It’s Not You, It’s Me: Radical Self-Care and Acceptance [Podcast]
“Our responsibility is not to match the standard of beauty that we’re given in the advertising world. Our responsibility is to feel well enough so we can go out and do what’s purposeful and passionate for us.”
-Rosie Molinary
I think of PCOS Diva and the work that I do as helping women move beyond the pain, struggle and symptoms of PCOS so that they, in turn, can live the life they were meant to live and shine their light without PCOS holding them back. Self-acceptance is a really important piece of that. I often recommend Rosie Molinary’s book, Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance to my clients, family and friends. Rosie’s message of radical self-acceptance is powerful and potentially life changing. Listen in as we discuss:
- How to build a positive, healthy relationship with ourselves
- Recognizing that your worthiness is your birthright
- The body warrior pledge
- Defining your own beautiful
“A lot of women say, ‘I don’t have the luxury of taking care of myself.’ The reality is you don’t have the luxury not to.”
All PCOS Diva podcasts are now 
A full transcript follows.
More about Rosie Molinary
As a radical self-acceptance champion, Rosie Molinary, MFA, uses profound questions and wholehearted connection to empower people to treat themselves well so they can connect with their talents and passions to authentically and intentionally live their purpose and help heal the world.
The author of Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self Acceptance (Seal Press) and Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina (Seal Press), Rosie teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, serves as a national Dove Self-Esteem Project educator, offers workshops and retreats, and speaks on self-acceptance, body image, self-care, media literacy, the Latina experience, and intentional living around the country. Rosie also serves as a creative catalyst to companies and brands that wish to provide a synergistic, empowered and soulful experience to their clients and employees as they serve the world through workshop and retreat facilitation and consultation.
A committed activist, Rosie helped found HAMMERS, a non-profit initiative to provide emergency home repair for low income families in her community, and Circle de Luz, a non-profit that radically empowers young Latinas by supporting their transformation through extensive mentoring, holistic programming and scholarship funds for further education.
Full Transcript:
| Amy: | Hello, this is Amy Meddling. I’m a certified health coach and founder of PCOS Diva, and you are listening to the PCOS Diva podcast. Today I want to talk about a subject that I think many women with PCOS can relate to. I am a recovering perfectionist and I talk about this in my blog, and I know that many women with PCOS can also place themselves in this category because I hear from you from my blog comments, private coaching and Jumpstart program. I think we feel like we’re never enough. We find that we don’t want to accept ourselves until maybe the acne goes away or we lose some weight or we feel less anxious or maybe get a new job, but I think at the core of healing is learning to accept yourself and love yourself where you are in this moment.
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| Six years ago I stumbled upon a wonderful little book, and it really helped me in my journey towards self-love and self-acceptance. It’s called Beautiful You. I’m thrilled today to be talking with the author of this wonderful book, Rosie Molinary. I just want to welcome you to the PCOS Diva podcast, Rosie.
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| Rosie: | Amy, thanks so much for having me. I’m really honored.
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| Amy: | I want to just tell listeners a little bit about you. You are a radical self-acceptance champion, which I love, and we’re going to talk about that in a minute. Rosie is an MFA and she uses profound questions and wholehearted connection to empower people to treat themselves well so they can connect with their talents and passions to authentically and intentionally live their purpose and help heal the world. She’s the author of Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance and Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina. Rosie teaches at the University of North Carolina and Charlotte. She serves as a National Dove Self-Esteem Project educator, offers workshops and retreats, and speaks on self-acceptance, body image, self-care, media literacy, the Latina experience, and intentional living around the country.
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| Let’s start by defining what is radical self-acceptance.
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| Rosie: | For me, I’d like to start first talking about self-love. In an ideal world, I think everybody would be self-loving. One of the things that I’ve realized in my work is that the concept of self-love is really uncomfortable to some people, and it’s for a litany of reasons. Part of it is that perfectionism piece that you’re talking about, and part of it is maybe what their upbringing was around this idea of where self should play a role in your life. Some of it’s faith-related, some of it’s cultural-related, some of it’s just ideas around language. Whatever the tension is, the idea of self-love makes a lot of people really self-conscious, and so having self-love be the ideal destination for folks can feel really inauthentic. People say, “I can’t be self-loving so I’m not going to use a relationship like that at all with myself.”
