Ep. 72 Emma Wright Reveals The Key To Overcoming Body Image Struggles In Midlife

[00:00:00] Meegan Care: Emma Wright, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Tell me. Who you are and who you help.

[00:00:07] Emma Wright: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation. So, so my name’s Emma Wright and I am a body freedom coach.

And I help women who feel really disempowered around their well being. People who tend to know a lot about well being and really care about their health. But get to the point where they’re either like, I just cannot face going on another diet. I feel like things, you know, my health isn’t where I want it to be, but I just feel frustrated.

I feel like I do really care about my health, but the world is looking at me like I don’t for whatever reason. Those, that is often at times of change in our body. So I do have lots of clients in midlife and who uh, you know, and I, I know we, we can get into that a lot today who our bodies really are changing.

And while we might know and be looking for wellbeing. You know, to support ourselves, we don’t often talk about our relationship with our body as a really fundamental tool to our well being. And so I really bring that into the conversation for women. I also work with women who are going through pregnancies or postpartum and they get to the, The end of that and they go, I just, my body is so different.

I don’t know how to feel at home anymore. And sometime and women who feel like sometimes the wellbeing the, the, the things they try almost feel like a thumbscrew, like the harder they try the worse it feels. And, and it can be really confusing and really upsetting. And. And feel very, very isolating. So I work with a lot of women who feel like their confidence has been really battered about.

They don’t know, they’ve stopped speaking out for themselves, standing up for themselves. And realize that ultimately that is a real loss of power. Not, not feeling like who they are inside is as valued on the outside as they know they, they, they really could be so really that’s, that’s in a nutshell, who I work with.

Wow.

[00:02:24] Meegan Care: I can relate to so many levels of that. And there was something that stood out to me. In that, you know, midlife is a time of great change in our, in our physical, mental, psychological well being as women. And so this piece around our relationship to our body, and therefore our relationship to food and exercise.

[00:02:47] Emma Wright: Yeah.

[00:02:47] Meegan Care: Goes through this change as well. And we’re going to dive into that some more this morning. So, really excited about that.

[00:02:55] Emma Wright: Fantastic. I have a lot to say on that topic. You have a lot to say.

[00:02:58] Meegan Care: So good. So good. So let’s start with, why is our relationship to our body and also our relationship to food such a challenge for us as women?

[00:03:10] Emma Wright: It’s a really good question. It is, I like to look at it from several different perspectives. I don’t think there’s one quick answer to that, but what I want to, what I want to open up for people when I get asked this question is that it’s, we can look at it historically and that gives us some real insights into where we are at this point in, in history.

And historically, what has happened, if we look at it from a patriarchal lens, and I don’t mean that by saying men are bad and women are better or anything like that, but just the power structures in our society have really made made it easy for our culture to ask women to focus on their bodies as a place for our value to be seen.

By the wider culture, and if we look and we don’t have time today for a big history of how that’s happened, but if we if we just take some really quick things historically, as women have had more power and in the last 150 Twenty fifty years we have had thanks to feminism, comes to a change in culture.

We’ve had a real increase in our power in terms of we can have our own bank accounts. We can you know hold down big jobs. We can go to universities. And these things 150 years ago, obviously women didn’t have, you know, voting has only been a hundred years. And as we have had more power, our culture has had more and more interest in women turning their attention towards their bodies.

And the attention that our culture has really put on us is we need to keep it within a certain weight range. As a start, you know, if we look at the diet industry for a start off They have suggested that we get really, really focused on how we look and keeping within that weight range. And that has really distracted women.

It’s a really great mechanism for patriarchy. If you want to look at it through systemic structures for women to get really preoccupied and not, not use their power in other ways. And it’s a brilliant mechanism because the more we focus. On trying to show our value to the world through how we look, the less we’re able to actually feel good about ourselves.

