Episode #153: Overcoming PCOS Challenges: Building a Confident You

Hi, and welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast, where today we are going to be talking about the emotional side of pcos, taking a really honest look at the type of emotions and thoughts that go through us and how they both motivate, but also can block our ability to create discipline and create the habits that we want and can leave us kind of in this emotional spiral of feeling not up to the task, not good enough, and ultimately kind of drag us down rather than spur us forward. So with that, let’s go ahead and get into it.

When we’re managing symptoms like irregular periods, right? Irregular backup. When we’re managing symptoms like irregular cycles, fatigue, weight struggles, it’s hard enough. But when we’re also taking the toll about how we feel about ourselves, comparing ourselves to, to other people’s success or towards what we want to look like or how we want to feel. And then when we start trying and the negative symptoms that we’re feeling, maybe it’s the fatigue, maybe it’s the cravings, maybe it’s the discomfort, like bloating and things like that, and they start to create these extra hurdles that can feel like doors in our face.

Like, I’m trying so hard and. And then this happens, or I started to get some momentum and then I got sick, or I started to get some momentum and then my stomach acted up or I started to. I had like a little injury from a workout or whatever it is. We can start to feel like everything is stacked against us.

And it’s amazing how the subtle emotional toll of how we feel about ourselves can make those hurdles almost nothing or absolutely everything. And so in today’s episode, I’m going to give you some of the things that have helped me and that have helped other women to both accept and honor where you’re at, who you are, what you look like, as well as dream and have goals and move towards them and take action towards them, and how while having these dreams and goals and action forward doesn’t have to pass judgment on where you’re currently at so that you can gain the confidence to finally be happy in your body, but also be happy with the progress that you’re making.

Pcos, although, you know, it’s a hormone disruption disorder, it has a metabolic component. And those are kind of all the root causes that we talk about. What we don’t talk about as much when we talk about those root causes is the toll that it takes on our self image and our confidence. Because a lot of those symptoms from that hormonal imbalance that stems from that metabolic dysfunction include things like weight gain, fertility problems. We talk about self worth, right?

Like that. For some reason, even though logically we can tell ourselves, like, I still have value, all these things. There is something huge that happens inside of a woman when she can’t get pregnant when she wants to.

Things like the acne, the weight, the hair problems. It’s like you go and you try to, you know, like you go to the makeup counter and you buy a new lipstick and yet you’re frustrated because there’s hair on the upper lip. It’s like I can’t even just, you know, how nice would it be to just go and buy a pretty lipstick and put it on and feel pretty. But no, because of pcos, I still see all of these quotes, flaws and so many things to just take care of our bodies. And it can feel like just to get to where the rest of the world is, is like a whole waxing and shaving and trying to eat a certain way.

And it can feel like just to take care of our bodies can be overwhelming. And that takes a fairly large emotional toll on our self image and it knocks down our confidence significantly.

This emotional weight can feel extremely heavy. In fact, sometimes it can feel heavier than the actual excess weight that PCOS is putting on us. One of the things that I have worked with so many women to, to overcome in both programs and working with them one on one, that they’re not just wanting to lose weight, they’re wanting to feel like themselves again. Maybe there was a time in their life where they felt more light and vibrant. Not just excess weight light, but like their entire energy felt lighter.

Or maybe they can imagine a time like that and maybe they never have experienced that yet and they want to feel good in their skin and they want to trust their body. They don’t want to like live in this fear of like, if I eat that, I’m going to pay the price. They want to feel like they have the ability to have some flow and flexibility and that their body will work with them and that they understand their body so they know what works for them as compared to feeling like, well, I think I have it figured out and then, no, it’s still not working for me and nothing works for me. And why am I surprised? Because nothing ever has worked for me.

If any of that seems familiar to you, I want you to, even before you necessarily trust the process, try to take some of these next steps and see if it can start to lighten that feeling in you and start to create a different mindset shift that allows you to start being surprised at the progress that you can make.

