269. Preference Or Altar? When Your Body Goal Costs You Peace

Is your body-transformation goal still a preference, or has it become an altar?

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to lose weight, change your body, or improve your health. Feminine empowerment includes the freedom to accept your body as it is, pursue physical change on your own terms, or create a personal balance between both.

The problem begins when a desire starts demanding sacrifices.

In this deeply personal episode, Kayla shares how an unexpected ten-pound weight fluctuation after a successful road trip sent her into frustration, discouragement, and several difficult weeks. The experience forced her to confront an uncomfortable truth: sometimes the body transformation, business result, or external proof begins to matter more than peace.

You’ll learn the warning signs that a preference has become an altar, including sacrificing presence, bargaining with the future, making your consistency conditional, and losing momentum when results appear to move farther away.

Kayla also walks you through an elemental process for returning the goal to its rightful place:

Earth: Body cooperation and presence
Water: Compassion, honesty, and repair
Fire: Desire held inside a hearth
Air: A new story and perspective
Ether: Trust in timing and the larger path

Your desires are allowed to matter.

They simply cannot be allowed to become courtrooms where your humanity is constantly placed on trial.

Links Mentioned

• Know Your Hungers / Fire Starter Diaries Newsletter
• Episode 226: Weight Loss Isn't Anti-Feminist. Shame Is
• Episode 262: The 2 Elements That Keep Discipline From Becoming Diet Culture
• You Are Not Behind: Building a Life You Love Without Having Everything You Want | Meghan Ryan Asbury
• Into the Body | Andee Love

