It’s the thing that carries our souls, lets us care for others and do our jobs, and is a scientific marvel and miracle. And yet our relationship with our body can be…complicated. Heather Creekmore joins AllMomDoes host Julie Lyles Carr for a dive into why body image drives so much of our culture and conversation today and what it means to appreciate and care for the bodies we’ve been given without making our physicality our everything.
Show Notes:
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Transcription:
Heather Creekmore:
We’re outside the Christmas season now, but I love the Christmas carol, Oh, Holy Night. And there’s a line in it about, “Then He appeared and our soul felt its worth.” And I think the underlying issue for most of us is that we really want to feel worthy. We just want to know that we’re worth something. And it’s just with all the messages around us, the only way that we seem to chase that for most of us is well, “Okay, if I looked a certain way, then I would know I was worth something.” But I think the Bible tells us something different.
Julie Lyles Carr:
This is the AllMomDoes Podcast. I’m your host, Julie Lyles Carr. We’re part of the Purposely Podcast Network. I am bringing you a fellow Austinite today, a friend of mine named Heather Creekmore. We met over a decade ago. How we have gotten this far without having her on the podcast, I am not sure. Heather is an author and she’s the wife of a pastor and she’s also a podcaster. Her podcast is called Compared to Who? And it has lots and lots and lots of downloads and lots of fans. Heather, thanks so much for making the time to be on the show today.
Heather Creekmore:
It is great to be with you, Julie.
Julie Lyles Carr:
It’s so fun to have you here. And again, we got to do this more than once every 10 years. I’m not quite sure what happened there, but here we are. Well, Heather, you are here in the Austin area. Give the listener a snapshot of life for you today, what season you’re in, kids, all that kind of stuff.
Heather Creekmore:
Yes, I am in the teen busyness season. I think I’m going to file a formal complaint because no one told me how much needier they were going to be in this season than they were even as toddlers.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right.
Heather Creekmore:
So I don’t know who I filed that complaint with.
Julie Lyles Carr:
But somebody needs to be contacted.
Heather Creekmore:
But yeah, I had four babies in just over four years, Julie. So my oldest turned five three months after my youngest was born. And so now we are in the 12, 14, 16, 17 age range and life is very full. But in addition to my house of teenagers, like you said, I’m writing, I’m speaking, I’m podcasting, and my husband is a pastor on staff at a large church here in the Austin area. So there’s just something, always. We need some more margin for sure.
Julie Lyles Carr:
There’s a lot going on. And Heather, you are so right. One of the things that I was so immersed in baby care for so long and toddler care for so long that when the kids started hitting those teenage years, it wasn’t the physical day to day in the same way, although they can create even bigger messes when they’re bigger people. But it was keeping up with all the social calendar, all the school stuff, all the extracurricular everything. I mean, not to discourage the mom who’s out there just feeling like she is overwhelmed in the toddler and early elementary age, but it is something that you need to be taking your multivitamins for because there are things that are going to be a lot easier and there are going to be other things that are going to be a lot tougher. So just keep up the good work, drink your water, all the things.
Well, Heather, you have a lot that you have done in your time in ministry in helping women and helping them think through a lot of different issues and things that come up for us, particularly in the lane of comparison, the way we think about ourselves, the way we talk about ourselves. How did this area become a heartbeat for you?
Heather Creekmore:
It’s not the heartbeat I ever wanted to have.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Okay.
Heather Creekmore:
Because I think comparison is one of those things that we don’t like to talk about. It’s kind of our secret struggle. No one’s really out there saying, “Yes. I really wrestle with not comparing myself to others all the time.” And really my entree into comparison was talking about body image issues, which even more so than comparison is something that no one wants to talk about. But body image issues were a part of my story beginning in third grade. And I journeyed for decades as a Christian woman believing that there was no actual help from my body image issues, aside from just trying to do all the things that culture told me to do to fix my body image issues. And in there I had an eating disorder, definitely disordered eating around the eating disorder. I became a fitness instructor because I thought, “Well, surely that would fix it” because then I would prove to the world that I was in good enough shape.
