Three things we dive into in this episode:
What it means to feel your innate sense of wholeness and to stop sourcing it from outside yourself
Why sourcing a sense of wholeness from outside yourself harms your health and wellbeing
Holistic and actionable ways to start sourcing a sense of wholeness from within yourself today
📘Resources
Check out the Whole, Full, & Alive’s official trailer to learn more about me and the podcast.
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📌Episode Highlights
[05:24] About the Whole, Full, & Alive Podcast
Whole, Full, & Alive’s mission is to help you fall in love with your life and with who you truly are.
The podcast aims to inspire you to embrace yourself underneath all the titles, labels, relationship status, body shape/size, or other limitations you may have put on yourself.
At the end of every episode, Caitie will give a processing prompt and an actionable “experiment” to help you move forward in your own journey towards feeling whole, full, & alive.
[12:24] Getting Your Sense of ‘Wholeness’
Many of us depend on something outside of ourselves — a job, relationship, body size — to feel complete. We then feel threatened or out of control when we lose it.
When this happens, people result to maladaptive coping tools to feel in control.
Please forgive yourself if you’ve ever turned to maladaptive coping tools when you lost your sense of wholeness.
Caitie: “Just don’t forget: when you’re making life decisions, when you’re creating your life, when you’re living your life, the most reliable home you have is always going to be the one within you. You are whole. You are complete on your own.” - Click Here To Tweet This
[17:47] Romanticize Your Life
Do all the things that you do with or for other people for yourself.
Play cozy music in the morning and make yourself a luxurious breakfast. Make your life romantic.
You do not have to suppress the desire or intention of finding someone. But you will never feel as good as you can if you think you’re inadequate without a partner.
A partner will be an addition to your life, not someone who makes you whole.
[21:07] Wholeness as a Foundation for Nutrition
When you source your sense of wholeness from the way you eat, this only buries you in rigidity and restriction.
Instead, nutrition habits should come from a place of understanding that you are already whole and deserve good self-care.
Use healthy habits and self-care to boost your energy levels, amplify what you can contribute to the world, and live an awesome life; not as a way to make yourself feel more worthy.
This intentional mindset also applies to other things we mistake to be the reason for our wholeness.
[24:00] Seeking Wholeness Outside Yourself Can Lead to Disordered Eating
Caitie grew up seeing women trying to complete themselves through having a certain body size, being the perfect wife, or playing a certain role just to feel complete or get validation.
This drove her to engage in unhealthy practices, from developing disordered eating to exercise addiction.
Eventually, she found the grace to break through these maladaptive behaviors. She found wellness mentors and holistic and sustainable practices.
Caitie: “Once I crossed that bridge, I learned that I had to cross a million more. I had to learn [that] ‘Okay, I’m whole even if my GPA isn’t perfect. I am whole even if I don’t take five fitness classes per week. I am whole even if not everyone loves me.” - Click Here To Tweet This
[38:50] The “Sinking Sailboat”
Caitie shares the time when she recently sourced her sense of wholeness from her partner. She couldn’t bring herself to leave a partner that was a bad fit because she built her home on their relationship status.
During a trip with her ex, she realized her relationship is akin to a sinking sailboat. Tune in to the episode to hear Caitie’s story!
You first have to face the things you feel are stuck within you before you can act in alignment with your beliefs.
[46:25] The Link Between Thoughts and Behavior
We can practice reframing our thoughts or practice mantras. However, we cannot control our brains the same way we can control our actions and behaviors.
Change behaviors first. Actions, over time, will ultimately change your thoughts.
Normalize being proud of yourself.
Believe that your sense of wholeness and worth is inherent.
[49:51] This Week’s Processing Prompt
What’s the thing that you’d feel incomplete without?
What could become possible if you loved yourself so much that you didn’t need this ‘thing’?
What would you do if you knew you were a complete, whole, and worthy person?
[53:04] This Week’s Action Experiment
Step 1. Recognize what you feel inadequate without. Name the void and know what you’re filling it with.
Step 2. Acknowledge the desire you have for that thing and just let it be.
Step 3. Besides that desire, acknowledge that you can still feel good now. Fill the void with your energy.
Ask yourself what basic self-care you are neglecting and consider taking action in this aspect.
Find something that regulates your nervous system or sparks inspiration within you. Commit to making these and self-care part of your daily regimen.
Caitie: “Forgive yourself for anything maladaptive or ridiculous that you did when you were just trying to feel whole again… Firmly, compassionately and confidently break the pattern of sourcing wholeness from outside of yourself.” - Click Here To Tweet This
About Caitie
Caitie Corradino MS, RDN, CDN, RYT, CPT, is the founder and lead counselor of Full Soul Nutrition. She is a registered Dietitian-Nutritionist, a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, a certified fitness and yoga instructor, an eating disorder recovery coach, and a reiki practitioner. She is passionate about providing counseling services that are truly integrative and provide healing for the whole person.
