Body & movement · Turin · 6 min read
Nurturing the movement
What if we stopped asking how little we could eat, and started asking what our bodies actually need in order to move?
The run was the easy part. Five kilometres through the park on a warm Saturday morning, at a pace slow enough that nobody dropped off the back and everybody could still talk. That was deliberate, moving in nature together.
But more importantly was the picnic afterwards – mingling, enjoying the sun, and reflecting upon an important topic.
the question nobody had asked out loud
Adele is a nutrition expert, who has also noticed how historically, almost every conversation about women, food and sport is organised around subtraction. How many calories burned. How much to cut. What to avoid, what to feel guilty about, what to earn back. Even in spaces that call themselves body-positive, the underlying arithmetic often stays the same.
So we asked the group a different question over the food: what would change if we thought about eating as fuelling the movement?
what came out of it
What followed wasn’t a lecture. It was closer to a dozen women reflecting on how much the relationship with food women had been shaped by an equation nobody had ever asked them to agree to.
Adele created a good reflection on fueling the movement. And more importantly, nobody was told what to do. That’s not how these conversations work here — we’re explicit that we don’t have the answers, and this one was no exception. What the group got instead was a frame that made the old one visible.
the pattern, again
This is how most Asterisco* events come about. Someone in the community already knows something worth sharing. Together we plan the run, sort the picnic, and get the word out. And it turned out to be a very meaningful time for us all.
This was the first time for Adele to organize an event.
If you’re reading this and there’s a question you’ve been wanting to put in front of a room of women — with or without a run attached — that’s all it takes to start.
Written by: Lina from Asterisco* community
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