(gentle piano music)
- Hi there, it's Kati again,
and thank you so much for checking back.
Today's topic comes from one of you guys
and your requests and you've been waiting very patiently
for me to address this question/situation
that we all deal with, and that is exercise.
How much do we do?
What's appropriate?
If we're trying to recover and exercise was
part of our eating disorder, can we ever exercise again?
I mean these are all questions that come up
from a lot of you, and in all the treatment centers
I've worked in, this is something that, we,
every week we had a whole group around this.
So, I know, it's affects everyday, every minute
for some of us, it's just as bad as our eating disorder,
we feel like we can't do anything if we haven't worked out
and it gets in the way of us actually spending time
with people because we're too busy trying to plan
our exercise around that, right?
Some of you are thinking, yeah, all the time, right?
So,
what do we do?
How much do we do?
What's appropriate?
Well, I'm sorry to say, it's different for everybody.
Everybody's body is different, right?
I'm never gonna be able to exercise like, like her
because I'm me, I'm not her and she might not be able
to exercise like I do cause, you get the picture.
But something that I want you all to remember
is that lifting weights is a good thing,
even if it's your own body weight.
If you're doing little push ups or you're doing,
you know, bicep curls or some leg something,
whatever you're doing.
It is good for our muscles to pull against our bone
because it actually strengthens our bones
and that's something that, oh,
I don't even know the percentage.
I could try to make something up
but I know that osteopenia and osteoporosis
are huge concerns within the eating disorder world
because we don't get enough calcium and nutrients
and our bones slowly break down.
So if you are in recovery, you're following your meal plan,
try to make sure that you're doing some kind
of weight lifting.
I know we don't wanna bulk up, we don't wanna look like,
you know, the Hulk or anything,
but we just want to look healthy.
We want to make sure that our bones are strong, right,
because we only get one set of those
and we'd like to make sure that we're always
able to do what we wanna do, okay.
So that's the first thing.
Make sure that you do some kind of weight lifting.
This could just be two pound weights too, by the way
or something like that.
Now the second thing is, if you're too tired,
don't work out.
Like just the other day, I usually do yoga,
couple times a week but I was exhausted,
my body is exhausted, it's sending me a message,
it's saying Kati take a nap,
your body is fricking exhausted.
You can't do it anymore.
It puts me into submission and if I was to work out,
I'm actually hindering things that my body
is probably trying to fix, right.
Like let's say, you have a cut
that you had to get stitches on
and you overwork your body,
well your body can't really heal that wound,
because it takes extra energy for it to do that
so we have to give it that extra energy.
Does that make sense?
If we have like a ear infection
or some kind of sinus infection and we push through,
you've all done that before, right,
and then we end up getting sicker than we were.
Maybe Pneumonia, maybe we got Strep Throat, who knows?
And that's always way worse than,
oh, I had a runny nose for three days or four days,
I couldn't work out, but now I'm all better, right.
So listen to your body.
That's kinda part two.
So part one, we wanna make sure we're taking care
of our bones, number two, we wanna listen to our bodies
and I know lots of you are like,
this isn't an exercise video, what crap is this?
You're not helping me at all.
But these are things that our eating disorders
rob from us.
They don't want us to listen to our bodies,
they don't want us to worry about the long-term effects
of things that we're doing.
These are things that are important, because we all
wanna be happy and healthy and it takes a little work,
okay.
And my third and final tip for exercise,
what's appropriate, is,
all in moderation.
Usually, at the treatment centers, it was 30 minutes,
that's how long you can work out, 30 minutes.
So, maybe your, you take a nice walk for 30 minutes, right,
that's fine, you do that about three times a week
and that will be fine,
but always remember, listen to your body.
We also wanna do a little bit of weights,
so maybe we do like five minutes of weights
and then we do 20 or 25 minutes of walking
or elliptical or something.
Something low impact because a lot of times
our joints are having a hard time, and like I said,
our bones can be a little fragile,
we don't wanna hurt ourselves.
So that's what I would recommend.
But above all of this, ask your doctor,
check in with him.
Ask your dietitian,
some dietitians also have their master's degree
in some kind of, you know, Kinesthetics
or some kind of medical field.
So you wanna to find out from them,
you wanna make sure that you get the feedback
that you need about what's appropriate for your body, okay.
So just for a review, we wanna make sure
that we do a little weight lifting,
so we strengthen our bones.
We wanna make sure we listen to our body
because it tells us what it needs.
If it's tired, it's tired, okay.
And then we can do a little bit of the cardio exercise
and the weight lifting for about 30 minutes,
three times a week, okay.
But before any of this we wanna talk to our doctors,
we wanna talk to our dieticians.
We wanna make sure that we're healthy enough
for exercise, okay.
And you can leave your feedback below.
Remember it's a healthy, positive, supportive environment,
I don't want like, oh, I do 'X' amount of this,
this many times.
Just say that you talked to your dietitian
they were very helpful, I've been doing,
you know, exercise.
You could say three times a week
but if you're gonna promote, like doing too much
I'd rather it not be on this, okay, you know what I mean,
you know what we try to do here, okay.
And also don't forget to check out my website.
I have a free workbook on there and the videos
and information can't be found on my YouTube channel
or anywhere else.
So, you just go to my website, you click,
there's a little tab that says workbook
and you can download it from there.
And let's just keep working together,
I know it's hard, I know exercise is a big trigger
for a lot of us but try to listen to our bodies, right,
as we work towards a healthy mind and a healthy body.