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So you've started on a body positive fitness journey, and you're setting goals that aren't related to shrinking yourself! Congratu-freaking-lations! That is heckin rad, and I'm super proud of you. It's hard as hell to break out of the mainstream fitness and diet culture that pushes you to endlessly try to shrink. Now that you've started moving your body and are trying to make it about feeling good, it might be hard to figure out how to set goals. Here's a few ideas to get you started.
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Subtitle: Do I overthink shit? Yes, yes I do.  Look at that ugly deadlift face! Look at those powerful legs! I'm currently training for a powerlifting meet, and I've been noticing my legs and shoulders getting more muscular and defined, and liking the change. It got me to thinking, can you be "body neutral" and like changes that come to your body from working out? Like many things, the answer is a bit nuanced, so I answer with a "Yes, AND...."
Like I said, maybe this is overthinking. If you think I'm overthinking, that's fine, but I KNOW that some of you are worse overthinkers than I am. I know because I've talked to some of you. When I find myself getting stuck on a weird thought like, "Oh no, is it okay to like how my legs are looking?", I find it helpful to explore it a bit with more questions. All the questions.  Helloooooooooooo shoulders!  A recent in-person barre class I attended at Upcycle in Collingswood. Barre isn't always my "thing", but I like trying different shit sometimes! 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!
 Can you mindfully enjoy a PBJ? Intuitive eating was first defined by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in their seminal work, “Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works.” Intuitive eating is NOT a weight loss plan. In fact, the first principle of intuitive eating is to ditch the diet mentality and get rid of the notion of intentional weight loss. Improving your mindfulness when eating will help you along your intuitive eating journey. This is not enough information to truly embark on an intuitive eating journey, but if your curiosity is piqued, I would be delighted to talk with you about it more. Before we dive in, we should define mindfulness. While mindfulness has come to mean a lot of different things, it is, very simply, bringing your attention to the current moment without judgment of what that current moment holds. We can apply this kind of intentional attention paying to eating in several ways that support an intuitive eating journey. 1. Take a pause to tune in to what you really want. Sometimes, a person will start eating without pausing to decide what they really want and will end up eating a bunch of different things and feeling unsatisfied. I have been working with a client recently who was struggling with feeling like she was snacking mindlessly. We worked to apply this principle, and to tune in a bit to what she really wanted, and then eat that thing mindfully until she was satisfied. This only works if you have given yourself permission to eat what you want and do not have any off-limits foods. My client found that she was able to apply this skill and eat what she really wanted without feeling bad about it and without making herself overstuffed from what I have come to call eating around the food you really want. 2. Be attentive to your hunger and satiety cues. Your body will let you know when it needs food and when it has had enough! Notice it. Part of this principle for me involves eating mindfully, without distractions, and slowly if possible. If I eat while I’m working or doing something else, I am less likely to notice my body’s satiety signals and will instead just clear my plate. Also be attentive to how your body lets you know it is time to eat. There are many ways your body may signal hunger, and it might not always be a growling belly. 3. Use mindfulness to find the satisfaction factor. I alluded to this in talking about my client who was struggling with mindlessly raiding the pantry. Enjoy what you eat! Eat good food that tastes good, from a plate while seated, and preferably with company you enjoy. Maybe dinner music helps you enjoy your meals. Tuning in to what you really want and then eating it with enjoyment helps you find satisfaction. 4. Cope with your emotions without using food. Look, some emotional eating is normal. We eat for joy as much as we eat for sadness, anger, or anxiety. However, I like to see folks have a number of different options for coping with emotions. I recently came home after a particularly tough day at work and was about to hit up the snack drawer. Instead, I ate my dinner, and thought about what would really help me cope with my emotions. I used my mindfulness skills to tune in to what was going on inside myself in the moment. I realized snacking wasn’t really going to make me feel better, but would just distract me for a bit. Instead, I talked to a friend and did some yoga and felt much better. If you often cope with your emotions using food, you may find that it is difficult to find satisfaction. That is because the food won’t fix the feelings, so you just go unsatisfied. I’m not suggesting you NEVER emotionally eat, just be sure you’re tuned in when you do it. Intuitive eating is a radical change if you’ve been dieting and struggling with your weight for a lot of your life, but you can rediscover yourself as an intuitive eater, learn to respect your body, and find food freedom! Applying mindfulness to the principles of intuitive eating is a powerful way to connect in the moment and be able to effectively apply the principles. This post contains an affiliate link to Bookshop.org. I will receive compensation if you purchase through my link.
