bloG: before & after pictures

We get asked a lot about these at Move it Mama. With the best of intentions, people want to ‘see’ if Move it Mama ‘works’. Here’s the thing: we don’t want to do them.

For too long, our society has been conditioned to find beauty in the human body when it looks a certain way. When there are no stretch marks, cellulite or rolls in sight. We’ve been raised to believe that in order to be beautiful, we can’t have stretched skin, ‘flabby’ arms, or a ‘mum tum’.

We’ve also somehow been conditioned to believe that exercise is a punishment; a chore or a job we need to do to counter balance our ‘bad’ behaviours. Still we see magazines claiming the need to run 20km just to burn off a burger and fries. A strong message continuously delivered to us by the media centres on the notion that exercise is punishment and we are to punish ourselves if we eat ‘bad’ foods.

There’s a lot wrong with this. Thankfully, with the rise of social media and a ‘fitness culture’, there are positively influential people out there teaching us that in actual fact, exercise is a privilege and dieting often just leads to a life of guilt and restriction, with the potential to result in disordered eating, among other problems.

Move it Mama’s main mission is to break down the barriers to exercise.

That is, to make exercise affordable, accessible and achievable for as many people as possible (and not just mothers). Second to that, is our mission to shift peoples’ relationship to exercise. We want to teach people to treat exercise as a constant in their lives to benefit their mental health, not just their physical health. Put simply, to exercise because it makes us feel good. To exercise because it gives us energy, makes us feel empowered, allows us to actively play with our children, improves our relationships and improves our mood (the list goes on).

Any physical changes to the body are a byproduct of cementing regular exercise into our lives. The science tells us to exercise to reduce our risk of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc., etc. We know that and thankfully, there’s no denying science.

We just think transformation pictures have the potential to add fuel to the fire. We understand and appreciate that this is how some people will measure the ‘success’ of Move it Mama. We also understand and appreciate that for various reasons people have physical-based or weight loss goals, and that one way for them to measure this is to take photographs. We understand and appreciate this wholeheartedly.

But at Move it Mama, we don’t want to base our success on these images alone.

We want success to include sparkle; a brighter smile, a better mood, more patience, happier relationships, improved concentration and overall, a healthy and loving relationship to our bodies, stretch marks, cellulite, rolls and all.

Once you’ve been actively in Move it Mama a while, this is what we hope you take away from it. After nearly two years in business, we’ve had hundreds of women write to us to say that they started our programme with weight loss in mind, but that Move it Mama has helped shift their motivation to exercise away from just the physical benefits but towards the associated mental benefits, too. And not only have they achieved the physical goals they set out to, but they’ve also become more motivated to exercise for their mind than anything else.

The human body comes in many different forms. We respond to exercise differently, we respond to food differently, we have different genetics, we have different lifestyles - there are an infinite amount of variables.

It's time we started to celebrate our bodies for what they can do, not what they look like.