Fitspo, body image and exercise

I was having a look through my Twitter feed during the week and came across this from SweatyMissBetty:

One of my issues with so-called fitspo is that it’s completely unattainable for a lot of women. Let’s take... tmblr.co/ZN3FptfBEVSy
— Sweaty Ms. Betty (@SweatyMsBetty) February 28, 2013

I was curious about what "fitspo" was, and after a quick look discovered it stands for "fitspirational". I guess pictures of how you want your body to look to keep you on track with your weight loss or training goals.

And so I read the post and urge you to do the same. It says all I want to say about these sorts of images and body image in the media.

I'm not doing this run in order to change my body shape, although I won't lie, it would be nice. While I was recovering I put on a lot of weight. I was in pain for a long time, extremely tired and demotivated. Just walking round the supermarket was exhausting. I took a lot of pleasure in eating a lot of chocolate and the natural result was putting on a lot of weight very quickly.

During the second part of follow-up, I did manage to lose some weight using Slimming World but I soon fell off the wagon travelling to see Olympic events (oh the irony!) and going on holiday to Switzerland, land of cheese and chocolate. And I was mostly OK with that, really. It's hard to be happy with your body, with all these images of "the perfect body that's not yours" being flung in our faces at all angles, every day. But, it was ok, the weeks slipped by and I just got on with stuff and tried not to mind too much.

When I started training, after a few weeks I noticed my body changing, and I liked it. I started weighing myself and being disappointed that the scales weren't changing. So then I thought I'd try changing my diet to see if that would work alongside the exercise. And still the scales weren't changing.

Time for a wake up call!

I'm not doing this training to lose weight, or anything like that. I just want to finish it and reach my fundraising target. Thinking about my weight or my body shape is just a dilution of where my focus should be and any negativity I feel about the scales not going the way I want them to just takes away from what I am achieving. So, I'm not going to weigh myself anymore, I'm not going to look at anyone else's body and wish mine looked like that and I am going to celebrate those distance milestones. The body I want is a body crossing the finish line on 5 May.