Move over exercise…
because joyful movement has arrived and its bloody marvellous!
For 20+ years of my life, diet culture did a pretty good job of taking the joy from my relationship with moving my body. Since the age of 21 I have been a regular runner but never felt I could truly say that because I didn’t feel I fit the profile of a runner. Diet culture had me believing that to be fit you had to be thin!
I hated the gym, loathed it in fact! Truthfully I just found it so incredibly boring but for many years I tried to like it, hoping it was the answer to my never ending crusade to ‘fix’ how I looked to the outside world.
Finding a gym or fitness class that isn’t riddled with diet culture promises and expectations to lose weight, get to the after photo, or lose the jiggle is nearly impossible these days. If you hire a PT at the gym to help you then the first thing they focus on is what you weigh and what you want to lose, and that experience put me off.
Years later I got sucked back in to Beachbody programmes - The programs themselves are riddled with fatphobic comments, there are streams of before and after photos and the expectation of being able to workout out 7 days a week nearly killed me on several occasions. I hated the fact that the larger bodied folk were always used to demonstrate the modification exercises, thus confirming their Fatphobic views and sending a clear message to the consumer that fat is bad!
(Don’t get me wrong, there are a growing number of PTs and fitness professionals in the health at every size community and when I find them I share the hell out of their social media accounts because we need more, many more of them! but generally speaking even those who say they are focused on health not numbers are often still trying to fix what isn’t broken when it comes to body size)
When it comes to exercise I often see people fall into the following:
All or nothing - The diet is on so the fitness is on! This used to be me, I would be working out 5/6 days a week when I was on the diet train. I would go from zero workouts to working out every night, getting my steps in, buying tons of fitness equipment or signing up to a plan to get my body where I wanted it. I wanted maximum calorie burn and I didn’t care how I got there as long as I just got my dream body at the end of it. It always ended in me feeling like a failure, I just couldn’t keep it up, it was impossible and I just ended up throwing in the towel.
The ‘I will soon’ crew - The intention is there but they struggle to get started. Gyms feel a scary unsafe place to be especially for larger bodied folk and this can be so off putting when it doesn’t feel inclusive or you feel as though you will be judged for your size. Fatphobia in our society is real and I often hear people say they want to start something but feel they need to lose weight first and so the cycle continues.
The exercise obsessed - Missing a workout feels like the end of the world, there’s panic if the workout hasn’t been done and food becomes a real concern if the calories haven’t been ‘earned’. They will often double up on exercise efforts if they miss a day and 99% of the time they will organise their life around their fitness commitments not the other way around.
I always fell into the first category. I have always had a regular exercise routine but my efforts were certainly tripled when I was ‘on it’.
When I discovered that it was entirely possible to stop dieting and have a ‘normal’ relationship with food without rules, I also discovered that there is a whole world of movement out there to be enjoyed purely for how it made me feel mentally and physically and it had nothing to do with how I look.
Finally I could move my body in ways I enjoyed, as often as I wanted to without any rules and my goodness what a revelation that was. I actually found that my body wanted to move regularly, much more so than when I was ‘off plan’.
I ditched the fitness tracker for a while and focused on how I felt instead of how many calories I had burned!
I tried new things like breath work classes and meditation (I credit both these things for really taking my body acceptance journey to another level!)
I got silly and stopped caring about being perfect and I fell in love with dancing around the room to some cheesy pop with my 7 year old.
Walking became enjoyable again instead of it always needing to be a run, I could feel the sun on my skin, the birds in the trees instead of the constant body bashing voice that used to swirl around my head.
10 min workouts became a thing instead of it always having to be a minimum of 30 minutes otherwise I felt it didn’t count!
The rules were out of the window and the joy and connection with my body took over - and what a glorious thing to find after all these years!
Rest days became just days - no judgment, no need to label them as anything, just a day that didn’t involve a workout. There was nothing to fail, but I gained so much it blew my mind!
Now I have discovered so many inclusive fitness trainers and I recommend them to my clients to help them develop a personal relationship with movement and help them gain back the confidence in their body and find the joy for what their body can do instead of punishment for what they ate!