I am reminded today that the primary perceived role of personal trainers is to help people lose weight. However, let it be known that some personal trainers focus on many other priority items such as injury prevention and recovery, sports performance, or diabetes management to name a few.I happen to love to work with women around body image. Helping women and girls develop a strong inner belief about their beauty is what makes my heart sing. "The Body Positive movement, started by Dr. Deb Burgard, focuses on defining 'healthy weight' not from a generic height/weight chart or even by arbitrary Body Mass Index cut-offs, but rather as the weight your body is when you are living a reasonable life. The practice of the Body Positive message is not in focusing on weight at all, but rather the decisions you make day-today about how you parent yourself and meet your needs." Here is where it gets tricky.
We can be obsessed with an ideal that is not realistic for our life circumstances and body type, but we can also self-sabotage to the point where any attempt we make to feel better about ourselves ends up getting flushed down the toilet along with our sense of self-worth. There is the over-striving to please a peer-pressured and media driven society, and then there is the horrible consequences of hating ourselves so much that we don't even remember what it means to have a day where we are proud of who we are outside our own skin.
Where do you fall? "Who am I and how do I make a difference in the world?" has been replaced with "What should I look like and what image should I project?" (Kearney-Cooke & Striegel-Moore, 1992, p. 99).
How is your perception of your body or the energy of your health taking you away from how you are making a difference in the world?
Now that is something to chew on!
