11. Exercising for Health

Meet exercise culture - diet culture’s fraternal twin sister.⁣
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Are you under the impression that unless you’re doing a bootcamp 7 days a week and you’re sweating for an hour straight each time, the workout doesn’t count?⁣
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What if I told you that that’s not what’s necessary to reap the health benefits of exercise? I can bore you with the research…”exercise is beneficial for health…”blah blah blah, yes, yes it is beneficial for health. But how much? The research certainly does NOT suggest that your workout needs to be a bootcamp to “count.”⁣
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The research shows that any movement beyond sedentary improves health outcomes. This means that if you are sedentary most of the day and you add just 10 minutes of walking to your routine, you get to reap the cardiovascular and muscular benefits of exercise!⁣
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ALSO, if you do a kick ass workout and then eat fries and a milkshake afterwards, guess what? You STILL get to experience the health benefits of exercise. Food in fact does not “cancel out” your workout.⁣
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Does your relationship with exercise go hand in hand with your relationship with food? Do you have really big plans of starting an intense workout routine along with a really strict diet? And then once you come off your diet, your exercise plans go in the trash as well? How long have you been stuck on that cycle only to grow more and more frustrated in your attempts to get healthy?
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Here’s some more research - people who do not push themselves to do workouts that are uncomfortable, end up moving and exercising more over the course of their lives than those who are stuck in the diet/exercise-binge/sedentary cycle. In other words, people who practice joyful movement end up exercising more than people who subject themselves to intense, unsustainable workouts. Are you scratching your head? Ironic, I know.⁣
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This doesn’t have to be your story anymore. You can break this vicious cycle. In what ways do you enjoy moving? 

In this episode, I explain how you can start to build a healthy relationship with exercise.

 

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Book Referenced: Intuitive Eating. A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch