Exercise is not a punishment. 

Where did we get this idea?!?

There’s an idea in the fitness world that working out equals weight loss.  Of course, this isn’t everyone, but it’s easy to see how people get into a cycle of trying to “whip their body into shape” by being hard on themselves with exercise.  

That ice cream you had last night? You can burn it off!

Have a dinner out tonight? A good, hard run oughta take the pressure off of all the wine you anticipate indulging in.

It’s a terrible cycle – trying to skew the calories in – calories out equation in your favor.

But what if you were to look at exercise as a way to love and nurture your body? What if you were to choose exercise, or movement, that made you feel joy? Movement that made you feel alive, energized, and happy?  

It can feel scary to let go of the bootcamp-style mentality for fear that your body might “run away and go to hell on you”.  If you don’t crack the whip, you’re going to get fat. Your muscles are going to turn to mush.  It’s all going to be terrible and go downhill. 

No! 

I challenge you to listen to your body and soul.  What does it want? What does it need? How can you love yourself with exercise/movement?

Listen to this episode to hear my take as well as some ways I think you can change your perspective on exercise.

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Episode 65 Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to Real, Brave, and Unstoppable. This is your host, Kortney Rivard and this is episode number 65. It’s Monday as I record this today and I’ve been fiddling around with my acoustics. I have a new office back upstairs, and it’s very echo-y and I didn’t really think about that when I moved up. I think I fixed it for now, but if it’s a little echo-y, I’m sorry. And please know that I am working on it!

[00:00:35] So yeah, Monday!

[00:00:37] This episode is not about Mondays, but I thought it was worth mentioning that today I really just felt like I needed to get outside and hike. Normally on Monday I would either lift weights or go for a run after I bring my daughter to school. But I was just really feeling like that was just not what was going to do it for me today.

[00:01:02] So, I went out to Sugarloaf Mountain in Dickerson, Maryland. If you are local, I’m doing a group hike on Saturday, October 2nd at Sugarloaf. It’s a little mini retreat, more on that in a little bit, but we’re going to hike there. That’s where I went hiking today. I did like a seven-mile hike today, and

[00:01:24] there was a lot of work that I sort of set aside to go do that hike, but I really was feeling, I just kinda needed to take care of myself and spend some time connecting with my body and with nature and just kind of do some thinking. It was a beautiful day. I feel so good

[00:01:44] and I’m so glad I did it.

[00:01:50] That’s a pretty good segue because today I’m going to talk about exercise and it’s not what you think. I’m going to talk about exercise as a form of nourishing and nurturing your body, taking care of your body, connecting with yourself and with your soul. Really, finding exercise or movement that feels joyful to you.

[00:02:15] Exercising doesn’t have to be a hard or punishing. And even if you like a hard workout, it’s really about the mindset behind it. So, we’ll get into that.

[00:02:28] It makes a lot of sense that exercise has kind of taken on this role of military-style drill sergeant bootcamp. Like you need to whip yourself into shape… the worry that if you don’t exercise your body’s going to run away and get fat on you, stuff like that.

It’s easy to fall into that because we have been taught that our bodies aren’t good enough the way they are. We get this from the media. We get this from how clothes are sized, from ads for clothes, ads for perfume ads for makeup, ads for you name it…For milk – ads everywhere. Right? There are products that are telling us that if we just had it this way, that everything would be better.

[00:03:15] The other day, I saw a post on Facebook with a picture of Simone Biles, walking down the street of New York wearing a tank top that shows off her “toned arms”. I mean, come on. Right? I mean, there’s a lot more to Simone Biles. Of course, she has freaking toned arms.

[00:03:33] She’s a goddamn elite gymnast for God’s sake. So, do we really need to draw attention to her toned arms? Anyway, that’s a little bit of a side note, but you know, we’re always being told things like “we should all want toned arms like that.” So, we’re always trying to be someone different.

[00:03:51] And when we’re always trying to be someone different, we’re telling ourselves that we’re not enough the way we are. We’re letting everyone on the outside define our worth and we’re letting them tell us who to be.

[00:04:02] So we do all the things. We buy all the things to try to be that person, that person who has the toned arms that somebody is going to take notice of on a street in New York. So, we buy gym memberships. We spend money on Peloton and Peloton memberships.

