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Description: Did you know the average age a girl starts dieting is eight years old!? My guest today, Susan Hyatt is helping to combat that craziness and get us out of diet culture, and actually putting our enery towards living big lives instead of trying to shrink and be as small as possible. Let’s dive into un-dieting today! 

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:

• 01:03 Who is Susan Hyatt
• 01:48 Dieting and Diet Culture
• 14:29 Passing Down Diet Culture
• 21:21  What Feels Like Love
• 37:46 Making Exercise Fun

WHO IS SUSAN HYATT

Susan Hyatt is a TEDx speaker who gave a sold out speech about why women need to stop obsessing about their weight and instead focus on earning money, gaining power, smashing the patriarchy, and running the world.

She’s a mom of two kids, a master certified life coach for over 15 years and bestselling author of the book Bare, that has inspired women all over the world to stop shrinking their bodies and start expanding their lives.

DIETING AND DIET CULTURE

Let’s dive into what dieting and diet culture it. First up, Susan says that dieting is a verb. It’s a way of eating that is unsustainable, a way of eating that requires rules, her definition is “if you can mess it up, you’re on a diet.” It’s pretty simple.

And diet culture is literally the air that we breathe. Diet culture is part of a system that reinforces the idea that you need to be smaller to be more valuable, so you need to take up less space and you should always be working on becoming as small as possible, and as fit as possible.

It’s been around since the late 1800’s and ever since then we have been bombarded with every changing standards of beauty that seem impossible to keep up with. The big problem with diet culture is that it keeps us as women focused on the wrong things. When all our brain power is taken up by this constant pressure to be smaller, it’s exhausting and we can’t step fully into who we really are and what we really are capable of.

How much time are really smart, capable, educated, amazing women wasting their creative time, their business capacity, their empathy, all those things, on what, what did I eat? Keeping track of how many points or how many macros or how many calories? And then did I get my steps in?

PASSING DOWN DIET CULTURE AND HOW WE TALK TO OUR KIDS

So much of this diet talk comes from the way we were raised. Not that our moms were intentionally passing down toxic messaging to us, it just happened. But we can decide that it stops with us. We have the power to change the conversation. To make movement about fun and enjoyment, to practice attentive eating and relearning to listen to our bodies. We can make the conversation more about love and when we do that, we can shift the entire culture.

WHAT FEELS LIKE LOVE

What feels like love? When you really think about that, when you’re making choices around how you want to feed yourself and how you want to move yourself, and you ask the question, does this feel like love? Just eating broiled chicken and rice three times a day, or does this feel like love to go to boot camp twice a day, five days a week?

If we’re really honest with ourselves, if we’re not rooted in this, like no pain, no gain culture, and we’re like, Well, what’s the most loving choice? It’s usually something pretty sustainable. And so what feels like love to me is to go for a run this morning. But it doesn’t feel like love to exist only on broccoli.

What feels like love is unique to each person. But I guarantee you, nobody signs up for a loving relationship that puts you in a cage where you can’t go out to eat with friends or you can’t travel, or you can’t leave the house because you’re afraid of food.

MAKING EXERCISE FUN

Exercise doesn’t have to suck or feel like a chore. We can and should be making exercise fun! We don’t have to be doing these things that we hate just because we feel like we should, or someone told us that’s the only way to like be fit or healthy. Start experimenting with new things and you just might find a new thing that you absolutely love doing, that doesn’t feel like torture!

I loved this conversation with Susan, and I can see why her TEDx talk was so dang popular!

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Follow Kelli on Instagram
• Find out more about Kelli Here
• Join the Finally Fearless Book Club Here
• Check out everything from Susan Hyatt here. 
• Get the book, Bare.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode! I’m honored and excited to be on this journey toward personal growth and greater confidence with you. If you enjoyed the podcast, I’d love to ask you to take 2 minutes to leave me a 5-star review on your podcast app, that way we can help even more women to join us as we #dropkickyourinnermenagirl together.

P.S. If you’re looking for ways to increase your confidence and silence your inner mean-girl, download my free workbook, 6 Ways to Dropkick Your Inner Mean Girl.

xo,

kelli