Connect with Caitie: Website | Instagram
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Whole, Full, & Alive is a podcast exploring the art and science of falling in love with your life, with your story, and with who you truly are — underneath your titles, your resume, your relationship status, and your bank account.
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Transcript
Caitie Corradino: You don’t cultivate a sense of wholeness, you don’t cultivate a sense of believing that you are enough and that you can have a home within yourself by thinking your way out of things. You cultivate that sense of wholeness, that sense of enoughness, that sense of ‘I am complete on my own’, by taking actions in alignment with that belief.
Welcome to Whole, Full, & Alive, a podcast exploring the art and science of falling in love with your life, with your story and with who you truly are underneath your titles, your resume, your relationship status, and your bank account. I'm Caitie Corradino, a registered dietitian nutritionist, certified fitness and yoga instructor, eating disorder recovery coach, Reiki healer, and founder of Full Soul Nutrition.
But underneath my titles and resume, a big fan of kitchen dance breaks, early mornings, all things chocolate truffles, world traveling and serendipity. I'm here to share no bullshit stories and actionable tools to help you feel unshakably worthy. You have everything you need within you to feel whole, full, & alive, right here, right now. Let's get into it.
It would mean the whole world if you could take a few steps today to help celebrate the launch of this podcast, and if you take these steps, you get a chance to join my nutrition coaching program and community called Whole, Full, & Alive for free.
So for free, you'll get a one on one counseling session with me, ten live group calls and access to dozens of lectures from myself and amazing guest coaches to help you trade restriction, obsession and yo-yo dieting for delicious, energizing and nourishing routines that support your most aligned life. I know, pretty big deal.
Here's how you get to enter for a free spot in Whole, Full, & Alive. First step, listen to an episode. Step two, subscribe and follow the show. Step three, leave a rating and review on Apple Podcast. Step four, share the show on Instagram and tag me @full.soul.nutrition. Step five, once you've completed the four steps above, just send me a DM with the message podcast and you'll be entered into the giveaway. I am so, so, so thrilled to share the show with you, and I will email the winner of the giveaway in one week.
Hey, welcome to episode number one of Whole, Full, & Alive. I'm really excited to be here talking to you. This is a long-anticipated project, and I don't quite have all the words for what I'm feeling, but I do know that I am really freaking excited and that I am beyond grateful for you.
I am beyond grateful that you are here, that we were connected in some way and you want to tune in and see what's going on here on the Whole, Full, & Alive podcast. Episode One is just me. Hi, I'm Caitie. If we haven't met yet, and if you want to know more about who I am and why I'm here, listen to the trailer. It'll definitely give you a better idea of who I am and why I'm here in like a cozy little summarized format, and this episode will definitely give you a better idea of who I am and why I'm here.
But, I just want to say right off the bat that this episode one is not going to be like my life story episode. When I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about in my first episode, first of all, I felt so intimidated by the idea of a first episode. So, I sat on it for a while. I thought about, okay, what do I want to discuss? I decided that it doesn't make any sense at all for me to be attempting to plug a life story into Episode One.
I wanted it to be, maybe like okay, how did I end up here on the podcast microphone? What are the things that led me here? But there are so many things that led me here. There are so many experiences that led me to where I am today, and just like everybody else in the whole world, my story is nuanced and trying to tell it all in one episode would be pretending that things in life are tied up in neat little packages, and they're just not.
Everything is a winding and nuanced road, and so I will intro you to me today. I think through what I'm going to talk about, and I will tell you about the format of the show and what every episode is going to look like. But just to be clear right off the bat, the theme of today's episode is not Caitie story and how she came to the podcast microphone. The theme of today's episode is wholeness, and this show is called Whole, Full, & Alive.
So, the first three episodes I really want to use to define why I'm calling the show that. So in today's episode, I'm going to talk about wholeness. In Episode Two, I am going to talk about fullness, and Episode Three is going to focus on aliveness. We will establish why this show is called Whole, Full, & Alive. So yeah, today is wholeness, and I'm going to share what that means, and why I think it's important and why the word whole is in my podcast title.
I'm going to share how I learned, the hard way, what wholeness means and how I learned, the hard way, why wholeness is important. At the end of the episode, I am going to give you a processing prompt, or a journal prompt, but I know some of the people who are going to be listening to this and I know that some people have an aversion to this idea of journaling and an aversion to this idea of journaling prompts.
So, I'm going to call them processing prompts, because that is the point of them. Processing is how we unstick the stuff that might be preventing us from taking the actions that we know we need to take, so that's why I love providing processing prompts. If you want to use them as a journal prompt, that's great. You can also just use them as a prompt to process and there's a lot of ways to process.
You can process with someone out loud that you're speaking to. You can process on an audio note in your phone. You can record yourself talking. You can just write some words on a note in your phone. You can write some words on a napkin. It doesn't need to be a beautiful novel in a hand painted journal. If you want to write in a handpainted journal in your room and cozy up in a blanket and Dear Diary it, that's cool. You can do that.
