S2 E013 | Reframing Fitness: Navigating Movement in A Larger Body

Melanie [she/her] (00:00)
Hey friends, welcome back to episode number 13 of The Culture of It All. As you can probably tell from the title of this episode, we are talking about fitness. Fitness is our f -word for this episode and I’ve thought long and hard about how I want to explore this topic with you because my relationship to fitness is super complicated. In hindsight, I think it’s always been a little complicated and there’s a number of reasons why and…

We’re going to talk about that a bit today because I think for so many of us, especially for those of us in larger bodies, our complicated relationship to fitness probably started at a very young age. As I’ve touched on in previous episodes, a few years ago, I was a personal trainer. However, that really didn’t help.

relationship with fitness if anything it just made the whole situation worse and harder and more complicated and I will be talking about that a bit today. So this month in October, officially spooky season, we have five episodes. Well three episodes plus the two bonuses because there are five Tuesdays in October which is really exciting so you’re get three episodes this month.

So don’t forget if you want to get these episodes a day early plus get access to our myth-busting mini-sode all you need to do is subscribe for free over on Substack. I will put the link and details over in the show notes or you can just search the culture of it all on Substack and you will find us over there. You can subscribe for free and you will get these episodes a day early in your inbox. You can add the audio to your preferred podcast player

so you don’t have to listen in the Substack app. You get all the show notes and you will also get that extra mini episode. This month’s mini episode I’m going to be talking about priorities, privilege and fitness. my. I saw a TikTok video and it pissed me off and you know, there we go. A new episode for the podcast was born. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about and that’ll be coming out next week. So if you are interested, make sure you head over to Substack and…

join us over there as well. Our little growing community, it’s amazing to see those of you over there. Thank you so much for listening. you’re listening on substack right now, hi, how the hell are you? Thank you so much. And just thank you for supporting my work and continuing to listen to The Culture of It All because this has been a very interesting and exciting journey throughout this year. And I’m so, glad that I decided to do it. And I’m so, glad that you…

supporting me and this, conversations and this work. So yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. So for today’s episode as I said we’re going to be talking about fitness, we of course will be kind of talking around fitness. I’m not going to get into like the nitty -gritty of fitness, I’m not going to be giving opinions on workouts or anything like that whatsoever because I really don’t have many opinions on that nowadays and you will hear about why. Of course from my personal experience there is going to be some

talk around the connection between the diet industry and fitness and growing up sports things like that but of course if at any point you want to take a pause please do your mental health is so much more important than listening in to this episode but we are gonna get started let’s just dive in I’ve kind of split this in my in my head I kind of split this into three areas I feel like there’s pre -personal trainer right there’s like

Up until the point at which I decided I was going to be a personal trainer, and I don’t think it was quite that simple of a thought, but up until that point, then there was like this period of time where I was in the fitness industry, and then there’s now, or after leaving the fitness industry, I guess. And that’s kind of how I look at this, this topic for myself, because like so many people, I was not a sporty kid, or at least…

I wasn’t a sporty kid and I guess in the way we are told kids should be sporty and I see it now. I have a 10 year old, I see it in the way. He has very little interest in competitive sports. We have always encouraged him to try things. He tried football, soccer, he hated it. He enjoyed playing, he enjoyed the warm up, he enjoyed running around with the ball, he enjoyed messing about with his friends. But the competitive side? He doesn’t have that.

He’s also a very competitive kid. I’m also very competitive, yet don’t understand competitive sports in the slightest. So, super interesting, right? But this year he started karate and loves it. And yes, there are people around him, but it’s also a very individual sport. So I can get it, right? I understand. So I’ve definitely encouraged him to try lots of different things out. And I think, and I hope…

We’ll see when he’s my age, but I hope that his relationship to movement is very, different to the way mine was as a child. I wasn’t a joiner. I didn’t do any clubs or any groups or anything like that. I’m very introverted and clearly was from a very young age. I was also very shy and I just wasn’t really ever good at sports. And I mean, again, did I enjoy it? Maybe, but I never really felt like enjoyment was an option.

I don’t know if any of you can resonate with that, I just never felt like enjoying a sport was something that was… it felt really foreign to me. I was like, no, I have to be good at it for it to be enjoyable, which is so not the case. But alas, child me, I, little Melanie, was like, no, I have to be good at it. And I definitely struggled in sports in school, like in primary school up until the age of 11. I don’t think I was…

I don’t think I hated it, but I just, yeah, it was just a thing I had to do.

