health in the process of that. And like most things, I think we can see two sides of the coin, right? Running can be really healthy. It was really positive for my mind. It was really clearing and freeing and it made me have a lot of confidence.

22:04On the flip side, I also ran to maintain my weight, to beat my body and to submission so that I could eat more calories later. Like there's two sides of every coin. But I started to realize like I really miss the positives of why I ran. I don't want to run anymore because I don't think it's worth it to get to a certain weight. I don't even know that I need to get to a certain weight. But I missed just the freedom and the confidence and just the ability to process life that happened when I went on runs. Like running was truly a form of therapy for me. And I couldn't do it. Like I could not get my body to respond to running well. And while I just assumed it was because my body was just running was just too stressful for it. When I started to pick up on the fact that yes, it was stressful for it. Because I didn't have the capacity for it. That's when I was like, oh, I need to build capacity. I need to make my body strong.

23:09It is just literally not strong enough. It does not have the same amount of structures that it needs in order to actually use running in a thriving sense. And that was one of my biggest motivations, honestly, to start to build capacity and strength of my body. It wasn't about losing weight, which is why at that point I still wasn't weighing myself. I didn't really care about the number. I had to make the choice first that I cared more about the strength and resiliency of my body. Was my body and could my body become capable again of engaging in the things that I really found incredibly beneficial to all parts of my life, especially my mindset. And so I started this journey, which you noticed a few years ago about resourcing the body and supporting the body and building capacity. And what I truly believe most about body weight, which matters based on the structure of your body.

24:11And you can change the structure of your body without ever having to step on the scale. And that's how I started. I started understanding that body weight was playing in a part because running is hard when you have too much body fat on it, impossible, absolutely not. But it tends to inflame you more. I was very aware of that. I was also aware that my proportion of body fat to muscle mass was not allowing me to be and to engage in running in a way that was actually filling me with energy. That was actually helping me process. Again, it tended to be more of a stress where I didn't have the resources to effectively do that. And I wanted that. I wanted that back. So what I'm trying to say is, even if you don't want to weigh yourself, you can still pay attention to the integrity and the structure of your body. And use situations in life like I did of being able to run or maybe it's hike for you or I don't know what it is for you.

25:14But I think that we can all have those those outcomes that we desire to be able to do and work ourselves into doing them. Like I know some people it's like different yoga moves or being able to squat a certain amount of weight. Like I think these are all really healthy achievable goals that we can give ourselves that help us to move in the right direction of structure matters more than the number. But on the flip side, the scale can be incredibly beneficial at helping you understand how much progress you are making. Yes, you can pay attention to all the situations in life and the external factors. And I did that for years. It honestly wasn't until like a year ago that we even got the scale back out. And I don't even use it that often, but I am aware of it. And here's the thing, like the reckoning with the scale was, it's a metric, right? It's a number. It's like taking your body temperature or blood pressure.

26:18Stepping on it can be really hard, especially because it's going to bring up a lot of old feelings, no matter how much work you do, no matter how much you can shift your picture and see more goals, better goals outside of just the number on the scale. The scale is a really valuable tool and helping to understand are the things that you're engaging with, helping your body to create progress, or are they causing your body to react to them? Again, it's like changing blood pressure, right, or changing body temperature. You can use those things to help you understand are the actions I'm taking, helping my body to maintain a sense of neutrality, to build strength, to build resilience to have energy, or are they pulling it away? Now again, I think you can go into the scale and step on to the scale with all of the right intentions, but there is a moment every time you step on the scale, if you've ever struggled to the scale that there is going to be an emotional response, that doesn't happen when you take your body temperature.

27:25At the same time, I think this can be really powerful in creating emotional maturity and regulation, because doing hard things is often the catalyst to creating the most change, like you can't experience joy without also experiencing pain. I forgot a quote, I heard it this morning, and now I cannot remember it, and I wanted to say it in here, but it's essentially this idea of like you truly can't experience happiness without also experiencing pain, right? Like you have to have both sides of it, and I think there's something to be said about using the scale to also help us to process other emotions. Yes, there's a confrontation of it, there's the, oh my gosh, I'm not sure how I feel about that number, or I don't like that number. This can help us reprogram our mindset patterns, and if we do it in the things like even the scale, these internal things, it also helps us learn how to do it with all other things.

