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In a heartfelt exchange between Robin and Gina, Robin shares her journey with raw honesty, reflecting on her experiences losing 40 lbs with The Livy Method, societal pressures, and living with chronic illness and a disability. Her openness encourages people to bravely and optimistically accept their own stories.
How did you find out about our program?
Robin: I was in rehearsal for a show. Actually, I wasn't even in rehearsal at the time we were doing auditions and I was talking to a colleague of mine. The director for this opera and the music director for the opera and I were chatting between auditions and somehow we got onto the topic of the history of dieting, toxic dieting and then on weight loss, then she was said “Have you heard of The Livy Method?” I was like, “No.” She was so excited! She said “Here's the podcast link. Just go listen to it whenever you're ready.” After auditions that day, I was getting ready to drive home, cause it’s an thousand year long drive from where we do this show to my house and I set up the podcast on my phone and put it through the car.You happened to say something in the live, which is something you say all the time, but you know, it was the right thing for me right at that moment.
You were saying. “You didn't fail at the diets, the diets failed you!” I bursted into ugly tears in my car. I couldn't drive for a while. I just sat there outside the theatre. It was exactly what I needed to hear. Because of course, I've been doing this for a really long time. I've tried all the things, all the fads, a lot of them worked, you know, worked in the sense that I lost a lot of weight. But, fundamentally they're not designed for me to keep it off. So I didn't.
You did your first diet at the age of 11. You were a dancer, very intense with classic ballet and your ballet teacher recommended, despite the fact you weren't overweight, that you go on a diet. Let’s talk about that.
R: Yeah, it was a very serious ballet school. She didn't mean any harm by it. It was just that I was 11 and I hit puberty early, at age 9. So by the time that I was 11, I had curves. In the ballet world you’re not supposed to be there. I was fit, I looked like a normal 11 year old who was exercising five times a week. Because I was in ballet school that often. So I started food restricting and calorie restricting. My mom, whom I love dearly and we are very good friends, was helping me with this and on the calendar every day we would write in my weight. I have this core memory seeing the calendar with my varied weights as a child. The things that people do, you don't recognize are going to stay with you, but they do stay with you.
"I BELIEVE IN CULTIVATING JOY AS A PRACTICE, AS AN ACTION ITEM THAT YOU CAN DO."
Conversations were different back then, people talked more freely about dieting. I think every mom who took their child to a weight loss program didn't really understand the effect and impact that would leave on them. What kind of impact did this have on you?
R: Well, first of all, I stopped growing at age 11. My height has been constant through this entire process, I am 5’1”. I think my weight has varied by about 80 pounds, which is a lot when you're short. I've been very small and I have been very not, all in the same short little body. I knew it had done damage to my metabolism because I got to a point where I felt like I couldn't physically eat any less. I have this core memory of being a teenager and driving in the car that I was borrowing from my parents and having to pull over because I was crying because I had eaten too much salad. Now, adult me who has gone through the program, I recognize the impact of that and I have empathy for that person. I carry that version of myself with me everywhere I go. She's a part of who I then became. It wasn't me being irrational in that moment. That was what diet culture had taught me.
Because of my physical health, I knew walking into this program that I couldn't go hard at it. My body would not support that. Therefore, I knew that my version of maximizing is really spending a lot of time with myself, imagining my past self, sitting with her and sitting with myself now and recognizing my patterns. Doing the mental work is where I put my maximization energy because I can’t do as much movement as maybe the next 32-year-old over, you know?
I believe in society to say, “Well, my trauma around this can't be that bad because other people's trauma is worse.” or something. But that doesn't mean that you don't carry it. That doesn't negate the power it had in your life. You can honour what you came to and how impactful that was for you.
Can we talk about your physical health? How would you describe it?
R: I do call it a disability and a chronic illness. Not all chronic illnesses are disabilities. Not all disabilities are chronic illnesses. Mine happens to be both. The definitions of disability just sort of say that it's something that impacts you, impacts your ability to move through the world in a normal way. I have hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome. It's a genetic connective tissue disorder. My connective tissue just wasn't made right on the genetic level and nothing can teach my DNA how to make it any better. Your connective tissue impacts all of your systems, including your digestive system. Most of your guts are connective tissue, honestly. So it's not just that it makes me sort of wobbly and makes my joints dislocate, but digesting is hard. My veins don't contract well as most people's do to push the blood where it needs to be in my head. It sort of is systemic, but I mean, but I think the sort of rundown of all of that is that my body is sort of under stress, trying to function a lot. My inflammation, my baseline inflammation levels are high because it's just sort of trying to exist. It's like, “Wait, how do we do this?” That's the reality of my body and that's not really a positive or negative thing. The way that the symptoms affect my day to day life can suck, but it is as much a part of my body as my hair color.
