All About Relationships!
Note: this blog post is not a substitute for health care, mental health counseling or coaching, or medical attention. Please seek assistance and support from a professional if you suspect you have disordered eating, dysfunctional exercise, or an eating disorder.
When I met one of my now mentors on a video call for the first time, she referred to herself as a bit of a relationship expert.
Relationship expert? Spoiler: she is a dietitian, not a marriage counselor.
And yet, something clicked for me that this is the piece that is so often missed.
You may have heard about developing a healthy relationship to food, exercise, and your body.
But what the heck does that actually mean?
Many of us move, train, eat every single day without giving it much thought. How do we actually meaningfully influence what we bring into those life decisions?
Firstly, do your relationships need housekeeping?
Some signs:
You find that in a lot of ways, your actions are self-harming in nature. You know, like forgetting to eat, ignoring an injury because “no pain no gain”, or eating until you feel sick.
Your self-talk is often rooted in negativity, self-blame, and “shoulding” i.e. “you really should just eat healthier”
All-or-nothing thinking. You’re either “being good” or “being bad” with your nutrition. You’re either doing an intense, draining workout or not at all.
You feel that if only you could _______ (lose weight, gain muscle, look leaner), you would finally be able to feel good about your body.
The big question is how do you relate to exercise, food, and your body?
Is your self worth derived from your weight class, your lifting total, or your recent 5k PB? Or do you recognize your athletic identity as a part of who you are?
Do you view exercise as punishment? Or something that you enjoy and reap the benefits of?
Here are three areas to dig in and start shifting your relationships towards balance.
Get Curious!
What happens when you don’t, can’t, or shouldn’t (due to injury, illness, or programmed rest) exercise? Is it not a big deal or are you more irritable, upset, or do you change your nutrition dramatically? Get genuinely, non-judgmentally curious about your experience.
What is so upsetting about not being able to exercise? What does it mean about me if I go to the gym every day with no rest?
Practice the Middle Path
If we are used to living in extremes, we often swerve from end to end, left unsatisfied and chaotic in the long term. Cutting out entire food groups and spending hours prepping meals daily might work for some time, but being “on the wagon” often doesn’t plan for the long-term when other life commitments inevitably happen.
How I often see this pan out with my clients is a lot of self-blame, discouragement, and reduced confidence in the belief that we know how to nourish our bodies! Unfortunately, in an effort to correct course, folks often oversteer in the other direction and repeat the cycle again and again.
The Middle Path is really freaking hard because it involves giving ourself permission to make mistakes which requires us to…
Cultivate Self-Compassion
Self-Compassion can be one of those eye-roll inducing concepts, and in a past life I’ve probably scowled at the idea as well. It’s normal to be skeptical.
I should mention that I know absolutely no one who does this automatically, probably because of the cultural conditioning that we simply can’t trust ourselves to take action and must bully ourselves into compliance.
There is a growing body of evidence that this isn’t true, and more likely that we avoid doing things we are afraid of failing at (this is closely tied to perfectionism) and actually it’s self-compassion that gives us the courage to try new things, get out of our respective comfort zones, and grow.
Self-compassion is a practice and even if you’re not good at it, you can learn. Kids suck at riding their bikes and they still do it all the time. The easiest way to start practicing self-compassion: pretend you’re talking to someone else who is having a hard time.
Now, offer that to yourself.
It might suck at first, but is truly pivotal in transforming how you relate to nutrition, exercise, and yourself.