[00:04:19] I’m not saying that’s bad. Just, we do it. Right? There are weight loss programs, weight loss products, there are diet books. We consume all this info online on how to look younger, how to lose weight, how to get a six pack, how to look a certain way. So today we’re going to talk about the part that exercise plays in all of this.

[00:04:42] I personally love to exercise, but I honestly have to say that I do struggle with not letting it be about controlling weight or a way to skew the “calorie equation” in my favor – calories in versus calories out. How can I make that balance towards the negative, you know, having a deficit.

[00:05:04] I haven’t ever been a real obsessive exerciser where I work out hours and hours on end so that I burn all the calories that I took in. That really hasn’t been me. The times in my life where I have worked out for multiple hours have been what I’ve been trading for an endurance race.

[00:05:26] But if I’m being honest with myself, was that calorie equation in my mind. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if training that much didn’t burn any calories, would I still do it? I’m not sure. I don’t know the answer to that.

[00:05:51] But, to say that I’m not always very aware, even if it’s subconscious of how many calories that are getting burned in a certain activity, I would really not be being very honest.

[00:06:02] And I think a lot of you probably can relate with that. It gets to be the cycle of feeling bad about eating calories that you shouldn’t have eaten and then exercising, but then there’s this feeling of some leeway because you did exercise.

[00:06:16] So then the whole cycle just kind of keeps going. And how many of you have felt guilty for not exercising for missing a day? And why is that?

[00:06:27] So feeling this way about exercise and the reason I wanted to talk about it today is whether or not you realize you feel this way, it’s a cycle that is really not very healthy and is not going to benefit you. And this is something I’ve actually been working really hard on – to choose exercise that my body feels good doing.

[00:06:47] Doing movement that feels joyful and feels like it’s actually nurturing my body rather than just being hard on it and “whipping it into shape”. Basically the thing I want to drive home today is that there are really two ways you can think about exercising.

[00:07:05] The first one is a way to keep yourself in check, you know, whip yourself into shape, be hard on your body. So your body doesn’t “runaway and get fat on you”.

Or the second way, which I personally like better, is to love your body and yourself. Choose exercise and movement because it feels good.

[00:07:29] And I like to call it movement because it kind of opens the door for a lot of other types of exercise that we might not think of as exercise, like maybe dancing in your house, turning on the music and just.

[00:07:46] Dancing it out.  That is movement. And you can, we’re not talking about burning calories, but if you’re wondering, you can get good heart-pounding exercise doing that.

[00:07:59] So what I really want you to get out of today’s episode is a new perspective on exercise that you can entertain. If this is something that you struggle with and if not, just it’s good food for thought, in terms of choosing movement that feels good in your body. Usually there is some fear around choosing option B, which is the love your body and yourself and choose movement because it feels good

[00:08:27] and not because it burns calories. People forget that they actually do get to control their thoughts, feelings, and actions. So your body will not “run away and get fat on you” if you don’t let it.

It also begs the question. What is your relationship with thin and fat? Are you able to love your body and love yourself no matter your shape or size?

That’s a whole other episode, but that’s a really good question to keep in mind if you find yourself afraid of option B, the love yourself option, as opposed to the beat yourself into shape option.

[00:09:10] The first thing I want to talk about today is – who sets the standards that we all seem to subscribe to? Why do we work so hard to try to be like other people? We all spend a lot of time absorbing information about how our bodies are “supposed” to look or what we’re “supposed” to eat.

[00:09:33] And I think we lose touch with what we actually want and what we actually desire and what actually feels good to us.

[00:09:43] So we lose touch with that. We start punishing ourselves by doing exercise that we don’t love because everyone else does it. Or that’s the way that you lose weight or that’s the way that you get a six pack or that’s the way that you’re going to burn more calories.

[00:09:58] We end up moving in ways that make us feel like shit. We ended up maybe exercising at times that really don’t work for us doing things that maybe aren’t even good for our body.

[00:10:09] And the other thing is the exercise that we do love – If we’re doing something that we do really enjoy when we have this mentality, that exercise turns into a slave driver or a guilt tripper. And that’s not good either.

A couple of stats for you that are really eye-opening: I found this online, it’s a CDC study from 2018 that says nearly half of American adults attempted to lose weight between 2013 and 2016.

[00:10:41] And almost 63% of those chose exercise as a means to achieve that goal along with consuming less food. Even more startling, I believe, is this one from the National Eating Disorders Association: 40 to 60% of elementary school girls are concerned about their body and weight.

