We have been told for our whole lives that our weight equals health which equals our worth. Have you ever stopped to ponder how this diet culture mentality has been engrained into our relationship with our bodies and our health? Just because diet culture tells us that thinner equals healthier, it does not mean it is the truth.
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Key Takeaways
If You Want To Start Asking Yourself The Important Questions, You Should:
- Acknowledge what your relationship with the scale is like and how it is serving you
- Shift your focus away from weight loss and towards the many other benefits of gaining health
- Ask yourself what expectation you are comparing yourself too and when it is going to be enough
- Focus on how you want to feel and the additions health gains will bring to your life
Eff The Scale
I used to let the number I saw on the scale completely dictate if I had a bad day or a good day. Like so many women out there, I had a toxic relationship with the scale, and I thought that if I could achieve my ‘goal’, I would be happy. This obsession extended into how I viewed other people, and I was buying into the story that intentional weight loss via restriction was the only path.
Weight loss can be a beneficial byproduct of improving your health, but it is not the only measure that matters. Gaining health is about feeling better in your body at whatever size, instead of the number on the scale.
How To Find Sustainable Health
When people prioritize their health, they often assume that it is the weight loss that makes them feel better. In reality, it is the habits, behaviors, and changes you are making in your life that make you feel better, and weight loss can sometimes be a byproduct of those healthy habits.
It is not inherently wrong to want to change your body; you have the autonomy to do what feels right for you. But to make health changes work for you, think about how you can stay focused, how you want to feel, your deeper why, and the habits you can commit to consistently. Instead of forcing yourself to stay motivated based on the number on your scale, focus on how you want to feel in your body, and you can gain truly sustainable health.
What did you think when you read the title of today’s podcast? Share your gut reaction with me in the comments below.
In This Episode
- Why the way our society views body weight leads to us judging other people (8:33)
- All of the ways that improving your health can make you feel better without weight loss (11:20)
- How to ask yourself what you are truly seeking and when it is going to be enough (15:45)
- What to do if you want to make body changes in a way that feels right for you (23:30)
- Questions to ask yourself to start unraveling the nuances of wanting to lose weight (28:30)
Quotes
“When I criticize the diet industry and diet culture, I am not criticizing the individual dieter, the person who goes on the diet. Because they are simply trying to exist in a system that is constantly reinforcing that weight loss is ‘the path’.” (10:41)
“It’s not even normal in our world to think about ‘well, what else is there besides weight loss?’ because that is the only thing that is ever presented to us from the diet industry.” (15:22)
“There are often times lots of changes that people were making, but they go back to it being the weight loss that helped them feel better. When in fact, a lot of the time it was the behaviors and habits they had changed that were actually making them feel better and improving their quality of life.” (23:01)
“We need to connect to how we want to feel because feelings drive actions.” (25:26)
“We need to consider that when we gain health, weight loss is sometimes, but not always, an outcome. And losing weight doesn’t always automatically confer better health.” (35:57)
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Is It Wrong To Want To Lose Weight? FULL TRANSCRIPT
Steph Gaudreau
Okay, it’s time to get brutally honest. When you read the title of today’s podcast, Is it wrong to want to lose weight? What did you think? What was your gut reaction? Did you shake your head? Did you think, oh, here she goes, did you think yes, that’s what I really want? Or did you think every time I think about this, I just feel so shitty about myself? Well, today on this podcast, I’m going to attempt to tease apart some of the threads that weave together into the tapestry that makes up the story we’ve been told about weight loss and give you some practical things that you can do to really get a little bit clearer on this question for yourself. Ultimately, I’m not here to provide you with an answer. But what I am going to do is leave you with some questions that I want you to explore a little bit deeper. Let’s go ahead and dive in.
The Listen To Your Body podcast has one bold mission, to help change-making women like you give themselves radical permission to listen to their bodies get free with food and fitness, and channel their energy, and be a force for good in the world. I’m a certified intuitive eating counselor, nutritional therapy practitioner, and strength coach Steph Gaudreau. This weekly show brings you discussions around dropping diet and exercise extremes, letting your inner wisdom lead and taking up space from inclusive body neutrality, health at every size, nondiet nutrition perspective, we’ll examine how diet culture and the patriarchy keep women busy and distracted by the quest for body perfection, and how we can break free to live life on our own terms. It’s bound to be fiery, and ultimately, to make you think, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app. And let’s dive in.
