Finding Body Image Freedom Through Understanding Agency Part 1/2 [Podcast Transcript]

Title: Finding Body Image Freedom Through Understanding Agency Part 1/2

Podcast Date: October 1, 2024

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Description 

Host Heather Creekmore dives into the concept of agency and its importance in growing up emotionally, spiritually, and mentally to defeat body image issues. She begins by framing agency as the ability to make good decisions for oneself without excessive dependence on external input and approval. Heather shares her own story about overcoming internalized limitations imposed by others' opinions, highlighting how these constraints often manifest in our lives.

Heather emphasizes that agency is crucial for managing body image and food issues. She discusses how a lack of agency—stemming from experiences like emotional abuse, overly controlling environments, or childhood trauma—can lead to unhealthy food relationships, including restrictive eating or impulsive bingeing. She connects this to broader themes of spiritual growth, urging you to trust yourself under God's guidance and to stop allowing other people's opinions to dictate your self-judgment.

By examining scriptural teachings and real-life examples, Heather will encourage you to challenge your fears and limiting beliefs. Growing up means taking control of one's life, making independent decisions, and seeing oneself accurately through the lens of God’s truth, rather than through the judgments of others. 

Ready for coaching? Learn more at: https://www.improvebodyimage.com/christian-body-image-course-coaching

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Outline

04:49 Finding Freedom To Paint My Room

09:58 Agency And Our Relationship With Food

15:54 What Happens When You’re Not Free

21:46 What Happens When You Don’t Grow Up

Heather Creekmore [00:00:02]:

Life audio. Hey there, friend. Heather Creekmore here. What do you do when you order a meal at a restaurant and it doesn't come out right? Or maybe it's not what you ordered at all. What about if someone tells you that you're doing something wrong? Do you correct immediately or do you keep doing it? How much freedom do you feel like you have to make your own decisions? And let me clarify. To make good decisions for yourself. Or do you feel like a little insecure around decision making? You need lots of input, information, data, and approval from others before you make a decision? Friend, depending on how you answer these questions, today's episode may be just what you need to hear.

Heather Creekmore [00:00:47]:

Because today, we're discussing agency. Agency is our ability to act like a grown up, for lack of a better way to put it. And I mean this in the kindest way possible, friend, but some of us just need to grow up. We need to stop worrying so much about what other people think of us. We need to make growing decisions. I mean, friend, I know some of you are decades over the age of 21, and yet you're still afraid to do something that your earthly mother or father wouldn't approve of. I'll tell you my story today on the show, but this episode is going to challenge you and encourage you to think critically about the concept of growing up. You know, scripture actually commands that we grow up.

Heather Creekmore [00:01:24]:

Jesus grew in stature and wisdom, we read in Luke. We're supposed to become adults and being an adult is a lot more than just wearing adult clothes and shoes. We need to grow up emotionally, spiritually, and mentally too. Frankly, friends, some of us are just stuck here. And today, I wanna help you find your way out. I'm glad you're here. We're gonna start a new coaching session very soon. So if this hits home for you, reach out so that we can get you plugged in, maybe on the track to body image freedom.

Heather Creekmore [00:01:52]:

Drop a line to [email protected] or visit our website at improvebodyimage.com, and you can learn about all the programs we have to offer. Now, let's get to today's show. Welcome to Compare To Who, the podcast to help you make peace with your body so you can savor God's rest and feel his love. If you're tired of fighting body image the world's way, Compare To Who is the show for you. You've likely heard lots of talk about loving your body, but my goal is different. Striving to fall in love with stretch marks and cellulite is a little silly to me. Instead, I want to encourage you and remind you with the truth of scripture that you are seen, you are known, and you are loved no matter what your size or shape. Here, the pressure is off.

