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How Training Jiu Jitsu Helped Me Heal My Relationship With My Body
13 Plays4 days ago
The early 2000s beauty standards are back: low-rise jeans, "#SkinnyTok," Ozempic ads everywhere. I get GLP-1 ads every single day. And as someone who lived through the "you must be size zero or you're fat" era, I'm having flashbacks. But here's what's shifted for me: jiu jitsu changed how I relate to my body.
Here's what we're exploring about body image and martial arts:
- How beauty standards are ever-changing (I finally got skinny in 2014 when the standard was 2003)
- The shift from aesthetics to functionality - what can my body do vs how does it look
- Why jiu jitsu is different from gym culture (jiu jitsu hair don't care is real)
- Growing Pains segment: I'm still struggling with body image even as a coach
- The most empowering shift - appreciating what my body can do instead of just how it looks
From understanding that women are hyper-aware of how they're perceived everywhere to discovering the freedom of being too focused on not getting choked out to care about your appearance, this episode shares my 15-year jiu jitsu journey. Plus the new 'Growing Pains' segment where I share that I'm not completely healed, I still struggle, and that's okay.
Subscribe. Share. Remember that your body's worth isn't determined by shifting beauty standards.
Small steps, big healing. Keep growing! ✨
Join the conversation! What helped you shift your relationship with your body? DM me on Instagram @YourCoachMari!
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Transcript
Introduction to Growing With Soul Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, beautiful souls, and welcome back to the Growing with Sol podcast, where we explore the moments and stories that shape who we're becoming. I'm Marisol, and this is where I love to have real conversations about growth, self-discovery, and learning to put yourself first.
00:00:18
Speaker
Whether we're diving into books that change a perspective or unpacking personal experiences that teach us something new, this podcast is for women who are done playing small and are ready to embrace their own journey.
00:00:29
Speaker
If you've struggled with putting everyone else first or battled self-doubt, you're in the right place. This isn't about perfection. It's about the messy, beautiful process of growing into yourself.
00:00:42
Speaker
So come grow with me.
The Return of Early 2000s Beauty Standards
00:00:44
Speaker
The early two thousand s are back They are. Not as strong as they were when they were happening, i would say. But I think i think we're there. i think we're kind of I feel like we're there more so than we're still getting there. do you know what I mean? In terms of the beauty standard for women in the early two thousand s if you were...
00:01:06
Speaker
conscious of what was going on back then. The beauty standard was to be extremely skinny. The beauty standard was emaciated, looking like you need help. And that was a rough for all women, i would say at that time. Even if you met the beauty standard, it was still difficult then you had to maintain that as you got older and naturally as your body shifted. But essentially, we see this a lot right now on social media, the rise of like skinny talk, The low-rise jeans, like, fad is kind of back.
00:01:38
Speaker
I still, i don't know. Maybe part of it is also just, like, my age group because we lived it the first time, so we refused to go back. And I think a lot of us also refuse to ever put on a low-rise jean again. well Spoiler alert about me. One, I never had the body type for freaking low-rise jean to begin with. And I still don't. Okay, low-rise is not not comfortable. Doesn't look good on me anyway. If ah you think they're comfortable and if they look good on you, all the power to you.
00:02:06
Speaker
All the power to you. But that that's not for me. Never was, never will be. But if you are young, if you know someone who is very young, preteen, teenager, and...
00:02:21
Speaker
they're wanting to wear those low-rise jeans and it's the trend and their body type doesn't fit the trend, I think we all can commiserate and recognize how painful that feels when you're that age.
Impact of Beauty Standards on Health and Society
00:02:34
Speaker
With that being said, other than just the trends in terms of what's going on with fashion, we have the rise of Ozempic, other GLP-1s being advertised everywhere. i don't think I go a day without getting fed some type of GLP-1 ad.
00:02:51
Speaker
Like, i isn't that crazy? i i I didn't realize how much I was getting those ads until I started to write the outline for this episode.
00:03:05
Speaker
It's crazy. And I'm someone who's saying done a lot of their work around body image and all of that. So like, okay, you give me the ad, whatever, like,
00:03:16
Speaker
I'm gonna keep moving on, keep pushing. Although I will say there was a time where I was really struggling with my body image, just like last year. i was go that's going through it, okay?
