A Body-Positivity Creator Says 4 Words From Her Doctor Changed Everything 

You can have it together on paper and still be holding the whole thing up with caffeine and vibes. Alicia McCarvell knows the feeling. 

On Don’t Think, the body-positivity creator gets honest with host Carla Bezanson about what finally made her stop powering through—and the four words from her doctor that flipped a switch she didn’t know was off.

The hotel that broke the camel’s back

McCarvell built a following in the millions based on self-love and humor, but for years she was holding more together than anyone could see. She’d long figured she had some form of ADHD and just engineered around it. “I did a really good job of coming up with my own coping mechanisms for a long time,” she says. “I know that the attention wasn’t there, but I always did a good job. I’ve always been good at getting things done last minute. So like, why would I take a drug for something that I’m managing?”

Then life got bigger than her workarounds. “My plates were just getting too full that I started to drop things, and I’ve never dropped things.” The breaking point came in Toronto. She showed up to her hotel only to realize she’d never actually booked it. A month later, she overcorrected and accidentally made two rental car reservations instead. “So it’s either no reservation or two reservations,” she says. 

The bittersweet part of finally getting help

When she finally said out loud that she was struggling, she braced for a heavy, complicated conversation. Her doctor gave her the opposite: “There’s no prize for suffering. You should try medication.” It landed like a record scratch. “Oh, yeah. I never thought about that,” she remembers thinking.

Giving it a real shot is what sold her. “I am seeing more glimpses of joy,” she says, naming small wins like “getting out of bed earlier in the morning.” But the better she felt, the more a thought kept hitting her about all the years before. As she puts it, “that didn’t have to be that hard.”

The years she won’t get back

That’s where the “grief” came in, a kind McCarvell says she “didn’t anticipate experiencing.” It showed up in the form of little what-ifs she couldn’t stop turning over. “What would my university days have been like if I had this resource? What would my time with the company that I was with have been like if I had had this as a resource?” 

For McCarvell, it wasn’t so much regret as a lingering sense of, “Well, damn, that would’ve been nice to know sooner.” And that’s a big reason she talks about this stuff so openly now. “I don’t want anybody else to have to do what I did,” she tells Bezanson. 

Her advice isn’t to change your whole life overnight, either. Start somewhere. “If you’re not seeing a therapist, start seeing a therapist,” she says. And if that’s not realistic, “start journaling and start writing out the things that you feel.” Because once one thing starts helping, the next step doesn’t feel nearly as scary.

Listen to the full conversation on Don’t Think, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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