Gutsy Chick Podcast

Turning Negative Body Image into a Tool for Growth

• Amanda Smith • Episode 54

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In this conversation, Amanda Smith and Whitney Otto explore the complexities of body image, particularly for female athletes and high performers. They discuss the distinction between body image and body self, the impact of societal standards, and personal experiences with eating disorders. Whitney shares insights from her journey as a lightweight rowing world champion and her work as a coach, emphasizing the importance of community, self-compassion, and practical skills for managing negative body image. The discussion highlights the need for awareness and curiosity in addressing body image issues, as well as the significance of seeking support in the healing process.


In this Episode: 

00:00 Understanding Body Image Beyond Appearance

03:02 The Journey of Writing a Book on Body Image

06:08 The Body Self vs. Body Image Concept

09:08 Personal Experiences with Body Image and Eating Disorders

12:07 The Complexity of High Performance and Mental Health

15:08 The Importance of Community in Healing

17:55 Practical Skills for Managing Body Image Issues


Here’s how to connect with (guest’s full name):
http://bodyimageinsideout.com/

https://www.instagram.com/bodyimageinsideout/

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Check out more from Amanda:
Website: Body Whisper Healing
Instagram: @Amanda.G.Smith
Facebook: Body Whisper Healing
Pinterest: AmandaGSmithBWH
LinkedIn: Amanda (Ritchie) Smith

Take the Gutsy Chick Quiz to find out how your athletic mindset might be holding you back from healing your chronic health issue: https://gutsychickquiz.com





