Episode #18: Diastasis, Hernias, Prolapse and Decolonizing Fitness with Inemesit Graham
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In this episode, Dayna and Rhonda welcome pre/postnatal fitness coach Inemesit Graham.
Inemesit Graham is a personal trainer and nutrition coach specializing in pre and postnatal fitness with a focus on diastasis recti, hernia, and prolapse management. Inemesit believes that your aesthetics don't determine your athletics and takes a decolonized approach to fitness based on body liberty and free of body oppression.
Inemesit is a wealth of knowledge and wisdom. And we touch on many important topics including:
🔹Her journey with fitness and what led to her focus on the perinatal population as a coach
🔹 Her experience with diastasis throughout pregnancy and postpartum
🔹 How her approach to exercising with a diastasis has evolved over time
🔹 Her experience with surgery and symptom management with an abdominal hernia
🔹What decolonizing fitness means to her
🔹 Why it’s important to learn about the history of anti-black racism in relation to health, fitness and definitions of beauty
🔹 Her unique experiences as a black woman in the fitness space
🔹 Helpful suggestions from Inemesit about how we can all be better allies
We’re excited for you to listen to this episode and hope you get as much out of this conversation as we did. Let us know in the comments!
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Episode 18 - Diastasis, Hernias, Prolapse and Decolonizing Fitness with Inemesit Graham
We're excited to have you join us for this episode of Pelvic Health and Fitness. I'm Dayna Morellato, Mom, Orthopedic and Pelvic Health Physiotherapist. And I'm Rhonda Chamberlain, Mom, Orthopedic Physiotherapist and Pre Postnatal Fitness Coach. On this show, we have open and honest conversations about all phases of motherhood, including fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, menopause, and everything in between.
We also provide helpful education and information on fitness, the pelvic floor, and many aspects of women's health, including physical, mental, and emotional wellness. Please remember as you listen to this podcast that this is not meant to treat or diagnose any medical conditions. Please contact your medical provider if you have specific questions or concerns.
Thanks so much for joining us. Grab a cup of coffee. Or wine. And enjoy!
Welcome to episode 18 of the pelvic health and fitness podcast today. We are joined by Inemesit Graham. Inemesit is a personal trainer and nutrition coach specializing in pre and postnatal fitness with a focus on diastasis recti, hernia, and prolapse management.
Inemesit believes that your aesthetics don't determine your athletics and takes a decolonized approach to fitness based on body Liberty and free of body oppression. So welcome. Welcome. We're so excited to have you and I will say personally, I've learned so much from you and I'm so thankful for everything that you teach about on Instagram and I'm just so excited for our listeners to hear your story and learn a little bit about what you do as well.
So, before we get into it, I would love to just hear a little bit more about your story and what got you into the world of fitness in the first place. My journey to fitness really started in 2013. I have two children and in 2013 I just had my second child. Um, that was about two years after my first. And so my first, I don't know that I noticed anything significantly different in my body.
I had that like kind of bounce back that some women are just like lucky to get. They just, In their postpartum body is not too different from their pregnancy body. And it was, I had a good recovery. When my second son, my body was really dramatically different. And so because I, I never, I wasn't used to existing in my body, the way it looked.
And so I joined an online fitness group because lots of the information I was getting here online at the time was about, um, just bouncing back and. Getting your post baby body back. And I remember one post particularly that resonated with me because a part of me was I was struggling with between this idea of I don't like the body I'm at, but I have just had two kids.
So maybe this is how it's supposed to look like and I just don't understand it. And it was a lot of people know that what's your what's your excuse post in 2013 that post like I saw that that really resonated with me because I was in here trying to, I guess, struggling between. giving myself compassion, but also knowing that I wasn't satisfied with the way my body was.
And I had this message of what's your excuse? And it was this lady with her three young children, and she just had this vision of a body that I saw as ideal. Yeah. And in that, I thought, Well, what is my excuse? Maybe it just means that I'm not doing enough. I'm not working harder, hard enough. I need to do what she is doing and then I will look like that.
And so that's really what brought me into exercise. I was like, okay. I, cause originally I started with dieting. I'm like, I must need to lose this weight. My belly looks this way because I just gained a bunch of weight. That was the first foray into, Oh, exercise. I need to exercise. I'm not exercising hard enough.
And that resonated with me too, because I wasn't someone that exercised. I was active in high school, but outside of high school, I was very sedentary. So I did, I did believe, like, I must just not be doing the things that she's doing. And all these women that have babies look amazing. It's because they're working so much harder than me.
And so that was my head, just in my head, just work hard, just exercise. And I joined a fitness group for mums that posted different exercises. And as a way to stay accountable, I started sharing my workouts. And there was a plank challenge and I showed my picture of a plank and someone commented on my belly and they said like, do you have diastasis?
Because in the plank, it was doming down the center. And at first I was offended. I'm like, what are they saying about me? But I Googled it because you Google new words that you don't know. And I saw all these women that had bellies that look like mine. And it was the first time I'd really seen somebody that had a body that resembled my postpartum body.
And so that's when. Um, I started this foray into diastasis. I'm like, okay, this is what I have. I need to know everything I can about it. I need to know why I got it. I need to know how I can fix it. And then when you start going down there, how do I fix this? That opens up a whole new avenue of fitness. And then it was all, then I started learning about what exercises that I was supposed to do and how I should exercise.
And then there was this other side foray into surgery. And I have my own like personal trauma with surgery as a child. It's part of my history. I've I had abdominal surgery when I was six and so I had some unpleasant memories for that. And so that's really what pushed me more into the fitness as a way.
My thought was if I can exercise and fix myself and I don't have to go down the surgery route and that's what I did. And I was. And I first, I did see some improvement because I'd never exercised and if you do anything that you've never done before, you're going to see changes. And so I did see some improvement, but as I, the more I did it, the more that it wasn't enough and it wasn't fixed in the way that I envisioned that my body should be fixed.