The first time I remember talking about going on a diet, I was about nine years old. I can remember where I was standing, in my grandmother’s house, and saying that I was fat and wanted to go on a diet. I was the oldest of four, and somehow, the only chubby one out of my siblings. My brother used to have this “trick” where he would suck his belly in so hard it seemed like there couldn’t be anything inside him, and you could count all his ribs. I, by contrast, had thighs that always touched, and a wiggly belly.
I grew into a young adult who turned to fitness and dieting to try to control my weight. Having been “overweight” on the BMI chart since my teen years, and eventually starting to move into “ob*se” range, I thought the sensible thing to do was to try to lose weight through diet and exercise. This is the message we hear all the time, and so that is what I did. I started out counting calories, and working out at the gym at my university. I didn’t know what to do there, and after a few embarrassing incidents in classes there, I switched to jogging on the indoor track. That became my thing, and eventually I started running outside, and later did a triathlon. Yet, I remained “overweight.” (Over what weight? I don't know.) Having babies put my weight loss aspirations on the back burner for a while, though I still worked out when I could. I am sad to say that I spent a significant part of my postpartum period hating my body, and feeling frustrated with myself for looking how I did. Instead of being able to marvel at all my body had done, I was frustrated with how my belly looked, what it didn’t do, and what I thought were my body’s myriad of failures. As my babies got a bit older, I got back to the battle of the bulge, and ran through a number of different diets. Some were packaged as lifestyle changes, or nutrition plans, but no matter what you call it, if the point is to shrink your body, it is a diet. I tried things that involved shakes, things that were whole foods, things that were highly detailed and had me counting almonds, things that were less restrictive but had me recording every single thing I ate. I tried things that were inexpensive, and things that cost big bucks, including MLM supplements meant to kickstart my metabolism and increase my body’s basal metabolic rate. Most worked in the short term. A few worked in the medium term. But no matter what I did, I could not get my weight into that “normal” range. I could get into the low end of overweight. But never “normal.” My last diet was about three years ago. It was a bikini body bootcamp with a coach who gave me a very strict meal plan together with MLM supplements and workouts. I followed it, but got so sick of alternating chicken and broccoli and fish and broccoli, while also cooking separate meals for my kids. Then, once a week, I had a “free” meal. During that free meal, I would make myself ill from overeating. Why? Why was I doing this? I started to think I had a binge eating disorder. After a lot of research on binge eating disorders, I picked up a book called “Reclaiming Yourself from Binge Eating” by Leora Fulvio. She starts with a discussion of her own struggles with binge eating, and went on to explain that binges are caused by restriction. It is the act of restricting foods that causes cravings that are so powerful that you end up binging. She talked about intuitive eating as the solution to this problem. It was the first time I had been exposed to the actual principles of intuitive eating. I next got the original “Intuitive Eating” book by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. In it, Tribole and Resch lay out ten principles to help you quit dieting, make peace with food, reclaim your health, and end the battle. I’m going to explain a bit about the ten principles of intuitive eating. This is not enough information to use to truly embark on an intuitive eating journey, but if your curiosity is piqued, I would be delighted to talk with you about it more. The Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating 1. Reject the diet mentality. To really rediscover my ability to eat intuitively, as I had before I started dieting at all, I had to fully squash the idea of losing weight. I couldn’t find real food freedom while still hanging on to the idea that I might lose weight doing this. I had to get angry at the culture that told me my perfectly strong and healthy body was flawed. I had to get angry at the diet industry (worth $72 billion USD in the US alone) that is quite satisfied selling all of us temporary fixes. They know that it is only a short-term solution, and that we will be back, again, throwing more money at them. The greatest predictor of future weight gain is going on a diet. I had to fully reject the idea of intentional weight loss to be able to rediscover myself as an intuitive eater. 