...because we tend to think our body image is just what we look like and how far or near we are to whatever desired template the culture has given us or we have adopted for ourselves, right? But I can prove that our body image is not just that because we have all had the experience of waking up in the morning and thinking you look terrible or you look great and three hours later you have a very different impression of yourself. Your body could not. physically change in that time, but your experience of your body has changed. Did you know that you can take your negative body image and turn it into a growth asset? Yeah. That's what we're covering this week on Spirit of an Athlete. I'm your host, Amanda Smith, creator of the Gutsy Chick Quiz at GutsyChickQuiz.com and the heal to grow system, which you can find out more about at BodyWhisperHealing.com. I invited Whitney Otto to share her journey. Of being a lightweight rowing world champion and alternate for the U S Olympic row team in 2000, as well as she is a master coach and has her a in counseling psychology. Her clinical perspectives are informed by over a decade of experience treating eating disorders. Her inspiring story and collaborative style was further honed through years of experience serving as a master coach for physicians, elite athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives. She's my people. On this episode, she's going to give you tips on converting that negative body image mindset into a growth tool. Stick around. Whitney Otto. Thank you so much for saying yes to being on Spirit of an Athlete with me and talking about your book, your podcast and body image for female high performers. yeah, I'm here for it. Okay, so the book. Tell me why in the world you decided it was time to write a book and what it's about. Okay, well, I will tell you about the invitation I got to write a book. So I was in the field of eating disorders many moons ago before I transitioned to becoming an executive and performance coach. And I ran workshops with a colleague of mine and we were also friends and we were also both recovering from eating disorders. And one of the things that we found was that when we talked with one another about our body image, we could move the dial in ways that we couldn't within our own minds. that's because when we showed up for one another, we could bring curiosity, we could bring compassion, we could bring a little mindfulness into the mix, but we couldn't do that for ourselves. And so that was the basis and origin of a workshop series that we created together called, we called it then the Body Self. This idea that we have within us a body self, which is separate from body image, right? Because we tend to think our body image is just what we look like and how far or near we are to whatever desired template the culture has given us or we have adopted for ourselves, right? But I can prove that our body image is not just that. because we have all had the experience of waking up in the morning and thinking, you look terrible or you look great. And three hours later, you have a very different impression of yourself. Your body could not possibly physically change in that time, but your experience of your body has changed. So that's what we call the body image inside of us. So we love doing these workshops. And about five years ago, Deb was like, you know, I use this stuff all the time in my practice. Let's just put it together in some cute little workbook that we can self publish and put on our websites. And I was like, I am here for that. And then of course, like it grew and it grew and it grew. And then we got a publisher and so it became a much grander, larger, more, more comprehensive project than we originally set out to. But the gift of that is that I now know so much more about. body image than I did at the beginning. And it has taught me a lot. yeah. Wow. Okay. We've there's so much to unwrap. I mean, you and I could be here for days. This is honestly in the grand scheme of female athletes, female high performers. This is probably the crux of are, we are at the nexus, we are. I mean, as executives, we've got to show up in a certain light. if especially if we're in the health industry, we want to look healthy. Right. And this I love the concept that you gave us of body self versus body image, because the body self changes faster than the body image can change. That's fricking beautiful. Yeah, that their body self exists. Yeah. That we are not just, because our body self is our personality, our history, our trauma, our desires, our dreams, our cultural influences, our legacies. It's influenced by so many powerful factors that once we start getting curious about and we learn to respect and understand, can really take a lot of pressure off of our body image. Right? OK. So you mentioned that you had a body image issue. Just a tiny one. Yeah, it was a short little blip in there. moment in my early teens. If you're open to talking about it because you were a high level athlete, you were an Olympian alternative. Yep. So I was alternate in 2000 Olympics. So I've had a lot of time to think about all of these things in a weight restricted sport. So I was a lightweight rower. you know, rowers are all about endurance, all about pushing, all about grit. And then you add the lightweight component to it and it gets a little bit grittier, shall we say. I didn't realize that rowing had different weight classes. It only has two. It's not like wrestling that has two. Right, the open weight and lightweight. my God. That's okay. as a powerlifter, I'm in a weight restricted sport. watching like my brother was a wrestler and watching what he had to do in order to get his body to a certain weight so that he could make weight and wrestle at that weight class. But then going into weightlifting, I ended up doing the same thing where I was like, okay, I can either go, well, who cares? I'm just going to lift at whatever weight I am or I know I can compete at a very high level at this weight. So this is the weight I'm going to go to guess which one I picked. Of course, sign me up for the lower weight, always, right? It wasn't the lower weight actually. Well, was the lower weight, but it wasn't about being at the lower weight. was that I wanted to qualify for worlds and I knew that I could qualify for worlds. could lift the required amount of weight at that weight class and the next higher weight class, I would have missed it by like 15 kilos, which that's a, that's a decent amount when you're moving the most weight you can possibly move. yeah. Well, I love that you brought that up because I think one of the ways in the book