None of the things that I tried, none of the fixing my body endeavors ever led me to the freedom that really they promised they would or that I really wanted, that I craved. And so I found freedom in the most unexpected way. God really just kind of stepped in and intervened and said, “Heather, this is your problem.” And when that happened, I’d love to say it was like a switch that flipped from off to on and I never struggled again. But that would not be true. But when that happened, it definitely set me on a different path. It changed my journey, it changed the way I saw everything. And so I started speaking and writing really out of that change, hoping to encourage other women to find the same freedom around their body image and food and all the things the same way I had.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Heather, you have looked at research that says that 87%, [inaudible 00:05:54] of women say they have body image issues, that this is maybe one of the most common shared experiences of women in our culture today is having this sense that something needs to be fixed about their physicality. For myself, when I think about when I started becoming aware of how my body was presenting and how it was being perceived by others, this sounds like a bizarre problem now. But at the time, it felt like a really big deal. I had a nickname when I was in elementary school, junior high, early high school, which was String Bean Legs, string bean, string bean. Because it was perceived, at least the way I was interpreting it, that my legs were too long and too skinny, which sounds ridiculous. Almost like, “She has too much money. She’s too …” I mean …
Heather Creekmore:
She’s too beautiful.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Yeah, it’s just sad. It’s just sad. But at the time, I will tell you, it was so difficult, that statement. I was very self-conscious because I was super, super … I used to ask my mom, I was like, “Were you worried about my brothers?” And I mean, my dad was six five and my mom was very petite, but very tiny at five two. So we as kids growing up in Southern California, running around all the time, weren’t allowed to do a lot of snacking. Not in a bad way with food, but it was like my parents were keeping an eye on stuff. My brothers and I were like the string beaniest kids ever. And I would say to my mom, “Weren’t you worried?” And she was like, “Well, all three of you looked like that. So I just thought, okay, this is what children of a guy who’s six five look like.”
But I remember the weight of that, of being extremely self-conscious, of not wanting anybody to have anything to say about my string bean legs. I remember that as kind of the entree point for then me looking around and going, “Well, where else do I not match up? And where else am I falling short or I’m over the line, or whatever the issue is?” Define for the listener how you think about body image, body image issues. And what you typically find is the point at which a woman starts to become self-conscious or is at least very aware of the perception that her body brings into the room, into the conversation, into the acquaintanceship.
Heather Creekmore:
Yeah. Well, to start with your last question, I mean that varies. So I talk to women who share my story where it was around third grade, and interestingly enough, my, I’m going to call it a lie. But my lie was the same as yours, that my legs weren’t right, that my legs were too big. So the opposite spectrum. So I meet women that have that same story, but then I also meet women who are good until pregnancy, and then what pregnancy does to their body, how their body changes after pregnancy kind of stirs something in them that they never felt before and never experienced before.
But when we’re talking about body image, it’s really important to clarify that we’re not talking about how someone looks. Because you and I had the same maybe instigating lie about our legs, but it was opposite extremes. So you can do a quick Google search and find hundreds of articles of the Victoria’s Secret models who have body image issues and the celebrities who have body image issues. So it’s not really about how we look, it’s about how we think we look. And really to go even deeper, it’s the fears. I’m going to say also, it’s like our spiritual, our heart issues around what we believe, how we look, how we present ourselves to the world really means about our value and our worth and our identity.
Julie Lyles Carr:
All those things colliding together and the challenge that can be. Now, Heather, you and I are looking at this from a perspective of when we were kids and got this message that something about our physicality wasn’t right or didn’t match or was teased or was pointed out as something that was different.
Another side to this though that I think can be very interesting is where we make our body image, either that we were blessed with when we were born and happens to line up with what a societal standard is at the time, or one that we’ve worked super hard on through fitness and dieting and all the things, we can make a body image that we actually feel pretty good about, this strange thing that is our identification, our verification of our worth moving forward. And then the desperateness that can come into play if we feel that slipping at all as we move into different ages and stages of life and things begin to change. So part of what I think is powerful is to remember that it’s not just about what you think is wrong with your body. It can also be the things that you take an over level of comfort in that you think could be right about your body and therefore mean you have value and worth. Does that resonate?