Transcript

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Welcome to Embodied Writing Warrior, the show where healing gets a book talk upgrade and consistency feels like foreplay. I'm Kayla, a writer, recovered white knuckler, wellness math 100 dropout, and the woman who turned her food freedom journey into a Y choose romance with two very opinionated inner archetypes. This is where high-performing, deeply creative women stop treating their bodies like a performance review and start treating their lives like the spicy novel they were always meant to be. Let's go. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast. Today we are tackling a deeply important question. If you have a weight loss goal, body transformation goal, or a health goal, is it a preference or an alter? Now, this is a show about food freedom, deep health, creativity, spiritual growth. And sometimes these things also include desires to shape-shift the physical body. If you've listened to previous episodes like 226 or 262, you'll know that I believe real feminine empowerment is about choice. Just as women now have the choice to stay at home with their children, pursue a career, or master the art of balancing both, I believe in today's world, women also get to choose between either accepting their bodies exactly as they are, pursuing a transformation on their terms, or striking their own unique balance between loving, appreciating their bodies as they are now, while also working to create change. I don't think it's ever the physical transformation itself that's the issue. I think the issue can become how intensely that physical transformation is pursued, why it's being pursued, and at what cost. Today we're gonna cover the red flags that indicate your preference or desire for a body transformation might have turned into an altar. We're gonna talk about why worshiping a goal, weight, size, or any metric is disastrous for food freedom and consistency. We're gonna talk about the elemental path back to relegating a body transformation to its rightful place. Once you do this, food freedom, consistency, and honestly, just feeling less miserable and frustrated all tend to happen naturally as a result. This episode gets more personal than some of the recent ones, but I think this personal story is universal in many ways. And the lesson was incredibly valuable, so it's worth diving into on the show today. I had to ask myself this question after a road trip in mid-July. So I went down to the States to surprise my mom for her 60th birthday, see my siblings, my niece, my nephews that I haven't seen in forever, which was so nice. And also, road trips have historically been problematic for me. They tend to become these three, four-day effort spirals where I'm devouring everything in sight. Now, this road trip, I was determined to show up differently. I wanted to create a new proof of concept that I could go on a road trip, indulge some of the time, but also make more aligned choices and not use the trip as an excuse to eat so much that I'd go to bed every single night with a tummy ache, which has basically always been the case in the past. I went into this road trip with more consistency than ever, more presence, and I was feeling really good about where I was physically, mentally, all the things. The road trip itself went so well. Yes, there were more indulgences than my everyday eating, but there was also more intentionally choosing healthier meals more often. I kept up with my kundalini and my evening ritual. I made time for my long run on the Sunday while I was there, and I didn't get a single tummy ache from overeating. Even the drives themselves were not full of timbids and candy and sugary drinks. It was basically all water and a few sugar-free energy drinks because let's be real, 11 plus hours of driving each way when I hate driving. Yes, I still want caffeine. Thank you very much. And you know, when I got home from this road trip, I expected to be up in weight. That's normal after a prolonged drive where you have more sugar, salt, carbohydrates in the system. I expected five, maybe six pounds. And I got home to find out that I'd gained 10. Not five, not six, not even eight, ten. This led to a ton of frustration, confusion, and also some deep discouragement. I had a couple very off weeks after this happened. I also realized something during those off weeks. This realization came from listening to an audiobook called You Are Not Behind by Megan Aspury. It was one Spotify recommended. Usually they do a pretty good job with that, and I had 11 hours of driving ahead of me. Now, this one was more religious than a lot of the books I consume. And if you're like me and more spiritual than religious, this book still has a beautiful message if you're able to read it with your own personal version of spirituality in mind. One thing I loved about the book was that she didn't write in a holier than thou or self-righteous way. She was deeply honest. One of the things she admitted in the book was that sometimes she wanted the relationship or the job promotion more than she wanted Jesus. That stuck with me after getting home and feeling emotionally trainwrecked by a 10-pound weight gain. So emotionally train wrecked that I had moments where I wanted to give up on this book launch altogether. It was that bad. To be fair, there was also some absolute chaos with the book cover designing journey, which did not help matters. But I had to get honest with myself about the fact that sometimes I prioritize the external stuff, the body transformation, the book funnel success, the beautiful book cover I'd been dreaming about, more than I prioritize peace. That was a hard thing to face. It's also not easy admitting this on the podcast. And I'm still sharing it because this pattern is not unique to me. It's something many people wrestle with. And I think it's especially common in high-performing women with a lot of ambition and big dreams. And the ambition and the big dreams are not the problem. The problem is when those big dreams turn into altars instead of preferences or desires. The problem becomes when the desire stops being a desire and becomes a courtroom. So, how do you know when a desire or a preference mutates into an altar? There's a few key ways, and they were revealed to me in my own lived experience. First, an altar by its very nature demands a sacrifice. When you have a preference, a weight fluctuation after a road trip may feel less than ideal. When you have an alter, that fluctuation can feel catastrophic. Like the thing that mattered most was taken away in the span of a few short days. You might also end up sacrificing presence. When you want your circumstances to be different with too much intensity, you sacrifice the joy of being where you are and start worshiping a future place that you're not yet. And when something becomes an altar, there's often a lot of bargaining and conditions in place. You might make an internal promise to be grateful, trusting, and calm when the evidence shows up on your ego's timing. And maybe the biggest red flag that you've turned something into an altar is losing momentum and consistency when it feels like the thing you're worshiping gets farther away or even feels impossible in a hard moment. So instead of continuing with the rituals and daily habits because they're attached to the identity you're building, there can be this feeling of what's the point? It's not getting me closer to the goal, so why bother? This is why worshipping the body transformation itself, instead of making it a preference, is disastrous for food freedom and consistency. If your consistency is conditional based on how much progress your consistency seems to be creating, that consistency is going to disappear when progress slows. And when progress slows and it feels like you might not get the thing, you turned into an altar, that's when the despair, the frustration, the hopelessness, and the fear kicks in. Pressure is going to build in the system. Your body is going to seek relief. And this is where many of the effort moments with food come from. But then this often creates more negative emotions because now the gap between where you are and where you want