How to Fall In Love With Your Over 40 Body

How can we truly accept your over 40 body?! Our bodies are NOT what they used to be, and today my guest and I are going to dive into this a topic. How can not only accept your over 40 body but also LOVE that you are over 40 and love what your body has become?  So… Let’s dive into the things you are thinking but you don’t want to admit when it comes to this topic at hand.  

I know for me personally; my body gave me the finger after turning 40!  My body just stopped! One morning I woke up and was like what happened to my body? I mean… I know my logic and feelings wires got crossed and I KNOW it didn’t happen overnight, but it sure felt like it had! What really happened instead was that it was a slow drip… yet it’s something you only see once you can’t easily button your favorite pants. And one day we are like how did this happen.

Nina Manolson sat down with me to talk about all these things and more and it really was so enlightening, and she knows her stuff! Nina Manolson is a Body-Peace® coach. She helps women end the war with food and body and finally feel truly at home in their body—as it is. Nina’s Body-Peace work is all in service of helping women to get off the diet roller-coaster, and into a compassionate and powerful way of eating & living which creates a positive long-lasting change in and with their bodies!

Okay, so I know that there are really so many factors that come into play. Our perception of ourselves and how we perceive ourselves on the inside is a big part.  Another can be that we are a bit shifted. Aches in our bodies or knees start to pop up, or our hips feel funny.   Sometimes there is a yelling in our body that gets our attention that things are different.  All of those things whether it is our reflection in the mirror, aches or pains, doctors more often… all those things that come with having a body that has lived for a decade or 2, have us come face to face with the reality that our bodies change!

I know it’s basic knowledge that our bodies are changing, we know this, but it’s the media that is telling us “OH NO do not change”. “Do not let your bodies change.” 

It takes a lot of work and a lot of support. Let’s stop the comparison game. Celebrities, their bodies are their products. That is what they focus on.  While most of us are focusing on other things, they are the place of our focus like our children, our jobs, our family or community, etc.  That is where our focus is so we cannot compare ourselves to people we see on TV.  We have other things here to do!

Expectations. 
When we put such high expectations on ourselves, they become wrapped in stress, and now we are messing with our hormones.  If nothing else has taught us over the last 15 years, hormones are disrupted by stress!  So, if we say we are supposed to have a body of so and so or of us at 20, there is so much stress that it actually disrupts our own relationships with our bodies and keeps us in that fight or flight mode which is that sympathetic nervous system activation and keeps us out of the parasympathetic which is the rest and digest!

Most of our feeling good is in the rest and digest. And we you are comparing, feeling you aren’t good enough you are in that fight or flight mode.  In that mode all the time is exhausting, and women just feel more depleted.  When we start talking about the expectations, we have on ourselves. That is heavy. You’d never ask anyone to do the things you’d expect yourself to do.

How do we nourish ourselves and how do we get in the way of nourishing ourselves?
Have you noticed that nourishing yourself gets pushed off.   Let’s flip the script on that and you NEED to put nourishment!  This means slowing down, taking time and putting your oxygen mask on before someone else.  We have to look at where you are not being taken care of? Where are you slipping through the cracks?

Nourish is such a rich word. But we ask so many people where you are falling through the cracks with nourishing yourselves and then again, our lists start with where I need nourishment! Start with just giving yourself 15 minutes a day and don’t worry about a list. Sit for 15 minutes to do something for you! 15 minutes just to be. Even if it’s just sitting in silence! That will begin to give you the nourishment you are longing for.

Emotional Labor. 
You say something a lot of people don’t understand the word and that is emotional labor.  Emotional labor is primarily a female thing. It’s rare that it is a man. But emotional labor is all the little things that we as women take care of that we don’t think about.  Laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, holidays, Christmas, birthdays, getting kids from here to there. The nuance of life.  I think of that as the mental load too. The list we are holding in our head that never gets written down. That we are thinking about or what we should do.

You spend so much time nurturing others that you seem to always quietly sit our needs  the sidelines. Be a good steward to this amazing body of yours!

As our body ages, we need more, “I am here.” Day after day. We could get away with it when we were 20… our bodies had elasticity to it. But as we age, our body needs that sense of consistency. I am present, I am here, I am for you, I am with you, and I am not doing to you.

Being Body Current.  
I want to get current, where is my other story?  That is where we want to be with your body. What is the story now? What is with this body?  Sometimes to get current, we have to go back and say, “Woah.. This did a number on my body!”  (or that birth, that miscarriage or infertility, a care accident, illness or injury.) Sometimes we have to go back and look at the important scenes in the story of our bodies!

Our bodies are the stories of our lives. We hold the story of our life and body and that is why it is so important to listen to her.  Getting body current! I have to play catch up and down where I am right now! So many of us want to be who we were when we were 30. But we aren’t, instead we have to see how we feel right now, the age we are at and then be okay with that!

Body Piece Poem – My covid body and it touches on the idea that our bodies are ever changing. – Nina Manolson
My COVID body.
I’ve had so many my COVID bodies padded for survival.
My summer body, strong from swimming.
My Mom body, stretched from growing a person.
My wedding body, small from photo fear.
My injured body, immobile from pain.
My surgery body, scarred from fighting my winter body, soft from hibernating.
My 20s body, fearless in motion.
My teen body, heavy with shame.
Every day, a different body.
Every day, a different body adapting to this one, precious life.
How many bodies have you had?
There are so many different bodies and how do we engage in our current body? How do we do it with compassion so that we don’t feel like we are in a war with ourselves where we can actually feel good in our own skin!!!

It’s about taking this giant step back…. And allowing yourself to slow down. Allowing yourself to have breathing room so we can figure out where we are.  It is taking a step back and really looking at that holistic perspective. Where am I at with my relationship with my body? Where am I at with my relationship with food? Is this a relationship that’s working with me? Or am I constantly feeling bad about this relationship?  Am I really in the process of working on this relationship and healing this relationship? And it’s very important to know that we can!

Ladies make sure you take a pause and be able to really get into your body because it’s not fighting you, we are fighting it!

What is the one thing that makes you feel magical? 
Water.. I swim at Walden as much as I can. I take baths. I go for isolation floats. I drink a lot of water. Water to me.. Gets me back into my flow. Reminds me of the fluidity of how I want to feel in my body. It makes me feel connected to the juiciness of life and pleasure!

LINKS  

Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/kimbarnesjeffersoncoach 

Facebook Group:
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Website:
https://kimbarnesjefferson.com/ 

Podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fit-girl-magic-healthy-living-for-women-over-40/id1476883661  

Drink Surely Wines: Use Promo Code kimbarnesjefferson to get 15% off
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Learn more about Nina: https://ninamanolson.com/ 

FREE Practicing Body-Peace Journal: https://ninamanolson.com/body-peace/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NinaManolsonBodyPeace 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ninamanolson/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ninamanolson 

Free Nourished Woman Nation group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/nourishedwomannation 

Body-Peace® Poems: https://ninamanolson.com/body-poems/ 
Free Resources: https://ninamanolson.com/freebies/ 

Body-Peace Seekers:  https://ninamanolson.com/bodypeaceseekers