32 - Intuitive Eating and Exercise - How to Listen to What Movement Your Body Wants and Needs

What comes to mind when you hear the word “exercise?” The truth is, most of us existing in diet culture have a distorted view of exercise. 

Diet culture tells us:

• Exercise to burn calories and lose weight. (pssst…that’s actually not now it works!)
• The more intense and extreme, the better! (e.g. HIIT? Yes, please! Ultra marathon? Wow, impressive! Yoga? Doesn’t count. Hot yoga? That sounds like more of a workout!)
• No pain, no gain. You must work hard, sweat, and feel the burn in order to get benefits from exercise.
• You’re lazy if you don’t exercise. 

These messages are so toxic. It is setting us up to exercise for the wrong reasons, or to not exercise at all because we’ve made it such a chore.

People tend to fall into a few different categories with exercise:

1. Doing it off-and-on, usually in conjunction with dieting. This leads to feeling like a failure when you aren’t being active on a regular basis. 
2. Exercising with too much rigidity. Pushing yourself to do your planned amount of exercise no matter what, even if you’re short on time or not feeling well, and feeling incredibly guilty if you miss a workout. 
3. Doing it just because you feel like you should. You don’t over exercise, and you are able to take days off, but you don’t particularly enjoy it. You just do it out of a sense of obligation towards your health. 

With intuitive eating, we talk about listening to your body and honoring what it is telling you in regards to food. And exercise is part of the intuitive eating framework as well (it’s principle #9!).

What’s so cool is that we can learn to reframe exercise as “movement” and to view it as something we do because it aligns with our values, and not as a way to punish our bodies. 

So, if you’re ready to figure out what work for YOU with exercise, pop your earbuds in and tune in.

Key Quotes

“Movement feels a lot more open and free and flexible in terms of how it's done and how it's experienced. The possibilities feel a lot more limitless.” - Katy Harvey

“When you take the pressure off yourself and shift that language from exercise to movement, it can really shift the way you feel about it.”  - Katy Harvey

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