Starting a fitness routine can feel daunting, overwhelming, and a bit intimidating. Trying to start a fitness journey outside of mainstream fitness culture can be all of that plus feeling like you're swimming upstream. If you're trying to start working out and want to keep it weight neutral, here are some top tips for getting moving!

1. Fill your feed with diverse athletes and movement. Find some folks on your social media of choice to follow who look like you for athletic inspo. Seeing diverse bodies in motion can provide the best kind of fitspo! It will help you to see what is possible without having to shrink your body.
2. Try different things. One of the great things about the pandemic has been the boom of virtual fitness classes. On any given night, you could do body positive yoga, size inclusive strength training, fat liberation burlesque, weight neutral HIIT, body liberation pilates, and more. It is amazing to be able to try so many different types of movement with practitioners who are HAES-aligned! It can feel overwhelming to have *so* many different choices, but I encourage you, especially early in your journey, to explore what you like. Sometimes, even if you didn't love a particular form of movement when it was brought to you by weight-loss oriented trainers, it may be worth trying again with a body positive trainer.
3. Pace yourself. When you start out trying to get a movement routine going, sometimes people go too hard too fast and end up either exhausted, injured, or both. Sometimes when you start out a new movement routine, it can feel really exciting, and you might go hard right off the bat. It's just important to pay attention to how you feel and give yourself rest days. One of the things that helps me remember not to go overboard is to remember that I'm in this for the long game. I want to be lifting and moving my body for a looooong time. While I might have short term goals, it helps keep things in perspective to remember the long game.
4. Invest in a few key pieces of apparel/equipment. Having good shoes, a good sports bra, and some comfortable (and maybe cute?) workout clothes helps with injury prevention and comfort and motivation in your workouts. You don't need to buy a ton of new shit, but think about what kind of movement you plan to do the most of, and what will be helpful, motivating, and useful for you in your own movement routines. In short, get yourself a few things that are important, but don't feel like you need to have all of the perfect gear just to begin. For example, I did my first (several) triathlon(s) on a pretty crappy old mountain bike. I invested in good running shoes (to prevent injury) and a tri suit (for comfort and style points). You don't need every single thing just to start.
5. If at all possible, seek the services of a body positive fitness professional. Sure, you can do classes at your local globo-gym, but having the support of an ACTUALLY body positive personal trainer will make a huge difference in how supported you feel in your fitness journey. Obviously, as a weight neutral trainer, I am biased, but not only am I the president, I'm also a member! (I hope someone is the right age to remember that ad.) Early in my switch from weight focused fitness to weight neutral movement, I continued working with trainers who were weight-loss focused. I really thought I could just take the good, ignore the weight loss talk, and make it work. In reality, I felt more supported and better able to reach my goals working with a body positive coach. 

There are a million benefits to moving your body regularly that have NOTHING to do with weight, and I hope if you're on a body positive fitness journey that you are aware of those benefits. I commend you for even thinking about embarking on a body positive fitness journey -- a fitness routine is challenging enough, and when you commit to making it weight neutral is really swimming upstream. You got this! Seek support where you need it.

I effing love deadlifts. All kinds of deadlifts -- barbell deadlifts, kettlebell deadlifts, Romanian dumbbell deadlifts, single leg deadlifts... there are so many options! I program some variation of a deadlift for nearly every client I work with, and here's why.

• Deadlifts can help you learn good technique for lifting things in day-to-day life. Learning a good technique for lifting normal objects up can help prevent injury. 
• Deadlifts help build strength throughout your posterior chain, including glutes and hamstrings. Nearly every variation of deadlifts works to strengthen these muscles.
• Deadlifts (when done with good form) help you build a strong lower back that is less prone to pain and injury. It is important that your deadlift is done with good form!
• Deadlifts can help you build a strong grip. Do you love opening your own jars? Seriously, though, grip strength is important to many daily activities (carrying groceries, laundry baskets) and can decrease with aging.
• Finally, most women can build a lot of strength in a deadlift, whether working a barbell, kettlebell or dumbbell variation.  Building a strong deadlift can make you feel like an effing powerhouse!

One of the most common challenges I see in deadlifting is that folks have difficulty finding a good hip hinge, and sometimes trying to explain it can feel a bit like Moira from Schitt's Creek screaming, "You fold it in, David!" My personal favorite cue for teaching deadlift is to make sure at the bottom of the move that your butthole is pointed to the wall behind you. I love this cue because it is mildly gross, memorable, and effective. Pointing your butthole to the wall behind you ensures that you are initiating the movement by hinging at the hips and NOT by rounding through the low back.

In my early 20s, I was in therapy with a phenomenal therapist who helped me work through a lot of family issues and trauma. I was also struggling with some body image issues. She was an older woman who was fat (this is relevant information to the story). One day in session, I was ranting kind of tearing my body apart, how much I hated it, hated my belly, thought I was fat. She interrupted my body disparaging spiral to tell me that it was pointless to just endlessly rip my body apart, and I either had to work to accept it, or make a choice to do something about it.

I was sort of stunned into silence, and I remember feeling a bit annoyed, like this was my session and if I wanted to use it to bash my body, that she should have some better solution for me other than accept my body or decide to change it.

In hindsight, I really respect her for setting that boundary. It was unfair of me to use a fat woman as the sounding board for my boundless body loathing, whether she was paid for that role or not. I've recently heard Aubrey Gordan (@yrfatfriend on Instagram, cohost of the Maintenance Phase podcast, and author of "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat") talk on Maintenance Phase about this phenomenon -- thin/smaller bodied people using fat people as a sounding board to resolve their body image issues. It is a weird but common phenomenon, and surely not fair to do to fat people.

I share this to let you know a few things: growth happens. Nobody is perfect, and we all can (and should!) grow and evolve. The other thing I want all of us to learn from this is that you don't need to be the punching bag for someone else's body image issues. It it totally fine to set a boundary that we aren't just going to sit here and listen to a person tear their body apart. Even if you're being paid to be there. There isn't usually really a point to just scorning the shit out of your own body, so if someone comes to you trying to do that, it's okay to say, hey friend, we're not doing that today.