Reclaiming Movement: A Rejection of Diet Culture’s Cooptation of Exercise
/I, like most of us who grew up inundated with harmful messaging from “diet culture,” believed for most of my life that the only point of exercising (or at least the biggest point) was to lose weight. In a recent NPR article, UK-based body image researcher Nadia Craddock defines “diet culture” as “that collective set of social expectations telling us that there’s one way to be and one way to look and one way to eat and that we are a better person, we’re a more worthy person if our bodies are a certain way.” Throughout my history of experiencing body shame and disordered eating, the times I exercised with intention were the times that I meant to lose weight. Even the word “exercise” brings up reactions related to body shame for many people, myself included. In so many ways, diet culture has kidnapped the whole concept of moving our bodies, packaged it with shame, and sold it back to us for the cost of an infomercial workout DVD box set.
As I got older, and gained more access to learning around the values of feminism, I began to unlearn the values of diet culture, and forge my new relationship of acceptance with my body. Something happened in my relationship with exercise: in my process of letting go of the unhealthy expectations of diet culture, the pendulum swung the other way and I completely rejected exercise. Once I had removed the value of making myself smaller from the concept of exercise, I saw no value in it whatsoever. I dismissed recommendations of exercise as a path toward wellness as outright bullshit. Every wellness influencer posting images of the back of a blonde woman’s head, walking through the forest, with the words “exercise is the best antidepressant” overlain on the image, was a liar and a fraud. I often angrily wondered aloud, to anyone who would listen, “how dare they push this diet culture narrative that is making people blame themselves when going for a walk in the woods doesn’t cure their depression?!”. I wanted to allow myself the challenge of accepting myself as I was.
At the time, my work was to let go of the pressure on myself to exercise, which was feeding shame. And in the process, I did build a relationship with my body that was based on my humanity. I was able to find more compassion, appreciation, and even love. Through that self love, I began to learn to listen to my body; to learn the language, to understand how and what it was communicating to me. I started understanding and meeting more of my body’s needs for nutrition, sleep, and boundaries with substances. I also started exploring my body’s needs for movement with more freedom from shame and more focus on pleasure. This perspective on pleasure was introduced to me by adrienne maree brown’s book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, part of her Emergent Strategy Series. In her writing, adrienne asks the question, “How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life?” I realized that I was fighting for some idea of “social justice” without any understanding of what a fulfilling life even feels like, let alone how to get there. I realized that I was so deeply programmed by shame, mind-body dualism, and “protestant work ethic” that I was alienated from my body, devaluing and dismissing the pleasure of my body altogether.
I started asking myself, “What brings me pleasure? How do I know pleasure when I feel it?” I started going on daily walks and enjoying the warmth of my legs as blood flowed through them. I started to go out for only music that I wanted to hear and allowed my body to move as it wanted to. I allowed myself to stay in my body while hiking and practiced reframing the stimulation of being in my body from “uncomfortable, unwanted, a threat” to “pleasurable.” From this practice, I noticed that when I was resisting being in my body, when I was disembodied, when I was dissociated, my heart rate increasing and my muscles getting warm felt unbearable to me because they made me notice my body; they pulled me back in when I was trying to get out. But when I could breathe deep into my diaphragm and remind myself that I am safe in my body, that this is my only home, that my body supports me without me even having to think about it, I was able to stay with the sensation. And, when I was no longer running away from my body, but just allowing myself to be, I experienced its pleasure. The discomfort of being in my body after a lifetime of disembodiment has been, by far, my biggest challenge when engaging with movement. I am challenged by this practice every day. And every day that I can have a few moments of being embodied, is a gift.
To my complete surprise: engaging with movement has improved my mental health. Because, guess what? The brain is the body and the body is the brain. Turns out, taking care of one looks like, you guessed it: taking care of the other. Regular movement has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on my mental health. My mood is more stable, my energy is more consistent, and I have so much more access to my other skills. Probably the biggest impact has been from centering myself and my own wellbeing in my life. I am now in a stronger, more supportive relationship with all parts of myself, which includes making my mental/physical health a top priority. Whereas, for most of my life, my mental/physical health was at best an afterthought, and at worst, a source of shame. As I’ve been bringing movement into my daily routine, I’ve been reminding myself, “I’m doing this for my brain-body system. I’m doing this for my mental well-being. I’m doing this to regulate my hormones and neurochemicals. I’m doing this to feel stronger. I am NOT doing this to lose weight.” The last point is backed up by a rigid (for now) boundary on refusing to weigh myself.
As is often the case when we learn something integral to our wellbeing, and make a needed and positive change, I have also been processing grief for all the time I spent not being in my body, not being in this place. Part of processing my grief means processing waves of unpleasant emotions like anger and resentment toward the entire mental health/medical industrial complex in this country, which seems to be inextricably tied up with diet culture. I started going down rabbit holes of research on exercise as an intervention for mental health conditions, and opinion pieces about the dangers of the US health system denying a holistic approach, in favor of the view that we are disembodied, segmented, and can treat issues in isolation. I find myself often outraged and thinking, “Why is movement thought of as a first-line intervention in so many countries, but not here? How many of us are too busy trying to survive in capitalism, to notice that our bodies and brains are degrading? How many of us are noticing and are just too exhausted, and internally and externally under-resourced, to make any lifestyle changes? How many people like me have been lied to by the messaging of diet culture, and for too long believed that there is no inherent benefit to movement beyond reaching some bullshit ‘standard of beauty’? Why have my doctors only ever told me that my BMI was too high, case closed, but skipped the part about how moving my body could help my mental health? How many doctors don’t even get that training? How am I a clinically trained therapist and social worker, and am just now finding all this out, eight years into my career? What about people who don’t have the access to information, privilege, and resources that I have?” This process has prompted a hell of a lot of self reflection, personally and professionally, to say the least.
I know I’m not the only one. I’m seeing a new wave online of memes and posts with the theme: “devastated to report that exercise is actually helping my mental health,” and “livid that this works, now I have to keep doing it wtf.” If this feels familiar, I’m right there with ya.
The bottom line is this: diet culture doesn’t get to steal movement from us anymore. We’re taking back this essential element of the human experience and leaving the shame behind.
