No Sweat

 YES!!!  THIS BOOK!!!

If you are frustrated with your body, if you have poor body image, if you hate exercise and hate the gym, and especially if you’re procrastinating going to the doctor because you don’t want another lecture, then this is the book for you.  Michelle Segar gets it.  THIS is the book everyone should be reading in phys ed and in medical school.  It talks about the difference in mindset between those of us who feel locked in struggle with our own bodies, and those of us who thrive on exercise.

I’m a marathon runner who used to have fibromyalgia, thyroid disease, and migraines.  I also used to be obese.  If anyone understands the complicated combination of negative attitudes toward physical fitness, I am that person.  Segar understands that the missing key is how we feel about the very idea of moving our bodies.  When we think it’s a chore, that we “should” do it, that we’ll be lectured if we don’t, or that it feels physically awful, then there’s no way we’ll do it.  That’s deeply sad if moving differently is the only way to release ourselves from chronic pain, stress, and/or depression.
Recovery and healing count toward ‘physical activity’ too.  Speaking from experience, physical therapy can be an exhausting workout.  For some of us, we have as far to go from minus 1000 to zero, as others do to go from wherever they are to a marathon.  I can also speak from experience when I say that zero feels like a victory when you finally get there.

No Sweat starts with what to do when exercise feels like failure and humiliation.  What do you do when you’ve already made so many commitments you weren’t able to keep?  How do you trust yourself to make more, when you’ll probably just let yourself down again?  Segar cites a study saying that those whose motivations to exercise included “weight loss” and “better health” spent the least amount of time exercising, up to 32% less time than people with other fitness goals.  We’re not able to think about the long-term future in any meaningful way, and if we want to succeed, we have to frame it in a way that feels like immediate gratification.  For instance, my main reason to exercise every day is that I feel like a broken box of dry noodles before my workout, and then afterward, I feel like Mary Lou Retton on a sugar high.  That only became my motivation several months after I started, though.  The first several weeks didn’t feel good at all!  I just believed that eventually it would, and I kept going long enough to prove it.
​
“It’s time to stop choosing the wrong reasons for exercising,” says Segar.  Emphasis hers.  This is just from the first chapter of the book, and it gets better from there.  She is absolutely right.  For some strange reason, everyone seems totally obsessed with body image issues right now.  That doesn’t click with me.  Whatever I look like, deal with it; it’s none of my business what other people think of my appearance.  What works for me is to tune into how it feels to live inside my body every day.  That used to be a place of constant pain and confusion.  Once I learned to change my body composition and my postural alignment, once I fixed my nutrition and my sleep issues, I learned to tap into the natural analgesic (pain-relieving) effects of exercise.  Instead of pain, I had a glowing, energized, pain-free feeling that lasted for hours each day.  It changed my life.  My motivation won’t be the top one for everyone, but everyone can have something.  Whether that’s time for some private headspace, the resurrection of a buried passion like dance or yoga, a way to exorcise anger like kickboxing, or something else, reading No Sweat can probably help you find it.

---