and in my life that I found really helpful to understand the complexities is that we have multiple, we have different parts inside of us. The internal family system lens is not just one. So I had a part that really wanted to make weight, right? Really wanted to make the team, really wanted to be successful. And I was more, I could be successful as a lightweight, right? Similar with you, a very ambitious part. At the time, I didn't have the part that cared deeply about my health and my wellbeing, but now I do, right? And those can be polarized. Those can be having different goals, different agendas about what's going to make Whitney safe, what's going to make Whitney happy, right? And so I think just the acknowledgement of that can be helpful. We may have competing agendas inside of us. And when we allow each of them some airtime and space to be heard, we're going to feel less jumbled up and chaotic inside. It's interesting. You bring up the time piece. We actually started this conversation around that as athletes and executives and high performers period. You don't feel like you have the time. You've just got to keep moving, keep going, keep producing, keep working at that high proficiency. Well, and that's why when I work with high performers, we are really looking at where energy gets wasted. And very often energy gets wasted when we get overly anxious about something, overly stressed, we put too much effort into something. What's going on beneath the surface that's taking up more energy and effort than it needs to. love it. Okay, so you were an alternate for lightweight Olympic rowing. And you had an eating disorder. What eating disorder came with that? So, I mean, you know about the way eating disorders work, right? They can be sort of dormant. You can have periods where they're active and periods where they're not active. And there were periods where I was like, I'm over it, I'm healed, right? But I wasn't, right? So, it spanned in the beginning of my 20s and it went to my mid 30s. when I was training, when I was working out three times a day and like spending all my energy not eating so that I could make weight, like I wasn't technically in my behaviors as a bulimic, but I was, you know, my whole life was oriented around my body and my weight and my size. So I didn't think, you know, at those times I thought I don't have a problem right now. But it was just that it was being directed so fully by my sport. And that's one of the things that I think's tricky about so many things in our culture, but particularly eating disorders and sport athletics is because I could wake up, okay, one perspective, I wake up and I'm, you know, working out three times a day. I'm working out hard. I look really fit and I'm tan, you know, and I'm eating all this quote unquote healthy food. and you know, people are going to applaud me. Look at you, you know, you're so strong. Look at you. You're just a fit. Look at you. You're so healthy. Was I? healthy in my emotional state, you know, in my thoughts? Like, no, no, not at all. But it looked like health to our culture. So I think it can be tricky. Okay. So what were some of the, the mental things that you kept under wraps? Because I find that a lot of high performers, a lot of athletes keep the emotional side of things under wraps because it's not outwardly apparent to your team or your coach or, nobody knows how to handle it. So here's another thing that's complex. And I used to work with teams around this. One of the things that is complex is that a sport family, a routine, regular exercise is really healthy and gives us a lot of what we need as humans to regulate, to do well as a human being. But if you ratchet that up to a really high level, It can become all consuming. And I think we know how we're doing in the off season, right? We're all going to have a little bit of a mood disturbance probably when we're out of our sport and out of our routine, but that's when you really know how you're doing. And you can't do deep healing work when you are in an intensive performance season or cycle, right? So I think sometimes the intensity of our experiences or what our sport or job demands of us can mask to ourselves how we're actually doing. So I think it's really looking at things over a larger span and you just know, you know if you're not happy, you know if you're how you feel and or sometimes people reflecting that back to us. If we have people in our lives that we're close enough with who will say, hey, know, these behaviors indicate to me that you're not that happy or You know, it seems like your weight isn't in a healthy place and here's how I know that, right? So I think that I always say even it's so uncomfortable and sometimes it might not be effective. If people in a really loving way reflect that back, I do think that's important feedback. So what do you think about how we know the truth of how we're doing in these very intense success oriented and sometimes environments where we're getting rewarded for what we're doing to ourselves. For me, it was rage and anxiety. Those two things as they showed up more and more as I became this high level performers. And this was back in, you know, junior high and high school where I'd already decided I'm going to be an Olympic athlete. I'm going to go play in college. I'm going to be a pro softball player when they have pro softball. It became this, I would go do practices by myself, my one-on-ones with myself and I would rage out. I would turn on. death metal and I would rage for an entire half hour. And that was the indicator for me. then performance anxiety wasn't something that I had until I got to college. But there was this level of pressure that I was putting on myself that would show up. And when it came to body image, it was the same thing for me. Outwardly, everybody was like, my gosh, I want your eight pack. I want to look like you're tanned. gorgeous body and on the inside I was just a ragey mess. So those were the mental indicators for me at a young age. At an adult age, we get more space and time within adulting. I have a 10-year-old and a husband and a house and a dog and a cat and adulting and three businesses at one point. required my attention, but I also made sure that I found space for myself so that I could peel back what in the world was going on for real. And it was finally in those moments where I got to go, yeah, that's why I had that rage. And it's been great having a podcast and I know you have a podcast too. It's cathartic. Yeah, you learn, you learn from people. You do. You learn from people, you learn from the topics that you're having on the podcast and you're putting your own work to work while you're podcasting. 