Heather Creekmore:
It does. Although I think in doing this for almost a decade, I have met very few women who actually are able to take comfort in the things that they believe they’ll be able to take comfort in.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right.
Heather Creekmore:
I think that there’s a body image idol that we are all tempted to serve, and the body image idol says, “If you can just get to this weight, if you can just get toned like this, if you can just get this part right, then you’ll be free, then you’ll be able to rest, then you’ll find peace and joy and your whole world, your life is just going to fall in line because you have fixed your body in this way.” And what happens and what women tell me over and over again is they got to that weight and they didn’t change how they felt. And so they say, “Okay, it must be five more pounds.” Or they got toned. And then it’s like, “Well, maybe now I need the surgery to fix this part.” There’s never a time that we will, I think, feel completely content and satisfied in the way we look. And I think God designed us that way because we’re not supposed to take our joy and satisfaction in that.
So yes, there is the extreme of, I hate myself, but I actually think I hate myself and I love myself are super close in terms of being two sides of the same coin, where in both cases, we’re just uber focused on ourselves and our bodies, and that really prevents us from feeling joy and peace and rest like God intended.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right. Now, we’ve talked about the things that triggered our awareness and the things that we were looking at going, “Oh, well, if so-and-so’s noticed this and has said this, then maybe that’s something wrong with me.” What do you say is the root of these body image issues? Because there’s always going to be somebody who’s going to have a comment, good or ill. There’s always going to be somebody who seems to have it more together or is struggling more. And we can play that whole comparison game to feel better about ourselves. But what’s at the core of this thing for women today?
Heather Creekmore:
Yeah, I think the core is it’s the idolatry, the temptation towards the idolatry. But to kind of make it even simpler than that, we live in a world that tells us that our value comes from the way we look. And part of this is maybe just the pitfall of living in a more affluent society. We don’t have to worry about where our next meal is going to come from for most of us. We don’t have to worry about whether or not we’re going to have a place to spend tomorrow night. Most of us have these basic needs tied up. And what that allows for is for us to really believe the messages of marketers that tell us what we need to be happy, to be joyful, all the things is to look a certain way. And if we looked a certain way, Julie, then we would have value. Then we would know that we are really worth something.
And we’re outside the Christmas season now, but I love the Christmas carol, O Holy Night. And there’s a line in it about, “Then He appeared and our soul felt its worth.” And I think the underlying issue for most of us is that we really want to feel worthy. We just want to know that we’re worth something. And it’s just with all the messages around us. The only way that we seem to chase that for most of us is well, “Okay, if I looked a certain way, then I would know I was worth something.” But I think the Bible tells us something different.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right. Heather, how do we marry the idea that we need to be more than just these physical vessels, these physical bodies? At the same time, there’s so much about our spiritual life that has to do with how we’re conducting ourselves in these physical bodies. There are boundaries God puts in place for these physical bodies because there are things that matter and they matter at a soul level, whether that is being faithful in your marriage to how you are caring for your physical body to the disciplines that you carry forward, all those things. How do we create an alliance between our sense of worth, our souls and our physical bodies? Because you and I know from church history, there were the Gnostics and the Essenes who were just basically saying, “The body’s everything or the body’s nothing.” And these extremes all the way around.
I still at times encounter people that they want the fix to a lot of these issues to be, “Well, the body just doesn’t matter.” And I think, well, but we are created in God’s image. And it mattered enough that Jesus came in bodily form and it mattered enough that He was crucified in bodily form because there is value there. There is value in these physical bodies that we have been gifted. So how do we find that balance? Because like I said, I tend to see people go one extreme or the other. I myself at times have been in that case where I’ve thought, “Well, it doesn’t matter what I’m eating or what I’m doing or anything else because my soul has greater worth.” And yet the physical would definitely impact at times the soul health I was experiencing when I wasn’t walking in some of God’s best ways of operating this physical machine. How do you align all of that?