That’s, that’s, that’s not something anyone ever arrives at and completes. You know, it’s, it’s a real place of getting stuck in a cycle of, oh, I still don’t feel like I’m really being valued. It must be the size of my legs or, or I’ll go on another, or I’m not bendy enough in my yoga class, or I don’t fit the latest fashion, or I don’t, we, you know, we continually focused back on ourselves again and again.

And. We and we’re invited into so much misinformation about about what we should eat and shouldn’t eat and the size we should be and shouldn’t be and how that’s related to our health and, and, and I don’t want to get down to, to like, as I say, Megan, I could speak for hours on this, but I think if you, if you take that history of women being asked to focus on ourselves, If you take that And being asked to really show our worth to the world through our container that we live in and how closely we fit the ideal beauty beauty ideals of today.

You can start to see why it is such a big deal, particularly for women and why we get so stuck and you add age into that. And suddenly if we don’t look like we’re aging correctly, or, you know, we’re not fitting the beauty ideal of someone who doesn’t put on weight in their midlife and, you know, who continues to be perfectly healthy, then somehow we are at fault.

And we take that on like another thing that we’ve somehow got to, to manage. Yeah. So. To fix. Yeah. To fix. Yeah, goes a little bit to why we’re, we’re so stuck where we are at the moment.

[00:07:19] Meegan Care: Yeah. And it’s just, as you were talking, my mind was going to all sorts of different places where this still shows up in, in the wellness industry and, you know, improving our physical wellbeing and the food that we eat and the clothes that we wear and the way our face looks and all the rest And I think it’s such an important piece for us to understand how did we get here?

Because then that helps us to disentangle ourselves from it and understand this is not a fault with ourselves. That this is going on, right? Because that’s what we do. We turn it on ourselves.

[00:07:57] Emma Wright: Oh, look, I love that you say that because when I work with women, so often they’re in a real state of, it’s my fault, really feeling bad that they have somehow haven’t done it.

Correctly, and when we take that history, we’ve just looked at that sort of patriarchal history that we’ve just looked at. And then we start to look at our own, how that’s, how that’s played out in our own lives. You know, we look at our mums encourage us to go on diets so that we’d find the man so that we’d be respected in society.

Then we, then we go to school and we get bullied for either our hair or our bum or our nose or. Whatever. And then we go into the workplace and we have to dress a certain way in order to get promoted and did it continually just time after time after time. We’re told how you looks really important and it’s your job to look correctly.

And then we get told by the, the, the wellbeing diet industry that it’s 100 percent our responsibility. And I’m a massive advocate for personal responsibility. We can, there’s a lot we can do to manage our own health and to do things. But when we get told that the entire sum of how we look and how, and our health is directly and only related to, to the behaviors that we have, I start to get a little bit cross about that.

[00:09:28] Meegan Care: Go the wild woman and her voice. I love it. When you were talking, I thought about myself and I, and I thought, I actually just recognize now that I have a certain thermostat in terms of my body shape and size. So I don’t weigh myself regularly, but I happen to know that I’ve put on quite a bit of weight and menopause, but I do still, even though that’s there and that’s helpful, I have a thermostat where my body gets Beyond a certain shape or weight, where there’s a must fix it, must change it, driver that comes on board.

Can you speak to that?

[00:10:10] Emma Wright: That’s, that’s really, I love that you’ve just recognized that because in that insight, I believe there’s a tremendous power because when we start to go, Oh, you know, I really do want to feel good about my body. I want to reject. Those those ideas that I have to be a certain size in order to be a valuable person.

We also, we, and I, and I actually quite like your terminology, which I’ve never really heard anyone use in terms of saying you’ve sort of got a thermostat because I can get that you kind of get to a certain point where suddenly you’re uncomfortable and. I, we hold a lot of trauma in our body due to our body size.

So when, when I just mentioned, you know, you go back through your history and you go, you know, your, your mom told you this and, and your dad said that, and someone said that, and then you started a diet and it didn’t work out and you ended up bigger than, you know, so we have, All women, I believe, hold in their body difficult times and difficult experiences that they’ve had around their body and almost universally around the size of it.

