Self-Care Roundup

The best companion posts from the Fixing Fitness with Kelly podcast, highlighting new perspectives on what "self-care" means.

Can you out train a desk job?

Popularized studies have examined how much physical activity per day is needed to reduce the risk of various lifestyle diseases. But how does your risk increase in proportion to how much time you spend not performing physical activity?

Turns out that sedentary behavior is its own risk factor in whether you develop lifestyle diseases, independent of whether or not you participate in the recommended amount of daily activity. In fact, if you’re sitting for more than 10 hours a day, even a one-hour daily workout might not be enough to counteract it!

So what if you start thinking about your self-care in terms of how much time you spend not being sedentary?

Is your wearable device too much of a good thing?

Are you using your fitness tracker to track your health metrics…

Or has it become a compulsion to check a box?

Some say that long-term use of wearable devices has a net positive impact on both physical and mental health. But many studies are showing that psychological distress caused by them doesn’t go away.

In fact, it can even create addictive behaviors.

So when it comes to self-care, is your device supporting you the way you think?

What type of goal are you setting?

There are two principles you need to master when it comes to your goals.

Knowing what type of goal you are setting, and making sure you don’t get lost by indulging in a premature sense of completion.

There are lots of times when self-care means setting new goals for ourselves, but what if self-care also meant showing up for ourselves by getting really good at executing on those goals?

Dieting is not self-care.

And in fact, your diet may be wrecking your health.

We’re so brainwashed by diet culture, a phenomenon that makes us value being thin above everything else, that we think we need to be in a perpetual calorie deficit in pursuit of the ideal aesthetic.

But the science doesn’t track. Driving yourself into a deep calorie deficit is not only counterproductive to your goal, it’s doubling down on the mindset that being thin equates to being fit. And self-care should be about your health and wellness, not your weight.