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| What I really like is to talk to folks about this idea of self-acceptance. For me, I like for folks to imagine a line and it’s this continuum. On one hand, let’s say the left-hand side, is self-hate, and on the right-hand side is self-love, and that in the middle is self-acceptance. It’s this place where a woman can understand that she has worth and power and dignity simplly because she exists, that a woman’s worth doesn’t have to be earned, it doesn’t have to be proven, it just is. You talked about that, Amy, in your intro where you were talking about learning to love yourself right where you are, and that’s what self-acceptance is.
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| One of the things I want to be clear about is that I don’t think that practicing and embracing self-love is arrogant or self-impressed or anything like that. I think it’s great, but I think this can be a semantics issue and I don’t want semantics to keep people away from a practice that’s really good for them. For me, talking about self-acceptance and encouraging people to embrace self-acceptance is really about finding an accessible way for women to build a positive, healthy relationships with ourselves.
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| Put really succinctly, I think of self-acceptance as a position of neutrality about the self, and it’s rooted in our decision to not have an adversarial relationship with ourselves. My worth doesn’t have to be earned, I am not bad or ruined or imperfect for anything that I do. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with me. In fact, I’m fundamentally right simply because I exist, because I, just like any other person on this earth, was put here for a purpose. For me, it really is this idea of recognizing that your worthiness is your birthright just like anyone else’s worthiness is their birthright. That becomes this fundamental underpinning to self-acceptance.
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| Amy: | I know for me in my journey too is learning to embrace who I authentically am and not trying to be somebody that I’m not. Which I think I spent probably my 20s and early 30s trying to be somebody else that I thought I would like, but now I really embrace my strength and what makes me uniquely Amy. There’s something really appealing when you can be authentic. For me, that was a big part of my self-acceptance journey as well, that authenticity.
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| Rosie: | I think that’s the perfect example of self-acceptance. It’s just stepping into your authenticity and saying, “This is how I show up in the world, and it’s neither bad nor good, it just is.” I tell my college students a lot that we spend so much of our adolescence and early adulthood trying to shield or hide or mask what makes us unique, and then later in our lives we finally get to this point where we’re like, “This is what I have to offer.” One of the things I encourage them to do is to think about going ahead and embracing what they have to offer as early as possible. How young can we be when we decide that we’re not going to get in our own way? That’s really this concept of self-acceptance is how I can I decide that I have value to me and to the world because I exist? It doesn’t trump anyone else’s value, but it’s also not less than anyone else’s value.
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| Amy: | I’m trying to teach that to my kids, because wouldn’t it be wonderful to shorten the learning curve for them?
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| Rosie: | I do see with my students that they’re willing to have these conversations and really engage in it at 18, 19, 20 in a way that I would probably have been terrified to do at 18, 19, and 20 because it would’ve demanded such vulnerability just to say the words. That gives me a lot of hope. I feel like there’s plenty we can do if we’re earnest and authentic in our efforts to not just help ourselves but to create a whole new foundation of self-understanding for generations to come because, let’s be honest, there’s so much other work that needs to be in the world that if we can check this one off the list, then great, we get to tackle some other stuff.
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| Amy: | I bet you have a story. Doing this work in the world which really is so important, there must be a back story. How did you come to a point of self-acceptance?
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| Rosie: | There is. I think you end up teaching what you most need to learn, and so I will try to condense this as neatly as possible. If you really want to read it, they can check out Beautiful You or my blog and get more of it. The short of it is I’m Puerto Rican and my family moved to the States when I was two. We moved to the south, and I was the only Latina around. I think that I constantly felt a really profound sense of otherness, and some of it was around ethnicity and some of it was around social class. It was just a struggle to find my place. For a long time my place was, “Can I be as good as possible so that I’m as respected as possible so that the world can unfold for me in a way that I hope?”
