About Our Guest:

Whitney Casares, MD, MPH, FAAP, is a practicing board-certified pediatrician, author, speaker, and full-time working mom. Dr. Whitney is a Stanford University-trained private practice physician whose expertise spans the public health, direct patient care, and media worlds. She holds a Master of Public Health in Maternal and Child Health from The University of California, Berkeley, and a Journalism degree from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is also CEO and Founder of Modern Mommy Doc.

Dr. Whitney advocates for the success of career-driven caregivers in all facets of their lives, guiding them toward increased focus, happiness, and effectiveness despite the systemic challenges and inherent biases that threaten to undermine them. She speaks nationally about her Centered Life Blueprint, which teaches working caregivers how to pay attention to what matters most amid pressure, at multibillion-dollar corporations like Adidas and Nike, and at executive-level conferences. She is a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics and medical consultant for large-scale organizations, including Good Housekeeping magazine, Gerber, and L’Oreal (CeraVe). Her work has been featured in Forbes, Thrive Global, and TODAY Parenting. She is a regular contributor to Psychology Today.

Dr. Whitney practices medicine in Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband raise their two young daughters.

About the Episode:

Dr. Whitney gets personal on this episode talking about body image, weight, and the world’s standards of health. She talks about why it’s so hard for women to have a positive body image even in the movement of body positivity and how we can help break that cycle for our kids.

Episode Takeaways:

• There is such a divide in women’s health when it comes to body image and weight. And, as women, we’ve been steeped in diet culture our entire lives. From watching our parents go through a million diet and exercise programs to the way they spoke to us about our bodies (even when their motivation came from the right place!) it really shaped and formed our relationships with our bodies, food, and exercise. And it’s really difficult as parents, now, to navigate that with our kids, knowing how much it has affected us.

• I often struggle with hearing all the voices that have spoken into my life about weight. I hear my parents talk about their own body, I hear all the people who told me I looked so great after I lost weight. As a result of those thoughts, it’s really difficult to make my actions line up with my mindset. I want to be as healthy as I can be for my kids, and I want to be the best role model in the area, but I’m a human being and sometimes I fall short.

• There are times when I exercise not just for the joy of movement, but to lose weight. I do eat foods and think, “Will this make me bigger?” “Will this make me smaller?” I do look at my body and think critical thoughts. But I’ve learned there’s a difference between thinking a thought and taking it and passing it onto your kids. I can fight those internal demons and still pass on something better to my kids.

• When I have those thoughts, I give myself the most grace and self-compassion. When I think critically, I tell myself WHY I’m being critical–because of the way you’ve been conditioned to think for so long. And then I ask myself what I’m going to do with that thought. I’m going to be mindful, I’ll store it away, and move on. And if I do take an action, like eating for restriction or exercising for a version of “health” that isn’t healthy for me, I can still stop and reverse it. It doesn’t have to be the new normal.

• Oftentimes, these things aren’t even noticeable from the outside. It’s just the constant mind chatter going on inside your head. That doesn’t mean you can’t be authority on this for your kids. That doesn’t mean you can’t undo all the damage of diet culture. It means that it’s okay that you’re not perfect. That it’s okay that it’s still a struggle. It’s going to take several generations for our kids to unlearn what we learned and to unsee what’s on the internet with photoshop and filters.

• Just because your experience was terrible, doesn’t mean it has to be that way for your kids. But they live in the real world, so we have to take those times to explain to them what’s happening, what stereotypes are, what old ideas are out there about what it means to be “healthy,” and what our families are going to do to set our relationships with food and our bodies.
  

More Blogs on this Topic:

• If you’re eating oreos in the closet, this one’s for you
• Being more in-tune with your body is the “diet plan” you’ve always needed
• New year, same me

More Podcast Episodes on this Topic:

• Telling our kids the truth about their bodies
• How to stop looking at exercise as punishment for living your life
• When you feel like shit about your body