When I inquired of a new client about the state of her diet, she replied, “When I’m being good, I’ll eat oatmeal with a banana for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and fish with vegetables for dinner.” I immediately knew her work was less about teaching her the nuts and bolts of weight management than it was about learning to take care of and nurture herself.
The good/bad dialog that many people have around their exercise and dietary practices can set them up for wild swings in behavior. Viewing habits as all or none, ‘I’m either being good or being bad,’ when ‘being bad’ they tend to isolate and hide because being bad (lacking willpower) brings shame with it. This is the opposite of nurturing, or what should be the basis of eating and exercising.
Shifting the good/bad dialog toward self care is a principal step toward whole health and well-being. Your exercise and dietary practices are not primarily about your weight. They are about stewarding your body so that you can live your most full life. When you eat right and exercise, your weight will fall to its natural, healthy level and you can instead focus on the things and people that are most important to you. Studies indicate that living this way (connected and with purpose) are the keys to a happy life.
Another client, a 50-plus year old woman asked me about her “saddle bag” area, the area of fat deposition that most women carry around the bottom side of their rear. She’d recently lost 10 pounds by cleaning up her diet and getting consistent with her exercise, and was happy with her legs except for this one area. I could hear the frustration in her voice, “I do everything: spin, leg lifts, strength training … is there any machine I can do that will target right here? I feel really solid everywhere else but I can’t seem to lose this.” I knew what I had to do to help her and it had nothing to do with exercise.
Magazines and television have led women to believe that with enough willpower, it’s possible to get so lean that we would have no fat on the hips or buttocks. One of the largest selling issues of People Magazine is the one that shines light on celebrities’ cellulite. We feel relieved to know that they have it, despite access to trainers, chefs, and plastic surgery! Cindy Crawford told Oprah that when doing shoots she would always be conscious of her leg positioning so that she could best disguise the fat on the back of her legs and buttocks. Women everywhere let out a collective sigh of relief alongside Ms. Winfrey and her studio audience.
I am an exercise physiologist; I’ve run, biked and swum many miles, and I follow my own advice and I still carry excess fat there, too! This is important for you to know, because in clothes, you might assume otherwise. What about the magazine covers, you ask? By now you should know that most of them are airbrushed to create an illusion of perfection. No one looks like that without lighting, airbrushing, and computer cropping.
The lessons are two fold: first, take care of yourself. Drop the good/bad conversation and start by loving yourself no matter where you are on your journey. That is the absolute first step to whole health. Second, get real. Take comfort that all bodies are far from perfect, even the ones you think might be.