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| As you know, that just gets paralyzing and can ultimately lead to profound pain, whether that’s external, internal, a combination of those. That was the reality was that I began to realize that being as good as possible all the time didn’t actually shield me from feeling the loneliness that I felt or make me feel better like I hoped that it would. I just remember having this conversation with a friend in college and saying something along the lines of struggling with my idea around my weight. It’s interesting now to look back and be like, “Bless your heart that you were consumed with that,” but struggling with my idea around my weight and saying something, and she said, “You just can’t have it all.” I know that she thought she was being helpful to me and I remember thinking, “I don’t have anything.”
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| Those perceptions were so painfully present in that moment. I had this moment where I thought, “I don’t want this to be what my life’s about.” I don’t want, at the end of the day, to have how I physically look be what’s consuming me. It was just this moment where I was tired of the same conversation with myself, and I just decided I had to have a different conversation with myself. Now, it wasn’t that easy to make the switch, and we’ll talk more in a little bit about how to make switches like that, but I just remember that was the moment where I thought, “I’ve got so much more to give this world than a particular size waist or a particular length hair, and I want to start to give that.”
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| That, for me, has been the thing that has led to my central philosophy which is that I really think … A lot of people think of me as body image activist. What I know about myself is I am an activist in general. I really care about the condition of the world, and what I believe is that every single one of us is here for a purpose, that each one of us is here to be a part of a solution that this world needs. What I’ve realized is that the reason why there’s so much suffering in the world is partially linked to our relationships with ourselves. If we don’t have a good relationship with ourselves, we can’t go out and do the work we’re meant to do in the world, which means they can’t heal.
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| What I have come to is that my work is really based around this idea of helping reconcile their relationships with themselves so they can go out and do the stuff that is really urgent in their lives, that feels like I’ve got to be able to offer this to the world and makes them feel really purposeful and really passionate and on purpose. That back story is where my aha came from, and then it has driven what I try to be from then.
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| Amy: | I think that’s why your book just resonates and your work that you do resonates with me so much because I think of PCOS Diva and the work that I do as helping women move beyond the pain struggle and PCOS so that they, in turn, can live the life they were meant to live and be able to shine their light without PCOS holding them back. That self-acceptance is just really important piece of that. I’m often recommending your book, Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance, and, in fact, just did so in my current jump start program because there was a woman on there saying that, “It’s really hard for me to feel like I’m worth taking the time to do all of this meal prep that you know I need to do, making sure that I have healthy food. I just feel like I’m not really worth it,” and so I recommended your book.
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| I would love for you to share with listeners how the book is structure because it isn’t your typical self-help book in the way that it’s structured.
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| Rosie: | I want to stop and say real quickly that what you just said about your work with PCOS Diva is exactly it! For a period of time your own PCOS demanded a significant amount of your attention so you could get well. Then what you realized is you had a special set of gifts of understanding the condition and talking about it in a way that was accessible to people, that could help other people begin to heal themselves. That’s it exactly it. You and I have talked, and I have PCOS, and when you find that information out, you go into this tunnel, and it feels like I may not ever get out of this tunnel, but you did and then you recognized, “I’ve got this gift that I can give to the world and help other people with their healing so they don’t have to feel like they’re stuck in this well for a period of time. I just wanted to acknowledge that I love that about what you’re doing.
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| So for Beautiful You; it really is … Now the answer to the question, how did I get myself out of this spiral of having had a way of viewing myself and having had a way of making demands on myself and creating a shift in my life. For me, I tend to be the type of person who needs to build a foundation and then just add a ring every day. That is what I try to do in my own, if you’ll call it, recovery work. Recovering from perfectionism and all these different pressures that I had was to say, “Today I’m going to be about the process. What piece of the process do I want to focus on?” What I kept reminding myself is that the process itself was the goal, that the effort I made today was worth it and I didn’t have to be a different person at the end of the day, I had to philosophically exercise the effort that I was looking for.
