Body Positive Wellness
We focus on finding the fun in moving your body, the taste of shame free eating and focus on living in your body on your own terms.
Holley Mangold successfully snatches 110 kilograms during Sunday’s U.S. Olympic Team Trials for Women’s Weightlifting. Mangold, who stands 5-foot-8 and weighs 374 pounds, won a spot and will compete in the super-heavyweight division of the 2012 Olympics. She is also the sister of Nick Mangold, a four-time Pro Bowl center for the New York Jets. (Jamie Sabau/Getty Images)
GALLERY: U.S. Weightlifting Olympic Hopefuls
GET IT, GRRRL!!!
I would love to be able to do this!
(via myownbody)
TW: Diet talk
My focus on personal wellness has recently revolved around discovering how my everyday diet influences how I feel, both mentally and physically.
Let me preface this by saying that this method of assessing what you eat may not be for everyone, and that is perfectly okay. The beautiful thing about health and wellness is that it’s different for everyone. I’m telling my story as I find it helpful to write down my experiences in this way. If keeping track or paying close attention to what you consume on a daily basis is triggering in any way, please do avoid doing it.
Whenever I used to start a diet (in what I like to refer to as the Dark Period of my life), I began with recording everything I ate. This probably sounds familiar to a lot of you, either starting a journal or joining a website like Weight Watchers or MyFitnessPal to keep track of calories or whatever.
Of course, back then, my focus was to track my food and regulate it with the sole purpose of losing weight.
It has taken me probably 5 years from the time I was introduced to body positivity to finally get to a place where I can stop doing this with weight loss goals in mind and start doing it with the intent to record more important things than numbers and weight loss.
As I eat things intuitively throughout the day (not paying attention to calories or numbers, just eating whatever foods my body and brain are drawn to), I make a note of what it is. But what really helps is taking note of my mood, energy, and anxiety levels throughout the day, as well as an overall feeling of wellness. It becomes quite easy to make a connection between what you eat and how your body reacts to it.
If you suspect you have a food allergy, an intolerance to dairy, gluten, or anything else - this would also be a perfect way to figure that out. Because I suffer from diverticulitis on a semi-regular basis, weeding out the foods that upset my stomach or make me feel ill has been very helpful. The more I have to look back on and the more my body reacts, the more I can understand how my mental and physical health is influenced by my diet.
That’s not to say I don’t indulge or refrain from allowing myself to enjoy whatever the hell I want to eat if I want to eat it. Just that if I do eat it, I understand the consequences on a more acute level, and sometimes my body responds to that kind of knowledge and rejects the need to nom a burger. But most of the time I nom one anyway, because I love cheeseburgers.
I am just starting out and my efforts will probably wax and wane, but for now learning all of this has been really interesting and informative! And it’s been fun to become more attuned to my body’s cravings. Has anyone else tried something along these lines before? What has been your experience?
——
Haley
Me and my mom. Doing yoga in my C&C tee shirt. Love to wear it to the gym. Repping for fatties in cute couture everyday, even when I work out. Love you Rachel! Thank you for working so hard to make all bodies look good. xoxoxo
My body is amazing. It may not look like the girls in the magazines, but that doesn’t matter to me anymore. My legs let me travel and explore the world I live in. My core keeps me stable and steady in this roller coaster of a world. My arms lead my hands to touch, feel, and experience my life. I can run. I can dance. I can do yoga. I can lift. I can swim. I can smile. I can live. This body lets me experience my world. I could never hate it again.
(Source: healthyandhappyandhopeful, via bigfatfeminist)
This is probably my favorite thing to do at aerial yoga. It is called a roll up, to see a video of it being done look here —» Link. This photo is with only one wrap around my foot. I enjoy it because you are able to lock your foot into place while doing fun things and I’m still working on being coordinated enough to actually climb the silk…
Don’t forget to submit your own stories / photos to Body Positive Wellness! Otherwise you will be stuck seeing my yoga photos every week, and that is just boring.
So lately, I have been learning and attempting to exercise different ways of experiencing food through both intuitive and mindful eating practices. More frequently I find myself more mindful of what I am putting in my body, but in a different way than I ever have before.
Intuitive eating is an approach that teaches you how to create a healthy relationship with your food, mind, and body—where you ultimately become the expert of your own body. You learn how to distinguish between physical and emotional feelings, and gain a sense of body wisdom. It’s also a process of making peace with food—-so that you no longer have constant “food worry” thoughts. It’s knowing that your health and your worth as a person do not change, because you ate a food that you had labeled as “bad” or “fattening”.
The underlying premise of Intuitive Eating is that you will learn to respond to your inner body cues, because you were born with all the wisdom you need for eating intuitively. On the surface, this may sound simplistic, but it is rather complex. This inner wisdom is often clouded by years of dieting and food myths that abound in the culture. For example, “Eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full” may sound like basic common sense, but when you have a history of chronic dieting or of following rigid “healthy” rules about eating, it can be quite difficult.
I’ve slowly been turning my food “worry” into food “interest” because I’m curious to know the effects it will have - more interested in how it makes me feel and less interested in how it with physically impact my weight.
Flipping over a carton of something to study the nutritional facts is not a new thing for me. My eyes used to go directly to the calories - now they go to the ingredients. Through doing this I’ve found that steering clear of high fructose corn syrup makes me feel less sluggish. I’m currently testing the limits of introducing more fiber to my diet, as for some reason I have been intuitively eating a LOT of it lately.
I also came across an article in the New York Times recently about Mindful Eating that I have also found quite helpful.
Mindful eating is not a diet, or about giving up anything at all. It’s about experiencing food more intensely — especially the pleasure of it. You can eat a cheeseburger mindfully, if you wish. You might enjoy it a lot more. Or you might decide, halfway through, that your body has had enough. Or that it really needs some salad.
“This is anti-diet,” said Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher in Oregon and the author of “Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food.” “I think the fundamental problem is that we go unconscious when we eat.”
I am kind of a loner and I really like to eat alone on my lunch breaks with a book in hand, but I’ve started focusing less on the book and more on what I’m eating. Texture, tastes, flavors, ingredients, everything taken into consideration. Rather than going “unconscious”, I become hyperconscious in a way that I almost don’t have the patience for, but ultimately my mindful eating experiences have been really helpful in maintaining a positive relationship with food.
Learning about these methods to help build a stronger sense of mind-body relations could help people of all sizes as well as those suffering from eating disorders understand their eating habits. Either way I think it’s a really positive way of assessing how we feel and how our bodies react to the things we eat, which is always a good thing to get to know.
That being said, I am writing this having just demolished a pulled pork sandwich as I’ve just traveled hundreds of miles and am now plopped back into an office, trying to squeeze in a blog entry while I’ve got a break in my schedule.
Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of pausing and being mindful of everything we consume. Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of choosing what we eat due to our lifestyles, schedules, income, etc. Sometimes it’s necessary to attack a burger and fries without dwelling on it at all. It’s not about judgement - It’s all about what works best for you.
// Haley //
(Source: bodypositivewellness)