Heather Creekmore [00:02:37]:

If you're looking for real talk, biblical encouragement, and regular reminders that God loves you and you're not alone, you've come to the right place. I hope you enjoy today's show, and, hey, tell a friend about it. Okay, friends. So today, we are talking about agency. What we're really talking about is our ability to be grown up women. I know that can sound kinda harsh or dramatic, but I've been working with women around body image issues for about 10 years now. I know my own journey, my own struggles in this area. And today, we're gonna talk about something that is often hiding at the core when body image issues are present, and that's agency.

Heather Creekmore [00:03:17]:

Another way to say this is maybe having power to decide for yourself what is best. Now today, we're gonna explore this concept from a biblical perspective as well as looking at how this affects women who are battling body image and food issues. Of course, once we are believers, as Paul says, we are slaves to Christ. My body is not my own because, 1 Corinthians 6:20, I was bought with a price, the blood of Jesus. So as we talk about agency today, I want you to hear what I'm saying under this biblical umbrella. No. I don't believe you should choose your own destiny and make decisions apart from the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But as I continue today, I'm not gonna keep giving you that disclaimer over and over again.

Heather Creekmore [00:03:59]:

So please just hear what I'm saying inside of that context. Let me also start off by saying that some of us lack agency because of things we've experienced, and it may not be as simple for you as deciding to be different. You may need some help to sort out why you feel so powerless. It may be that you were the victim of emotional or narcissistic abuse. It may be that during childhood, you never felt like you had the opportunity to make decisions, or maybe your whole life just felt so outside of your control. Please, friend, do not beat yourself up for ways that you've behaved when you're coming out of trauma or a difficult past. And, honestly, it may be that you don't really feel like you had that difficult of a past. You don't feel like you have that dramatic of a story, but it could simply be that you had a mother who didn't let you grow up.

Finding Freedom To Paint My Room

Heather Creekmore [00:04:49]:

I hope to do a whole episode on that soon, but this is very common among women who have body image issues. So many of us are broken in these similar ways, and my point today is not for you to feel shame or guilt over the ways you've struggled to grow up or grow apart from childish thinking or behavior. Right? I don't want you to feel bad about that. Rather, I wanna encourage you and help you see that these are issues so that you can grow up. Okay. Now that we took care of all that, I wanna start off with a story. So I, at this point, am 29 years old, and I owned my own condo. I purchased my own condo outside of Washington DC in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Heather Creekmore [00:05:30]:

This was just about a year or so before I met my husband. And the whole place, of course, is just white walls. And I've never painted a room before. Now my mom didn't like painting. She thought it was too hard to get it perfect, and so it was better just not to try. And so every time I mentioned the idea of painting, she gave me a long diatribe about how messy it always comes out, how it looks bad. You have to do it just perfectly. You have to spend a whole day prepping.

Heather Creekmore [00:05:57]:

It's just not gonna look good. Painting just never turns out right, etcetera, etcetera. And I heard her, but I kinda wanted a Caribbean blue bedroom. I just had this vision in my head of a blue bedroom with white plantation shutters that would make me feel like I was on an island, and I could not get this out of my head. And so I did it. One day, I went to Lowe's. I bought the paint and some brushes and some blue tape, and I came home, and I painted that whole bedroom Caribbean blue. And I never mentioned it to my mom.

Heather Creekmore [00:06:29]:

I didn't tell her. Now I'm single at the time. I talk to my mom every single day, But this secret was, like, caliber of, like, a teenager sneaking around with a guy that mom didn't want me to date. Like, I was not going to let my mom know because I knew what she would say. Weeks later, my parents came to town, and I knew I had to let the secret out. It was killing me, in fact. So I walked my mom upstairs, and I showed her my blue bedroom. I don't think I could breathe.

Heather Creekmore [00:06:59]:

I honestly don't think I breathe the whole way up the stairs. I had prepared myself weeks in advance for what she'd say and how I'd respond to what she'd say. I was gonna hold my own. I was gonna defend my choice. I was gonna defend my right to paint. I was so ready for criticism, the challenge. I didn't wanna face it, but I knew I had to. Would you like to know what happened? My mom responded that it looked great and that I did a great job painting because painting is hard and she's not good at painting.

