It’s not uncommon to hear diet survivors talk about their struggles with exercise. For many people caught in the diet/binge cycle, exercise patterns can mirror the same dieting cycle: you’re “good” for some period of time as you follow your workout plan – but then you skip a day or two, feel guilty, and perhaps even stop completely. Part of the solution to this problem is to break the diet mentality and stop viewing exercise as a means of weight loss. You may also need to delve deeper to understand the meaning of exercise in your life. The following excerpt can help you consider your relationship to exercise and where you might be stuck:[private_membership circle]
We wanted to share a story with you about a woman who began the process of ending her overeating years ago. She was able to learn how to listen to her body’s physical cues to tell her when she was hungry and when she was full. As a result of her work with attuned/intuitive eating, her bingeing stopped, and she felt calm around food. Occasionally she ate out of mouth hunger; she used these experiences as opportunities to explore what was going on with her emotionally so that she could deal directly with the feelings that triggered her overeating.
As pleased as she was by her relationship with food, she experienced another challenge: she valued the idea of exercise, but despite her membership at a fitness club, which she renewed year after year, she could not get herself to go there. She considered other forms of exercise as well, such as walking in her neighborhood, but nothing seemed to work.
How important is it that she figures out her obstacles to exercising and engage is physical activity? Well, that depends. Each of us is entitled to make our own decisions about how active we want to be and how we want to make that happen. If this woman felt comfortable with the notion that she is someone who chooses not to exercise, that’s fine. There’s no point in beating herself up or feeling guilty – if that helped motivate people to exercise, a lot more people would be moving! Negative thoughts never lead to positive change, and not everyone experiences exercise as important in their lives.
On the other hand, this woman had the sense that she would feel better if she moved her body on a regular basis. She believed that exercise would support her health and give her more energy. When she avoided physical activity – and she had gotten really good at coming up with reasons not to exercise – she felt that she was letting herself down. Her sense that she was missing out on some good caretaking made this issue important for her to explore.
She considered her resistance to exercise on several different levels. First, she had been pushed by her parents to exercise as a child and adolescent, who saw it as a way to get her to lose weight. She felt angry about the way they focused on her weight as a condition for acceptance, rather than offering her unconditional love. Every time she started to move her body, she couldn’t help but feel that her parents were “winning.” She was still locked in a battle with them at an emotional level; after all, now that she’s an adult, there’s really no reason that she has to share with them whether or not she is exercising. Her first challenge was to understand that if she didn’t exercise because her parents wanted her to, then they had just as much control over her as if she did exercise because they wanted her to! Real separation from her parents meant that she was truly in charge of making her own decision about whether or not to be physically active.
Even as she moved away from the struggle with her parents, she now had to face a different issue: her belief that exercise was a means to lose weight. What if she worked out regularly and her body remained the same size? In her mind – and despite the other reasons she offered for wanting to exercise – she found it hard to escape the idea that there was a point in exercising if she didn’t lose weight. This idea was so engrained in her from the culture, that she had to actively remind herself over and over to unhook her value of exercise to foster wellness from any lingering wish to become thinner. If she didn’t, she would get caught back in the diet mentality of thinking she was “good” when she exercised and “bad” when she didn’t – leading to the accompanying feeling of guilt and the pattern of exercising for a short period and then stopping completely once she missed a time or two of working out.
As this woman “legalized” all of the possibilities – from giving herself permission not to exercise to figuring out a long-term plan of consistent exercise, she ultimately became unstuck. She had increasingly focused on how to take better care of herself in numerous areas of her life. As part of this effort to give to herself, she decided that she would schedule several sessions with a personal trainer available through her health club. To her surprise, she loved the attention she got from this knowledgeable woman, who gently encouraged her to start slowly and listen to her body. They agreed there would be no focus on weight – her measure of success would be strengthening her body and becoming more flexible. One year later, this woman now has a routine for herself that fits into her lifestyle and leaves her feeling that she’s accomplished something wonderful for herself, both physically and emotionally.
One final note: we recognize that not everyone can afford the services of a personal trainer, especially during these rough economic times. At the same time, we’ve heard many people tell us over the years that they “shouldn’t” need a personal trainer to exercise, as if it’s a character flaw. Our response is that if people didn’t need personal trainers, it wouldn’t be such a booming business! There’s nothing wrong with asking for – and getting – help with something that’s important to you, and that you’re having trouble doing on your own. If you do decide to work with a personal trainer, make it clear what you want to get out of the sessions. In our experience, many personal trainers focus on weight loss and give advice about various diets and eating plans – and often, that’s what their clients are looking for. It’s worth checking around and finding the person who is the best match for you and will honor your focus on fitness rather than weight loss.
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Eat well! Live well! Be well! Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel, are co-authors of The Diet Survivor’s Handbook, Beyond a Shadow of a Diet www.dietsurvivors.com Chicago Center for Overcoming Overeating: 847.267.1200
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