In today’s bonus episode, Kristen sits down with her friend and fellow coach Julia Pontillo.

Julia is a body relationship coach as well as a health coach specializing in transitioning into a whole food plant-based diet. She has a background in speech therapy which awakened her love for neurology and opened the path for developing a true fascination for the human body. She is now helping women all over the world to heal their relationships to their bodies, ditch dieting and use food as an instrument that works for them, not against them.

Julia has her own story of how she fell in love with her body, as can be hard for many of us to do. She grew up in a very safe home—in a protected environment--in a small town in Northern Germany.

Her main problems in her life were around weight and body image because people started comparing her with her sister, who was very thin. Julia was a little chubby at the age of eight. She was cute but people compared them nonetheless. She started her first diet when she was 12 years old.

This is a hard time of life to diet and restrict nutrients and calories since you are growing and developing hormonally and in other ways physically. But, she and her mom didn’t know better and the family culture made it likely that she’d be ensconced a dieting mindset.

She was preparing for her final exams in speech therapy when she was 22 and she started her first and last very extreme diet where she worked out consistently by doing a high intensity workout and restricting her calories to not more than 1600 calories per day. She did this for about eight months. She lost 18 pounds, lost her period, developed hormonal acne, and had to cut her hair off from chest-length to neck-length. Her hair was so damaged from dieting.

She didn’t see herself accurately and did not think she had lost any weight. She had developed body dysmorphia where she just couldn’t see her body correctly.

People would congratulate her on her weight loss and willpower. She wanted to keep going until she lost every single fat cell on her body.

Then, luckily, she moved to Australia. She started binge-eating, which was the exact opposite of what she had been doing previously. Binge-eating is when one consumes a lot of food in a very short amount of time without stopping. Within 15 minutes she’d have a chocolate bar, one or two bags of chips, gummy bears, licorice. This was a really hard time for her and her body, emotionally and physical.

She then moved to California and started her health coaching training. This is when things really started to change for her. She got very deep into self-development and mindset work, which laid the foundation for where she is today. It wasn’t until January or February this year that she was able to say that she really and truly loved herself and her body unconditionally.

The most important mindset shift that helped her get there was to realize that having unconditional love for someone or something is not a destination that you need to reach or you will suddenly reach once you accomplish the goals you set for yourself.

Many of us might be able to relate in having the thinking that, “Once I lose ten pounds, or once I get rid of the acne, I will be able to love myself.” Then we reach that point and there is still something in the way.

We never really reach that destination.

Loving your body does not happen immediately. It involves a lot of reprogramming and making a decision every day until it becomes second nature. You can start to realize that you can love your body for what it is.

And it’s not really about the looks because Julia says that she still is not 100% in love with her looks all the time. It’s important to understand that your body is not your looks; it’s so much more than your looks. Your looks are just the outer layer of your body.

Understanding that you can control how much you love your body empowers...