Heather Creekmore [00:07:30]:

Why do I remember this story, like, 20 years later as if it was some major life milestone? Because in a way, it was. I realized that I was way, way, way, way, way too concerned over what my mother thought. I realized that she hadn't even told me, like, directly not to paint. But yet, just by her negative sounding comments, I'd internalize this as something that I was not allowed to do like a child. It was something that would be bad if I did it. Something I was not old enough to do on my own. And to some degree, all of these thoughts and assumptions were on me. They were not her.

Heather Creekmore [00:08:10]:

She hadn't said any of those things directly. I was acting like a child. I was behaving like a child. I was not acting like an adult woman who owned her own condo, had her own job, could buy her own paint. I was acting like I was in a one down relationship with my mom, and I was almost 30. I'm wondering if you, my friend, have ever done something similar or if maybe in general you just feel like you're in one down relationships with lots of other people. I mean, it's hard not to feel that way sometimes with people in authority over us, or parents, or grandparents, or even doctors, or just people we feel are more famous than us, even leaders at church. But this takes us back to those questions I posed to you at the beginning of the episode.

Heather Creekmore [00:09:00]:

If someone tells you that you're doing something wrong, do you immediately change course? Do you feel like you are heavily influenced by other people, maybe even those influencers we talked about, and maybe a little afraid to do your own thing or pave your own way? I mean, sometimes of course we all do this. Right? To avoid a conflict or just to be loving. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with just going with the flow from time to time. You don't have to send every wrong meal back at the restaurant in order to have agency in your life. You don't have to turn into a mean person in order to have agency. Rather, what I'm challenging today is whether or not it's okay for you to have your own opinions and make your own choices. Love sometimes requires or maybe even often requires that we lay down our own desires for others. Now that I'm married, again, I can't paint my bedroom Caribbean blue for different reasons, mostly because my husband would not like it.

Agency And Our Relationship With Food 

Heather Creekmore [00:09:58]:

But figuratively, my friend, can you paint your bedroom blue and not care what anyone else thinks of it? Are you free to do that figuratively? So let's look at this in relationship to food and the way we relate to food. Can you eat carbs when everyone else around you is talking about how bad they are? Can you eat a piece of birthday cake at the birthday party when everyone else is talking about being good or how many calories are in the cake? Can you order a hamburger when everyone else at the table orders a salad? And again, these aren't fail safe tests. If you don't want a piece of cake or a hamburger, you never have to eat one. But my question is, are you free? You see, agency is that sense of control that you feel in your life. It's your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behaviors and have faith in your own ability to handle a wide range of tasks and situations. In other words, in many cases for the believer, it's your ability to say, nope. I'm hearing from the Lord on this.

Heather Creekmore [00:11:13]:

I'm gonna do it and go forward. Even if other people are saying, no. I don't think that's right. Now, of course, it has to match up with God's word. Right? Like, God's never going to instruct you to do something that violates his word. And then if other people are saying, no. Don't do that. I mean, you need to listen to them.

Heather Creekmore [00:11:29]:

But that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm just talking about, can you trust yourself? Can you trust that the Holy Spirit is guiding you and that you can make good decisions for yourself? You see, your sense of agency helps you to be psychologically stable, but it also helps you to be flexible in the face of conflict or change. Without agency, we live our lives imagining these constraints, these, I'm gonna say, like, chains where there really aren't any. We believe that we'll be scolded if we do it wrong. We tell ourselves that certain things are not allowed or certain things are not normal. Interestingly enough, there's a study that examined the role of agency and people's desire for cosmetic surgery. And it found that if you can strengthen and increase agency, you can reduce the desire for plastic surgery if the surgery was desired just because of negative body image issues.

