We've Got Better Things to Burn Than Turkey
What fires will you light between now and the end of the year?
After returning from a surprisingly delightful* trip up to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, I logged onto my Peloton Row and clicked into a “Turkey Burn” class. It was sort of automatic, this choice to do a Turkey Burn. The class popped out at me from the list because I was back home after a holiday spent eating pie, ice cream, apple fritters, cheese, and other delicious food. The split second it took me to choose the class encapsulates everything about my relationship with food and diet culture that I am trying to dismantle. In that split second, my subconscious mind said to itself, “Ooh, I should do the Turkey Burn, because, after all, I just spent two days eating bad, unhealthy food and so I need to burn all those extra calories.”
All of that - shoulding myself, shaming myself, labeling food, focusing on calories and weight loss - is what I am trying to dismantle in my brain. In these midlife years I am working to rebuild my relationships with food and my body. I want to feel free and grateful instead of powerless and guilty. I don’t blame my subconscious mind for following old behavior patterns and well-trodden neural pathways. But I want to do better.
By the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, I felt compelled to move my body and get some endorphins going. I am finally at the point in my personal development journey where I no longer exercise to punish myself for over-drinking or over-eating. I exercise to feel good, to have time to myself, and to build muscle as I forge further into middle age. I am proud of this evolution.
And yet I still clicked on that Turkey Burn class.
I sat down on my rowing machine. I strapped in my feet, grabbed the handle, and used my legs to push myself back. As my legs straightened, I leaned back slightly and pulled the handle beneath my chest. Legs-body-arms, arms-body-legs. Over and over.
The repetitive, almost meditative, nature of rowing gave me time to think about the idea of a Turkey Burn. Turkey Burn workouts and races are fairly well-ingrained into the fitness world by now. And I don’t have a problem with that. I love the idea of exercising to boost your mood during a holiday weekend. But the idea of having to exercise to burn off calories consumed? Like, I should feel so guilty for eating pie for breakfast that now I need to go torture myself with a grueling workout? Ugh. I’m over it.
Here’s what I propose instead: let’s think of other things to burn. I’ll go first.
I would like to burn my limiting self-beliefs. I would like to torch my negative self-talk. I would like to set fire to that little piece of my subconscious that caused me to click on the Turkey Burn rowing class because I ate a lot of pie and ice cream at Thanksgiving.
We have been conditioned throughout our lives to invest so much physical and emotional energy into counting and burning calories. What if, instead, we focus on being kind to ourselves, enjoying food, and burning the negative thoughts that have kept us so full of shame for so long?
This is what I’ll be practicing for the remainder of this holiday season, as I continue the work of dismantling my relationship with diet culture. If I catch myself slipping into shame around my food choices or anything body-related, I am going to try to remember to ask myself, “What can I burn instead?”
*Amazing what a difference it makes when neither the kids nor the dogs are total turds for the duration of a road trip and overnight at Grandma’s!