And it wasn't changing in the way that I imagined it should be changed. And I wasn't looking like the, what's your excuse picture, even when I was, even though I was doing all those things. And that kind of pushed me to. Keep looking look for something else. Okay. So yeah, so that was after your first child.
Is that what you said? Or the second one? My second child. After your second one. Okay. And then, so you went into a third pregnancy then. And what was that experience like? Did you, did you have fears then about your body changing even more having a third pregnancy? There was a big difference between, because my first son was born in 2011, my second son was January 2011, and then I had my second son January 2013.
They're actually two weeks shy of exactly two years apart. My third son I had in 2018, so there's a five year gap there, and in that five weeks... Is when I got a lot of education around my body. And so going into my third pregnancy and through my third pregnancy, I was in a completely different place in my life.
And I had a completely different experience in my body. Gotcha. I think that's so important. I hear that all the time from moms that like, there's the fear that comes out. Am I going to make this worse, whether it's diastasis or prolapse? Um, and just, I think there's power in just learning about your body.
Yeah. And I'm really. I think because what I'm thankful today, I see the diastasis as a blessing in disguise because that was the first time in trying to understand the diastasis recti and how it affected my body. That was the first time I really tried to understand my body and I really put some effort into understanding what was happening with my body and through exercise.
It's the first time I really tuned into the experience in my body and I'd never, I'd always been so focused. Exercise is powerful in that way because it brings a focus to yourself. I'd always been focused on what people, I thought people wanted of me. This external focus, how I thought I should present and how I thought I should look and how I thought like people should see my postpartum recovery.
But with, um, this diastasis, it first came to just building an awareness of what was happening in my body. And, um, the more I. And that, like, it was through the diastasis I was born, which is part of my story, which, and why I had surgery, I was born with, um, an umbilical hernia, and I have, was born with two hernias, but it wasn't until, um, I was in my late 30s, late 20s, trying to figure out the diastasis that I understood the hernias, and then I got more information about the hernias, and then I finally, like, was able to accept that that was part of my body, and that was all wrapped into this journey of trying to figure out what was happening with my abs after babies.
So, Yeah, interesting. So what led you to become a pregnancy and postpartum athleticism coach? Where in your timeline was that? Um, so yeah, I started, I started doing different programs. I started, um, exercising and this became more regular. One of the things that made a difference like there's lots of lots of the programs that are targeted for diastasis, at least the programs that were targeted for diastasis eight years ago, lots of them are very low intensity programs.
And when you're new to exercise low intensity is great and it worked for me it was, it was something simple and basic I could follow. But as I started. getting more proficient at the movements I was doing. I wanted more. I wanted something more challenging. And I, there was a point I started, I joined and started working at a CrossFit style gym.
As I started learning more about my body, people would ask me questions about what I was doing. And I didn't want to just, give my opinion. And so that opened up my interest into in personal training. And so in that time, between my second and my third pregnancy, I got certified as a personal trainer. And I started working in this gym that was, um, so there's a CrossFit gym.
They moved away, but they still did the same type of workouts. And so they had these board workouts, workouts. And if you did the workout as it was within a certain time, your name would be put on the board. If you didn't, it wouldn't be. But at first going to the gym, I was fine with doing things my own way.
And I modified a lot of things because I had this idea that I wasn't supposed to like do punching movements. I wasn't supposed to do twisting. So I wasn't doing the sit ups in the workouts. I wasn't doing the total bars. I wasn't doing the oblique twists. And I was, my name was just never on the board because I always modified the workouts.
And there was a point that I just, just wanted to be on the workout is a bit of ego, a bit of wanting. to be part of this gym, this group, and so then I started asking the question of, can I do these things with diastasis? Can I do, can I learn how to do these things? Is there another way to do these things?
And that's what led me to, um, pregnancy and postpartum athleticism. In me asking these questions and being on Instagram, I, started seeing other people that were in that same conversation. And one person in particular was Lisa Marie Ryan. Um, I saw her on Instagram and she had a very large diastasis and her belly distended.
It looked more extreme than mine, but it was like mine. And I remember the first video I saw of her was her doing total bars, which is where you're hanging on a bar and you're lifting your feet up and touching the bar with your feet, which is. everything they tell you not to do with diastasis. So I watched this video and then I read her post and her post was about like, I know people are going to freak out, but my physio says that this is okay.
And I'd also had that experience when I'd been posting some of my workouts, like dead lifting and squatting heavy weights. I would have like physios come in my inbox and other trainers come in my inbox and say like, It's nice that you're doing this, but this isn't actually safe. And it's irresponsible of you to give out this information to other women, which is also part of the reason I wanted to learn more about what I was doing wrong.
But that was the first time I saw like someone else doing things that they weren't supposed to be doing. Like I had tried a little bit and they were saying that it was okay. And so I was like, well, who is her physio? What physio is saying is okay. And who is this person? And through, um, Lisa Marie Ryan, I lost.
Learned about Brianna battles, and she was also in this diastasis journey trying to figure out her own body And she was putting out information that was kind of validating the things I was noticing about my body Because there were things like I started the more I train I started lifting heavy weights and the gym that I was Working at we just we tested our max weight every month So we were trying to lift the most and I just did it because I wanted to be part of something even though People were telling me I shouldn't.
And so then I saw, um, Brianna Battles, and she was doing it too, and Lisa Marie Ryan, and she was doing it too, and through Lisa Marie Ryan, I learned about Anthony Le, which was the physio that she had referred to. And he was telling women that, um, people that they could learn how to do, they could learn how to do things that they could train their bodies to do things in different ways, if the ways that they were trying weren't helpful.
