Your body is talking to you, are you listening? | Lizzie Braicks-Rinker | TEDxUofW

Today I'm excited to talk to you about wellness culture and what it really means to be healthy when you hear the term healthy, what comes to mind? What do you consider health? For some reason, I've always been the type of person who is drawn like a moth to a flame to subject my

body

to intense physical discomfort. I'm the friend who if you tell me you went to an exercise class that made you feel like you were going to throw up, I have to try it. to know what it was like when I was in college I was a rower and my whole life everything I did revolved around being healthy and being an athlete.

You could say I was in my physical best. He obviously worked out all the time, but he was also a very die-hard vegan. He had an elaborate regimen of vitamins and supplements that he took every day. He carried my emotional support water bottle everywhere he went and was a cliché healthy person. However, the reason I started to really think about What It Means to Be Well is that despite being super healthy on paper as an athlete, I felt terrible, my friends, I had panic attacks almost every week. I had this really weird chronic pain that no one could understand and I wasn't feeling it.

During my periods I just felt bad, but I was very healthy, right. I kept saying something didn't feel right and I couldn't really articulate what it was, so this is a photo of me from halfway through college, my brother Steve had just turned 15. and I was about to start high school and this is what I looked like in college all the time, this is my personal uniform, it was head to toe sportswear and that's only partly because I was an athlete, the other reason was When you're an athlete you can get away with wearing the same clothes every day and no one notices that you're not taking care of

your

self because I was incredibly depressed I was incredibly sad I wasn't taking a shower I wasn't washing my hair I wasn't changing my clothes, I wore those shorts a lot and the reason is because nine days before my dad took this photo, I moved into my apartment, our mom Becky died after a very long, hard battle with cancer and let me tell you, it sucked.

It is incredibly disorienting to see someone you love get sick and die. It was incredibly disorienting to go through that experience when I was a college athlete because a part of my life revolved entirely around optimizing my

body

, my health and my well-being, and I was seeing evidence every day of that work, yet in the other side of my life, my mom did everything right, she was healthy, she was active and yet she got sick and there was nothing we could do about it, because of my mom's illness because of my experience as an athlete, I made a whole career really exploring what it means to be healthy, so the last 10 years I've dedicated to health and wellness and what it means, so I'll give you some definitions, okay?

The first is Health, the World Health Organization defines Health as having no diseases in the body, so in that case I was healthy, Mary, a toxin was approaching this. I was obsessed with being clean and you know, doing all the right exercises, but I couldn't. I don't really explain what was going on and what I discovered in my work is that what I didn't have while I was healthy is that I didn't have any such Holistic Wellness. Wellness is a trend that is widespread and rooted. In this idea that we are a whole person, not just our bodies, so instead of putting all our eggs in the physical basket, we begin to look at our lives from the health of our environment, look at all our circumstances, everything we experience . experiences and really take those things into account to consider what we need and I'm not saying that we are not aware that this is all part of Wellbeing, but I am saying that it is a little more like this, right? that these things are important but they are like little sprinkles on top they are not the main course I have been working in Wellness for 10 years and I have trained hundreds of athletes and I have seen a couple of things that are always true The first, from a point of view athletic, is that if an athlete does not have a balanced and holistic life, their performance will fail, it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when, it's incredibly difficult to keep it together and worry about I don't know. go a little faster on the rowing machine if you're waiting to find out if

your

mom came out of surgery if you don't have a safe home life, it's very difficult to perform Michael Phelps and Simone Biles are two great examples of this.

True, they are incredible athletes at their physical peak, but at some point that didn't matter. True, their personal experiences and the other parts of their Wellbeing caused them to not be able to do the other thing that I see when we only focus on the physical. wellness is an identity crisis, this can happen for many different reasons, it can be because an athlete gets injured and all of a sudden he can't do this thing that was like his whole life and he may never be able to do it. again, um, or maybe they don't know why they are valued outside of their body, the last thing I see us all doing when it comes to wellness is we all shoot ourselves in the foot, so when I say I'm

talking

about all the things that said I should really do more of XYZ and it might not even be something you like.

