Moving My Body For Joy is an Act of Reclamation

I recently started reformer Pilates. A colleague is getting her certification and she asked me if I would be her student. It’s a new skill for me and I’m feeling muscles I haven’t felt isolated in a long time and it’s reminding me how much I love the feeling of strength.

It’s also reminding me of how much I enjoy the feeling of progressively getting stronger. I’ve been working out at home over the past year and honestly, it’s simple, it’s convenient, and it’s an easy lift. But being in the Pilates studio reignited something in me.

It reminded me how much I miss the feeling of lifting really heavy weights.

I talk extensively about my relationship with strength training in my book, The Body Liberation Project. But for those unfamiliar, I used to powerlift competitively. And for a girl who grew up thinking I was just destined to be a weakling, it changed my relationship with myself in more ways than one.

Here’s an old video of me casually deadlifting 405 pounds.

Strength training changed my life because it allowed me to be comfortable in my own skin. I finally stopped caring about being smaller and focused on how cool it was to see myself getting stronger. Lifting gave me a new appreciation for my body and all that it’s capable of. I changed my focus to being strong and capable for life.

It also helped me realize that I’m stronger than I thought and more capable than I thought. This transferred over into every area of my life and gave me confidence to do new things and stop doubting myself.

Most importantly, it taught me to stop attaching my self-worth to my body fat percentage or the number on the scale. I developed the ability to love my body through every part of the journey instead of just relegating to love my body when I was finally “skinny.”

Breaking up with diet culture has brought me freedom in nearly every area of my life and one of the most impactful areas has been my relationship with movement. For over a decade, I viewed exercise as something performed solely as a means of shrinking my body, a vessel through which I could take up less space. But as I healed my relationship with body image, rejecting Eurocentric standards of beauty, I also healed my relationship with exercise.

I finally started thinking about movement as something that can and should feel enjoyable. Diet culture has really disconnected us from the benefits of exercise that have nothing to do with weight loss. In fact, it wasn’t until after I broke up with diet culture that I realized one could have a movement practice if they didn’t intend to lose weight. Up until that point in my life, I had never intentionally moved my body just because. I’m not even sure that I realized that was an option. If I wasn’t exercising to burn off calories or to beat my body into submission, then what was the point?

And there’s a good reason I felt that way. Although the benefits of movement are vast—including reduced stress levels, improved mental health, better heart health, and better sleep, just to name a few—mainstream fitness tends to focus on exercise solely as a means to lose weight, frequently sharing the most effective workouts to burn fat. Why would I consider exercise for anything else? This is also one of the reasons I now refer to exercise as a movement practice.

“Exercise,” unfortunately, has a lot of negative connotations attached to it, thanks to diet culture, but a movement practice doesn’t involve torturing ourselves with workouts we don’t enjoy, and it doesn’t need to involve the gym or weight training (although strength training is a personal favorite of mine). Movement is just what it sounds like—moving your body. That could be yoga, surfing, biking, having a dance party, swimming, or taking a leisurely stroll around the block, among other things.

Kelly McGonigal, PhD, wrote a book entitled The Joy of Movement, in which she states the following:

Around the world, people who are more physically active are happier and more satisfied with their lives. This is true whether their preferred activity is walking, running, swimming, dancing, biking, playing sports, lifting weights, or practicing yoga. People who are regularly active have a stronger sense of purpose, and they experience more gratitude, love, and hope. They feel more connected to their communities, and are less likely to suffer from loneliness or become depressed.

Breaking up with diet culture and reframing movement as something I do because it brings me joy or as is the case with strength training — makes me feel strong, powerful, and confident — is an act of reclamation. I’m reclaiming all one of the many things diet culture stole from me — the ability to be in my body and move for just the joy and enjoyment of it. And what a beautiful reclamation that has been; to rediscover all the ways I find pleasure in moving my body without the thoughts of shrinking my body.

All that to say, I think I’m in the mood to get really strong again. I think I’m ready to feel what 405 pounds feels like in my hands again. It’s going to be a journey to get back to that but it’s also going to be fun. And I think I’m going to take you all on the journey with me.

In my most recent article, Critiquing Women’s Bodies vs. Discussing the Skinny Epidemic: On the normalization of extreme thinness, protruding bones, and the war on women, I talked about the normalization of extreme thinness by mainstream media.

This headline is a prime example of exactly what I was speaking to:

I have also always been very clear that I don’t believe in commenting on individual people’s bodies, especially when we don’t know them, but honestly ever. It’s never appropriate.

However, in reality, there is a monumental difference between critiquing women’s bodies individually and speaking openly and candidly about the normalization of extreme thinness. And without a doubt, we are smack dab in the middle of an extreme thinness epidemic.

I grew up in the days of Tumblr. When we were looking at images like these and “helping” each other strive for this “toned” look, which in fact, is not toned at all. It’s dangerous.

Many of the images of extreme thinness that we are seeing — the visibly prominent rib cages and hip bones — are being flooded through the social media and tv landscape, thrust upon us as not only the norm but something to strive for.

So yes, I dare to speak on the normalization of extreme thinness. No, not in an effort to criticize women’s bodies. But in an effort to free us all from the war on women’s bodies. To free us from the grasp of white supremacy and the patriarchy. In an effort to lead us all towards liberation.

Because undoubtedly, the rise is fascism is correlated to the rise in and normalization of extreme thinness.

Thank you so much for reading The Liberation Collective. I’m eternally grateful to have you here. You can also follow along on Instagram and TikTok. And if you want to partner with me, you can email me at info@chrissyking.com

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