Food: The Good Girl's Drug: How to Stop Using Food to Control Your Feelings by Sunny Sea Gold

Author:Sunny Sea Gold [Gold, Sunny Sea]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

All that said, physical activity is a helpful tool only if we are able to use its power for good, not evil. “I do have to be careful with exercise,” Anna admitted. “Physical activity always makes me feel better, but it can be a binge trigger, too. I can often feel like a vigorous workout entitles me to more food than I need. Or, if I’m in a workout routine and I miss a day for whatever reason, I can easily come to the opinion that I’ve blown my whole healthy lifestyle. I have to really work to have balance around exercise. I try and stick to forms of exercise that are gentle, or that I really love and can build goals around.”

The same kind of black-and-white thinking that creeps into our minds about food can make us get weird about working out. Bingeing on exercise can be just as destructive and dangerous as bingeing on food. There’s even a type of disorder called exercise bulimia, in which one binges then works out for hours to “purge” the food. That’s a subject fitness trainer Kathy Kaehler knows a lot about. She’s the author of seven books, including Teenage Fitness, and has worked with dozens of celebrities. But she’s also the ambassador for the Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness. Why? Because Kaehler used to be bulimic. She stopped bingeing and purging in her early twenties, but then her disorder basically shifted into an obsessive need to exercise, she told me. “I wasn’t realizing that I was compulsively exercising at first, because it ended up being my job,” she said. “I wanted to have money, so I was working hard; but that meant I was exercising with clients multiple times a day. There was such a negativity to exercise when I was sick. I thought of it as the killer of calories, the killer of fat.” But it’s not like that for her anymore—she’s found balance and uses her history with compulsive exercise and bulimia to help other people find it, too. “Now I really do enjoy going out and riding my bike, and exercise is something that is a way to make me feel good, a way to make me loosen up my body, a way to nourish my joints and my muscles. It’s more of a happy feeling, a positive feeling, an accomplished feeling.”

I was never a compulsive exerciser, but I still make a conscious effort never to think about calories or weight when I work out. Putting movement in a weight-control framework instantly takes the joy out of it for me and turns it into a chore. I move my body on a regular basis not to burn calories or lose weight but because it is an ongoing tool that improves my mood, clears my mind, and keeps me feeling connected to my physical body. Like Anna, I tend to do gentle exercise that feels more nourishing than punishing. I do weight training and Pilates once or twice a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.