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| I wanted a different feeling in my life and I wanted to behave in a way each day that allowed room for that. Beautiful You is really taking that approach that I had for myself and giving women a journey to do that for themselves. The way that it’s structured is that it’s a 365 day journey, you can start at any day of the year. It is a short essay with a concept, and then an exercise to do that day. Some of the exercises are reflective in nature and so you’re writing in a journal. Some of the exercises are action-oriented in nature; I want you to go to the store and get fitted for a bra. It varies what it is, but all of it is around taking a small moment every day to listen to, honor, and respond to yourself and to engage in the process.
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| What’s interesting is it’s not me dictating what the journey looks like for you other than making suggestions for activities and some mindset instructions. It really is a bit of a choose your own adventure. For some women it looks some way, for some it looks the other way. Some activities don’t resonate with the person and I say skip that. I’ve had a couple people say, “I have to keep going back to this one,” and I think that’s okay, too. It’s really taking what works for you and amplifying it and doing it in a way that allows you to really engage and process.
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| Amy: | It’s really powerful. On day two, you call it a pledge of allegiance to yourself. I’m a huge fan of daily affirmations. I encourage clients to come up with affirmations that are authentic for you and to say them in front of the mirror. Louise Hay talks about mirror work and I just think it’s so powerful. I’m telling your body warrior pledge here. It’s an affirmation. If you said this to yourself in the mirror every day, it would change everything. There’s many points it, but I just want to give listeners a flavor. I’m just going to read a couple of lines from this.
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| The body warrior pledge. “Because I understand that my love and respect for my body are metaphors of my love and respect for myself and soul, I pledge to stop berating my body and to begin celebrating the vessel that I have been given. I will remember the amazing things my body has given me: the ability to experience the world of a breadth of senses, the ability to perceive and express love, the ability to comfort and soothe, and the ability to fight, provide, and care for humanity.” There’s several other points, and I’ve highlighted, because it really is aligned with the PCOS Diva philosophy.
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| “To see exercise as a way to improve my internal health and strength instead of a way to fight or control my body. To understand that my weight is not good or bad, it’s just a number, and I am only good. To love my body and myself today, I do not have to weigh 10 pounds less or have longer hair or have my degree in my hand to have worth. I am worth just as I am and I embrace that power. To understand that a body, like a personality, is like a fingerprint: a wonderful embodiment of my uniqueness.”
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| There’s just many other points, but it’s just this beautiful affirmation. I love it. I actually signed it because you have signature that you made the pledge, and I have “Amy Meddling. 1/9/2011.” Was when I took the pledge. This book, it’s worth it for the pledge alone, Rosie, and more.
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| Rosie: | I remember writing that and I just thought about, “We operate under so many conditions. What are all the conditions I’ve ever had before?” I thought about these things where I would say I can’t do that until this and I just thought, “If we put our lives on hold like that, at the end of our lives we’re just going to have a lot of regrets and no memories.” That’s just no way to live. For me it was this really liberating thing to put that all on paper. I like to encourage people to maybe look at one or two and say, similar to what you were saying about affirmations, which one do I really need to remind myself about? Then it might be that to recognize my body strength becomes one’s affirmation so that when they start to say something negative about their body, they instead change the tone and say, “I recognize my body strength, period.”
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| I just think that can be really powerful in shifting some of your energy.
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| Amy: | What you were just saying there reminded me of a quote by Diane Ackerman, which I love. It’s on my bulletin board here. “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to live the width of it as well.” I think that you can, and that shift, when you do take this radical self-acceptance approach to life.
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| Rosie: | It’s fascinating, when you get there, when you ever begin to start practicing it, you realize for years I didn’t do X because I was worried what other people would think of me. The reality is other people weren’t thinking of you, they’re worried about their own stuff. One of the things that was so liberating for me to realize was people just want to be seen and heard and to feel like someone’s trying to understand them. I can be paralyzed on a Saturday night about needing to go to some community event and, in my closet, trying on 17 things, but, ultimately, if I just show up and engage with people, that is what they want, that is what they will remember. It won’t matter to them if I have blue jeans on or the cutest dress ever.
