10 things to do that will stop you feeling guilty about missing exercise
Why have we normalised feeling guilty for taking a day off?
It’s not healthy, but it’s normalised. This guilt you experience when you take time away from your usual training routine (or even simply when taking a necessary rest day). Holidays, the festive season, illness, injuries and life - they’re all likely to pull you away from your routine. This shift in physical activity isn’t usually an issue. It’s perfectly natural and healthy (and unavoidable) to miss your regular exercise to support a wholehearted life. The story you tell yourself about it and the guilt for doing so, that’s where the problems arise. Accordingly, compulsive and compensatory aspects of exercise are both predictors of disordered eating.
Here are 10 tools you can use to move from feeling guilt around changes in your routine towards a more peaceful relationship with exercise. These tools have helped remove exercise guilt from 1000s of people we’ve worked with at ETPHD coaching so I can almost guarantee they’ll work for you too…
Stop tracking calories in workouts (& steps day to day).
This may sound rogue, but take off your fitness tracker, even for a few days each week. Those who engage in fitness tracking may experience higher weight/shape concerns. Cross sectional research suggests that disordered eating symptomology is higher in those who use diet and fitness apps and among those who use them more frequently, than non-users. If this feels impossible for you, then it’s likely even more important that you challenge yourself to remove it. The 10,000 step goal was built on the shaky grounds of a marketing campaign for a pedometer in the 1960’s. You do not need to hit that exact number every day to be healthy (and if you’ve been tracking for a while, you probably know what 10,000 looks like without the need for that external reassurance).
Develop body food choice congruence around training.
Try out different meals before training & reflect on how it feels in your body. Body food choice congruence is the exploration of how foods feel in your body, and body food choice congruent food choices are associated with a healthier movement profile, which isn’t a huge surprise given that physical activity is positively associated with healthier eating behaviors, like increased intuitive eating and vegetable/fruit consumption, and lower emotional eating.
Practice mindful movement.
When training, practice coming into your body, visualising your body components moving through the exercise & taking that time to be in your body (instead of in the mirror criticising the outside of it through body checking behaviours). Mindful exercise encompasses any movement that is done with attention, purpose, self-compassion, acceptance, awareness, and joy. Rather than exercising for appearance-driven purposes, mindful exercise is driven by the outcome of self-connection and health.
As a side note, mindfulness is associated with lower self-reported feelings of guilt and as a practitioner in disordered eating and exercise, I’d encourage everyone to develop a mindfulness practice that works for them (hint: it doesn’t have to look like meditation).
Stop eating higher calorie foods only on days you can train.
Restricting food types to specific days as a general rule is something worth avoiding. Rigid food rules and this dichotomous thinking around ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods increases your risk of disordered eating. Importantly, creating these food rules around training days creates an association between exercise and calorie burn, whilst playing into the narrative that ‘food is fuel’ (food is also pleasure, joy, comfort, relational, functional and so much more). Associating exercise with calorie burn leaves you preoccupied by how much you’ve eaten on days you haven’t ‘burned as many calories’ through exercise.
Develop somatic awareness.
Through body scans, incorporating yoga, mindfulness & somatic experiencing, you’ll create a greater connection with your body. Your drive to move your body will begin to be led by how you feel instead of how you look. Reducing the emphasis on exercising for how you look will again reduce the preoccupation you feel with your body when your exercise routine changes. Improving body awareness is also a viable target for supporting improvements in body image, especially in disordered eating recovery.
This sounds wonderful, but learning to listen to and honour your body is one of the hardest parts of overcoming a disordered relationship with food and exercise. It is very hard to honour your body's needs and wants when you don’t feel safe there, or when you have spent decades in chronic disconnection. So be gentle with yourself.
Actively include rest days.
Rest days are those that you’re gifting your body with rest. Not days during which your hands are tied and you’ve physically no option other than to rest. Not rest that looks like still being in the gym but doing high intensity conditioning instead of weights. Actual days without exercise. Multiple per week. Actively reframe these rest days as an opportunity to practice the softer side of self-compassion towards your body.