28:25So what I mean by that is when I stepped on the scale and I saw the number, a number I didn't like, I had the choice, right? I could use that to beat myself into submission, I could use that to beat myself up about what I'm not, or what I'm not capable of, or I could make the choice to say, while I don't necessarily like this, I am doing something to change this, and I'm feeling really good in the process of it. It seems silly, but it is really impactful, and it's not to just say that you're going to get rid of the emotions altogether. That is an impractical thought, that is an illusion. You're never going to get rid of the old story, you're never going to get rid of the emotion. It is always going to exist. What we need to learn how to do is interrupted so that you can write a better story so that you can create healthier emotions. You're going to feel it, it's what are you choosing to do with it? Are you choosing to allow that to be your story, or are you going to interrupt it and create a better story, a story that you actually want to choose?

29:34So I could get on the scale, and this is my reckoning. When you stand on the scale and you're like, oh, I don't really like that, and that actually makes me feel really bad, because I've been working really hard to change it, and I'm kind of frustrated that it's not changing. I have a moment to decide, okay, am I going to let that be my story of you did everything and it didn't work. Your body is such a failure, you might as well just eat whatever you want, like screw this, like I'm not going to do it. Or you could say, okay, I recognize I'm frustrated. I'm going to allow myself to feel frustrated, but I know that consistency is going to pay off. I know that in due time, my body, when it feels safe, and when it feels nourished, is going to choose to help me get healthy. It's going to change. It will change. It is changing even if I can't see it. That is an interrupt. That is the pattern story interrupt, where you say, it's not to say that you don't feel those things. It's to say, what are you going to choose to do with them, and how are you going to change the story and the narrative that you tell yourself out of it?

30:40Because here's a reality, and you know this, if you're a scale person, you know that if you stand on the scale, and it's not what you want, you can let it control your day, ruin your day, change how you show up, and honestly just give up on your day. There were times when I stood on the scale, and I might forget it, like I might as well eat whatever I want, because all the work isn't paying off. You know those days, right? But where is that getting you? Nowhere, it's getting you to the same cycle over and over of the next time you stand on the scale, it's the same thing. So you just repeat the pattern, and you're never consistent enough to actually stay in it long enough to create the change that you're looking for. Your body is changing even if the scale isn't seeing it as long as you're creating healthy actions, and living out health, creating a higher expression of health, eventually your body will show that in the physical form, but that takes time. And most of us aren't patient enough to stay with it and to see it through myself included for a time.

31:43But lately, my reckoning with the scale really happened when it was I can stand on the scale, I can embrace the hard, because oftentimes it's going to be hard, right? At least initially, at least until you can learn this process. Now it is more like information that I can use, but I'm not going to lie, some days it's still hard. It's what are you choosing to do with that? Use it as motivation or use it to derail you, like you get to make the choice. And I think when you start to see the power and the choice that you make after you experience the hard thing is really what's going to feel you and move you forward to create the most change in your life, like that is where your power comes from. That is when you can start to use the scale to help you instead of hurt you and derail you. So I say that is encouragement. It's not easy. Like I'm not going to sit here and say this is easy. That it's not going to create hard feelings that you're not going to have to confront the places that you don't always like.

32:51It is going to shine a spotlight on all of the things that you struggle with in your health. But I also think that's where the power is, right? Because if we don't confront those places, the places where self hate still lingers, where you kind of want to beat yourself up, where you don't respect yourself, then we're always going to kind of repeat the cycle of allowing ourselves to stay in a place that's familiar, but that you hate. And fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, your body is always going to go for what's familiar if it's safe over what's different and confront the hard places. You have to choose to do that. Like the natural pull in the drift of life is always towards what's familiar, but the familiar is often the artificial form of health or like this. I'll just call it artificial, right? It's never really generating what you want, even if it's keeping you safe. I think what you want is always going to come with a period of feeling a little unsafe, a period of feeling the hard things of confronting them, not to be used by them, but so that you can interrupt it and change the story.

34:05And I think that's the power of the scale and not necessarily just in the fact of, I think the scale can be a good tool to help you understand how your body's responding to the things that you engage with. But I think the scale is actually a great tool to help you move forward and respect and true love for yourself and your body because it confronts the places that have hurt you or that you've hurt yourself and the process of creating stories. That are not helping you to actually live out of the design of health that you were created for. Like in a way, if we don't confront those things, I think we're always going to be consumed by them. I think not stepping on the scale is its own form of bondage. Stepping on the scale in the wrong way is a form of bondage. We have to learn how to break the bondage and that means doing the hard things and confronting that and choosing to change the story. Choosing to see how much choice you have and what you do with what you see.