Heather Creekmore:
Yeah. Well, I think we have to go back to what is truth. So what is truth? There’s God’s truth. But then our culture tells us a whole lot of different versions of truth. We’ve all been around long enough to know that one thing can be true at one point and then oh, all of a sudden that’s not true anymore. And so to back it up, like you said, our bodies are not everything and our bodies are not nothing. God made my body on purpose for His purpose. I can’t do ministry without my body. And I can look at my body and I can see some clues as to what that purpose is, what He made me for. So I’m not a super tall person, but I would say I probably spent decades trying to look more like a model. And that was a little ridiculous because God did not make this body for modeling. I’m five foot five, but I have these short, stubby fingers that can type a super fast. Yeah, I’ll challenge anyone to a typing contest and I’ll win. And that is an indication of what He made me for.
And I think one of the things that’s challenging in the church is we get so much of these little t truths from culture that sometimes we conflate them with the big T truth of God’s Word. And I’m going to talk about food as one of those cases. Eggs are good. Eggs are bad. In the 1990s, Julie, I ate plain bagels and I sprayed something called butter, but it was really chemicals, onto my plain bagel because that’s what was going to keep my body healthy and thin. And then in 2012, I remember standing in my kitchen with a stick of butter and a jar of coconut oil and a mound of nuts, and I was trying to make something called a fat bomb because that’s what was going to make my body healthy and thin.
And so really I think we have to kind of peel back this tendency that we have even as Christian women to follow the trends of culture, believing that that is what’s healthy or that that’s actually what’s holy. And that might sound a little awkward, but I think as a Church, capital C Church, we’ve kind of just adopted all the language around health and food and nutrition and exercise that culture’s taught us. And so we’ve just followed the winds of change, and I think it’s time to scale back and realize what is good for me, what makes my body feel healthy and energized might not be the same as what’s good for you and what makes your body feel healthy and energized.
We are bio-individual people. God made us that way and we’re such a blend now of all our backgrounds, and then what we know about epigenetics, our histories. We are so complex. For me to believe the best way to care for my body is what an Instagram influencer that maybe doesn’t even live in my part of the world tells me is what she’s doing to care for her body just puts me on a wild goose chase following health trends that aren’t that capital T Truth. So I think the best way for us to care for our bodies is to really start listening to them and to seek the Lord. He says we can … I mean there’s no food rules in the New Testament, but what does He say? He says, “To always give Him glory as we eat and drink.” And so I think we need to just put Him back into the equation when we talk about how to take care of our bodies and kind of tune out what culture tells us to do.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I love you bringing up this bio-individuality that we have because girl, I’ve done the same thing. I mean, you and I have seen all kinds of trends come and go, everything from fat free to fat full to all the different things. And about a year ago, I ended up on a very different journey and started really listening in a much better way to how my body was responding to certain things that I was ingesting. And when I really began listening to that, I eat in a way that some people might think is very odd and very strange.
But I’m really clear that it has been so helpful to me and I’m also super clear that I’m not recommending anybody do it the way I’m doing it because it took me a long time to figure it out, having gone through all of these other approaches that people will take. And you’re so right. Everything becomes so trendy, I can look back over the things that I used to do and think, “Why on earth did I do that?” But Heather, my intention was I was thinking I was getting some great information at the time and not thinking through how God individually created me. I love that you bring that up.
Well, while we’re talking about things like understanding what our individual bodies need when it comes to nutrition and help and care and all of the things, you brought up that for some women, they start getting this strange message about their body image when they’re in elementary and middle school ages. Then you have some women who clear, get through their 20s, but man, after that first baby or that second one, or really after that third one, they begin to go whew. And one of the things that I’m finding interesting both about the maternity space and then the maturing space is both the inspiration that’s out there but also the defeat that we can sometimes feel.