[00:11:06] That just breaks my heart. That concern doesn’t typically go away., It’s pretty scary to me, especially as the mom of a, nearly 12 year old girl.

[00:11:19] So I want you to stop and ask yourself if you’re someone who is into exercising and into fitness, (whether you emjoy it or not) I want you to ask yourself this question. What is the reason that you got into fitness? A lot of people get into fitness with the idea that the goal of exercise is to manipulate your body,

[00:11:41] and in a lot of cases, the idea that exercise will shrink your body. The fitness industry has really perpetuated this idea that exercise should lead to weight loss. There was an article I was reading the other day about a woman who was kind of like just an average body type. She wasn’t super thin, but she wasn’t overweight either.

[00:12:00] And she would go and run on the treadmill at the gym because she just really enjoyed it. And this guy that was always there at the same time as her came up to her one day and asked her if she was wondering why she wasn’t losing weight while she was running. She wasn’t wondering, and he continued to offer her advice about what she should be doing differently to lose weight running.

[00:12:35] And I’ve been guilty of being part of the exercise-as-weight-loss culture in the past too. I’m actually a personal trainer. I don’t know how many of you know that, but that’s the culture. People go to the gym to lose weight. You might not be one of those people, but I’m just telling you, the majority of the people that go to gyms are concerned with their body or their weight.

[00:12:55] Another thing that comes up too in this is that, you know, we’ve got Fitbits and my fitness pal – all the apps and I mean, I’m not one to talk… I have these too, so I’m not preaching. I’m in this with you! But fitness trackers and weight loss apps, they make it seem like our bodies are these bank accounts where we track the calories in (what we eat) into the bank and figure out a way to drain the account (and go into debt).

[00:13:21] It’s reverse, right? Instead of wanting to bring money into our accounts, we’re wanting to get it out as soon as possible. It’s a very giving mentality, only in the worst of ways.

[00:13:33] The problem with this is, you know, I mean, wanting to lose weight is not necessarily a problem but, I can’t say this enough people. It’s the mentality behind it. The problem with this is that it’s really obsessive and it’s really not enjoyable. And I’m speaking to you from experience and years of obsessive counting calories.

[00:13:53] I have been really working on that. And I struggle with option A and option B I talked about before. I do sometimes have a fear that if I give up on obsessing about those things, that my body’s going to run away and get fat on me, go to hell all those things. Now, logically, I know that’s not going to happen if I don’t want it to, but it can be a little scary to trust myself that way.

[00:14:14] So I’m right there with you in all of this.

[00:14:18] So one thing to remember is that if you want to actually enjoy exercise, your body needs to be fueled. For example, if you want to get stronger by lifting weights, if you want to improve your aerobic efficiency so you can, you know, go hiking with me on Saturday, or have more, more energy playing with your kids or doing things with your friends,

[00:14:44] or even just being able to get those feel-good endorphins from exercise, you actually do need to fuel your body adequately.

[00:14:54] I can’t even tell you how many times as a personal trainer people have told me that they didn’t eat before their workout because they were trying to conserve calories, they’re trying to lose weight. Your body needs food.

[00:15:08] If you’re just exercising to burn your food or to earn your food, you’re going to be left depleted physically and mentally. A better option here is to really look at your food and see what you’re eating? Are you eating too much? Are you eating things that aren’t healthy for you, are you eating to numb your emotions or avoid things?

[00:15:30] it’s good to look at that because in a healthy world, you would exercise because it feels good and you want to get stronger or get those feel-good endorphins, and you would be fueling your body with food that it wants and needs, and that feel good in your body.

[00:15:49] This mentality of exercising should equal weight loss does not have to be the goal at all. And this is for another episode and I mentioned it a second ago, but I just want to touch on it again. If you’re on the endless hamster wheel of managing the caloric bank account, I would ask you to consider these questions:

[00:16:11] One, how is your relationship with food?  What, if you were to learn to listen to your body and you trusted that your body would tell you what it needs and wants?

[00:16:21] Do you think, for example, that your body really wants a half-dozen apple cider donuts because that’s what it needs to feel nourished? If you’re like me and you ate six donuts, you probably wouldn’t feel that great. Just saying. If you’re being honest with yourself, they probably tasted really good going down, but I’m guessing you didn’t feel good after.