This happens to me a lot. I really like running. I am a great runner. I love running and people will discover that. this on me and he comes up to me and tells me I should really run again. I used to be a great runner. I wonder, oh, what happened? Did you get injured? Did you have a child? They say no, I hate running. I just really hate running and I'm wondering why do you think you should do it? There are literally so many other ways you can exercise, but this is what we do to ourselves, we tell ourselves we should do all these things.

It should be learning to listen to our bodies, so in theory I knew this was important. I knew that wellness should include not just the physical but a more holistic picture of our lives, but I didn't realize until 2017. And when I say hit me, I mean I was sitting at a traffic light and a car rear-ended me. the car in front of me, so I went from posting handstand photos on Instagram to actually not being able to keep my head up for more than a couple of hours due to the extent of my injury and, for the first week After this car accident, I realized that I had an incredibly toxic relationship with my body and with fitness.

I was just looking at both things from what it looked like exactly what my how my body looked or what it could do I had no idea what my body needed I wasn't

listening

to myself at all and the more I started

listening

to my body and I was forced to do it because there was no other way, it felt more like going back to an old friend a couple of months after my car accident. I got married and we went on vacation for the first time as a married couple, even though we had been together for about seven years.

I think at that point we had already been together for a long time and all of our friends were making this Google document with all the food they were going to make and all these amazing recipes and I had been vegan for seven years and I sat next to my husband. in this cabin and I looked at him and I thought I can't do it anymore and he was trying to act calmly like oh oh, you can really do whatever you want, you know, I support you in whatever, but also like, do you want to? let me make you some bacon um and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being vegan but at that point I stopped because I realized I don't know how to feed myself and I realized I didn't like that food and I felt terrible because I wasn't getting the energy and nutrients I needed, so it forced me to listen to my body now.

Why is it important to listen to your body when you were an athlete and coaches said you need to listen to your body? You're going to end up like me and have back problems or something. I would just roll my eyes and ignore it, but I want you to instead think of it like this, your body is your home. so raise your hand if you've ever been in a house that's been renovated or just like they're painting a wall yeah we've all experienced that and it sucks it's like looking at your arms it sucks and you can't. relax, you can't get comfortable even if it's like a small little thing, this is what you're doing to yourself when we treat our bodies like these constant things that need to be fixed, we constantly put ourselves in a state of renewal, so actually you never feel comfortable in your house, you are never really thinking about what you want to do with that plant or that strange corner that receives strange light.

Also, wellness culture tells us that you need to have a really nice house, you need to have an immaculate garden, but since you may not have any money left to put anything in your house, you may have furniture, but at least it will look nice. on the outside and why is this important? I know what the purpose of wellness is: just losing weight, just looking a certain way or being able to go a little faster in the water, or the purpose of wellness and the balance of all these different things. maybe I don't know how to make your life a little better instead of just your body because I would say that how you feel is much more important than how you look, we can't control how we look, we can't control the beauty standards in our culture, But you have something to say about how you feel and I don't know.

I think you deserve to feel really good, but why is this happening? I want to delve into all the reasons we do this to ourselves. because this is not unique to me, it is unique to wellness culture, but fortunately once you know what is happening in wellness culture, it is very easy to start redirecting yourself, so the first thing we have is the influence that influences in this hustle culture. What tells us as a society that we need to do more but in less time, hustle culture also tells us that taking a break or quitting something is a failure, which is why people will run all the time even though they hate it.

They are tired even though it makes them miserable because they feel like quitting is a failure when maybe you just need to change your routine. Next we have a diet culture. Diet culture is everywhere and it is the belief and social expectation that we are a more worthy person if our bodies are a certain way, here we also have a privilege, that is, people who have smaller bodies are treated like differently than other people. An example of this is the last months of my mother's life, she was very fragile. She had lost a lot of weight and couldn't drive so I had to take her to the supermarket which is like her nightmare because she didn't like me driving but we got to the supermarket and this woman saw her from across the road and ran up to her and told her.