00:03:28
Speaker
And I was getting the ads and I was like, should i Would I benefit from it? Hmm. and with and you that There's no medical reason for me to to use one. Other people have made the choice to use one to help them lose weight. You know what, cool.
00:03:41
Speaker
You talk to your doctor, you do what you do what's right for you, no judgment. But the amount of ads, and I think this is also like a genuinely like American thing as well, because I've heard other people from other countries say they don't have ads on like television or what have you or social media because at this point for medication, I think that's really like American thing as well.
00:04:02
Speaker
Anyway, i get them every day, every fucking day. Crazy. Even deeper than just like what we're talking about, like in a snapshot of today, and but even deeper than like changing beauty trends and what have you. Like, I do think there's also this longstanding history of a women's relationship with their body being centered on how it looks.
00:04:28
Speaker
I do think part of it just has to be with how society has been built, where essentially beauty is or has been our most valuable currency, which is kind of crazy because, okay, I literally binge watched Bridgerton last night. Instead of being a productive human being a member of society, i decided to watch all the second half of the the this last season of Bridgerton in one go.
00:04:56
Speaker
And really, like they fall in love in like a month. But what is that other than like lust and just thinking someone's hot, you know? Which again, beauty being their most valuable currency.
00:05:09
Speaker
But with that being said, more presently, especially within the last, I would say, 30-so years, you know women constantly, even prior to that, but definitely within my lifespan that I can speak to personally, is women trying to contort themselves to fit ever-changing beauty standards. And the beauty standard has changed quite a bit over time.
00:05:34
Speaker
Within my own lifetime, I've seen it go from being super super skinny, wearing like a zero, size double zero, being like the cool. And if you were anything larger than like a four or even like, God forbid, a six, and then like you were fat.
00:05:51
Speaker
Like, devastation. remember one of my cousins one time, we were like 15, so like 2005-ish. 2003, because if she was 15, I was 13. So 2003. And she was crying. She came back from the store, and like the jeans she bought were a size 5.
00:06:08
Speaker
and that' say And this was someone who used to fit into a size zero. So it's like you should from a zero one day to a five the other We all know women's sizing is a crapshoot, but like when you're that young and you have to be a size zero, or maybe if you're lucky enough, a size double zero, all of sudden you have wear a five, it she had to crash out.
00:06:27
Speaker
Okay? She totally had to crash out. That's what I'm talking about here. How we are so like our relationship with our body is fraught, essentially, and how it remains that way. And I do think for a lot of us millennial women, the beauty standard of having to be a pinchy palo is what really fucked us over. like and again, sometimes, you know, a lot of us, even in our 30s, a lot of us are in our 40s now, we still struggle with this.
00:06:58
Speaker
One of the things i want to talk about, though, is also myself and like my own journey.
Shift from Aesthetics to Functionality through Jiu-Jitsu
00:07:03
Speaker
And as you can tell from the title of this episode, my relationship with my body and with body image has shifted significantly because of Brazilian jujitsu.
00:07:15
Speaker
I've been doing Brazilian jujitsu and off for like look Like, well, it's 15 years now. Again, on and off. Like, are you kidding me? If I would've done it consistently for 15 years, I would've been a black belt by now. But you know, life happens. I took a pause.
00:07:33
Speaker
I did grad school a couple times throughout there, and so I wasn't training consistently. I took time off for years. Anyway. I've been doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu on and off for almost 15 years now, and that has shifted and shaped my relationship with my body. To give you a little bit of history regarding my own journey with a body image, again, i grew up in the early 2000s where you were supposed to be a stick, where again, looking emaciated was the beauty standard, where you could fit into a double zero, you were winning.
00:08:07
Speaker
So for me, as a little a chunky kid in the 90s and early 2000s, I didn't fit that beauty standard. I think ages ago, I even talked about how like I still didn't, when growing up, I also didn't fit like the Latino beauty standard of being like curvy with like a big booty and all that.
00:08:24
Speaker
Wasn't me either. there So I was just a little chunky kid who didn't fit into like either beauty standard that was supposed to apply to me. So that was fun. It was not.
00:08:35
Speaker
Anyway, with that being said, i was never athletic. And as I got older, into like preteens and like teenage years, I got stuck at a certain weight.
00:08:46
Speaker
And like i mentioned, that weight never fit the beauty standards. Low-rise jeans were just like perennial, like muffin top. and like But the thing is also, like which I say that we're not fully back at the early 2000s, because back then,
00:09:02
Speaker
You couldn't find any jeans that were not low rise. You can find jeans everywhere that are like mid-rise, which I say also like the low rise trend right now.
