Content warning: In the following blog I describe my story of how I viewed my body, food and movement. I use language that ran through my head repeatedly and was frequently used around me in years gone by. This language is something I would never recommend anyone use towards themselves or others, as it can trigger strong emotions and can be difficult to hear for anyone who is or has gone through issues with body image and eating problems. I am in no way a health care professional who is able or attempting to diagnose myself or others.

NOW ON TO OUR SUBJECT!

I started RTL because I believe deeply in the power of intelligent movement. I briefly shared some of my struggles with back pain through my teenage years in January. Long story short, I was a serious ballet student in my teens and later became a professional contemporary dancer. My relationship to movement and my body was, for a very long time, fraught. This is something that I know so many of us have struggled through so I wanted to share some of my story. When I wrote my January blog I went through many photos of myself in my youth. I have a clear memory of what my perception of my body was at the time and it was fascinating to look back. I had a hard time reconciling who I had thought I was from what I saw reflected back.

I remember feeling ‘fat’, un-ballerina like, and like the awkward, dorky, unpopular kid in teenage movies. I went through phases of weighing myself every day, scrutinizing food labels and coming up with daily exercise plans of 100 sit ups. This may seem extreme for a young teenager but let me assure you I was not alone in my day and I would venture a guess this is quite common among today’s teenage girls. And perhaps even still among women of my age.

WE CRAVE SIMPLE ANSWERS - I IGNORED MY MIND…

I used to religiously watch The Biggest Looser and I remember Gillan Michaels yelling at someone that losing weight is really simple- you burn more calories than you consume, that’s it! Most of us crave easy answers. In order to achieve X you do Y. Simple, concrete and easy to implement. In this case calories consumed vs. calories burned - simple. The problem with this is that it distills food and movement down to a math problem and we totally ignore all other factors that may be present.

When my son was a baby a friend recommended “The First Bite” by Bee Wilson. I was hoping for some helpful tips on introducing Ari to different flavors, but what I found was a book that thoughtfully discussed how our upbringing, the society around us and even our families’ previous generations, affect and shape our relationship to food and eating habits. Let me explain this a little more in detail as I think this is also relevant to how we think about exercise.

SMALL CUES WE GET AS CHILDREN CAN PREDICT OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD/MOVEMENT AS ADULTS.

You get hurt and cry as a child. You get a piece of chocolate. Magically all is well again! Later that night at dinner you are coaxed to “Just finish three more bites of your broccoli”. What we learn from those interactions blueprints several things. We learn that chocolate is tasty and brings us comfort. But it also teaches and conditions us to use a sweet treat to recover from any undesirable situation. On top of that we now connect broccoli as something that is “good for us” but that we dread and must force ourselves to eat. For me it’s fascinating to think about our relationship to exercise in the same way.

Let’s face it, gym classes are awkward for every kid - no matter your shape, size or fitness level. I say this from my own experience of being a healthy and athletically inclined kid, but not participating in gym classes past 7th grade. Beyond the social awkwardness of shorts and showers and maneuvering our developing bodies, the gym classes I experienced taught me that fitness is a competition and workouts are something to be dominated. I was told to push through to get the maximum reps of sit ups and push ups and the fastest running time possible. I was also graded on how ‘well’ I performed. ‘Well’ was defined as the most movement in the least time or the maximum exertion possible. There was very little thought given to how to move in a functional pattern and there was never a focus on how to build a healthy movement routine with sustainable habits.

WHAT YOU TELL YOURSELF MATTERS!

