How to Manage Body Shame as a Man Over 40

SHOW NOTES

In this latest episode of “Man in the Arena,” I'm talking about body shame and its impact on men over 40. Discover how these feelings can hold you back and learn actionable steps to overcome them.

Topics Covered:

• What is body shame
• Why it's important to address it
• Understanding body shame and its effects
• The unique challenges men over 40 face
• My story with body shame
• Practical steps to overcome body shame

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to man in the Arena. This podcast is for men over 40 who want to master their health and weight loss goals once and for all. With innovative strategies, practical tools and insightful interviews. My goal is to help you overcome your limiting beliefs and achieve your optimal health. It's time to look good, feel good and do better.

Hey guys, welcome back to Manly Arena. Thank you so much for stopping by. I've got a great episode today where I'm going to talk about body shame and specifically the emotions, the thoughts related to body shame. This episode was inspired by another episode I was recording with a friend of mine and a peer of mine, Patrick Fox, who's out of the UK. He's a coach who helps men stop over drinking and stop drinking completely, and we kind of got onto the topic of shame and how impactful that is in doing this work and improving and how it holds us back. And so I wanted to kind of record a really quick episode here today for you, because I know some of you are dealing with your own body shame. I know some of you have thoughts and really strong emotions around this topic and so I wanted to bring it to the podcast. And today I'm going to kind of share my own body shame story where it comes from. I'm going to talk about what happens when we experience shame and then I want to give you some ideas, some tips, some things you can work on to manage your own body shame.

You might be surprised to think that I actually experience body shame. You know I'm in good shape, I take care of myself, but I'm also a human being and there's lots of times where I have these really critical, judgmental thoughts about my own body. And that just goes to show. It doesn't matter how show, it doesn't matter how fit you are or how overweight you are. We all have these negative, judgmental thoughts that lead us to feel shame. You know, more specifically, I have to be aware and catch myself when I find myself judging my body. Right, you know, there'll be times where I'll think, oh, my posture is really poor, I don't like how my stomach looks. Or, you know, there'll be times where I'll think, oh, my posture is really poor, I don't like how my stomach looks. Or, you know, I'm a really pale guy, I'm a really fair guy, so I'll judge. You know just how pale and fair I am. And so there's lots of things that come into my mind that lead me to feel like I'm not enough, I'm not good enough, and that's what shame is. I'm not enough, I'm not good enough, and that's what shame is. Shame, you know, I love this definition by Brene Brown, who's a researcher around shame, and she says that shame is this intense, painful feeling or experience where we believe that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love or belonging, and it leads us to feel, like I said, we're not worthy, we're not enough, I'm a bad person. On and on and on.

And then, more specifically, around the shame we experience with our body. It's more specific to the critical, judgmental thoughts that we have and this shame that we experience, these thoughts that we have, it comes from a number of different places. It can come from cultural and societal norms that exist right. It can come from cultural and societal norms that exist right. We see the magazine covers, we see people in movies and there's sort of this expectation of what our bodies should look like. We also have had experiences in our past where other people have made comments or judged us on our appearance or on our bodies, and so then we absorb that and we take that on and of course, they become our beliefs. So shame can we absorb that and we take that on and of course, they become our beliefs. So shame can come from many different sources and it's really important that we become hyper aware of the shame that we experience.

Now, when you become a man over 40, I find that shame actually tends to increase, because this is when we are typically more vulnerable. We become more vulnerable in our health. Our bodies start to decline. We have less testosterone in our bodies, so we start to see a decline in muscle mass. We see changes that, frankly, they're really not great changes in our body, whether it's the look of our skin, wrinkles. We lose hair. I know a lot of guys experience what's called gynecomastia, where they start to have these male breasts, and so there's a lot of changes in our bodies. Right Another thing that happens is men who are overweight. There's what's called a panus, which is this overhanging extra subcutaneous fat that hangs down, and so a lot of men feel shame around that even just the shape of their stomach.

So there's lots of different things that we focus on, and the problem with this is shame is such a toxic emotion. I mean it's helpful in a way because it holds us back from doing a lot of negative things that you know, like lying and doing other things. So shame is a helpful emotion, but when it becomes too heavy it becomes toxic, and the problem when it's toxic is shame shields us from solutions. It shields us from taking action. The reason this is it's such a heavy emotion. It's perhaps one of the heaviest human emotions and if you actually measure the frequency of shame, there is very little tone to the frequency of the emotion. You look at something like joy and happiness very high frequency emotion. Something like joy and happiness, very high frequency emotion. So that just tells us how harmful shame is.

And so what I encourage you to do, right, actually, before I go there, let me just say, you know, back to my own experience around shame, when I started to realize what shame was, what was causing me to feel shame in certain areas in my life, and I started to become more aware of the feeling of shame and I found it very difficult to understand. So I want you to kind of give yourself a lot of grace here. If you find that you're someone who is struggling with shame, who battles with it, to give yourself lots of opportunity to learn about it and figure it out, because I really had a hard time understanding what shame was, what it felt like, how I reacted to it. And I'll give you an example A lot of times my partner and I would get into arguments about certain things in our relationship, whether it was parenting or finances or whatever it was, and when we got into those arguments a lot of times I would make those arguments mean that I wasn't good enough, that I was unworthy, that I was a bad person, and so it led me to feel shame. And I was completely unaware of that. And it took my partner, amy pointing that out to me, saying you're in shame right now. And, of course, because I was in shame, I didn't want to see it, so I couldn't even acknowledge what she was saying and she was coming from a good place.