So let’s start with the body image struggles. This could be the weight that seems impossible to lose. It could be the acne that doesn’t want to clear up even though you have tried every perfect skin care routine out there. It could be hair thinning in places that you don’t want it or hair growing in places that you don’t want it. Whatever it is, when you think about your appearance and pcos, those feelings that you have that are negative towards your body have you feeling like you need to be in I must fix it.

I need to do like it’s not okay the way it is and it’s, it’s subtle, but that’s the message that we’re sending. We’re sending our body the message that it’s not okay the wear with the way it is. And this is more than just appearance. And we, you know, we, whether we like it or not, we live in a society that is hung up on appearance. It used to be the super thin, tall model appearance and now we’re seeing more and more body types being put in marketing and highlighted in movies and, and not just having a one size fits all look of how women should look, but which is great.

However, we’re still emphasizing appearance. We’re still focusing on is our appearance okay by the standards that we’re seeing around us. And so when we don’t fit the quote ideal or when we look out, when we, even if there are many different looks now in the imagery out there for us, we, we still gravitate towards, well, I want to look like that or I want to be more like that or we look in the mirror and I want to have less of that.

But when our body doesn’t fit that quotes ideal, especially when it’s because of something outside of our control like pcos, it’s easy to start to internalize this message that somehow I’m less than or I’m not good enough or that I am somehow failing because if other people can look like that, what’s wrong with me? And then we have that, you know, all of the different diet method, methodologies and all the different things out there that people are doing and we feel like, well, somehow I just haven’t found the right thing or I’m not disciplined enough to stick with it or I don’t have enough motivation. And so all of those come down to something is wrong with me. I am somehow failing. But here’s the truth.

Your body is not broken. Your worth is not tied to your dress size, your skin, or your hairline. And you are not alone in feeling the way you do. And so let that soak in for a little bit.

You are not broken. Your body is a living thing and it’s responding to how it can survive.

Your value, your ability to enjoy your day, your life experiences are not tied to your appearance, but you are also not alone in feeling this way. And I think that in some ways, this accepting body image culture makes us now feel like, well, now I should feel okay with the way that I look, or I should be okay with the way that I am. And if I’m not, somehow, now something’s wrong with me because I’m not okay with it. You’re not alone in having this internal turmoil of being frustrated with where you’re currently at. And I think of that as the gift of we want to have goals, we want to have growth, we want to do better.

It’s this natural want, want for us inside of us to grow. You see it in children, like, they want to learn things, they want to experience things, they want to widen their horizons and have traveled more places, tried different experiences, meet new people, learn new things, read new books, all of these things because we want to grow and that’s okay. Wanting to grow, wanting to better ourselves, wanting to improve our health, wanting to improve our knowledge, wanting to improve doesn’t need to equal. I’m not okay the way I am that I can’t start living my life today.

So as we start to acknowledge that, we can start to make this shift of self compassion, of not just. It can sound like just a word, right? What is. But, you know, giving ourselves that grace of, oh, I’m just a person on the road to learning more and doing better. And so we don’t have to compare ourselves with where somebody else is because they’re learning their own better and growing into doing the things that, you know, they’re learning.

And so when we start to shift, as we give ourselves that grace, we can start to shift from being so critical about what’s wrong with me, why am I failing? To being curious about our awareness, about learning, about gaining the knowledge, about gaining the how to’s, about starting to implement them, see how they work, and to start to actually open that door to healing instead of staying in this place of frustration early on. A lot of our wins can come from function. What does our body do? Well, go for a walk.

Wow, I haven’t walked for 30 minutes in a long time. That was great. My body did great. I haven’t asked it to do that, and it just did it, you know, learning how to be grateful for. Look, I haven’t done that before.

That’s pretty great. And that doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you went to the dress size that you wanted, but your body was able to do something and accomplish something on the path to get there. And so when we start to shift to that, okay, my body is functioning, it’s doing the things, it’s letting me get to where I want to go. We can start to celebrate those abilities.

As we start to create a new a meal that nourishes our body, we can start to celebrate that as well. I tried something new. I cooked something different. I prepared something that I wasn’t sure I would like, and I prepared it in a way that I found quite enjoyable. These are all things that we can start to incorporate and start to celebrate and start to realize, hey, I’m actually able to make these changes and start living in a way that’s going to create the lifestyle and life and body and energy and everything that I want.

