I spoke with Jane Brody after she wrote an article about all of the incredible health benefits regular exercise brings. 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 product frequently and loyally,” 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: We need to actually feel friendly toward our goals for exercising. 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.
At the risk of being cliché, I’m compelled to write this post in between Thanksgiving and New Years about how the holiday season offers us an opportunity to give thanks to our bodies, something too many women don’t do.
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 breakthrough 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 your self.
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 approach the holidays and pave our way toward making our New Years Resolutions for 2010.
How do you want to feel in 2010? What health and well-being related goals have you tried to achieve in the past 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? If the latter interests you, but you don’t know where to start or how to get there, I’d love to help.
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At lunch last week, my friend Isabella told me that she wasn’t exercising because she’s just lazy. My response? “Isabella, I don’t believe in lazy”. I’ve found that when women say they are too lazy to exercise it’s usually a smoke screen for what’s really going on.
The first reason women conclude they are lazy is because they are simply tired from successfully juggling and achieving A LOT. Being tired and needing to relax is very different than laziness. The challenge for women who feel too tired to exercise is to learn how to determine when resting and relaxing their bodies is what they most need (something that is really important to do at times) and when they’d be better off doing some form of physical activity to increase their energy and improve their mood.
The second reason that women erroneously conclude they are lazy is because they compare themselves against too high of a standard. We were told for most of our adult lives that exercise had to be hard and vigorous to be of benefit. On top of that, when we see some of our friends training for marathons or spinning every day, something that confirms our suspicion that we are lazy!
Contrary to what fitness companies want us to believe, newer research shows us that exercise doesn’t have to be vigorous to be of benefit and that all types and durations of movement “count”. But regardless of science, if intense exercise is unappealing (which it is for most women in midlife, including myself much of the time) we won’t do it anyway.
Bottom line: There is no need to compare ourselves to anyone else when it comes to being physically active or feeling like we need to do it their way. (That would be like comparing what you like in bed with what others enjoy and then condemning yourself for not being like them!)
The fix? Just change the definition of exercise from what you think exercise SHOULD be (because that’s what others are doing) to one that incorporates the types of physical activities and movement that feels good TO YOU. By the way, what feels good to do will and should change based on how you feel on any given day and time. You will discover that the idea of being laziness becomes much less relevant. Not only will you not feel lazy but you’ll wind up doing more physical activity.
Have you wanted to know why women gain weight after menopause? In this post, you will learn about important research on this topic as told to me by Dr. Heidi IglayReger of the University of Michigan.
So far, this is what we know: As you might be aware, estrogen, the primary female sex hormone, significantly decreases as women approach and then go through menopause.
Dr. Heidi IglayReger told me about the following new research documenting that the presence of estrogen in female rodents increases spontaneous activity. Though humans and rodents are clearly quite different, estrogen may also influence spontaneous activity in women. While this has not been proven in humans, if it were to be the case, postmenopausal women might be less active than they were pre-menopause because of decreased estrogen. What may be the key is what is meant by “spontaneous activity”.
Naturally, it includes planned activity, such as attending a group fitness class or going for a walk or run. But more likely it has to do with unplanned, and often unnoticed daily activity, such as standing up longer before sitting down, picking up around the house more frequently, or even fidgeting more - things that women (and men) do without realizing that they are moving”. Individually, these small changes in physical activity may not make a significant difference, but overtime, decreased physical activity without a matching decrease in food intake will cause weight gain.
This research suggests that by mindfully adding more brief periods of spontaneous physical movement to your day you might be able to prevent the weight gain that is associated with menopause. The simple solution to move more may appear to be easy. But while coaching women in midlife I have found that many, if not most, women have difficulty believing that these small amounts of lower intensity movement actually “count”. Intellectually, it makes sense, but when it comes to purposefully doing it and fitting it into your life it’s a different story. I advocate to clients that they LET THEMSELVES override the old outdated notion that only vigorous and lengthy exercise sessions are valid, and accept that fact that intentionally taking a parking space father away from the entrance or and taking the stairs instead of the elevator several times a day, among many other types of spontaneous movement, not only count but are extremely valuable.
