Summer is almost here! The perfect time to enjoy the warm weather, have fun, relax, and soak up some sun. ☀️
However, I know that for many people, it can be a source of anxiety when you’re also focused on weight loss and struggling with overeating or binge eating.
I know all too well that when we struggle with weight or health issues, the thought of baring our body in shorts or swimsuits may feel overwhelming.
But don’t let these worries hold you back from enjoying everything summer has to offer!
With a little bit of planning and creativity, you can enjoy summer in your now body while still staying on track with your health and weight loss goals.
So, watch this video as I talk about 5 Ways To Enjoy Summer In Your NOW Body so you can learn:
☀️ What to do to avoid feeling weighed down by your body
☀️ Powerful + effective ways to keep you focused on your health and weight loss goals.
☀️ How to make the most of this sunny season so you don’t feel like you missed out!
I hope this is helpful!
Audra.
Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome everybody to our Tuesday Live.
Today we are gonna dive into enjoying summer in our now body. I am Audra Baker. I am your hostess and I am excited to be here with you. If you are new into my world, welcome to Hello Body Freedom. This is where we work with women to heal the deeper reasons why they are struggling with their bodies in the first place.
So, there’s a lot of distortions out there. We keep reaching for diets. We keep reaching for fitness regimes and all of these things. But at the end of the day, if we keep using food to cope, if we keep using food to fix everything, if we are stuck in stress eating patterns, comfort eating, bored eating, sad eating, lonely eating, anxious eating, mindless eating, like there are so many ways in which we use food as a way to try to fix our feelings.
And, the more and more we do that, basically, just, it just thumbs me up because like a diet plan, it’s just, it’s not gonna work and never will work if we keep getting in our way that way. And, this is what we do inside of Hello Body Freedom.
So, I’m really excited to be here with you today to be talking about what it means to enjoy, just enjoy your now body, and enjoy summer in your now body. And, this is a pretty important concept.
So, I don’t know about you, but my birthday is in the summer and not everybody’s birthday is in the summer. But, I feel like I am definitely a summer baby. I love being in the water in the summertime. I like being in warm water. I wanna make that very clear.
I will not get in cold water.
People keep telling me to take ice baths because it’s supposed to be super good for your health. And, I’m just thinking about it right now. I’m not actually there yet, but I’m hoping that I will be there soon. But regardless of that, like, it’s a whole lot easier to get in an ice bath, the sun’s shining.
But, think about, like, the actual fun that we can have for summer, right? This is usually a time when we go on vacation. This is the time when we have backyard barbecues. This is a time when we’re getting together with our friends and the truth is that summer is right around the corner.
And, one of the big issues here, almost always, is we are struggling with our bodies. We are struggling. We were scared to put a tank top on. We’re like, “Oh my God, I can’t, I don’t wanna put on shorts.” We have all of this insecurity and challenge around our bodies and around our health. And quite frankly, we miss out. We miss out.
So many clients I’ve worked with, I know that I have missed out back when I was a hot mess express with my relationship with my body, my relationship with food, and our relationship with dieting. And, I’m just really blessed and happy to be on the other side of that. And, I wanna help you get on the other side of that as well.
Summer also is a time of just more activity, right? The sun stays out longer. The days are longer. The energy is higher, right? So, it really can be this beautiful way to move forward in life in the way that you like it.
And so, I also want to talk about this from a standpoint of maybe health goals that you have for yourself. Maybe fat loss or weight loss goals that you have for yourself. If you’re struggling with pre-diabetes or high blood pressure, or all these other kinds of health concerns that include, well, I’m on this healthy journey. I wanna feel better in my body. I’m healing my relationship with food, right?
So, it can be a little defeating because the truth of the matter is, is that the journey of healing the body, like you can’t just like take a pill tonight and then tomorrow, poof, everything is just like, “Oh, there it is. I’m exactly where I wanna be.” It doesn’t work that way, right?