Now, some of us It’s that is a very internalized pain and shame, and some of us, it is a very externalized pain and shame. And I think that’s a really, really important distinction. And what I mean by that is there is a certain size in which you go out into the world and the world is incredibly mean to us.

You know, we, we get to a changing, we get into a store and there’s literally nothing that fits us. We go into to a dentist and we can’t get into the chair. We, we’re told constantly by messages that our body is wrong and, and we are responsible for it. And those are like daily discomforts and sources of pain, literal pain for us.

When I think when you, what you’re talking about and that thermostat is you get to a certain size and it is literally reminding you of that pain that you have felt. And what we do as women, because of the training we’ve had, you know, in our society, that our body is so important. And also because it is the way human beings operate, I believe, is when we feel that pain in ourselves.

A couple of things happen. We a try and suppress it, you know, cause it’s really uncomfortable. Right. And I, I, and, and whoever is feeling pain in their body, I just want to Reach out and acknowledge how normal that is and to say there’s nothing wrong with you if you’re listening to this and feeling like, yeah, get that pain.

You, us in such good company of pretty much, I won’t say everyone ’cause there’s no such thing as, you know, like 99% of women feel this pain. So it’s very, very normal and I wanna normalize that. And very few of us have ever been invited to actually see that pain as a very normal, very really actually good biological response to what’s happening to us.

And when I say good biological response, I mean, it is you and your thoughts and your feelings protecting you from this uncomfortable feeling you’re having. And then what happens is in order to. In order to protect ourselves from feeling those discomforts, most of us then decide right, I’m going to up my exercise, I’m going to change my diet, I’m going to fix my external look so that I don’t have to deal with that pain anymore, rather than healing the pain itself.

Because when you actually Have an ability to address that pain, heal it, and realize that it’s not you that’s broken. There’s nothing broken in you. There is something that needs healing. There is something that can be addressed. Then you’re free to exercise and eat in a way that just makes your body feel good.

That supports your body. That, that, that allows you to live with freedom and space in your mind rather than trying to escape. A pain that you’ve had that’s probably been there a long, long time.

[00:14:40] Meegan Care: Gotcha. That’s so powerful, isn’t it? That’s just landing so clearly with me. Yeah.

[00:14:47] Emma Wright: Good stuff. And it’s a really, really surprise, well, not surprisingly, but it’s such a common experience.

Yeah.

[00:14:56] Meegan Care: Yeah. And so embedded in our psyche that it really takes this kind of conversation, I believe, to help us to start to differentiate, Oh, actually, that’s so. Some of my conditioning and in my upbringing and my parents upbringing and it’s actually not just an inherent part of me that I can never feel differently about.

It’s something that’s been put upon us because of the cultural suit that we’ve been raised in.

[00:15:24] Emma Wright: Absolutely. And, and once again, so much freedom in that, right? To not go, this is a, this is just I spent so many years Megan in my mind feeling broken. You know, feeling like I just had one of those brains that was obsessed with food and just could never feel, I could never feel okay in my body.

I was, I was, I was absolutely in a world of trying to survive it and, and reaching for the next, next, you know, next exercise program or food to cut out, or if I could just get it right, then I’d be able to feel okay. And my body and having that freedom to, to go, Oh, actually, there’s nothing broken in me, but there is something very broken and the expectations on me.

And I can take responsibility for the pain I have felt and deal with that and manage that. And also have Take and also then have the power to actually set some boundaries with the world outside around us and say, actually, I’m not going to take on those messages anymore. I’m, I’m, I’m, I am actually going to reject that because once you see it, then you have that ability to reject it.

And that for me, and this is such a good conversation for midlife that to me shows up in the relationships we have with people. And the conversations we’re willing to have with people and at the core of us. Nurturing our own internal conversations and the way we feel about ourselves inside is ability to stand up for ourselves and go, actually, I’m not, I’m not going to take on the idea that

[00:17:10] Meegan Care: I’m

[00:17:11] Emma Wright: broken or that I need fixing.