We would never talk to anyone else the way that we talk to ourselves in our own mind. And so one of the other things that’s really important is to start talking to ourselves. You know, it’s easy to say, give yourself some grace, but what if we fully start talking to ourselves the way we would talk to somebody else?

What if we cheered ourselves on? What if we offered ourselves support and encouragement? What if we offered ourselves some kindness and some praise instead of just reminding ourselves that you said you were going to do this and you failed? What if we instead said, oh, you said you were going to do this? That got in the way.

How about you let this wait till tomorrow and you go do it. Support yourself, encourage yourself.

It’s easy to start feeling like down because we miss the mark somewhere and then we start to spiral downwards. Why do we do that? Because in our own head, we are telling ourselves, you failed. I knew you weren’t going to do it and you didn’t do it. What if instead we’re like, oh, I overscheduled myself there.

I’m going to make a note of that so that next time I don’t do that. And instead I’m going to put that till tomorrow and go do the thing I told myself I was going to go do. I’m going to go walk the loop, and instead of an hour, it might only be 30 minutes, but I’m going to make it happen. And I’m going to be excited with myself that I put my shoes on and I went for the walk.

I was really hungry this last weekend and I’ve been kind of tracking my macros and things because I’ve just. I like to go through phases where I kind of recheck and make sure that I’m kind of on par with where things are. Things are at. And I was really surprised because I hadn’t even exercised that day. It was a rest day.

Hadn’t been hungry the whole week leading into it. It wasn’t like I was like significantly depriving myself or anything like that, but I was just craving food and it was kind of that shift from the first half of my cycle to the second half of my cycle. So probably it was just that shift in hormone changes, but I was just like, man, I want to eat all food. I could sit here and eat like, you know, snacks and apple and peanut butter. Like, I just wanted to eat, eat, eat.

And so around lunchtime I’m like, you know what? I am just going to eat a really good sized lunch. And I made myself some chicken and some healthy Alfredo sauce with some broccoli and some whole wheat noodles. And I sat down and I ate a big bowl and I marked out all my macros and I’m like, well, that doesn’t leave me a whole lot for dinner. And I’d.

It was a slightly later lunch by the time I got around to it. And I was like, well, you know, I’m really full now. I’ll probably get hungry towards bedtime, but I really don’t need any dinner. So I’m gonna call this my meal. And now I feel really satisfied and I feel like I have good energy to, you know, go and do my rest of my day.

And I’m gonna go outside and work in the yard and get some fresh air. And then tonight, if I need something small, I’ll have some like veggies. Otherwise I’m just gonna have some hot tea and just kind of enjoy letting my digestion kind of have a rest and then see what happens tomorrow. And it was interesting because I was listening to my body. I took care of the situation.

I was open to feeding it a little bit more towards the evening, but also just kind of like, I don’t think I’ll need it because I had a nice big meal. And it was more that curiosity, some grace, but also just some like, hey, my body’s telling me it needs something. I’m going to work with what it’s telling me, but also try to continue to maintain, hey, this is what I said I was going to do. I’m trying to stay within these specific guidelines of my nutrition and that’s what I’m going to do. But let’s shift things around a little bit because I’m struggling to make it to dinner time tonight without wanting to just snack, snack, snack.

That is a way of treating yourself with both kindness and understanding while still sticking to your goals. Just one example of it. There’s many ways that that could happen, but those are some things to keep in mind.

Next, how can we separate our health goals? So where we want to get from our current appearance based pressure or even that feeling of like, you know, I’ve had three kids, I can lose the weight after baby number three, but am I just going to have a bunch of loose skin around my waist? Is it even going to be worth it? You know? And we start to get in our head about these things because we’re putting in all this effort and it’s hard and it’s day after day, doesn’t feel like we’re making much progress.

And so we get in our heads and we try to talk ourselves out of it almost. So here are some ways that we can start separating the two. Ask yourself why and then remind yourself of this over and over and over. Why do you want to lose the weight and not just because you want to wear a smaller size of jeans or a smaller dress size? Why really?

