You Don’t Need To ‘Earn’ Birthday Cake, And Other Things I Learned In My 20s
I turn 30 this week. (!!!!!!)
While the Leo sun in me absolutely loves a birthday, I spent many, many years of my life dreading the calories I’d have to consume at celebrations of any kind.
I spent too many birthdays stressed about how to accommodate cake…whether it was insisting on a health-ivied version that absolutely no one else wanted to eat, or spending time in the gym doing grueling workouts I didn’t enjoy just to feel like I “deserved” to celebrate. That may sound like a dead giveaway of a disordered relationship with food— but in reality, everyone around me praised me for my discipline and wrote it off as me being very dedicated to my “health”. Little did they know, I was actually wracked with negative thoughts about my body, obsessed with counting macros, trying to manage worsening social anxiety related to dining with friends, not to mention perpetually cranky, tired, and hungry.
To say that my Saturn return largely revolved around this figuring this out is an understatement.
It’s because of this part of my story, that my mission as a trainer is so much more than just creating challenging, fun, mentally engaging, and dare I say FUN, accessible workouts. My hope with Helen Phelan Studio or even just through the lovely conversations I’ve had with people through DMs- when I post something about diet culture, is to help you heal your relationship with your body, exercise, and food. It shouldn’t be the status quo that we all hate our bodies— the same ones that carry us around all day, protect us from illness, and even create life.
The Thin Ideal Has More To Do With Politics Than Health
Releasing the idea that thinness is the answer to self worth is scary. It’s still scary for me too. I still hear echoes of diet culture in my head sometimes telling me there’s a reason diet culture is the mainstream, that I must be in the wrong, that I must be the crazy one. There’s also the little, nagging voice in my head that calls me a fraud because though I’ve technically gained weight since I started eating and exercising intuitively, instead of with rigidity and restriction, my body is still in the societally acceptable size range for women’s bodies, and because of that thin (cis, white, straight passing, able bodied, upper middle class etc) privilege, I can’t ever be an effective advocate for others in more marginalized bodies. It’s precisely because of that privilege though, that I feel like teaching others to enjoy exercise as an act of taking care of yourself, to get comfortable doing not just tricky planks and burpees— but to get comfortable feeling worthy of self care through movement. In this respect, wellness is about the most political thing you can do- and it’s not wellness until we make everyone feel safe and welcome.
Like I’ve written about before, it’s your call if you have aesthetic (weight loss) goals, I get it. Tbh, even though I’ve really doubled down on body neutrality as part of my *~~brand~~* it’s still really scary for me to talk about as a fitness instructor! For every 50 DMS/emails I get thanking me for my work, there is one grumpy person yelling at me about diabetes with outdated information or telling me I should stick to bikini pics and shut the fuck up. Ah, how lovely it is to be a woman on the internet!
While I get why promises of weight loss are so attractive to consumers, hell— when I first started teaching I was the one spouting the diet culture BS in my classes—link to about me page, link to sickest when i looked healthiest) I’ll never promote intentional weight loss again. When my teacher hat is on, I just don’t feel right about linking body dissatisfaction to movement. To me, regardless of your thoughts about HAES and diet culture, you can’t deny that body shaming people into buying a product encourages people to have a compensatory relationship with exercise. When we think of body dissatisfaction as the result of our size, and exercise as the “remedy” or “punishment” we get stuck in an unproductive thought loop that leaves you avoiding cake on your own birthday.
Exercise Is Transformative, But Not In The Way We Were Taught
Exercise will change your body. That’s a fact we can all agree on. When you unpack that a little further, though, you realize that that change isn’t necessarily (or even likely) to look like the person who wrote you a program or a quick fix. Our bodies respond to diet and exercise differently— and often the pursuit of thinness is at direct odds with the pursuit of health-both mental and physical. Some of you might be saying, “well, I’m not necessarily trying to be healthier— I’m trying to feel better about my body naked or on the beach”. To that sentiment I have 2 responses, and you’re not gonna like either of them. 1) Our society’s acceptance of certain bodies and vilification of others cannot be separated from white supremacy, patriarchy, and the policing of women’s bodies. 2) Losing weight to improve body image is like smiling to cure depression. It seems like it solves the problem- but the root hasn’t been addressed.
Exercise DOES have the potential to change how you see yourself— but not for the reasons you might think.
Pursuing movement for the sole reason weight loss doesn’t not make you feel better about your body will never make you feel better about your body unless you choose to focus on things like how empowering it is to build strength, to see yourself showing up to do the hard things and to improve at them, to enjoy how a little sweat on your skin makes you feel, and so on.
Conclusion
My goal is to get people to look forward to working out by changing what your focus is. The alternative of thinking of exercise as merely something to burn calories or earn a fun food is not only a major distraction from how GOOD movement can make you feel, but also a slippery slope down to ED town. When we start viewing exercise as a gift we can give ourselves to live longer (and be more mobile longer), improve our sleep quality, boost energy and mood, take time for ourselves, and get a lil endorphin buzz, instead of a form of punishment, everything changes. I hope you’ll check out Helen Phelan Studio 10 Day free trial to see what I mean ;) 😉
In the words of Caroline Dooner— “you are not alive to just say bills and lose weight!” and I’ll def be taking that sentiment with me into the big 30.
Other Articles You Might Like
Can Exercise Really Be Body Neutral?
20 Reasons To Work Out That Have Nothing To Do With Weight Loss
The Unexpected Power Your Instructor Has Over Your Body Image