The 9th principle of intuitive eating is Gentle Movement, Feel the Difference.
Unconditional permission to eat and rest are crucial parts of healing your relationships with food and movement. Unconditional permission to rest, specifically, is extremely important because you have to overcome the external thoughts from diet culture telling you, “you have to earn your food, you have to burn your food” to truly feel pleasure from body movement. This ties into unconditional permission to eat because no matter how much you exercise, your body needs fuel no matter what day of the year it is.
Let’s start with a bit of reflection. I challenge you to reflect on what your current relationship with diet culture is like. This may be something you’d never thought to reflect on deeply before. But, reflecting on your relationship with diet culture will help you to establish an understanding of the influences that lead you to participate in movement. Thinking of intuitive eating, you may not immediately relate it with movement; you may only think about food.
Giving credit where it is due, intuitive eating was created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, two registered dietitians, in 1995. Since 1995, over 175 research studies have been performed on the topic and the book has evolved through multiple editions. The greatest part about intuitive eating… it’s an evidence-based health care approach to eating that helps you reestablish trust in your body!
Principle #9 Movement, Feel the Difference is all about moving your body with the goal of being active based upon the way it makes your mind & body feel. It involves shifting your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than movement with a focus on burning calories through militant exercise. Focusing on how movement makes you feel, such as energized, can make all the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk, morning walk versus hitting the snooze button on your alarm.
I’d like to offer a plug for intuitive eating professionals & personal trainers on social media! First, check out Meg Boggs. Meg is the author of Fitness for Every Body. She talks about how you can restore your relationship with movement and moving your body because it feels good. Another great account is Tally Rye, the author of Train Happy and host of the Train Happy podcast. She, also, focuses on how to rebuild your relationship with movement that hallmarks the feelings you receive from it, from both a mind & body perspective. Lastly, is Lauren Lavelle. Lauren will help you unravel your beliefs surrounding movement and where you learned them.
To dive on in, even though we are discussing movement, we have to bring this conversation back to dieting. There is actually a lot of correlation between dieting and exercise.
So, how many years did you spend in diet culture’s grip? When you think about your personal history with dieting, think about trying different diets and how the restriction-binging cycle has reared its ugly head within your own life. You may think about counting calories or macros, being aware of portion size, counting Weight Watchers points, or something else, because there are a variety of examples; diet culture is toooo pervasive in our society and everyday lives.
To take this reflection further, start to think about what your relationship with movement was like during those 5, 10, 20, 30+ years spent in diet culture. We know that diet culture is a thing, but so is fitness culture. Fitness culture includes ideas such as burning it to earn it, punishing your body to burn as many calories as possible, working out doesn’t count unless it’s painful or militant, and so on.
It’s important to logically recognize when the neural pathways in our brain have connected movement to punishment or changing your body, it is really hard to immediately shift your focus from that to how the movement feels. The intention behind the movement has been to punish yourself or it served as a method to make yourself more “worthy” by changing your body. For example, if you hate participating in yoga yet still find yourself doing so, you have not established nor honor your personal movement preferences.
To offer a different perspective for this conversation… when making peace with food, we must give ourselves unconditional permission to eat. We must allow ourselves to eat, even the foods diet culture has steered us away from. When we’re making peace with movement, we have to have unconditional permission to rest. The reason for this stems from years spent in diet/fitness culture, undergoing strict exercise, lacking the intention of participating in movement for pleasure. Your brain has been programmed to believe that exercise does not count unless it’s a form of punishment, or burning calories, or a method to shrink your body.
You cannot flip a switch and say, “okay, I used to participate in movement for X, Y, Z reasons… tomorrow I am going to believe that I love the movement I choose to participate in.” A great analogy, which has been used here at Find Food Freedom®, when discussing making peace with food is: if I spoke Spanish for 30 years, I cannot simply choose to wake up tomorrow and speak German—it’s a totally different language! So, if your language surrounding movement has involved militant punishment, strict calorie-burning, and/or shrinking your body, you cannot wake up tomorrow and all of sudden have made peace with movement.
Some of the difficulties that arise with intuitive eating, and thus its principles (e.g., Principle #9 Movement, Feel the Difference) is that it sounds logical and straightforward. You can read the principle telling you to shift focus from punishment, yet difficulty arises from the centralized belief systems that have driven your decisions regarding food & movement. Begin by giving yourself grace. It’s going to take time to unpack your relationship with movement, especially if it has been driven by diet culture for 5, 10, 20, 30+ years.
Personally, when I went through my journey of making peace with movement & rest, I was thinking, “why can’t I run anymore?!” Truth is, I was so f*cking sick of it, found it triggering, and hated it. I got to a breaking point. I did not know that I needed unconditional permission to rest.
You may be thinking, “Sammy, you don’t understand, if I have unconditional permission to rest, I will never move my body again because if I don’t have to workout, I won’t work out.” I get it. I promise I understand. I understand the root of that thought because this is the same fear and thought that arises when first hearing you have unconditional permission to eat. When making peace with food, the number one comment I hear from clients & followers alike is, “you don’t understand, if I have unconditional permission to eat, then I’m only going to eat the cake, the cookies, the pizzas, the brownies. All day long, everyday.” To that, I say that’s not true. Once you give yourself permission to eat all the foods, your relationship with food becomes a lot more peaceful.
Now, let’s use this as a parallel; it’s the same thing. If you have unconditional permission to rest, you are training your brain and reworking your neural pathways to understand that you do not have to move to be a “good” person. Movement has NOTHING to do with morality. If you choose to go for a run or if you choose to sit on the couch, neither will make you a better person.
If you experience feelings of guilt or shame from skipping a workout, let’s break this down further. Guilt is a moral emotion, so when you’re feeling guilty for missing a workout, that means you have created a tie between morality and working out. Morality tied to working out makes behavior changes that align with your mental, emotional, and physical peace very difficult.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to move your body or wanting to improve your health. In fact, those are fantastic goals! So, thinking back to your reflection earlier in this blog post on your previous relationship with diet culture, let’s take it a step further and reflect on your relationship with fitness culture.
- Do you engage in exercise that you enjoy?
- Do you still have punishments?
- Do you still feel any guilt or shame tied to movement or lack thereof?
Before we can focus on how the movement feels, we have to examine the intention behind it. If you go back to making peace with food and having unconditional permission to eat, the fear that arises slowly goes away once you realize that you begin to crave nutrient-dense foods.
There is nothing wrong with being a hardcore lifter, a yogi, marathon runner, or whatever you may identify as. But, this all comes back to the intention behind the movement.
Making peace with movement and your body image does not need to be accomplished at the same time. Making peace with food, movement, and your body are separate entities. These are three separate relationships, but making peace with movement allows you to pour that peace into other areas of your life. If you are focusing on making peace with your relationship with food, do not feel that you have to immediately jump into making peace with movement. This relationship will always be there for you to work on further.
Take a deep breath and sit in stillness to reflect. Get curious about your relationship with movement, with food, with body image. Give yourself grace and do not judge yourself. Entering intuitive eating is all about entering a paradigm of curiosity, learning, and acceptance.
If this blog post resonated with you, listen to our podcast episode “You Have Unconditional Permission to Rest!” to dive deeper! You can listen to this installment of our Find Food Freedom® podcast here on Apple Podcasts. We also stream our podcast on Spotify and Amazon Music!
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