In the EssentialSteps program I do with clients, I refer to spontaneous movement as “Opportunities to Move” because embedded in that concept is the value of creating time and space to move. When we move more, we feel better. Moving more accumulates throughout our day. Research suggests that moving more can improve our health.
But I’m more interested in promoting more physical movement as a way to enhance women’s daily sense of well-being. Why? Because my research shows that improving “health” isn’t a very compelling motivator for women in midlife who are, in general healthy. What we mid-life women want is to feel good - about ourselves and about our bodies.
Dr. IglayReger’s bottom line: Even though scientists are still searching for answers, post-menopausal weight gain may not be inevitable and may in fact be preventable through more brief physical movement throughout the day.
My bottom line: Moving more throughout the day will give you more energy, get blood flowing, decrease stiffness, help clear your mind, and will just help you enjoy every day more.
So what’s getting in YOUR way of moving more during your day?
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Dr. IglayReger summarized the research above about rodents under the direction of Dr. Peter Bodary when she was a post-doc in the Vascular Biology Laboratory in the School and Kinesiology. She continues research in the area of physical activity and body weight as the the laboratory manager for the Laboratory for Physical Activity and Exercise Intervention Research at the University of Michigan.
As we enter February, a month after our New Year’s Resolutions, a study came out to remind us that most exercise equipment ads are fiction and there are no quick fixes for changing our bodies drastically.
Instead of re-summarizing the study in this eNewsletter, I’m going to give you the link to a column about this written by Gina Kolata, the New York Time’s fitness writer. In general, her article was very good. Despite the fact that Kolata only used examples of men and didn’t address women’s additional barriers to changing their bodies, the research reported offers an excellent reminder that fitness is an on-going process instead of a quick or drastic outcome.
I hope you all are doing well. Remember, that these Winter months are the MOST challenging to be physically active all year. The cold weather and gray skies can easily de-motivate and be discouraging.
If you find that you are barely moving your body and feel guilty about it, give yourself a break. Remember, physical activity ebbs and flows with life’s currents and contexts. I find that some women who decide to do “less” physical activity in Winter, often do MORE. Why? If less physical activity is what is realistic for someone, then that’s what they should aim for now. When the weather starts to improve, women who don’t guilt themselves out, naturally discover that they want to move more.The only caveat to this is that moving one’s body is a natural mood elevator. So, if Winter is accompanied by the blues, creating Opportunities to Move, even for 3-10 minutes might really help.
I am currently living in Toledo, Spain with my family. While I wish it were warmer, finding Opportunities to Move here hasn’t been an issue! I’m enjoying the frequent (but hilly) walks to get groceries and do errands.
My good friend Sarah e-mailed me and mentioned that she was about to re-start Weight Watchers (WW). I was surprised to hear that because just a few weeks ago, she told me how well the program was working and that she was losing weight. When I asked her why she had stopped WW, Sarah informed me that overindulging in her daughter’s birthday cake over a few days had led to a three-weeek backslide and a six-pound weight gain.
This phenomenon, “over eating something leads to blacksliding,” is very common and a real problem for many women. There are important psychological reasons this happens and my hope is that by understanding the causes, you’ll be in a better situation to prevent it.
In this blog entry, I am going to focus on explaining the psychology of how demonizing food often backfires, leading us to backslide into an eating frenzy. Then, in a future blog, I’ll go into some specific solutions to help you change your mindset and behavior.
You’ve probably heard that categorizing some food as “bad” is harmful to weight control.In basic terms, when you tell yourself you can’t eat a certain food for some reason, because it is high calorie or “bad for me”, you create a tension that often leads to a type of obsession with certain foods and an on-going war within yourself.
There are two psychological theories that help explain why this is so. Reactance Theory is almost self-explanatory. When someone TELLS you what you can or can’t do, you react against that – you rebel. This psychological effect comes into play whether the person telling you what to do is someone else or yourself. “Michelle, you CAN’T have this piece of cake because it is BAD and will make you gain weight.” My reaction to this would be: “Don’t tell me what to do, I want the cake, and I’m going to eat it.”Often, we eat much more of the cake than we even wanted as we prove that no one can tell us what to do. Demonizing food sets this dynamic in motion.
