Jeanne, now in her late thirties, takes us on a deep journey through her struggles with self-acceptance, self-love and toxic body image. She gives a raw and honest account of her challenges and how she still walks the path toward self compassion.
Jeanne, now in her late thirties, takes us on a deep journey through her struggles with self-acceptance, self-love and toxic body image. She gives a raw and honest account of her challenges and how she still walks the path toward self compassion.
Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction.
01:43 History and background to Jeanne's challenges with Self-Acceptance.
03:23 Using an unhealthy relationship with food as a coping mechanism.
04:10 Having a baby and how this impacted the journey.
05:49 The turning point.
08:07 The biggest obstacles Jeanne faced.
09:00 Jeanne's obsessions with her weight.
10:45 The three core values Jeanne identified and that she TRIES to live by.
11:21 The first core value.
15:33 Value number 2.
18:00 Value number 3.
22:22 Conclusion
Jeanne Retief: Blog | Podcast | Instagram | FIGGI Beauty Shop
[00:00:00.000] - Jeanne
Good morning, FIGGI goddess, and welcome to the My FIGGI Life podcast. Here I am again talking and sharing way too much personal details about my life, but hopefully it helps and inspires and makes you feel less alone. I know talking to you makes me feel less alone, and I'm so grateful. So grateful for this community and your support of the FIGGI Life and FIGGI Beauty. Today, I'm going to talk about self-acceptance, self-love, and my struggle with that, how I think I've gotten to a better place with that, but how I also think I've had a relapse in that in the last month or so. If you want to know more about my journey to self-acceptance and self-love and my struggles with it, stay tuned.
[00:00:49.330] - Intro
Welcome, goddess, to your sacred space. This is my FIGGI Life podcast, where we openly discuss life's wins and losses on our journeys to self-discovery. This is your best life. This is your FIGGI life. Now, here is your host, Jeanne.
[00:01:09.240] - Jeanne
Welcome back. This is, I think, such a profound episode because whether we want to admit it or don't want to admit it, whether we choose to ignore it, whether we choose to embrace it, I really think that many, many, many, many of us have or maybe still are struggling with a form of self-acceptance. Gosh, women are so tough on themselves, and I know I am for sure one of those. Mine was born from many places of insecurity, which stemmed from my childhood narrative, which I am absolutely sure also goes back to my sexual abuse history, my sexual assault history. I had a difficult upbringing. I was exposed to many things that I think I was way too young to be exposed to that caused a really lasting imprint on the way I saw myself. I was introduced to the modeling world from the moment I can remember, really. All my friends would go to birthday parties on weekends, and I would be standing primed and primed in a queue full of little pageant queens waiting for my chance on stage. This really morphed into a teenage modeling career. I had a lot of pressure to succeed in that.
[00:02:29.720] - Jeanne
I had a lot of pressure to look a certain way. When I was 16, I won a modeling opportunity to go to Italy, to travel to Italy, to model there. I was exposed to an absolutely brutal amount of scrutiny about my body. I mean, being measured with a tape measure every single day over your hips and your tummy and your thighs and scrutinizing about the half inch or half centimeter you gained or didn't gain, comparing yourself to the other girls that are differently built than you, it just all of these things led to a really, really bad place. When I had my mental breakdown after my unfortunate second instance of sexual assault in my young adult years, one of the coping methods was cultivating a really, really unhealthy relationship with food, which had always been in my life and I had a place in my life. At that point, I've been on diets for as long as I could remember. Especially before I had gone to Italy, I got this folder from the agency that gave me the diet I was supposed to be on. There was a lot of pressure on me to stick with this diet and to make sure that I looked a certain way.
[00:03:50.410] - Jeanne
In a weird way, I think somehow that control I had over what I put in my body made me feel in control of other things that I was not in control of. So my unhealthy relationship with food was denying myself. So, of course, fast forward a couple of years later, many years later, actually, when I had my little girl, I was really sick during my pregnancy, very, very ill. So I only gained 12 kilos. I lost eight kilos as soon as the baby was born. And those last five kilos took me four years to lose. And I was one of those that I had a C-section. And I didn't even wait the recommended amount of time before starting physical exercise. I was one of those. I immediately went on every diet I could find. I pushed my body to the absolute limits of what it could achieve. And I was working full-time. I didn't take maternity leave because I had my own consultancy at that time. I think the American way of life can understand that because that's very much the South African way of life. It's go, go, go, go, go. If you're not on the bus, you're off the bus.
