Principles of Joyful, Intuitive Movement

Push back against the diet culture ideas that you have to burn off or earn your food, the focus on changing your body, the emphasis on weight loss, the equating health and weight, the stigma against fat bodies, and other aspects of diet culture. Reject weight stigma and anti-fat bias. Push back against all forms of oppression that interfere with health and wellbeing. Actively pursue anti-racism.

Learn about somatics and interoceptive awareness. Tune into your mind and body. Assess how you are feeling and what sensations you detect. Allow this to guide your ideas about how, when, how much, and how often to move your body.

Discover different ways you can experience joy during movement or in your relationship with exercise. This can be simply feeling joy while you move, but it can also be training for an activity on your bucket list or tuning into how you feel after movement or the satisfaction of accomplishing a goal. There are many ways to find joy around movement.

Being entrenched in diet culture disconnects us from our values. Identify your values so that you can reconnect with them. Then incorporate these into your movement relationship so that it will be more fulfilling and genuine to your true self.

Be kind to yourself. Investigate and explore everything that comes up both mentally and physically. Approach exercise with a gentle spirit so that you can tune into your mind and body and make adjustments. Maintain flexibility around your routines and goals so that you can adapt to the demands and desires of your mind and body.

Think outside the gym! Get curious and creative about what types of movement you can try. Find ways to incorporate things that bring you joy into your activities. Explore the many ways to bring joy and movement into your life.

Break free from the shame and punishment of diet culture and wellness culture. Learn how to identify co-opted language and move away from it. Curate your social media to focus on your self development. Free yourself from being trapped in harmful attitudes and judgments toward mind and body. Identify implicit bias and internalized oppression and take steps to reduce and remove them. Fight against all forms and systems of oppression.

Figure out what you're passionate about and how you can incorporate these into your relationship with movement. Try out some activities that you used to enjoy but stopped. Try something new you've always wanted to experience. Incorporate a hobby into your exercise.

Allow yourself to rest. Let yourself stop after 5 minutes. Allow yourself to move as long or as little as you want. Enable yourself to enjoy a variety of activities and intensities. 

Honor and respect yourself holistically. Mind, body, and spirit are all important and deserve peace and harmony. Your relationship towards movement and exercise is a key part of this. Your personal health journey and cultivating health-promoting behaviors become possible when you honor and respect all parts of yourself.