10 mindset shifts that will forever improve your relationship with your body, fitness & food.
Any hateful beliefs you have about your body have been taught to us through media, environment (family and friends), culture (values and norms), discriminatory behaviours (weight stigma, racial bias), and/or personal experience (hurtful experiences or trauma) — meaning, with time and practice, we can unlearn them, and distance ourselves from the power those beliefs hold over us.
2. Viewing an increase or fluctuation in scale weight as ‘failure’ (without even considering the context) is rooted in fatphobia (fear of fatness) and our capitalist culture’s obsession with deeming qualities such as ‘self control’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘hard work’ as morally superior.
So, emotionally detaching yourself from your numerical relationship with gravity & instead shifting your focus on health-promoting behaviours will heavily decrease the stress that body measurements can cause.
3. We are taught to blame our body’s appearance for common unmet emotional needs that every human is entitled to (e.g.: needing validation, respect, love, belonging, community, intimacy, safety, trust in ourselves and others, etc). Unless we unpack WHAT we think drastically changing your body will achieve, & address it independently from our fitness and nutrition habits, it is possible that no amount of exercise or diet will EVER feel ‘enough’. This understanding will help us see our health habits as what they are (a way to improve/maintain your health), rather than seeing them as tools to manipulate our sense of self worth or meet all our emotional needs.
4. Having someone else as “body goals” for ‘motivation’ will almost always backfire into a discouraging feeling of ‘disappointment’ and comparison: even if every single woman had the exact same routine, we would still look completely different. It is infinitely more “motivating”to admire others’ strength, consistency, resilience or the challenges they’ve overcome (rather than glorify the outward outcome of one’s body).
5. Progress comes from flexible and enjoyable consistency, not perfect stressful rigidity. When priorities change in life (which they very often will!) we can always readjust a plan, and move forward. When we have taken a significant break and are re-approaching fitness, we can always take habits back to basics, and move forward. Neither has to involve convincing ourselves we’ve ‘failed’ or have been ‘defeated.’
6. All movement ‘counts’. 10 mins of walking. An entire gym strength session. Dancing with friends. 15 minutes of bodyweight. And if you feel like you tend to put what exercise should "look like" in a very rigid box and that consistently leaves you with an ‘all or nothing’ mindset that has you anxiously feeling like "I can never keep it up", "I always just quit", “I’m going to lose so much progress”, start with this understanding: It all ‘counts’. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to adopt a more chillaxed approach, especially if it means you're more likely to keep at it in the long term.
7. Making realistic and stress-free changes to our lifestyle often involves breaking down the big habit/task we want to achieve into small actions that are easy and take a few minutes — and doing THAT on a more consistent basis. The most important part of this is how it helps affirm your identity as someone who just shows up.
8. Food shouldn’t make you feel guilty or anxious. And we often believe that if we feel guilty for eating certain foods, or label them as 100% off limits, we will be more in “control” of the food, “healthier” and “more motivated” to not have it. However the opposite often tends to be true: when we associate guilt with certain foods, we put them on an emotional pedestal that can make us feel LESS ‘in control’ around them and lead to an overconsumption → guilt → over restriction cycle.
9. Which leads to our next shift: Establishing an anxiety-free relationship with food often involves lessening your over-restrictive beliefs, rules, and tendencies.
10. Finally, you always deserve to eat and you do not need to ‘earn’ your food. You deserve to eat even if you didn’t workout today, if you don’t like how you look today, if you overate yesterday. This understanding helps create consistent eating behaviours.
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