Pilates, tacos and body confidence
i'm ba-ack!
my pilates weekend in austin + a powerful mindset shift for body confidence.
ALIGN SUMMIT
Stretching it out in Austin, Tx with my dearest dance buddy, friend, teacher, Danica Kalemdaroglu
i want to say big thank you to all my clients for your support for my blissful weekend away at the first annual ALIGN summit pilates conference in austin.
this weekend gave me so much life! it felt incredibly good for this distracted mother of two littles to just worry about my own damn self for awhile, and while i got about 12 hours of sleep the entire 4 days and have needed many naps since, i've come back to the studio refreshed and energized in my teaching and passion for pilates. i woke up at 6 every day for class, stayed up late drinking, discussing & dreaming with dear friends, enjoyed some new york normal but relatively long walks in beautiful 90 degree austin, and ate approximately 75 tacos. i would do it again next weekend if i could!
It’s all in your mind
real talk : body confidence
fair warning, this section of the newsletter is about to be even more personal (and possibly self-indulgent) than usual, but it seems to me an important share in the fitness space.
one truth about me is that while i preach body positivity all day long, my own internal monologue is not always so cheery. i am certainly nowhere near body neutrality. while i appreciate those that have found freedom from self-judgment, oppressive beauty standards and all the tragedies of aspirational modern womanhood, that just isn't where i live.
i have always been motivated to seek beauty and to make my body into something beautiful. i'm a deeply physical person, and all my greatest pleasures are physical - listening to music and dancing, cooking and eating, feeling sand between my toes and swimming in the ocean, snuggling soft babies and being kissed by my husband with his strong stubbly jaw. experiencing the world through the body gets me out of my head for a little while and is a welcome break from the swirl of thoughts and feelings that constantly jumble my mind.
moreover, i honestly think a little vanity can be a great motivator towards health & fitness, provided it's not the end-all be-all of why we work out, and as long as our sense of self-worth isn't measured solely against cultural norm beauty standards. my workouts have never been about making our bodies fit into some cookie cutter ideal of fitness or beauty. rather, my approach is to use modalities that reveal and highlight the individual specialness of each body, so that her muscles, whatever their size or shape, look (and function at) their own unique best.
all that said, as positive as i am, i still grew up steeped in diet culture and fat phobia, around women on perma-diets who were taught to hate their bodies, and the body dysmorphia is real (as is transitioning to motherhood and feeling the feels about what the hell i'm supposed to wear on any given occasion that doesn't require leggings).
so when i went to try on my jean shorts and summer clothes as i packed for austin and nearly nothing fitright, i felt frustrated, ashamed and a bit hopeless. for all i do to take care of myself, it still wasn't enough.
immediately i began plotting my weight loss strategy and analyzing everything i was doing wrong. cut gluten, for real this time. stop eating cookies with the children and finishing their mac and cheese, you pathetic, weak emotional eater. all the legumes aren't doing you any favors, better skip those. and, my favorite - your body just isn't the same after having babies and you'll never feel the way you used to. the feeling in my chest was a mix of sadness, frustration and shame. all because a pair of cutoff levi's i bought second hand in flagstaff, az tore a little at the pocket when i buttoned them.
but then i paused and looked at almost-two-year-old Ramona, who is beyond beautiful with her little round belly and long legs and sweet, sensitive skin and i realized the time is now to help fortify her against the trials and supreme waste of mind energy that await her in our objectifying, youth-worshipping and fat-phobic world. already, her brother calls her fat because she is round where he is straight. (which, p.s., is a mystifying bummer to me because we never use the word fat in our house to describe a person. ever. but that is how prevalent and toxic it is that my highly observant and normally very sweet son would pick this up so early in life.)
so, right then and there, i shifted my mindset towards what i'd want Ramona to think about herself, should she ever be faced with a similar jean shorts dilemma. instead of beating myself up for being a normal human woman and starting some major self-improvement project, i realized that i had an awesome opportunity to flip the script of my ongoing self-criticism and show my body unconditional love. perhaps last week's indulgences are just now showing up and we'll de-puff in a few days (this is, in fact, what happened). perhaps the jeans don't fit because all the heavy weights posterior chain work actually works and my booty is finally growing - hooray! let me celebrate these curves because my hips are indeed 4 inches wider than before, and that just means more to love, and more to scoop, in pilates.
now i can think: look at this body, the obvious care that is being taken with it, the magic within it that makes it grow and change and shrink and expand and do its own thing. and i have to say, while i don't think i received a single compliment over the weekend, it didn't matter, because i just felt awesome in my own skin. this is key. i finally felt the body positivity, the love from within, that i talk about all the time, and truly didn't need it validated from the outside world.
the mindset shift, again, was this: instead of getting frustrated and feeling like i needed to diet my way to some aspirational body ideal, i instead saw an opportunity to practice unconditional self-love. i would not force my hips into too-tight things or quietly shame myself about a second breakfast taco. rather, i would let myself be curious about my extra curves, about how an exercise actually felt in my body as opposed to what i thought the results would be.
and while i still don't really know what to wear as a 40 year old mother of 2 as opposed to a 25 year old bartender (the extremes of my wardrobe at the moment), it doesn't matter. with extra size comes extra bearing, a bigger presence, and i am not at all mad at that.