It was really when I got to high school that it became much more obvious that there was a very clear divide. And at that time, and I don’t know if they still do it, I’ll find out next year, we’ll revisit this topic when Greyson goes to high school. But when I was in high school, we had different, they were called sets. So it was like first, second and third across all topics. First set was the academically bright.

kids, right? It was people who were gonna get A star, A, maybe a B, and then there was middle set, which was me. For every, every topic other than sports, I was middle. I’m probably still middle. But in sports I was in the bottom set. You know, it wasn’t third set, it was bottom set. So sports throughout the whole of high school, I was in bottom sets. Now…

I’m gonna be honest, looking back, I don’t think that does much for your feelings about sports. It doesn’t really improve the relationship you might have to movement.

Whilst there may be an understanding of why they have to divide us into those groups, I think that it really discourages those who already feel quite discouraged in fitness and movement. So for my five years of high school, I hated sports. I hated PE. I was always last in cross -country.

cross -country is a very sore and a very difficult topic for me to talk about because I fucking hated that. It was miserable. Why do we have to do cross -country in the dead of winter? And they would make us leave the school property, so we’d leave the school grounds and we went on to like farmland? Now, I hope.

that nowadays you wouldn’t get away with this, know, health and safety. But it was the late 90s, what is health and safety? And we would run on this, like on these fields and there was mud and there was ice and there was, it was wet. And to the point that some of the ground was so saturated and like muddy, you could lose a shoe.

And then one year, a girl in my class, really badly cut her leg on barbed wire. She fell onto a barbed wire fence during this cross country session. She was in hospital. We still had to do it. They still made us do it.

And as an adult, I’m just like, absolutely not. It is wild to me. But yeah, it was the 90s of it all. Yeah, I hated that sport. I hated it. I always last. Always last. It was miserable. There was just nothing enjoyable about that process. You know, it’s cold, but you’re hot. You’re losing your shoes. You’re slipping over. It’s muddy. You’re filthy. Nothing about it was fun.

So again, didn’t really do much for my feelings about fitness. And then there was one year when we did athletics, getting ready for sports day, which I think in the US you call it field day, but we have it. It’s very organized. In high school, it’s very competitive. And there was one year, probably middle of high school, when we did shot put and discus. I know that many of my close friends have heard me tell this story because I realized looking back that…

I was actually pretty good at discus and shot put. I am built like a discus and shot put person. I have very strong legs. I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t like my legs. My legs are really strong. Naturally, that is the way I’m built. I am low to the ground. I am sturdy. And I was really, really good at shot put and discus. And I remember thinking, I ain’t bad at this. And I remember there was this like chatter around me in the group I was in because people were kind of impressed by the fact that I didn’t suck.

But it was never encouraged, nobody ever said to me like, you should work on this, you should try it out, we’re impressed. No. So there was this one summer where I was briefly good at discus and shot put and that was it. But it never went any further and you know, that was my relationship with movement and as I got older I just grew up associating fitness and workouts with dieting and the diet industry and weight loss and body change.

For me, whilst of course in my head I could diet without movement, there was always that feeling that if I did both together I’d be so much better. It’d be faster, right? So and oftentimes I would kind of do both. I associated the both of them because I didn’t enjoy sports. I wasn’t a sporty person. I didn’t go to the gym.

or exercise for fun or because I had any other types of goals. Because I think the other thing to be clear about is that there were no other goals as far as I was concerned. The only goal during that time was to be thinner. And so because of that movement didn’t matter unless I was making effort in other ways. And that was my feeling at the time.

and I think a lot of us probably have had similar experiences.

And even as I got older I still felt the same way about my body, I still felt the same way about food and movement. And I joined a small local gym in 2010. And the reason I know it was 2010 is because I was getting married the following year.

And so unfortunately I was doing the very stereotypical thing of losing weight for my wedding. I went to the gym a lot because I didn’t have anything else going on. And I remember one day I was there alone during the day, was nobody else there, I thought to myself, I wonder how long it would take me to run a mile.

I had no idea, I no concept at that time of running a mile was or any of those things. And this kind of led me to becoming, guess, quite an avid runner over the following years. It of became my go -to. It certainly wasn’t easy, and there were times when I really wanted to just stop doing it because it was not fun. It wasn’t fun for my body. But it became kind of my go -to movement, my go -to exercise, I guess.

