Welcome to healthy Ish fans, friends, listeners of this podcast. How are you Hope you are feeling well healthish of course, this is the daily podcast from Body and Soul. I am the host of Felicity Harley. Now. I first spotted our guests on the bestseller list. It was a few weeks ago. Her book is called What's My Body Telling Me? And Ah, I think it was number one or two. Anyway, I thought we have to get her on this podcast. Dr Anthea Todd I tracked her down. Yes, she is
here today. She joins us from the Gold Coast to discuss her concept of health attachment style, how to identify yours and boost your health today. Now. She's also a chiropractor who holds a double Masters in Women's health Medicine and reproductive Medicine. She knows ther stuff. You'll enjoy this chat. Make sure you're also listening to extra health Ish, where she shares her simple formula for better body and mind balance. You can catch that where we get your podcasts Anthea,
lovely to have you on Healthy Today. Congratulations on the success of your new book.
Thank you so much for listener. Great to be here.
Now let's talk about this health attachment style, which actually caught my attention when I was reading your book What Is This All About? You write about this whole idea.
Well attachment style. I'm not sure whether you've heard of it, but a lot of people refer to it in terms of relationships. So there's basically four main types. You can have an anxious type, an avoidant type, and anxious avoidant. If you're really lucky, you get both, and also a secure type. So in relation to your body, if you have an anxious attachment style, it's like you don't trust your body and you trust other people more than you
trust your body. So a classic example of this is that you are like any little thing, You're like, I've got cancer, or you're like always googling things thinking or worse is going to happen. But also this can also show up in ways where you thinking I have to meet a certain step count, or you feel guilty if you don't go and exercise that day, or you're always counting calories. You're doing those things because you just feel like underneath the surface, your body is fragile and you
don't trust it. So that's an anxious type. Then we have the avoidant type, which is the complete opposite. It's like my body will be fine. I'm going to ignore everything. She'll be right type of attitude, just like ah nah, I'll get on with it. But we can also have that as mums, where we put everyone else before ourselves and we just ignore, ignore, until eventually we get a big whack and we get some form of big symptom that knocks us out. Yes.
I think we've all had one of those.
Yes. And then the anxious avoidant is you can sort of think of this like you go from one to the other. So avoidant is you trust yourself over other people. Anxious is you trust other people over your body. The anxious avoidant you switch between. This is often where you're like, oh, I feel like something's wrong. You go and see some form of health practitioner. You do the thing for a couple of weeks, and you go they didn't know what they're talking about. That didn't that didn't work. No one
knows what's going on. My body's my body will be fine or my body's broken. You sort of like ying and yang between them. You don't really know what's going on, and that can be really frustrating as well. And then the secure type is where you trust your body, you know that it can look after itself. It's very robust, but you also know when to reach out for help, and you seek help when you need it. So that's what I mean by the health attachment styles.
Yeah, I like that. Is there any one that you see more of with you know, your clients or people that come to you for help?
Is there?
I mean I feel like probably every listener was thinking, oh, yeah, that's me. Definitely me.
Well, I often I see a mix, but probably the anxious avoidant people are the people that I see. The most avoidant people I don't see as much of because mostly don't reach out for help until they really need it. But yeah, the anxious avoidant type, which is that typical you've been searching for answers and you're lost in that space between I call it. We've gone and seen typically a medical practitioner, which is great, it's a great first
port of calls to go and see. But if you don't have anything significant enough to need medication or surgery, then often we're told there's nothing wrong with us, and then we sort of go into that loop of anxious and avoidant space where we're like, okay, well, is there actually nothing wrong with me? Maybe I should just ignore these symptoms and it's in my head or we're being
medically gas lit and all those things. But then we can also go into the avoidant state of like, oh my gosh, I've tried to go and get help and no one can help me, so I may as well just ignore it. So's we go through that cycle when we're lost in that space.
Yeah, that rumination, And I'm presuming secure is the place we want to get to.