[00:05:02.190] - Jeanne
If you're not here because you're on maternity leave, that's great and we're happy for you, but we're just going to find somebody else to do what you could. I was go, go, go, go, go, go. I continue to have an excessively bad relationship with myself and my self-image and self-love and self-acceptance. It went from a really bad place that it had always been to an excruciatingly toxic space. I didn't want to go out with friends anymore. I started completely changing my wardrobe and only wearing super baggy, oversized clothes. I would stand in front of the mirror every day and berate myself and say the most horrible things to myself. The turning point really came for me when my daughter was three and a half, four, and we were standing in front of the mirror. One of the key things for me with raising my daughter was she should always know how beautiful she is inside and out. She should always believe it and feel it. I would never want her to go through this type of mental anguish. I worked so hard to instill this value in her. Yet I was struggling with installing it in myself.
[00:06:18.350] - Jeanne
She was standing next to me. We were getting ready for the day. I just gotten dressed and you know that little whirl you do in front of the mirror does everything fit together, does everything tucked in. I turned around and at that point it was so bad. I didn't even realize I was saying it out loud and I just said, You are so disgusting. Why are you even looking at this? There's nothing you can do to make it better. It was just such a normal part of the day for me. I didn't even actually realize I was saying it. Immediately after I said it, my little girl chimed out and she did a twirl in front of the mirror and she's like, You're so fat. Look at you. My entire world just came crashing down. The stab in my heart from seeing my little girl say that because she was mirroring me, what I had said to myself, how I had seen myself was completely devastating. That was the turning point for me. That's how I reached out to my beautiful spiritual mentor. That's how I got onto this path, and I've really come a long way.
[00:07:22.470] - Jeanne
I'm so happy about that. But of course, this was not an easy journey. I would have never dreamed of saying what I do in this episode in my old life. But I know many women in power positions secretly feel this way. Still, I understand the professional world doesn't allow us to voice or give attention to these silly fears and insecurities. It just gets added to the list of things that are swept under the rug. That I really, honestly, I'm talking from experience. If you're pulling an undercover listening act with this episode, you're also so completely welcome, fellow traveler. Your secret is safe with me as long as you can just give an out to these feelings and feel that you're not alone. My most significant obstacle in this journey to inner peace was really, honestly, as I've just explained, loving the skin I was in. I read so many hundreds, thousands of articles and supportive commentaries on loving your body as it is, embracing the miracle of life, the fact that my body was made for me. But still, nothing made a significant shift in my mind. I was never deeply invested in fad diets.
[00:08:33.450] - Jeanne
My vice was always over-exercising and under-eating. I just didn't eat or ate a whole lot less than I should have, and I over-exercised. I have worked out my entire life with fierce resilience. Like I said, postpartum, I went a little insane. I exercised until every part of my body was in pain and I could barely move. I pushed through fatigue, pain, stress, illness. My weight and how my body looked were the only goals, the only things that mattered, and the most essential measures of my identity. But the scale never moved. It didn't matter how much I did. It didn't matter how little I ate or how much I exercised. It just stayed the same. Then being inundated with information about diets and workouts or the one weird old trick that will officially help me shed these last kilos, that didn't help. It seemed like someone on the internet always had the secret to helping me get there faster. I spent hours combing through every piece of clothing in my closet before I went out. In my mind, nothing fit. Everything made me look horrible and I was beyond ugly. I said awful things to myself like I've just explained.
[00:09:39.500] - Jeanne
I would never, ever say these things to anybody else. In fact, I would feel so horrible and deeply hurt and sad to see anybody say that to themselves or speak that way to themselves. But I somehow felt completely comfortable and vindicated in expressing that to me. That moment when my little girl mirrored it back to me, I was so appalled. My heart broke for her. I would never want her to speak to herself like that. She is gorgeous and beautiful, just as she is and beyond measure. Like I said, this was the turning point where it hit me. How can I expect her to see her own beauty and be confident in it if I couldn't even love myself? What example was I setting for her? Is my reality so distorted that I am okay with speaking to myself this way? I would be appalled if somebody else talked to me like this, and I just knew something had to change. So in this quest to turn all of this around, I realized three things that I now do my best to live by every day, and I honestly struggle to do some days. But the fact that I've realized it and I'm trying is helping me.
[00:10:45.840] - Jeanne
And to be clear, this doesn't mean that I don't still get mornings when I feel bloated and gross and days that I berate myself for not exercising. I'm human and this is a journey and it's not an accomplishment. All that matters to me is that I'm aware of it. I try to stop the negative self-talk and I redirect if I can. On days I can't, I try to embrace the feeling and work through it and get to a brand new day tomorrow. If I do my best at any given moment, there is always a reason to try again. The first thing I try to install in my mind is to move my body and not the needle on the scale. The steadfast love I've always had for exercising became a hated pastime for me and my quest for the version of perfection that I wanted. This grueling pace left my body sore and depleted and fatigued. I hated getting up in the morning, promoting, veining myself to get to the gym. I was a near permanent visitor to the osteopath or physical therapist because I always had some muscle I overworked or overstressed. Guess what?