Lately, on social media, I’ve been talking about some things that make some folks feel really uncomfortable, and frankly defensive. And here’s the thing, whenever the topic of weight loss comes up, it is bound to be a loaded conversation. Because we’ve been told our whole entire lives, that our weight equals our health and our weight equals our worth, especially as women and women-identifying folks. Just notice in this episode, if at all, strong emotions start to rise up in you, because it’s probably a giant flashing neon sign that there’s something to look deeper into here. I will preface this show by saying that my job is not to tell you what the answer is.
And on the flip side, as an intuitive eating counselor, what I teach is not intentional weight loss. intuitive eating is a framework that says you may not experience any body changes or your body might change, your weight could go up or down or stay the same. It’s really a weight-neutral perspective on improving your relationship with food and your health. All that being said, you have the autonomy to decide for yourself what you want to choose. So while I’m presenting this, to try to get you to ask some really important questions, and I don’t teach intentional weight loss, you get to do you, as they say, and you get to drive the boat for yourself. But I hope today’s episode will give you some food for thought. Pun definitely intended, as you start to untangle the threads that make up the story that you’ve and we’ve all been taught about weight loss and what it means about our health and what it means about our worth. So the story generally, generally goes like this, lose weight, get healthier, and there is so there are so many reasons and so many examples of why there might be a correlation. But the causation is where we get lost. And we’re constantly reinforced by the dieting industry and diet culture, that thinner people equal healthier people. And we just know that that’s not automatically the case.
As a society, we focus so much on reducing the number on the scale, it becomes The God to which we prostrate ourselves in this attempt to become healthier we exist for reducing the number on the scale. And that can be achieved through different means water loss, muscle loss, fat loss, a combination of those not eating at all, or eating very little, it might have an impact on our physical body, but what about our mental health, our emotional health, our social connections, and so on and so forth. Ultimately, when we look at it, though, the weight on the scale is how much gravity is pulling down on us. And that becomes our primary focus, above all else, be honest. And I really want you to be honest with yourself about this.
My day, see, if you really, my day used to be completely dictated the tone, and quality of the day and my mood. And whether or not I felt like I was on top of the world, or I felt like I was an utter piece of hot trash was completely dictated by the number on the scale. If the number went down, I was elated. It was like a high of delicious dopamine that made my brain feels so great. And if I’m being truly honest, it dissipated pretty fast, which is why every day I would get back on that scale, sometimes multiple times a day, hoping against all odds that that number would have gone down the day, if the number went up the day it was ruined. I beat myself up, I started down the path to try to cut back, I was constantly running the negative self-talk in my head. And it was just if you thought about the scale as a relationship, this was a toxic relationship. Now, not everybody has that relationship with the scale. But be honest with yourself. Is that what’s going on? Now, obviously, there’s a lot to this. And there are so many layers of things like weight stigma in the medical community and BMI and what we’re being told about health and how it’s only the health of the physical body that we’re so heavily focused on. And then yes, for some people in larger bodies, weight loss feels like it will be a path to safety when you’re in a marginalized body. So I acknowledge that there are many, many layers to this conversation, many of which I do, I don’t have lived experience with. So I just want to say all of that before I get a lot further because it’s not cut and dry.
But we’ve been taught that a lower weight automatically equals better health. I just want you to think about how much that’s been reinforced in your life, whether it’s a workplace weight loss challenge, or it’s the things you were taught in school, or it was the things that your family taught you or it’s the things that you read in a magazine or the things that you learned at your doctor’s office.
And just think about how much that message has been ingrained over and over and over again. And then yes, we’ve been taught by a society that is largely fatphobic, and where there’s so much weight stigma that fatness is bad. And not just that, but that fat people are bad, they’re lazy. They’re unhealthy. They’re unworthy of even the most basic of respect. And on the flip side, thinness and then people are good and virtuous and dedicated. And just earlier today I was on Clubhouse, where I hang out from time to time talking with another practitioner, and she is a doctor and she was talking about how off she was talking about how often she used to judge people. And I think back to when I was at the height of feeling so shitty about myself and so preoccupied with my weight. I was always the one in my head, judging other people on the surface. Of course, I was nice and kind and but underneath at all, I’d go through the grocery store, and I would like to look at other people’s grocery carts and judge it and think, well, should they be eating that or that doesn’t look very healthy.
