Many of us have been worn down by societal images that depict beauty as coming only in small sizes. We’ve spent thousands of dollars in pursuit of this narrow and culturally-synthesized ideal. So many moments of our daily life have been spent bemoaning our lack of will power and loathing parts of our bodies.
Some women have been lucky to have escaped the quagmire caused by our obsession with what food we want to eat compared to what we think we “should” eat. They either never felt pressure to diet or lose weight or just decided they were not going to let someone else’s rules dictate their eating.
But most women are not so lucky. Most have succumbed to cultural pressures and yearn to fit the one-size-fits-all mold. This yearning has led women to spend 20 to 30 years of their lives cycling through diet and exercise programs, eventually giving up when results don’t match expectations. The most unfortunate part of the diet/exercise cycle is that it causes too many women to loathe their bodies and feel that they have failed INSTEAD OF recognizing that they were set up to fail. The aim of this cyclical paradigm has been to produce consumer behavior, not sustainable lifestyles. Once this fact is recognized, women can start forging their own unique paths to healthy and satisfying lifestyle behaviors instead of buying another “magic bullet” that will set them up to fail.
A great way to start this new mindset and approach is to recognize with gratitude what our bodies actually do for us. Instead of focusing on the most superficial aspects of our bodies (literally and figuratively), such as subcutaneous fat, let’s focus on its core abilities and functions; the things that make our bodies incredible.
- The ability to move our bodies by our sheer will.
- The energy to work on projects that are meaningful and exciting.
- Well functioning digestive and elimination processes. We don’t appreciate these until we learn that when they don’t work well our daily quality of life is drastically reduced.
- The ability to see the exquisite colors fushcia, orange, and violet.
- The ability to wrap our arms around our loved ones and express to them our appreciation.
- Resilience to break through tough times and come out on the other side.
Aren’t these things worth SO much more than any excess pounds we might be caring around? Do you treat your body with sufficient respect and appreciation for what it does for you?
I hope you might reflect on that question. And if your answer is no, than I offer you this: Now is a great time to start thinking about ONE single thing that you may want to try doing differently as a way to show increased appreciation for your body, a central part of yourself.
Appreciating what you have instead of resenting it, is a much better place to be if you want to make changes that will help you feel and live better.
Consider this choice as we enter Spring this year. How do you want to feel? What goals have you tried to achieve in the past to improve your quality of life that haven’t been sustainable? Are you going to continue striving for what others tell you that you should achieve, or would you like to start following your own intuition and voice?
I spoke with Jane Brody after she wrote an article about all of the incredible health benefits regular exercise brings. (The link is at the end of this post.)
She was frustrated that, with all of the incredible benefits, people still didn’t exercise. I suggested to her that these are the same benefits that we’ve been marketing to Americans for over 25 years, and while true, they have MIS-BRANDED exercise (for creating sustainable behavior, anyway.) We’ve been promoting exercise to Americans out of a medical model instead of a consumer model. Apple doesn’t say: “Hey Americans buy our ipod and you will hear music you like,” even though purchasing is the behavior that they want people to sustain. They create cool branding that hooks into people’s emotions and makes people WANT TO Keep buying their products!
The result of promoting exercise for these medically-based and practical reasons is that we’ve turned it into one more thing to check off our daily To Do List (a “should” or “chore”), instead of something we DESIRE TO DO. This is one of the reasons we haven’t been more successful in helping Americans adopt physically active lives that they want to sustain. (See also: Make It Stick and Switch, great books by Heath and Heath.)
Think about how this translates into actual behavior. Consider someone who thinks of exercise as a “chore” but has made plans to exercise. When some type of barrier arises to prevent them from doing their planned exercise, how motivated do you think this person is to overcome this barrier? Not very! In contrast, imagine someone who considers exercise “a gift they give themselves” confronting the same barrier. This individual will feel much more motivated to overcome this barrier. Why? Because that barrier is getting in the way of giving themselves their gift of physical movement!! People who exercise with a gift-based meaning of exercise are much more motivated and capable of identifying creative solutions to overcoming their barriers. Who is inspired to use creativity to overcome barriers to EXERCISE THAT FEELS LIKE A CHORE?! Some are, but not most of us.
A great deal of this is a branding problem, so we need to incorporate research on marketing to solve this public health issue. Research by Bagozzi et al., shows that having desire toward the actual behavior AND having desire for one’s behavioral GOAL are key for that behavior to occur over time. There has been an under emphasis on the role people’s exercise goals play in motivating or undermining sustainable participation in physical activity. There is a personal goal hierarchy that is also relevant to this conversation, but I’ll save that for another post.
We can easily see how women who exercise with goals to lose weight may feel toward their exercise goal. Women have been socialized to initiate exercise with this goal. But an implicit driver underneath is the idea that her body isn’t good enough or valuable as is, and she needs to fix it partly through exercising. Thus, exercise becomes a weapon of war AGAINST her body instead of a gift we give our self. Can you see how this easily turns exercise into one big psychological YUK!? It turns exercise into one big self-objectifying experience (Barbara Fredrickson et al.,) It also focuses women on selecting physical activities that will burn calories instead of that feel like gifts. Who’s likely to keep that type of yuk up for long? How draining and not fun! But even making the analogy that ‘exercise as medicine’ isn’t giving exercise an emotionally-compelling meaning. The data on medication adherence shows that it is a HUGE problem too. So, why are we asking folks to start considering exercise as a medication to take daily? These are logical but not compelling reasons to exercise. These reasons WILL get many people to start exercising but not to maintain it for the rest of their lives. By now, we know that logic does NOT work to produce sustainable behavior. It’s time for us to start getting more creative with marketing exercise to Americans.
There are many other reasons/goals that women and men can claim for pursuing physically active lives. They just need to be educated about them through better marketing of physical activity. HEY BUSINESS, HEALTH CARE AND GOVERNMENT: You can get Americans to move more by creating a more emotionally compelling BRAND OF exercise!
BOTTOM LINE: Our goals brand exercise. Let me say this in a different way. The goals we have for exercising guide how we approach it, what physical activities we choose to do, what attributes we expect from it, and how we FEEL about it. The reasons we initiate exercise may be as important as the type of physical activity we decide to do if we are to create life-long sustainability. Only through sustained behavior can people reap the numerous mind/body/spirit benefits from physical movement - so we need to transform it into something that feels COMPELLING to do on a DAILY basis. See Jane Brody’s discussion of this issue.