It takes time to do this work with our bodies. It takes time to untangle emotional eating. It takes time to create healthy habits, right? It takes time to untangle the quote-unquote, self-sabotaging habits that keep getting in the way, right? We have to learn a different way to be in relationship with our health and with our habits and our body and things like that.
And when we start to do that, over a period of time, things start to change. We start feeling stronger. We start feeling more alive and vibrant. Maybe weight loss is a part of that journey for you. And it’s wonderful, but it takes time.
And so, here we are sitting at the beginning of summer and you might not be where you want to be. And that’s what I wanna talk about today. You might not be where you want to be. And so, the first thing I wanna talk about or regarding this really is around a sense of surrender, a sense of making some strong decisions about who you wanna be this summer and how you wanna show up, right?
Because, if you allow yourself to, I don’t know, cancel invitations, not show up to see family because you’re not where you wanna be, you’re literally saying, “I don’t wanna live. I don’t wanna live life to the fullest. I don’t wanna be who I know I’m supposed to be on this planet until I reach these goals in the future.”
And in actuality, what I’ve seen with my clients, what really works is when they decide to start living life right now when they make decisions for how they wanna show up for themselves, when they make decisions of how they wanna show up for their health, for the people in their life, for the life that they want to live, and how they can live it right now. And this, I think, is the magic.
The magic is that we keep waiting, well, one side diet myself down and then I will lose weight, then I’m gonna be happy. But, it just doesn’t work that way. In fact, most of us, what we do is we punish ourselves by going on diets. We punish ourselves on this awful weight loss regime.
And then, we wonder why, even if we lose the weight, why we end up gaining the weight back. We think that losing weight is going to be this epic thing where it just fixes everything, right? But, it doesn’t fix everything, it just makes you smaller, right?
And maybe, it fixes health problems. Maybe you’re no longer diabetic or pre-diabetic, maybe your blood pressure goes down. All of these things are great, for sure. And yes, whenever you do lose some weight, when you lose 10 pounds, 40 pounds, 100 pounds, you substantially, you can feel it. It is an embodied difference, it feels different.
But, if the journey that got you there was awful, if you were hiding away, if you were beating yourself up the entire time, right? If you weren’t really learning to love the life that you were living, then I mean, yes, the weight loss feels good, yes, the energy feels good, but that newness wears off. It wears off after a month or two.
And, the next thing you know, you’re in a situation where you’re stressed out at work, or you’re feeling like maybe you woke up on the wrong side of the bed or something doesn’t feel right, and then you keep thinking, but wait, I’m a size eight now, or whatever your size is, right? Why do I feel this way? Well, because the size of your body doesn’t fix that, right? What fixes that is you living the life that you were meant to live. You showing up the way that you are meant to show up.
So, asking you the question right here and right now, like what do you envision for this summer for yourself? Where does the family get together? Where are the get-togethers with friends? Where are the vacations, right? Or is any of this in your summer? Where are the late nights and the warm nights and the early mornings with the sun coming up early? Like what pleases you?
What would make you feel so good this summer? Who are the people involved? What are you doing? Right, are you going to the beach? Are you going to the pool, right? What would light you up? What would light you up? And so, just think about that and go how do I want to show up for myself? How do I want to live this summer? How does that look to me, right? Because when you start showing up for yourself in a way that you want to live life, things really can start radically changing.
Now, with that said, how do you want to show up for, let’s say, that I’m guessing you are, if you were here in my group, if you were likely wanting to be or are on a health journey, a healing journey, a weight loss journey, a way to come into the way that you want to express and be through the body on this planet. And maybe, you’re not quite there yet, right? Maybe that’s changing some habits with food.
Maybe, that’s learning how to feel feelings more and process and regulate and go through that so that we’re not using food as the fix, right? So, maybe this might be a part of your journey. Maybe it’s integrating these healthier habits. Maybe it’s moving more. Maybe it’s getting more sleep. Maybe it’s hydration, right?