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| Once, I had this moment where I thought, “Nobody really cares.” I care and I’m consumed by it. Someone might say, “That’s a cute dress,” but really do they care? They don’t care. What they care about is connection. Connection’s the greatest gift we can give, and we get so distracted by these other things that we could be doing to look the part that we forget that we already have everything we need inside of us to give the people that we interact with a meaningful experience with us.
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| Amy: | In your book and in your work, you talk about defining your own beautiful. Maybe you could give us some tips on how do we go about that process?
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| Rosie: | I think it starts with what you started with, this idea of perfectionism, and really letting perfectionism go. Because I think that so many of us know that perfect doesn’t exist, but we have a caveat in our minds where we’re like, “I’d like to be as close to it as possible. I’d like to be the best non-perfect person there is.” Here is what I’ve realized really acutely in the last few years is that if perfect doesn’t exist, which we would all agree that it doesn’t, then actually imperfect can’t exist, either. The continuum can only exist if there’s a place to go on the other side and if there’s stop in between. We all know that imperfect just isn’t there.
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| Perfect’s an idea, and not a truth, which actually means … Perfect is totally a construct to sell us this bag of goods, or actions, or insecurity. If there’s no perfect then there can be no imperfect. There just isn’t an opposite. What it means is that we were all designed to be unique individual beings. We weren’t mass produced. We’re like that fingerprint, or that personality we were talking about earlier where we were each supposed to our own little works of art. We are each our own little masterpiece. That’s this really powerful thing I think to realize in your own reconciling beauty effort is if there’s no perfect, there can be no imperfect, either. You can begin to let go of chasing as close to perfect as possible and begin to just set in to your own truth which is that you’re not an accident, you’re uniquely made, there was no mistake, and we’re divine just as we are.
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| Then what that means for figuring out beauty and for you is that you get to decide what lights your soul and heart up and you don’t have to agree with anyone else’s opinion. It’s incredibly subjective. It is really about you choosing to be the authority in your own life. I had this really great experience probably six years ago now with a young woman that I was mentoring. We were driving home from lunch and she was telling me about how there was another girl in her school that had just moved to school that her name, it was a rare name, and she said, “I was real worried about it because which Sally was I going to be?” I was like, “What do you mean by which Sally were you going to be?” She was like, “Was I going to be fat Sally or skinny Sally or pretty Sally or ugly Sally or smart Sally or dumb Sally? They were going to define the two of us and which one was I going to be.” I was like, “Oh my goodness.” So I’m driving and I’m trying to find words to respond to this.
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| She said, “I went into the cafeteria one day and there she was, and she is not ugly.” I thought, “This is when she tells me that she’s ugly Sally.” She looked at me and said, “Here’s what I figured out: we’re just different kinds of pretty.” It was a great moment. I couldn’t have come up with that as eloquently in that moment because I was so panicked about finding the right words that I was definitely not going to find them, but that’s exactly it. When we can begin to recognize that we’re not meant to compare ourselves to other people and that we are meant to each be our own unique expression and that our bodies aren’t benchmarks, they’re our vehicles for this world and we have a responsibility to our bodies to take care of them, but that responsibility is around them running well, like the work that you do with PCOS Diva, and not around them looking a particular way.
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| Our responsibility is not to match the standard of beauty that we’re giving in the advertising world, our responsibility is to feel well enough so we can go out and do what’s on purpose and passionate for us. I think that that’s the place where I want to encourage women to think about with beauty is to give up this idea that there was perfect and imperfect, because there’s not, to recognize how incredibly subjective it is. The gift in that is that you get to be the decider about what is beautiful and meaningful for you, and then to operate from this sense of responsibility for caring for your body because it matters to you how it runs, not because it matters to you how it looks.
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| Amy: | I love that. I like what you said about choosing to be the authority of your life. I think of the empowered Diva. We are, in essence, the goddess of our own life and we have to step up and take charge, and I love that you brought that out.