I was so deep in my own internalized issues that I was judging other people and projecting my insecurities and projecting my biases on other people. So, so far we’ve touched in this episode on, you know, our beliefs that health equals weight, how that’s constantly reinforced by society, and how we can even internalize and carry those things with us such that we make weight loss, the most important goal because we’ve been told, it is the most important goal. And as always, I always say this, but just in this episode, especially when I criticize the diet, industry, and diet culture, I’m not criticizing the individual director, the person who goes on the diet, because they are simply trying to exist in a system that is constantly reinforcing that weight loss is the path. Intentional weight loss, usually via restriction is the way to do things right, go hard, do the fad diet do the huge amount of restriction. And we’re not presenting any other options. So it’s even difficult to ask this question because we have to set the stage with so much nuance and background and looking at a bigger picture if we’re going to be able to answer this question. So yes, like, weight loss is sometimes an outcome of improving your health. That might happen. Weight loss is sometimes an outcome, a byproduct, if you will, of improving your relationship with food.
And sometimes it’s not. So think about if you’ve ever tried to improve your health in a really sustainable and gentle way, or you’re changing your habits and really focusing on behavioral modification. And think about Did you not lose as much weight as you wanted to as quickly as you wanted to, or maybe the scale hardly moved at all. And you felt so much better in so many ways, more energy, better mood, clearer, mind, fewer mood swings, more, feeling stronger, feeling better throughout the day, right? Think about all the things that you started to improve. And if the scale didn’t move, or it didn’t move as quickly, it’s very common to focus on that, because we have a negative bias as humans, and to think nothing got better. Nothing got better because the scale didn’t budge very much.
So yes, of course, we can focus on health. And even in intuitive eating, there’s a 10th principle called to honor your health with gentle nutrition that aims to bring true health for people into perspective and help folks work on this help you work on this in a way that is kind and gentle and not hindering on extremes. And what that really says to me is sustainable. So if you do, focus on improving your health, and weight loss is a byproduct of that’s perhaps a beneficial byproduct, or you might be, you might feel good about that byproduct, you might be happy about that byproduct. But if your goal is to improve your health, you have to think about what are the ways I’m measuring my health? And are those getting better? So for example, am I tracking my blood work? And looking for internal markers? Am I looking for other ways of measuring things? Like maybe I’m seeing how much more fit I am? Because I’m able to walk further or lift more weights or whatever the case might be? What is the quality of my mental, emotional, spiritual, and social health as well? Am I keeping track of those because it’s not just the physical body that impacts your health? So think about those things. And I call that health gain. What if we flip the script from weight loss to health gain? Would that change the perspective? And again, I’m not here to answer this question for you, but rather to present multiple ways of looking at this question.
So thinking about dental nutrition, thinking about gaining health, thinking about the concept of health at every size, which basically says that people in all sizes of bodies are, are allowed to and should have access to and deserve to focus on health-promoting behaviors. It’s not like a lot of internet trolls and other people who seek to purposely misunderstand saying that we’re glorifying obesity. It’s really important to understand that I should, at some point, probably bring on somebody who’s, you know, health at every size expert or Lindo Bacon, maybe we’ll come on the show.
Who’s the sort of the spearhead of the health at every size movement? But there are multiple ways that we can look at this and health gain is such an expansive way of considering this. So it’s not even normal in our world to think about, well, what else is there besides weight loss, because that’s the only thing that’s ever presented to us from the diet industry. Another point that I wanted to bring up here, as we’re sort of going down the list of healthy health and weight are not always equal. How else can we look at our health, right, gaining health, keeping track of all of those things? One other part before I kind of start to bring it back to the question and then give you some questions to think of back. And this is where I get a little bit unpopular. But my lived experience as someone in a straight size body is that many of the people I work with, or who come to me, are also in smaller bodies. And for most of my life, I had a very dysmorphic view of my own body where I wasn’t able to rationally see this, the size of my body, I was always convinced to my body was so much bigger than it actually was.