And that just kind of just really blew my mind. And it opened up from feeling stuck in this box where I could only do some things I could never be part of this fitness community that it was now important to me. I was just like, Oh, maybe I can do, do other things. And, um, so through a Brianna battles that have pregnancy and postpartum athleticism is her certification.
And that was the only certification that was also talking about diastasis from a high intensity approach, which is what drew me to it. I'd taken other certifications that talks about diastasis. Um, and they gave those low intensity Pilates style movements, but she was like here if, and she came from a CrossFit background.
So she was saying, if you want to lift heavy and do CrossFit and do high impact movements with diastasis, these are some strategies that you might find helpful. And that was really empowering to me. It was the first time someone wasn't saying No, they were giving me options. Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. You go.
Antony Lowe changed my practice. Truthfully. He even has like a physio. We're sort of given these, I don't want to say rules, but definitely guidelines to follow for certain groups of people. Um, pregnant and postpartum postpartum population being. One of those categories and listening to him for a few lectures just changed everything I believed about what person A should be doing person B should be doing.
Yeah, and he was also powerful too because the thing with Lisa and Um, my journey and Lisa's journey and Brianna's journey, although it has some parallels, like the difference between them and where I'm at is they both went down the surgery route because it made sense for their journey. And so watching their surgeries, and they both shared their surgeries on Instagram, and I watched both their stories and I followed it throughout the whole journey, there was also always that thought in my head that I know that you can get progressed, and I know that you can improve, and I know that you, and I've seen these things, but it was always like, will I?
be fixed unless I have surgery? Will, do I, will I need surgery in the end? Is this just a route to surgery? Is it for everyone? Or do I have a choice in this? And I did have a lot of, um, trauma around surgery. And so it was something that I found really challenging. Um, but when I saw, um, Because after learning about Anthony Lowe, I took one of his courses online, and then it happened to, like, six months later, he happened to be in, um, coming to Canada, coming to Alberta, and he was hosting a live course there.
And so I bought that course and went to attend so I could, like, work with him in person. And his, um, he was the first one, like, he just, he, it wasn't about what people could do with diastasis, what this, um, imaginary non existent, um, theoretical person could do with diastasis. It was about what I could do in that moment.
And what stuck out with me is, um, he asked me like, what's something that I was afraid of doing or I was, um, I found challenging. And I said, I found oblique twist challenging when you're sitting in kind of a boat, hold a V hold position, sitting on your sit bones in a V and rotating from side to side. And just because that's one of those things with diastasis or the information I was being told, like don't crunch your body.
don't do any rotational movements. And, um, but also the information I'd gotten was about, um, if you're going to do hard stuff, you need to like prepare your core. You need to like, um, brace, hold everything in, make sure nothing domes down the midline. And so when he said that I took all my strategies, I held everything as tight as I could.
And I wrote it from side to side. He looked at me and he said, how was that? And I was like, fine. And he said, It looks like you're working really hard. I'm like, yeah, I am. And he just says, why don't you relax and do it?
I'm not allowed to do that. But also there was this. Physio that was a professional that I respected that was kind of giving me permission to do that And so it was the first time I just kind of relaxed and did it and it was a lot easier and like nothing happened I didn't break I didn't explode it wasn't Yeah It was just this moment where I realized that maybe I didn't have to work as hard as I was but also that The thing that we forget about training, the purpose of training something is to teach your body new habits.
And the purpose, the beauty or power of that habit is something that it's thoughtless. It's something that doesn't take much effort. And I had done all these rehab, rehab and all these retraining of my body to respond in a certain way. But I realized the big thing is, although I train it to do that, I didn't trust that it would do that.
And when told me to not work so hard, basically like let go. That meant that I had to trust that my body would do the thing that I had trained it to do without me consciously doing it. And like I did it and it showed me that I could do it and it felt easier and I could do it for longer. And he just asked, how did that feel?
And I was like, fine. But it was just in that small moment, I realized that, um, I can, yeah, my body is response to my training and I can do hard things. And even though like I have this diastasis, I'm okay. And maybe I can be whole without surgery and maybe that's not my path. And that can be okay for me too.
Yeah, I love that so much. Yeah, Dana and I are huge on this podcast with talking about that and just in terms of, you know, prolapse and diastasis, just not attaching that fear mongering to it. Um, I think, yeah, you can go down a rabbit hole on Google. Or, you know, some pelvic floor therapists who are well intentioned might sort of give that fear messaging of you can't do this and you can't do that you're going to make it worse.
So I'm also very thankful along my journey that I came across Brianna Battles right away, Anthony Lowe, who are very just empowering for women I find right and just Try it and just see what your body can do and that's honestly, I love that about your Instagram and Emma said is you just post all these amazing videos of you doing exercises that are just so awesome.
Like your box jumps, like everything you do. I'm like, she's just so great. Like check out her Instagram and a lot of that you sort of tie that back to. Your diastasis journey, which I love, because yeah, you're just proving that point that you might still have a visible diastasis, but like, would you say you're doing everything you would want to do physically?
Like, do you feel limited in any way? No, not at all. I do. I'm doing everything I want to do. And now I also know that if I can't do something, I just need to practice doing it. Um, I know that I'm really good at the things that I practice and I'm not very good at the things that I don't practice. And that was like really the difference.
And that's what I learned about. Um, pregnancy and postpartum, it's just, it's a phase of you get deconditioned and your body learns new habits. And it's not that you're even necessarily weaker, you just have different strategies. And the postpartum journey is just relearning strategies, but also learning new strategies and giving you're building a new options to do movement.
And where I was really stuck is I had. Practice doing movement one way and my body knew how to move one way and when my body changed because like physically the your body changes physically the, um, the relationship of your muscles, the location of your muscles, the relationship of your mind to where those muscles are changes and so, um, postpartum, it's not that you're broken, it's just that there's change and you need to respond to change.
