Hello Reader,

Someone said something to me when I was 15 that I carried for decades.

I was walking home from school and a guy passed me on the street. He didn’t know me. I’d never seen him before. He looked me up and down and said

“Nice face, shame about the legs.”

I don’t know why I let it land the way it did, but I did. From that moment I told myself a story: I have chunky legs.

I’ve always been active – body pump, cycling, hiking – things that build leg muscles, as it turns out. Over time, gradually, without really noticing, my legs got stronger and more toned. And somewhere along the way I stopped believing him.

Not because of a single moment. Just because the evidence slowly stopped supporting the story.

That’s one kind of story. The kind that eventually gets disproved.

Here’s another kind.

When I was at university I just danced. I didn’t think about it. A tune came on, I loved it, I moved, completely unconscious. Nobody told me I was good and nobody told me I was bad. It just was what it was – joy, music, friends, Friday night.

Then on two separate occasions, years later, two different people told me I wasn’t a good dancer.

And I believed them.

I told myself the story: I’m a not a great dancer, I have no coordination, I’m the one going left when everyone else goes right.

I laughed it off. I kept dancing. I didn’t let it stop me.

But it did affect me. I hesitate now, when there’s dancing involved. I feel a small dread when a message says “dinner and dancing.” I’m constantly checking whether I’m doing it right, instead of just doing it.

The career ones? I dealt with those better. Not perfectly, but better.

I once gave a presentation at a conference where I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. I winged it. Halfway through I caught someone’s eye and he looked completely bored – understandable, it was the Finance team’s employee engagement results, but still. It threw me off and I didn’t recover. Afterwards I overheard someone asking the CEO “what happened to Kirsty?”

And here’s what I did with that. I asked myself, is it true?

It was. I hadn’t prepared properly and it showed. So I did something about it. I put myself forward to speak at the next Leadership Conference, completely out of my comfort zone. I rehearsed until I knew it cold. I nailed it.

Then I did four more conferences and co-hosted our employee awards five times. Nervous every single time. But I’d examined the thought, found it was true, and decided what to do with it.

Most of us have a version of this. We call it imposter syndrome.

It’s the feeling that you’re not quite qualified enough, not quite good enough, that someone’s going to work it out eventually. I spent most of my career feeling like a jack of all trades, master of none. A business degree, a masters, twenty-five years of experience, and still the voice saying “But are you actually any good at this?”

Turns out most people feel this way. We’re all winging it to some degree. The ones who seem most confident are usually just better at hiding it.

The difference is what you do with the voice when it shows up.

In my HealthMindset certification, I learned about cognitive behaviour coaching. You take the thought – the comment, the story, the belief – and you examine it.

• Is that thought a fact, or is it just a thought?
• What’s the evidence for it? What’s the evidence against it?
• Is it true? If it’s true, what does it mean? What do you want to do with that?
• If it isn’t true, why are you still carrying it?

It sounds simple. It isn’t, particularly when you’ve been carrying something for a long time.

The dancing one, I looked at. Is it true? Probably, yes. Could I do something about it? I could take dance classes. But to be honest I’ve chosen to accept that I’ll never be the best dancer on the dance floor, and dance anyway. And that is the secret: you don’t have to fix everything to move past the story.

This is why I’m sharing this with you today.

I work with women whose relationship with food has been shaped by this kind of thing. Someone said something about their body, their eating, their weight, what they should or shouldn’t have. The person who said it has long forgotten. The woman listening hasn’t. She turned it into a story, the story became a belief, the belief became a behaviour. And years later she’s still eating, or not eating enough, around something someone threw away decades ago.

The stories we tell ourselves are powerful. Not because they’re true. Because we stopped questioning them.

That’s the kind of thing I'll explore here in The Middle Ground – and it's something I work on with my clients. We don’t just look at what you eat. We look at what you believe about yourself and your eating – and we ask whether that belief has earned its place in your life.

Some of the stories turn out to be worth keeping. Most of them don’t.

One small thing for you:

Is there a story you’re still carrying? Something someone said that you turned into a belief about yourself? Maybe about your body, your eating, what you can or can’t do.

You don’t need to fix it this week. Just notice it’s there.

Until next time,

Kirsty
Nutrition & Behaviour Change Coach
​@kjrcoaching​

Food, mindset, and everything in between.