2. Honor your hunger. I had to eat when I was hungry. This seems simple, but years of dieting had screwed up my ability to really understand when I was hungry, and had taught me that ignoring my hunger was “good” and to feel proud of not eating when I was hungry. I had to start feeding my body. 3. Make peace with food. I had to give myself permission to eat every and anything (if you have legitimate food allergies, clearly that is an exception!). I have been working with a client recently who was struggling with feeling like she was snacking mindlessly. We worked to apply this principle, and to tune in a bit to what she really wanted, and then eat that thing mindfully until she was satisfied. This only works if you have a good base on the previous principles. She found that she was able to apply this skill and eat what she really wanted without feeling bad about it and without making herself overstuffed from what I have come to call eating around the food you really want. 4. Challenge the food police. Who are the food police? The internal and external voices that tell you that you are “good” for eating certain things or “bad” for eating others. This language is all around us, when we describe desserts as “sinful”. The food police can be your mom asking “Do you really need another helping of potatoes?” or your internal voice suggesting that you’re naughty for eating cookies right before bed. I have a client who was recently able to connect some of her food police thoughts to athletic coaches from her youth who wanted her to maintain a small body. Being able to ignore and shut down these food police is key in rediscovering intuitive eating. 5. Feel your fullness. Notice that this principle doesn’t say you have to always stop eating when full. It simply says to feel your fullness. Notice it. Part of this principle for me involves eating mindfully, without distractions, and slowly if possible. Some of us may have food police who say we must clear our plates (I know I’m not the only one who heard about the starving children), and being able to shut down those food police is also important to being able to feel our fullness. 6. Discover the satisfaction factor. I alluded to this in talking about my client who was struggling with mindlessly raiding the pantry. Enjoy what you eat! Eat good food that tastes good, from a plate while seated, and preferably with company you enjoy. Maybe dinner music helps you enjoy your meals. Tuning in to what you really want and then eating it with enjoyment helps you find satisfaction. 7. Cope with your emotions without using food. Look, some emotional eating is normal. We eat for joy as much as we eat for sadness, anger, or anxiety. However, I like to see folks have a number of different options for coping with emotions. I recently came home after a particularly tough day at work and was about to hit up the snack drawer. Instead, I ate my dinner, and thought about what would really help me cope with my emotions. I realized snacking wasn’t really going to make me feel better, but would just distract me for a bit. Instead, I talked to a friend and did some yoga and felt much better. If you often cope with food, you may find that it is more difficult to find satisfaction. That is because the food won’t fix the feelings, so you just go unsatisfied. I’m not suggesting you NEVER emotionally eat, just be sure you’re tuned in when you do it. 8. Respect your body. You have a body, but you are more than your body! I had some clients work on thinking of their bodies as “containers” for themselves. And while having a pretty container is cool, having a functioning container that holds some really awesome joyful stuff inside it is probably cooler. My teen years were in the nineties - the thigh gap, Kate Moss, heroin chic years for those who don’t remember them. Part of respecting my body is respecting that is not the shape that my body wants to take. Even while eating a very low calorie diet and working out multiple times a day, I did not get that small. My body just doesn’t want to be that small, and that is okay. Some people have bodies that remain smaller. Even if we all ate the same and exercised the same, we would still have different shapes. It has become kind of vogue in recent years to talk about loving your body, and I think loving your body is great, but not always necessary. Just respect it, and treat it with respect, and see how that changes your thinking. 9. Move your body and feel the difference. As a personal trainer, this is my favorite principle! That being said, moving your body doesn’t have to take the form of defined exercise. There are so many ways to move your body, and it might happen in a gym, or maybe it is outdoors, or at home. So many of us have attached movement to losing weight that we never really explored movement for fun, joy, for the multitude of health benefits that have nothing to do with changing the size of your body. Notice how it feels to move your body without focusing on weight. What kind of exercise would you do if you were not trying to change the size of your body? 10. Honor your health - gentle nutrition. Some folks think that intuitive eating throws away nutrition. However, I find the opposite. It returns us to common sense nutrition that is sustainable and logical. Eliminating large groups of foods is neither logical nor sustainable. Gentle nutrition encourages a focus on eating foods in as close to their natural state as possible, while also seeking enjoyment and satisfaction from our foods. Eat a variety of foods, incorporate a lot of plants, make sure you’re getting good sources of protein. People often want a magic bullet, when the real magic bullet is literally that simple. Intuitive eating is a radical change if you’ve been dieting and struggling with your weight for a lot of your life, but you can rediscover yourself as an intuitive eater, learn to respect your body, and find food freedom! 12/2/2021 0 Comments What is HAES?I talk about HAES-aligned fitness as a service I provide, but in a conversation with someone who had been looking at my site, they asked, "What is H-A-E-S?" So first, the simple answers! HAES (usually pronounced like haze) stands for Health At Every Size. Please note, it is HEALTH at every size, not healthY at every size. It is an important distinction! HAES comes from the book "Health at Every Size" by Lindo (Linda) Bacon. In the book, Dr Bacon summarizes a variety of research to build a case that body weight is less culpable for health issues than has been previously believed. HAES is based on the following principles:
