The #1 Secret to Building Your Self Confidence: Ditching Diets & Embracing Joyful Movement
Did you know that the average woman spends 17 years of her life on a diet?
That doesn’t include the time that we spend worrying about how we look or telling ourselves that we aren’t good enough.
The past year has taught us life is too short. Things we take for granted can be what we end up deeply craving when they’re gone.
The fitness and beauty industry want us to believe that the answer is: we just have to work harder and spend more money.
It’s all crap.
The research is overwhelming: diets DO NOT work. According to the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination, 95% of diets fail and more than half gain back any lost weight within 1-5 years.
So, if diets don’t work - what does?
Embracing Joyful Movement
Re-think how you see exercise and its role in your life.
We need to stop believing that the reasons we need to exercise are to burn calories, justify what we ate or punish our bodies into a smaller size.
Ask yourself: what else does movement do for me? How does it improve my life? Why else does it feel good to move my body?
A few examples: It reduces my anxiety. It’s relieves stress, helps me sleep and have more energy!
Or, here is a radical one: I have fun while I am doing it.
Seek out movement you ENJOY even if it doesn’t look like traditional exercise. What did you like doing as a kid? Did you dance? Bike rides? Baseball? Use that as your inspiration.
Mindful Eating - Healing your relationship with food
We’ve been taught to ignore our hunger cues and use food for emotional comfort.
Here are some questions to discover your “food story”:
- What were you told about food growing up? How did your family act/relate to and around food?
- Do you have any strong childhood memories, good or bad, about food?
- What role does food play in your life right now? What does it do for you? Is it something that brings you joy, stress, shame?
Write out your answers. Highlight any patterns, recurring thoughts, or statements that aren’t objectively true or anything that was “passed onto you” by someone else (or by society!).
Write a new story by incorporating mindfulness into your eating routine.
Mindful Eating is all about slowing down and learning how to listen to your internal cues of hunger and satiety.
Embrace mindful eating by:
- Eating without distractions. No TV, phone, books, etc. Experience your food and explore the taste, texture, smells, colours of your food. Chew thoroughly before swallowing.
- Sipping water or taking small breaks between bites. Give your body time to digest and notice how you feel.
- Before eating, ask: Why do I want to eat right now? Am I hungry or am I ___________ (insert other emotions here).
With these small steps, you can connect with your body in a new way!
Replace shame, guilt and self-blame with honouring your body, celebrating what it can do, its abilities, and how you FEEL in your body - rather than how it looks.
You aren’t broken - diet culture is.
If you want to learn more, get FREE access to our Self Love Formula Webinar so you can learn more about how to stop self-sabotage and build your confidence.
Courtney McCarthy is an ACE certified group fitness instructor, Mindset Coach, and Founder of Loyobo FIT. Loyobo FIT stands for Love Your Body Fitness, which is a hybrid body positive fitness community that helps women to ditch diet culture and use fitness as a foundation for confidence in every aspect of their lives.
Courtney is happy to be a Happy Healthy Women Guelph, ON Trailblazer.
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