We all have personal stories we unconsciously tell ourselves. Just like our relationship to food can be shaped by small cues in childhood, our personal stories are created and shaped by everything and everyone around us. One example of this is how as a teenager I would continually tell myself I was ‘fat’. I was actually often told by my family how ‘skinny’ I was - my weight and appearance were often commented on by my mother and her family, regardless of whether I had gained or lost weight. Before anyone blames my mother or my family for my unhealthy teenage habits, let’s take a moment to actually talk this through. I wasn’t self conscious about my weight because I was being told I was ‘fat’. I was obsessed with my weight and looks because I was given the signals by multiple generations of my family that ‘skinny’ is good and ‘fat’ is bad. I unconsciously started evaluating myself against those invisible measuring sticks. Being a ballet student and spending upwards of 12 hours weekly scantily clad in front of a mirror didn’t help matters. I constantly compared myself to my peers and felt chunky in comparison. So I created my own narrative - I was ‘fat’ and I wanted to be ‘skinny’. But this narrative didn’t start with me. It was simply being passed down from the previous generations of women in my family. This stuff runs DEEP.

The good news is that because we create our own narrative we also have the power to change it and the smallest little tweaks can be incredibly powerful. At the start of Covid I found myself dreading teaching group classes. I couldn’t give any touch cues, talking through an entire class while also demonstrating is, frankly, extremely hard, and the whole set up felt weird. We all know the stories and have lived them. We were all deeply overwhelmed and, for me, teaching a virtual group class just felt like another chore on a long list of stuff that had to be done. Then, at some point I decided enough was enough. I love Pilates and I had to change my attitude. I decided I should feel lucky to have a chance to have a regular Pilates practice built into my life. As soon as I changed my narrative from “Do I really have to?” to “Yay, I get to!”, things shifted dramatically. I became excited when I woke up and realized I had a class to teach that day.

ARE WE OUR OWN OBSTACLES?

My professional life is spent dealing with how muscles and fascia move but I find the brain and human behavior absolutely fascinating and often quite relevant to my work. I recently went down a Ted Talk rabbit hole and came across a talk by Dolly Chugh where she addresses some brain basics, and how our subconscious routines affect our ethical decision making process. Dr. Chugh mostly researches unconscious bias and how to overcome it - truly fascinating topic in todays world but pretty far outside of my expertise (I’ve included some links below if you’re interested in finding out more). However, one of the fundamental ideas that her research is based on is by Manfred Zimmerman, a German Physiologist, who states that our brain is capable of processing 11 million ideas at any given moment but that nearly all of this work happens unconsciously. Out of the 11 million points only 40 actions are conscious*, most of our life is run on autopilot without us giving any meaningful thought to it. This idea has been rattling around in my conscious mind recently and I’ve been thinking about how this affects how I move, as well as my relationship to movement and food and the world around me.

I named these vast number of unconscious processes that our brain performs every second ‘habit loops’. This is not a technical term at all, only something I made up. It helps me to remember that these are habits that I am bound to repeat again and again in a loop. The only way I can change these ‘loops’ is to first consciously notice them and then make the decision to break or alter the habit. These ‘habit loops’ can be simple, concrete physical actions that we perform repeatedly, like brushing our teeth. We don’t have to think about it, we just go and do it. But these ‘loops’ can also be something more subtle and explain how these small cues we get as children can unconsciously become imprinted as long standing ‘habit loops’ in both how we create our own narrative as well as how we act in general in the world. More on that in a bit.

OUR MOVEMENT AND THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

I deal with movement so let’s first talk about how these ‘habit loops’ can affect how we physically move. If you’ve ever watched a child learn to walk you can see how they spend every single ounce of concentration on just putting one foot in front of the other. Yes, they do need to build strength in order to be able to stand up but most of their concentration is spent on learning the movement pattern and mastering the coordination. As adults we don’t necessarily dedicate our precious 40 conscious thoughts to any movement or exercise we’ve already done before. We most often let our ‘habit loops’ take over and we just move through as if we’re brushing our teeth. How often have you finished the hundreds without even remembering what you did? I’ve written a bit before about how the magic of pilates lies in the potential it has to change our movement patterns and not just in building strength (see link to props blog from January). The problem is that in order to make changes we first have to recognize and acknowledge our current patterns. Unless we are aware of our ‘habit loops’ we can’t make any changes. Because what we tell ourselves really matters!

