Fitness and Healthy Eating

Healthy eating and exercise is one of my New Year’s resolutions again this year, because I want to practice self-love. I can honestly say that I don’t want to change a single thing on my body. I want to practice self-care by giving my body what it needs. My body does not need botox, perfect abs or whatever else I’m supposed to strive for. My body needs nutritious food and exercise to be strong and healthy. When I was younger beauty was my main motivation for working out, today I only want to be healthy.

I was struggling with eating disorders and anxiety about how my body looked for most of my twenties. It wasn't a fun way to live. Our world is obsessed with looks and beauty, take a quick look at Instagram and this becomes obvious. No matter how much the beauty ideal changes, the result is the same. We are still told that looks are very important. Imagine how much world change we could accomplish together if we spent that same energy on something else than our own faces and bodies. The obsession with the self in our culture is astonishing to me, it’s not making anyone happy.

We live in a world where much of a woman’s worth is based on how she looks and because of that I’m not a fan of book titles like “The Bikini Body Guide”. That said, I understand why Kayla Itsines is a popular personal trainer, she does her work with excellence! I don’t like the book title, but I love the recipes!

Kayla’s new book is filled with yummy healthy recipes and I love the pictures of the food! I personally don’t like cooking books without pictures. I’m also a big fan of Kayla Itsines’ workout programs so I was very happy to buy her new book this month. The book is exactly what I needed to find some new inspiration for healthy eating and exercise this winter! Thank you Kayla!

The Workout

My favorite workout during the summer is swimming. I like to do a HIIT swimming workout just before sunset. I love doing swimming workouts in the lake because I prefer to do all my workouts outdoors. Lake Ontario and Lake Huron are my gym in the summer.

My workout routine has changed a lot over the years. In my early twenties my main motivation for working out was to lose weight or become fit, it was all about beauty. During my late twenties my motivation changed and became all about performance. My focus was on getting faster,stronger and better. I was focused on getting a better PR every year and winning medals. After getting injured a lot I decided I was done with trying to prove my worth through fitness and sports. It's astonishing what us humans will do to ourselves in the search for meaning and self-worth.


Today my motivation for working out is to take good care of my body. Some weeks I treat my body well, I eat healthy and reach my goal of four workouts per week. On other weeks I eat more cupcakes than green juices and do zero workouts. I have to admit that it was easier to find motivation to work out when what motivated me was fear of not performing well enough or fear of not looking good enough.


Today I'm very content with how I look and I no longer need to have a good PR to feel that my life has worth or meaning. The downside is that contentment sometimes leads me to choose watching TV over going for a bike ride. On the other hand, I still remember what it used to feel like to obsess about my level of fitness. A few years ago I used to work out 5-6 days per week, sometimes twice a day. Today I do 3-4 workouts per week (on a good week). I have a peace, joy and contentment about my body and performance level now that I never want to lose. My body and my strength are gifts to enjoy, but it's not what my body looks like or how fast I can run that gives me my worth as a human-being.


What can easily happen with things like a sport/fitness is that we make it the source that will give us our worth in life. We become addicted to the praise and approval we get from others when we look fit or perform well in a certain sport. But fitness isn't the only thing that can make us addicted when we start relying on it to give us our sense of self-worth. We can get addicted to things like our careers, our achievements, our social status etc. We get addicted to the approval we get from these things so we have to have them.


We know we have become addicted to something when without it we feel insecure, anxious and like we aren't good enough. Good things like our work, relationships, sports etc. have the power to enslave us if we start basing our identity on them. There is a big difference between being good at a sport and needing to be good at it constantly to feel good about oneself.

Fitness Goals

You read a lot about fitness goals on social media these days. I love that we live in an era today when people are more educated than ever about the importance of physical exercise and eating healthy, but there’s another side to the phenomenon. Sometimes I’m a little worried about our mental health when I see how much our culture values “the perfect body” and beauty. You can’t escape the fact that our human bodies need exercise and good food to stay strong and healthy but at the same time we also need to be kind to ourselves to stay healthy.

Our culture values physical fitness and beauty so highly that it makes me wonder what the consequences of this ideal will be. You already hear people talk about “shaming over-weight people”. It makes sense to me that in a culture where we worship being “fit” we will start looking down on people who don’t fit into that ideal. If having “the perfect body” is very important to us we will naturally start hating our own bodies and the bodies of others who don’t measure up to that ideal.

Eating disorders are still something that only happen to a minority group of women in society but when you look at the percentage of women with eating behaviors that aren’t healthy the number gets a lot bigger. A big group of women in society have eating behaviors that are neither normal nor healthy but they aren’t “sick enough” yet to get diagnosed with an eating disorder. I feel bad for all the young women who have to grow up in this culture with such high expectations and so much pressure on them to look perfect.

I remember my own late teens and early twenties as a time when I was not at peace with my own body and did not have a very healthy relationship with food and exercise. I really hope that as more bloggers and journalists bring up this important topic and decide to become good role models themselves this negative ideal will slowly start to disappear. We can’t only criticize the ideal, we have to decide to create a new more positive ideal that we follow instead.

I thought to myself “what could be a better ideal for me to follow than striving for “the perfect body” or “fitness?” I didn’t come up with any good ideas at all, but then I read a book called “Life is ____ .” by Judah Smith. One of the chapters in the book talks about Shalom and that’s when I thought “Yes! Shalom, that’s what I want!” The meaning of the word “Shalom” can’t be translated into one word in English, it means a lot of different things. Shalom means peace, tranquility, wholeness, completeness, prosperity, health and well-being.

I don’t want to waste one more year of my life striving for “the perfect body” or “fitness”. I want to strive for Shalom! I want to strive for both physical, mental and spiritual wholeness and well-being. This means that I will prioritize exercise and healthy eating but I will also prioritize time for rest, enough sleep, me-time, prayer time, time with friends etc. I want my wellness goal to be about more than just looking good on the beach, I want it to be about being whole as a person.