Being Intuitive with Exercise

At this juncture if you have been reading my intuitive eating blogs, I hope you have begun to grasp that it is a mindset shift I’ve been encouraging rather than a specific meal plan to follow.  These principles of intuitive eating can also be applied to exercise.

If you’ve been a chronic dieter, then most likely you started exercising when you started dieting.  And when you went off the diet, you stopped the exercise.

Here are 3 mistakes you might have made in your exercise past:

1.   You started your exercise plan with an extremist approach.  You started off with too much too fast, after which you were exhausted and most likely had unpleasant experiences with the exercise.  You were left seeing exercise as a negative, rather than for all of the positive things it can bring.  Just like the word “diet” makes you cringe, exercise can get bundled up in the same negative mentality.

2.  You put exercise off “until you were ready”.  You believed that in order to go to the gym you had to attain a certain amount of physical skill, or get down to a certain size before you can be seen in gym clothes.  The same way I have encouraged your journey on mindful eating, I encourage you not to worry what other people think.  Lets face it, are they really looking at you anyway:)  They are engrossed in their own exercise routine and aren’t even paying attention to you.

3.  You associated exercise with weight loss.  You tied exercise into how many calories you burned.  Instead, try to think of exercise not as something you are doing to negate the calories you have eaten or to burn a certain amount to lose x number of pounds.  You are doing it because it is strengthening your heart, bones and overall ability to function day to day.  Being able to run around with your kids is much more valuable than the ¼ pound you have to work off to be at that week’s “goal weight.”

I know that separating exercise from the diet mentality can be difficult.  But use what you have already learned from eating intuitively and apply it to exercise.

Stay tuned next week when I address how to begin making exercise a part of your healthy lifestyle, rather than something you have to do to lose weight.
Your turn to take action: What are some “diet-like” thoughts you have associated with exercise?