Why Fitness and Nutrition Feel So Complicated

Sometimes I think we make fitness and nutrition more complicated than they need to be.

"Easy for you to say; you have a degree in this, and you've worked in this field for almost a decade. The rest of us don't have that knowledge and are supposed to eat low-carb and go on 74 walks a day one day, low-fat and nothing but short intense workouts the next," you might be thinking, and I get that.

But I firmly believe the barrier to entry feels so steep by design: if the world keeps you believing there's a secret or, "one weird trick," then you won't trust your own body or yourself, and you'll hand over whatever you have to restore that feeling of competence that seems to be locked in a golden tower.

It's a nefarious scheme based in power, affecting us all (but not all of us equally, because it's certainly an easier ideal to achieve if you're only a slight variation on the standard and have the means to modify). And who's winning?

It most certainly isn't the people allegedly being helped.

Who wins in this scheme? The people keeping us small, unsure of ourselves, uncomfortable in our bodies, questioning our worth and all that we know to be true. There is a $60 BILLION (with a b, not a typo) industry depending on this dissatisfaction of yours, scrounging and scrambling to do whatever it takes to keep you exactly where you are.

The easiest way to do that? Tell you it's too difficult to figure out on your own. Tell you that only the solution of February 2019 will work; everything else you've bought so far is bullshit. Confuse you into believing that you have no idea what's best for your own body: that you're wrong about how it should look, what you should be able to do, how you should eat, how you should move.

So, it seems big and looming and scary and like you've done it all a million times before and have tried everything. And you probably have, except for one thing:

Pick what makes you feel alive — move in such a way that each bead of sweat is a sparkling reflection of joy, a celebration of the fact that your body is yours, and you can move it to express yourself (or get out some anger and calm down, or make the sadness go away for a little while, or wonder what it feels like now that you've recovered from injury) in whatever ways you choose.

xoxo,
Steph