Tag Archive for: intuitive exercise

Being Intuitive With Exercise—Part 2

I hope since last week you have been able to think about how you fit exercise into your life.  If you are making any one of the three mistakes discussed, then today I have some ways for you to reframe your thinking of exercise so that you will see it as a more positive aspect of your healthy life!

  • Making Time.  One of the biggest if not the biggest excuse for people not exercise is not having time.  Even it is just 10 minutes a day you devote to some type of movement that is beneficial to the body.  If you get accustomed to making those 10 minutes work, you may start to see how you could add on more.
  • Schedule it!  Just like any appointment in your schedule, make your time to exercise one that you cannot miss.  By putting it in your planner you are making it a commitment like anything else you have that day.
  • Start Small.  By getting active in life in general, you start reaping the benefits of exercise.  Try some of these easy steps:

–          Park your car farther away so that you are elongating the walk to the entrance of the building

–          Take the stairs rather than the elevator.

–          Carry an extra shopping bag in each hand to simulate weights and strengthen your shoulders.

  • Choose What You Love.  Exercise can be and should be fun and enjoyable.  Instead of just joining a gym, perhaps joining a sports league or exercising with your kids will make it feel like less of a negative experience as it may have in the past.
  • Don’t Force Things.  Don’t feel like you have to wear a certain outfit to go to the gym or be the best one in a class you want to take.  Do what makes you happy, wear what makes you comfortable, and feel good about the fact that you are exercising.  Everyone is focused on themselves in a gym and they are not looking at what top you decided to wear, so go ahead, hop on the spin bike!
  • Listen to Your Body.  Some days you might feel sick and you might be too tired to work out.  That’s OK.  Paying attention to how you feel is so important to the whole intuitive eating process.  Just remember if you miss a day, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed.  Get right back to it the following day and the missed day will be a thing of the past!

So listen to your body and make movement a part of your life.  It will be a perfect combination along with all your healthy eating and you’ll feel that much better!

Your turn to take action: Which of these tips do you think will help you overcome your difficulties to commit to exercise the most?

Being Intuitive with Exercise

TreadmillAt 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?