From NY Mag: “Know those women who are liberated enough to parade around the gym locker room naked for an extended amount of time? A hilarious sketch written by Monica Heisey for the new all-women Canadian comedy showBaroness von Sketch celebrates them — and will make you feel incredibly excited to turn 40. (For those of you already there, congratulations on seeing the light.)”

Here’s us on locker rooms:

• Women-Only Spaces and Why I Love the Locker Room
• Why I Left Goodlife Fitness
• A Tale of Two Locker Rooms
• Why Putting “Ladies” on the Locker Room Door Is a Disservice

I sat down at one of the tables in the community centre common area – hot, sweaty, and wanting a long, cool drink. I looked down at my feet, where I’d thrown my gym bag full of my aikido gear, and had a sudden realization.

I’ve grown to love physical exercise.

It hasn’t always been that way. I grew up a girl in the 1970s when, thanks in part to Title IX in the U.S., women and girls were becoming increasingly active in sports and intense physical activity. But I hated gym class at school, especially once I started menstruating at age 12. Being hot and sweaty, and wearing skimpy clothes at a time when I didn’t even know how to use tampons (and pads were bulky) made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. Plus as an introvert, I had an aversion to team sports.

Thankfully my high school had a dance program which students could take instead of Phys. Ed., and I learned that I loved to dance. I also loved to swim, and joined a pool leadership program and trained to become a lifeguard and swimming instructor.

In my mind I still didn’t think of myself as a jock, however. Dance satisfied my aesthetic desire to be feminine and pretty, and swimming didn’t feel like work because the water cooled you off and washed away all the sweat.

Aerobics classes became all the rage when I was at university in the 1980s, and were enough like my dance classes to feel safe and comfortable. I was intrigued by running, but really hated what felt like extreme physical exertion and discomfort.

I used a bike for transportation through high school and university, but again really hated being hot and sweaty – a challenge, since summers in my part of the world are humid.

In my late 20s I discovered yoga, which was a revelation. It was something that I could do that capitalized on my flexibility, but also didn’t leave me too hot. (I did a gentle Iyengar practice.) I also started hiking in wooded areas during my late 20s, and that felt like a great fit: gorgeous surroundings, peace, quiet, and communing with nature.

Then I discovered aikido two years ago.

Around the same time (thanks to my friendship with Sam and exposure to this blog) I became aware of how important it is – especially as we age – to do regular physical activity. Plus sitting is the new smoking, and all that.

But it’s not guilt about my sedentary job that makes me attend six aikido classes a week. And it’s not that I don’t sweat during aikido class – because I do. (And now that I’m bald from my chemo, I notice the sweat on my head more than ever.)

I’ve tried high-intensity workouts in the past year, but the only thing I like about the 7 minute workout is its short length. I also hate the exercises that my physiotherapist has prescribed for my various injuries. The repetition bores me to tears.

I can bear all those things I dislike – sweat, repetition, being out of breath – in aikido class, though. And since my revelation, I’ve been trying to figure out why.

I think part of it has to do with the dance-like nature of aikido. There are physical movements to learn and perfect, and each time you do a technique it’s a new experience, because you may have a different partner, or move a slightly different way each time. There’s always an element of the unknown, of surprise.

Then there’s also the mental exercise that fully engages my mind, and helps me forget how hot or out of breath I might be. It feels truly extraordinary, this love I have for going to a community centre six times a week.

And then there’s the excitement of the fun of it – of successfully remembering and executing a sequence of movements, of flipping upside-down when you’re thrown, or yelling a loud “kiai” when you’re done.

Whatever the reason, it delights me to no end that I’ve embraced physical exercise so heartily. I love the ritual of packing at home for a workout, and unpacking my damp clothes afterwards. I love getting dressed in my gi. I love entering the dojo, and the workout I get from setting up the heavy tatami mats for practice.

Most of all, I love the way I feel after a good class (that hasn’t exacerbated my injuries): flying on an endorphin high, feeling strong and centred.

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Michelle Lynne Goodfellow works in nonprofit and small business communications by day, and also enjoys writing, taking photographs, making art and doing aikido. You can find more of her work at michellelynnegoodfellow.com. Michelle has also written about her breast cancer journey on her blog, Kitchen Sink Wisdom.

The other day I wandered into the Y at 5:45 a.m. to go swimming for the first time in awhile. When you’ve been gone for a bit you notice the changes. They had a bunch of motivational posters and sayings on the walls and floor:

I kind of like these. They’re inviting and happy looking. They invite us to move and promote values like happiness, balance, thriving, and vibrancy. I can get behind all of these things.

But the campaign lost me a little with the culminating idea:

I stopped because I really hate this whole narrative about being “a better you.” I’m good with the idea of becoming better at things: a better writer, a better swimmer, a better cyclist, a better knitter.

But to try to motivate people by encouraging the idea that being physically active will make them better versions of themselves, better people, strikes me as the wrong sort of carrot.

Look, I like the sentiment behind the “thrive” campaign. And I love my local Y because you will never find a more diverse, inclusive, accepting environment to work out in, to try new activities in, to kick back and have a coffee or tea or a sandwich in. And that’s probably why their suggestion that “a better you is waiting” caught me off guard.

Everything I’ve always felt about the Y has always made me feel like I can–indeed, I should–be perfectly happy with who I am today.  I can practice getting better at, but all in all, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with who I am right now.

The rhetoric of being better is part of a popular narrative that no one, nothing is good enough right now. That’s one of the attitudes that keeps us stuck in a state of constant striving, always dissatisfied.