I’m going to take on the idea that I can actually say no to something outside of myself rather than internalize it.

[00:17:25] Meegan Care: Yeah, so powerful and midlife is such an opportune period of life for us to be able to do that because so much is changing with our physiology as we go through perimenopause, early postmenopause and our brain is changing and so For me, you know, yes, it’s very hard and can be very challenging for women in terms of their self concept and how they relate to themselves, but it’s also a massive opportunity to create these very changes that you’ve just been speaking to.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:59] Emma Wright: And it’s really I don’t know, I don’t know if you are aware of this, but I like to, I like to say it as often as I can and in many different spaces as I can, but midlife going through the menopause transition is the second highest at risk time for women to develop an eating disorder. Yeah.

[00:18:20] Meegan Care: Can you say more about that?

[00:18:21] Emma Wright: Yeah. I, So we tend to think of eating disorders, we stereotypically as teenage sort of thin, privileged women, and there couldn’t really be anything further from the truth like eating disorders, or first of all, we need to understand that eating disorders don’t discriminate against genders socioeconomic status color of your skin, size of your body.

So it’s, it’s very, it. Eating disorders are just as prevalent in people who are at the bigger end of the size scale as they are at the small end of the size scale. Only only about 10 percent of eating disorders are accompanied by visible thinness. So there’s 90 percent of eating disorders you can’t see.

So we need to kind of, we don’t, it’s really helpful to step out of the idea that we can see someone has an eating disorder and The second highest at risk group is a woman going through the menopause transition and now that I know what it’s like to go through the menopause transition myself, I can get that, I can get that really in my bones because our bodies are changing so much.

And again, our body feels so, you know, so unexpectedly odd. And that pressure, both from our culture, you know, cultural pressure. I mean, I, every day I see an invitation for mid life weight loss. Even though I am not Googling it, I am actively not interested in it, it still comes at me. And it’s really when you’re not feeling good about your body and that changes.

And when we have been taught over and over again, that history we’ve just, we’ve just had that if we are uncomfortable in ourselves, the way to confidence, the way to feeling good is through weight loss. And It is, we might get some very short term satisfaction from that, but we end up with long term real problems in our, in our thinking that causes us way more pain than that short term benefit we might get.

 And that’s because we literally don’t have a long term weight loss solution that works for more than two or 3 percent of people who try. So what I mean by that is out of a hundred people who intentionally set out to lose weight, only two or three people succeed in the long run without any weight loss.

without any major psychological problems with it. And actually, so for the 97 to 98 percent of people, the weight will come back on, possibly more than what you started with, and you’ll set up discomfort internally. With you. So that’s why that is by far the most common outcome for intentionally losing weight.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t huge numbers of things we can do to support our well being, even with nutrition and exercise in midlife. It’s when we’re using weight loss as a measure for that, that things start to go really pear shaped.

[00:21:51] Meegan Care: Yes, exactly. And I’m, my guess is that you help women to put their self concept first before any of those other changes.

to diet, exercise, that kind of stuff.

[00:22:13] Emma Wright: Yes, that’s right. So I really help women with their internal landscape. How, how do we get ourselves into a position where we’re exercising For how our wellbeing feels to our body internally. How can we u how can we be at home in our body and how can we live in our body for what it is designed for?

And when I say that, it took me so it, it was such a massive aha moment for me when I actually stopped living in my body. Like it was there for other people to look at. Yeah. You know, like my, like when, when you ask people the question, what is your body for? We start to go, what’s for me to experience the world.

It’s actually not, I don’t have a body. So you making can look at me and decide whether I’m a good person, which is how we live. So much of our lives, right? My body is actually for me to experience life really full stop. So I only get to be here talking to you on this podcast because I have a body. I don’t get to do that with just my brain, you know, and when I’m living in my body, knowing that I live in my body and it’s for me, my ability to take care of it is completely different when I’m trying to fix it.