It just makes me think of the quote that's associated with Darwin, which is the The survival of the species, it's not the strongest, it's the one that is most adaptable to change. Yes. I love that. I think, I think often we fall in, or many trainers, anybody who's sort of working with the postpartum population, I always say to people, you're not fragile.
Of course we want to lay, you know, the, the basis. Of course you want to start lighter and then load, but we have, motherhood is physical. And you just grew and birthed a human. You are not fragile. We just need to relearn. Try some different strategies. And I love how you said that Anthony Lowe said to you, let's just try it.
Cause I use that all the time. People, clients will say, well, can I do this? I don't know. Let's see. Can you? And even what you said that, um, just trying and that we're not fragile, it's thinking with, there was something that Diane Lee, that she's, um, a physio and she does a lot of research into diastasis.
And she, um, said that. For women that are afraid, or people that are afraid they're going to make the diastasis worse, she said, well, if you can, by doing a single movement or by practicing a movement, she thinks if you consider the conditions that led to it, it wasn't a single thing. Like for a lot of people, it's pregnancy that really leads to it.
So it's like, you'll go through nine months of pregnancy. You experience all this stretching and changes that is heavily influenced by hormones. You go through labor and delivery, and then you have this body. And so that was. to imagine that you're going to replicate the conditions of pregnancy by trying to do a sit up or trying to do a single oblique twist.
It's like when it, when she described it that way, it just seems like ridiculous. Like how are you going to replicate the conditions of pregnancy that cause the diastasis in a single exercise to make it so much worse? And even thinking about it like that, it gave me the confidence just to try, to try to do things.
And a lot of where people find, get stuck with diastasis, a lot of people, women will come and they'll say, um, they're afraid of movement. And so you get, they feel like they're stuck because of the diastasis, but they've never tried anything because of the fear mongering around diastasis has made them afraid to retrain their bodies or to learn new strategies.
And so it was never the physical. It was the mental, it was the information that they were getting. It was the fear. For sure. For sure. Yeah. So you touched on your experience with hernia and I think hernias, myself included, I feel like it's an area that is sort of understudied. We don't know a lot about hernias and kind of how to treat them and, uh, sort of how they arise.
So could you share with us just a little bit more about that background with hernia? Yeah, for me, I was born with, um, an umbilical hernia, and so, which I did not know was an umbilical hernia until I was 27. But what a hernia is, it's It's a hole, like a hernia, it just means a hole. Um, and so a hernia, because it's a hole, things can protrude through the hole, an umbilical hernia.
Technically everybody, every single person in the world is born with an umbilical hernia. It's the hole where your umbilical cord attached to your mother. And when that, um, cord detaches, when you were born, it leaves a very, very small hole. And that's. your belly button a little bit sinks into it. That's why you have a belly button or sometimes people have an outie because some fat pushes out of that hole and just pushes it up, up.
So everyone has it. Mine was just larger than, um, you see, typically see in like European children. So because of that, I had a distended belly button and I have a lot of pictures from my childhood, but my belly button stuck out like three inches. It was, you could see it protruding through my clothes, but as until I don't really have any memory of it until I was six.
And the difference was when I was, um, when I was six, I moved to England before that I'd lived in Nigeria and nobody really ever pointed it out to me. When I moved to England at six, my body was. start starkly different to my peers and my peers in school started pointing out that my body was different and I became self conscious about it and I was teased about it and it was because of that bullying that I had surgery and um, I remember the surgery but I don't remember the things that led up to it and the account my mom tells me is she said that I was, I'd refused to I'm dressing in front of her, just like she is a mom.
She has a six year old daughter who won't even take off her clothes in front of her for like a bath or in front of anyone. Cause I had so much shame about my body. And so she thought if I can get this addressed now, then she won't grow up with. All these body image issues and so that was her hope and so I had surgery when I was six and um, because my mom was I was put on the general anesthetic and there's with every with anesthesia, there's risks and there's high risk with children and so she was worried about me being put under twice.
And so to have my stitches removed don't want me to put people on the general anesthetic and I wasn't given any other pain option and that's one of my Memories from that is I had my stitches removed without any anesthesia. Oh my goodness. Pulling it through my skin and my skin popping up and my dad holding me down and me just screaming.
And so like these are the things that kind of popped up when people were talking about surgery again. I'm like, I don't want to go through that. I remember how it felt when the dressing was changed and the air touched it. So I had a lot of things. trauma from that. But also within a year, like the hernia reopened and another one appeared on top of it.
And so I started off with one hernia and then I ended up with two, which is known as an umbilical and a paraumbilical hernia. And I never understood the hernia and I never understood why another one opened up. And my parents were, didn't want me to have additional surgeries. And so then I grew up from six with two hernias and a scar across my belly, which just Added to my body image issues.
And so it was part of becoming, I remember my first pregnancy, I loved my body because my belly expanded and it flattened out the hernia because everything was expanded and it stretched and flattened out my belly button and it looked like every other pregnant belly. And so when I was pregnant, when my first.
Sun. That was the first time I ever felt like I had a normal body. So I like loved my pregnant body. I like hid all the things that I was self-conscious about. But after my second child, when I discovered the diastasis and I had the extra skin and all these stuff, I remember wishing so much that I could have my body back before babies.
But also knowing the irony of it, because I hated that body so much, but I was like, I didn't even know you could hate your body. More . Yeah. Yes. So true. So many layers there. Yeah. And um, so it was through learning about pressure management, how diastasis, um, may affect the way that you manage pressure and learning different pressure management strategies in the d in with, for the diastasis.
And my hernia was in my midline, the same spot as the diastasis. I found that the same pressure management strategies, um, helped me when I exercise, it took away any discomfort I had around the hernia. Like if I raced or I sent a lot of pressure through the hernia, it botched me, it felt like hard and uncomfortable, but I learned different ways that I could exercise where I didn't have that discomfort and where it felt different.