Heather Creekmore [00:12:34]:

Of course, it doesn't have anything to do with, like, reconstructive surgery or anything like that. But if you think you need plastic surgery because you don't like a certain part of your body, these researchers actually found that by increasing agency, you can diminish your desire for it. That's how powerful this is. Another example of, you know, telling ourselves, like, that we're not allowed things, not having agency, came up in the coaching call I did with Presli. If you listened a few weeks ago, Presli said something and she indicated an area in her life where she doesn't have agency yet. She said she believed that other women, thinner women, were “allowed”, was the word she used, to eat whatever they wanted to eat. But that she had to watch it. She had to restrict, and she had put a constraint on herself that wasn't actually grounded in reality.

Heather Creekmore [00:13:24]:

Right? She had put these imaginary limits on herself because she lacked agency. These imaginary constraints are sometimes referred to as lateral thinking. We accept explanations for how things work or how things are because it's the story that we repeat to ourselves over and over again. And the narrative, it stops us from living free. The narrative in our head dictates the way we think about what we can do and what we cannot do. Another way we talk about this is the term limiting beliefs. You see, the more agency you have, the more resourceful you can be. Because you can focus on what you can do, a positive outlook, instead of what you can't do.

Heather Creekmore [00:14:14]:

You are thinking, acting, and moving from a place of freedom, instead of from a place of bondage. You haven't put those extra constraints on yourself that come with those limiting beliefs or lack of agency. In other words, you get to choose how you act. You are not simply acted upon. You're not a victim. People with low agency experience common challenges when trying to make sound decisions. Right? It's a really scary thing in a lot of ways to make a decision independently when you have low agency and you rely so much on all the, I'm gonna say it this way, “adults” around you to tell you what a good decision is or a bad decision. So the person with low agency may procrastinate.

Heather Creekmore [00:15:02]:

They may obsess over the details. They may worry excessively during the process, the worry warts, staying up all night riddling around the decision. They may lack confidence, so they may just be risk averse. Or the opposite is, they're thinking maybe too fast, and they may be impulsive. For those of you who are in that impulsive category, you know exactly how this works. You act impulsively, but then you regret it later, and maybe then you go to obsessing over the details or worrying excessively about what you just did. Can you see how clearly this connects to eating disorder issues? Many women with eating disorders come from a background where they didn't have agency. Like I mentioned before, it may be that they didn't have control over anything in their lives, or it may just have been that mom tightly controlled food.

What Happens When You’re Not Free

Heather Creekmore [00:15:54]:

A little aside here, like, this is why I cringe when moms tell me that they put their child's snacks for the week in a little Tupperware container so when they're gone, they're gone. These little tips and tricks, oh, they can be so damaging to our kids. Setting them up to feel like food is scarce, creating a disordered relationship with food where the child doesn't feel any freedom or agency around their food choices. 

So what happens when you're not free? Well, one option is you may restrict, or you may restrict and binge, or you may obsess over food because it's forbidden, or you've just never had enough of it to feel free around it. Similarly, remember how we were talking about impulsivity? We don't feel like we have agency in our lives that connects to our food choices, and we don't feel like we're free to choose. We feel like this burden that we shouldn't choose or we aren't allowed to have something, And we live under that pressure until we explode for lack of freedom. It's kinda like we do what a lot of kids do who grew up in a controlling environment. Maybe this was you.

Heather Creekmore [00:17:02]:

We rebel. And rebellion in this arena can look like eating all the food we've told ourselves not to eat. It can look like restricting. And, you know, you're supposed to eat. It's good for you to eat. And oftentimes, it's impulsive too. It's like there's this internal pressure that builds and builds and it gets so strong. We have no option but to explode and eat all the things, binge the pantry.

Heather Creekmore [00:17:23]:

And rebellion, friend, that's not freedom either. Again, it's just a lack of agency. Teenagers rebel because they're not old enough to make their own decisions. But once you become an adult, you are. You are old enough to make your own decisions. You are old enough to decide what feels good for your body to eat and what doesn't. And that's why I caution women who are transitioning from maybe chronic dieting or following different plans to intuitive eating to not think that they've mastered it right away. Because most of the time, you have to go through this transition, like, this rebellious period, for lack of a better way to put it.

