Cult of wellness | The secret to body neutrality as wellness girlie
Fitness and body neutrality are not mutually exclusive
It’s been a minute since I’ve done a deep dive “Cult of wellness” rant, so I thought I’d make this one free for all subscribers! If you read this and feel yourself nodding your head vigorously in enthusiastic agreement, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription and forwarding this email to a friend to support my work. 😊
When I first read Intuitive Eating and discovered body neutrality, the perfectionist in me was so stressed as soon as I closed the book about the impossibility of reinventing my world view in a single day I felt ITCHY.
I put the same pressure on myself to unlearn a lifetime of diet culture as I did to eat perfectly “cleanly” at the expensive of getting to enjoy my life. You can’t take the perfectionism out of the girl, it seemed. But actually no, you can! Just in baby steps! So…how does one radically change their relationship with wellness without beating themselves up along the way?
It is a (f*cked up) fact of life in our current society thin people are treated better than people who aren’t. The Economist even found that for women, losing 65 pounds has the same positive impact on income as obtaining a master’s degree.
Do you hear the “How I love being a woman!” TikTok sound right now too? 😭
I mention this because a) unpacking learned fatphobia absolutely needs to be part of our own individual healing journeys, but also because b) despite all the intellectualizing we can do about being kinder to ourselves, it remains incredibly challenging to not want to look a certain way when your livelihood depends on it. And who’s livelihood depends more on how they look than fitness instructors (besides models and actors, obviously)?
For the record, I do not subscribe to the notion that “your body is your business card” as a fitpro, I know countless incredible teachers with years of highly specialized training and sophisticated anatomical knowledge who don’t fit the “pilates body” type. What you look like is a shit indicator of experience and education. Alas, many people in this industry still think this way.
In a study in Journal of Eating Disorders, “Disordered eating behavior among group fitness instructors: a health-threatening secret?”, researchers found that 22% of male and 59% of female fitness instructors could be classified with disordered eating. Deeply upsetting on it’s own, but also double alarming because these are the people we’re supposed to be relying on for guidance in improving our own health. How are we supposed to develop a healthier relationship with food and exercise when the blind are leading the blind?
While you can’t shake everyone by the shoulders to make the influence of diet culture on fitness and nutrition professionals disappear, with this information you can maybe offer people a little bit of grace and empathy even if they trigger you (I personally find this incredibly freeing anytime I stumble into an awkward exchange in my work, as you never know what someone else is dealing with, but also just because it might ring alarm bells in my head with my lived experiences, not everyone experiences the same hang ups the same way and 9 times out of 10, there was no ill intent.
You can also minimize those awkward situations for yourself and find a body neutral trainer who still pushes you athletically, (hey, hello, I’m available!) and commit to remember two things for yourself:
“Yes, and…”
There’s no such thing as perfect body neutrality.
First, get realllll comfy with nuance and fully absorb the idea that two things can be true at once. You can wake up feeling some sort of way about over indulging over the weekend and still choose a satiating breakfast. You can envy Miley Cyrus’ arms without forcing yourself to do two a day workouts. You are not a bad person for feeling proud of your hard work unveiling newly visible abs as long as you ALSO understand that defined abs don’t necessarily mean strong core (it just means low body fat, which can be healthy for some, but it can also easssssily be extremely unhealthy for others). We unfortch have to live under capitalism and diet culture, so it’s best to make peace with the face that we’ll never be able to 100% escape potentially triggering moments. “Being body neutral” doesn’t mean there’s an absence of diet culture in your life, it means you choose to respond to interactions with it by prioritizing your mental and physical health over a number on the scale.
Second, accept the truth that loving your body every second of every day is equally as elusive as the “perfect” body. As a practitioner of body neutrality, you will still have complex emotions come up over beauty, health, and worthiness. You just need to have the simultaneous understanding that getting your body to look a certain way is not always grounded in in positive health outcomes and happiness, and emphasize taking care of your body over spiraling.
Being able to successfully integrate the emotion about a body and the actual knowledge about health takes time! I’m not saying those are the ONLY things you need to do to shift into a healthier relationship with your body…but they are really strong places to start.
It might take working with a licensed mental health professional, working with body neutral trainers and registered dietitians who care about drawing attention to the difference between real health and beauty, improving your media literacy to understand who is a fitness entertainment influencer and who is actually qualified, cleaning up your algorithm to minimize the influence of diety conditioning and up the influence of people who look different from you and and who challenge these beliefs…and even then, it might still clunky.
It’s DEFINITELY gonna take giving yourself time and space to f*ck it up a lot along the way.
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