There has been something trending recently in social media, a young woman … I have eight children, so anybody else who has eight kids, I’m like, “Yeah, how did we do that?” And there’s a woman who has eight children and just a handful of days after having her eighth child competed in a beauty contest, swimsuit, evening gown, the whole thing. Heather, let me assure you, a handful of days after my seventh and eighth children, twins were born, there was no swimsuit competition. There was no evening gown competition. And the fact that we were surviving in four hour sprints was incredible to me.
When I look at some of the conversation around maturing today, it is fascinating to look back at what we felt like women, let’s say in their mid 50s were supposed to look like 20, 30 years ago. You’ve probably seen the meme like I have of the Golden Girls and the ages of a lot of those women, Alice from the Brady Bunch, all of that, and how different women look today.
Heather Creekmore:
Yes. [inaudible 00:23:13].
Julie Lyles Carr:
The reason I bring this up is there’s something very aspirational and inspirational in saying, “Wow, a woman could have her eighth baby and could go on just a few days later to do this.” It feels like that’s amazing, girl power, to realize that a woman can decide the kind of fashion, the way she wants to present herself, the kind of vivacity and youth that she wants to carry forward, that she can make those determinations. It doesn’t need to be by a calendar. At the same time, and you see all this dialogue around these issues, there are those places and there are those people, and there are those situations where seeing those examples can feel incredibly defeating, like the bar has now been set even higher for women.
So how do we know without veering into comparison, how to glean the aspiration and inspiration from those stories, from those situations where someone’s like, “Being a woman is amazing. Look what the female body can do. Look how God created us to be able to give birth and still show up in these ways. Look at how we can age as women and hang on to life and life to the full that Jesus came to give us,” without getting in the ditch of feeling like we’re falling behind like we used to feel back in junior high, maybe how we felt in elementary school when people were commenting about our legs. How do we do that?
Heather Creekmore:
Yeah. Well, I think that it’s dangerous, and I don’t know, we might disagree on this, Julie, so feel free to push back. But I think the inspiration part of that could be dangerous because what is that inspiring me to? It’s inspiring me to a certain type of greatness, a certain type of beauty that I would say are the world’s definition of greatness and beauty. And so oftentimes I just feel like that’s a dangerous road to travel.
What I think is healthier is recognizing this truth that all bodies change. And I think that that is something that we’re lied to about a lot. So I turned 50 this year and thinking about the ads I see in my Instagram feed are all about how to beat perimenopause, how to make sure menopause doesn’t get you the same way it gets others. But then if I’m a realist, I look around, I look at my friends that are the same age as I am, and we’re all changing in very similar ways. And then I’m like, “So what is true?” Is it true that I’m supposed to be defeating this, beating this? Or is it true that if I look around at a population of women, I’m probably going to be able to tell without really analyzing their necks and faces, I could probably just tell from body shape who the 20-year olds are, who the 30-year olds are, who the 50-year olds are, because bodies change in a predictable way.
And then thinking about what happens to girls during puberty. Can you imagine telling one of your daughters like, “Oh, whatever you do, don’t let your hips get wider, whatever you do, don’t let your body change?” That would be ridiculous messaging because that’s a natural thing. And yet I think the messages we’re hearing from culture are, “Oh, you had a baby. Well make sure that doesn’t affect the way your body looks. Make sure your body doesn’t change. Oh, you’re hitting 50. Make sure your body …” And so I think we’ve got a couple different things going on. And I think we really have to wrestle in our hearts with what is true? And what is true at the end of the day, I believe, is that bodies change. Now, I’m grateful that we haven’t aged in the same way the Golden Girls or Alice … I have a lot of people tell me that I don’t look like I’m going to be 50.
Julie Lyles Carr:
We don’t hate that. We don’t hate that.
Heather Creekmore:
I’m not upset about that at all. And yet I do feel very much like the reality of, oh wow, I see things are changing and I have two choices. I can either thank God that I’ve got more time on this earth. Thank you, Lord that you still have stuff for me to do, and this is just what happens to bodies after they’ve been here a while. Or I can be frustrated and kind of put all my focus into trying to go back to the way I was, even though I know, and we can see this from the way celebrities have modeled this in Hollywood, there’s no surgery that could make me look like I did when I was in my 20s and have that work out well. So what do we need to just accept? And then we do the best we can with the knowledge that bodies change.