Heather Creekmore [00:18:03]:

And during this period, you're not really making choices of what to eat based on what sounds or taste or feels good to your body necessarily. A lot of times, you're just eating all the things that you haven't been allowed to eat in order to prove to yourself that you are free to do so. You're proving to yourself that you're not gonna die or nothing bad is gonna instantly happen to you if you eat a donut, even though donuts have been on that illegal list forever. So in many ways, part of the process of becoming an intuitive eater is just growing up. It's becoming an adult. It's learning that you do have agency to choose what is best for your body to eat so that you can choose to have the piece of birthday cake if you want the piece of birthday cake, or so that you can order a salad when everyone else is ordering burgers because you just feel like you need some vegetables. You have the freedom to listen to your body and not worry about whether or not your mom will think you're eating too much or your husband will judge you for eating dessert. Agency is important.

Heather Creekmore [00:19:03]:

Not just important for helping your relationship with food, but it's also important for helping you see yourself properly. In 1 Corinthians 11:26 through 30, Paul talks about self examination and self judgment. The context here is actually communion, whether or not you have some work to do before you take the Lord's supper, before you eat the bread and drink the cup. But Paul talks about examining ourselves, and the word examined here is the word “diakrino”. So Bible scholars say that this verse could be translated best “if we took a proper view” or “if we formed a just estimate of ourselves”. And this means to separate thoroughly, discriminate, make to differ, judge thoroughly. So it seems like these verses in first Corinthians are really talking about a certain type of self judgment that Paul encourages. But the kind of self judgment that Paul encourages is not this, like, down on yourself. I'm doing so bad.

Heather Creekmore [00:20:04]:

It's one that involves seeing ourselves accurately rather than seeking to condemn ourselves. It works alongside God's accurate judgment. Right? Because God can see us and judge us accurately to make us more and more like him. But what happens to us when we don't have agency is that we let other people's opinions of us determine our self judgment. So we aren't examining ourselves rightly. Neither are we letting the Lord examine us and learning from that. Instead, we're allowing others, again, sometimes authority figures, sometimes it's just the crowd or even just the way other people act or eat or dress or look, we allow all those things to determine how we feel about or examine ourselves. And it's a childlikeness that affects us when we should be able to be adults.

Heather Creekmore [00:21:00]:

We should be able to be grown ups, where, again, we are just a victim to our thoughts or fears or other people's opinions. You know, I like to say that you don't have to believe everything you think. You also don't have to believe everything you feel. Feelings can be great indicators that we can be curious about, but you don't have to believe them. Late in the summer, I did an episode where I talked about how feeling afraid of not being accepted or being rejected is not actually the same as being rejected. Right? And some of us are trying to fix a problem we don't have. We're trying to make sure we won't be rejected because our feelings are scaring us into thinking that this is a huge challenge, but no one has actually rejected us. It's all just in the realm of our fears and our feelings.

What Happens When You Don’t Grow Up

Heather Creekmore [00:21:46]:

And so I wonder if this is why, as believers, again, we have to grow up. If you wanna defeat your body image issues, my friend, you have to grow up. You have to grow in spiritual maturity so that you don't believe every fear and feeling, and so you can instead stand on the truth. You don't have to believe what you think of yourself and bow to your own opinions of yourself. Growing up means that you understand that your opinions are not always right, and you can submit to God's opinions about you as more true than your opinions about you. You see, children are very self focused. They don't think rationally and logically. They don't say, mom, you are far wiser than I.

Heather Creekmore [00:22:30]:

So I will understand and submit to you wanting me to go to bed at 9 PM instead of staying up all night to play video games. I know you know best. No, kids don't do that. Instead, they kick and they scream, and maybe they sneak out of bed to see if they can get back on that gaming console. They believe that they know what's best, and they only think about themselves in a short term way. They don't think about the fact that if they stay up all night, they'll have a hard time getting up for school, or then it might hurt their brain development. No. They're not thinking about any of these things.

