Special Guest: Becca Chilczenkowski

Lilli: All right, Becca. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Becca: Thank you for having me.

Lilli: Absolutely, I'm so happy to have you here. So I'm gonna start out with the first question that we always ask our guests, which is, what do you know about co-dependency and/or how has it touched your life? 

Becca: Yeah, so when we first talked about doing the podcast, the word didn't actually bring a ton to me in terms of meaning, so I actually asked you what it meant to you, and hearing you explain it, I really started to relate and so after we chatted, I dug into it a little bit more. And I know that co-dependency, I think routinely means a relationship, maybe with another person, and for me, it wasn't so much with another person, but it was with an industry and a sport. So after college and really my whole life, I struggled with my body image and being happy with my weight and how I looked and always wanting to look a different way. And after college, I found CrossFit and CrossFit gave me a place to fuel an addiction to change my body. And at first, sure it could have been seen in a healthy way, I was losing weight, I was feeling better, no more bloating, no more digestive issues, I was getting stronger, but it really turned into an unhealthy addiction with both exercising, with food and I became dependent on, not only the industry because I quit my job and started coaching CrossFit and went into professional CrossFit per se, 'cause it's not really... Kinda a wishy-washy thing professional CrossFit.

Becca: But I utilized that to help me fuel and justify my addiction for fitness and for looking a certain way. And so it became very unhealthy, I lost my period, I lost a lot of relationships with friends because I didn't wanna go out anymore at night, I didn't wanna eat anything out at a restaurant, I trained two to three hours a day, and it turned into something that was no longer healthy, and I identified as a CrossFit athlete. And when I didn't have that anymore after getting injured and then having a little one, I have a little one now, and it just wasn't realistic to get back into competing, even though I tried. I didn't really know who I was. It was hard to understand who Becca was when she wasn't a CrossFit competitor. And so I heavily felt that co-dependency at that point in my life, even though I didn't realize it at the time, but I utilized fitness and the industry and my sport as a way to justify my addiction.

Lilli: That's so powerful, and I think... So we've known each other for a while. I think one of the things that really attracted me to your story is the growth that you've had since you went to that really dark place and figuring out what you were doing wasn't healthy. And I think what you just said was like, you completely lost yourself, you didn't know who you were, you lost your identity. I feel like that happens a lot. Like you said, whether that be with food or with people, but we've talked about before, a lot of people don't know, but my co-dependency led me to an unhealthy relationship with food, an unhealthy relationship with my body. And that's one of the reasons why I thought our niches don't really align, but I think that a lot of people have that same feeling, whether that be, if you're... For me and my partner was attached a lot to how I looked and that fueled me to look a certain way and to have a very bad relationship with myself, my body and food.

Becca: Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's hard, and it's hard to look back and today, even now that I've developed a healthier relationship with my body and with food and with who I am, which is so much more than a CrossFit competitor, it helped me realize how harmful it was and how much it didn't matter. At that time, I wasn't even happy. And you think you're happy, you lie to yourself doing it. People looked at me and envied how I looked and I was so fit and I was so strong, and deep down I was miserable. I was terrified of food, and when I did allow myself things like drinks or pizza, I would binge eat and I would binge drink, to the point where I was sick to my stomach, and then I would hate myself for multiple days and over exercise to counter-balance it, and I didn't realize how harmful it was and how extreme it had gotten until I was on the outside, on the other end. And for me, it got to a place where... So I work with people nutritionally, and I saw all the signs happening, so after I had Carson and when I tried to get back into competing, it was fine for about six months and then my body kinda just gave up.

Becca: And this happens a lot of times with people with stress, when we teeter on this border line of running on cortisol and adrenaline and complete burnout. And people can be there for years, especially people that are addictive to exercise. And I was there for years, and postpartum, I think was my trigger, that my body just couldn't take it anymore, and I gained weight very rapidly in a short period of time, and I finally came to terms with my body needed a break, it needed support, it needed nourishment. I couldn't keep running it into the ground.

Becca: I didn't have to look a certain way to be healthy. And it really helped me then help my clients, and help people I work with understand and comprehend that the scale is not our happiness. It is not what defines us. It is so far from what defines us, and you can... People don't want a weight on the scale as much as they think they do, it's... People want happiness, they want acceptance, they want to know who they are and be comfortable with who they are. And so that's what I work a lot with my clients on, that's what I had to work with myself on. With... I bought new clothes, I bought things that I finally felt good in, versus trying to fit myself into clothes from when before I had a kid, and when I worked out two to three hours a day and it's kinda letting go of who I thought I had to be, to become someone so much happier and let go of that dependency I had on exercise.

