My health philosophy

I spend so much time ranting against weight-loss dieting that you might wonder what my approach to food, exercise, and health consists of. It doesn't help to point out what DOESN'T work unless you can figure out what DOES work. *Disclaimer* I'm just saying what my personal fitness and health philosphy consists of, not saying it'd work for everyone.

A bit of background: My health philosophy is largely influenced by my dysfunctional relationship with food and exercise that was largely reinforced by my birth family.

My family loved to cook and loved to eat. There’s nothing wrong with that, but they also had a love-hate relationship with food, which might be summed up by a family joke that "Bread is the Enemy."

In our family, you didn’t just eat because you were hungry.

-You ate when you were sad.
-You ate when you were stressed out.
-You ate because you were bored.
-You ate as a reward for getting good grades or helping out in the family garden plot.
-You ate to celebrate.
-You ate as a competition.
-You ate to be polite and not offend your host/ess.
-You ate because it was "meal time."
-You ate because you wanted to get a bang for your buck at the “all-you-can-eat” buffet.

As you might imagine, that kind of compulsive eating, combined with not enough exercise produced a lot of chubby people in my family. Many of the women in my family have been on dozens of diets throughout their lifetime and have struggled with body image problems.

By my late twenties, I was driving my husband crazy with my food and body image obsessions. I would be food-focused when I wasn’t on a diet, but I was completely obsessed with food when I was on a diet. I was also completely obsessed with how fat and ugly I was whether or not I was dieting. He talked to a co-worker about my "eating disorder," and BOY HOWDY was I pissed off and insulted! I did NOT have an eating disorder. I mean, how many women in American society do not have bad body days when you think you look horrible and unattractive? How many women in America haven’t at least thought about dieting?

But, in retrospect, I am so grateful that dionysus1999 talked to his co-worker, who was a recovering bulimic, about body image and food issues. She recommended the book “Appearance Obsession,” and we read it together. He learned a lot about what I was going through, and I began to understand that there was a better way to approach body and food issues than through chronic weight-loss dieting. Within a year of reading that book, I came across my mother’s copy of “Overcoming Overeating.” At first, I thought it was just another diet book, but as I read it, I realized it was a whole different approach to addressing compulsive eating habits and body hatred.

Since then, I’ve done a lot to educate myself about the lies and hype about obesity and weight, the dangers of chronic and yo-yo dieting, and healthy ways to address food, healthy, and body image issues. Some of my biggest influences have been:

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To be continued in my next post.

My health philosophy, Part II

At first, my focus was on developing a more healthy relationship to food and stopping my appearance obsession in its tracks. Let me tell you that my body image and confidence now is 10 times better than it has been at any other time in my life, and I attribute it largely to stepping off the starvation/binge cycle and focusing on how my body FEELS, not on how it looks.

Later, I began to address my feelings and attitudes about exercise and staying active. For much of my childhood and teens, I was a fairly active person, but erratically so. I would veg for weeks at a time, and then walk miles all over the city with friends. I would bike for half an hour every day over the course of the summer, only to return to a sedentary lifestyle in the fall.

I never understood why people found exercise pleasurable or even got addicted to it, because I never exercised long enough, hard enough, or consistently enough to get that “rush” that runners and other athletes talk about sometimes. I was mainly exercising for fun but not thinking about it in terms of exercise (those multiple-mile midnight rambles) or I was exercising explicitly in the hopes of losing weight.

These days, my thoughts on staying active are much more influenced by the following two philosophies:

The Health at Every Size philosophy.
I’ll refer you back to an earlier post on this topic:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sarahmichigan/131360.html

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The Spark as explained in the book The Spark: The Revolutionary New Plan to Get Fit and Lose Weight-10 Minutes at a Time

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743201566/qid=1126624701/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-0331429-1863935?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

There’s still a bit more emphasis on weight loss and food plans than I’d like, but a lot of the basic philosophy is quite sound. Gaesser, an exercise physiologist, is also a fan of the Health at Every Size philosophy, and he has written several articles backing the idea that you can be “Fat AND Fit.” He has conducted several studies that show a) that many measures of health, including blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar/insulin issues are positively influenced by exercise and good food choices regardless of weight loss and b) those measures of health are much worse in people who weight-cycle than in heavy people who maintain the same weight but get regular exercise.

Some of the ideas I picked up from this book were:

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