It took a lot of time to chip away at that sort of facade and so once I started to see it, once I started to see the impact of it, then I was able to kind of really settle in and start to feel shame in the moment. And I got to tell you it felt awful, it really did. It felt like I wanted to run and hide. I felt so vulnerable in those moments when I would feel shame and stay in a conversation and still feel shame because I had to confront those thoughts that I wasn't enough, that I was unworthy, that I was a bad person.

And so when you stand in front of a mirror, when you go to a party and you have to put on a certain outfit, when you go to the pool and potentially take your shirt off, you will have thoughts that trigger shame, and if you're not aware of that, it will continue to perpetuate, it will continue to grow, and so it's really important if you want to change your health, to change the way that you look, to change your body, you have to be aware of the impact that certain thoughts are having on you and how they lead to shame, and then how that shame causes you to shut down, or it causes you to kind of blame other people and blame back, because that's what shame does. Either it causes us to shut down, which it did for me and in extreme cases it causes us to defend ourselves because we're at a threat. We don't want to be sort of castaways or judged as not enough or a bad person, so we tend to over-inflate, right. We tend to blame back other people who might be critical of us, and so shame shields all solutions. It shields us from actually taking action and changing.

So this is how I've learned to manage shame, and this is what I want to offer to you as you pursue this pursuit on your own. So I've talked about this already, but the first thing that I want you to do is be aware of your thoughts around, the things that cause you to experience shame. Maybe this is exercise or going to the gym. So you go to the gym and do you feel certain level of shame there? I'm not strong enough, I'm not fit enough, I don't fit in here, right? What I encourage you to do is to do a thought download and I've talked about this before in other podcasts, and this is where you simply just you know, at the top of a page in a book, in a journal or on a piece of paper, write down my body, or you can write down your weight, or you can write down your fitness, and then just download all of the thoughts that come to mind. Right, my body is overweight, my body looks terrible. I don't like the way my stomach looks. What happens here is you become aware of all the thoughts that cause you to feel shame.

The second thing I encourage you to do is speak shame out of existence. What I mean by this is I want you to share with people close to you what shame feels like, what thoughts lead you to feel shame. This is one of the powers of men's groups and groups like AA, because you're able to express shame to other people, and shame thrives in the dark. When you don't speak about shame, it actually grows, it gets stronger, and this is so important something that I realized once. I was able to kind of understand and be aware of what shame feels like and tolerate that. I was able to speak about it more, and then you start to realize, like those limiting beliefs and those thoughts that you have, they're not actually true and you can create new thoughts, and I'll talk about that in a minute.

The third thing is to understand that your body doesn't define you, and I've talked about this on another podcast. You are separate from your body. Your value, your worth, all of that is completely intact. Your body has nothing to do with that, and so it's really important that, if you experience a lot of body shame, that you separate yourself from your body. Okay, who you are as a person Because a lot of us tie up our identity into our appearance and that simply is not a helpful thing okay, something that I practice personally is I'm very conscious of not commenting on other people's appearances how they look physically, you know all of those sort of things simply because that's a subjective opinion and it has no value in terms of that other person, how they feel Okay. So I want you to do the same thing with yourself.

I want you to then find neutral, bridging thoughts and this is number four about yourself. So I want you to get to a place where you stop judging and criticizing yourself. And a judging, sorry. A bridging thought is where you might have this thought like I don't like my body, my body is fat, my body is overweight, my body looks terrible. You can't just jump to a new thought like I love my body, my body's amazing. It's not going to work. You won't believe that thought, it won't feel authentic.

And so what you can do is you can create a more neutral, bridging thought. So I have a body, my body gets me to work, my body allows me to experience my life, my body still does all of the things I need it to do Right, and what you want to do is rehearse these new thoughts like lines in a movie, like you're practicing for a new role. That's what you do this mental rehearsal over and over and over again. And, believe me, over time they will start to take root. You will start to find even better thoughts and then, the more, the more. Now you start to feel good, instead of feeling shame, you start to feel gratitude, you start to feel positive, you start to feel hopeful and optimistic and more confident, and from that place, that's where you take action. That's where you start to eat better, exercise better, you start to get better sleep as well, okay.

So don't bury shame, don't avoid it. You have to speak it, speak about it, talk about it, bring it to to the surface, okay. The other thing that's really important I want you to avoid is is toxic positivity. Okay. So you need to feel, uh, these new emotions, positive emotions. You can't just, like I said before, create a new thought and hope that it takes root. You have to believe in the thought and you have to feel the associated emotion. All right, guys. So there's my podcast on shame, a really quick one there. I hope you found some really insightful information there. As always, I want you to keep showing up, keep doing this work right. We don't deserve to feel the level of body shame that is out there. Okay, thanks, guys. Have a great day, have a great week. We'll talk to you next week.

Now is the time to take action and change your life. Head on over to thespearmethod.com and discover how I can help you get started on your path to better health and weight loss.

Tune in to hear inspiring stories, expert advice, and strategies to reclaim your health and confidence. Don’t let body shame hold you back any longer!