MOVEMENT

This post contains descriptions and thoughts around my experiences with disordered eating and fatphobia. For professional resources, visit Alliance for Eating Disorders or Health At Every Size.

At the beginning of the year, I made the opposite of everyone else’s resolution and decided to try doing LESS intense cardio.

Resolution is too strict of a word, really. It was more of a noticing that my body wasn’t recovering. Muscle soreness would stick around for days on end or I’d find myself on the verge of tears in the middle of a run or a fast paced conditioning section at the gym. It was almost as if getting my heart racing and becoming short of breath fooled some part of my brain into thinking that I was having a panic attack – it couldn’t tell the difference between real stress and exercise-induced stress.

For the past 20ish years, I’ve held a belief that cardio was the way to control my weight, to control my body. That working hard, getting my heart rate up, was the only way to burn enough calories to allow myself to not have to worry as much about what I ate. While the calculations stopped being exact after high school, I didn’t bother to challenge the “rule” that losing weight was as simple as consuming less calories than you burned. Moving my body wasn’t something I did because it truly felt good; it was something I did as a type of self-policing and self-control, as a way to compensate for my need to eat.

Burnout became the reckoning. I’m currently reading Enchantment by Katherine May (savoring is a better word for what I’m doing with this book), and there is a line she wrote that both makes me feel jealous that I didn’t write it and so incredibly validated at the very same time:

Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs.

I have committed and recommitted to learning to, if not love, at least accept my body over and over again. Part of accepting my body is reminding myself that my body is not lying to me – the tiredness, the stress, the headaches, the hunger, they are all real – even when I can’t understand what she’s trying to say or why she feels the way she does. In the place of not understanding, not knowing, I have often assumed the worst – that my body was broken in an irreversible way and use of force was the only way to convince its cooperation. The problem is that not listening is very much a type of ignoring. There was simply no way to heal my burnout without learning to speak the language of my body.

There are days when I worry that taking a break from intense cardio – for now – will cause me to gain weight or make me unhealthy. The you’re-not-doing-enough version of my inner asshole doesn’t take a break. On one of those days, I was talking to my sister and decided to ask her about something she’d said in passing awhile ago about how to breathe while doing strenuous activity (she’s a coach and also was a firefighter, so she’s done some of that). I wanted to know the secret. “Don’t move faster than you can breathe,” she told me. I know this, but how easily I forget.

It reminded me of something one of my mentors told me once, to never move through life faster than I can feel. Moving forward is something that’s worth waiting to feel pulled toward. My body’s language is sensation and breath. Sensation is how she speaks to me, and breath is the gentlest way I know to respond to her, to guide her back to peace and ease. For right now, my body is asking for intentional movement, yoga and intuitive dance and long walks and strength training, and I’m finally willing to listen. 

When I wrote about looking for life tools in books, what I left out was that it so often feels like the message is to start with changing the way you think and then you can change the way you feel. But I’m learning that for me, the process of relearning – or unlearning – is the opposite. My body wants to feel heard and validated first. When she knows she’s being cared for and accepted, then she shares her deepest wisdom, and we can let go of beliefs that aren’t true.

Movement is a treasured part of being alive and one of my favorite creative tools. I crave the way it makes me feel free and playing with motion to create photos feels exciting. This is something I understood artistically before I understood how to live it, and it’s one of the ways that making art continues to teach me about myself. Trusting my body and using movement as a way for us to connect instead of control feels like part of the secret to growing into the bigger pot.