Exercising for the Fun of It: Games Slim and Fit People Play

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with exercise for a long time. For years, I sweated my butt off just to lose weight. From my early teen years to my late 20’s, I thought of exercise as a necessary evil that I had to endure in order to tame my thighs. During my 30’s and early 40’s, I even fooled myself into thinking that I loved exercise because I was spending two hours in the gym every day. Maybe I did love doing that. Who knows? But I do know that more is not actually better. Now looking back in retrospect, I realize that kind of thinking cost me a lot of injuries which only created tons of negative associations around exercise for me.

Since I began Intuitive Eating about 18 months ago, I decided to toss out exercise along with diets. I was tired of pounding my body into the ground and living to exercise. Over the past few months, I realize that it’s time to welcome back activity again and in order for it to stay and become a preference rather than a chore, I needed to start thinking differently about exercise and see it from a more useful perspective. In NLP, this is known as “reframing.”

Recently one of the women in my forum asked me to help her get motivated to be more active. After reading her note, I had to admit to myself that I was faced with the same frustrations and was still on the path to finding the answer for both of us.