[00:16:43] And then also, are you really overeating or are you just being hard on yourself? If you are overeating, pay attention to your thoughts and feelings when you are, or when you’re eating foods that aren’t necessarily healthy (i.e. too much sugar, etc). A lot of times we try to avoid difficult feelings by distracting or numbing with food, and there are a ton of other ways to distract or

[00:17:06] numb. I don’t think it’s good to numb your feelings – and that’s another episode too – it’s always good to feel them. But there are a lot of ways to manage your feelings without food. If you have any questions about that, just reach out. I’m actually a stress eater in that way. And I always forget that because I don’t normally carry a lot of stress really.

[00:17:27] Recently I was feeling very emotionally stressed about some things, and I realized I was totally stress-eating. So, it happens. And remember food is not a reward either.

[00:17:42] So moving on. What if we were to move our bodies in a way that actually felt good to us? What if we use exercise or movement to connect with and nourish and nurture our bodies and our souls?

[00:17:55] How would that change things for you? What if you were to approach every workout you do or did by checking in with your body to see how you were feeling that day? Like, what if you asked your soul, how it wanted to move in that day, in that moment? What if the purpose of working out wasn’t to lose weight?

[00:18:13] What if working out didn’t burn calories at all? I think this is a great question. If working out didn’t burn calories at all, what movement would you enjoy? It’s a really good question and it’s really important also to remember that working out is not supposed to be a punishment.

[00:18:30] It’s a celebration of what your body can do. It’s an opportunity to get strong, feel strong and grow in a lot of different. It can also be a way to connect with other people. When I trained for a marathon a long time ago, I had the best time. It was so much fun because I met the coolest ladies, and we had such a good time on our long runs.

[00:18:52] It was really, really a lot of fun. Exercise is a great way to relieve stress as well as renew and re-energize yourself. So you have more “fuel in the tank” to succeed at what you do during your day, your goals, your daily roles.

[00:19:07] I’m a poet…and I didn’t even know it! Kind of punchy today. Anyway, I also want to say there’s nothing wrong with loving hard exercise. I’ve been a triathlete and an endurance runner. I enjoy that. But your mindset around it is really key.

[00:19:24] If you’re an active athlete and you don’t refuel yourself properly, overtrain, you beat yourself up for missing a workout, or you don’t listen to your body when it needs to relax and have a break; that’s a sign that you have an unhealthy relationship with working out. It’s not about the caloric bank account.

[00:19:41] It’s about reaching goals, being healthy, giving your body what it needs, and giving your soul what it really wants. So how can you learn to change your relationship with exercise?

[00:19:52] How can you learn to enjoy it as a form of self-love rather than a way to punish a body that you deem is unacceptable?

The first way I’m going to talk about is a nod to Marie Kondo. Any Marie Kondo fans out there… does it spark joy? You want to ask yourself if what you’re doing feels good – if you feel like happy while you’re doing it.

[00:20:17] Or, for example, if you’re getting into running and running feels hard for you…because running is sometimes difficult for people who are just starting… but if you feel good after you do it, even if you feel like while you’re doing it, it’s hard but then when you’re done, you feel good doing it, that counts too.

[00:20:35] You just don’t want to wake up and dread it. If you dread it, you might want to think again.

Next, celebrate what your body can do instead of looking at what it can’t do or what it isn’t. Instead of looking at what you’re lacking and what everyone else has, flip that script. Look at what you do have the others don’t have.

[00:20:56] And then look at just generally, how amazing is your body? You know, whether it’s skinny or fat or in between or whatever, look at your heart. How amazing is it that that thing pumps blood everywhere to keep you living. And it communicates with your amazing brain who has, which is fascinating beyond measure. Your legs…

[00:21:19] they carry you places. Your arms… you can give people hugs. So, it’s all in your perspective. And if you really look, there’s a lot there to be thankful for and celebrate and how your body moves.

[00:21:32] Don’t let other people take away your power. Don’t let what you see everywhere advertised as the “ideal body” make you wish you looked different. Don’t let that tell you what you’re worth. Cause that’s just not right.

So next, look at food and exercise as a way to nourish and nurture your body.

[00:21:52] Not to punish it. Usually, the exercise-as-punishment idea starts with feeling like you’ve rewarded yourself too much with food. And food is not a reward. As I’ve mentioned, food is a basic human need. And if you start to tune into what your body’s actually asking you for, you’re going to want to start feeding it foods that are nourishing. It doesn’t mean you can’t splurge and have treats,

[00:22:15] but the goal is just to break this cycle. If you’re human, you’re going to have baggage that causes you to think thoughts and feel feelings that make you feel uncomfortable. For example, we don’t like to feel sad. We don’t like to feel stressed. So, food a lot of times can be a way to avoid those feelings or to take the edge off.