00:09:12
Speaker
a lot of the low rise quote unquote low rise jeans, I see people on their like hauls and stuff online. Baby girl, that's mid-rise. I see too much zipper. Too much zipper. But you know what? I am not a proponent of low-rise jeans anyway, so you wear those mid-rise jeans. Call them whatever you want. Be comfortable, okay? Anyway.
00:09:34
Speaker
So, but looking back now to like my journey as a preteen, as a kid, and even like into my 20s, I felt huge. Looking back, I wasn't. I mean, was i was a little as a kid, i was a little chunky, but I wasn't like big But back then I felt huge.
00:09:51
Speaker
I felt like a whale back then, you know? And... Really, the only reason i ever even got into fitness was because I wanted to lose weight, because I wanted to change how I looked. I wanted to change how I felt in my body, which valid reason to lose weight. But let's talk about what was fueling that.
00:10:10
Speaker
It was my low self-esteem. It was living within the context of these beauty standards that made me want to lose weight because I felt so big when I also really wasn't.
00:10:20
Speaker
now In my 20s, I did eventually lose the weight, but also by then the beauty standard had changed. So there was that. i remember, i worked so hard to finally lose weight when I was like in my mid twenty s And then i finally was, i ended up getting, the goal wasn't to get skinny. The goal was just to lose weight and whatever happened, happened you know what I'm saying? But I lost so much weight in my 20s that I was very skinny.
00:10:48
Speaker
and But by that time, this is like, what, 2014 era? By that time, the beauty standard had changed from being palo to being slim thick, okay, where you have a flat stomach but a fat ass.
00:11:03
Speaker
Tell me how that works. Tell me how that works for most people, naturally. Anyway, that was the beauty standard. And by my nature of losing weight, I didn't look like that.
00:11:15
Speaker
So I finally reached the goal of being skinny to fit the beauty standard of like 2003 when he was 2014 and I needed no waist in a fat ass. yeah I couldn't win. i couldn't win.
00:11:29
Speaker
But that just goes to show that beauty standards are ever shifting and changing and we shouldn't allow an external beauty standard to dictate how we feel about our bodies and how we relate to our bodies.
00:11:42
Speaker
I know that's a tall order, it's a tall ask, I get it but it's something to definitely work towards. So how did jujitsu change my perspective? Like I mentioned, I started training when I was around 21 years old.
00:11:56
Speaker
And for me, jujitsu gave me a new way of learning, being a very academic person. i was always in my head about everything. I still am, let's be real. But in terms of learning something new through the physicality of jujitsu, learning something with my body instead of with my brain necessarily,
00:12:17
Speaker
it allowed me to express myself in a new way. it allowed me to learn about myself in a new way and learn something in a new and like kinetic way.
00:12:28
Speaker
so For jiu-jitsu, it shifted how I related to my body from aesthetics and solely focusing on the aesthetics of my body to also looking at the functionality, the strength, the flexibility, the the endurance of my body, essentially. Like, what can my body do? How can my body perform in this athletic way? Became more of a focus instead of just how do I look?
00:12:55
Speaker
So with jujitsu, i wanted to build strength. I wanted to increase my endurance. I wanted to increase my flexibility. I say wanted past tense, girl, it's present tense. Like, let's be real.
00:13:08
Speaker
Like, I still need to build strength. I still need to to work on my endurance, work on my cardio, and I definitely need to keep working on my flexibility. But essentially, i because of jujitsu and my training, I've become a more appreciative of what my body can do versus what my body looks like.
00:13:26
Speaker
And that is one of the most empowering shifts that training martial arts has given me in terms of how I relate to my own self and how I feel about my own self.
00:13:39
Speaker
And I also think that one of the beautiful things of jujitsu, where like when it comes to the actual practice of it, like when you're there, Because again, like when we're talking about beauty standards and like us as women, and let me know if you relate, but like you're you're very, I would say most women are very aware of how they appear and how they are being perceived at all times.
00:14:04
Speaker
Like even just right now, i woke up hella early just so I can like take a shower, do my makeup, do my hair, and look as perfect as possible just to film this. Girl, like why? I mean, not that I shouldn't look good at the camera myself, but it's like I'm very, I was very cognizant and conscious of like how I was going to present on camera.