Lilli: Yeah, that's so freeing. It's so freeing, it's a freeing feeling. I'm interested a little bit more about the journey from... It sounds like I'm paraphrasing, but it sounds like you hit rock bottom, you... Like you said, your body just couldn't take it anymore, and it was like for me, in my rock bottom, I don't think we talked about this, was suicide, and so that kind of... I was just so unhappy I couldn't keep all the balls in the air, so to speak, and it's different, but it's also... I'm almost positive that you felt the same.

Becca: Yeah. Absolutely.

Lilli: So I'm interested a little bit in that journey from... Like I said, what attracted me to you, not obviously in knowing each other for a long time, but also your message now about acceptance of your body, everything that you just said about really the importance of your mental health before your body. And maybe also your intentions of why you wanna be a certain way because co-dependency, what we talked about before, is it draws you into these little channels that maybe aren't really your decisions, the little choices that you have to make. So you can elaborate a little bit on the journey how you got to being in this great place...

Becca: Of course. I think for me, because I was a CrossFit coach, I felt like I had to be the example of health and fitness, and I had to [08:02] ____ that, and so that equaled competing and eating perfectly and never derailing onto something that I maybe enjoyed but wouldn't allow myself to have. And so that was all up until I got injured and I got injured training for a big competition, and I'm sure a big part of the injury was me not giving my body what it needed to recover, and that injury was pretty devastating. I ruptured my Achilles, and so it ended my career with CrossFit. And my husband and I decided to have kids and I couldn't because I didn't have a period, 'cause I had let my body get too lean. And at the time, you think, I don't have a period, this is great, but now I know how unhealthy it is for females to not have a period, and it's basically a report card of health and... So we went through IVF, which was very challenging. I had to purposely gain weight, which was mentally really hard.

Becca: I was lucky enough to have Carson, and then after the baby, I was still kind of in denial that I needed to get back to being that person, being that competitor, being that fit person. And I got there, kind of, but my body kept falling apart, it was just injury after injury, I wasn't getting any stronger. And then about 18 months postpartum, I was just exhausted, I was so tired, I didn't wanna wake up to work out in the morning, I had zero motivation with food, I just... My mental clarity wasn't there, it was just... It felt like my body was falling apart.

Becca: And I saw all the signs of complete burnout of cortisol and the adrenaline, and I just ignored them because I was in denial. I was like, "No, I'm a nutritional coach. I'm a fitness expert, I coach people with CrossFit, I have to upkeep. What are people gonna think of me if I gain this weight, if I don't keep up with this?" And it was such a challenging situation of being in constant denial of what was truly going on with my body and what my body needed, and what I thought I had to upkeep. And it was a really dark couple of months, I remember, it was actually right before quarantine started and I just... My periods were getting shorter and shorter, I could tell my body was stressed, and then my body just... It seemed like I had zero control over it. Like I said, I gained about 10 pounds in two weeks. I wasn't doing anything differently, I was tracking all my food and I was working out, and it just...

Becca: I couldn't ignore what my body was telling me anymore, and so since then I have... Because of my journey, and because of how much CrossFit, I think has caused this for women, 'cause it supports an over-training regimen and under-eating and looking a certain way. That just isn't healthy. And so many people have reached out to me with me opening up about my journey and what it led me to with total burnout, my body basically just couldn't handle it anymore, and what that looked like, and it turned into me accepting it and leaning into the process because I had no where else to go. I couldn't keep dieting, I couldn't keep exercising, like my body... I had done that and my body was like, "Nope." And so I knew what was going on because this is what I do, this is what I work with, it's hormonal changes, women and I still wasn't going out, because I was so deep in it, and so since then...

Lilli: Isn't it crazy that we don't take our own advice sometimes.

Becca: I know. It's so hard. And so since then, I've thrown away a lot of clothes that just made me feel sad about myself. I stopped working out as much. I still work out a little bit because it was hard for me to totally give it up 'cause I do enjoy it, and I love the benefits it brings me in terms of my body and my strength and my capabilities, and I started eating more, a lot more. So I started eating 500-700 calories more a day and just let my body do what it needed to do. And it's surprising how much better we can start to feel when we start to treat our bodies right. And so I've just been trying to share this as much as possible with people because it gets to a place where there is no other option, your body just cannot tolerate the stress that we create constantly.

Becca: And I think so often we just have... We're so deep in our addiction, we have these blinders on that we're in denial, and we just don't believe... We believe that what happened in the beginning and what brought us results or what we thought was happiness, we have to keep doing that, 'cause that's what happened in the beginning. But it just got to a place for me where I just couldn't do it anymore, and my body couldn't do it anymore, and I had to find another way to be happy, and so I'd kind of... What I consider gone all in. I used to never wanna eat out, I used to never do things that were fun and not exercise for a day, and now I just do it whenever I feel like it. And I've found so much more happiness and different things that bring me happiness other than just what I look like. And I'm healthy, I have an amazing family, I have so much positive around me that I just never saw before.

