The great lock-in

I saw a TikTok the other day about September 1st being the great ‘lock-in’.

Basically, it’s 75 days of focusing on calorie counting, step targets and daily weigh-ins, with the intention of it all ‘paying off’ by the time it’s summer here in the Southern Hemisphere. 

When the weather gets warmer, though it’s exciting to look forward to longer evenings, beach trips, and actually getting out of the house a bit more - it’s common to also have that underlying dread of ‘ughh… people are gonna see my body.’ 

Often, we assume that if we don’t like something about ourselves and we’ve got the ability to try and change it, we should. So therefore, if we think we’d look better if we lost a bit of weight - then that’s what we should be trying to do. 

I think there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to lose weight, or preferring your body to look a bit leaner, but it’s the way that we go about it that can sometimes be counter-productive to what we really want.

I used to think that I’d look better if I was a bit more toned and lost (just a few) kilos, so I’d try all these silly diets and do ‘toning’ workouts (which aren’t a thing, by the way) expecting to magically feel more confident in my body. That was when I was about 8 kilos lighter than I currently am. 

As part of my job, I have conversations about body image with all sorts of people - and one thing that I can tell you with certainty, is that body image is something that people of every kind of shape and size you can image struggle with.

It sounds disheartening, or maybe we can be in denial that we’d feel that way if we looked the way that we think we want to look (she’s just being silly, if I looked like that I’d walk around naked) - but it can also be freeing. 

When I heard my personal trainer colleagues - sculpted, fit looking men and women - endlessly pick apart their appearances and their bodies in the team room of gyms where I used to work, I was so shocked at how hopeless it all seemed. People were coming to us, because they struggled with their body image - yet here we were, never feeling like we were good enough. 

Now what I remind myself and my clients of, is that it doesn’t f-ing matter, what you look like, because those thoughts will still get you.

Now, we can remind ourselves that even if the urge to lose weight for summer is creeping upon us, giving in to it doesn’t mean that we’ll feel any better in our bodies. 

If feeling better in our bodies is something that we want, we have to work on that separately to trying to change them. 

That doesn’t mean you can’t lose weight or do anything to change your appearance at all (I’d be a massive hypocrite to say that) - but it means that if you do choose to do these things, you’re not choosing to like yourself or consider yourself to have more value as a person than if you didn’t. 

Whether or not you choose to ‘lock in’ for summer,

Don’t expect it to be the magic pill for feeling good about your body that it’s sold to be.

That’s it from me today!

Bye for now,

Lx