Also, if you struggle with perfectionism around journaling, or you're just struggling with the idea of getting yourself to journal in general, just remember that it's the processing that counts. Anytime you sit with the processing prompts that I give you is a huge win. The processing itself, regardless of how much you write down in a journal, will be meaningful exposure therapy for you.
It's going to be a meaningful chance for you to confront your thoughts and to connect with your true self and to just process some of the stuff that's feeling stuck, that's preventing you from taking actions that you want to take. After I give you the processing prompt, I'm also going to give you an action to take. An action that relates to today's theme wholeness, but on every episode, it'll just be an action relating to the theme that I'm talking about that day, and I call these actions experiments.
I'm calling them experiments, because they're experimental. It's not a ‘if you do this, you will get this result.’ It's try out this action and see how it feels, see what results you get and see what you learned from it, not a pass fail system. I just really like calling experiments because if we want to feel better, if we want to feel good, and our bodies and our minds and our souls, we want to feel hopeful and alive, and we aren't sure how to get there.
We've got to try some stuff on. So, I'm always going to give you a processing prompt, so that you can unstick what stuck inside of you, what's unprocessed inside of you, whatever might be preventing you from taking the actions you want to take. Then, I'm going to give you an action that you can take if you're open to it, an action that I call an experiment. You can try it out.
You can see how it feels and see what results you get from it and see what you learn from it. So, that's the format of each episode. I'm going to talk for a little bit. I'll share some stories, or I will share an interview if I have a guest joining me. I'm going to have quite a few guests joining me on the show. The interviews are already lined up and I'm pumped about them.
Then at the end of the episode, I'm gonna give you a processing prompt, which you can process in a journal or out loud or any way you feel like you want to process, whatever way resonates with you, and an experiment, an action you can take to start to cultivate your own sense of wholeness, fullness, aliveness, whatever it is I'm talking about that day. Cool? So wholeness. Here we go. How do I want to talk about wholeness? Where am I going to start?
I think a good place to start is you might know that this is not my first podcast. You might know that I used to have another podcast, and it was called Full Soul Nutrition, which is the name of my business, the name of my private practice. I hosted that podcast with my best friend, James, and we just talked about nutrition on that podcast. We just talked about current events and emerging trends in nutrition through the lens of intuitive eating and Health at Every Size, and it was a great time.
I am a dietitian, and I love talking about nutrition. I love busting nutrition myths. I love busting nutrition fads, and I really love helping people explore the concept of intuitive eating, and Health at Every Size. I also love James, my former co host. However, after that podcast went on for a year and a half, James and I started going our separate ways, logistically. We started living in different places and working on different projects and leading completely different lives.
So, I took over the podcast on my own. I started hosting that podcast solo. When I was on the podcast mic on my own, I found that I didn't only want to talk about emerging trends and current events in nutrition. I found that I wanted to have a new mission, a wider mission, and so here I am. I'm on a new show. I started a whole new show with a whole new mission.
That mission is to help you fall in love with being alive, and to help you fall in love with the person that you are, the person that you truly are underneath all the things the world tells you you're incomplete without, so who you really are underneath your job title, underneath your resume, underneath your relationship status, underneath all those things that I'm going to say in the intro of every episode.
I want you to know that your whole, that your worth is inherent, and I want you to know that you will never feel as good as you can feel if there's something you think you're inadequate without. That's why I'm talking about wholeness on this first episode. You will never feel as good as you can feel if there's something that you think you're inadequate without. Why am I sharing that message?
We depend on something outside of ourselves, like a job, or a relationship, or a certain body size to feel complete. We feel incredibly threatened whenever this thing might be taken away from us or when this thing is taken away from us. We feel out of control, which is a really scary feeling that leads us to resort to harmful things and live our lives in a way that we don't feel good about.
When we feel unsafe, we subconsciously lean towards maladaptive coping tools like disordered eating, like drinking, like bad habits, like lying and manipulation just to try to get ourselves regulated again. So, for example, if you feel like you're incomplete without being at a certain body weight, or body shape, or body size, if you feel like your sense of completeness is dependent on you getting to a certain number on the scale or achieving a certain body type, when your body changes inevitably, or when you're having an impossible time getting to that body size, you will feel out of control.
You will feel threatened. You will feel unsafe, and that's going to lead you to do things, to try to source a sense of safety again. Another example, if you are relying on your relationship status, if you're relying on having a partner to feel complete, if you don't feel whole on your own, when that partner is taken away from you when you break up or when your relationship is on the verge of ending for any reason, you will feel incomplete.
You'll feel unsafe and that will lead you to engage in behaviors that are probably maladaptive and you're just trying to source a sense of safety again. I see this pattern play out so much in the counseling and coaching sessions that I do at Full Soul Nutrition when I'm helping people recover from disordered eating and body image issues and self-esteem issues. I see that pattern play out all the time, and I've seen it play out a million times in my own life, and I'm definitely going to talk about that.