I don't think my body was used to that and my back let me know that living in these extremes was not good for me. That combined with working from home, doing a very sedentary job, and the cold winter weather setting in, I probably had never been so sedentary in my life. Prior to starting on this yoga journey, I had been doing some more rigorous home exercises and must have done some workout that my back did not agree with. About a month ago, I pulled out my yoga mat and dedicated myself to doing an hour a day for 30 days as a way to try to heal my back.
If it happens to go down, so be it, but perhaps not making that the focus gets all of us closer to optimal health.ģ0 days of Yoga. Perhaps the way to go about it all is thinking about the behaviors you can engage in that are sustainable and feel good for your mental health and physical well-being without focusing on the number on the scale going down. We also know that weight loss can be done in many different ways that are incredibly unhealthy and damaging to the mind and body. Weight loss is incredibly challenging and most of what we know is that diets can create weight loss that typically leads to weight regain. Let's be clear, being a lower number on the scale does not equal health. Can we love and accept ourselves and still want to lose weight? This is something we talk about amongst our colleagues at Mind Body Health. This is a really difficult thing to balance. She talked about how awful these times were, but she also discussed that at times when she was exercising and losing weight, she did feel better in some ways. She talks extensively about her personal history with bulimia and going on diets. What I loved about this book was Roxane's discussion about her difficulty in fully accepting her body as it is and wanting to lose weight and simultaneously feeling appreciative of the body positive, body acceptance, and healthy at every size movements. It just goes to show that there are many ways to deal with things given how varied our cultural and family contexts can be. I liked how Roxane Gay discussed how that was actually what worked best for her and her mother.
There was a moment in the book where the author highlighted an interaction between herself and her mother that danced around the trauma she experienced.
There weren't a lot of explicit discussions in the family around it. In the end, her parents read her publications. You could feel the love the family members had for one another and the simultaneous struggle to fully be vulnerable with one another. Her parents were concerned about her weight gain and tried to have her go to a camp and have medically supervised weight loss to address it, but without knowing all the underlying factors that led her to be the weight at which she was. Roxane is from a Haitian family and grew up with a mother who would put great effort into cooking food and preparing snacks for her and her siblings. There was an interesting storyline about her relationship with her family.