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| The other thing that’s been a theme in our discussion is moving beyond defining your beauty so that then you can get on with your real work in the world and connecting with your talents and your passions. I have to say that women with PCOS are highly creative, and it’s been my experience that those of us who are really suffering have lose that connection with their creativity. I would love for you to maybe talk about how can you nurture your passions and creativity and get to that place where you can connect with it again, or even connect with it at all if you haven’t yet.
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| Rosie: | I’m not surprised to hear you say that and I can see it for a couple different reasons. One is there’s that perfectionism step and we think, “My body functions in a way that’s different from other women. How can I compensate? How can I have something to offer now that my womanhood feels a little different even though it doesn’t have to be?” Then there’s this other piece where you also feel crummy when you have PCOS and it’s unmanaged, and so it’s easy to have your spark go out. I’m not surprised to hear you say that, and I think that the thing that has to happen first for you to get that spark back is that you have to take care of yourself. You have to do this thing that we don’t like to hear but is so important, and that is self-care.
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| A lot of women will say, “I don’t have the luxury of taking care of myself.” The reality is you don’t have the luxury not to. It is so essential. I think a lot of times we think of self-care as a spa day or a night out with girlfriends, and it does not have to be that significant of an undertaking. There are little things that every single one of us can do, that you teach really well, Amy, almost every minute of the day that can make us feel better and that add up to a whole lot of self-care over time.
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| There are times where I feel run down and I know the thing that makes me feel better is to hop in the bath with Epson salt and baking soda and an essential oil, and it’s super-hot, and I do it for 20 minutes. I will literally run out of putting my son down for bed and run to the bathroom, run that water, and get that going and just do it for 20 minutes and then I’m out, but I feel so much better and I’m like, “That was worth it because otherwise … that 20 minutes had a much bigger exchange rate.” I think it’s important for women to identify some things that have a pretty big exchange rate for them for the effort. Drinking a whole lot of water might be it, what you eat for breakfast.
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| I would remember when I didn’t have a better grasp on my PCOS, eating something and having it give me a stomach ache and then being like, “I don’t feel great,” but then eating it again, and then finally having this moment where I thought, “I can actually not eat that. I could choose to eat something else.” I thought, “For efficiency’s sake. I’ll eat that and at least I’ll get some food in me.” It’s not worth the exchange rate if it gives me a stomach ache all afternoon. If I can just put a little bit of effort into thinking about how do I tweak my lunch so that it’s something that doesn’t make me feel that way, and then I don’t have a stomachache all afternoon, that’s certainly worth it.
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| The question I like to encourage women to ask is: what do I need right now more than anything else? I like to encourage women to ask themselves that question every single day, and I want the answer to be small enough that it can be accomplished within 48 hours. The answer then isn’t I need a trip to the Bahamas because no one’s running away for the Bahamas tomorrow when they come up with the answer, or if they are it’s a pretty rare opportunity. What can you do in 48 hours to answer that question? What can you give yourself? Then the answers become I need to call my girlfriend and just decompress. I need to make a therapy appointment. I want to do some meal prep. It becomes these things that really do create shifts in our life around self-care that help us to feel better to get sparked.
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| For me, it’s a question I ask daily, and my rule is that if I’m giving the same answer in 48 hours … If I say today “What I need right now more than anything else is a massage,” and by Saturday I ask myself that question and I say a massage and it’s because I haven’t booked the massage, then I have a deeper issue I have to resolve within myself. Which is: why am I denying myself care? I wouldn’t deny anyone else in my life that I love care, and so why am I denying myself care? That is where I’d say start to get your creative spark back, to get lit up, and to feel passion and purpose, you have to start by making sure you’re not running on empty, which means dousing yourself in self-care.
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| Then what I think you find is, what’s been my experience is, that as you start to physiologically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually feel better, then you start to say, “I had a little bit of energy around that,” and you start to pay attention to your flash points and for your flash points you fuel this fire. If you’re like, “I really enjoyed volunteering in my son’s art class today,” then that’s a piece where you’re like, “I need to pay attention to that. What’s that telling me? Do I need to go buy some art supplies? Do I have them at home? Do I want to take an art class.” What is that?