It’s also trading on moralistic language. You’re not so “good” now, possibly even “bad.” But don’t worry, you can always be better at some time in the future. What’s wrong with that picture when we put it in terms of activity? It moralizes healthy choices.

Of course, there is definitely something worthwhile about choosing to thrive. And it may be quite right that we can make our lives better, that we can get better at things, and that there are changes we can make that would make us happier, stronger, more balanced, and more vibrant. But I take exception to the idea that all of that adds up to “a better me.”

If there’s one thing that sets my teeth on edge it’s when people start going on and on about how they’re “eating clean.” I’m not the only one. In “The Unhealthy Truth behind ‘Wellness’ and ‘Clean’ Eating,” Ruby Tandoh argues that “wellness” and “clean eating” are more sinister than they might appear.

Though they don’t cause eating disorders, they can be used to mask them. They depend on demonizing certain foods and singing the praises of others. Instead of proposing moderation, they insist upon elimination and all-or-nothing thinking.

She first came upon wellness in the hopes of getting away from her eating disorder. Instead of calorie counting, the wellness approach was all about self-care and choosing “good foods” while avoiding “junk.” More than anything, it’s promoted as “a lifestyle, not a diet.” Despite no calorie-counting, it’s a quite rigid way of eating:

Orthorexia is a preoccupation with “right” and “wrong” foods. Although it doesn’t yet have an agreed upon diagnosis among clinicians, a spokesperson at beat, the UK’s leading eating disorder charity, told me that there has been an anecdotal increase in the number of people who suffer from the disorder in the recent years, and explained that “this may be exacerbated by the emphasis on what is termed “healthy eating”, which may prompt people to go beyond taking care and moving into fixation or obsession.” Some consider orthorexia an eating disorder, while others place it closer to OCD, but regardless of its diagnosis, its symptoms – anxiety around “Bad Foods”, dietary inflexibility, a concern with physical health at social and emotional expense – seem to be on the rise.

She goes so far as to suggest that “wellness” and “clean eating” are actually a rebranding of “dieting.” They involve the same fat-phobic central assumption.

Fat is as the heart of wellness, though you’d never guess it by the way the industry brands itself. Tess Ward is quick to point out that her “Naked Diet” isn’t a diet diet, but a lifestyle diet, just like the how that Madeleine Shaw separates her calorie-counting past and her gluten-free present. Again and again, Deliciously Ella shuns any claim that her diet is about “deprivation”. Wellness isn’t a diet, we’re told, but something clean and sustainable, far from the baseness of ‘diet talk’, weight-loss and bodies.

And yet throughout these books – the very same ones that tell us to locate our self-worth not in how we look but in who we are and how we feel – there is a consistent, entrenched fear of fatness. When Deliciously Ella allays our fears that “things like avocados and almonds will make you fat,” she leaves that foundational anxiety around fatness intact as a valid concern. When Madeleine Shaw boasts that her lifestyle tips can create a “leaner, healthier physique,” you could be forgiven for wondering where her “be your own cheerleader” pep went.

She ends her piece recommending well-rounded meals and snacks that include a variety of foods from a range of food groups and that give us pleasure.  And she includes a plug for intuitive eating, which works well for me, though not all of us at the blog are as enamoured by it.

This post is not saying that there is something wrong with the foods recommended as part of a wellness approach. Rather, it’s meant as an invitation to think about the moralizing and demonizing of some foods in the name of wellness. Granted, mangoes and strawberries, celery and zucchini, fresh greens and whole grain bread are healthy foods with all sorts of nutritional value.

But if you’re rigidly stuck on the idea that some foods are permissible and others forbidden, and if fat-phobia is the motive behind the method, then maybe it’s time to branch out, enjoy a few things that are on the wrong side of your list, and relax already. There is nothing “dirty” about not eating clean.

Here are some of our other posts about clean eating, detox/cleanse diets, and demonizing foods:

Why Food Is Beyond “Good” and “Evil”

Non-Dairy Ice Cream Cleanse

Living Clean without Eating Clean

Don’t Get Sucked in by the Rhetoric of Eating Clean

 

 

Every time I visit Europe (I’m writing this post in Innsbrook, Austria) I have the following series of thoughts:

Oh, wow. Our hotel has stairs and lots of them and just a teeny tiny elevator. Good thing I’ve got my backpack and not a wheelie suitcase. Good thing I’m in reasonable shape.

Also, look at all the people walking and riding bikes. That’s how we all ought to live. Everyone looks just kind of  average here. Fewer super fit looking athletic types, fewer overweight people too. (I think this even as an overweight fit person.)

This is so different than North America.  Better.

But wait, where are the people in wheelchairs? Where are the older people using walkers? Are there no disabled people here? Not out in public because they can’t be? Because the cobblestones and lack of curb cuts and elevators mean there is no way to get outside? Not better. Worse.

Talking about this with my partner we wondered why state-heavy European countries don’t have more demanding rules about disability, access, and inclusion.

Here is one lovely elevator we did see, to the cable car from the Alpenzoo.  The very famous Innsbrucker Nordkettenbahnen is barrier free.  The website even announces, “All stations from the Congress and up to Hafelekar are barrier-free, so really everybody can enjoy the ride up to 2256 meters.”  Planned and designed by star architect Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid the cable car Hungerburg funicular is striking and beautifully fits with the landscape. Click here for more images of the stations themselves.

My last post about Europe and accessibility: European walking norms, worries about accessibility, with added bonus: statue of baby eating ogre.