The second theory is Self-Determination Theory (SDT). Within this very complex theory is a gem that applies to this situation. It’s about how we “regulate” ourselves. If we do things because we want to do them, SDT refers to this as “intrinsic regulation”.Research has shown that doing things out of intrinsic regulation leads to better commitment and follow through, and even happier lives. (Why? Because our actions are inline with who we are and what we want.)
But when we do something because we are “supposed to” we have a type of regulation whose name is as unappealing as the effect: Introjected Regulation. Introjected Regulation is caused by having partially internalized a belief that we learned from outside of ourselves (from our culture, family, physician, etc.), but we haven’t fully made it our own. That’s actually how it becomes a “should”. We know we “should” do it, but deep down we don’t own this belief and it isn’t experienced as compelling.
I believe Introjected Regulation is women’s greatest enemy when it comes to eating well, exercising, and losing or maintaining weight. With Introjected Regulation, we do things out of guilt and/or the sense that “I should” do it. For example, “I should walk away from the cake table”, “I shouldn’t eat the cake because it is bad for me”, etc. However, because Introjected Regulation is in force we don’t have a deep conviction to say no to something we actually want, making it hard to be very committed. The result is that we feel very ambivalent about the “should behavior”, and often do not sustain it for long.
So why does this lead us to backslide? Imagine a boomerang. What do boomerangs do? You throw them and they come right back. In this case, the boomerang is “I shouldn’t eat this bad food” and that introjected energy and intention ricochets right back and smacks us.When we behave out of this “should” stance it often backfires and leads us to do just the opposite and more (ie., the backslide). So you see, operating with these types of “shoulds” can be self-defeating.
Because awareness is the first step and the key to preventing this introjected phenomenon, I’m going to ask you to take this month and try to be really mindful of whether and when you find yourself judging a food as “bad” and the “should messages” that accompany it.
In a future blog post, I’ll go into more depth about how you can learn to circumvent this phenomenon to avoid boomeranging into an eating frenzied backslide.In addition, stay tuned for an upcoming guest blog post from an investigator doing innovative research on why menopause often leads to weight gain.
If you have any personal experience with this issue please share it. I’ll respond to everyone who comments. I welcome any comment, including those that don’t agree with my ideas above.
My newest study was published last week in Women’s Health Issues. We found that when mid-life women set exercise goals to lose weight or improve health, they spent significantly less time exercising than those with goals to improve well-being and to reduce stress.
The longitudinal study, released last week in Women’s Health Issues, sampled healthy women who were between 40 and 60 years old and worked full-time. We collected data on women living in the Midwest at three intervals, including one-month and one-year periods. The subjects answered questions about how much they exercised, what their exercise goals were, and how committed they were to achieving these goals.
Although regular physical activity helps prevent cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, diabetes, depression, osteoporosis, among many other illnesses, most mid-life women do not exercise enough.Understanding which types of exercise goals motivate women to exercise, and which ones don’t, can offer clues to developing better strategies to help women exercise more and prevent these devastating conditions.
We wanted our research to be practical for women and their physicians to easily understand and use. Our findings suggest that the typical way that most women approach exercising may be undermining their participation in it.
It is important to note that these findings challenge how society thinks about exercise.It’s counterintuitive. Instead of prescribing exercise to prevent disease, healthcare providers who emphasize physical activity as a means to enhance women’s quality of life might better facilitate long-term participation among healthy women, making disease prevention more likely.
Our research indicates that women are more committed and are more likely to plan exercise into their daily lives if they know that exercising will make them feel better immediately.Unfortunately, the standard approach to exercise taken in our culture has mainly taught Americans to consider exercise as a type of medicine to prevent disease and lose weight. It turns exercise into something we should do rather than something we want to do. This undermines and harms women’s motivation and participation.
The study also revealed another trend: women who exercised to lose weight reported exercising less than those who worked out to maintain their weight, regardless of how much they weighed.
Because research shows that exercise is effective for maintaining weight but less so for losing weight, we think that women who exercise to lose weight may not see results. Thus, they get discouraged and may quit working out.