I did a number of races at that time and what ended up happening was that running became a really toxic behaviour for me. It became this form of control. If I hadn’t had the week I wanted, I would push myself. would run further, I would run faster, I would push myself.

And I think if you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that I loved it. You ask me now, I would tell you that I do not know. I cannot tell you if I actually enjoyed running or what I believed it meant, you know? So did I actually enjoy it or did I just enjoy the fact that people saw me as a runner? Did I enjoy…

the perception that I was somebody who was athletic and sporty and to be honest I think that’s probably the reality. I had never been that person, I’d associated that with some kind of worthiness and so for me running was not something I enjoyed, I thought it was, but it was more so that I enjoyed what I thought it meant to other people, that people saw me as a runner.

When I got my personal training qualification, I started it before I had my son, so I started it before I was pregnant. And it really was an impulsive decision. I often am very impulsive with things like this, and so I decided in the midst of this, what would end up being the last time I ever tried to lose weight.

I decided that I wanted to end my corporate career, I hated my job, and I’d always wanted to work for myself, and hey, I know weight loss, I know diets, I know how to do this. I’d been doing it my whole life. So I made it my job.

I started with fitness because at the time social media was still fairly new to me. I didn’t really know anything else and so I just went with personal training and fitness because I was like that seems like the logical route. I could work in a gym, I could do one -on -one sessions like that just was the route that I took because that was the thing I knew a little bit more about in terms of how to translate it to a business.

On the outside, exterior, I presented as somebody who fit in, but inside I never fit. Inside I still felt like I didn’t belong there. It was like I was playing this role of somebody who was trying to fit in.

You know, when I went to my personal training qualifications, because obviously a lot of it is practical, you have to go to a gym and there’s groups of people there who I don’t know. And these people didn’t know me. And so as far as they knew, this was who I was. I was this fitness person. Unless I told them otherwise. And I remember just being around these people who clearly

were fitness people, they were into fitness, they were into sports. And I just remember feeling like it was such a joke that I was here. You know, how could I be good at this? And it was so weird to look back at it. I felt so self -conscious compared to other people that were on my course. You know, just because my physical body was smaller, just because I felt like I looked like I fit in, it didn’t mean that my lived experience wasn’t there. I still…

that lived experience of being in a larger body and what that meant to me and that never left. It never left and

After having Greyson, I pursued my fitness career. I decided that I wanted to continue pursuing it. I wanted to work for myself. I believed that I’d figured it all out. Which, of course, was not true. I literally thought, I have the secret! Except I don’t know what I thought the secret was, other than, unfortunately, the idea that if I can do it, so can others.

and I do not prescribe to that now. I understand how privileged that is and how wrong it is.

But at the time when I started in the fitness industry, I labelled myself as a plus -size trainer. I really had no clue how much of a crutch fitness had become, with my weight in particular. Over that period of time, I got my qualifications, I started an online business, I worked in a gym for a year.

that in itself was a very interesting process. I was so desperate to work in a gym, I thought. And again, I think it was me working in a gym. And I remember going in and speaking to the new owner of this place that I had been training in previously. And I remember feeling like he didn’t bat an eye at the fact that I was in a larger body.

And I remember being very confused by this thinking like, he just, he just wants to hire me. Okay. My experience of then actually working in the gym was vastly different. I had people not come to my class because they didn’t think that I was as good as the other trainers who perhaps looked differently to me. So unfortunately my entire time, that entire year spent, I was exhausted. I was so burned out because

I was trying to prove myself to not just me, but everybody else that came to my classes. I was horrendous. I made the hardest classes going because I was determined to prove to people that I belonged there.

And it just got to the point where I realized I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t enjoy writing workouts or creating classes. I enjoyed the music. That was probably my most beloved part of it, was putting together the playlists. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like working late nights. I hated the environment. And I was like, I don’t want to do this. This is not what I want to be doing or what I should be doing with my life. And I left.

And when I left working there and I cut off all ties, I was like, I just can’t be here. I can’t be here as a coach or as a client. I just don’t want to be here.

And so when I cut off ties from that experience, I just stopped exercising. Because my job no longer revolved around this. And I found it so hard to do anything.

I tried and I went through phases,

even as late as 2020, I think probably a lot of us experienced this during during lockdowns, there was so much of this narrative about being outside or here in the UK, I mean it was worldwide but Joe fucking Wicks was doing his workouts every day and

Even at that point I was still trying to like, quote, figure it out, you know. My relationship to movement, as I said, just became really complicated. But part of the complication was my feelings around movement itself, the attachment I had between movement and body change or weight loss.