Julie Lyles Carr:
It is probably one of the number one questions I get being a mom of eight kids. That question is, “What on earth are y’all doing about college?” And I can tell you with eight different kids, eight different learning styles, eight different ideas about what the kids want when it comes to their careers and all of the rest, college has been a big topic of conversation around here. Well, there is a university that I want you to know about because it just hits so many of the things that are really important when it comes to considering your kids’ college education. George Fox University, it’s the number one private school in Oregon. It’s a Christian university. It’s located in the heart of the Pacific Northwest. And what’s so great is in addition to a top-notch education, students have the opportunity to grow and deepen their faith. And they can learn in this really pivotal time in their lives who God made them to be.
I mean, let’s face it, we need more people coming out of our universities who know how to be leaders and how to be leaders with character. And George Fox University offers more than 60 academic majors, and that includes a nationally recognized engineering program, a nursing program. It allows your student to pursue their passions and prepare for the calling that God has for them. And let’s not forget about fun when it comes to college. George Fox University students have a great student life. There are weekly campus events. There’s chapel, there’s service opportunities, there are 23 NCAA division 3 athletic teams. Here’s something that is important to me. There’s a study abroad opportunity, so if your student wants to go and experience life somewhere else for a semester, they can do that. There’s outdoor recreation because of course we’re talking about Oregon, so gorgeous. George Fox University could be just the perfect fit for your student as you are looking into college, career and all that goes beyond. George Fox University, where your student will learn and thrive in the center of it all.
I do find this whole idea that somehow we’re supposed to become static once we hit what many times in our culture is considered the peak of adulthood, somewhere in those mid 20s. That somehow that is supposed to be maintenance level at that point when that is not how God designed the vessel. It’s just not. And I think you can take beautiful care of yourself. I think you can be a good steward of the body you’ve been given, and you are still going to feel the effects of time and gravity and age and experiences, and you haven’t done anything wrong. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with it. I do like the distinction that you’re creating because that line where something is inspirational to all of a sudden, it becoming this really difficult messaging about, “Well, this woman was able to do this two weeks after this major physical event, or this woman is the same age as you and why don’t you have some of the same physical attributes or whatever?”
It does create a really weird economy very quickly, even when we’re celebrating that someone has been capable of doing something pretty remarkable, whatever that is. But to not take it on is now the new standard, is the new report card, is the way we’re supposed to be weighing in on how things are going to be done. I think that’s a great way of looking at that.
So what’s one of the key things we can do to heal the way that to some degree, if we lived in this culture, tend to have let some of this messaging in? For some of us that’s going to be a longer journey. We have more steeped messaging. Maybe we had a mom who was really insecure in her own body image and we now have been a generational carrier of that. Maybe we got really hurt by something that happened because of physical attribute that we have, and people commented on it. Maybe we had an experience of being a certain physical prototype until the last baby was born or until we hit perimenopause and now we’re mourning the physicality that we used to have that we no longer have. And maybe for some of us, it’s just a place where we’ve always felt pretty good and really appreciated what God’s given us. But there’s a little bit of messaging creep that starts to come in over time. How do we begin to identify that and heal that so that we can live as grateful recipients of the physical bodies God’s individually given us?
Heather Creekmore:
Yeah. So let me answer that by maybe answering a question that you didn’t ask, but maybe it was sort of in there. And that is the question I get more than any other question, which is, “When do I cross the line? I want to take good care of my body. I want to be healthy.”
Julie Lyles Carr:
It’s a great way to say it, yeah.
Heather Creekmore:
“I want to feel like I look attractive, but when have I crossed the line into, ooh, this is obsession, this is no longer healthy, or even this is idolatry?” As I would put it. And I think that’s when we can apply the Treasure Principle, the principle that Jesus laid out in Matthew for how we should deal with money. Well, really with how we should find our treasure. And it’s talking about money, but it’s like where your treasure is, your heart will be also. And I think we can identify where a treasure is by where we spend our money and by where we spend our time.