So how can this research be used to help a woman exercise more? Healthy midlife women will embrace exercising if it nurtures them, not depletes them. Both my coaching with women and the research I’ve conducted show that women are more likely to be hooked on exercise and make it a priority if their reason for doing it is to enhance their day rather than prevent an illness that they may never get. Ironically, taking a life-enhancement approach to exercise results in midlife women improving their health and controlling their weight.
Bottom Line: With life enhancement as your goal, you are more likely to choose physical activities that you enjoy doing, making it much more likely that you will stay motivated and remain physically active.
Implications for successful weight loss: Physical activity should be a behavior you do to enhance your well-being rather than burn calories. Regular physical activity will contribute to your long-term successful weight control, but to do so you need to sustain it over time. Ironically, to achieve your weight loss goals, your reason for being physically active might need to be changed to improve your daily quality of life instead of burn calories.
If you have any questions about this study, or would like a PDF of this published study, just email me at michelle@essentialsteps.net or fitness@umich.edu and I’ll send it to you.
If you lack on-going motivation for exercising and feel like you don’t have time for it, this blog is for you! But in order to understand the steps you need to take to help you, it is important first what is often the true hidden reason women say “I don’t have time to exercise.”
Time is a rare commodity these days. But, do women who are regularly physically active actually have more time than those who aren’t?
Women who are regularly active don’t have more time, but they do create time for exercise. What tends to distinguish the “I don’t have time” women is that they don’t prioritize being physically active. (Caveat: Women living in extreme circumstances such as mom’s with a newborn, women working 2-3 jobs to make ends meat do truly have less leisure time available for an activity such as exercise.)
The real question is why do some women prioritize fitting physical activity into their days and others don’t?
One reason is that the women who prioritize physical activity do so because it constitutes an important aspect of their self-care; it reduces their stress and enhances their sense of well-being. Their daily quality of life is enhanced when they are physically active, and diminished whey they are not - so they are very motivated to fit it in! These women do what I call “want-based” physical activity.
In contrast to that group of women, most of us consider being physically active as a “should”; something that we are “supposed to do” rather than something that feel we need or actually want to do.We don’t consider physical activity as an essential aspect of our self-care. In fact, “should-based” physical activity can feel draining, more like a self-care detractor! Who really has time in their day for another “should”!?
The deeper differentiator between women with “want-based” and “should-based” physical activity isn’t how much time they have, it is how they personally experience being physically active.
The “want-based” women personalize and tailor physical activity to their likes and desires. They do what makes them feel good, what reduces their stress and gives them energy. In general, women who do the “should-based” exercise tend to follow other people’s recommendations, including what the media and/or “experts” say constitutes the RIGHT way to exercise and be fit. But this “should-based” approach doesn’t lend itself to being sustainable nor to being a life-enhancing experience. And there is no RIGHT way to exercise.
The majority of American women fall into the “should-based” category regarding exercise and physical activity – and don’t do it consistently. This is because of the predominant exercise prescription that we have learned from our culture during the past 25 years.
Importantly, I’ve found that “should-based” women can become “want-based” by learning how to tailor physical activity to themselves, their desires/likes, and lives. If you want to transform your relationship with physical activity to be “want-based” you can do the following:
1)Make a conscious decision that you WANT TO start getting the incredible self-care benefits that physical activity brings (improved mood and sleep, etc.);
2)Decide what experiences you want to have from physical activity (Reduced stress? Social time with friends? Etc.)
3)Chose a physical activity that will give you that experience(s). (Reduced stress? Try walking outside in nature; Social experience? Ask a friend or family member to take a walk, or join a gym with you.)
4)Plan it into your day, and give yourself permission to leave whatever you are working on/accomplishing to do your planned physical activity.
5)Evaluate whether the physical activity you chose gave you the experiences you wanted. If it wasn’t a positive experience, try a new type of physical activity, a different teacher, or try a lower intensity, try a different time of day, etc.. (Figuring this out can be a process that may take some experimenting to figure out, but it is worth it.)
6)Decide that enhancing YOU AND YOUR SENSE OF WELL-BEING ARE WORTH spending time on.