[00:11:56.630] - Jeanne
The scale didn't move an inch. Out of steam and due to pure exhaustion, I made the best decision of my life, and I took back my power. I canceled my gym membership. I canceled trainers. I deleted all of my training apps from my phone. I politely tried to redirect conversations when well-meaning friends try to sell me the benefits of their workout and diet secrets. I didn't need to hold myself to anybody else's standards anymore, just my own. And that was my goal. I set my own pace and I narrowed down what worked for me and investigated what felt good to me and what I enjoyed. Yoga finally re-entered my life and I set up a calm space, beautiful space for exercising. I set this intention to be more aware of what the mental chatter was that abused me on days I skipped workouts instead of working on congratulating myself for allowing my body to be so completely exhausted and depleting from exercise. I focused more on congratulating my body for allowing myself the time to rest and rejuvenate. I tried to exercise three times a week, but I also try to remind myself that life happens and it's not the death of all things if I only make it to my exercise pace twice in any given week.
[00:13:19.640] - Jeanne
I shifted my focus from esthetics of a perfect body to how my body was speaking to me and what it was telling me it needed. Am I really in pain today and tired and exhausted? And can I benefit from calm, stretching and mobility and meditation? Or am I claustrophobic and anxious and stressed and I need a day in the open air working in the garden? Or maybe I just need a mind-clearing walk in nature. When I eventually managed to reprogram my approach like this, I began to enjoy exercising again. I felt re-energized by workouts and not burnt out and in agony. I stopped setting exercise schedules, which became much easier to do, I will admit, with work from home. I started going to my exercise space when I was good and ready, when my body told me to take a break, or when I found my head spinning from meetings and long hours behind the desk, this was a welcome break to me. This really helped me find intervals of calm during my day, which helped my anxiety disorder. I returned to work relaxed and revitalized. I absolutely understand this is not an option for everyone, but the key message here to me is to exercise on a schedule that works for you and makes you feel good, not guilty and more stressed.
[00:14:40.690] - Jeanne
I don't hold myself to burning a certain amount of calories in a workout session or pushing through for a full-hour workout. I just focus on the joy and the release exercising brings me and where my body is on that day. This means I sometimes want to powerhouse an hour's cardio, and other times I move through a gentle yoga flow that only lasts 30 minutes. Either way, I try to congratulate myself for any time I managed to set aside for this and just revolve in the feeling of being physically active. That has significantly changed my outlook on things. The next was understanding, moderation in abundance. If you're feeling less than beautiful in your own skin, it's really easy to be tempted to jump down the diet fat rabbit hole. For me, this backfired many times. I get shaky, sweaty, nauseous. If I don't eat regularly, if that happens, it's a trigger for my anxiety disorder. I get panic attacks. Depriving myself of balanced regular meals was really not a wise choice for me. I learned that balance and simplicity are the key drivers to feeling good. In my opinion, there is no good reason for depriving myself of healthy foods unless I've been medically diagnosed with an illness or I've been advised by my medical professional or nutritionist to follow a particular diet for a specific reason.
[00:16:06.250] - Jeanne
I never experienced any of the many benefits everyone touts about keto and paleo or fasting for long periods of time. I always just felt sicker and weaker and miserable. I now embrace the notion that there are enough complications in my life. While not everything can be simple, making things unnecessarily difficult is also not helpful for me. I was an overall healthy woman, and I decided to instead celebrate the fact that I could eat a balanced diet and that I was not in a position that forced me to eat a certain way or refrain from eating certain things. I found joy in this, joy in being this blessed. I felt even more so when I saw the pain and frustration friends with celiac and other diseases had to struggle through each day. I try to keep maturation in mind and not deprive myself of anything. But also, I don't just eat that piece of chocolate cake. I savor it and I enjoy every bite. I don't have carb nights where I don't count calories. I absolutely indulge in Fettachini because it's delicious. I drink that glass of wine because it's cold and it's perfect and it's beautiful.
[00:17:15.170] - Jeanne
I don't do it every day, but I don't deny my body its requests when it makes them. Again, this is a personal journey and this is what has helped me. You may be in a completely different situation and a position and you have to do what works for you. But this was a beautiful experience and realization to me. Life is so short and it speeds past me so quickly. I don't want to think about that chocolate cookie I should have eaten in my dying moments. What's the point of savoring that bowl of pasta if I'm constantly proclaiming to the world how bad this is for me and how I should not be eating this many carbs. There's no rhyme or reason in this for me anymore, so I surrender. I surrender to balance and I try to be grateful for it. The last thing was how I realized that self-acceptance slowly grows into self-love. Looking in the mirror and identifying things about my body that I didn't like never worked for me. It was awkward, it was weird, and pointing out the things that I didn't like about myself and then saying something positive about it followed by the same train for my body also didn't work for me.
