Confidence in your Movements

One of the best parts about bariatric surgery is how quickly you lose body fat and how that loss of body fat affects how you move. The thing is. Surgery doesn’t really affect your brain or confidence. 

As you start dropping a lot of weight you’ll notice that you’re able to be more free in your movements. This gives you the opportunity to do a lot more activities then you could previous do to the bariatric surgery. A lot of the time though even with a loss of weight you’re still fighting old “fat” habits, one of the biggest being your confidence in your movements. 

More than likely when you’re overweight there are a lot of things that you didn’t want to do for fear of hurting an already painful joint or even worse falling down. It might be as simple as stepping off a curb or squatting down to pick something up off the floor. After a few months post bariatric surgery you’ve probably lost enough weight for neither one of those to be a big deal but your past self says differently. 

How do you fix this problem? My suggestion is start adding and movements and balance work into each one of your workouts. This is especially important if you’re newly out of surgery so that you can progress faster with other movements later. 

For a lot of people that have gone to weight loss surgery lack of confidence directly connected with a lack of balance. So when you work on one you’re actually working on both. For an example of what I’m talking about i’m going to use a challenge that I think a lot of people that have obesity or had obesity difficult. Walking down stairs. There’s a lot that’s going on with this movement especially if you’re very overweight first it’s the fear of falling down the stairs and injuring yourself and secondly it’s the pain in the knees and hips and low back that come with descending stairs. So taking this example little bit further how can you add this into your workouts to start building confidence descending stairs? 

First off start slow and understand that you’re probably not going to do it right the first few times. 

Let’s break down what’s involved with the sending staircases and the fear that goes along with it. I think the primary mover for most people that have obesity when they’re going downstairs is the fact that it hurts your knee joint and low back. And with this pain comes the trepidation of not feeling confident in your balance. And when you were very overweight it was probably a very wise thing to be that cautious. You’re losing weight, and hopefully your joints are becoming less painful you can start experimenting more with that movement. So when you’re doing a workout what I would suggest adding into that is more balance work on one leg stepping up and down off of low box when you have a wall or some kind of support near you. 

I would say do this balance work at least once a day usually within a few weeks you’ll start to notice that you’re not as wobbly as you first started. And as you become more balanced you’ll notice that your company movement increases accordingly. When you start to notice this I would challenge you to start doing things like going up and down stairs but hovering your hands over the hand railings with the ultimate goal being to go up or down stairs without even thinking about hanging onto the hand railings. 

This might seem like a very simplistic exercise to add into your life but working towards erasing you’re old fat mind and replacing it with a new more cop mindset will go a long way towards your success in your weight loss and open up a lot more opportunities for activities that once seemed impossible and maybe even scary.