What I would invite you to ask yourself here, and this is one question you can ask is, what is the expectation that I’m comparing myself to now again, you can decide that you want to pursue this, even if you are in a smaller body? But where does it stop? Ask yourself that, where does it stop? Because a lot of the people I work with are in smaller bodies already, frankly, a lot of them are actually quite lean and have low body fat already. And so I asked, Where does it stop because, for me, it was never enough. No matter how much weight I lost, no matter how much the scale went down. And that day that I hit the lowest like the number, the goal number that I wanted to hit, I remember exactly the day where I was standing, I wasn’t wearing anything, I was gonna say what I was wearing, because you only ever wear in a way yourself naked, right?
I remember that day, I remember seeing the number. I was deep into a racing season, not eating enough training all the time, too much training, right, stressed the fuck out. And I got on the scale. And I saw the number. And for a moment, as I said earlier, I got the dopamine hit, it was delicious. I thought, oh, finally, finally I did it. And after that, it wore off. And my next question was, what else is there?
It wasn’t enough, it would never be enough. And this is the slippery slope that a lot of people, perhaps even you end up going on. So yes, you still have the autonomy, you can decide. But I have to ask, When is it going to be enough? And I don’t know the answer to that question for you. But what I can say is, for me, and for a lot of people that I’ve worked with, they start to realize, yeah, it would never have been enough. And what’s the messaging? What are all the internalized messages and all the beliefs and everything that’s reinforced by diet culture, that tells us that we just need to shrink, we need to be smaller and smaller and smaller, and it’s never enough? We would virtually have to disappear for it to be enough. So that’s, that’s sort of my slightly unpopular point that I wanted to make because I run across a lot of people in small bodies who are there, like me, and I get this is so focused and fixated on just being smaller, just the smaller, there’s always something under it. What are you hoping it’s going to bring you? What are you seeking truly seeking from this? I know for me, it was validation it was being seen for For me, it was a sense of happiness that I couldn’t quite ever touch. And that’s what I was hoping it was going to bring me.
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So back to my original question, Is it wrong to want to lose weight? Not necessarily. But the reality of it is very nuanced. And ultimately you get to decide, so no hate mail, okay? If you want to do this, you can, you can absolutely do it. But what I want to make a couple of points on is this, it’s not inherently wrong to want to change your body, right? This is body autonomy, you get to get tattoos, you get to get piercings, you get to dye your hair, you get to carry a child in you or not, or whatever you want to do, like, that’s your business. So it’s not inherently wrong to want to change your body. And I’m super respectful of that. You get to do you gotta you gotta live with you. It’s your life. It’s your body, it’s your changes. It’s your health. It’s all the things we’ve talked about. Nobody else lives in your body, and nobody else knows how you feel every day. So if you’re feeling crummy, in your body, life is generally not very fun. If you have chronic headaches, you’re always tired, you can’t poop or you’re pooping too much you have menstrual issues that are super debilitating, your moods are just all over the place, you’re in pain, you’re constantly getting sick. You know, when you don’t feel good in your body, it’s common to want to seek something to change it. And that’s not wrong. It’s not wrong to want to feel better.
But think about those times, if you ever did make your body smaller, and it was sustainable for you like what were the things you were actually doing at those times, what a lot of people tell me is Oh, I was cooking a lot more at home, I was more consistent with my exercise. I wasn’t as stressed as I am right now. Because hashtag COVID is now a thing still, and we didn’t have that back then. So there are oftentimes lots of changes that people were making. But they go back to Well, it was the weight loss that helped me feel better, when in fact, a lot of the time it was the behaviors, the habits that they had changed, that were actually making them feel better and improving their quality of life. Right, if your digestion gets better, and you feel better, that honestly probably doesn’t have a lot to do with this your overall body size, maybe you improved your digestive function.
But think about what it was the result of was a result of the changes that you made, right? The habits that you reinforced the behaviors that you modified in your life. So here’s how you can if you do decide you want to make body changes. Here’s something that I want to present you with a couple of things. The first is, before you set out to make any changes in your body. Numbers are not motivating because numbers are logical. So if if you set out and you’re like I want to change this thing, I have this goal, I don’t care if it’s to… if you want to change your body, if you want to lift 300 pounds, or you want to change your body size, here’s the thing. A number is not inherently motivating because numbers are logical. And human beings are not driven by logic. Even though we like to rely on it all the time. We poopoo intuition at the, at you know we make logic and rational thinking the king and intuition were like a bunch of hokey bullshit. We are driven by emotion. Anyone who is in marketing knows this very well. It’s all about how can you get an emotional response. A lot of this has to do with our ancient lizard brain. Our limbic brain, which is the center of motivation, emotion seeking safety, memories, fear. And you can think about, for example, your favorite song or a movie that really affected you emotionally.
