Episode 240: Overcome Societal Expectations of ‘You’re Not Enough’ With Wellness Coach Ali Sempek
Have you ever felt that you just don't look right? That You’re not enough. You should take up less room. Be quieter. Most women really tend to feel this is when it comes to food and weight. Today's guest helps women heal from all of the societal expectations thrown at us.
Ali Sempek is an Internationally Certified Wellness Coach and Founder/CEO of her own women’s empowerment company, Ask Coach Ali.
After a decade of disordered eating and failing to "hate her body skinny", Ali craved more from her life than a smaller jean size. Today, she’s changing the narrative of what healthy looks like by helping women transform their relationships with food and who they see in the mirror.
You might be wondering why I brought on this guest for the Game on Girlfriend podcast. It's because this is exactly what I do with clients when it comes to money and your business. What Ali’s out to help women heal is the idea that what they're doing is incorrect, that if they just hate themselves more, if they're just a little bit more punitive, everything will be okay. And I am trying to help you heal from the same messages around business and money.
These are very deeply connected concepts, and they all come down to how you view yourself as a woman in the world today, given all of society's expectations and hearing “who you are is not enough.”
Journey to food and wellness coaching
Ali says so much of her own story digs into why she coaches what she coaches.
“I kind of joke with my clients that I am part therapist and part best friend that you want to get a drink with,” says Ali. “But it really comes down to women's relationships with their body and how we use food as a control. So many of us have been so fearful of food and our bodies for the majority of our lives.”
Ali had started counting calories when she was six years old. She was constantly looking up meal plans, macro breakdowns and workouts. When the pandemic hit, she lost her marketing job and moved back in with her parents.
“I'm 26, like, ‘what is my purpose?’ And I kept coming back to, you know, I have been through so much with my own body, in my own journey with food,” says Ali. “How do I help other women feel confident, feel empowered, feel safe and understood the way that I always needed to feel and I just could never find?”
Ali tells her clients they live in a society that is action based. Do this and get something in return. You do this diet and you'll get this fat loss. You do these things in a relationship and you'll get married. What happens when you do and do and do and do, and you never get the result that you want, or one that's not long lasting?
Maybe it’s not realistic or sustainable for your life. But all we've ever been taught is to just go back to the “do” and repeat -- we expect a new result.
“If you're not getting what you want, you've got to go all the way back and say, how am I thinking? What is my mindset around this,” says Ali. “Whether it's about limiting beliefs or it's about how I'm showing up in the world or what I think we've been even capable of.”
Ali asks her clients to look at who taught them or what experience taught them. Your thoughts impact your feelings, your feeling impact your actions, you actions impact your results.
Ali says we have become a society that is starting to be more open to mental health, to therapists, to psychologists, to that realm. But there is no one that's in the middle. There's no one that says, “Yes, you might have a lot of areas we need to work on, but you can also love yourself in the interim.”
You're allowed to have the “and” not just the “either or.” Ali says as a coach, she looks at right now to find the reason you're not getting what you want. She recognizes as a wellness coach the reason is probably painful, restrictive or punishing in some contexts.
Three pillars for food and wellness coaching
Ali wants to build sustainable practices for her clients trying to overcome society expectations. She has three main pillars:
- Mindset: Who are you? Why are you the way you are? Where did your habits come from?
- Intuitive nutrition: Who are you being around your body and food? What specifically are you eating? There's so much misinformation or outdated information when it comes to food and our bodies that causes us not to trust ourselves. It's really about learning that you are not a robot that needs the same exact things every single day. You are constantly evolving human being and your body needs different things on any given day or a moment.
- Confidence: What do you think confidence is? What does it mean to you? Ali says we tend to look at confidence through the lens of being a certain size or beauty expectation. She argues it’s more about authenticity; it comes from your own worth.
“I'm going to say something that might be a little triggering to some people. I find it hilarious that as women, we outsource our intuition to men,” says Ali. “We're outsourcing to men who are trying to help with our hormones, with our relationship to our bodies, our relationship to food. And I just want to shake everybody and go, but they're not a woman. They haven't had the same experiences that you are having.”
When you look at society, we are constantly being told as women what we should be, what we shouldn't be, how we should eat, how we should act, how we should talk. They're constantly telling us what's wrong with us. And then offering, saying, “here, but buy this and we will help you fix it.”
They teach us that it's our fault, that we are the broken ones, that we need to be fixed. And the only way to be fixed is to buy into the system. But why would they ever want to heal you, Ali asks.
“Investing in yourself is the only knowledge and tool and resource that no one can ever take away from you,” says Ali, who like to use the fashion industry as an example of how society asks us to buy into something that’s constantly changing, so we have to buy again.
She says when you feel insecure in your body and disconnected from who you are, you don’t feel confident shopping. For decades, Ali wouldn’t wear T-shirts or tank tops because she didn’t want people to see that she didn’t have a flat stomach. She hated that people could actually see her body in them.
We can’t avoid the pressure that is thrown at us. We can't avoid the truth of those conversations and the impact that it's had on each of us.
“I always say curiosity over judgment, always,” says Ali. “You cannot feel curious and judgmental at the same time. Rather than judging yourself, why did I do that? … Get curious about who you are and where that's coming from because that's going to give you a lot more feedback for the future rather than continually keep you stuck.”
Mentioned in this episode
Binge More Game On Girlfriend™ Podcast Episodes
Something Just for You
Freedom in your business is here. Make revenue that allows you to exhale. Grab my free Freedom Calculator below, and know exactly how much your business needs to make so you can be FREE.
Thanks for subscribing! Check your email for further instructions.