Search results for ""Author Sarah Hays Coomer""

Women have long been taught that their bodies are unruly, weak. We're taught to approach our bodies by shrinking, whittling-and, aided by the traditional beauty industry, constantly "fixing" ourselves. With a fresh voice in troubled times, Physical Disobedience says "stop it"-because mistreating our bodies that way is nothing less than an act of submission to gendered inequality. We need to focus on health, fitness, and strength-as we ourselves define it. Hays Coomer knows that when we strengthen ourselves, we're making our activism personal, by reclaiming our right to a healthy self-image and bodies that function to the best of their ability. And, yes, at the same time we're building stamina for the literal work of activism-the marches and the protests, plus the everyday emotional resilience it takes to face the news. Hays Coomer shows us, step by step, how to reframe our idea of "fitness," reclaiming it and instead associating being fit with being powerful. And as women, now more than ever, we could use that collective fitness and reclaimed power.

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Forget every tactic you’ve ever tried to lose weight and feel better. Put down your weapons once and for all, and step out of the field of battle. Despite how it may seem, your brain and body are not unsupportive beasts bent on undermining your fitness goals. They just want some chips and dip, that’s all. They aren’t the problem. The way you’re trying to manipulate them is. In Lightness of Body and Mind: A Radical Approach to Weight and Wellness, personal trainer Sarah Hays Coomer offers a different approach. She proposes that you will never be able to achieve a body you love by doing things that you hate, that deprivation and limitation will never set you free, and that punishing workouts and strict diets are dead end roads. The way to a body that works is by doing more of what you authentically love. Through memoir and intimate client stories, this book encourages you to dance with your demons, to choose and cherish the ones you have no intention of giving up, and to build a solid infrastructure, dedicated to good health, in which wellness and indulgence spring from the same source. You don’t need more control. You just need functional knowledge of how habits are formed; a reverent, dizzy appreciation for falling apart when necessary; and laser focus on what brings you to life.

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