Have you ever thought, “I wish I could lose weight, but I just can’t no matter what I do”? Clients sometimes feel hopeless when I meet them; they’ve tried so hard for so long, so many times to be healthier or lose weight and nothing changes. I’ve heard people say it and I’ve seen it written online, the lament that “my genes are causing me to be overweight and there’s nothing I can do.”

That idea is false, and does a dis-service to that person’s power and autonomy, and to their health. Although it’s untrue, like most effective lies, it holds a grain of truth. Some of what our minds and bodies do IS out of our control. We can’t entirely determine our own body’s chemistry and structural integrity. But we can always change it for the better, and maximize what we have.

Weight is not pre-determined. It’s a complex mix of genes becoming more or less active as a result of lifestyle factors. Our bodies are a combination of what we eat, how we move and our environment. Eating an apple does something different in our bodies than eating a slice of cake. Sitting for eight hours does something different to our bodies than going for an eight-minute walk.

If you’re a normal human being like me, you’ve slouched at your desk. In doing that, we encourage our bodies to respond by stressing our necks and backs and at some point, we feel pain. We may attribute such pain to aging when truthfully, we’ve simply been in the wrong position for longer. Minutes turn to hours turn to years, and no high intensity boot camp is going to resolve that. With sub-optimal posture, even a yoga or Pilates class could be setting us up for pain and injury. If we’re in pain (or worse, already injured), do we have the energy to do the things that will help us lose weight or manage our health effectively?

There is hope! Here’s the truth: form follows function follows form. Just as the mind and body aren’t truly separate, neither are how you look and how your body works and feels. Get your mind and body in better positions and you begin to feel better. Upgrade the hardware, and the software has to get better.

The fantastic news is, you can start TODAY to decrease pain and increase your ability to move and live pain free! That’s the point of having a healthy body and minimizing pain and injury to your body: so you can live freely. You can choose not to take your health for granted until you’re in pain. You can choose to do something to alleviate your current pain.

How do we change hardware for the better? First, address movement quality.  Build intensity gradually. Are you an executive? A student? A new mom? Tailor the program to your lifestyle. I highly recommend working with an experienced coach who can help you understand how to stretch and strengthen optimally given your needs.

If you want to lose weight, you can! In fact, this can make re-claiming healthy pain-free posture a lot easier. You just have to learn what to do. Until we all become robots, your current body is the only one you have. But no matter where you’re at today in relation to where you want to be, you can change how you feel right now and going forward, not just temporarily, but for the rest of your life.

Reach out to me at blendablebalance@gmail.com with any questions you may have! I’m here and happy to help.

Part one here.