Think about the last time you had a gut feeling about something, or some, some something that you bought that you just wanted, or you just knew you had to have it like there might not have been much logic there. And that’s all of the limbic brains. So what I’m getting at here is, we need to connect to how we want to feel, we need to connect to how we want to feel because feelings drive actions. Okay, so the difference between saying I want my weight to be bla bla bla pounds, and you know, I want to climb the stairs, pain-free chase my kids in the park without getting exhausted and needing to sit down, I want to wake up with tons of energy every day. Whatever it is, those are much stronger motivators. And so that’s very interesting. Because if you think about those things, most of them have to do with the changes that you’re going to make in your life to get you there, not a specific number. So ultimately, focusing on how you want to feel is going to help you make the positive changes that you want to make to move your health forward, not just focusing on a number, which is inherently demotivating. Think about every time you’ve gotten on the scale, and the fucking number hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s gone down, it’s not gone down, it’s gone up or it stayed the same. How motivating does that feel? It’s not motivating. You end up mentally flogging yourself feeling guilty, feeling shameful, feeling late shit feeling like a failure. And then what happens, right? We want to go back to restriction we want to crawl into the shame cave and not come out. Right, we start to give up on our habits that we know make us feel really, really good. But nobody teaches you this right? We all again, society tells us that focusing on weight is the most important thing. And the scale should be motivation. I don’t you know what, even if you set a goal and you’re like, well, I’m gonna do 10 push-ups or I want to squat my body weight. Those can be slightly more motivating because we’re focusing on something that really helps us to connect to something other than weight, right, our bodyweight because we focus on weight so much. But sometimes if you put the goal outside of weight, you’re like, Oh, this is new and interesting and novel. But even if you squat, the body weight, you do the push-ups, whatever it is, it’s going to lose its luster.
To connect to how you want to feel because that is going to keep you going I just had a conversation with a dear friend of mine the other day, she said I don’t feel motivated in the gym. I don’t get it. You know, I’m there. I’m doing the thing. Nothing and I’m like, Well, what are you like, what how do you want to feel? How do you want to feel? And she had to think about it long and hard because she wasn’t even really sure. So connecting how you to how you want to feel. And I told her these days how I want to feel when I workout is I want to move energy through my body, I want to get this stuck energy out like I want to get my I want to move my energy I want to get past the like the stress and the anxiety in my body. I want to just move it right get it out, get it out. And I want to feel that call afterward. That feeling of groundedness afterward that feeling of wholeness afterward. That’s the feeling I’m chasing. So chase the feeling instead of just a number. Alright, so let’s wrap it up by asking these questions. Here you go. here’s the finale. If you have an if you are getting to the end of this and you’re like yes, like that’s still my that’s still the thing I want to do. That’s still the goal I want to have is changing my body is making my body at a different size, shape, or whatever than it is now. Or you just want to focus on I shouldn’t say just you want to focus on health, gain gaining health. Here are the questions I want you to ask yourself. Number one, what specifically do I want to feel by making these changes? keep it focused on what you want, not what you don’t want. We have this tendency to go well I don’t want to be tired. I don’t want to be stressed. I don’t want to be moody. No, we want to focus on what you want. Not what you don’t want. I want to feel energized from the start of the day to the end of the day I want to have a meal and have it digest normally I want to have a normal poop. I haven’t talked about pupils in a long time on this show. But here we go. I want to have a sex drive again. I want to be able to lift my I want to feel strong enough to be able to lift my body weight. I want to run a five k without stopping. I want to climb the stairs without getting winded. It could be an emotional feeling. It could be a body sensation. But how do you want to feel by making the changes you’re about to make? You need to get crystal clear on that.
Number two, what am I fighting for? Again, not against fighting against and having that mentality of cutting things out and restricting and all that is not sustainable. What am I? What am I fighting for? What is my larger? Why? I want to see my kids have children, I want to feel capable enough to, you know, take care of the house on my own, you know, do all the house maintenance on my own, I want to be stronger for myself and the people I care about, I want to make a difference in my community, whatever it is, like what am I? What’s the bigger? Why, right?