Lilli: Yeah. I think what's awesome for me is also like... Well, you touched on this, the mental recovery piece as well, because without... Your body was telling you things for a while, but you just weren't listening, and it takes a lot to feel, to be able to re-tune yourself to listening to your body. That's amazing. Just kind of one last question as... We're kinda gonna close it up. I like to keep it short here on the podcast. So one of my hesitations, and I talked to about this before about you coming on, was I am... I'm pretty anti-diet in general, just based off of my experience. I was telling the story actually early today to one of my other coaches, that I got to a point where I was binging like... I would go to the store and buy all this stuff and bring it home and hide it from my boyfriend and just like in one session, just take it out, and it felt obviously like an addiction, it felt like shame and fear about that too. And one of my... Like I said, one of my hesitations is like, you are in an industry where it's hard to toe the line of mental health and tapping into exactly what someone means and is it...

Lilli: "Why do they wanna lose weight? Do they wanna lose weight because to get their body in alignment or is it an outside force taking that over?" So if you can kinda touch on that a little bit. That would be awesome, kind closing, and also a little bit about what your practice right now, it looks like and how you work with your clients about toeing that line and work on calories and body image and stuff, yeah.

Becca: Yeah, so when I first started with people nutritionally, I was still on my addiction, and I would take on any client, I was new, I would just manage, I needed clients, and I would... I truthfully was unhealthy with it. I would put people in calorie deficits right away, I wouldn't ask the right questions, and I didn't know any better. And during my time, I've been doing this now for about seven years almost, I've learned so much and I've learned from myself. And because of that, I've created much more of a niche of who I work with, and I specifically try to work with women that have... Are chronic under eaters, people that yo-yo diet, that constantly restrict, that just deprive their body and have suppressed their body's metabolism and its functions that are in a bad place, kind of hormonally and metabolically. And what we work on is slowly starting to bring food back in their life and improve their relationship with food to bring them to a healthy place, and if weight loss is a goal that they have, we talk about why that is, and what do they really want from the weight loss, what do they think that number on the scale will bring them.

Becca: And if they think it will bring happiness, talking further into what they're missing from their life and what's truly void of that happiness, because as we all know, the number on the scale isn't it. I've been there done that and it didn't bring me happiness, and I see that constantly with people with trying to reach a number on the scale or a certain body type. And so I work a lot more with women, I'm healing the body and bringing the body back to health because so many people just wanna lose weight, but don't realize that we can't lose weight unless we're healthy. And because of the diet industry and the diet culture, it preaches eat less, do more, eat less do more, and it's ruined our bodies and our minds. And so we go through a lot of bringing back foods we enjoy and how... Not only should food be nourishment, but it should be nourishment for your soul, because the stress that you create from worrying about eating a certain food is more harmful to your body than actually eating that food.

Becca: And so I work a lot with women more, so I'm helping them slowly re-introduce calories that is realistic and sustainable for them. I'm not asking you to start all of a sudden eating a 1000 more calories tomorrow. Something that's realistic for them, how to listen to their body and how to listen to hunger cues and how to listen to how food responds with the body in terms of bloating and constipation and energy levels, and then helping them understand food so that they can then, over time, learn to eat intuitively for them, for their body, for their needs, for their goals, whatever those might be.

Becca: And the cool thing, like you said, is along the way, people realize that what they thought they wanted that they don't actually want. And when they start feeling better and actually having energy and having a sex drive and having all these things, they realize that they're happy in that place, and they don't need the weight loss to be happy. It might come just because, but it's not the why. And so that's what I do with women is we work on fixing broken bodies in a way, because unfortunately, our culture just drives us into the ground.

Lilli: Yeah, I think your work is so important, and I think it's a little bit revolutionary because you are bucking up against a whole industry...

Becca: All the fad diets.

Lilli: Yeah, a billion dollar industry, so... Yeah, I love it, but I do want to give you the opportunity to shout out where people can find you because I know I love your post, like I said, I'm inspired by your journey. And so if people want to... Listeners out there wanna find you where can they find you? 

Becca: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm mostly on Instagram, Becca Chilcz, B-E-C-C-A, C-H-I-L-C-Z underscore nutrition. My husband, although I love him, gave me a horrible last name and really long and hard to pronounce. And so that is my Instagram handle, and then if you wanna email me, I'd be happy to talk to someone, becca@lsn.fit. Lsn.fit is our website, that is the company lifestyle nutrition I work with, and I started a few years ago. And so that's what I do. I love working with women that just wanna feel better and wanna improve their relationship with food, so... Yeah, thank you...

Lilli: That's awesome, and I'll link all that stuff up, so people... But it is been awesome to have you on. Yeah, thank you.

Becca: Thank you for having me.