On this guest episode we were joined by the host of The Balanced Factor Podcast and mental health advocate, Emily Newton. Emily is passionate about helping other young girls and women find balance and love their body though all of its stages. Growing up Emily always played sports, she really became serious in high school when she joined the Track and Field team and took up pole vaulting. She decided to take her passion even further and pursue pole vaulting in college. This is where her relationship with food and working out became toxic.
relationship to body and food
Playing a sport in college changed her entire outlook on her body and feelings toward exercise and food. Her sport became her life, and she was thrown into a toxic environment of competition, food regulation and even received comments about her body daily. She never even noticed many of the things her coaches were pointing out about her body. Since she began lifting for her sport, her body responded to the hours of working out by bulking up and her coaches made her start to track her food in order to lose weight. At a young age, she was forced to look at her body like something was wrong with it, and the only way to make her “look better” was to restrict her food intake. This led to an unhealthy relationship with food and viewing foods as “bad” and was undereating for the amount of physical work she was doing every day.
the effects of stress on the body
She was under so much physical and mental pressure, and her body knew it could no longer stand the stress. She felt uncomfortable in her own body and was feeling so rundown and mentally struggled every day with how she looked. She knew she had to do something to put an end to all the stress but was so conflicted between helping herself and her body + letting her team and coaches down by pulling out of the sport.
In the end, Emily decided that the best thing for her was to leave the team and take a well needed break. However, the stress didn’t instantly go away because she still had to live with her teammates for the remainder of the year. She was extremely lonely and felt out of place, but learned how to take care of herself and face difficult situations head on.
Looking back, she realized how damaging this time of her life was to her body and mind. It took her quite a bit of time to regulate her body and to learn to accept herself. She mentioned how everything still affects her today but not to the same extreme, and now she can look back and see how far she has come to finding balance.
finding her willpower
She learned a lot about herself and her willpower as well. She had to learn how to pull herself out of difficult situations and that sometimes you must choose yourself and your health over pleasing other people. This point is so important, whenever your mind or body is telling you that something isn’t right, you have to listen to it and respect what it needs. Sometimes in today’s culture it is easy for us to shut off those feelings and over-power our body and tell our brain that we are fine. But it’s important to do mental and physical body checks to understand how we are really dealing with the stress of life.
finding balance
Emily said that when she finally found balance, she actually sat back and looked at everything she went through; restricting in college, not being able to exercise when she got sick during covid, and once she finally removed herself from the exercise and food restriction, she realized that she “didn’t have to kill herself to look good”. On social media, we see these fit girls, working out for hours and eating very little, but sometimes all our bodies need is extra love and taking time to rest, do more low impact exercise or eating the foods we really want!
Finding balance is so important. Constantly thinking about food or exercising for hours will put so much stress on our bodies and mind, that it will end up causing us more harm than good. You can’t feel your best all the time, if you aren’t caring for your body when it needs rest. Spend extra time in bed, say yes to going out with your friends, and if you feel like waking up at 6am for a run, then go for it! Just listen to your body and what it needs in that moment :)
xo
Michaela
If you want to hear more about Emily and how she's found balance listen here!
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