Beyond Ditching-Diet Culture: what if movement can be so much more?

If you’re here, you might already be in the process of untangling your relationship with movement and exercise from diet culture. Maybe you’ve set down the scale, unsubscribed from fitness influencers, or started noticing how movement has been tied to shame, and control. Maybe you’ve begun to question the stories you’ve been told about what your body should look like, or what exercise is “supposed” to be.

That work matters. Deeply. There’s a real and necessary process of disentangling from diet culture and its many layers—the rules, the guilt, the binary of success or failure. Many of us carry the scars of that system in our bodies and our beliefs. So if you’re in that stage, let me say this, this work is so worth it, you’re right on track

But I want to plant a little seed today.

What if this journey isn’t just about what we’re leaving behind?
What if it’s also about what we’re moving toward?

It’s one thing to reject shame-based fitness. It’s another to reimagine movement as something that can actually support your life, nourish your sense of self, and build your belief in your own strength, capacity, and growth.

Because here’s the thing: we can set our sights higher than just exercise that’s “not harmful.” It can be powerful. It can be expansive. It can reconnect you to your body as a source of knowing who you are, not just a project to fix. It can help you experience—tangibly, physically—that you are strong. That you are capable of growth. That you are allowed to evolve and to take up space

That’s a shift from seeing the body as an object to control, to relating to your body as yourself. Your body is not something you HAVE, it’s something YOU ARE. Your body is your existence.

When we move with that intention—not for punishment or performance, but in relationship with ourselves—we create the conditions for so much, including an increased self-efficacy and capacity for meaningful connection to the world.
Not the grind-your-way-to-the-top kind, hustle mentality that never delivered on what it promised, but the grounded, embodied belief that you can meet yourself with care, navigate challenge with compassion, and show up for your own becoming.

This is more than just a mindset or cognitive re-frame. It’s something we can feel. When a hike gets easier, or you move with more ease, or you surprise yourself with what you’re capable of—that’s not just fitness. That’s a lived experience of your own adaptability and strength.

And that experience can ripple outward to the rest of your life. It can challenge old beliefs like “I’m not athletic” or “I never stick with things.” It can gently unravel the limits that diet culture and other social systems have burdened you with and replace them with something rooted in trust, attunement, and self-respect.

It’s not just about quitting the toxic version of fitness.
It’s about creating something new entirely.

Something that meets you where you are, honours your lived experience, and supports the life you actually want to live.

Because movement can be more than tolerable.
It can be meaningful.