Loving our bodies, whilst great in theory - isn’t something you can just choose to do when society has a very clear bias towards a specific kind of body.

What I propose as an alternative, is learning to be ‘ok’ with your body.

Just like when you were a child, you didn’t necessarily ‘love’ your body, but I’m sure you were at least ok with it (up until a point, right?). 

When you’re ‘ok’ with your body, you accept that you might not fit into the clothes you used to wear, but that doesn’t mean you’ll stop looking after your body.

When you’re ‘ok’ with your body, you accept that you’re not gonna love every photo taken of you, but that doesn’t mean that the people close to you don’t see your unique beauty. 

When you’re ‘ok’ with your body, you’re more likely to stick to your health and fitness goals - because you’re not desperately trying to change yourself, you’re doing things out of respect for your well-being. 

Not ‘loving’ your body doesn’t mean that you have to hate it. In fact, for most of us, loving our bodies might be unrealistic, but I also don’t think it’s completely necessary. 

When circumstances change and therefore so might the way that you appear - your comfort zone equilibrium is shaken and you believe this puts you in a more vulnerable position subject to criticism or negative thoughts from others. We must get back to how things were! - you panic internally.

It’s all perspective. We want to minimise our risk of feeling like people are staring at us, judging us, nit-picking us the way we nit-pick ourselves, and wondering if they can tell how self-conscious we are.

The little apartment you’ve created for yourself of how things ‘should’ be confines you to keeping everything in a certain, specific way to remain cosy and comfortable for you. Except it still isn’t going to be resilient to an earthquake, or a power outage, or when you realise that there are only so many old sitcoms you can watch by yourself before you realise your life’s actually a bit sad really.

The presence of the Pleiades in the mid-Winter night sky symbolises the cycle of life and death. We acknowledge the lives of those who have passed away, their spirits marked by individual stars. Matariki is a time for remembrance and celebration: to practice gratitude for what we have and honour the lives of those who are no longer with us.

I am lucky and blessed to work with clients of many different ages. Because of that, I don’t view ageing as a negative experience. Something that I’m so grateful to provide through my work are skills that empower my clients through ageing, by helping them develop and maintain strength, agility, mobility and good nutrition habits.

When we look after our bodies and invest in taking care of them, ageing isn’t a negative thing at all, more often it’s our perceptions that make it so.

The fact that you feel guilt is usually a sign of self-awareness, which is a positive thing.

However, from my experience - it is completely possible to be paralysed by guilt without taking action to reconcile whatever you feel guilty about.

I think for a long time I chose to feel guilty about a lot of different things because I thought that being able to recognise where I was screwing up would keep me from repeating the same mistakes.

Ironically, I only broke away from the negative patterns in my life once I chose to release the feelings of guilt I held on to and prioritise self-compassion and overcoming black-and-white thinking instead.

Perhaps the reason why the idea of eating at maintenance can feel pointless or even 'unhealthy' is related to the 'no pain, no gain' mentality that we either consciously or subconsciously apply to our jobs and productivity, that we must 'work hard' or 'suffer' in order to earn something, in this case health, longevity or attractiveness. In a society that pushes us to strive for a place at the top, many of us feel guilt when we're not 'working towards something', hence why actively choosing to accept our bodies at the size or shape that they are (i.e. enter a maintenance phase) might feel like some kind of personal forfeit.

The issue for most people isn’t about implementing healthy habits, it’s about sticking to them.

This is because they haven’t considered the necessary mindset shifts to overcome self-sabotaging behaviours and cultivate a more positive relationship with food and exercise, which is the secret to long-lasting habit change and sustainable results.

This article will outline how to set and stick to habits that help you feel healthy, that you’ll want to stick to for the rest of your life.

These days, it is an act of rebellion to be truly connected to our bodies, when denial and restriction are praised as a form of martyrhood. Hustle culture, 'no-pain-no-gain' mentality, diet culture, purity culture, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia are the external forces that tell us to suppress what we truly desire to meet the demands of a society that expects us to fit a certain mould of being.

Of course, it is a struggle to 'listen to our bodies', like we are so often told to when in so many other aspects of our lives we are essentially told the opposite.

Whilst nervous system regulation, breath work, yoga and somatic exercises are ways that we can practice embodiment and re-claim autonomy over our sensational experiences, it's ironic when they are somehow marketed as tools to make us 'hotter' and 'more efficient workers' when the pressure to be such things is what dysregulated our nervous systems in the first place.

When it comes to making long lasting behaviour changes with nutrition, I tend to believe that the issue isn’t usually a lack of knowledge around nutrition, it’s more likely that there’s a struggle with finding balance.

What even is ‘balance’?

It’s this term that keeps getting thrown around that seems to mean discovering the elusive ‘right amount’ of work and play, or sinful and saintly.

Is being cool and laid back all the time cultivating the opposite for our mental health?

Perhaps we do need more avenues to share, express, connect, and be a little OTT.