And in exercising, Through that with the diastasis is when I also started going to my doctors to kind of find my doctor, like, do you think I need surgery? I'm doing all these things. Do you think I need surgery? And it was one of those appointments. I had gone through two pregnancies and the doctors had never mentioned my hernia.
They'd never explained it to me. And one, it was that one doctor appointment. She said, like, it's just a whole things push in and out of the hole. It's just depending on like the pressure behind the hole. But, um, Having the hernia there itself is not dangerous. It's not harmful. It's not problematic. And it was the first time they told me that you're kind of lucky because you have a really large hernia.
A large hernias are tend to be less problematic than small hernias. And the reason people are surprised to hear that, but the reason is hernias aren't dangerous when they become dangerous is if something gets trapped in them. So because the hernia is a hole, whatever is behind it, things can get pushed into the hole.
And what often gets pushed into the hole, um, especially if it's an abdominal hernia, is fat or organs. So, um, your stomach, part of your stomach or intestine can get pushed and bulges into the hernia. And with mine, it's so large that things slip in and slip out. With smaller hernia, sometimes things get stuck and pinched.
And when it gets, something gets pushed in and it's trapped and it can't come out, Then your body will start sending you signals. You'll start, it will start feeling uncomfortable, red, inflamed, painful. And that's because when something gets trapped, it loses oxygen. And that part of the organ will start to die.
And so if you do have a painful hernia, if you do have an inflamed hernia, it's really important you see a doctor immediately. And a painful red hernia is the only time you will have to have emergency surgery for it because whatever is trapped needs to be removed for your own health. But with that said, if something gets trapped in a hernia, you can take your finger and you can push it back out.
Then like do that. You don't need to run to the hospital. Um, but yeah, with mine, it was like, things are going in and out. It's not good or bad. It just is. You're just seeing a visual representation of what's happening in your body. And it also was helpful to me with my training because it was a visual representation of in the ways I, which the ways in which I was managing pressure.
When I have high pressure management and management strategies, I can visibly see a bulge down my midline. I can see my hernia push out further when I lower or. Not even lower change my pressure management strategies and distribute pressure in a different way. I can visibly see my hernia and the diastasis respond to that.
And it's not that my body's doing anything different than somebody's body that doesn't have those conditions. It's just that I can see things in my body that might not be obvious because there's the fascia is thinner because there's a hole there. Yeah. So it's extra, extra feedback that some other bodies wouldn't get.
Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's sick. So I'm just curious. What do you wish everyone who had a diastasis or pelvic organ prolapse? What do you wish that they knew? Um, what I've learned, and I wish they knew, my philosophy now, what I say is that your aesthetics don't determine your athletics. So I really thought for a long time with Diastasis, there was a lot of focus for many years on closing the gap and that, um, you will be fixed if you close the gap.
And I've trained now with my diastasis for, um, including my pregnancies for like eight years and my gap has not reduced at all. But my The way that my body responds to women is completely different and my body does look different, but my gap is the same and my hernias are still there. I still have two large hernias, but I'm able to do things that people with hernias, people with hernias are told not to lift heavy.
And I've learned it's not what you lift. It's not, um, what you're lifting. It's how you're lifting it. And it's not what your body looks like. It's. the strategies that you're using. And yeah, having diastasis does not mean that any movement is off limits. And the same with prolapse. The research for prolapse has seen that the descent is not...
related to symptoms. There's people that have a lower prolapse, a lower descent with prolapse and don't have any symptoms. There's people that have a less of a descent and have symptoms. And so it's not about what it physically looks like. It's really about responding to your experience in your body. And like with prolapse, um, like with diastasis research shows that, um, diastasis is defined, um, as greater than 2.
7 centimeter gap. But the research has shown that women that have had people that have had children and people that have had multiple children tend to have a larger line, larger, um, gap between their, it's not a true gap, it's the linea alba, but a larger stretching within their midsection. So that just might be just part of going through pregnancy and part of aging.
And research has also shown that as people get older, the position of their pelvic organs naturally changes. So it's for a long time, prolapse and diastasis has been looked at. As at this dysfunction and I would argue it's not dysfunction, it's adaptation and you can learn new strategies to adapt with it.
I love that. I love that point that you made to just about the gap because I don't know about you, Dana, but a lot of my clients come to me saying right off the bat, I want to.
Um, I'm very upfront with them about that, that yes, I can teach you pressure management and we can go through progressive overload to load the core, all of those things, but there's not a guarantee that will close the gap, right? And that's not a given some bodies just remain, have a gap that remains. And again, I think you're just such a beautiful example that.
You still have a gap, but you're doing everything you want to be doing. Um, so with that said, so I know you sort of touched on like the body image piece with your journey. And so how, how did that all go for you with the look of your tummy? So I know you said like you loved your pregnant belly and then you had a harder time postpartum.
So how have you come around to the body image side of things with your diastasis and the hernias? Oh, I have got, um, get to the body image. Something, sorry, I also wanted to say with the advice for diastasis and prolapse is also knowing that there's no such thing as perfect movement. Because that's what you'll get when you're like Googling what to do with.
How to exercise the diastasis and prolapse, you often get a list of exercises and there is no such thing as a perfect exercise. There's no such thing as perfect movement. It doesn't exist, but there is a supportive movement. And so like lists don't work because perfection doesn't exist. And there's no right and wrong because right and wrong is subjective, not universal.
So a big lesson I learned and wish that women knew is that progress is not imperfection, progress is in persistence. And I progressed and I got stronger, not because I did it right, or I did it perfectly. It was a lot of trial and error. Um, and I had a lot of struggles, but what made the difference is that.