Yeah, ideally, and how we do that, Like, you're not destined to stay stuck in any of these I should preface that so you can always change. And that's the same when they talk about attachment style in relationships as well. You can always move to a secure So secure is where you really learn how to listen to your body and trust it and just know that it is always looking out for you. Like if you are listening to this podcast right now, I know your body is working
for you because you're alive. So it's doing all of these things, trillions of reactions every single second to keep you alive, to make sure you can listen to this and you're not defecating at the same time when you're driving your car and like you can eat your breakfast on the way to work, and you're doing like you're doing all of these amazing things. And then sometimes we go like, oh, but like, but this is happening with
my body, or that's happening with my body. But it's like underneath the surface, it's actually looking out for you. You have no idea of the amazingness that it's full of. So when we can actually lean into that and learn how to listen to our body and then learn how to get the type of care that we need when we need it, that's when we move to a secure attachment.
Why do so many of us miss the signals our bodies try to tell us.
Well, I think it's sort of twofold in that we miss it because we don't we normalize common symptoms. So say, for instance, something like stretch marks, not a big deal, not life threatening, but it's actually your body telling you something. Depending on the color of them, are they purple or are they white? It can tell you a significant nutritional deficiency in copper or sorry, an excess in copper and a deficiency in zinc, which can tie into why you
have heavy periods. And then your heavy periods can tell you why you're losing a lot of blood and why are I indefficient? But then what's really underneath all of those surfaces. But what happens is we go, oh, yeah, your friend has heavy periods and you go, oh, so do I. It's like, oh, well, then that must be normal.
You just carry on and then I think you know what I really like about your book is that so many of us just carry on and think, oh, this is normal, or we go and seek medical attention, which we should, and then we're put on something, but we're not really addressing why it's happening.
And that would be great if we were all healthy, but we're not. One in two of us have a chronic health illness, so that just doesn't work. Not listening to your body is never going to work. So it's always paying attention to Okay, what is this symptom telling me? And I'm not telling everyone now to go like, oh my gosh, I've got stretch marks and I've got these little symptoms that aren't life threatening. It's just going, ah, interesting, my body is telling me something with this, what might
that be? So it's just having that curiosity, but also remembering your body is really robust and it's looking out for you. So knowing that you have that safety and trust in your body and being able to connect to it, is that that first, like, when we can have that, that's really really powerful. And then when we come from that space, we can go, ohh okay, I wonder what this symptom is telling me, whether it's something as small as stretch marks or white spots on your fingernails. But
then it can get louder. It can be like, oh, I'm losing hair. There's comps of hair coming out in the shower. Does that mean I need different shampoo? Or is it telling me that maybe I'm not eating enough calories or I'm deficient in different proteins or micronutrients. Like, it's just listening to our body in a different way as it gets louder and louder. Hopefully not, but if it does, we know that our body is looking out for us.
There's a sentence in the book that I really liked, and you wrote a society or system that often makes our bodies out to be the enemy, when really there's the solution. If we could do one thing today to better tune into our body. What can we do?
Oh, that's a.
Great one One thing.
One thing, Okay, one thing. It's really just about paying attention to the small things and doing what your body is telling you. So say, for instance, you need to go to the toilet, Go to the toilet, you're cold, put on a jumper. The more you pay attention to the small signals of your body and you actually go through with them, you don't ignore them, you don't treat them as like inconveniences, you will develop a deeper connection with your body.
Great advance, Anthea, Thank you for coming on Healthish.
No worries. Thanks for having me.
My friends. If you do want to read Anthea's book, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I'm about halfway through. It's called What's My Body Telling Me? And it is out now. If you did enjoy this chat, tell us we love all feedback. You can rate and review this episode, or of course subscribe. Then you know exactly when we drop a new app. Bodyandsoul dot com dot you is a place to go. If you want more info, make sure you're following us on socials. Our print edition, of course,
is out in your local Sunday paper. Grab that for a good read, and until tomorrow's stay ol fish