BACK TO OUR NARRATIVE

Now on to the less concrete. Another idea that Dr. Chugh talks about that I find helpful is the smog effect (coined by Beverly Daniel Tatum in the context of unconscious racial bias). This is the idea that we subconsciously notice everything. It’s like smog that washes over us and we can’t avoid it or be selective about what permeates and affects our unconscious ‘habit loops’. This applies both to ideas we consciously agree with (like, for me, positive body image messages) as well as concepts that don’t align with our conscious beliefs (like repeatedly seeing heavily airbrushed super models on magazine covers - I know the images aren’t real but they still seep in and affect my ‘habit loops’). In the context of my relationship with food and exercise it could be that piece of chocolate my great aunt gave me to soothe me after a fall. Chocolate = happiness. Or that time I was cheered on by my gym teacher in 5th grade to dig deep and finish that 3K run with a bang. While I was happy to beat all the other girls in my class I really just wanted to puke. Exercise = Pain.

Our narratives are in a large part shaped by our ‘habit loops’, but once we recognize what our subconscious patterns are we have the power to change them. Instead of staying stuck in our ‘habit loops’, created and put into practice without conscious choice, we have the power to notice our current patterns and consciously come up with new patterns. Thankfully there are a lot of people doing research on how our mindset affects how we live our lives and on how we can ‘trick’ our minds into healthier and happier patterns, but that’s a whole post in and of itself. So for now I’ll leave you to ponder what you have been doing daily without ever questioning how or why you do it. And I challenge you to explore an ‘old’ exercise in your next class to see if you can make it new again.

Happy Moving!!!

RESOURCES

If you are interested in following me down the rabbit hole I hereby formally invite you to join me! Here are some links to Ted Talks, podcasts, and articles that I find interesting. Please share anything you find interesting or relevant in the comments!

The First Bite, a fantastic book by Bee Wilson that speaks intelligently about our relationship with food, as well as how deeply rooted it is and influenced by everything around us.

The Happiness Lab Podcast: All four episodes of the podcasts that have come out this year are super relevant to this subject. Specifically I like Episode 1, which deals with how we should treat ourselves with more compassion (more on this at later time) and Episode 4 which deals with how our relationships to movement may be formed very early on.

Dolly Chugh: I have listened to her Ted Talk multiple times and find it fascinating every time. I also find this interview very relevant for the times - more specifically focused on implicit bias, but I think a lot of the information is relevant to how we view ourselves and our self worth based on societal influences. I generally find her willingness to candidly talk about her failures, and how she has learned from them very inspiring.

Brené Brown: I think her research and Ted Talks on shame and vulnerability is quite relevant to this conversation. And just like Dr Chugh, I find Dr. Brown’s ability to talk about difficult subjects with humanity, wit and grace utterly delightful and inspiring. Plus I connect with her impulse of wanting to organize things into boxes and categorize all of her life. Sadly I have been pretty bad at accomplishing this feat…

The Hidden Brain: Last summer’s ‘You 2.0’ series featured Gabriel Oettingen and her WOOP method where she speaks about overcoming the “obstacles within us” and how the WOOP method can provide a concrete way to overcome our ‘habit loops’ and develop strategies of noticing and Emily Balcetis’s research into how visualization can help us achieve our goals and put our priorities into perspective.

What’s a Ballet Body? An interesting discussion of how Covid has influenced ballet dancer’s relationship to their body, and speaks to some of the issue I personally dealt with and have discussed with so many of my friends from the dance world.

My Fat Body is Not a Punishment… Interesting discussion on how our culture is hardwired to see our weight/looks as a positive or a negative, and how we constantly have the impulse to ‘control it’.

*Citation: 11 Million processed thoughts, 40 of them conscious is from the following resource: Zimmermann, M. (1986), "Neurophysiology of Sensory Systems", Fundamentals of Sensory Physiology, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 68–116, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-82598-9_3, ISBN 978-3-540-15870-7

Harnessing Our Mind’s Power by G

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