Hello! So I joined the gym, for real (I had a 7 day pass bundle
last month, which I wrote about here). Those first few visits felt like baby steps
back into living in the land of gym culture while trying to maintain a
body positive/non weight loss driven mind set.
Now that I am going to be seeing the weight loss package
posters and other potentially triggering stuff on a regular basis, I do think
it’s important to exercise fairly vigilant self-care about keeping my mind
free of diet culture and outside pressures to "fix" my imperfectly perfect body ;-).
Much of the body positive attitude to fitness is “do what
you love/what gives you joy” type thinking when it comes to movement. Which in
a perfect world, yes, I would just dance my little heart out all the time. But
I have dodgy knees that need a more pragmatic attitude to rebuild them, so I
can hopefully dance more in the future (mostly in the privacy of my living
room, but still! ;-)).
I do feel like there is a common misconception that people
who are body positive don’t work out. I know when I did a Twitter search
looking for articles/resources, 99.9% of the results of the word “body positive”
combined with “exercise” were derogatory and rude tweets. People are just so dang
ignorant and cruel sometimes.
I know that I can exercise several times a week and feel
stronger and better for it, but unless I have a weight loss or results type “after”
photo to show off as “proof of fitness", not many people will cheer me on. At
least not with the same unbridled support they direct at people on extreme diets
who are dropping pounds and fat shaming their before pictures.
And it’s not that I’m looking for anyone’s approval, truly,
but it does sting a bit sometimes to know that this way of life is not one that
has a built in support system of understanding, not in the way that the weight loss and
diet industry have conditioned us to blindly worship reducing our size. It means that we have to
seek support from other places, if we need it.
So far I am getting a lot of help and feeling a sense of
community from Body Image coach Summer Innanen and her Facebook group, Break the Rules: Body
Positive and Anti Diet Community (it is a closed group but anyone is welcome to
join who is on the body positive/neutral/intuitive eating track, there are many
people at different stages of it participating).
What I appreciate most about the intuitive eating/body positive attitude to exercise is that it is completely kindness/self care driven.
So many people begin fitness routines and get sucked into feeling guilty for not exercising hard enough or often enough or having enough to show for their efforts. Which for me personally, now sounds crazy demotivating. How does beating yourself up/only rewarding yourself for losing weight or inches ever end in anything but eventual frustration and disappointment?
So many people begin fitness routines and get sucked into feeling guilty for not exercising hard enough or often enough or having enough to show for their efforts. Which for me personally, now sounds crazy demotivating. How does beating yourself up/only rewarding yourself for losing weight or inches ever end in anything but eventual frustration and disappointment?
But who can blame us, it's all we know/are taught. Most “fitspo” revolves around NOT
respecting or listening to your body in most cases, i.e. “Exercise even if you
feel like sh*t, you will feel so much better about yourself after you work out”/no pain no gain nonsense.
I’m not disputing that sometimes you can feel better after exercise, of course you can, but listening to our bodies seems to be something we are encouraged to forget about.
I’m not disputing that sometimes you can feel better after exercise, of course you can, but listening to our bodies seems to be something we are encouraged to forget about.
Most everything to do with mainstream fitness motivation is
geared at the outside. The “looking good will make us feel good” type fitspo I
find particularly sneaky, because what, we cannot feel good about ourselves
unless we fit a certain societally prescribed weight limit or size?!
I have mentioned Body Positive Memes before, but truly check
out this Instagram and Facebook page by Michelle Elman if you find traditional
fitspo frustrating or demotivating. She
is great at turning it on its head with humour, showing how insidiously harmful
to our self-worth so much of it can be.
I think, looking back on it, maybe I was letting go of residual feelings of disappointment that exercise and vague calorie counting didn’t magic away the pounds. If I’m being 100% honest with myself some part of me did still hope to lose weight "accidentally". But at the same time I luckily discovered body positivity when I was beginning to feel a bit negative about my "failure" to lose weight once more (thanks universe!), not to get all hippy dippy on you!
It can be very
hard to not treat exercise as a weapon or punishment for food consumed. Even
now, for me it is hard not to compile the calories burned at the gym with the
calories I might be consuming in my brain, because they are on the displays of most machines.