He said: Becky. I haven't seen you in years. You look amazing. You look so good. You are so healthy. Good for you, girl, for being so healthy. What did you do? My mom was like me. literally dying, but I guess you could call it like the cancer diet or something if you're looking for a name for it, but this is what we do to each other, we assume that if you look a certain way you must be having a certain experience and that's simply not true, you can't really tell anything about someone's well-being or their lived experiences and their circumstances by the way they look, the next thing that hits us is the illusory truth effect, that's when you see something that times you know it's fake or maybe a little ridiculous but you start seeing it over and over again so you can convince yourself it's real social media is a great example of this, you can know that Skinny Tea is just laxatives in hot water, but if you see people posting about them 10 times in a day, especially a celebrity, you might start to think that you really need them, right?

We are doing these things because we see it and are told it all the time. time even though it may not actually be what we need or may not be good for us, the ultimate reason why this happens is the welfare industrial complex, which is this really manipulative combination of welfare and capitalism and everything that I just mentioned, but it is essentially strength. that tells us what our bodies are supposed to look like, what we're supposed to eat, what the right workouts are, and all of this just encourages us not to listen to our bodies and not trust our own needs or honor this holistic image. of Our Lives, so would you prefer to live in this house?

It is in constant renewal. There is no carpet. There are things everywhere that will probably fall on you. Do you want to feel like this at home or do you want to feel like this? I would say that we deserve to feel like this at home, we need to move from a version of Wellness that looks like this to maybe something that looks a little more like this, honoring that things come and go, there are seasons we know our bodies age without matter what. your body will need different things at different times just because you are a human being and you are alive and when we do this, when we look at wellness more holistically, when we start to consider all thedifferent things that someone might be experiencing or going through or able to be a lot more compassionate one of the reasons I've always been really frustrated with wellness culture is because my brother Steve Steve is autistic, he loves doing the same thing everyone Every day, he knows exactly what he likes to do and exactly what he wants to do and he has no filter, so Steve is not going to do something just because he is supposed to do it, he will do things that make him feel good and he has a lot of very good routines. established rigid rules that will help you be a better coworker that will help you stay really balanced and calm, which will help you feel good. really nourished if we just look at wellness from this perspective, there's not a lot of places for Steve, but if we take the good or out of wellness and add a and wellness can also start to look like this ABS and the smoothies that we looked at before, it could include going to a concert, Taco Bell breakfast, right, maybe it's skating, those are the things that light you up and bring you joy, and I think Steve deserves to see himself included in wellness and deserves to see a world of wellness that is designed to For him, being an athlete was very frustrating because I was constantly in this world of peak physical performance and I loved it, but I also didn't see how it was inclusive or accessible and that's why we have to consider holistic well-being and we have to start seeing our health as something more than our body, but everything that we experience, because I'm really not sure what my version of Wellbeing would be like if it weren't for my family, if it wasn't for my brother and my dad and my mom I don't know what it would be like there is no way to that I can anticipate or predict it but I have the feeling that it would be much less compassionate those are the things that make a life not only what you weigh well you do not exist only to lose weight and die or to fit into a certain size of pants or to be able to do There are certain things I love, like I mentioned, going to ridiculous exercise classes, but we have to consider other parts of our being. because at my mom's memorial service we didn't talk about her pant size or her dedication to her Peloton classes, we talked about how fiercely she defended Steve and her love of Christmas, we talked about how much she unfortunately listens to Kenny G everything time. time we talk about her love for reading we talk about how she met my dad because she was a friend of my aunt in college those are the things we talk about because those are the things that make a life I don't know if you remember but before I asked you to think about two or three things that come to mind when we think about Wellness or when we think about health.

I hope that maybe you can be a little more compassionate with yourself, maybe you can say it. I know I'm going to skip this workout and rest because that's what I need. It also gives you more compassion for the people around you. You don't look at the person in front of you who is buying a cart full of processed foods as if it's unhealthy. When we've considered them through a holistic wellness lens, we think maybe this person is doing this because they don't have access to refrigeration, maybe their coworker has gained a little weight recently because he's overcoming some eating disorders. and your friend who works three jobs to try to make ends meet probably doesn't want to hear that she just needs to take a bath and take some time for herself that's not helpful, we need to consider our entire being and everyone else's when we consider Wellbeing so that we can all have a little more compassion for ourselves and our bodies and just enjoy our lives.

Today I leave you with a quote from my favorite poem and I told my body Softly I want to be. Your friend took a deep breath and responded. I've been waiting for this my whole life, thank you.