How Ditching Diet Culture Can Make You Love Exercise

Aug 24

Most of us are introduced to exercise as first and foremost a way to change our appearance, and then told to believe that that pursuit is the same thing as trying to improve our health. Often times, however, those two things are actually at odds with one another.

If you’ve found your way to my page, no doubt you’ve realized that that’s not a sustainable motivation for you. Listen, I can’t speak for everyone, but in my personal experience, it’s VERY hard to learn to love a body that you’re constantly trying to “fix”. Contrary to what we’ve been sold up to this point, I actually don’t believe that changing your body leads to improved body image— because even if you can successfully get your body closer to the beauty ideal, all the inner stuff that relies on what your body looks like to feel worthy business is still there.

To be perfectly frank, I don’t think that “loving your body” should even be our goal at all— which is why I prefer the verbiage of body neutrality to body positivity for my own inner work. It’s important to point out here that while everybody benefits from the body positivity movement and eased judgements about their perceived imperfections, it was not created to celebrate bodies that look like mine. Rather, it was meant to create a space to celebrate those in marginalized bodies so they could heal from the stigma our society puts on them— and to center myself, or other people with thin privilege (and otherwise) in that conversation would be missing the point.

That doesn’t mean that it’s not important to me for every body to have a healthier relationship with wellness, and exercise in particular. If we can shift into a framework where taking care of ourselves is non-negotiable, no matter what thoughts or societally pre-programmed self judgements happen to show up on any given day, we can actually make the most positive impact on both our physical and mental health. Part of doing this is acknowledging how politicised access to wellness actually is- and once you realize that health has SO much more to do with what your body looks like, it becomes glaringly obvious that healing our communities and their access to healthy food and movement resources is a big part of healing ourselves as individuals.

It can feel scary to let go of diet culture, because up until this point, it might have been the main reason why you engaged in “healthy” behaviors like eating nourishing food and exercising regularly— and it might feel like you’ll stop having any motivation to do those things if you don’t put pressure on yourself to look a certain way. You might also be fearful of not being able to trust your body won’t just stay on the couch for 10 years straight eating nothing but cheese puffs. I get it. When you’ve relied on striving for a beauty ideal to get you to do healthy things for your whole life, it’s easy to assume it has to be one or the other— or to forget the fact that obsession with “health” isn’t healthy at all. There are people far more educated and richer in lived experience that can help support you on this unlearning— all I ask is that you open your mind to the concept!

How To Learn To Love Exercise

We’re simple creatures, really. We tend to enjoy the things that make us feel good, and dislike the things that make us feel bad. If you’ve hated exercise your whole life, and just push through it begrudgingly, “no excuses” style, you get in a pattern of shutting of your bodies cues and overruling your intuition. It also makes you associate exercise with feeling frustrated with your body and makes it hard to receive all the mood and energy boosting benefits of fitness when your head is focused on what you see as wrong with you. This puts you at odds with your body, and encourages disordered thinking and habits that seriously impact both our physical and mental health.

If instead you lean into how exercise makes you feel, how it improves your sleep quality, your energy levels, how it helps you release pent up emotions, etc, even if you haven’t completely silenced that voice in your head that tells you you’re not good enough (because, let’s face it, we all have those days) it becomes something else. Exercise can be about so much more than trying to adhere to some abstract beauty ideal— it can genuinely be about the habit of taking care of yourself (and I’d argue that routinely critiquing your body, cannot and will not ever be legit self-care).

Conclusion

The cruel irony of the whole situation, is that diet culture teaches us to hate exercising, because it becomes attached to feeling like we’re not thin, tall, toned, ripped, sculpted, lean etc; ENOUGH. Though the body shame and the fear mongering around foods does have the power to work initially- it’s often what gets you in the door, it is a fast track to burning out in a blaze of exhaustion and frustration with wellness. If you’re only ever moving your body with the mindset that your appearance is a problem that needs fixing will cause resentment of your body and avoidance of that emotion through avoidance of exercise. No one wins in that situation— except diet companies. Instead, if flip the script, and choose to move our bodies with the intention of doing so to make our mind/body/spirit feel BETTER, we’re so much more likely to stick with it long term, and reap all the rewards.

It’s for this reason that I created Helen Phelan Studio and the 10 day free trial to get started so you can start to shift into this approach to exercise. I won’t lie to you like a influencer selling a quick fix— it takes time to unlearn and form new opinions about what health feels and looks like to you- but as they say, time passes anyway. Don’t you want to wind up feeling more at peace in your body and have an exercise practice you look forward to at the end of it?