Building a Positive Relationship with Food and Fitness

My blog posts are usually inspired by something I’ve been dealing with or by something you requested and this one is no different. If I can be honest, like really honest, being about some of the topics that I write about, aka the “Prime Five” (food, fitness, skin, hair, and mind/self care) is hard. The skin, hair, and self care parts are easy. I thoroughly enjoy trying different things with my hair and I think I’ve reached mastery in a lot of ways, I’m totally a skincare junkie, and self care has become a way of life. But the food and fitness thing? It’s rough. Well eating food is easy, I love food. But many of the things I love to eat aren’t great for my health or my waistline. I like lifting weights, but I absolutely loathe cardio. But even lifting gets boring sometimes and I find myself spending more time on breaks in between sets than the actual sets.

I noticed a few months ago that I don’t have a healthy, positive relationship with food and fitness. I’m forever on a quest to lose “just 10 pounds”. I always think about how a few cookies will set me back instead of how I deserve a few cookies for my diligence. When I go to the gym, I’m usually visualizing my aesthetically pleasing goal body, not a healthy body in whatever physical form it may take on. On the rare occasion, I’ve tried to force myself into the corny “love yourself, no matter what” box, but the bottom line is I don’t love the extra belly rolls or the disproportionality that comes with them. So I say all that to say I’ve been actively trying to change the way that I look at food and fitness in hopes that both of them will always spark joy, whether I end up losing those illusive 10 pounds or not. I figured that if they’ve been helpful for me, you might just find them helpful too.

Here are the five things I’ve started doing or doing differently since intentionally focusing on building a positive relationship with food and fitness.

MyFitnessPal Gets the Boot

For those of you who don’t know, MyFitnessPal is a smartphone app and website that tracks diet and exercise to determine optimal caloric intake and nutrients for the users' goals and uses gamification elements to motivate users. I’m all for tracking if one, the system is accurate and two, you’re doing it in a healthy way. After a while, I used MyFitnessPal to keep track of what I was eating, not necessarily to limit myself. Sometimes I just wanted to keep a digital food diary. But there were other times when I used it in a very cut and dry, restrictive way that wasn’t healthy. I later switched to Cronometer, which similarly is a web app for counting calories and tracking your diet and health metrics. 

One of the things I like about Cronometer is that it provides a detailed nutritional breakdown of your vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. This is on top of the basics like calories, fat, protein, and carbohydrates. I’d only suggest that you use an app like this as a meal diary for a bigger purpose (ex. your doctor wants a diary of what you eat to address a food intolerance or sensitivity, you want to know if your diet is balanced, etc). I don’t advocate for any kind of food policing and wholeheartedly embrace the intuitive eating movement now.

Food Heaven

I love auditory stimulation. I love music, podcasts, and audiobooks and I know that what I take in (auditorily, visually, etc.) highly affects me. So I make a conscious effort not to engage in certain things that I know will set me off-center and I actively pursue engaging in things that increase my centeredness. Among those things has been incorporating the Food Heaven podcast into my podcast rotation, where they talk all things food, health, and nutrition. In this podcast, hosted by dieticians Wendy and Jess, they cover tips for making lifelong sustainable changes to improve your health. They’re two black women with black experiences talking health and that’s really important to me because everything is not clear cut across the board! Black women naturally have higher muscle mass, which affects our overall weight. This means that the health of a black woman shouldn’t necessarily be assessed by a white woman or man-based system and Wendy and Jess go there with these kinds of topics! That’s a whole ‘nother topic in and of itself. I also don’t think there are enough black women bringing their experiences to the nutrition space so I’m always going to go up for that. But yeah, just listen to the podcast. I promise you won’t regret it.They also have a blog that I’ve been following for a while if you’d rather read than listen. Perfect segue to my next point.

Bye Bye, BMI

I no longer care about Body Mass Index (see Food Heaven podcast episode “Is BMI BS?”). BMI is a number you get after doing a really ridiculous calculation that supposedly is an indicator of the amount of body fat you have. I’m not saying that I don’t care about how much body fat I have. Aside from the vanity aspect, there’s plenty of research out there that says having more body fat than is necessary to pad your organs and promote health promotes health decline instead. But what I am saying is I don’t care about BMI. For one, all of the research on BMI is based on white men and I’m a black woman. Two, BMI was popularized by a life insurance company in an effort to have leverage in terms of validating who they would and wouldn’t insure, how much your life insurance would cost based on BMI-based life expectancy, etc. I believe in people doing what works best for them, but please do your research before you jump on the next fad train because I wish I had dug a little deeper in 2015 when I started my health journey. I highly suggest doing research and adopting a system that works for you.

Eating More Fat

I adopted a high protein, lowish fat diet a few years ago per the recommendation of a nutritionist (sidenote: Anybody can be a “nutritionist”. There are no national certifications for becoming a nutritionist. Had I known then what I know now, I would’ve done things very differently. But I digress).  The high protein, low fat diet worked well at first but I eventually plateau’d and didn’t change my diet because I didn’t think I needed to. Fast forward to present day, I now know that not only is fat not the devil, our bodies actually need healthy fats to process certain nutrients. So I was literally hindering my body from processing some of the nutrients I needed by trying not the eat a reasonable amount of fat. So to be honest, nothing is really off limits anymore in terms of food groups. I now follow the My Plate method (yes, the same one you and your mama probably learned about in elementary school). I feel a whole lot better eating based on this than based on protein intake.

Build the Mind-Body Connection

We’ve all heard this term probably a million times but I really mean it. I’ve been listening to my body more. Instead of ignoring my knee pain when lifting, chalking it up to being flat-footed and naturally having a misaligned body, I modify the rest of my workout accordingly and foam roll and stretch at home or at the gym. Self-massaging has been a lifesaver and so has yoga. I listen to content that is encouraging and matches the level of exercise I’m doing. At the moment, I love Beychella for cardio and I love podcasts or anything mainstream and not mellow for strength training. I said earlier in this post that I really hate cardio and I literally almost flew off the treadmill a few weeks ago, trying to power walk on tempo without realizing that my treadmill wasn’t set to the tempo of the song. If that’s not proof that it works, I don’t know what is lol.

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That’s it! I hope that you found something useful in this post. Trust yourself, trust the process, and be patient with your mind and body. Thanks for journeying with me, until next time.