[00:18:20.540] - Jeanne
It felt insincere, it felt forced. Celebrating my inner attributes was much more accessible, and it had a much more powerful impact on my journey when I started internalizing my praise. I worked on my mental narrative about my body by trying to immediately think about how I would react if my little girl had said what I had just said to myself or thought about myself. This, to me, was the kick in the butt I needed to change my negative thoughts with true conviction. Once I realized I said something negative about my body out loud or thought it, I immediately told myself, You're radiant, you're glowing from within. Listen, this is not always easy, and I still struggle with this sometimes, and it's not a magic cure that immediately makes you feel better. Not at all. We all have days. We all have days where the mirror seems like our worst enemy, and we feel the visual picture staring back at us is much more powerful and real than the invisible glow we are working on. But focusing on the inner beauty instead of the outer really helped me to slowly and eventually more easily focus on changes that were more complete and permanent.
[00:19:30.030] - Jeanne
As long as I felt bright and glowing on the inside, it slowly started to matter less if my butt looked a little more jiggly or the unexpected pimple dropped in to say hello. It was like the inner glow move toward... It was like the inner glowmoved outward and either disguised the physical in my mind or gave me a new perspective on it. I'm honestly still figuring this last one out. What I know for sure, though, is that when I am in doubt, I need to settle my thoughts within. A difficult one that has come up from you is social media. When I started FIGGI, I had no social media presence whatsoever. When I started FIGGI Beauty, the skincare product line, social media became a necessity because it's one of the business engines that you use. There's a strategy behind it. You have to post. And the whole idea of FIGGI and the whole concept of FIGGI is me sharing a lot about my personal life and a lot about me. And this was an uncomfortable position for me to be in because I'm a deeply private person. I'd never done this before. It's really weird and stressful for me to always be out there and sharing so much of myself.
[00:20:36.600] - Jeanne
But when I started doing it, I was in such a good place of self-acceptance, and I felt beautiful and I felt glowing. Then when I went on holiday recently, I had noticed this was a tricky, tricky, tricky, tricky monster that had sneaked up on me little by little by little by little by little by little. And it increased and increased until I found myself posting a story one day and it immediately just hit me, Oh, my gosh, you're taking anywhere between 20 and 40 minutes to post the story, purely because you're so concerned with how bad you look in this picture or how crooked your smile is, or how horrible this blemish looks, or how pronounced your wrinkles are. That small narrative had started sneaking in again because you see so many people on social media, Oh, she's so beautiful. She's so glowing. She's my age. She has three kids, not one. And look how beautiful she is. Look how amazing she's built. You think you're not saying these things to yourself, but the mind takes it in and you do see it and you think you're above it, but it sneaks in and you're unaware of it.
[00:21:42.860] - Jeanne
Well, I was until it bolts up to such a degree that you find yourself going, Oh, whoa. Uh-oh. Gosh, what happened there? And then when you think about it, I saw moments for myself in the past few months where I'd been spending more time in front of the mirror, scrutinizing how I looked, where I had been saying more negative things about myself, where I'd been feeling worse about myself. You have to keep your pulse on it. It's something that you consistently and continuously have to work at because those negative narratives sneak in so quickly that sometimes you're so unaware of them. These are the things that I'm working on every day. It's principles I try to live by, but I admit I don't always master. As with my anxiety disorder, I try to focus on the fact that I'm trying and that I'm aware of my mental clutter and chatter, and the rest will come. I believe it. I don't know if I lost weight or if I toned up or anything actually changed physically because I threw out the scale and my clothes seem to fit the same, but I definitely feel different. I feel more beautiful.
[00:22:50.610] - Jeanne
I feel changed. I feel like I'm constantly learning to celebrate my body more. I feel like I'm more able to be aware of when it goes off the rails, like I just explained. This is the only piece I think for now I require. I don't have to be the best at this. I just need to know that I have a plan for me that works for me that helps me be aware and try every day. If you've been listening to this episode, goddess, I just want to tell you that you are such a gift to this world. You are the beauty that glows for the people around you. I don't know you, but I promise you there are people in your life that look at you with awe and wonder, that covet elements and characteristics of you because they think it's beautiful and lovely. I hope you remember this as I try to remember this about myself.