How are you going to feel different? How are you going to behave different? How is it going to truly affect your life? And how are you going to just love that?

Think about that, put yourself in that position, daydream about it, hold on to that, Remind yourself of that.

Focus on behaviors more than outcomes. It takes so long to make health transitions that if we focus on the, well, I think I lost a pound over the last two weeks. That isn’t enough to excite us and disperse on. But if we think about all the times throughout the day that we took the time, made the effort, and did the health behavior change that we had said we were going to do, Are we nourishing our body with whole foods? Are we moving in ways that feel good?

Are we managing our stress? Are we sleeping well, all of those things will actually make you feel better and have better energy and we can celebrate those and be excited about those along the way. Even though we haven’t fully achieved the body weight or the body composition that we currently want, we can still be proud of our. I’m making My daily exercise happen. I’m, you know, planning out my meals and I’m doing all these things.

As I’ve been slowly losing the weight from baby number three and getting back in shape. I had several injuries along the way. Some things that needed. I had to have a surgery for an injury that I’d had. And it’s been a long road back from baby number three, and I still have some excess weight I would like to lose.

However, the functional ability has finally returned. My energy has finally returned. My, like, functional ability to get out and run and to lift and to snow ski and water ski and do the things that I love. It took me two to three years to get back to that. And he’s five now, so I’ve been enjoying that for a while.

And now I feel like, okay, I’m at a really stable place. I would like to lose a few more of the baby fat pounds. But the point is, is that it takes a while. And all along the way, I was making progress, but, I mean, we’re talking five years since he was born. It took me a year of PT for one problem.

It took me, and then I had to have a surgery, and it took another year of PT and focused exercise workouts to get me back to where I could rejoin the gym, workout with my community of women that I like to go and do, and to where I could, you know, run again and to really get to where I could get out on my water ski and cut hard and not pull something. And, you know, all of that just took a while to get back to. And, you know, we all have setbacks. As we get closer to 40, which I’ll be 40 this year, we start to have, you know, little injuries along the way and, like, old injuries acting up. And so there are things that come up, and these are normal for everyone.

And when we start to see everybody’s highlight reel on Instagram, we feel like, oh, but they just go out and do these things and we don’t see the times that it took them to work up to it, the times that it took them to heal from an injury, the times that it took for them to keep showing up and doing the behaviors and knowing that the outcome would follow or that once they got those behaviors in place, they could make slight tweaks to this or that to get the results they wanted. All right, and then this is a big one. Detach from the timelines. Like I’m saying, kind of intermittently throughout all of this. It takes a while.

When we start to think it’s going to take me two years to reach the size that I want. It gets very, very, very depressing. It’s very difficult to be motivated about something that’s coming in two years. What if we look at what can we accomplish this month and we make a monthly goal and sure, it can be in line with what we want to have ultimately happen. That’s going to take us two years to do, but what if we focus on short term goals and also again, look at the behaviors of what it would take to get there?

Focus on those. How do we improve our water intake? How do we improve our sleep? How do we. How do we work on our mindset that we don’t so we don’t constantly feel like we’re failing when our goal is so far off, how can we even tell if we’re failing or not?

Okay, so with all of that, let’s get practical here. How do we actually maintain these thoughts, these mindsets, these focus on the behaviors, not just the back up. Focus on the behaviors and not just the outcome. It can come down to daily practicing positive self affirmations. Now, okay, I know that can sound really cheesy, but what if you remind yourself every day that you are capable and look what I’m doing.

It doesn’t have to be this whole flowery thing that you read to yourself, but what if every day you remind yourself, look at where I’ve come from, look at what I’m doing. Look at what I’ve accomplished. Look at what I have added to my daily routine. I am now up to drinking X amount of water a day. I’m getting X amount of steps in a day.

Look at how the trends have changed and acknowledge that for yourself with affirmations. I am good at getting my daily steps in. When we say that to ourselves, it starts to remind us, keep walking, you know? But we’re also telling ourselves, hey, good job.