These are all very basic tenants of a healthy life filled with vibrant energy, right? And so the thing is, is you get to start doing those things now, right? You get to start living that even if you’re not there yet. Like, it’s not like you can start doing those things and then tomorrow, poof, you just land there.
But, when you start putting your habits in the direction that you wanna go in a way that’s like baby steps, in a way that’s doable and in a way that you actually like, in a way that you can live with, right? And so that might look like, “What am I doing during the week? What is my plan for the weekend get-togethers with my friends? Do I have a plan, right? Where do I, you know, where are my past behaviors, where I go all or nothing and then it’s just like all the food, all the alcohol completely shut down,” right? You know, going numb and then waking up the next day feeling awful.
Where can I create something that feels realistic? Where can I create, like, this idea of what I want to and how I wanna show up, right? Where do I throw those boundaries out? Well, I do wanna have some drinks, but, you know, where’s my two-drink minimum or my two-drink max, right? I’m gonna have my two drink max and then I’m gonna switch over to sparkling, whatever, sparkling something, something like, I don’t know, I drink like Waterloo and LaCroix and all sorts of fun sparkling waters that are just fun. I love them.
They feel like a treat, you know? So, like where are those boundaries at? Because this is how we start to live the life we wanna live by showing up for ourselves in the way that we wanna show up on the planet and then also integrating the doable habits in a way that works for us, all right? So let’s start to think about all of this fun stuff. Let’s start to think about this, like, enjoying summer in your now body.
So number one, what are the, where are the places you’re going, the experiences you want to have, and imagine what you are gonna get when you go to this place, when you have this experience? Maybe it’s a concert, right? Maybe it’s a vacation, maybe it’s a neighborhood block party. I don’t know what it is, right?
But, how can you feel good in your now body? Could you dress in a way that makes you feel comfortable and makes you feel good? Maybe it’s not the same thing you would want to wear or would be wearing at the end of your journey, but it’s something that feels good now, right?
Would you, if it’s a concert, like, what would that feeling bring? Like how would you, how do you wanna feel when you’re at this concert, the aliveness, the music, right? This is the power of, like, the idea is to get so clear that so much of this isn’t about the body, it’s about the experience that you’re wanting to have, right? And, how can you evoke as much of that experience as possible, right? And, I don’t wanna like, well, I wanna feel like I can be comfortable in a bikini. Well, you can be comfortable in a bikini right now.
You literally could, right? That’s your, it’s your own hangups of whether or not you feel comfortable or not feel comfortable, right? And so, I mean, or you could say, well, I wanna be, I wanna wear a swimsuit, but I wanna be 30 pounds lighter or 50 pounds lighter. I don’t know, right? Okay, that’s great.
So, that’s in the future, that’s future pacing, that’s coming based on the habits that we’re working on now that we’re instilling now, based on the untangling of emotional eating, right? But, if you were to just get the essence of what you are wanting to experience and how can you experience that now, that is what we’re talking about. That is what we’re talking about.
So, enjoying summer in your now body is getting clear of the experiences you want to have and then creating the actual experiences, the actual outcome of that experience, and how do you work that in right now? Because that is waiting for you. If you are body-centric and body-focused, it will be a lot harder. But, when you realize that your job is to experience life, your body is like a paintbrush. Your body is the paintbrush that is painting the canvas of your beautiful life.
Nobody is sitting here going, ooh, nobody’s putting the paintbrush on the canvas next to the painting, right? They’re just looking at the painting going, “Oh my God, look at this beautiful life. Look at this beautiful soul. Look at this.” Nobody’s sitting here going, “Oh, but that paintbrush, man, it is old and decrepit and it’s missing some Brussels on that side.” Nobody’s doing that, right? The paintbrush is for living. It’s for creating that life.
