Have you ever had one of those days... ...where you run around like a mad woman, but you feel like you get absolutely nothing done? I sometimes have days where I feel like a complete mess and I know exactly what my problem is: My perfectionism. I sometimes throw around the sentence “I am a perfectionist!” like it’s no big deal and just some quirky character trait of mine. However, if I’m truly honest, it's the most painful, frustrating and alienating part of being me. What it means[...]
Leslie McDonald is the face behind the social media account @balanced_life_leslie. She is a sound healer, reiki practitioner, and certified holistic health coach with a passion for creating community, sharing recipes, and meal prep tips as well as making wellness accessible to everyone. Her work has been featured in Mind Body Green, Thrive Global, Greatist, and Whole30recipes. Trigger warning: Leslie has suffered from some autoimmune conditions and has found eating Paleo to be very benefi[...]
This will be a quick episode, because I want to get straight to the point today and share my personal experience with fear. In this episode I share: - How my fear of not being enough sneaks into my life and what I do about it- How I channel this fear into courage- What courage feels like and how exactly I build my self-confidence through feeling my fear- How to unleash your inner superhero Links mentioned in this Episode Join my brand-new Self Love Jumpstart course at https://courses.ownit[...]
The episode everyone keeps asking me about is finally out!I am interviewing my husband Shaun and we are having a very juicy and honest conversation about body image, diet culture for men, supporting a loved one through an eating disorder, mental health, sex and much more! Some of my favorite topics we covered - The “movie-version” story of how we met and why we didn’t start dating until 18 months later - My rock-bottom moment and eating disorder from his point of view - Men and diet[...]
Self-Love | ˈˌself ˈləv/ | noun Regard for one's own well-being and happiness (considered as a desirable rather than narcissistic characteristic). Self-love often gets confused with being a narcissist. “This person is full of themselves, they are just in love with themselves and think that they are IT. Ugh!” However, this character trait i[...]
Jen is a Certified Professional Life Coach, podcast host, educator, and public speaker based in Chicago. She is all about helping women grow their passion work from the inside out by taking care of themselves first. Topics we cover in this episode: • Why her eating disorder spiraled AFTER she had created the life she thought she’d always wanted and why it DIDN’T start from a place of wanting to lose weight • What it was like opening up to her husband about her eating disorder[...]
Did you know that the word “cellulite” didn’t really appear anywhere until pretty recently? In fact, the word “cellulite” and it’s description made its first appearance in North America when Vogue printed an article about it in the 1960s… Before that, cellulite wasn’t really a global term to describe our skin. These bumps on our skin are a very natural part of our body tissue. Not a “disease” that needs to be cured. Cellulite treatment is very recent and became[...]
I want to highlight something that I think a lot of us are ashamed to talk about: Our desire to be intimate - either with our partner/date or with ourselves. Since I restricted food severely from a young age, my desire to experience and enjoy sex never really developed. I was ashamed of my non-existent sex drive I always thought I’m just weird this way and that I’m just not one of those women that enjoys being touched and trying out new things in the bedroom. In fa[...]
When I decided I was done chasing the “perfect body” and dieting myself into the ground, I experienced a period of a few months where I ate upwards of tens of thousands of calories every single day. I would eat carrot cake for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. I felt so defeated and unable to stop. My body had completely taken over and I was on autopilot. Even though my stomach was painfully full, I was still hungry - mentally hungry. My body kept asking for more. This[...]
If I would have seen this body two years ago, I probably would have had a breakdown - that’s how disordered I was. I would have thought that this healthy body was flawed, because it doesn’t look like the body of my then-favourite fitness model. I would have beat myself up, because I was “too weak” to follow my food- and workout plan and “just suck it up”. Today, I look at this body with love and compassion. This body was never supposed to look like the[...]