Sweat & Smiles: Learning to Trust Your Body's Cues
By Melissa Romano on May 16, 2020 from Sweat & Smiles
Things like emotional intelligence, psycho-social skills, and emotional skill building hit main stream 30ish years ago. When you think of life in that perspective it becomes a little easier to show your family grace since they most likely did not have the skills or tools to support such things as feelings and emotions for themselves or for you. Marketers, politicians, journalists, and the media caught on to these skills first.... to create a need for whatever it is they are selling.??
Even if we aren’t watching tv or reading newspapers, the sensory overload is ongoing. The message most often: you are a problem to be fixed - oh, and you need to buy this formula or try this proven method.
This culture that says your problem is you - you aren’t waking up early enough, staying up late enough, you just need to do more and try harder. So you wake up earlier, you stay up later, and you try harder… only to feel run down instead of healthy and vibrant. This culture saying you just have to eat less and move more.
Let me tell you something, in a decade of this business I have worked with thousands of clients. I have a handful of clients that have lost over 100 pounds, hundreds that have lost between 25-50 pounds, and so on and so on. Not once - not one time - have I encountered a person that needed to eat less. The need for mending your relationship with food and change your habits does not equate to “eat less”. In fact, it was quite the opposite, most people needed to eat more. In one sitting? Usually not. Overall? Yes.
The majority of the time it came down to relearning how to listen… and trust… the body’s cues. It came down to connecting with food in a way that offers joy and health. In a way that leads you to feeling good. The way our culture defines “moving more” gives part the population anxiety simply thinking about stepping foot into a gym and having to do burpees in a room full of people. “Moving more” has another part of the population working so hard to meet quotas of movement that they’re too exhausted, sore, and tight to move throughout the rest of the day. The need to move more does not equate to x number of hours in the gym per week… and it doesn’t mean jumping has to be involved.
Don’t get me wrong, burpees are a fantastic exercise and a great functional training movement but they are not a requirement, can be overdone, and aren’t recommended for everyone. The actual need is mending our relationship with our bodies. Similarly to food, we need to relearn the body’s cues for when it’s feeling like it needs to get up and move around or shake it out and equal reverence for when it needs to rest. There is no one-size-fits-all and there is no one-size-everyone-needs-to-be.
There is, however, the truth the the body does not function on a plan that you’ve written on a sheet of paper. You cannot trick the body or override its survival skills. Reconnecting with the real goal: to FEEL good helps to readjust our sails. Begin to reclaim your power with this simple yet profound truth: your work isn’t to fix something that is broken, it's to find your way back to what is already whole.
You are whole,
Melissa
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