And so, when you can remember this, then your summer is gonna be like rock and amazing, okay? And then, number two is what habits are you building right now for your health journey that feels good? And, how can you incorporate those into your summer? Are there already things you’re doing like moving more, like water, like getting more sleep, right? Working the food freedom formula, working with your body cues, right? Learning this different relationship with food.
So, do this in your now body. And, the thing is that we have to use this up for ourselves with our healthy habits. And, we’re learning how to be in this different relationship with food. We’re learning how to create boundaries. We’re learning how to say yes and no to food in just the right way. We’re learning how to feel boundaries in a way that feels positive.
And, we’re learning how to let go in ways that we are making decisions around that makes sense to ease up, like learning how to say yes and no. And when we do this, oh my goodness, right, this is freedom. This is freedom. And, we do it in a way that’s incongruent with the vision we have for ourselves. We are future-pacing this vision we have for ourselves.
So, we might not be there now, but the more that we can continually put ourselves into the life we want to live, into the habits that we want to have, into the summer fun that we want to have in a way that meshes with our goals, it is just doesn’t get better than that.
So, the five ways to enjoy summer in your now body, I’m going to say right now is to, is to have a body, and instead of thinking about the body and objectifying the body and being all of the body, what we’re going to do is go, how am I going to enjoy summer in a way that my body is a paintbrush for me to enjoy the concert, for me to enjoy the bar, the backyard barbecue, for me to enjoy the vacation with my family, right?
That becomes the, the way that we enjoy summer in our now body. And, when we have our mindset straight, that’s number three, and we have our thoughts straight. So, we’re future pacing where we want to go that number five leads or number four leads to the habits that we are instilling day to day to day to get us to where we want to go.
And then, number five is that integration. How are we integrating? How are we integrating this future vision of where we want to be, but also the reality of the summer that we want to have? Where is the give and take? Where is the, the, where, where, where it’s both and it’s not either or it’s I’m strict and I’m punishing myself and I’m going on a diet for the rest of my life until I lose this weight.
See how that goes for you. Let me know how that goes for you. Probably ain’t going to work so well. Or oh, it’s summer, I’m going to eat all the things and drink all the things and who the hell cares, right? That also doesn’t work. Neither of those is freedom. My friends both of those are lost in the shackles of food, hell, and body jail, but that place in between where we can have this vision of ourselves for our health and we can integrate the life that feels good.
And then, we live that life in a way that is future pacing to who we are. We are becoming and enjoying the moment in ways that have boundaries. My friends, that is where the magic is at. All right. Thank you so much for coming in and playing. That was super fun and I will see you next week.
Oh my goodness, I believe I have a huge announcement for you next week. Super, super excited about it. And, but you have to tune in and I’ll, I’ll send you all an email If you’re not on my email list, drop me a DM and we’ll make sure you get the emails because we’re going to be giving out some $100 Amazon gift cards.
It’s going to be a lot of fun. And, we will see you next week with this big, giant, delicious announcement. And, I hope you guys all have a beautiful, you know, and I hope this was just helpful for your summer. And if it wasn’t, if it just made you more, angry, now you have a bunch of questions, drop me a DM.
I’m totally happy to hang out and help you with that. And, the last thing I will say before I go ahead and hop off is that if you want some help with this, if you want to spend your summer in community with women who are doing this work, who are healing the deeper reasons why they struggle with food and body in the first place, they are learning alternative ways to process emotions, feel what they’re feeling so that they stop using food as the fix or booze as the fix all the time and come into this right relationship with food, right?
Where we’re learning how to say yes and no to food in just the right amount where we’re stacking habits, stacking these baby step habits in the direction we want to go and doing it in community and doing it together, then you do not want to miss this Hellobodyfreedom.com/chatwithaudra. And, it is going to be an amazing journey, but you got to get on the phone and let me know that’s what you want.
Drop me a DM if you have questions or just pop right over here and let’s connect. And, I am looking forward to seeing you there and big, big announcements coming next week.
Stay tuned, everybody. Bye, bye.