[00:22:34] So just be aware of that. And this can just become a way of being over time. And then you’re in this cycle of rewarding with food and punishing with exercise. So, the gist of that is just to pay attention to your body.

[00:22:44] Learn to notice when you’re eating to avoid something. Pay attention to the physical cues your body is giving you and then ask yourself what movement would feel good for me? What would I enjoy? And if I’m not enjoying my movement, why is that? 

[00:23:01] Stop comparing yourself to other people. This one is huge friends.

[00:23:05] Look in the mirror. Do you like what you see? If not, why? How do you wish you’re different and why do you wish you were different? The greatest work that we can do in our lives truly is to love all of who we are. When we compare ourselves to other people, we aren’t living the life we’re meant to live. And we can’t be happy because we’re totally out of alignment.

[00:23:26] So instead, look in the mirror and say, I approve of you. If you can say, I love you and not meet resistance. That is amazing. And do that. Otherwise, I approve of you and work yourself up to I love you. Eventually, you’re going to be able to do that. You’re going to be able to say that and mean it.

Next, accept that your body is not going to look like anyone else’s. You’re unique.

[00:23:50] And that is a good thing, not a bad thing. Whoever put the crazy idea into our heads that some bodies are more beautiful than others truly just needs to go away.

[00:24:00] Remember, your body is not going to run away from you and go to hell if you don’t punish yourself with exercise. Most people think that if they stop being hard on themselves with exercise, they’re going to get fat or they’re going to lose muscle tone or whatever it is.

[00:24:18] It only has to be that way if you let it be that way. I mentioned being able to control your thoughts…I talk about this on the show sometimes where, you know, your thoughts, create your feelings, which create your actions. So, if you’re aware of those things and if you’re really self-aware about what your body’s asking you for, it doesn’t have to be that way.

[00:24:39] I would take a minute to answer this question very honestly: would you rather be miserable just trying to live up to some stupid societal standard? Or would you rather love who you are, accept who you are and be super happy?

[00:24:53] Just think about it – when you love all of yourself, you’re going to naturally want to nourish and nurture your body. It doesn’t mean you can’t want to get healthier or stronger or exercise or do races or go to the gym, but it means you’ll approach this from a place of love and care rather than military-style bootcamp.

[00:25:14] Also, if you decide that you’re going to get fat if you give up the punishment mentality, you’ve heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy. We get what we’re committed to.

The last one I have for you is to commit to treating your body like you’d treat someone that you love and care about. This changes everything friends.

[00:25:34] A couple of years ago, I was looking in the mirror and I was just trashing myself. It was so bad. And I realized it though. I caught myself in the moment and said to myself, I would never, ever talk to my daughter in this way. It actually made me cry because I was being SO mean to myself. I vowed in that moment that I was going to work on this. I didn’t say I was going to not ever do it again, because

[00:26:00] that probably wouldn’t have been realistic at the time, but I vowed that I would work on it. I committed to working on it. I can honestly say that while I’m not perfect, I am so much better at it. I’m SO much better at it. And I work on it every day.

[00:26:17] I just want to drive this home. I just want you to have a new perspective that you can think about. Do you want to go through your life, punishing your body, trying to whip it into shape, or do you want to go through your life really caring for your body and being kind and loving towards it and moving it in the way that it wants to be moved and feels good being moved?

[00:26:37] It can feel scary to take option B. I know this. It can feel scary, but I know you can do it and I can too. We’ve got to stick together, ladies.

All right. I hope that was helpful! I mentioned my hike. If you’re local, shoot me an email kortney@kortneyrivard.com. We’re going at 10 o’clock this Saturday, October 2nd, at Sugarloaf mountain in Dickerson, Maryland.

[00:27:03] It’s a beautiful place to hike. I was just out there today. Gorgeous! We’re going to do like a two to three-mile hike and do some great discussion about how to feel complete just as you are without needing to punish yourself through exercise or without needing to lose weight, to find completeness in who you are right now.

[00:27:23] So we’re going to talk about that while we hike. It’s going to be so great so get in touch with me.

All right, friends. Thanks for tuning in. I will see you next week!

Resources

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