Ilene Leshinsky
MSW
Official Guide
Creator of Find Body Freedom Expert
Ilene Leshinsky Quick Facts
- Main Areas
- Body Image, Women's Issues,
- Career Focus
- Coach, Retired Psychotherapist, Speaker, Writer, Seminar leader
- Affiliation
- Founder of Find Body Freedom (formerly BodySense)
I’d like to introduce myself to you. My name is Ilene Leshinsky. My husband and I relocated to Jupiter, Florida in April of 2017. As we got older the temperatures grew colder in Plattsburgh, NY (20 minutes from the Canadian border)!
I was a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in private practice in NY and MA, working primarily with women (for 25 years) who wanted more joy and fulfillment in their lives. In Florida, I coach women to find body freedom. I'll say more about that in a bit.
I graduated from Boston University School of Social Work specializing in counseling with adults and in group work. I love working with women of all ages (including adolescents). It’s not easy being a woman in today’s world with multiple demands on our time and energy. I’m gratified when I can help women learn to carve out time for themselves, to enhance their lives and their interactions with their loved ones. It’s amazing how depression lifts and anxiety lessens when we learn to value and take care of ourselves.
Women come to me who are struggling with body image, weight, and their relationship with food. I created Find Body Freedom for women (like me) who have felt trapped in battles with their bodies for as long as they can remember. I teach them to stop the struggles so they can learn to love their bodies and eat with joy. (If you are one of these women, I'd love you to contact me.)
Find Body Freedom is an online (or in person program if you are in South Florida) program of modules where you can progress at your own pace, have unlimited e-mail access to me, and individual sessions to discuss your progress and challenges (you select the number of sessions).
There are five modules in the progrm: An introduction to freedom which provides an overview and defines the terminology; freedom to love your body; freedom from the tyranny of the scale; freedom from diets, programs, and plans; and freedom to move your body.
Find Body Freedom also includes: lessons, activity sheets; logs, articles, videos and audios.
The cost is dependent on the number of individual, sixty minute sessions you would like with me.
If you would like to find body freedom, let's talk!
You can contact me at ileneleshinsky@gmail.com, www.findbodyfreedom.com, or 518.570.6164.
Articles by this expert
SelfGrowth articles and saved writing connected to this expert.
Article
***We’re All in the Same Boat
In my office waiting room, I have an oil painting of a small rowboat adrift on the sea. The boat is empty, about to go under and the sea is turbulent. It was painted by a former client, a young woman who I met when she had been struggling with bulimia for seven years. She gave me that painting right before she successfully ended treatment.
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***Exploring the Innate Wisdom of the Body
Sometimes I feel like a salmon, swimming upstream to fulfill its biological imperative, getting bloodied and battered in the process. Although my spawning days are long gone, I do feel pushed, compelled, called, however, to send the message to any woman (or man) willing to listen: Our bodies, your body and mine, have innate wisdom. Among many things, they will tell us when to eat, what to eat, and when to stop.
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***Find Your Own Way
As I write this article in late December, the annual influx of television commercials and magazine ads for weight loss programs has begun. Supplements, frozen foods, points, meal cards, meal replacements, on-line calculators, exercise machines, videos, balls and bands. Some promote themselves using celebrities (You, too, can look like Mariah Carey, Jennifer Hudson, and Janet Jackson). Some just use us ordinary folk. All of them, however, send the same message - that our lives will be transformed by weight loss.
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***“There is Beauty in the World…” And It Comes in All Shapes and Sizes
A couple of things happened this past August that made me wonder about beauty and what it means to be beautiful.
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***Get a Ph.D. in Body Image!
I’m getting a Ph. D.! According to Dr. Christiane Northrup, any woman who looks at her naked body in a full-length mirror, every day, is in a Body Image Ph.D. program. You may have see Dr. Northrup during Mountain Lake PBS fundraisers and she’s written several books including “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom” and “The Wisdom of Menopause”. She’s an OB-GYN and dispenser of important wisdom to women regarding our physical and mental health. I love her spirit and her energy.
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***Body Image – Self Image
A hundred years ago, Renoir painted “La Toilette” (The Bather), a portrait of a young woman in the nude. She has long, aubu hair, full breasts and hips, a rounded belly, and, if the truth be told, thighs that look like mine. She’s voluptuous and she’s beautiful! One hundred years ago she was the ideal of feminine beauty. Today, she’d be one of my clients, struggling to accept herself in the face of an unattainable beauty ideal. When I show her to my clients, some of them are heartened by the resemblance they see to themselves. Some think, she has such a pretty face, but boy is she fat.
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***The Greatest Love of All
Somewhere in the mid 1980’s, during that fifteen year stretch in between husband #1 and my second and forever husband, the song “The Greatest Love of All” came out. It was popularized by Whitney Houston but my favorite version is the one by George Benson. The song is about learning to love one’s self. I have this memory of trying to get to my office in downtow Boston, stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike with the song playing on the radio. Since I had nothing better to do (long before the days of smart phones and laptops), I really listened to the lyrics for the first time.
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***The Female Prosperity Hormone…Oxytocin
Ever hear of Oxytocin? No, not the painkiller, oxycontin, but the hormone that is released in childbirth and assists in the bonding experience between mother and child. Well, more and more research is demonstrating that oxytocin is also the female prosperity hormone, and responsible for not only feelings of love and well being, but of increased collaboration and altruism in women - and in men. Interesting, don’t you think?
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***BodySense: Make Eating a Mindful Experience
A while ago, one of my clients gave birth and decided to breastfeed her infant so she often brought her baby to therapy. Sometimes in the middle of session, it was time to eat. I’d watch the baby start to cry, curl her fists, scrunch up her face, and make rigid her little body. She was hungry and she knew it. As her mother attended to that need, I’d watch the baby melt with pleasure into her mother, face and body relaxed, eyes closed as her needs were met, both physically and emotionally. Witnessing this, I could not doubt the powerful connection between food and emotions.
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***Learning to Be Number One!
This past winter I was watching a football game with my husband and the TV camera panned across the stadium. A whole section of fans raised large foam fists with extended index fingers and shouted “We’re #1!” That moment got me thinking about what it means to be number one. Regarding what? To whom? What are the criteria? I remember being #1 in a spelling bee when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. And I was the shortest (and heaviest) girl in my second grade class. I guess that counts as #1 (although it’s not on my resume).
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***On Your Mark… Get Set… Go to Your Natural Weight!
The last time that I participated in an organized weight loss program was about thirty years ago, but I remember the experience as if it was yesterday. “What number do you want as your goal weight?” asked the receptionist at my first visit. I chose a number that I had weighed after my divorce when I was too miserable to eat and very skinny, by the way.
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***What I Learned When I was Single
When I was twenty-four years old, I became a divorced woman. I had been married for four and a half years and in relationship with this man/ boy since I was eighteen. Getting divorced rocked my world, turned it upside down, pulled the rug out from under me, and knocked me on my tushy. All the old clichés applied. At the time, I was a middle school English teacher and I remember the head of the music department saying to me, "Look at you Ilene. You're pretty and smart.
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Websites & resources
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Contacting Ilene Leshinsky
Please contact me at ileneleshinsky@gmail.com or www.findbodyfreedom.com or 518.570.6164.