I hate working out. Or, I used to think I did. For years, my experience with exercise looked like this – I forced myself to the gym to punish myself for “breaking my diet”. I would spend the whole time comparing and criticizing myself, and then end off by taking obsessive progress pictures or weighing myself to see if I had finally reached my impossible fitness goals. It wasn’t productive, it wasn’t fulfilling, and it definitely wasn’t healthy. But working out doesn’t have to look this way. How can you stay body-positive at the gym?
Why is it so hard to be body-positive at the gym?
Modern gyms, in the way we understand them, are a fairly new invention. Prior to the 19th century, most people had physically demanding livelihoods and had no need to “work out”.
Upperclass women sometimes participated in gentler activities like walking, dancing, horseback riding, or calisthenics, but women were warned against vigorous exercise. Even when commercial gyms first began popping up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were seen as a male-dominated space. It wasn’t until the rise of health clubs in the 1970s and 60s that women finally embraced the gym – around the same time that modern diet culture was born.
Like any other business, a gym exists to make a profit from its customers. And the guilt and shame that comes with insecurity is a powerful marketing tactic. And after 50+ years of the fitness industry relying on these tactics, it hasn’t been easy for most of them to let go of them.
Even the most well-meaning gyms often promote diet culture, whether they mean to or not. Gyms often place a huge focus on weight loss and physical appearance rather than all the other wonderful benefits of fitness. They are filled with mirrors, scales, and posters encouraging you to “sculpt your perfect body!” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that if that is what you want to get out of your gym membership. But if you’re trying to revolutionize your relationship to fitness and your body, it can make it extra difficult to stay body-positive at the gym.
It was this realization that lead me to take a break from the gym over the past couple of years (the pandemic didn’t help, either). Instead, I focused on healing my relationship with my body and started exploring all the other ways I could celebrate movement. Slowly but surely, I found myself ready to head back to the gym in a way that was kind to my body and mind. And I’m approaching fitness very differently this time around.
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How I stay body-positive at the gym
1. Revaluate your motivations for working out
For most of my life (and probably your’s too), we’ve been taught that the number one benefit of exercise is to change the way that your body looks. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Moving your body has so many positive impacts on your overall physical and mental health that have absolutely nothing to do with your appearance.
Once you start seeing weight loss (or gain) as a side-effect rather than the main goal, you can start to really appreciate all the other amazing benefits of exercise. Exercise will:
• Improve your mood and mental health
• Strengthen your heart, lungs, muscles, and bones
• Boost your confidence and self-esteem
• Improve your ability to learn and remember
• Increase your sleep quality
• Lower your stress levels
2. Remember that food and exercise aren’t enemies
The revelation that exercise doesn’t exist solely to burn off calories was revolutionary for me when I started trying to be more body-positive at the gym. Measuring your food by how many minutes on the treadmill it will take to burn it off doesn’t just take the joy out of eating – it will suck the life out of your exercise routine too.
The food you eat isn’t conspiring against your workout routine to make you gain weight. And similarly, exercise isn’t just a way to punish yourself when you’ve eaten “bad foods”. Instead, food and exercise are both tools that exist to help you nourish, inspire, and care for your body. Food is just food, and movement is just movement. Separating them from each other can bring so much more joy into both aspects of a happy and balanced life.
3. Use your workouts as a way to celebrate all the things your body can do
We often take our ability to move for granted – but movement really is an amazing gift. You might not give a second thought to your ability to walk, run, wheel, ride, stretch, or dance. But not everybody is lucky enough to take those skills for granted. And because of the unpredictability of being human, you can’t know for sure that you will always have the pleasure of doing those things either.
Every time you move, it should feel like a celebration of all of the things that you can do, not a punishment, chore, or hassle. Practice gratitude with every step. When you start viewing exercise as a privilege instead of a burden, it starts to feel a whole lot more special.
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4. Find new ways to measure your progress
If you’ve ever followed a workout routine in the past, you might be used to ways of measuring your progress that focus on how you look or how much you weigh. I would weigh and measure myself almost everyday (it was a lot, I know), and celebrate or despair when those metrics changed by a fraction of an inch or pound. Being so obsessed with numbers means that you lose sight of all the other ways that exercise can improve your life.
If you’re working towards being more body-positive at the gym, weighing and measuring yourself will only make you fall back into those toxic old thought patterns. I haven’t stepped on the scale since I started going to the gym regularly again a few months ago and it has been the most freeing part of my journey to find body-positive fitness. Instead, I try to measure my progress by noticing:
• How do I feel when I exercise? How does exercise impact the rest of my day?
• How has movement changed my overall mood?
• How has my endurance and strength improved? Can I run longer now than I did before? Am I lifting heavier weights than I could when I first started?
• Do I feel healthy, strong, and empowered?
5. Listen to your body
Even though most of us have learned to dread it, our bodies love to move. And they have ways of telling us what kind of movement we need.
Instead of following a strict exercise routine, I listen to the way my body feels on any given day. I alternate between different types or intensities of exercise depending on how I feel. Sometimes that means pushing myself because my body wants to push myself. That also means taking a gentler approach, or even taking a day off when that is what I need.
You would think that listening to my body would make me lazier, or less likely to go to the gym. But for me, the result has actually been the opposite. Since I started exercising more intuitively and trying to be more body-positive at the gym, I am actually working out more than I ever did before. And maybe even more importantly, I am learning to love it.
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6. Most importantly – do it for yourself
You’ll never find true joy, success, and fulfillment in anything you try if you aren’t doing it for yourself. Exercise can be a powerful form of self-care if you let go of all of that toxic pressure and comparison and do it from a place of pure self-love. Your body and mind deserve that gift of movement – more than you will ever know.
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How does body acceptance and body image impact your relationship to fitness? Leave your thoughts in the comments below so we can keep the conversation going. Wishing you lots of body-positive and joyful movement in your future. As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting my little blog! Sending you all of my love.
I love this. I am OBSESSED with the scale. It is so unhealthy.
Great advice
I struggled with body dysmorphia as a young adult and going to the gym only made it worse. These are great things to keep in mind and will help make going to the gym healthy for our mind and body. Thanks for sharing.