And just thinking about my story, oh boy, I was given to church, but if you looked at the rest of where my money went, there was probably a little too much going to wardrobe and let’s just call it, self-care. And again, there’s nothing wrong with spending money on those things. But if you looked at my bank accounts, you would see, oh, that was very important to me. But then beyond that, the money one’s a little fuzzy because everything’s expensive now. But the time, that one, yikes. If Bible study met the same time as spin class, more often than not, spin class won.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Was going to win. Yeah.
Heather Creekmore:
And then thinking about what happened in my head every day, every hour of every day, the time I spent thinking about, dwelling on, I’m going to use Bible language here, meditating on how to change my body was a sure indicator of the reality that I was too focused on my body. That little square box in my bathroom had become my little g god, and it told me what my worth was. And there’s a famous quote, it’s, “What you think about in your solitude is your religion.”
Julie Lyles Carr:
Great quote.
Heather Creekmore:
And I would’ve said that my religion was Christianity. I was raised in a Bible believing Christian home. And yet what I thought about in my solitude was how to change my body, how to get a better body, how to lose this weight, how to tone this part, because that’s the kind of salvation, that was the kind of rescue that I really longed for. And so no matter where the listener is today, if she’s like, “Oh, she got me, I’m obsessing all the time. Yikes.” I don’t want to put it like that because no one wants to admit that. I sure didn’t, but I’m obsessing. Or like, “Oh, it’s just kind of a fleeting thought every now and then.” I mean, I think the place to start is just recognizing it, just getting real with yourself. Where are you in relation to your body and your body image?
And then from there, I work with clients in coaching. And so depending on the level of whether or not this has spilled over into the way you eat, if there’s eating disorder or disordered eating habits, over exercising, which is kind of now in the eating disorder categories as well. Depending on where it’s spilled into, there are specific things we would do to kind of encourage you and put you on a different healthier path. But I think for all of us, it’s just asking yourself, “Has my body become my treasure? Has my health become my treasure?” Because even though those are good things, we can’t make them ultimate things.
Julie Lyles Carr:
The ultimate things. Oh, beautiful way of saying that. Well, Heather, I’m so excited for you. You have The 40-Day Body Image Workbook that listeners can go and find. And then you also have all kinds of coaching services and different things that you can help women who are really grappling with this, just trying to come to terms with this ever-changing vessel we have called a body and how it interacts in the world today in the perceptions of others and in the perception of ourselves. Heather, where can the listener go to find out more about you? The work you do? Find the workbook, all the stuff?
Heather Creekmore:
You can find all the things at improvebodyimage.com.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Improvebodyimage.com. All right, Heather Creekmore, I can’t thank you enough for being on the show. Thanks so much for taking the time and for the work you do, because we want to be better. We want to be pushing ourselves, we want to walk in greater spiritual discipline. But wow, this is one of those categories that can really trip us up. So thanks so much for the way that you serve women today.
Heather Creekmore:
Oh, thank you, Julie. Thanks for having me.
Julie Lyles Carr:
All right, listener, you know where to go. Go to the show notes. Rebecca puts those together each week for us, and you’ll find all the links, the things that Heather was talking about there. Also be sure and check out allmomdoes.com. You hear me say it every time, but seriously, it is a wealth of all kinds of great information and connection with other women walking through the same kind of seasons that you are, grappling with the same kinds of issues that you do. That’s AllMomDoes, allmomdoes.com, AllMomDoes on the socials. I love to connect with you too, Julie Lyles Carr, mainly on Instagram. You can find me over there talking about daily life, things that inspire me, things that I find really funny. So be sure and check that out.
Hey, when you like the show and when you share a link from an episode like today’s episode, it really helps us get the word out about the podcast and it also can help somebody else. So if you know someone who’s really struggling with body image and Heather’s message has resonated with you, be sure and send them the link because I really think this is something that could help these kinds of conversations where we’re just honest, we’re just talking about the experience of being women. I really appreciate it when you share the show and I’ll see you next time on the AllMomDoes Podcast.