If you find this really difficult, consider Cal Newport’s theory of deep work and deep rest (albeit less cognitively and more physically). You can only train with good quality when you rest and recover with good quality. Start here.
Develop compassion towards your body.
Treat her as your best friend, when she’s struggling, offering her kindness & when she’s not showing up for herself, offering her fierce compassionate accountability. Self-compassion is after all, a yin-yang process, a self-kindness balanced impeccably with self-accountability. If you struggle to take days off exercise, ask yourself: what would my tomorrow self thank me for? Resting when you’re exhausted? Or powering through in the face of it?
People often assume that should they show themselves compassion, they’ll lose motivation to exercise ever again, as if self-criticism drives motivation to exercise. In fact, the opposite is true and those who are more self-compassionate experience a greater intrinsic motivation to exercise, lower physique anxiety and lower obligatory drive to exercise. TLDR: self-compassion supports regular exercise from a healthful place of want rather than a less joyful ‘should do’.
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Stop trying to control your body at a very specific weight or size
Gosh it’s easier said than done in a diet-culture fuelled world, isn’t it? But as alluded to earlier, exercise that’s driven by a core focus of aesthetics is far more likely to be a source of discomfort and guilt than that driven through health, joy and your personal values. In fact, those who exercise with a leading focus of weight loss are actually likely to experience a greater eating motivation (i.e. quantity of eating) and disordered eating. Whilst somewhat ironically, those who experience greater intrinsic motivation to exercise are more likely to experience successful weight management (if you needed another reason to focus more on yourself and less on your body size).
When exercise is self-determined, it’s undertaken because it brings joy, it aligns with your values and/or identity and because you recognise the benefits. If exercise is non-self-determined, like in the case of aiming to meet societal standards for external validation or to avoid guilt, you’re actually less likely to consistent with exercise (because you’re waiting on the situation to arise to cause you to exercise, e.g. you start exercising more before that third date or your wedding) and more so, it’s linked to less healthful eating behaviours.
The more you internalise the notion that you must exercise every day to control your body, as if it is incapable of maintaining a healthful (or in your head possibly, a specific size) on its own, with regular (not excessive) movement and healthful eating, the more difficult you’ll find it to take a day off without feeling bad about it. This is a lie diet culture told you to make money off you. You do not need to track every morsel of movement and food, nor exercise every single day, in order to live in a healthful body (and actually, the opposite is far more likely to be true).
Cultivate a better body image.
Exercisers on the whole experience a more positive body image vs. those who don’t - great news. But there are a few important disclaimers here…
Those who rate highly on appearance motivation to exercise may experience lower body appreciation and satisfaction and therefore potentially a less positive body image. Those who experience an internalised thin ideal, specifically the ‘fitness’ or ‘athlete’ ideal are likely to experience a less healthful relationship with exercise, and greater compulsive exercise (compulsive exercisers experience more guilt surrounding rest days and changes in routine). Thankfully, cultivating a more positive body image and challenging your internal narrative may provide a fierce protector against this.
Your body image won’t magically improve overnight or with dieting. It will improve when you put as much intention behind it as you do your macros and exercise. Develop awareness and practice gratitude for your body functionality, manage body checking behaviours and develop body image flexibility (managing the negative impact thoughts about your body might have on your day - those who exercise compulsively tend to score lower on this specific pillar of body image compared with those with a more healthful but committed relationship to exercise).
It is very difficult to feel guilty about not overtraining a body that you care deeply for, respect and value for the life it allows you to live.
Consider daily movement > daily exercise
Yes, train hard if you love it. If it feels great in your body. Yes, follow the principles of progressive overload if you have goals to build strength and muscle mass (big fan). But reframe this idea that this is the sole source of movement for your body that is any ‘good’. Movement can look like outdoor walks, yoga, a Hyrox session, hiking or resistance training. Consider daily movement that nourishes your body, instead of daily exercise. All of this of course within the context of what’s accessible for you.