“I’m Not Athletic.”

Growing up, no one I knew would have described me as an athlete. Those who knew me as a kid are shocked that running is now a part of my movement routine. That’s because back then, I developed a near hatred for running, largely due to the fact that I was so slow compared to other kids.

I remember in elementary school, when it came time for organized footraces, we were divided into two groups: the fast kids and the slow kids. I was always in the latter group, and my nervous hope was simply that I would not finish last. Furthermore, coming from an immigrant family, formal exercise wasn’t something that was important to us culturally. Going to the gym or pool was largely seen as a leisure activity, something we had neither the time nor money to do.

I see now how experiences like this would affect my view of myself as someone who is not “athletic,” and consequently influence my movement habits as I got older. When I think back to my formative years, it’s clear that societal messages and cultural views influenced my actions around movement and exercise. Just as we discussed in the last chapter on food, this messaging can affect our personal choices in whether we choose to exercise or not, but unlike food, the messages we get in these areas can be more subtle and harder to spot. Let me explain.

As young children, almost all of us moved and exercised. Of course, we didn’t call it that—we called it playtime. We chased each other in games of tag, swung on the monkey bars, and jumped in a swimming pool whenever the chance presented itself. But for many of us, as we grew older, this playtime, and more importantly physical movement in general, fell by the wayside. Always the curious scientist, I wanted to know why this occurs for so many. Was it just a consequence of growing up? If so, why do some people continue with exercise and movement and others do not?

When I talk to my patients who haven’t been regularly physically active in years, one of the most common themes I hear is that at some point in their lives they adopted the idea that exercise and movement are something best done by those who are “athletic,” and that this was simply not how they would describe themselves Vinyl Gloves.

When I dug deeper, I found that those who were even just a little overweight often said that going to the gym felt more like an exercise in negative self-judgment and comparison than a means to improve their physical health Disposable Gloves Wholesale.