And it was really only in 2022 when I really allowed myself to start being okay with not pursuing intentional exercise. I know that in early 2022, that was my turning point, I can either decide that I’m going to continue down this path I’ve been on my entire life, trying to change myself, or I can actually figure out, really figure out how to.

ditch diets, you know, get away from this industry that I know doesn’t work.

That was kind of the starting point. Later that year I joined intuitive eating group program. And that was where it really started for me. Even at the beginning of that intuitive eating course or program, I remember wanting to know when the fitness piece was going to come up. I remember asking my coach, I was like…

when do we talk about movement and fitness? And I remember her saying like, it’s the last, the last topic, like the last, the last month of the program. And this is a 10 month program. And I remember thinking, 10 months? No, I can’t wait 10 months. I need to figure this out now. I was so focused on the fact that this was like, this missing thing in my life.

As I started working through intuitive eating as a practice and through the principles, I became more and more okay with the fact that Movement didn’t need to be what I believed it was, was, all my life, right? It didn’t need to be attached to my self -worth, it didn’t need to mean body change.

And over the last couple of years I still try different things out, but what I have done is discovered what I actually enjoy. Running is not part of that. Who knows, maybe in the future it is, but for me running is not part of that. I have discovered the movements that I really enjoy.

and I’ve become okay with them not being consistent.

my relationship to them is still very complicated. It has only been a couple of years and…

I am still trying to understand what that looks like for me in my life and who I want to be and how that’s gonna, you know, does it even matter, you know? Because I think that’s the thing at the end of the day we talk about like we don’t owe people health. I don’t know, I don’t owe anybody movement or fitness. I don’t have to.

do a workout. I don’t have to do a workout. I don’t have to be moving my body. I’m not saying that there’s not benefits to moving our bodies. My point is that the pressure that I’ve put on myself for so many years has done me more harm than good.

I want to understand more about my relationship to movement and my relationship to the things that I enjoy. Because even as I sit here now and I’m thinking about like the word consistent and I’m like, but what does that mean? Like, okay, if I’m consistent with something, why does that matter to me so much? And it’s getting to that route of like asking myself why, why does that matter? Why is that important?

Because in some cases, why it matters and why it’s important has nothing to do with me. You know, I know that I love swimming. I’ve talked about this before on the show. We swim every two weeks. We go as a family. There are other things I enjoy. Dancing. I enjoy lifting weights. I’ve always loved that feeling.

Am I consistent? No. I’ve not done anything besides swimming since before the summer. I am definitely a cool weather movement person. But none of this tells you how healthy I am. It doesn’t tell you what kind of person I am. And I don’t owe anybody movement. So these are just facts, right? These are just things that either happen or don’t happen in my life. It’s complicated. And…

I’m trying to learn to be okay with that. I’m learning that what has happened in the past doesn’t need to define what happens in the future. I’m trying to, you know, leave some of that stuff behind and move forward. And sometimes I feel like I should make more of an effort or just prioritize all of these narratives that we hear, but I always take a second to be honest with myself about where these thoughts might be coming from, as I said, because…

Again, are they mine? Are they my thoughts? Or is this diet culture and the diet industry?

I’ll often stop and think about why am I having this thought? Because there’s usually a reason. There could have been an experience or a situation or somebody might have said something or I might have seen something and it can trigger these thoughts and so my,

My process now is to work through that, to navigate it and then reframe whatever it is, you know, to reframe fitness. You do I want to do this movement? If I’m telling, if I suddenly decide that I’m, I need to do this, this and this, I’m like, hang on a minute, where is this coming from? What has happened that’s triggered this, this feeling, this, this, this belief or this.

And oftentimes it comes from stuff on the internet, honestly. I’m not immune to this, as are none of us. I see something and I’m like, ugh, I should be doing this, I should be doing that, right? It’s a process. I also think about what the inspiration or motivation is for that activity.

I think I touched on this before on previous episode, but like inspiration is the pull energy, the thing, when we’re inspired we pull towards something. Whereas motivation is very much a push energy. And I always think about movement or fitness as the example of that. Because I was never inspired to run. I was never inspired…

to go on a diet, I was motivated. I had to physically force myself to do things.

So I often look at it from that point of view as well, right? Again, reframing it. Am I inspired to do this or am I trying to motivate myself? And I also look at what the benefits are of doing this that have zero to do with my weight or body size. Like what are the benefits?