Even though I struggled, I persisted and I continued. And I think I have to say like a lot of my progress is because it's been three years since my last chart. It's been eight years since I was intentional about the ways in which I train and retrain my body. And I did a lot of different things. And like Anthony Lowe says, do something different.
I did a lot of different things and that's what really moved me forward. So perfection doesn't exist. Progress is just impersistence and the ways in which you persist can look different. I love that. That's, that's so good. Um, so with body image, that, I think like the first thing, the power with the diastasis journey is it made me start to learn about my body.
And for me, the more I understood my body, the less I... the less I judged it and the less I rejected it. And like with the hernias, there was a lot of fear around that because I really didn't know what it meant. And with me growing up, I knew, I saw the hernias were there and I could push my hands into the hole and.
Part of my insecurity growing up was also that I didn't know whether I was fertile or not because I really had no understanding of the surgery. I didn't know what had been done. All I knew was that my low belly had been cut into and I know that women carry their babies into their bellies. So that was always a fear growing up at the back of my mind.
And so I couldn't fully accept my body because I always felt like my body was. kind of broken. And so even going through the pregnancy, that was powerful for me because my body did something that I wanted my body to do. And I felt really good in it, but also learning about the diastasis and learning about the hernias and learning about Christian management strategies helped me to understand why my body responded in these ways.
And I think with diastasis, that is, it's not always just the physical, like women do come in, people do come in and they complain about back pain, or they complain about digestive issues or, um, you incontinence. And the old research used to link diastasis to those things, but now the new research the, um, has said that diastasis is not associated with back pain.
It's not, it's not a cause of back pain. There's correlation, but not association. It's not a cause of prolapse that women with and without diastasis experience the same amount of lumbar pelvic pain at 12 months postpartum. And so, um, kind of getting that information helped me to stop blaming my body. and empowered me to start understanding my body.
And when I let go of this resentment I had about my body and started understanding, it helped me to start accepting it. So I like for me, when I talk about self love, I think first we have to go. Self love is a good goal to have, but I think self acceptance is the place that you begin just first accepting your body and then moving to a place even of.
Some neutrality against it. So I started looking at my body, not as right and wrong. And my diastasis, the bulging, when my hernia bulges or my body midline, not as right, as wrong, just as information. And so I took away this moral judgment that I had about my body. And that was, that was very freeing too. I love that.
Fantastic. You're so well spoken. I love it.
Thank you. I hope I'm making sense. It's beautiful. I also think you need to have merch that says that aesthetics don't determine athletics. That is just whoo. I loved it. Okay. So in your intro, we, um, also mentioned that you take a decolonized approach to fitness. So could you share with us what decolonized...
Decolonizing fitness means to you, to me, it means, um, treating the client as an individual who is worthy of dignity and respect and not confining them by your bias, understanding of what health and fitness is. And like, I've had a lot of examples with that. Like when I started going, my first course I went to to train as a personal trainer.
Um, part of the course was we, I was in a room with different trainers and we had to assess each other's bodies based on the information on a book. And one assessment that I had someone assess that I had a, they had, um, a lower, lower lordosis, lower back lordosis or lumbar lordosis. That's it. Where your lower back has an exaggerated curve.
And I remember like looking at that and being like, No, that's just how my butt looks. That's how my mom's butt looks. That's how my aunt's butt looks like. That's how the women in my family's butt curves, but also recognizing that the studies and the examples in the book, there were no black subjects, like a lot of these studies aren't including, um, black people.
And so it was not that the person was trying to be malicious or mean, but it was just based on the information that they had. And so we all hold biases and I refer specifically to colonization. Because colonization was the act of Europeans settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area.
It's when like Christopher Columbus, um, accidentally went, sailed to America, like, and settles there. And, but the, The effects of colonization because of global colonization and transatlantic because of global colonization and the transatlantic slave trade indigenous knowledge is often dismissed and disregarded in favor of European understanding.
And that relates back to my journey personally about my hernia like being in England, and I heard I had this surgery on a hernia by, um, my dad is a doctor who moved to England because he's a gynecologist, OBGYN, and he got a job at a local hospital there. And so when I was going to for surgery at age six, he talked to, talked to his doctor friends and he researched a lot of doctors and I went to a very respected, um, pediatrician who performed the surgery.
And. Like, honestly, to this day, I really don't know what he did to my body. Like nothing really changed. In fact, I feel like if anything, it made it worse. And with the knowledge I have now, I understand that he shouldn't have done the surgery, but I also understand that. He had information like the information that he had was based on a medical system that was built on biases.
And he also, his normal was dealing with white children and, um, umbilical hernias aren't common amongst European populations. And as an adult now, I know that the statistics say that around 30 percent of children of African descent are born with umbilical hernias. And so understanding. Um, how European knowledge has been normalized, um, for if you're comparing my body to European standards, it was abnormal, but if you are comparing my body to African standards or to this information that 30 percent of children of African descent are born with an umbilical hernia, that's a huge percentage.
And so that normalizes me versus the information. Yeah, I have made me outside of normal, right? And what colonization the transatlantic slave trade did is they also established also established levels of people and worth. And so it's important to recognize how these beliefs influence our expectations of how people's bodies manifest today.
And the reason like it would be like we're talking on a fitness podcast, so someone would be like, why are you talking about this transatlantic slave trade when we're talking about fitness. But it's important to acknowledge that because what seems people seem to miss is that although slavery was 300, it was abolished 300 years ago.
It continued for 400 years. And so it affected a lot of world history. And for something like that, to continue, it had to be justified. And so in that 400 years and beyond, in that time, there were a lot of racist theories created to support and justify slavery. And even after its abolishment, there were a lot of, um, Theories that were still brought up to justify it, one such thing, which is huge that a lot of people don't know about is eugenics and eugenics was something that was studied for around 200 years.
