The Art of Doing
I have been working with my nutrition client with a restrictive eating disorder for about 5 months and today she posed a seemingly harmless question:
“You know how I’m not supposed to work out when I don’t eat at least 3 meals a day?”
(I nod, with the knowing that she does, in fact, work out when not eating 3 meals a day)
“Well, I actually did it, and it felt amazing”
And that is a beautiful testament to the art of experience.
I could talk about the facts and figures and what happens in your body when you’re not fueling adequately, and how training requires building blocks and carbohydrates and blah blah blah…..
But you don’t really know what it’s like until you do it.
This is true when it comes to speaking on the experience of doing something, in the same way that a yoga teacher that doesn’t practice yoga feels disingenuous.
You need to feel it to understand it.
If you’re a bit of a movement and neural processing nerd like myself, this is largely in part due to how our brain receives input. Yes, we need to see things, think about them, talk about them to process them. But there’s another pathway that is incredibly helpful when it comes to shifting patterns of behavior: doing them.
Now (the hard part): how do we go about doing them?
One of the most valuable pieces is lowering the barrier to doing the thing. What would this action look like if it were easy? Is hopping on a bike for 5 minutes doable? How about giving yourself permission to do something imperfectly or at a lower level of intensity?
Another way we can look at this is by reframing the action you’re looking to change and lowering the stakes. What if this was just an experiment from which we glean new information?
What if I just try this once, or for a day or a week and see what happens? What might be different if you engage with the process vs. the outcome?
In recovering our relationships with exercise, there is often a multitude of stories we tell ourselves about exercise and unpacking these stories are an important puzzle piece. And sometimes we need to experience something from a different perspective to rebuild this new relationship in a way that is interesting and aligned with recovery.