In her book, Dr Bacon describes research they conducted that supports this approach over weight focused approaches to improve overall health, including specific biometric markers of health. The recommendations that come from HAES are simple, common-sense, and sustainable behavioral changes, and also address some of the systemic issues that clearly impact health. So what does it mean to be a HAES-aligned personal trainer? As a personal trainer, my goal is to help my clients get into a sustainable movement routine. So let's break that down a bit: I want you moving your body in a way that you can continue to do for a long time. I don't want to kick your ass for a month or two, have you get injured and then drop off. That isn't particularly helpful for your long-term health or wellbeing. I want you to have a movement routine. You get the most benefit from moving your body on a regular basis. Working out to the point of puking once a month isn't going to have that much impact on your long-term health. What is better is to engage in some type of movement a couple of times a week, and find something you can stick with. As a HAES-aligned fitness provider, I don't weigh my clients. I don't do before-and-after pics. I don't have you measure your body. Of course, it is your body, and you can do whatever you want with it, but I'm not going to suggest that you do any of those things. My focus isn't on making there be less of you! My focus is on a sustainable fitness program that helps you feel stronger, more energetic, and improves your overall health. If you want to learn more, I definitely recommend checking out the book, "Health at Every Size." If you've read it already, leave me a comment and tell me what you thought about it! This post contains a Bookshop.org affiliate link. This means if you purchase through my link, I receive compensation.
11/26/2021 0 Comments Why do I do "Body Positive" Fitness?I spent years hating, battling, and trying to force my body to into some impossible standard. Through the years, I would stumble across things that were body positive, but figured I'd get body positive when my body was good enough to feel positive about. Here's the thing: my body was good enough all along.
Things escalated to a point where I was working out multiple times a day, following an extremely restrictive eating plan, and taking supplements to help me lose weight. It was excessive, unsustainable, and unhealthy. This is the point when I learned about intuitive eating. In intuitive eating, we talk about "joyful movement." Gradually, my approach to movement shifted from being something meant to force my body to shrink, and I started to approach movement as a way to feel stronger, empowered, and good about my body. It became less about punishing myself or earning food, and more about enjoyment. Don't get me wrong, just because I do workouts I enjoy doesn't mean they aren't hard as shit sometimes! You can move joyfully and still get your ass kicked in a workout. I started to find body positive movement communities, and from there, my horizons broadened into weight-neutral fitness, and body liberation-oriented movement. While there is a lot of overlap in these concepts, they all mean something a little bit different. Body positive fitness is fitness approached with the belief that everyone deserves to feel good about their bodies. There are people out there who embrace body positive fitness and still coach intentional weight loss. I do not coach intentional weight loss. Knowing this steered me towards the label of weight-neutral coach. I like the label of weight neutral fitness because it describes what I'm doing, but when I was introduced to body liberation oriented movement, I knew that was what I'd been looking for the whole time. Body liberation oriented movement focuses on liberating all bodies, and making fitness spaces work for everyone. This means fitness spaces that are inclusive for all races, genders, gender identities, and all abilities. In my opinion, this doesn't mean that any one single class or space is inclusive of literally everyone, but instead focuses on creating spaces that re inclusive of a many different people. It doesn't mean everyone in one place, but a place for everyone. My journey to body positive fitness, and eventually to body liberation hasn't always been smooth, and it surely hasn't been perfect. It's okay for your thinking and your approach to evolve over time. |
Jess Brock-PittsMom in charge at Enlighten Well. I do body positive fitness, intuitive eating, and whatever else I feel called to do. Get to know me here. Archives
April 2022
CategoriesAll Body Positive HAES Intuitive Eating Motherhood Parenting Personal Training Trauma Weight Neutral |
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