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| I think you start with layer upon layer of self-care, but we’re not talking these complicated day long organize a spa day with your girlfriends, which are awesome, but not always practical. I’m talking about the dailiness of living where you make a commitment to say, “I won’t sit for more than 45 minutes without standing up and stretching.” You do that stuff, and then start paying attention as you start to feel better in those four realms of well-being. You start paying attention to things begining to get lit and then you fuel what lights.
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| Amy: | I love that concept. This speaking of paying attention, in the last year of so, I’ve noticed that whenever I get irritable and maybe a little down and depressed … I just attended the Androgen Excess PCOS meeting with all of the leading PCOS experts. They were talking about women with PCOS are at five times the risk of depression, but when I look at myself when I’m feeling depressed, I have to look at my self-care and, I would say, nine times out of 10, if it’s not food-related, because gluten, if it sneaks back in, makes me down and irritable and depressed, it probably has to do with the lack of self-care. I have to make sure that I make that 48 … I love that 48 hour rule, by the way. For me, baths are a great … I love Pure Barre, and that usually will do it for me.
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| Rosie: | I do too!
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| Amy: | I think it’s a great workout for women with PCOS. There’s that mind body connection. I don’t think overwhelms our adrenals. We don’t bulk up. I think being aware of when you are down, too, that’s a sign that maybe I need some more self-care and I need to make that 48 hour date with myself.
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| Rosie: | Then there’s, I think, real power in claiming it. I will sometimes say to my husband, “This is something I’m incredibly anxious about. I don’t want to talk about it. I just want you to know that I’m anxious about it.” He’ll be like, “This is good to know.” I think it’s good to become really aware of that and to share it with others so that they can offer you support and to understand what’s going on. All these things that you can do where you get to know yourself better allow you to treat yourself as the guest star in your life, which you are! That’s not to say, this goes back to that self-acceptance piece, that you’re better than anyone else, but if you’re not the guest star to your life then you can’t go out and do what you’re meant to go out and do in the world.
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| Amy: | It’s so important because we need more women with PCOS lit up in the world and shining their light. We have so many gifts to offer. I just really encourage women to pick up a copy of Beautiful You and start going through these daily steps because you will find … You were talking about finding what you like and finding those light points, and you give women lots of different ideas in order to do that. Your book is available through your website and on Amazon. Maybe you could just mention some of the other resources that you might have on your blog. I know you do retreats and that kind of thing.
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| Rosie: | I do. The book can be found anywhere. I’m super excited to say that a second edition of it is coming out in November of this year where I updated about 25% of the content. There’s a new board, and so there will be a lot more activities around that. I’m working on a supplemental program for women who want to do the book maybe with some company. That will be announced this fall.
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| In the meantime, I do one-on-one retreats via Skype or in person. If you’re local to the Charlotte, North Carolina area that you can learn about on my website under one-on-one. Then I do lots of speaking and workshops. I really like interactive workshops were it’s not just me giving a key note but we are writing wellness prescriptions for ourselves and personal manifestos or writing missions statements where women leave with some real claiming about who they authentically are and what they intentionally want for the world and take that home with them.
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| I have had women say, “I live in Tennessee; will you come?” I’ve gone to Nashville and different places to do two-day women’s workshops, and I’m happy to talk to anyone about that if that’s interesting to their community. Then also, like I said, you can work with me one-on-one if you’d like.
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| Amy: | That sounds great. I will definitely post a link under the podcast interview to your blog and your resources and the book. I just want to thank you for taking time out of your schedule. I know you just flew in this morning and fit me in, but it’s just been fantastic listening and learning about your message of self-acceptance. Thank you, Rosie.
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| Rosie: | Thank you. I learned so much from the work that you do. Thank you for doing what you do and doing it in such an accessible and empowering way.
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| Amy: | That means a lot. Thank you. Everyone that’s been listening, I really appreciate you taking the time, and I look forward to being on another podcast with you very soon. Take care.
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