Being BAD

I remember walking up to the front desk at our Pilates studio, where we always had a candy dish.
Side note: amazing how many people got flustered/irritated/crabby about having a candy dish in a fitness place. “The balance of life!” I’d exclaim with glee.

Onward: I popped a piece of chocolate in my mouth after finishing teaching a mat class and a student said to me , “Ooh, you’re being bad!” and I said, “No, I’m being good.” And she replied, “No, you’re eating chocolate, so you’re being bad.” “No,” I said, “I’m eating chocolate, so I’m being good.” “Hmm,” she said, completely convinced that I was insane. Or just bad.

My unfavorite things

Here’s something I truly dislike: some women really hate looking in mirrors. One of my students asked me, “Do we have to turn that way?” (towards the mirror.) Another told me flat out, “I don’t want to work here because there’s a mirror.”

What do I say to that? “Please don’t hate what you look like, not everyone is 20 years old, not everyone weighs 105 lbs…”????? We have the most wackadelic society when it comes to beauty and age. On top of that, my students and I live and work in body-beautiful central, in West Hollywood. Anything less than perfect equals, here comes my favorite again, I am unacceptable.

Shit.

Welcome to L.A.

I was in a natural foods store in Venice, a place you expect to find natural food stores, because it’s all beachy and healthy, etc.  It’s also very easy-going, downright hippyish in some ways…but not on this day.  The thing that I noticed, right off the bat, was the number of women in the cookie, chips, and sweets areas, who seemed to be studying various treats quite intently, but they weren’t picking up anything (other than to check out the calorie count on the back label), and they weren’t happy. In fact, a couple of them seemed downright angry.

This is a pervasive thing here in Los Angeles: women who won’t allow themselves to eat what they want, women who may in fact be on a diet of some form all the time, and they are either hungry, or angry or both. Welcome to LA!

Sneaky Exercise

Maybe I had a “Christmas in July” moment, because I was thinking about New Years’ resolutions that so many people guilt themselves into.  That made me wonder how you might make a resolution you could actually keep. Here’s one idea: I’ve heard people say, “I’ll exercise every day for an hour!” or “I’ll go to the gym 5 times a week!” What if you first got rid of all those pushy exclamation marks (which will start weighing on your brain all too soon, believe me, I know) and thought instead about something more reasonable, and more malleable, as in, “I’ll get three hours of exercise a week.”

Would more time be better, particularly if you’re wanting to lose weight? Sure. But 3 hours over the course of a week doesn’t sound too horrible or impossible. And if it’s easier for you to exercise at the end of the week and the weekends, you’ll do those 3 hours then, and not feel at all guilty about not exercising on Mondays when your schedule is just too crazy. More loving ways to treat yourself, to follow…

Us vs. Them

I am definitely a live and let live person, but not when it comes to the nasty companies that take advantage of the unhappiness and desperation so many people live with because of their bodies. It’s definitely an antidote to my anxiety about our Heart of Pilates launch, that I intend to knock the socks of this crap. In my junk email right now there are 10 emails, and of those 10 there are these winners:
Re: Gastric bypass in a bottle
Re: New FDA device tones your stomach for you
Re: Be healthy and prevent disease

That last one doesn’t seem too bad, but when I opened the email it was some sort of Colon cleanse which supposedly can “flush away the pounds!” Also, it will “flatten your stomach,” “burn fat and shed pounds,” and if only they’d added that their product could bring about a peaceful resolution to all world conflict, it truly would be the miracle we’ve all been waiting for.

Maybe on our website we’ll have the laugh a day which will feature some crappy product that comes to my junk email. Here’s my new mantra: If it worked, we’d all be thin. Hmmmmmmm.

Pilates Pilates Pilates

I never tire reading/hearing accounts of people’s success stories with Pilates. In last month’s
Vogue, writer Plum Sykes (such a great name) tells her tale of painful woe and the long road she took to a strong, pain-free back. I like that she included a litany of modalities and doctors: chiropractic, acupuncture, reiki, PILATES…and I love that the beauty of her strong back was how she kicked off her story.

It’s funny, I didn’t realize that was one of the most important parts of the article til just now. Strong is so beautiful! I know students have commented on how my back looks. I love that! Shallow? Don’t know, don’t care.

Delicious

One of my Pilates students said to me, “You’ve got to come up with some different descriptors for exercises other than ‘Delicious’ and ‘Yummy’…something that isn’t food-related.”

Interesting. I use food terms to describe things that feel good.

Also interesting: my student has some real issues with her body and what she is and isn’t eating. Hmm.

“I am unacceptable”

I was thinking about this today: many people, and particularly women, think they have no choice. This is a big kettle of fish to get into, so I’ll just jump in and know that I’ll come back to it again.

What I refer to is the inner talk that says, “I must weigh ___ lbs/kilos, I must wear size___ jeans, I must eat ___ for breakfast/lunch/dinner, I must do ___ for exercise, I must look like (famous person, etc etc). Anything else is unacceptable.”

Oh, yeah, now we get right down to it: Anything else is unacceptable. I am unacceptable.

Beginning

I have to admit that I sometimes think it’s just such a lovely pleasant way to make a living, to teach Pilates (and more) to all my lovely students the way I do right now…and why jump into such a giant endeavor, teaching Pilates and moremore to many many more students through the internet.

But then I read an email or 5 from my students I’ve never met, who live in New York and New Zealand and that little island off Washington state and I know there’s so much I want to do for them…and it all starts with Pilates. I’m so excited to build my new interactive, fun, wild ride of a website! I believe we’ll be able to work together in a way that students and teachers couldn’t even have hoped for in the past…particularly when they didn’t live in the same state. Or country.

I am so grateful to have something I always dreamed of and prayed for: a mission.