Why It’s Important To Find Reasons To Exercise Beyond Losing Weight

 

 

Our culture has conditioned women to want to lose weight leading them to be critical of their body size, frequently want to start a new diet, or embark on a rigorous month-long fitness plan. Each one of us is being targeted every single day by big money advertisers and promised quick fixes. Those who fit society’s beauty standards want to be smaller and those who don’t fit the body standards are on a tireless pursuit. In both scenarios, women are put at war with their body and helplessly wanting it to look different. The focus isn’t on someone engaging in sustainable, healthy behaviors, but rather focusing on achieving weight loss using any methods as soon as possible. This is why it is harmful to only focus on size because as we like to say, in the pursuit of trying to look healthy, many forget to be healthy.

A government survey indicated that over half the “overweight” adults (51.3%) being targeted are metabolically healthy, and one in four “normal weight” (23.5%) metabolically unhealthy adults are overlooked. Health doesn’t look one certain way.

We also often see that these diets don’t seem to work or women regularly bounce between being on a diet and falling away from that diet. Why is this? Research shows us repeatedly that relying fitness and nutrition as ways to manipulate your body through punishment and shame only does more harm than good.

When you are practicing intuitive movement and enjoyable movement (not overexercising), your body weight may drop a lot, may increase, or may not budge at all. The important thing is focusing on your behaviors and habits independent of if they lead to weight loss. Your body will settle at its natural set point as you start becoming more in tune with its needs.

The reason diets don’t work for people is that they begin them for the wrong reasons. Many start diets because we want to look thinner, fit in smaller jeans, feel desirable by men, feel capable of love, or are just plain unhappy with how our bodies look. They focus on the weight, the numbers, the scale and determine their success from of these things. The problem with this is that none of these reasons allow you to commit to something that is meaningful enough to be sustainable. Many are looking for solutions to change how they look on the surface but haven’t made the lifestyle changes that are required to actually put us in line with who we are and everything that we are meant to be.

Find Your “Why” Behind Your Actions

Your reasons should allow you grace and compassion as you navigate through your wellness journey. They should allow you to make the small consistent adjustments to a sustainable lifestyle for the rest of your life, not just until your next beach vacation. Perhaps taking on a lifestyle change revolves around becoming stronger, maybe being able to keep up with your day to day activities, able to take longer runs on the beach, or whatever it looks like to you. Maybe you want to have a healthier life so that you can explore and see more of the world or to be around for your kids for many years to come. Your reasons will be specific to you, but what is important is that they are for reasons that will allow you to become the strongest mentally and physically version of you.

You want a change that won’t require high levels of restriction or discomfort but comes from a healthy balanced place. Once you have these habits in place you will have to focus on your daily wins. You will have to focus on what you can do day in and day out to continue to craft the healthiest version of yourself. See we can control our actions, habits, and behaviors. Maybe not today, and it may take some practice, but we can develop a lifestyle that will allow us to focus on the important aspects of a healthy lifestyle rather than the negative ones.