So you feel differently about me.

[00:23:43] Meegan Care: Exactly right. Because your relationship to your physical body is different from that place.

[00:23:50] Emma Wright: Yes, yes, it’s absolutely different from that place and the way you eat. You want to fit, you know, feel like nourishing yourself. And so I work with women to how do we get to that place?

How do we get to that place where we just. All the pain and all the upset and all the feelings of no confidence and having to hide ourselves away and upset with our bodies. And how do we, so we work through all of that. And kind of complete that for people, complete those feelings and open up a whole new relationship with your body and relationship with the way you eat, which is very different to asking someone, what should I eat in order to look a certain way?

Yeah.

[00:24:40] Meegan Care: So we’re. I see a lot on, on social media, a lot of talk about loving our body, really loving our body. Can you tell us your viewpoint, your perspective on that?

[00:24:55] Emma Wright: I I have a slightly different viewpoint than a lot of people’s on this. I even, I don’t say this very often, but I even wrote a book called Love Your Body, Change Your Life about 10 years ago.

And I have taken that to heart. Out of circulation, because I have learned that actually telling people who are experiencing pain that is in their body from psychological pain from their body, particularly from our internalized experiences. That has not been dealt with and also from, from our external experiences, when we go out in the world and people are telling us that our, that we’re not good enough and our body is wrong and we, we need to fix it and da, da, da, da.

When you’re not dealing with that, you’re just simply. Saying to people, you just need to love your body. It actually can cause more harm, I think, than good, because it can actually cause even, it can almost cause panic in people. Because those telling people to love the same potentially standing in front of a mirror and telling people just to have affirmations that tell them to love their body.

The act of standing in front of the mirror and seeing how they look can cause huge emotional pain. For people, and we need to normalize that pain. We need to go that pain that we’re seeing when we look in the mirror is really normal. We understand why you’re feeling like that. There’s nothing wrong or broken about you for feeling that and just trying to love yourself on top of that.

It’s really, really. And it can literally cause people to have panic attacks that can cause a huge disruption or, and it can make people feel even more crazy and more upset. And so I have really, I’ve really rethought that message and go, we actually, that’s, that’s not a helpful thing to say. I love the idea that woman can love their bodies.

Thanks. At any size. I don’t think that in itself is a bad idea. And what is a bad idea is saying, okay, you’re in this, you’re, you’ve got this difficult relationship with food. We know diets don’t work. We know that it’s almost, almost no one can sustain weight loss in a, in a healthy way. So you potentially are going to be living in the body and the size that it is now just go ahead and love your body.

You know, like that’s, there’s that whole bit in between to get from, okay, this is the body I’m in. It’s unlikely that it is going to change in size. How can I get myself from here to feeling like, and I think actually a far more helpful place is body neutrality. Like I don’t. I don’t help my, I don’t help any of my clients love their body.

Now I help them go from a place of their body and food is in their mind way too much. Like it’s stealing their thoughts, it’s stealing their energy. It’s, it’s a source of pain and upset. And crazy making to a place of I’m actually just not really thinking about my body that much. I’ve got way more space to, to be at my work or to enjoy my exercise because I’m enjoying it or to prepare my meal because I’m going to enjoy this meal rather than all that noise in my head.

And that’s really what I call body neutrality.

[00:28:44] Meegan Care: How did you do that? I mean, you help women come into this place of body neutrality. What was your journey like, finding that, exploring that for yourself?

[00:28:58] Emma Wright: My journey has come through a, the path of having an eating disorder. So I have that lived experience of being so uncomfortable in my body, I was willing to harm it.

In order to try and change it to, at the point I had my kids and I had my kids a little bit later in life. I was in my early forties when I had my kids and at that point I wasn’t an eating disorder behavior. I wasn’t in an eating disorder anymore, but I still had quite disordered eating, still had a lot of food and body thoughts in my head.

And I really didn’t want my kids to have that. I just was like, I really, really, really. If there’s anything I’m committed to as a mom, it’s that they don’t have that experience and that sent me on a journey of looking at the research. I have a master’s degree and I wrote a thesis about how athletes The, the effect of how we think athletes should look how that affects their ability to perform.

And actually the, my thesis, the content of my thesis is, is really of no consequence. But what it taught me was how to go to a body of literature and go, how, how do we do this? You know, what would, are these, is this data helpful or is it not actually helpful? And so I started to look at what can I do to help my kids?

That, you know, go, you know, how can I make good on this promise that I have? And that sent me down a really fascinating journey of going, Oh my goodness, actually so many of these ideas that we have about the way we eat and our bodies and da, da, da, they’re not based on any kind of. Evidence, you know, that, that plays out in studies.

It’s all based on marketing. That’s coming from people trying to sell us programs. And so I went through, so that really lit a fire under me to actually resolve those That disordered eating I had, and I’ve had a, I’ve had a journey of different working with different therapists. Some were atrocious.

Some came at it with kind of, so I’ve had the lived experience of therapists going, yes, we can help you. Yeah, we can, but we can also make sure you don’t get too fat. Like you can’t help someone have a good relationship with their body when you’re worried about them putting on weight. It just, it’s just not going to work.

So I’ve had that to very good people to talk to. And you know, that acknowledgement. You know, when I first had that acknowledgement of, Oh, actually I’m not broken. I don’t have a crazy brain. I have a brain that is responding very naturally to this environment that’s around me that I had a real healing.

And And from there I could start to actually learn how to feel what was in my body without a scary, you know, and I had to learn how to do that. I had to learn how to look at myself in the malaria with an actually see what they will to see. Without. The whole background of that’s too wrinkly. That’s too big.

That’s too saggy. That’s too, and, and learn how to be in my body and feel the gratitude of it doing things for me and giving me the experience of life. So that’s a very short history, but that’s, that is sort of how I got to where I am now.

[00:32:42] Meegan Care: Oh, it’s so interesting to me. I went through Crohn’s disease when I was in my 20s for about a decade.

And it was so fascinating to look back on now, hard, but fascinating because I could see where I started to come into this place of body is here to help me walk through life. My body was so very broken and I just couldn’t do anything. And so that really created space for me around it. My body and my physical appearance being there for other people’s gaze or other people’s admiration or whatever it was and really altered my relationship with my body.

So and so hearing that from your With your journey is you’re super interesting.

[00:33:29] Emma Wright: Yeah.

[00:33:30] Meegan Care: Thank you for sharing. Very

[00:33:31] Emma Wright: similar, isn’t it? It’s a very similar healing journey to, I love hearing you say that from a, from quite a different perspective, but ultimately it’s the same work.

[00:33:43] Meegan Care: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super fascinating.

So how do we as women, like, so not everybody has to go through a massive You know, healing crisis. But we can reclaim our relationship and alter our relationship with our body and with food. How, how do we do that as women?

[00:34:04] Emma Wright: We can, there are some really easy, quick wins. Is that a good place to start?

Just, just, you know, like if you’re listening to this podcast, you just want to go and have a couple of quick ones. You can. You can start to take control of the messages that are coming in towards you. You can start to go, actually, is the message that I’m, that I’m listening to or that I’m seeing. Is that actually leaving me feel empowered to take care of my body?

Or is that leaving me feeling like bad about myself and I need to fix and change myself? So for example, when I’m looking at people who support people in midlife, my first litmus test, if you like, is does that make me feel like I am proud of who I am and I can build on that? Or does it make me feel like I need, I’m not okay.

It’s not okay to be at this time of life if I need to, I need to kind of try and be pretend that I’m not this, or I’ve got to fix my body or I’ve got to da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And I reject the messages that leave me feeling bad about myself rather than empowered.