35:07And that is really what I've learned to do and I think that's also what's allowed me to step on the scale but not necessarily need the scale. Because it helped me to see that there's a level of consistency and understanding that my body is working and it's changing even if it's not reflective on the scale. And I don't need to be so controlled by that but rather just pay attention to life using it to see a pattern shift, to see a trend, to see if I'm moving towards that higher expression of self. Even more, hopefully using scales that show body composition which is a better depiction of health than just the number. Using that as another metric, not the end all be all. But again, I think it's going to be hard for people to fully live out the freedom of health which to me means not being consumed by health but using health to get out and live your God given purpose.

36:07That's the whole point. But in order to do that, I think we all need to have a reckoning with the scale and to go to the hard places and learn how to create that pattern shift. Learn how to interrupt that story so that you can use it to write a better story. So that's kind of my reckoning with the scale and again, how I use it. I mean, I don't even think ours has batteries in it right now and I'm perfectly fine with that. Will I step on it from time to time? Should I step on it more? Maybe. I don't know. Right now? No. Right? Maybe someday I will and I'll really use it in that way. But right now, I just needed to have that moment with it where I could interrupt the story about my body weight in general and use it to write a better one. So again, I want to encourage you with that to help you understand that I very much empathize with you about body weight being hard and body weight coming with all kinds of emotions.

37:13And probably a story that is not one that you love. And definitely not a story you want to keep living out, which I think has made health so impossible because we're wrapping it up into something that is an illusion, chasing something that doesn't exist rather than creating what it was meant to be so that you can get out and live your life. So I just wanted to bring that again as like, I get it. I feel you. I also still think body mass matters and shifting that story is going to help you create that in a new way. And I know for me when I and when I had this reckoning and I stopped allowing body weight and the scale to control me, even if I was never stepping on it because it was still controlling me. That's the thing about it, right? You can't just ignore it or numb it. But it actually helped me to start to see like, oh, I'm going to intentionally choose to take actions that are going to help change my body composition.

38:17I might not be able to run yet, but I'm going to start string training. I'm going to start wearing a weighted vest when I walk. I'm going to start changing my eating patterns, not just eating whatever I want and being like, screwed the scale, but actually being intentional about the foods that I'm putting in my body knowing that the resources those foods provide are essentially the building blocks to build this stable strong house. I don't want a house of just insulation, like I want something that's going to last. That's going to help me get out and live life. That's going to help me to live my bigger story, the story God created for me. And the only way that I can do that is by starting to build capacity by starting to build resilience and strength. That happens in the actions that I choose. So again, use all of that as encouragement. Again, one thing that helped me was really shifting my view of my worth and love and my attractiveness, which I'm going to have my husband come on after the show as we kind of talk about some of this. And he might not even remember all the things that he had spoken over me that helped me.

39:17But we're going to talk about that area, which is a little bit deeper and more intimate. So if you want to join in that. Make sure you join me in after the show. You can do so below by joining the weekly fill, which is our newsletter. There's a membership portion that you can pay for. It's $10 a month to join in. You get all the after the shows and all of the courses and challenges that we do inside of that. So join below or you can just become a free member to and get some more insiders on these podcasts. Anyways, join below and also make sure you go back and listen to and maybe even if you listen to last week's show. Maybe now you'll have a change perspective of it. A new view of why it's important. It might be good to go back and listen to that again. Takes time to settle in to some of these concepts that feel really threatening and unsafe. There is a progression of the more capacity you feel. The safer you're going to become and the more information you can soak in and use in a positive way.

40:18Last week might have felt like a big old threat and you're like, I didn't hear it. It felt overwhelming. I didn't have the capacity for it. But that's okay. Give yourself some grace. I get it. But as you build capacity, it's important to go back and listen to that and start to shape your view of body mass and body composition and also maybe encourage you to have your own reckoning with the scale. So thank you so much for being here. As always, we'll be back on next week with a brand new podcast. In the meantime, again, join us in the community. Check out the blog post that goes along with today's podcast. I'll link up a few other podcasts and blog posts about body fat that I had previously recorded and written. So check all those out in the show notes below. Thank you guys so much for being here and I'll see you back here next week. You