New year is a lot. The ‘New Year, New You’ juggernaut springs into action on boxing day, as we’re all prompted to atone for the ‘excesses’ of Christmas (which, just the day before, we were being encouraged towards). Despite a lot of progress, diet culture and exercise are still fused together.
I’ve experienced this myself and can chart the ‘problematic eras’ of exercise in my life. At high school as a nerdy, dyspraxic type wondering why the hell someone thought it was a good idea to give the mean girls at school sticks (when I had absolutely no proficiency/way of defending myself in this arena). Later, movement became linked to weight loss and a way to punish myself for being ‘bad’ and ‘earn food’. Ugh, honestly, it’s a miracle any of us end up wanting to engage with exercise at all. Because of the stigma and negative associations around exercise, when I check in with clients about self-care, I usually talk about ‘movement’.
But exercise and movement also have a tonne of health benefits, something you don’t need me to tell you! From a mental health and healing trauma perspective, incorporating movement can be particularly useful.
Movement can help re-establish safety and presence in the body, something which trauma experiences rob us of, and which is a key step in healing. It can help us manage stress, diffuse our bodies’ fight and flight response and help us gently thaw from freeze. The mood boosting effect of regular exercise has been shown to be a powerful treatment for depression 1* and anxiety2.
We know movement is good for us, but there’s a lot standing in our way from healing our relationship it. Here are some strategies for reclaiming movement, based on some of the things I’ve learnt in my journey.
1 – Find something you enjoy (or at the least, don’t hate)
If you want movement to stop being associated with punishment, finding activities you don’t hate with the very core of your being is a good place to start. Something that actually feels fun is the ultimate goal, but if that feels a long way away, exploring the places your curiosity natually goes to, or the types of things you hate the least can be a useful springboard. Pairing movement with socialising can help with increasing enjoyment and provide social support which can benefit consistency. For introverts, moving in nature and pairing your practice with things you enjoy, like listening to podcasts and music, can also be helpful.
2 – Focus on growth, rather than shrinking
In my journey, discovering strength training brought about a massive reset of my beliefs on the role and purpose of exercise. Finding communities focused on growing strength and lifting more, rather than shrinking and weight loss, felt like the antidote to diet culture for me. Other focuses, or things to measure other than weight loss, could be developing a skill, getting faster, making friends, or just having fun.
3 – Walking counts
It’s easy to discredit walking and think it doesn’t count as ‘proper exercise’. This mindset is often a part of the old ‘no pain, no gain’ philosophy of fitness, which I’d very much like to assign to the bin of history. Walking can be an accessible place to start a movement practice, you can walk with a dog, walk with friends, walk to top up your exposure to nature and sunlight. It’s also an easy movement practice to scale, as you can add weight, incline and speed. Walking doesn’t need resources or specialist training. Going for a walk often helps us get into ‘flow states’ and it’s a form of Bilateral stimulation (think EMDR). Walking definitely counts.
4 – Ease yourself in and drop the comparison
It’s easy to develop long, over-ambitious, movement schedules which aren’t sustainable and then set us on the ‘all or nothing’ track (this can often happen in January when this is being encouraged externally). I love Nerd Fitness’ concept of ‘dial mode’3 which conceptualises movement as something we’ll turn up and down in our lives depending on other stressors, health and commitments. As part of this, ditching the comparison with what others are doing and instead focusing on yourself and what progress looks like for you can also be helpful. Another sneaky way this can manifest is comparing what you can do today to what you were able to do in different circumstances (i.e when you were 20 and were able to run faster than you can now even after a night of heavy drinking and chain smoking). I talk about ‘meeting yourself where you’re at’ so often in therapy that it might very well be my catchphrase, and this seems especially applicable here. If social anxiety is making it too challenging to exercise in the gym, start by working out at home. If your health issues or disability mean you can only exercise for a few minutes and then need to take a rest, or need modifications, do that. In a world which often tells us we’re not enough, or there’s something wrong with us, this is a radical act.
5 – Curate your feed – Inclusive spaces and fitness professionals are gold dust
Curating your social media feed can be helpful in reinforcing empowering messages and images relating to movement. I’ve included some resources which might be helpful for this in the further reading section. The flip side of doing this is that you might need to minimise some of the less helpful messages around movement and mute some accounts (particularly in January).
Reclaiming movement from diet culture and traumatic experiences, improving body image and reducing barriers to self-care can be challenging to do alone. If you want to see how therapy can support you to deepen this work, get in touch to book a free 20-minute introductory meeting to see if we’d be a good fit to work together.
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Further reading and resources
Lifting Heavy Things: Healing Trauma One Rep at A Time Laura Khoudari
Chrissy King The Body Liberation Project
How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom
GMB
Girls Gone Strong
https://www.girlsgonestrong.com/womens-online-fitness-coachingThe Feldenkrais Project
https://feldenkraisproject.com/
Dr Arielle Schwartz Vagus Nerve Yoga https://www.youtube.com/@dr.arielleschwartz913/videos
- The effect of exercise for depression, BMJ: https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-075847 ↩︎
- Can Exercise help treat anxiety: Havard Health Publishing
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/can-exercise-help-treat-anxiety-2019102418096 ↩︎ - Nerd Fitness – the dial mode system
https://www.nerdfitness.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/NF-DialModeSystem-v5.pdf ↩︎
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