Moving Your Body Without Turning It Into A Weight-Loss Project
By an anti-diet, HAES-aligned Registered Dietitian, yoga and pilates instructor, and athlete here to help you heal your relationship with movement, one rooted in compassion rather than punishment.
I have a storied history with movement.
I've pushed my body.
I've shown up for early morning sessions in the dark and the cold, long before the rest of the world was awake, because that's what I chose to do, out of dedication to sport and movement that I love.
I've also spent days flat on the couch, unable to move much at all due to fatigue and dizziness, when my gut rebelled against everything I ate, and my nervous system ran on fumes.
I've had injuries that sidelined me for months.
I've had days where a slow walk around the block was the most my body could muster — and I've had to figure out how to manage and make peace with that.
What I've learned through all of it — as a practitioner, a movement instructor, and a person living in a sensitive body — is that our relationship with exercise is almost always about more than just exercise.
For most of us, especially those who've been indoctrinated into diet culture (who in the Western world hasn’t been?), movement got tangled up somewhere along the way with punishment, compensation, and the relentless pursuit of a smaller body.
Untangling that is some of the most worthwhile work I know.
🧘 How Diet Culture Colonized Movement
Somewhere between the step-counter and the calorie-burn tracker and the boot camp class that opens with "let's work off that blah blah blah that we ate this weekend," movement stopped being something we do because we're alive and started being something we do to manage our bodies into an “acceptable” shape.
Diet culture didn't just change how we eat.
It changed how we move — and perhaps more insidiously, why we move.
It handed us a framework where exercise is valuable only insofar as it burns, shrinks, tones, or compensates.
Where rest is laziness.
Where gentle movement doesn't really count.
Where the goal is always, underneath everything else, a different body.
This framework causes real harm.
It drives people to exercise through injury, illness, and exhaustion.
It creates a punishing all-or-nothing cycle where if you can't do the "full" workout, you feel guilty.
It makes rest feel like failure.
And for people with chronic illness, fluctuating capacity, or bodies that simply don't respond to exercise the way the wellness industry promises — it becomes a source of shame layered on top of an already difficult experience.
🌿 What Joyful Movement Actually Means (And What It Doesn't)
First off– while movement is wonderful and can be health promoting– if it’s too hot to handle for you right now, you have permission to not engage in it.
Yes, a healthcare professional just told you not to exercise.
Why?
Maybe you need to process your relationship with it before it can be safe.
Take the time you need.
If you opt to to engage in it, joyful movement is movement chosen for what it gives you — not for what it takes away.
It can be gentle or intense.
Athletes can practice joyful movement.
Strength training, dancing, competitive sport, challenging yoga postures — all of it is available to you within a joyful movement framework.
The question isn't the activity. It's the intention, and the relationship.
It's a simple-sounding shift that's far from simple in practice — trading what will this burn for what will this move me toward?
From how can I earn this to what does my body need today?
From I have to to I get to — and on the days when even that feels like too much, from I get to to I'm allowed to rest.
Listening When Your Body Is Unreliable
Here's where I want to speak directly to those of you navigating chronic illness alongside your movement practice — because the standard joyful movement conversation often glosses right over this part.
When you have POTS or dysautonomia, your heart rate spikes unpredictably.
Certain positions make you dizzy.
Heat can flatten you entirely.
Exercise intolerance isn't weakness or lack of will — it's physiology, and pushing through it the way gym culture tells you to can genuinely set you back.
When you have MCAS, a hard workout can trigger a mast cell reaction.
Exertion is a real histamine trigger.
What you could do last week may not be available this week, and there's often no clear reason why.
When you have a gut that's already overwhelmed — dysbiosis, motility issues, a nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight — high-intensity exercise raises cortisol, shunts blood away from the digestive tract, and can actively worsen symptoms you're trying to calm.
This doesn't mean movement is off the table.
For POTS especially, a carefully graduated exercise program is actually part of treatment — recumbent and supine work, then progressive loading over time.
Pilates and yoga, in particular, have been tremendously helpful in my own symptom management and in the lives of clients navigating these conditions.
The core stabilization, the breath work, the nervous system regulation that comes from slow, intentional movement — it matters.
But it has to be built around what your body actually is today.
Not what it was.
Not what you wish it were.
Not what the algorithm says you should be doing.
Practical Ways To Start Rebuilding Your Relationship With Movement
Ask a different first question. Instead of how much can I do, try what would feel good for my body right now. Even if the honest answer is nothing, that information matters.
Decouple movement from food completely. Exercise is not a transaction. What you ate does not determine what you “owe” in movement. These are two separate relationships, and they heal better apart.
Expand your definition of movement. Stretching counts. Walking counts. A ten-minute yoga flow between meetings counts. The nervous system doesn't recognize the calorie-burn hierarchy diet culture invented. It recognizes sensation, breath, and presence.
Practice capacity, not performance. Especially during recovery — from injury, from illness, from burnout — the goal is building a sustainable base, not proving something. Slow is not a consolation prize. Slow is how you get to keep going.
Let rest be part of the practice. In yoga, savasana is considered the hardest pose (seriously- BKS Iyengar, granddaddy of modern yoga states that in his quintessential yoga text “Light on Yoga”). Rest is not the absence of movement — it is where integration happens. Your body does not get stronger during the workout. It gets stronger during recovery. Rest is not optional.
Your Body Is Not a Before Photo
You don't have to earn the right to move — or move to earn the right to eat.
You don't have to be training toward anything, shrinking toward anything, or proving anything, even to yourself.
At its best, movement is simply how we feel at home in our bodies: strong, grounded, alive, present in the body we have right now, not the one we're working toward.
That's worth protecting, and worth untangling from any weight-loss agenda it ever got caught up in.
Your body, exactly as it is today, deserves to move in ways that feel like a gift — never a punishment.
Need Support?
If you're navigating movement, chronic illness, or your relationship with exercise and food simultaneously, support that holds all of those pieces together is out there.
You don't have to figure it out alone — or force your way through it.