00:14:22
Speaker
So, but I think women take that to like every aspect of their lives and everything that they do. But when you're at jujitsu, you're more focused on trying to practice the new technique or you're more focused on not getting choked out or getting your arm broken to care about how you look when you're training. Whereas also when you go to the gym and you say you're doing your cardio or you're doing your weightlifting, want to look here at the gym. You're still aware of how you are looking at the gym. Whereas in jujitsu,
00:14:50
Speaker
You know, jujitsu hair don't care is a real thing because you're looking crazy. You're looking crazy at jujitsu, but it doesn't matter because you're just trying to learn or trying to win.
00:15:01
Speaker
And I think that is part of the beauty of jujitsu.
Personal Growth and Body Image Journey
00:15:05
Speaker
I am doing a new segment on the podcast. It is called Growing Pains. And this is where I'm going to insert in today's episode, though usually it'll come a little bit more towards the center.
00:15:14
Speaker
It just felt like it fit better here for this one. It is called to Growing Pains, and it is a part of the podcast where I'm going to share where I'm still struggling with things. Often on the podcast, I tend to talk about things um maybe from a little bit more of like an academic perspective or a personal perspective of how I've overcome things, how I've dealt with certain of things, and how I've learned and improved, essentially.
00:15:40
Speaker
I'm a human. I'm still struggling through things. And even though I am a life coach, again, I'm human. I'm still struggling with things. And I want to share that as well. So through this segment called Growing Pains,
00:15:54
Speaker
Again, i want to be very clear that I'm not healed completely when it comes to my body image and my relationship with my body. It is something that has been fraught throughout my entire life.
00:16:05
Speaker
It's something that has been fraught within the last few years. And it's something that I still actively I'm struggling with because I am at a point in my life where I would like to lose weight and be in better shape and like aesthetically look better. Well, see, there I go again. Aesthetically look better. Aesthetically look more typically athletic, I suppose. There we go. and Yeah, that's what I would like, to look more typically athletic in terms of my aesthetics, you know?
00:16:35
Speaker
and i The funny thing is, is that like at this point in my life, I don't hate myself anymore. So when it comes to losing weight and sticking with it, like I have this like knee jerk reaction. It's like, I'm hungry. I should eat something. i' be and all Like when you're hungry, you eat something. But when you're trying to lose weight and you're in a calorie deficit, you're going to be hungry because you're in a calorie deficit to lose weight.
00:16:57
Speaker
But part of me is just like, no, that's anorexia. Eat something. Yeah. So I have this like, you know, it's like I've i've done so much healing that I'm like self-sabotaging my own like fitness journey because I associate those tactics with a time in my life where I was very unhealthy and how I approached losing weight and being fit.
00:17:16
Speaker
And now it's a shift in perspective for me that I am fighting and struggling with. And yeah, You know, I no longer hate myself. I no longer hate how I look, even though I wish to look differently or look different. But it is still something that i struggle with.
00:17:35
Speaker
So as much as I have a better and healthier relationship with my body, do know that I am still human and I am working on it as well. Ultimately, jujitsu has been a vehicle through which i have unlearned journey.
00:17:51
Speaker
I don't know, vain seems not like the right word, but I've unlearned like a problematic way of relating and viewing myself through jujitsu. I have been able to relate to myself in, I would say, a healthier way, view my body and my how I look aesthetically in a healthier way. And it's something that I truly appreciate i did not expect when I started training jujitsu.
00:18:16
Speaker
But let me know what you guys think. Have you experienced something like this? Do you train jujitsu or maybe any other martial art that has potentially changed how you view yourself, how you view yourself in terms of your aesthetics? If you that's something you haven't considered at all anymore, definitely let me know. and if you've made it this far into the episode, i truly appreciate you. You're amazing. So thank you for tuning in today to the Grow With Soul podcast. If this episode resonated with you, leave a lovely review, leave a little five star review, because it definitely helps get this out to more people who need to hear this.
00:18:47
Speaker
And additionally, if you are looking for support, if you are having some trouble with how you view yourself, having some struggles with your own self-esteem, your own relationship with your body and body image, definitely hit me up if you would like support with that.
00:19:01
Speaker
And it's definitely something I specialize
00:19:11
Speaker
link in the show notes until next time keep growing