Embracing Exercise As A Success Strategy without the Guilt

After A lot of Inner Work, I’m Working On Shifting My Limiting Beliefs Around It

I grew up thinking adult exercise meant housewives watching Jane Fonda video cassettes and a few ex-military guys lifting weights in their garage. Exercise as a pastime was non-existent in my childhood beyond fashion models and professional sportswomen. I never once met any women in my childhood who exercised. The women role models in my life worked. They got educated, held down full-time jobs, and built careers because they had to in order to afford to buy homes and raise children with housewives becoming the scarcity. Between the work shift and the home/childcare shift, the women I knew were twice as busy as men. My town did not even have a single gym open to the public until I was an adult.

As an adult, I became aware of a deep divide in society around exercise. There were women who did not have any dependents (single or grown children) who exercised regularly. My city, San Francisco, for example, was full of very young and very old women who jogged and visited the gym. Regarding moms, there was a deep divide between poor and rich: rich moms joined gyms, had trainers, ate healthy, and dedicated a lot of time and money towards self-care while poor moms did none of that. So I got the…