And eugenics was a science in the 19th and earliest 20th centuries in all the major universities around the globe, you could get degrees and masters in eugenics and this is the study of the ideal human trait. And this was based on. And this was basically based on the idea that European characters, European features, European populations were the ideal population and eugenics also contributed to the demonization of black bodies by claiming that white bodies were the standard for health and beauty and everything else was below it.
And it's important to know about eugenics because eugenics influenced a lot of major global thinkers. Like Charles Darwin is a known eugenicist. Marion Sims, who's known as the father of modern gynecology, who created tools such as the sepulum and some gynecological tools by operating on enslaved black women without anesthesia.
Margaret Sanger, who is Um, the parent, the creator of Planned Parenthood, her clinics are the, led to the evolve, evolved into Planned Parenthood. She was a major eugenicist and, um, Winston Churchill is also known to be a major eugenicist and what eugenicists are. All support is that, um, basically that white people are the standard and that black people are underneath that.
Like Darwin is known, what I realized as an adult, the theory of the evolution. And many of us know this theory that man evolved from apes, and that came from Darwin. Darwin was a eugenicist, and he believed that, um, Black people were closer to apes and his theory was that white men were the most evolved of all people.
That white women were slightly below white men and that black people were the least evolved and black people were a step up from apes. And so this theory of man evolving from apes is basically black men evolving from apes and white men evolving from white men evolving from black men. And so it's a completely racist theory, but it's a theory that we generally, a lot of people generally accept today because they don't know the history of it.
Um, things like BMI is one of eugenics. BMI was a way to prove that the average weight of European populations was lower than the average weight of, um, black and indigenous populations to prove that their health was better. Modern dieting is one of eugenics. Modern dieting, the first diet is attributed to, um, The, the guy that did the graham cracker, Sylvester Graham, who's attributed to Graham Cracker because Sylvester Graham, he was a Presbyterian minister, and he believed that the diets of indigenous and black people, which was rich and heavily seasoned, he believed it was the cause of their immorality.
It was the cause of savagery. And he thought that taking all the seasoning out of food would help you, um, be closer to God and would help you be more moral. And so there's a lot of, and the, um, the, uh, Grahamites, they're the first group in history that ate a certain diet and weighed themselves to show how that diet affected them.
So group weighing is, um, the history links back to Sylvester Graham and the Grahamites. And that whole thing was born of eugenics and racism. And so just to understand that a lot of our beauty standards today are actually have a lot of their roots in oppression and a lot of their roots in anti blackness.
It's important to know that and so when we're promoting these things it's important to know where they came from because when we're promoting these things without understanding their history what we're continuing to do is promote racist attitudes and promote discrimination. Oh, thank you for sharing all that and I'm gonna say I think that's been part of my journey and you've been a huge contributor to my education in this field and I'm super thankful.
But just that whole tie to the thin white ideal I think just learning about that was enough for me to be done with dieting and I just want nothing to do with it just knowing that history so thank you so much for sharing that and I'm sure. Um, you know, I think you shared this on your page to just if you.
All listening, Google, um, like fit woman, um, just see what images come up, right? Like, I think you've posted that on your page before Inemesit and it's all white, thin women, right? And I think just being, having your eyes open to that, that that is the world we live in. As much as we want to say it's in the past, it really still is very prevalent, right?
Yeah, like even with that, there was a quote unquote scientific study into the most beautiful faces a computer program, which obviously is influenced by people was put in and it pulled out from celebrities the 10 most beautiful faces in the world. Nine of them were white women, one of them, the only black woman on the list was Beyonce.
And so like looking at this and it was presented as scientific and what are we saying when we say scientifically, the most Beautiful faces are white. How does that, what is that saying about black women and about black beauty and the standards of beauty that we're subjecting ourselves to? That was part of my journey was, I wanted to feel beautiful and be beautiful, but I also had to dismantle what beauty even meant.
For me. And a lot of that was, um, addressing my own internalized white supremacy, knowing that we are all born in this culture and we all absorb it. It's not that only white people absorb this message. Black people absorb this message. And so when that effectively, it affects, um, affected my self worth and my trying to make myself something that I physically could not be.
And that was really learning how to let go of that and learning what my body was and understanding what my body was versus. What I thought my body needed to be in order for it to be acceptable. So good. So yeah, so Dana and I are both white women and we have a lot of privilege with that. And so in your experience, what would you suggest for ourselves and for our listeners, um, to be better allies in the health and fitness space?
Um, you can't, you don't know what you don't know. So I think because you can't change what you don't know and you can't change what you're not aware of, the most important thing is to begin to diversify the people that you get information from. And even talking about history, we get one side of history, and it's not saying that that side of history is It's false.
It's saying it's one side and fitness does that to fitness often presents one picture. It's like this versus that. And the reality is that two truths can exist together. Your reality may be true and valid, but it is important to know that it is not the only reality that exists. When we talk about white supremacy, it's, it's not talking about white supremacists or white supremacist group.
It's a, um, a way to explain this sociological idea that we're. We're all born under this society, under a society where whiteness is normalized. And so white supremacy refers to the normalization of whiteness, normalization of white, white standards. Um, And so like knowing that as a white person, like a lot of white people don't relate to racism or don't, um, believe that racism exists or don't, don't always understand that in the stories that they're hearing from black people, and it can feel triggering, it can feel offensive because you believe the world goes one way and it's not saying that your world isn't true, but it's saying this is another part of the story.
And this, it's important to know this story. And it makes me think of a quote by, um, She Amanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian writer, and she says, stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair a broken dignity.
So I think it's important to hear stories from more than one person. Make sure that you're not only reading books by white authors. You're not only following white, um, physios, white PTs, white nutritionists. You're not only watching shows written by white directors, white authors, starring white people.