It’s why they don’t actively encourage women
who are recently coming out of eating disorders to pursue exercise when they
are first committing to body positivity and/or intuitive eating/health at any
size (so many descriptors, I know!).
Last week I accidentally started rowing on a machine setting
that didn’t display the calories, and it truly felt like a relief (now I just
have to figure out how to find that setting on purpose!).
I also felt a bit weird when a young woman weighed herself in the locker room and the machine was saying “This is your fat percentage” – it didn’t say it out loud but you know, just being aware there was a machine that did that did make me remember how crappy everyone felt in high school when the gym teacher would publicly pinch our fat to get our BMI, which is widely dismissed by many nutritionists now anyway!
I thought about how at most times in my life I would have had an urge to get on the scale myself and see what it had to say about my weight and fat percentage, and how much that no doubt would have depressed me and ruined my post workout mood. And I felt genuinely no urge to do that to myself, which was pretty cool and liberating.
I also felt a bit weird when a young woman weighed herself in the locker room and the machine was saying “This is your fat percentage” – it didn’t say it out loud but you know, just being aware there was a machine that did that did make me remember how crappy everyone felt in high school when the gym teacher would publicly pinch our fat to get our BMI, which is widely dismissed by many nutritionists now anyway!
I thought about how at most times in my life I would have had an urge to get on the scale myself and see what it had to say about my weight and fat percentage, and how much that no doubt would have depressed me and ruined my post workout mood. And I felt genuinely no urge to do that to myself, which was pretty cool and liberating.
So yeah, that’s about it, I guess I just wanted to say that
you can TOTALLY be body positive/anti-diet and still exercise if you feel like it, maybe most people know that
but I admit when I first got into body positivity it was something I wasn’t
sure about myself.
I do think it is important to approach this from a place of feeling relatively secure in your own skin if possible, which I know, can be daunting, much of what we read and hear from body positivity is about the awesome, feel good "after" stage of self acceptance. We are all still going to have bad days, we all have to start somewhere.
For me personally, having plenty of body positive and intuitive eating reading material and other (mainly online) support is essential to maintaining my feelings of self acceptance. I have cleared my social media of most everything that does not help me - apologies clean eaters and dieters, but I have to protect my own mental health above all else with this thing.
I do think it is important to approach this from a place of feeling relatively secure in your own skin if possible, which I know, can be daunting, much of what we read and hear from body positivity is about the awesome, feel good "after" stage of self acceptance. We are all still going to have bad days, we all have to start somewhere.
For me personally, having plenty of body positive and intuitive eating reading material and other (mainly online) support is essential to maintaining my feelings of self acceptance. I have cleared my social media of most everything that does not help me - apologies clean eaters and dieters, but I have to protect my own mental health above all else with this thing.
I would love to hear if you have had any experience of
exercising without dieting, if you are interested in it yourself here are a few links that I found super helpful! :-)
-Sarah Vance: How To Start Having A Better Relationship With Movement
-Christy Harrison: Food Psych podcast #82: Intuitive Exercise & Overcoming Deprivation
(ok I admit I haven't listened to this one yet, but every Christy Harrison podcast I have listened to has been amazing, this one is next on my list!).
-Malinda Diel (txshortcake): There are lots of awesome plus sized yogis to choose from on Instagram - but I'll be honest, just as with thin yogis, I find a lot of their feeds daunting/impossible seeming. Diel describes herself as a beginner yogi but she has lots of daily, accessible seeming postures. I find her pictures inspiring and (in theory!) achievable.
-Malinda Diel (txshortcake): There are lots of awesome plus sized yogis to choose from on Instagram - but I'll be honest, just as with thin yogis, I find a lot of their feeds daunting/impossible seeming. Diel describes herself as a beginner yogi but she has lots of daily, accessible seeming postures. I find her pictures inspiring and (in theory!) achievable.
-Michelle Elman: How to Get Started in the Gym: Body Positive Exercise: 10 minute video from the always cheerful and sassy Michelle (of aforementioned Body Positive Memes) - I really like what she says about "exercise until you get bored" - because I have naturally been doing this lately, before I even watched this, so I guess I am on the right track!
Thanks for reading!
xo