to be has likely widened. So more negative emotions flood in, and then your body wants more relief. The solution here isn't simply to get back on track with your habits. The solution, the deeper work, is to heal the tendency to worship a size, a number, or a destination. And that often requires a sequenced elemental process. This is something I come back to in my own life because it's a framework that applies to so many things. This involves moving from earth to water to fire to air, and finally, ether. Many high-performing women who struggle with this tendency to worship an outcome often have underactivated earth and water and overactive fire. You always want to start in earth, especially for body transformation and health pursuits. The very first part of any health transformation needs to be body cooperation instead of control. And then you also want presence, which is something that often leaks away when you start turning a preference into an altar. These two things are key if you want to keep a desire from turning into an altar. When you move back into this place of body cooperation and presence, it becomes about so much more than the number. For me, I realize that when my blood sugar is all over the place, I'm more emotional, less creative, and less focused. Not only that, but when I'm fatigued from poor sleep or overindulging, it becomes harder to show up fully to my workouts. And my workouts are not about the calories burned. As someone with a ton of high voltage energy in my system, challenging workouts are part of what helps me stay balanced. I even had a naturopath once tell me that I was a human pressure cooker and needed to run or dance regularly. Good news is that I love both. So that's Earth. Then you move into water. And this has a few key pieces. The first is once you've noticed, oh, my fire got too hot, I turned this health goal into an altar again. You do not beat yourself up or make yourself wrong. You give the parts of you that turned this desire into an altar, compassion, and understanding. I had to realize after this road trip that, of course, this might be something I come back to and struggle with from time to time. After spending so many years in the personal training industry, a place where there's this silent, unspoken rule that a trainer's body is their business card, of course, this would come up again as I get ready to release the most important book I've ever written, a book about food freedom. Now, for the record, this unspoken rule about the body as business card was not something my specific training studio I worked at, subscribed to, or endorsed. I am referring to the larger, more universal assumptions people make about a person's body when they're in a health-related field. So this is universal, not personal. So it makes sense that more pressure would come back in this season. Because while the body doesn't tell the entire story, it does tell part of the story. There is this part of me that fears not looking the part of someone who's qualified to teach food freedom. Because there's a fear that someone out there who could truly benefit from what I'm sharing turns away because they judged the book by its cover. So, of course, I might get a little too fixated on the cover, both metaphorically and also hilariously, with my own book cover for this book. The other part of this that feels even trickier is not only having challenges around food resurface on occasion, but then also having these old challenges around body image resurface. But I've also realized that expecting to never have these challenges come up is a form of perfectionism in disguise. And I think this is something many leaders struggle with. Speaking of books I've loved lately, I'm in the middle of Into the Body by Andy Love. And I don't remember the last time I've highlighted so many parts of one book. She shared that she sometimes thinks that she should be more embodied, regulated, and feel more powerful since she teaches on these things. And she commented on the violence of turning your humanity into evidence against your calling. Which, yeah, I felt that one on a visceral level. She also shared these lines that I highlighted. This is the part about expertise no one talks about enough. Your mastery does not exempt you from being human. In fact, if it is real mastery, it brings you closer to your humanity. It makes you more honest about it. It makes you more responsible for it. It keeps pulling you back to the floor, the breath, the repair, the truth, the body you are actually living inside. Personally, I will probably come back to those lines many times. And if you're also in a leadership field where sometimes you feel like your hard moments disqualify you, they do not. Instead, they're deeper invitations to learn and grow through the hard moments so you can help those you're leading do the same. Water brings you closer to your humanity. It's where you stop demanding that you never have hard moments and start getting deeply skilled at repairing when you do. Water is also about acknowledging the truth, the real emotions, the frustrations, the doubt, the moments where you find yourself slipping back into unwanted approaches, when you notice your hearth fire has turned into wildfire. Water helps you come back to yourself to repair, to forgive, to release, so you can return the goal to being a preference instead of an altar. Then you bring back the fire, the desire, the ambition, the hunger. But now it's from this place where you're rooted in presence, body cooperation, and a willingness to be a messy human instead of a volcano goddess of unrealistically linear progress. This is fire with a hearth, not the wildfire that forgets earth and water come first. Once you've got fire back in its rightful place, you move on to air, your perspective. I was previously telling a story that my body needed to look a certain precise way by book launch time. And that story was creating pressure, scale worship, and internal chaos. I had to begin telling a new story, the one I recently read about in Into the Body. An unexpected weight fluctuation and a messy two weeks afterwards do not disqualify me from delivering this book. They make me even more qualified when I choose to lead myself through the mess in real time and learn from it. There was once upon a time when I wouldn't have even shared this on the podcast. It would have seemed too shallow, too messy, too human. I would have either never talked about it, or I would have come back months later after making all the progress I desired and been like, yay, here's the big lesson I learned from that hard moment months ago. And sure, that can be helpful, but it's not mastery. Mastery is letting you in on what's truly present when it's here and showing you how I lead myself through it in real time without waiting for the polish of wisdom that you gain in hindsight. And finally, ether. This is about trust. Trust in timing, trust in a higher timeline, trust that things will ultimately work out as they're meant to for the highest good of everyone involved. Maybe I had this happen to reveal where my own inner work needed to be directed. Maybe I had this happen to remind me that I can prioritize a metric, or I can prioritize inner peace, and the latter matters a hundred times more. Or maybe I learned this lesson so I could share it on this episode and help the person who needed this message. Maybe that person is you. And I go deep, so almost 300 pages explaining the method, the sequence, and the process. And this is not just ideas. There are rewrite rituals, templates, embodied exercises, things that will actually turn this into real life change. You can be the first to hear about its release by heading over to embodiedwritingwarrior.com slash gift. Signing up there gets you a powerful mini course and onto the Firestarter Diaries newsletter. All right, have an amazing rest of your week. Until next time, take care. Ready to stop outsourcing your worth and crack your own code? Grab Know Your Hungers. Two free assessments that uncover the real block behind your food struggles, plus a customized audio care package based on your results. You're not broken, you're just misdiagnosed. Link is in the show notes.