One of the really big questions that I love and I’ve held on to, I saw it on Instagram maybe a couple of years ago. Bri Campos, is body image by Bri on Instagram, she posted this.

story and she was talking about how people will come, she’s a coach, and she’ll talk about how people come to her and like I want to be stronger, I want to be healthier, want be fitter, want to you know whatever like the very typical goals we might have in relation to health, fitness, that kind of thing and she said that’s cool. Great. Do you still want those to achieve those goals if weight loss is not involved? Would you still want to achieve those goals if weight loss was not on the table?

And I remember thinking, wow, that is a very big question.

And I hold onto that. I keep that question in my back pocket for situations like this when I’m thinking, I need to do this and I need to do that. I should do this and I should do that. Because my ego takes over and the diet industry takes over and the internet is putting all this bullshit in front of me. And I’m like, hang on a second. Do I actually want to do this? Is this actually something that I’m choosing to prioritise in my life right now?

And also, what is the reasoning? Right? Do I want to do this because of some benefit? Or am I hoping that it’s going to achieve some kind of body change? I think it’s a really, really powerful question. Another question that I keep in my back pocket, which is actually from working with my coach, who is going to be a guest later this month. So excited for you guys to listen into that episode.

when I was working with her on fitness because it came up, it came up at the beginning of the program and then I worked with one on one with her and it came up again. And the question she asked me is, what is the bare minimum?

My ego did not like this question. I struggled to come up with the bare minimum to start with because I was like, well, it would be this and then I could do this and then, right? I was straight away like, and then I could add this to it and then I could do this. And she’s like, reeling me back in. Hang on a second. What is the bare minimum? And I established with her that the bare minimum was walking to the end of my street and back.

My ego still really struggles with it. I’m not gonna lie, I still struggle with the idea that I’m only walking to the end of the street and back and I’m like, no, like that’s fine. It is fine. And it’s also fine not to do that either. It’s all of it’s fine. It doesn’t determine who I am as a person. It doesn’t determine who we are.

It’s nothing to do with our worth or whether we should be respected as individuals. You know, and…

I think that’s the big thing about fitness and movement is that the diet industry has taken something that could be quite simple without all the other stuff. It could be quite simple if we

decided what we enjoyed, if anything, and if we stopped weaponizing certain movements against each other and stopped pitting certain exercises and workouts, if we stopped having these trends of what is the holy grail of movement, like, you know, I grew up in, I grew up, my business grew up in that industry and…

I was a part of that, unfortunately. I believed that what I was doing was the right thing, and anybody who wasn’t doing that was doing the wrong thing. And now I’m just like, just fucking let people live. Just let people do or not do whatever it is that they want to, or they enjoy, or they can do. And if it’s none of those things, that’s also fine. I just…

I think I find it really hard looking back at so many of these pieces of the diet industry and just looking at how unbelievably complicated they have become. And we’re going to touch on that in a couple of bonus episodes later in this month because there’s a lot of reasons why this has become so complicated and I’m not going to spoil our spooky episodes towards the end of the month but…

Yeah, it’s complicated for a reason and I just wish it wasn’t. I wish it wasn’t so complicated. I wish that it didn’t need to be.

So we talked about fitness, we got there. I feel like I covered a lot. I hope that there have been some nuggets of inspiration in this episode. If you have any questions, as always, feel free to reach out to me. Please come and say hello on Instagram.

as I said, at the beginning of this episode we have a jam -packed month, my favourite month of the year, except for my birthday month, and you get five episodes because, or three regular and two bonus, because it is a five Tuesday month. So that’s really exciting and we have our first guest in a couple of weeks and then I am sharing a couple of…

I guess I’m going to try and make them spooky Halloween -ish episodes later in the month. So stay tuned for those. If you’re interested in seeing what’s coming up on the show, on Instagram I post each month a what’s coming up with the different episodes, the bonuses and the dates of when they’re going to air. So you always have a look over there and see what’s coming up as well.

That’s it for this week, thank you so much for joining me, thank you so much for being here, I really really appreciate it. I’m gonna make sure I share those questions that I mentioned at the end of this episode, I’m gonna pop those over in the show notes as well, so you can make a note of those, and keep them in your back pocket as well, because they really really do make a difference when the diet industry is rearing its ugly head and telling me that I’m not good enough. So I just want you to know that you absolutely are good enough, you absolutely are worthy, no matter…

What the diet industry tells us, as you are right now, absolutely wonderful. Until next time, friends.