We talk alot about all the reasons why someone’s weight might be slower to move. You lost 40 pounds following The Livy Method while dealing with chronic pain, random joint dislocations, fainting, inflammation and a heart surgery. Your body was just acting beyond your control. You've learned not to have expectations of what it will do. And you understand when the scale isn't moving, it isn't failure on your part or your body failing you, it's just part of the process. A lot of people have issues that they need to deal with, whether it's health issues or whatever is slowing them down when it comes to being able to focus on the things that they need to focus on. How did you move past that? How do you reconcile that?
R: That's the big question in all of disability justice. When you're really facing something that is a sort of health change, which is something that I believe if we are all lucky enough to live long enough, we all eventually will. I think it's really normal to have a grief feeling, when you're grieving the person that you thought you could be. The dream you once had, changes and you're grieving your past self. And that is a normal part of the process. Grief is powerful and deep and a lot to work through. We do, hopefully move through it. And we come to a point where we have learned to live without the thing we've grieved. I believe in cultivating joy as a practice, as an action item that you can do. It's very hard to just change your mindset because you want to, that is not really a thing. What does joy actually mean to me? In my life. What does that really look like? Not as a sort of vague idea, but what is the thing that brings me joy here and now. Is that a small thing? Is that that I want to go out on my balcony when it's sunny and read Lord of the Rings for the 15th time? Because it totally is that for me. Or is that building a life that sort of generally puts you in a position to more access? That's what that looks like to me. When you're doing a program like The Livy Method, you're spending so much time imagining your why, that's what we should be doing. And our why may not fundamentally be attached to weight, right? It's attached to your sense of self. It's attached to the way that you move through the world. It's attached to the way that you experience food. It's attached to the way that you experience your own self worth. It can be more expansive. As I said, that's where the meat of the program is to me, where weight loss interacts with all these other aspects of our lives.
Let’s talk about your weight loss patterns during the program. You would drop and then have really long plateaus. Do you remember being frustrated?
R: The individual reminders day to day are so valuable to the process. That's one of the reasons I set all those intentions to sort of say it to myself.
The things that I know are true. You need this plateau, this is telling you that your body is probably under stress in some capacity. But yes, I've had all the feels. The great thing about this program is that it invites you to not say that feelings are garbage, but to say, you're having to feel so let's sit with it and get to know this.
Take some time for it and give yourself space to feel frustrated that you have been within the same three pounds since the third day of this program. If you sit with that and go, “Okay. Well, do we know why?” Well, yes, I know why! I'm currently directing three different operas. I'm gonna be in one of them as well. I think there might be some stress in my life. You have to sit with the feels and go “Okay, well, why?”
I give myself space to feel it. Then I think “What is the next action item that I can add that may help me move through this frustrating moment .I don’t dismiss it or shove it away, but simply move to the point where I'm open to feeling it.
How do you maintain a positive outlook and keep showing up day after day?
R: I am lucky in this sense. I am obnoxiously positive just as a human person. I am a ray of sunshine. There's a certain amount of it that I just know that I'm lucky that I am a happy person. I'm fundamentally that. I can give insights into what my brain is doing when that happens. I can share my pieces of advice, but if someone's brain is not doing happy, their brain is not doing happy. You know?
"YOUR WHY MAY NOT FUNDAMENTALLY BE ATTACHED TO YOUR WEIGHT, RIGHT? IT'S ATTACHED TO YOUR SENSE OF SELF. IT'S TO THE WAY THAT YOU MOVE THROUGH THE WORLD. IT'S ATTACHED TO THE WAY YOU EXPERIENCE FOOD. IT'S ATTACHED TO THE WAY THAT YOU EXPERIENCE YOUR OWN SELF WORTH. IT CAN BE MORE EXPANSIVE. AS I SAID, THAT'S WHERE THE MEAT OF THE PROGRAM IS TO ME, WHERE WEIGHT LOSS INTERACTS WITH ALL THESE OTHER ASPECTS OF OUR LIVES."
You’re a singer. Did losing 40lbs affect your voice?
R: For me, it hasn't been enormous vocally yet. I have some friends who want to lose weight and have a lot of weight to lose and they worry about it changing their voice because chords are such tiny little, little things. They're so itty bitty and your body will put fat all sorts of places,
That isn't to say my voice hasn't changed. I think it has. Not enormously, but yeah, it totally can. I have another maybe 25 to 30 to lose. So I may see more changes but here's the thing with with Opera it’s sort of singing without having chosen a style to me. If you just learn technique of how to make the chords vibrate the way that they are long enough, you just sort of turn around and you look around and you're like, “I guess I'm an opera singer now!” This happened to me. That's how I became an opera singer. You may hear it more depending on how you are producing the sound, because some types of singers are by their nature and there's nothing better or worse. It's just different or by their nature, like doing more things to the chords. Whereas my job as a singer is to sort of put the air through the chords and then just let it go. Let it be as much possible. So you actually really hear the body in opera. You may not hear the shape or the size of the body in other genres. So you'd have to be really in tune.