I find this one to be huge. Dress in a way that honors your current body. So even though, like I mentioned a few minutes ago, I would like to drop a pant size or two, I still went out and bought myself some of the newer wide leg in style jeans. Why? Because I’m not going to live my life constantly waiting for then I matter today.

And by dressing your body today in a way that looks good for how you are today, buying clothes that fit you today, not the ones that are going to fit you when you lose two more pounds, you’re honoring yourself now. You’re accepting yourself now and you’re putting effort into yourself. Now, which ultimately tells yourself you’re worth putting effort into. It’s amazing what a difference that does. The respect that you feel for yourself and the difference that makes as you choose throughout the day, how you’re going to eat, how you’re going to move, how you’re going to do things, what you’re going to buy at the grocery store, what you’re going to order at the restaurant.

All of a sudden you feel different.

Surround yourself with positive influences. Be careful what you listen to on social media. Be careful who you follow. Notice your thoughts after you see something. Is something inspiring or is it underlyingly toxic?

Are you finding yourself inspired because you’re like, hey, look, they’re doing what I want to do and it’s happening for them? Are you energized or are you like, no matter what I do, I’m never going like, that’s just not me. I don’t like. Yes, I would love that part of it. But like, something about it feels not like a good match.

Don’t follow them anymore. Fill your mind and surround yourself with what spurs you forward to what you want, not what drags you down. And that includes friends and family. Harder to do. It’s easier to unfollow someone on Instagram, but this includes friends and family.

Set non scale goals. This one’s huge, you guys. I’m not saying don’t weigh yourself. It’s a helpful metric. However, find ways of saying this would prove to me that I’m making progress.

Maybe it’s a strength goal. I’m going to be able to squat with X amount of weight. I’m going to be able to do X amount of squats or X amount of push ups. I’m going to be able to walk a 5k. I’m going to be able to run a 5k.

I’m going to do something that’s measurable, that’s not about weight. Okay? Those are ways that you can show that you’re making progress. Maybe it’s setting yourself a challenge of a bedtime routine. And for X amount of days, you’re going to go to bed at a certain time after doing a five step thing to help you relax and unwind.

Something that for you is in line with what you’re trying to do, but isn’t something that’s a measure on your appearance or your like. In other words, something that you can do regardless of what your PCOS timeline is. We might not be able to lose weight in a month. We can walk 5k in a month, right? So Those are things where set, set a goal that’s in line with what you want, but is not measured by the scale.

So today, as we recap, you’re not broken, you’re not failing, and you’re so much more than the reflection in the mirror. It is okay to dream. We should dream. It’s part of the human experience and it’s part of like, the joy of life to have goals and ambitions and to dream and to strive for things. And as soon as we let go of those, we feel dead inside.

However, when we attach to those where we feel like our worth today depends on those future goals, we’re kind of putting the cart before the horse. Like these. We’re we, we love who we are. We want to grow. When we have that kind of energy, our possibilities are endless.

When we beat ourselves up for who we currently are because we’re not who we want to be, we drag ourselves down. And so if we can make that small shift of look, this is what I’m about. This is what I’m growing towards. This is what I want to do. This is where my priorities are.

This is what I’m excited about. It’s so much more. It drives us and it creates the enthusiasm and it creates the motivation. At the end of the day, we’re going to have to create the habits and the discipline and the behaviors so that we can achieve the results. But it has to come from a place of being excited about it, not from being miserable that we don’t have it.

So thank you for hanging out with me today on this more touchy feely about the emotions, our mindset, and how we think and talk to ourselves around our health goals. But this part is so important on our PCOS Health journey. So I’m glad that you are here listening today and I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did, be sure to hit that subscribe button so that you get notified each and every week that a new episode of PCOS Health becomes available. And if you would like to continue this conversation with me or if you found today’s episode helpful or had a specific aha moment, I would love to hear from you over on Instagram.

That’s where I have more casual conversations and can hear back from all of you wonderful listeners. So I enjoy hearing from you over there. You can find me at Nourish to Healthy and until next time, bye for now.