5 Ways To Have A Healthy Relationship With Movement
Movement is important. It helps keep bones strong, it builds muscles, maintains mobility, and helps the heart stay healthy.
Unfortunately, diet and fitness culture perpetuates unhealthy relationships with movement. It makes you believe that the most important thing about moving your body is maintaining a great physique and losing weight.
Only using movement and exercise to change the way you look is problematic. It sets unrealistic standards towards yourself and exercise, it perpetuates unhealthy and disordered thoughts around movement, and it stigmatizes individuals living in larger bodies.
Moving your body doesn’t have to be all about how you look. In fact, there are many other reasons to exercise that have nothing to do with changing your body. Let’s look at 5 ways to have a healthy relationship with exercise:
- Don’t use fitness trackers
Fitness trackers are common nowadays. They track steps, calories burned, and many other things. Although trackers can be useful in some aspects, relying on them promotes tuning away from listening to what your body needs. When you rely on a fitness tracker to tell you how many steps to take, or how hard to work, you can start to have resentment towards movement as you feel the need to do something instead of choosing to do it. Furthermore, these trackers can contribute towards a disordered relationship to movement and potentially disordered eating. Instead of relying on a tracker to tell you how many steps to take, or how many calories to burn, tuning into what your body needs is more beneficial. This leads us to our second point….
- Tune into your body
Your body is going to feel different every day. Sleep, stress, travel, the amount of food you’ve eaten and many other factors will contribute to how your body feels. Learning to tune inwards and pay attention to the cycles of your body can be a great way to determine what types of exercise to do. Have a day of high energy? Perhaps you do a more intense workout on this day. Feeling tired? Maybe you opt for a light walk or stretches or take a rest day. Stressed? Perhaps movement can take you into the present moment, away from your thoughts. Learning to listen to what your body is asking of you and what your body needs can help to reduce over-exercising, injuries, and stress around movement. Tuning into your body ties into my third point which is…
- Set flexible goals
It’s great to have goals around fitness that have nothing to do with changing the way you look. Some examples may be being able to run for 3 km in 3 months without stopping, doing x amount of squats by the end of the month, feeling safe and strong picking up your grandchildren, or getting your first pull-up. Having goals gives you something to strive for and can motivate you to continue with a movement routine for positive reasons. However, it’s important to be flexible around goals and not rigid. Life circumstances come up, injuries occur, and priorities change. If you become rigid with your goals you can develop an all-or-none mindset sticking to something unachievable or no longer a priority. Being flexible with your goals allows you to re-evaluate what is important to you, how you will achieve it, and if it’s realistic. Maybe your goal of running 3 km in 3 months gets side-swept by an ankle injury. Being flexible with your goals allows you to change the goal from 3 months to 6 months, for example. Flexibility is great in goal setting and in life and is a wonderful way to maintain a healthy relationship with movement.
Just as setting goals for function instead of changing your body is important, so is my next point…
4, Exercise For Enjoyment Not To Change Your Body
When you exercise for enjoyment, you choose movements because they bring you joy, feel good, or help you attain a functional goal, not because they change how you look. Diet culture puts physical looks at the forefront of the movement. Fitness influencers have posts titled “do this one exercise to burn belly fat” or “lose 10lb in 4 weeks with this exercise routine”. Let me tell you a secret, no one exercise is going to burn all your belly fat, and no exercise routine can guarantee 10lb lost in 4 weeks. These are marketing tactics to prey on insecurities that fitness culture puts on you in the first place. Instead, when you choose movements because you ENJOY them, because they MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD, or because they allow you to SOCIALIZE WITH OTHERS, you choose exercise for healthier reasons than to change how you look. Finally, let’s look at my last point on having a healthy relationship with movement…
5. Observe Your Thoughts Around Movement
Do you obsessively worry about getting an exercise in? Do you stress that if you don’t go to the gym you won’t burn enough calories? Do you think about moving your body to burn off the food you eat? Noticing your thoughts around movement can help you understand the barriers you have to having a healthy relationship with movement. It’s not uncommon to have these thoughts. In fact, I’d say it’s probably pretty common. But, just because something is common does not make it healthy. If you notice you think about movement in ways that promote stress it might be useful to reach out to a professional to help with this mindset. Dietitians, mental health professionals, and physical therapists who take a health at every size aligned approach are all great options.
Has this blog sparked your interest in changing your relationship to movement? If you live in British Columbia feel free to book in with me using THIS LINK and we can work on this relationship together!
I also offer a variety of trauma-informed movement practices on YouTube HERE if you’d like to try out a different way of moving your body.