It has been a while because my life went a bit fucked for a bit. And I want to tell you why, but not because I want sympathy, or because I want “good content” in this weird-ass social media dystopia we’ve created. It’s because I think what went wrong is something a lot of us…
IF YOU'RE NEW TO THIS BLOG, START WITH THIS ONE.
Before The Anti-Fitness Project began, I was a pretty normal personal trainer. Most of my clients came to me to lose weight, and even though I didn't push it as a goal (preferring to use the words "healthier" instead of "thinner"), I helped them do just that.
This blog will help you create a better relationship with movement and your body by sharing a journey. Most of us start from the same point in a fitness journey: we know logically what we SHOULD do to get fitter and healthier, but actually being able to do it is a whole different thing.
Back in 2013, when I owned a gym, half of my job was giving nutrition advice; Practically everyone got the same guidance because their goals were ALWAYS, 1) get thinner, 2) get healthier, or 3) all of the above.
I didn't push a specific diet or advocate eating particular foods, instead, my advice was based on the current Western scientific view that energy balance and eating a wide range of foods in moderation are the keys to eating 'right'.
I'm still writing this blog as if it were 2013. And at that time, "health" held a different definition for me than it does today. Back then, I'd say a person was healthy if they were free of disease, able to move well, and function as a productive member of society.
Ask any Fitness Industry or Weight Loss professional what the key to behaviour change is, and they’re likely to give the answer, “education”. If I was given a single french fry for every time a government health policy told us that, “People just need to be more educated”, I’d be able to compete with McDonalds’ entire global operations by now.
Last time, I spoke about living life in a more process-orientated, rather than goal-orientated way. And how when trying to get what you want, this change of approach might work out better than diligently crafting SMART goals, which in my experience, tend to achieve F-all. I did personally find much of this goal-acting rather than goal-chasing system worked, so is something I still do today.
It’s 2018… Let’s start with a quick recap as to where the story’s at so far…
…I was a personal trainer who owned a gym with my personal trainer brother. We taught our clients that even though they don’t need to be thin, it’s probably healthier to be. Our philosophy was that the best path to health and happiness is eating and moving in moderation whilst respecting your body by being gentle with it. And even though my very own eyeballs showed me the evidence that this way of life is practically impossible for most people (including myself) to stick to, like most gyms, we just kept giving it out anyway. Our advice to people who couldn't keep it up was to try and create better habits and design a stress-free life.
It was a Saturday afternoon in late 2018, and I was bored. The gym I owned with my brother had closed a few months before, leading me to move back to my hometown. All my belongings were in boxes in my parent’s garage, and I found myself searching through their bookshelves to find something to do.
In essence, mindful or intuitive eating is about honouring our body by trusting the signals it gives us about when, what, and how much to eat. All of this is f*cking amazing advice for anyone looking to create a kinder relationship with food and their body. If you’re just dipping your toe into body positivity and just beginning to learn how to f*ck off diets for good, then you MUST spend time immersing yourself in as much information about diet culture and its influence on our society as possible. It’s a vital first step towards changing your life so please don’t skip this part, and don’t worry, I’ll also be coming back to the topic often.
2020 was a year of me trying to make Intuitive Eating fit into my life. I bloody loved the idea of it; Be guided naturally by my body into making gentle food choices that organically supported my well-being. Who wouldn’t want that eating utopia? And it all seemed so rational too. Maybe that’s another reason why my little science-led brain loved it. After all, it doesn’t make any logical sense that my body or mind would persuade me to eat a diet that would harm me.
If you’ve decided you’d like to move away from the heap of toxic bullshit known as diet culture, that probably doesn’t mean (as some suggest) that you simply want to stop taking care of yourself. You still want to eat right and move right, right? Right. But it always seems as if once we stop dieting, the only healthy eating recommendations then come from the intuitive eating movement. But what if the food decisions that we make intuitively from our body’s natural desire for health actually come from governments and Big Business instead?
I started to write a blog today about how healthism. But then I realised that to dive straight into that would mean missing a really fricking important section from the Anti-Fitness tale.
One of my first memories is at three or four years old at the local GP surgery and hearing the doctor say to my mum, “I’m sorry Mrs Geary, but Dominique (that’s me!) is unlikely to grow more than 5 foot tall.” And I remember thinking, “And?!!”. I didn’t see being short as any more of a problem than being blonde or having fingernails. It just… was.
When I owned a gym, it was my aim to help my clients become fitter and healthier. Once the gym closed in 2018, I took my fitness services online and started to create programmes with the same goals in mind.
Even though making people thinner was never the aim of my programmes, I assumed, like many, that being fitter and healthier would probably come with the side-effect of making someone thinner. And I wasn’t mad about that. After all, being thin has been an aspirational body shape in our culture for hundreds of years now, so if it happened, it wasn’t a bad thing.
