How many of you have ever felt uncomfortable, too big or just not good enough when going to the gym or trying out a new fitness class?

What if the instructor made you feel like you didn’t belong in the class or didn’t even know how to provide you with safe ways to practice?

So many of us can relate to feeling out of place. In fact, many people don’t pursue physical activities because of such feelings.

But there are amazing people out there who are working to change that!

Anna Guest-Jelley is a certified yoga instructor and founder of Curvy Yoga. And I think a true inspiration!

As she writes on her about page, “One of the primary goals of Curvy Yoga is to give fat people a safe space in which to move their bodies—for the first time in a long time, for many people.”

Plus, “Curvy Yoga also strives to give people quiet space for introspection and reflection to start challenging the ways in which they care for themselves and creating a life built on happiness rather than self-loathing.”

Below, Anna talks about why she started Curvy Yoga and her own struggles with self-acceptance, the diet mentality and body image.

Q: What inspired you to start Curvy Yoga?

A: I started practicing yoga when I was 18.  I found it kind of by mistake; I was looking for anything to help my then-chronic migraines.  And while it did give me some pain relief, it also opened up a whole new world for me.

What I love most about yoga is the ability it gives me to tune into my body.  This was so important for me, someone who had spent the majority of her life looking for ways to escape her body.

A series of really positive and really negative experiences in yoga classes inspired me to actually get Curvy Yoga off the ground, though.

The negative experiences were the regular minor and major indignities I experienced in class—teachers instructing me in ways that were not only unhelpful but unsafe because they didn’t understand how to offer modifications for curvy bodies, teachers constantly asking me if I was new to yoga just because I didn’t look like the typical practitioner, etc.

I think the positive experiences are more interesting, though, because they speak to the potential of the practice.  I’ve had the honor of learning from some amazing teachers who encouraged me to evolve a practice that worked for me.

They didn’t always know the best modifications for me, but they gave me tips to practice safely and the space and confidence to be creative.

And once I figured out ways that curvy people can practice safely—both physically and emotionally—I really wanted to share that with others.

Q: On your “about” page, you say that you’ve been on over 65 different diets. What inspired you to finally stop dieting?

A: For most of my life, I thought I was a really terrible dieter.  I couldn’t figure out how I could do so many other things, including going to graduate school while working four part-time jobs, but not do something as seemingly simple as losing weight.

Those questions were always in the back of my mind, especially as I developed my yoga practice.  As I delved more and more into yoga, I started wanting to take what I’d learned about mind/body connection off the mat, and that led me into the world of intuitive eating and Health at Every Size (HAES).

Life is always a process, though, isn’t it?  It took me several years to really “get” HAES and not just treat it like another diet.  And that’s something I still work on today; the urge to diet has been pretty deeply inscribed in me.

Finally, through working with a great nutrition therapist and incorporating a variety of mind/body modalities into my life, including yoga, meditation and acupuncture, I began to learn how to unclench from my obsessive dieting patterns.  These days, when I get that itch to diet, I’m usually able to check in, acknowledge it for what it is, and move on.

Acknowledgement and naming—to myself, and then in public—how many diets I’ve been on (and that’s 65 unique diets—some of those I’ve been on ten times or more) was a catalyst for me.  It really made me see that if 65 diets haven’t worked for me, the 66^th won’t, either.

It made me realize that I was focusing on the wrong issue; I didn’t need to keep looking for the next diet that would finally “work” but rather learn strategies to love myself enough to live my life now, not 10, 20, 50 pounds down from now.

I really want to be clear that I had to make this a very concrete, skills-based practice (which is another dovetail with yoga, the practice aspect).

I’ve never felt more sheer frustration, disappointment and anger than when someone would tell me “oh, you just need to accept yourself and then you’ll lose weight.”

I don’t think anyone has tried to strong-arm themselves into acceptance more than I have.

I’m not trying to knock acceptance as a concept, and I know it works for some people at that theoretical/philosophical level.  But for me, I really had to get literal.

For example, I learned that when I’m getting excited about starting a new diet, the first thing I need to do is derail that train long enough to ask myself why.

It’s this often tedious process of checking in (usually through journaling for me) and looking at what’s going on that helped me slowly (often annoyingly so) reclaim some autonomy over how I perceived myself and my relationship to food and dieting.

Q: Can you talk about your journey from yo-yo dieting and self-esteem struggles to self-acceptance and a positive body image?

A: I’m really glad you described it as a journey because, as hokey as that can sound sometimes, it’s so true.  It’s certainly still true for me, even today, and I imagine it’s a process I’ll be working in some way or another throughout my life.

I grew up with the same messages many girls (and boys) get about the need to be thin to be successful, attract a partner, be happy, and win a million dollars (not literally on that last one, but close).

While I got these messages from many places (middle school locker room, anyone?), I got quite a few of them from my family, especially my mom.  I really used to blame my mom for all my body image issues.

Her body type and mine could not be more different (I clearly got the genes from my dad’s side of the family!), and I never felt like she understood me (not exactly an uncommon experience for daughters, right?).  But the older I got, the more I discovered that what she was telling me was what she had heard from her mom and other women in our family, and that we were both doing our best with what we could.

It took me years and years to (a) figure out what messages I’d been given and (b) realize there was something I could do about them.

Eventually, I’d bumbled through enough of both of those things to start feeling like I didn’t want to waste any more time.  So I started doing what I could toward that end.

One thing that made a significant difference for me is that I stopped fat-talking, or talking about how much I hated x-body part or was “being bad” by eating food.  At first, not fat talking didn’t translate to my internal monologue, but over time it did.  It’s actually pretty incredible what not steeping yourself in diet culture and fat talk can do.

Now I’m at a point in my life where I can openly talk about being fat (which is different from fat-talking, which is all about negativity) and be okay with it.

There are for sure hard days, but I’m happy to be at a place where I can recognize those days, take a bath, and go to sleep instead of going into a diet cycle.

—

Thanks so much, Anna, for speaking with me!

Stay tuned for part two tomorrow where Anna talks about practicing yoga and building a positive body image.

P.S., Mara from Medicinal Marzipan has made this week Teen Week. She writes, “Teen week has developed out of the basic principle of reaching out to readers who are looking for positive role models, for someone who can say I’ve been there and there IS a light at the end of the tunnel.” She’s encouraging other bloggers to participate by writing a post reflecting on your teen years. I’ll be posting mine this week! Check out her post here for the details.

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    Last reviewed: 8 Feb 2011