Why does making these changes matter? Is it? Is it something you truly want? Or is it what someone else told you to want, or society told you to want? what’s underneath it? If you do change your body, what will it bring to your life? And if you’re saying it will make you happier, I want you to, I want you to really like meditate on it, take a walk and think about it. Because I will tell you very much from personal experience. And from working with so many of you out in the community and hearing your stories, a lot of you really did think that it was going to make you happier. Or like if I just get to this number, it will make me happy. If I just get to this number, it will make me happy. Happiness is the inner work, or the contentment, or whatever word you want to use. I feel like happiness is overused. But is this the feeling you want inside? That’s the inner work. What will this pursuit cost you? Everything? Everything has a cost, time, energy, resources, emotional bandwidth, whatever, what will it cost you? Is it worth what it will cost?
What kind of person? Am I if I don’t ever lose the weight? Or I don’t lose weight? What kind of person? Am I if I don’t change my body size? Who am I? outside of my physical vessel besides my physical body? Who am I? At my core? Who am I? What kind of person am I? Where else is my self-worth? Other than on the scale? So these are all questions to ask yourself. And lastly, what are one or two specific and simple habits that you can add to your routine and be consistent with in order to focus on the process of gentle nutrition. Now if you’re somebody who is still not gone through any process of improving your relationship with food, you may want to also work on that at the same time. I have one on one coaching spots you can apply for. I have other options where you can do this work with me in a group, you can get some of my DIY courses, we’ll link all of that in the show notes. But just suffice to say you may need to do some of this relationship with food work concurrently at the same time, or perhaps even before you start focusing on gentle nutrition again, however, what I want you to think about is making just one or maybe two changes at a time. I know it’s gonna feel like the fucking slowest thing on planet earth is going to be like watching molasses pour out of a bottle in the wintertime you’re going to hate it, you’re gonna think I’m not making progress as fast, especially if you’re used to quick diets. But I tell you what, this is the stuff that will set the foundation that will last Okay, so are you going to focus on you know, putting more vegetables on your plate, drinking more water, finding a way to kind of move your stress every day, taking you to know, adding some me time to your day, getting outside getting some fresh air and sunlight, getting a little bit of extra sleep, etc, etc. And notice how I didn’t focus on taking stuff away. When you come from a restrictive mindset or restrictive mentality, a diet mentality you’re used to just cutting, cutting, cutting cutting, your brain does not find that enjoyable in the least. So I want us to start thinking about what can I add and make it be small.
So all my perfectionists out there that want to make a million changes at one time? Where does it get you? It doesn’t you quit because you get overwhelmed because you’re human? Right? So these are some questions to start asking yourself. And you’ll notice that I started off this episode with a question, Is it wrong to want to lose weight? Obviously, there is no easy answer to this question. And I left you in this conversation with some big things to ponder in terms of the bigger picture. Where do we learn that we should value weight loss above all else? Where else are we finding worth and value in our lives besides just our physical container? Can we focus on gaining or improving our health and keep the emphasis there? Where have we internalized our beliefs about which bodies are good bodies? And then I left you with some other ideas here some other questions to ask yourself, what do I want to feel by making these changes in my life? What is my bigger? Why? What am I fighting for? Why do these changes matter? What does it mean about me if I make these changes, like what’s underneath it? And what are one or two small specific simple habits that I can add to my routine?
What we’re taught about weight and weight loss is often skewed or lacks nuanced perspective and different viewpoints. We need to consider that when we gain health. Weight loss is sometimes but not always an outcome. And losing weight doesn’t always automatically confer better health. It’s not inherently wrong to want to change your body, you have that autonomy, but to make healthy changes work for you, think about how you can stay focused on how you want to feel your deeper why, and the habits that you can commit to consistently. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Please DM me on Instagram, share your thoughts, share this episode out into the world. It really does make a difference when you say hey, I found this episode to be really helpful and you share it with your friends and family and your communities and the people that you know because this movement only can grow from the ground up. It’s been so great to hang out with you today. Thanks so much for being here. I’ll be back next week with another thought-provoking episode. Until then, stay badass. Have an amazing frickin week and I’ll talk to you soon.