What are your top tips for following the program?
R: For me, it's the lives and it's the podcasts. I'm a theater person and I'm on the west coast, I'm in Vancouver. I can't listen to any of the lives while they’re live because I don't go home until like midnight from rehearsal half the time. Taking the time to rewatch them cause they're there to read, listen to them when I'm driving home. That's so valuable and not having the pressure to catch up.
Just do it because you'll hear the right thing at the right time, no matter what! You'll internalize the right thing at the right time, but it's here in these discussions where we're chatting about the reality of the program, the reality of the challenges, etc. That's the heart of the program. There's a reason you say that. If you just did the basic food plan and never did anything else, you'd lose weight, that's true. That is forever true. But the work, the examination, the stuff that really makes you more aware, more in tune with your body on a sort of a more profound level, more radical, if I may put it that way, level. That's here. That's in the Spill the Tea segments, in your lives. That's in your sessions with Dr. Deena and Dr. Beverley and all the other guest experts. This is where people do their ugly crying. Because someone said something magical that hit them at the right time. Be here. You don't have to be here every day. Or for the entire thing, take the time when you have the capacity. That's my advice.
Thank you for sharing your story. You are a beautiful soul. Please let people know where they can find you!
R: Thank you for making the space for us. This community is so open and welcoming of people's reality. I know that a lot of the stuff that people share in the comments and in the Spill The Tea Segments may not be something that they would tell to even a close friend because it's personal and profound. I think particularly as Canadians, we don't love to get into the meat of that. We love small talk. This is so much more powerful to have the space to say and explore yourself with a community of people who will give you the space to do that. So thank you for making it.
I make YouTube videos about opera, disability, LGBTQ+ stuff, cats and tea. I love If you're in the Vancouver area, you can come say hi at the North Shore Light Opera Society. You can find my YouTube and Instagram here: Instagram: @robinhahnsopran YouTube: Robin Hahn
And, Just for Fun...
How many lbs down are you now and how many programs you have completed?
R: I’m four groups in and still about 40lbs down, the same as when I did my Spill the Tea episode in last group! Sometimes our bodies just want to stay stable when we’re in a high-stress time… and my goodness, have I ever been in a high-stress time this year! I’ve had so many operas to direct and perform in, sometimes all at once, and while it’s been joyful and so fulfilling, it’s also been the most I’ve ever had on my plate at the same time. On top of that, I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic connective tissue disorder affecting my whole body, and my rheumatologist and I are always monitoring my very-high inflammation levels. I went into this program knowing I may not lose at the rate people might otherwise “expect" of a healthy-looking 32-year-old, and that one of the things I’d be practicing and learning is patience with my body and giving it space to take care of itself the best way it knows how!
Do I wish the scale would stop bouncing up and down the same five pounds and drop? Yes, of course. Do I understand why it isn’t? Yes, I do! And you know what? That’s all okay with me 🙂. Maybe next week, when the last major show I’ve directed this season is closed, I’ll have the mental capacity to go through the maximizing post and see what I can add that might encourage my body to start dropping again. But in the meantime, it’s one day at a time of learning mindfulness, gentleness with myself, and reading the signals my body gives me so I can best support it.
If you could give advice to your younger self, what would that be?
R: I think if I could speak to the girl I was even fifteen years ago, I would tell her not to be so hard on herself. The failure she perceived herself to be when she couldn’t achieve the body type she was aiming for by using traditional diets - by depriving herself, counting calories, or even overexercising - was not, in fact, her failure. The diets she was on, as well as the messaging she received that told her she was not inherently “enough” as she was… those things were failing HER, not the other way around.
I’d also tell her that she’s not doomed to hate her body. She’s not doomed to be in a perpetual dieting cycle, or to always be at war with her own body, or to struggle with food forever. Even though my weight hasn’t dropped since the middle of last program due to all the stressors currently going on in my life, the gift that this program has already given me is that I am simply no longer at war with my body, and I no longer feel doomed to be in that war until the day I die. I know my relationship with food has improved, and I know where the work of this program will take me, in the end: to a goal weight that I’ll have all the skills to be able to maintain, always. I still have about 30-35lbs to go, I think. But the greatest battle for me has already been won, and the best gift the program could have given me I’ve already received: that sense of security and calm that comes with the knowledge of where I am going, and that I have the skills required to get there, no matter how long it may take.
What was your favourite thing to eat while following the program?
R: I’m always and forever a breakfast girlie! Full-fat, lactose-free yoghurt, topped with organic coconut shavings, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax, raisins, organic almond butter and local wildflower honey. So delicious!
What experiences with the Livy Method most helped you build your self-confidence?
R: See above 😉. It’s that security in knowing that the dieting cycle is OVER, even though I’m not actually done my weight loss journey. That’s the magic of it all!
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