Summer Innanen on Radical Self-Love
/Summer Innanen is a professionally trained coach specializing in body image, self worth, and confidence. She helps women all over the world to stop living behind the numbers of their scales through her private and group coaching at summerinnanen.com. She is the best selling author of Body Image Remix, creator of the You, On Fire online program and host Fearless Rebelle Radio, a podcast dedicated to anti-dieting, body positivity, and feminism.
Here are a few of the big topics we talked about:
We've been conditioned to believe that our value is in how we look and that it’s our currency in this culture
All of our time, all of our energy, and often our money goes into the way that we look, the size of our body, what are other people think of us, how we present ourselves to the male gaze. It takes away from knowing who we really are.
Diet culture, and why it doesn’t work!
Summer shares her struggles of pivoting from weightloss coach to body image coach.
We are wired to want to avoid emotional discomfort as humans beings.
We’ve been a victim of this system of oppression [how we look being our currency], and it’s okay to be angry.
Starting the process of learning to love yourself
Get rid of everything that doesn’t make you feel good, and then learn how to speak to yourself more compassionately.
When you get to a point where you’re not always thinking about your body, you start to find time to do other things that you’ve always dreamt of doing.
Accept all of who you are, and nurture the spots that are tender and need love.
In Summer’s Voice:
“What I found was that the stronger I was with my voice, the stronger I was with my convictions, the more praise I received, and the more followers I received.”
"I'd rather be somebody's cotton candy ice cream than everybody's vanilla."
“It's like learning a new language. So the metaphor that I like to use just to give people a good solid idea of how hard this process is that it's like trying to learn let's say german in the United States while everyone around you is speaking english. It's hard because everyone around you is still speaking the language of diet culture, everyone around you is still performing the behavior of diet culture.”
“Immerse yourself in body positive communities."
“When you start to deprogram all the limitations that have been put on you, you start to really know who you are and have more space in your mind, you realize that you are so capable of powerful and incredible things and you’re capable of changing other people's lives.”
“Any time we step outside our comfort zone we're going to hear the voice of our inner critic.”
“Laughter and sarcasm are such a good form of therapy.”