3 Reasons You Must Talk About Body Image With Your Postpartum Clients
I want to give you 3 reasons why we need to be helping our postpartum clients and patients separate their body composition from the results or goals that we are hoping to achieve with them.
As practitioners, it is our responsibility to facilitate these conversations as part of a well-rounded, effective training or treatment plan.
Number One
Their body weight is unlikely to be influencing their pelvic symptoms, their pain, and their aches that they might be experiencing, which led them to working with us.
If we have a client or patient coming to us with pelvic organ prolapse symptoms and they believe that their body weight is the thing that is creating and ramping up these symptoms for them, we need to be the people who are debunking that.
We need to be telling them that, no, it is highly unlikely that your body weight is contributing to the stuff that you are feeling.
We can work towards having reduced symptoms with your body composition staying as is right now.
Number Two
If we have clients who are preoccupied by their body composition, their weight, the size of their body in anyway changing and they are continuing to be distracted by those thoughts, we have to think about how that is also influencing their health behaviors.
We have to also think about how that might be influencing their body anxiety, their body discomfort, and what that itself might be doing to their symptoms and pain that they are experiencing.
If we think about it right now – that it is probably helping to ramp up, or to influence more aches, pains, symptoms and discomfort with this preoccupation that their body is bad, wrong needs to be fixed in some way.
We need to be the ones to help them quell that.
Number Three
I talk about this with a lot with my postpartum clients and that is, what if this is it? What if this is how your body is right now or for a very long time?
Because what we do know with postpartum bodies is that they might remain this size or this composition for an extended period of time. Or, it might not change, or it might get larger and bigger.
Is the work that we are doing together for nothing if the body is not going to change? No! We know that we see results and progress with people even if their body composition stays the same, or gets larger, too.
Again, we have to be the ones who are taking responsibility for facilitating these conversations with our clients about body composition and giving them the facts and hopes and trust in their bodies that they can feel better and different with their body staying as it is right now.
Get on the Wait-List for the Postnatal Fitness Specialist Academy
If you work with pregnant or postpartum clients or patients in fitness or any health modality, get yourself on the wait-list for the next class intake of the Postnatal Fitness Specialist Academy.
This is the information we must be teaching our people for truly better health and functioning bodies after birth.
We re-open enrolment (4 year anniversary upon us!) on October 20th, 2020.
Join the wait-list now for early access to register and discounted pricing.