Heather Creekmore [00:22:54]:

They want instant reward. They are impulsive, and they are highly affected by what other people think of them. And friend, again, that's why we have to grow up. That's why we can't be children anymore. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:11, when I was a child, I spoke like a child. I felt like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

Heather Creekmore [00:23:19]:

The Corinthians are having some issues with acting like children. They are acting in selfish, flesh gratifying ways. And Paul is telling them that their fundamental problem is they need to just grow up. And for some of us, our fundamental problem is we need to just grow up. We need to stop being afraid of what other people think. We need to recognize the authority of God in our lives above all other authority figures. Trust ourselves to lean not on our understanding, but acknowledge him and let him lead our paths instead of being led down the path that everyone else wants us to follow. We need to stop believing everything we think, or believing everything we feel and submitting to those feelings.

Heather Creekmore [00:24:00]:

Allowing those feelings to dictate our moods, or our demeanor, the way we treat or act towards others because we feel bad about our bodies. Come on, friend. I love you too much to let you act like such a baby. Grow up. God made you on purpose for a purpose. Stop agreeing with the enemy about who he says you are or what he says about your body. And instead, agree with the Lord who says he chose you. He picked you.

Heather Creekmore [00:24:26]:

He loves you. He has things for you to do that are far more important than a continued quest to get a better body. And, friend, it's from this place of adulthood that you can find freedom. It's from this place of adulthood that you can recognize that you are a separate person from your parents or your husband or the friends around you, and that you are free to make choices for yourself. Adults make their own choices. Adults also understand boundaries and the concept of accountability. If we’re following Jesus, we can realize that part of being an adult is recognizing our need for other people. But we need others with us whom we can be on equal standing with.

Heather Creekmore [00:25:04]:

We tend to look at the world as if everyone has one up from us, and that's a problem. We need people in our lives that we feel equal to so that we can offer accountability and encouragement to each other. I mean, this feeling of feeling like you're one step down from everyone really sets you up for a life of comparison too. Either you feel like everyone else is the adult and you're the child trying to catch up, or you try to compensate by one-upping everyone to prove that you're better than them. But it's not proving that you're an adult. Instead, we just need to relate to other people as equals. Get comfortable relating to other people as fellow grown ups. See yourself as a grown up.

Heather Creekmore [00:25:43]:

In the next episode, we're gonna talk a little bit more about how you grow up. What does it mean to spiritually grow up? What does it mean to become an adult? What does it mean to mature? And like I said at the beginning, this is easier for some of us than others. Some of us are just still kinda trapped. I talk to many women who are still just in complete bondage to their mother's opinion of them. And if that's you, friend, again, hear no shame or condemnation. We can work together. We can get you some help. There are ways to overcome that.

Heather Creekmore [00:26:15]:

But first, you have to see the problem. First, you have to recognize that you are acting like a child, that you're not free to be a grown up, that you're not free to make your own decisions. And then from there, we can start to do the work. So you can gradually feel empowered, not through self empowerment, but through the power of the Holy Spirit to mature and draw closer to the Lord so that he can help you grow up in him, which is the most important way to grow up. I hope this has encouraged you today. Hey. Come back next time, and we'll talk about this some more. Thanks for listening.

Heather Creekmore [00:26:52]:

Go to improve body image dot com and check out all the good stuff there if this is a brand new concept to you. Hey. There's tons of podcast episodes on body image issues, body image idolatry, so go check all this out. Also, we have merch, cute hats and shirts and all kinds of other things that say compare to who on it. It's a great message to where, especially to the gym, but really anywhere, right, to stop comparison, deadness tracks. So thanks for listening again. I hope something today has helped you stop comparing and start living. Bye bye.