100%. Right. It's regenerative. It totally is. So did you put that kind of pressure on yourself? special, mean, Olympic level athlete, that's the upper echelons of being an athlete. And then you went on to be an executive. Did it just trail right in from being an Olympic athlete to being an executive? So actually I went into being a therapist and then went into executive coaching. But I think the way I approached my, well, it's interesting, right? Because the way I approached my sport and what I learned like in the cells of my body about effort and trying and the hope in effort, right? And, you know, something's always kind of out of reach and you're always in the... heading towards zone and working towards zone. Like that lives on in me. And this is what I find so interesting about it. What you have to develop in yourself to heal from an eating disorder or depression, anxiety, or all those things are very different skill sets. You have to learn to receive, you have to learn to be with your own vulnerability, you have to learn what healing looks like for you, you have to... not push yourself sometimes, right? So you have to learn this whole other skill set. And I'm, you know, constantly working with the old urges, the old tendencies and bringing in what I've learned since then. And I would say working with other people is the constant drum beat that moves me towards evolution, right? I think we cannot, what we We can't heal what we didn't get by ourselves. And so I think it's magical to do work with other people and to learn more about ourselves and to heal. I love that you brought up that you and Deb started working together. The forest and the trees is what I always call it, right? If you are in the forest as a tree, you can't see that you're part of the forest. having someone else be able to witness and help you grow, those are key. There there's so like we can't say that enough we cannot heal by ourselves. We just can't Yep. You can't, you can't do it in a vacuum as an aerospace engineer. me tell you, you can't do it in a vacuum. It's too difficult. You have to have somebody else be able to point things out and then of service. You brought that piece up just now being of service to others so that the growth can continue. I love that fact. And I think that corporate America doesn't value that, but people in corporate America value that, right? What keeps people in jobs? Their bosses, the relationships they have with their bosses, right? And the people who invest in themselves, the people who are self-aware, the people who want to grow, they make the best bosses. So being of service to others, is all, especially if we are in leadership positions, involves working on ourselves often. Often, yes. And yeah, and working on being a leader and working on just like we've got to work on all those different facets of anxiety, body image issues, eating disorders. They all have different ways of learning and growing. Same thing when it comes to these skills in corporate America or as an entrepreneur or as an athlete, the physical skills, the mental skills that we have to learn just, they're exponential. Can I leave you with three skills for folks to practice to listen? Absolutely. you're so fascinating, we can go in so many different directions. But I want to leave folks with three skills because particularly as folks who are athletically minded, having something to train is really helpful. And one of the challenges is we are constantly training what I call the rotary of negative body image, which we have an overwhelming feeling, which might be I'm going on a date tomorrow, I have to give a presentation or work or I have to see this family member. And immediately, unconsciously, I need to fix myself. I need, you know, we have that sensation which often we experience as that's when like the bad body image moment comes in, right? It might have nothing to do with our size. And then we decide we need to fix ourselves. So I'm going to work out more or like eat nothing but cabbage or whatever ridiculous thing. comes to mind and then we're off to the races. We're distracted from that overwhelming feeling, right? So the three things that we ask folks to practice is first, mindful awareness. I'm having a bad body image moment. I don't have, it's not I am bad body image. I'm not the totality of bad body image, but I'm having a moment of bad body image, noticing that. Two, getting curious. What's going on? What might be triggering? What might be challenging? in my environment. And then also getting curious if I had whatever it is that I want in my body to be, if my body was that, what would it give me? Would it give me more peace? Would it give me more confidence? Would it give me more whatever it is? Just getting curious about that can be really helpful. And then the third thing is, and this is what you do and we want to, and I do in my coaching, but we want to train people to do for themselves is compassion. my goodness. This is a big deal. It makes sense that you're having big feelings about it and even having a bad body image moment here. I'm sorry. That's challenging, right? There's more steps after that, but those are three I think we can all practice the next time we have a bad body image moment. my gosh, I love that. Okay. Where is that at in the body image inside out book? So that is chapter three. Yes. The body image muscles. my gosh, body image muscles. I love that. love that in so many ways. Whitney, any last tidbits of advice you want to give some athlete that is dealing with body image issues. Yeah, you take that perseverance, that work ethic, and you honor that something isn't right for you, and you go after your own healing with the same fervor you know how to go after other goals, and I promise you it will lead you somewhere different. That's beautiful. Whitney, thank you so much for being on Spirit of an Athlete, sharing your experience, sharing your tips on how to handle body image issues. And then of course your book, Body Image Inside Out and your podcast, Untrained. Guys, go check these out. Whitney, thank you. Thank you, I love being here. Thank you so much for listening to Spirit of an Athlete. If you want to find out what part of your mindset might be holding you back from healing, but has helped you as an athlete, go check out the Gutsy Chick Quiz at gutsychickquiz.com. And if you would like more of me, you can go to bodywhisperhealing.com and read my blog, check out other podcast episodes, find out how I work with my clients, and much more. Thanks for listening to this episode.

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