YES, YOU CAN EXERCISE!

As a young girl, I was very active. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. As kids, most of our free time was spent in the great outdoors using our imagination and channeling it to physical play. In addition to free-play physical activity, I also participated in organized sports. I played on the school teams for basketball, volleyball, and track and field, and on weekends, I played in a soccer league.

Even at a young age, I loved how exercise made me feel: invigorated and alive. It was a place I could lose myself for an hour or two and push myself to my limits. What I know now is that I loved the endorphins and the chemical change in my brain when I exerted my body. Now I see that exercise, even at that young age, made me a happier, more confident kid and fostered a strong foundation for mental and physical health into my teen and adult years.

Through my 20s, I lived through a period of extreme diet culture. As many young women do, I got caught up in the idealistic beauty standards presented in our media message and I wasn’t accepting of my body. I used exercise as a tool to achieve my thinness goals and it started to taint my joy for movement.

On yet another quest to lose weight, I decided I’d give running a try. I figured that if all the runners on the front of magazines were lean, I could be too. On the first night of my new running clinic, I was terrified but was completely taken aback to learn that my new run leader was a plus-size woman. She was the first plus-size athletic representation I’d ever seen.

Her name was Chris and I trained with her for more than 12 weeks to the 5K finish line. She trained me like an athlete, never once mentioning my body size or the limitations I thought I had. Chris profoundly changed my life. I ran that 5K race, then many 10K races, then half-marathons, then transitioned into triathlons. I cycled long-distance events. I stopped dieting and started believing in myself at the size I was and started living my athletic dreams in the body I had. I eventually left my career to pursue fitness full-time to show others that no matter what they think their limitations are, they can still enjoy the power of physical movement.

Maybe your struggle isn’t weight, but whatever it is, accepting and adapting to how your body moves is absolutely possible. Meeting Chris made me realize that if one person can impact me so greatly with the power of her representation, then what would the world be like if fitness magazines and health and wellness bookshelves accurately represented the population at large? What if people of all ages, abilities, sizes, and ethnicities were included? What would the impact be if representation was commonplace and normative bodies became all bodies?

I believe representation is the gateway to accessibility and, ultimately, global health and wellness. This book is dedicated to the people who long to see themselves in fitness and who long to be inspired and motivated by a likeness of themselves. Representation shows us what’s possible.

I hope this book shows you that fitness is possible in your life.

LOUISE GREEN

(Instagram: @louisegreen_bigfitgirl)

DK
..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
44.211.117.101