Healing Space | Stop punishing your body

Exercise or diet that punishes the body can add negative emotions to the body’s existing burden. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

By now, we all know how to eat, what to eat, when to eat and what not to eat. We all also know about exercise, the importance of movement, and its impact on blood sugar and pressure and the heart. Between doctors, nutritionists and fitness experts, with some variations, the information is basically the same – eat fresh, low sodium, low sugar, unprocessed foods with a balance and variety of nutrients, and move. So, why can’t we simply do it? Because the difference between knowing health and living healthily is in the mind.

When we take all this information about what the body should and shouldn’t do, we treat it like an errant student. Imagine your body is in school and every single day all you get is a strict humourless regimen - sit straight, eat your greens, run around the ground. You might even reach your optimal weight, but you are filled with resentment, anger, frustration and feel constricted. The fittest bodies today are also the angriest bodies. How energetic you feel is not a true measure of how harmonious you feel.

The body is the seat of emotion, as the Buddha pointed out, as did Bessel Van der Kolk in his book Body Keeps the Score, and as other researchers too have. This is not new information. The things we feel and react to get stored within the physical structure. Our bodies store our anger, pain, stress, humiliation, embarrassment, abuse, but even our joy and emotional highs. This is why we get headaches or backaches or feel nauseous or light-headed when we are most stressed. We cannot put our bodies through gruelling schedules and expect to feel aligned. Exercise gets the endorphins going, adrenaline pumping, but that is to the end of aggression. We have to get things done, we have to put this energy somewhere. The body is in constant flight or fight mode, alert to sensory input at all times. When we are emotionally grounded, not afraid, or stressed, or tensed, our body relaxes, as do our emotions, pulse, heart and breathing rates. Measuring your health by aggression will give you a very different measure from measuring the health of your body by its repose.

It is not necessary that only a body that appears to be in peak photoshopped fitness mode is a resolved body. For instance, models and athletes who have maintained a gruelling fitness schedules during their careers, often gain weight when they leave the profession and begin to focus on themselves, their mental health, families, and what gives them joy. This is also true of victims of abuse. When people begin to heal their minds and access their true emotions, they may end up gaining some weight or adopting a more relaxed but balanced diets. For instance, they may move from keto to a balance with carbohydrates and necessary sugars. As long as their base parameters like blood sugar, pressure and exercise and diet are within a healthy range, the shape and size of the body should not matter. It should not matter whether you have a six-pack ab or not. This is because the body that has held work or personal pressure in for so long, under such high constriction, in the aid of peak performance, begins to release the emotional pressure when it gets a chance.

This is also the body healing emotionally and is a process we have to allow. A better way to approach fitness is to listen to the body. Listening to the body does not mean giving in to its every urge. It also means understanding where cravings come from, what emotional lack they seek to fulfil. If you are snacking because you are lonely, it is more important to understand and resolve your loneliness and its impact on your body, than it is to stick to a diet that cuts out specific food groups. This is because the latter may not be a schedule you will be able to stick to until you address the loneliness. A solution offered may be, go for a walk at the time when hunger pangs strike. However, if the root cause is loneliness, the walk can emphasise and make you feel more lonely, and result in greater cravings. If you understand your loneliness, you might join a walking group or an activity group, make new friends, and thereby resolve the need to snack much better.

Simply punishing the body for what seems to be its errant cravings is a self-defeating exercise and one that alienates you from your body. Instead, it is important to embrace the urges, impulses and emotional needs that sit in your body and work on resolving them one by one. This kind of harmonious evolution has, in the long term, a far greater effect on your overall health, which should always include the health of the mind.