[00:35:16] Meegan Care: How do you do that? How do you reject those messages?

[00:35:20] Emma Wright: So I do a lot of, I do a lot of blocking. On my social feeds quick, easy way to do it. Right. If they, if they, if they explaining to me that I need to lose weight or should lose weight or did it, I’m like, I don’t want to know about that. Thank you. I just, that’s just not helpful. Just block them, get rid of them.

When I’m with friends and they start talking about that, I either, if it’s, if I’m with a Conversation with each other and I start to go, Oh, that makes me feel like they’re judging me by how I look. I literally excuse myself and go to the toilet, you know, and just remind myself that actually my body is not there.

It’s not for them to judge me. And that that’s just an old thought in my head. And then I might come back to the table. And then if they’re still talking about, I will just gently change the topic. If they start to engage me in that topic myself about, Oh, think about losing weight. I’ve very, it depends on who it is, but I sometimes just very gently say, Hey, I’m just in.

I’m just really committed to feeling positive about my body and weight loss conversations really don’t support that. And I’d love it if we could talk about something else. So you’re not telling them they’re bad or they’re wrong or, and I sometimes It’s really helpful to start that conversation going, acknowledging why they’re bringing it up, because I think it’s really helpful for us women to support each other and go, Hey, I really get why you think weight loss is a good topic.

Because we, you know, and you don’t have, you just get in the world. Like you can get it right. Because for some women it is so painful to be in their body. They do want to lose it and then bring it back to us. But for me, it’s not a, it’s not a healthy conversation to have.

[00:37:18] Meegan Care: Very assertive and very thoughtful way of engaging when things are a little bit tricky.

And

[00:37:26] Emma Wright: another thing we can do that’s pretty simple that we can be in control of for ourselves is we can really start to think about the way we greet and compliment each other. You know, like I have really made a point of. Never mentioning someone’s body when I greet or compliment them. Good or bad. I just, I just feel like we get so many compliments about our bodies.

Or so many greetings like, hi, great to see you. You’re looking lovely today or hi, great to see you. That outfit’s flattering or da da da da. All of that stuff, I’m just like, I am going to be the person who greets someone by going hi. It’s so lovely to see you. You, it’s, you always, it’s always makes my day seeing you.

Do you feel so much better, right? Than being told you look good. And then that’s just us stepping out of the repeated message that how we look is so vital and so important to, to each other that we can, we can just have a little bit less of that in our lives.

[00:38:37] Meegan Care: So, so helpful. Yes, so helpful. Thank you. Thank you.

And as we, as we start to wrap up, if you could leave our listeners with a, you know, nugget of wisdom that you really want them to take away with them from listening to our conversation today, what would that be?

[00:39:02] Emma Wright: If I could have every woman wake up tomorrow morning with, with the thought that, of course I feel like this about my body. Look at the world I live in. Of course I have a struggle. Of course it’s like this for me. But it’s not my fault. It is not my fault that I feel like this. Yes, I might be the one that actually has to do something about it, but it’s normal to feel like this.

Of course I do. And it’s really not my fault. I would love everyone to wake up with that tomorrow morning, because if we all woke up with that, the amount of pressure that would lift off so many women, the amount of stress that would lift off so many women, I’d love to leave. The whole world with that. And also with the, with the aspiration that it is entirely possible to go from feeling like you, your body is an uncomfortable, horrible place to live to a really delightful experience.

And it really doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside. It is entirely possible to go to that. And there’s a huge freedom in that. And I would love every woman on the planet to also, to also have that journey and to know what that experience feels like.

[00:40:37] Meegan Care: What a gift. Emma Wright, thank you so much for joining us today.

I feel I feel enlivened around my relationship with my own physical body. So I really truly thank you for that.

[00:40:49] Emma Wright: I have literally, Megan, you’ve given me goosebumps. I love that. So thank you. It is an absolute pleasure to be here and talk this topic that clearly, as you can tell, I am deeply, deeply passionate about..