Because if you are, you're only getting one side of the story. You're only getting a white... Perspective, and you're not seeing the full story, and it's going to be very hard to understand and empathize with someone else when you haven't heard their story. I also think about, um, Krista King, she just posted a post today where she said, you can't create inclusive environments, ones in which individuals from all backgrounds are truly safe and feel seen, welcome, respected, and affirmed, while having a sense of belonging, without unlearning our biases and unlearning white supremacy.
And to begin to see our biases and to begin to understand white supremacy, it's important to hear the stories of the realities of people that are white. And even something very simple, um, which is like white supremacy has many levels, but something, um, an example of use is just sunscreen. A white supremacist can be used for sunscreen.
If you just open up Google and Google how, how to put on sunscreen or when to put on sunscreen, it pops up and it says you should put on sunscreen. I think it's. 30 minutes before entering the sun. And that's what it says. And that's a general recommendation for everyone. But Google is actually talking to white people.
That's white supremacy in action because for black people, there's a lot of black people in Canada and in North America and in the USA, um, that have a vitamin D deficiency. And that might be in parts because of white supremacy, because a lot of, um, beauty standards is the lighter, the more beautiful. And so I personally, as a child, I used to avoid the sun because I'm already dark and I didn't want to get darker in summer.
Like black people tan in summer. I'm darker than I am in winter. And that bothered me. So I would avoid the sun. But when you have melanin, what causes black skin is melanin. Melanin protects you from UV rays. And because melanin helps protect you from UV rays, which is why black people don't burn easily.
Um, It also blocks vitamin C like you get vitamin D through the UV rays, um, melanin blocks some of that. So it's harder for black people to make vitamin D from the sun. So if you are black, the recommendation is that you should start in the sun for 15 minutes before you apply sunscreen so that you can make vitamin D, which will be good for your health.
It'd be good for your bones. And then you can protect yourself from the additional, um, And so just something like that. It's like a very simple thing, but it's like, it's in everything. Like everything is recommended. Lots of the general information given is given for only part of the population. And this is apparent in.
Like the sunscreen thing, it's, you can say it's minute, but white supremacy is apparent in medicine. And in lots of ways in medicine, it is very harmful. Like there's a belief in medicine that is born of eugenics, that, and the transatlantic slave trade. That black people don't feel as much pain a way that slavery and the brutal beatings that happen in slavery would justify was it was said that black people have thicker skin, they don't experience pain in the same way as white people and this has been written into medicine.
And this is also something that Marian Sims, the father of gynecology advocated for when he was operating on enslaved black women and operating on their uterus operating on their vagina operating on their organs without Any anesthesia anesthesia was available at this point, but he didn't want to waste money on anesthesia.
And he said that these black women had an ability to endure painful experience that white women couldn't. And even today there was a 2016 study of medical students and 40 percent of medical students. Agreed with the belief that what black people have thicker skin, um, they also agreed that black people experience less pain and research into pain management has seen that in hospitals, black people are much less likely to get pain medication, they're much less likely to believe be believed about their pain symptoms.
And this also translates in. the higher death rates. Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, and black newborns are more likely to die in hospitals than white newborns, except when cared for by black doctors. They don't know the reason. I theorize that because black doctors see the humanity in black babies.
You have the same skin, you see the humanity, whereas if you don't have the same skin, and we've been, we've absorbed so many biases where we don't quite see black people as fully human. That affects the way you treat them. And that's knowledge that you might not, they're not even aware of. The thing about this awareness is many people aren't even aware of the biases they hold, but it's important to know that you do hold biases.
Yes. I think that's the biggest thing with my journey, my anti racism journey. First of all is you can't just one day call yourself an ally. It's an ongoing, lifelong learning. And I think just recognizing, you know, learning these things, it doesn't, I'm not, you know, a bad person because I have these biases.
So I think, you know, I've learned a lot of terms like white fragility where we tend to get our backs up when we think, why are you calling me a racist? You know, I think that's the biggest thing is just not taking it personal. It's just the society and the culture we've been raised in to have these biases and it takes, yeah, active unlearning for the rest of our lives.
I think to really, truly be an ally. Yeah. It was just accepting that racism is the norm. Like we're. Born in a racist society, it is normal to have racist attitudes. And so to be anti racist, you are going against what is the norm. You are going to go against what comes naturally to you. You are going to have to challenge those first thoughts that come into your head, but you're not even going to begin to challenge them if you don't.
Accept that you have them. And also it's like my journey with my body and with fitness. It's a little bit of stepping back and not building awareness around them without judgment saying like, this is the information I've absorbed, but not judging yourself as, as a bad person for having it. Like racism is not a bad about good and bad people, good people participate in racism.
So there is a part where you just have to really, um, take the morality out of it. And just. Look, observe and gather your experiences and your feelings and take them as data. And just like when we're training our bodies, we take, we take that data and we'll respond to it. And so look at that data and take that data and respond to it, but don't judge the data.
It's information. Mm hmm. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. You are, you are such a valuable person in this space for many reasons. All of that was amazing. So how can our listeners find you? How can, how can we work with you? Um, I am on Instagram right now. I'm early on Instagram at mummy underscore fitness can also like email me at, um, Mommy fitness at live.
com. And, um, I coach for balance three, six, five life. So you can, uh, see me through balance three, six, five as well. I love them. And yeah, we'll put that in the show notes. So if any of you want to reach out to an emissive, um, we'll put that in there. Thank you so much. Anything else to add before we go? Um, that, yeah, that's everything I just, and yeah, yeah.
Your aesthetics don't determine your athletics and progress is in persistence, not perfection. I love that so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. Thanks for listening to today's podcast. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. If you liked what you heard, we would love if you could share this with a friend, leave us a review, or subscribe to anywhere that you listen to your podcast.
Thanks for being here.
