Short reflection: Must…burn…more…calories
Reading time: 1 min
Originally shared as part of Inbox Reflections - my honest, heartfelt emails to support your binge eating recovery as a highly sensitive woman.
For a long time, exercise for me was synonymous with burning calories and weight loss.
Even when I tried to kid myself that I was exercising for my health, mostly I was trying to control my weight.
(I’m thinking about my early 20s here, when my ED was at its worst and I pretended to love running.)
But a wonderful thing that I recognised is that the more I’ve let go of exercising to lose weight, the more active I am and the more I enjoy it.
In fact, the things that I do now which could be classed as exercise are just things that I do, for the joy of doing them.
I love walking, my yoga practice, roller skating, swimming outside and lifting kettlebells.
And I think that if I started to attach weight loss goals to any of these, my enjoyment of them would go down and my resistance to doing them would go up.
So I want to ask you, how has focusing on weight loss affected your relationship with exercise / being active?
And what activities would you love to do more, just for the enjoyment of doing them?
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