How Can I Feel Good and Be Happy with My Body?

Two guys’ practical and empowering answers for satisfying and durable fitness and wellbeing

Photo by Sebastian Voortman from Pexels

Being healthy means different things to different people. For some, it means not suffering from any life-threatening diseases; for others, it means exercising fives days a week and constantly watching calories.

To a lot of people, it is this out-of-reach ideal that they tell themselves they have to pursue but never really seem to achieve, because in their minds, good health means sacrifices. It is perceived as expensive, time-consuming and complicated, not to mention far from fun or enjoyable.

But why does it have to be like that? Surely, if good health is something everyone aspires to, there has to be a way to approach things differently…

And as it turns out: for us, there is.

Story Overview

1. Ty’s Story
2. Our Vision
3. Our Lifestyle
4. Our Results
5. Our Takeaway

Ty’s Story

My brother Cyril and I count ourselves pretty lucky: growing up, we never had any serious health problems.

Apart from wearing glasses and contact lenses — for my part, or undergoing an appendectomy — for Cyril, we can’t say that we’ve spent a lot of time in doctor’s offices or hospitals, which makes us very fortunate.

However, we can’t say that we’ve always felt great in our bodies — or our minds — either.

When I was a kid, I didn’t care much about being healthy. I hated sports or any type of physical activity, and my sweet tooth meant that I always had a bag of cookies close to hand. I felt like I was pretty satisfied with my lifestyle, and never really second-guessed the way I was living my life.

It was pretty similar to how everyone else around me was doing it, so I would tell myself, “how bad can it be?” Yet, seventeen-year-old me would most likely say: “pretty bad.”

As a teen, I had really bad acne, couldn’t go number two without a stack of magazines, probably smelled horrible and could hardly look at my reflection in the mirror. My self-esteem was at its lowest, and it lasted all through high-school and into my early twenties.

Then, on top of everything else, I started gaining some noticeable weight, and it only seemed to be getting worse as the years went by.

Never once did I make the direct connection between the way I was living my life and the discomfort I felt inside my body and mind. Or if I did, I sure as hell always found a way to deny it and refuse responsibility for any of it. If I was like this, it was probably because I hadn’t won the genetic lottery, and I wasn’t meant for clear skin, washboard abs and regular bowel movements.

I simply didn’t consider health and beauty to be related in any way. Or rather, I didn’t want them to be. I didn’t want to live in a world where eating pizza meant I would get zits, or drinking a pint meant I would get bloated and gassy. I wasn’t ready to admit that what I used to soothe the pain in my life was actually causing the pain in the first place.

Being healthy was that abstract intangible notion. In my mind, it was vaguely linked to a few other do’s and don’t’s like “working out five days a week”, “no burgers”, “no smoking”, “no alcohol” and inevitably “no fun”. Everyone seemed to want the results, but the ways to get them appeared restrictive, hard to reach and even harder to maintain.

Choosing health felt like a bet where the odds were desperately unappealing: I’d be doing stuff that maybe would lead me to live longer, but at the price of privation and instead of fun and excitement.

Since I didn’t know any better, living with a healthy lifestyle felt like there was so much more to lose than to gain.

I could envisage a few perks of a healthier lifestyle: reduced body fat, a little more energy, a little less mood swings… But, in full honesty, none of that compared to the satisfaction of a burger and pint!

And in the long run, that ghost promise of “I might live longer if I keep it up” only paled in comparison to what I thought a fun life could be.

That’s because all of my experience with health was limited to following what was allegedly healthy. All the things I’d seen and heard during my upbringing, all the medical advice, mainstream notions, advertisements, studies that were out there, and perpetuated an unattractive and unreachable notion of health…

It seemed most of it was associated with not doing pleasurable things or doing things that were unpleasant, only to be able to say: “Well, I ate my salad and did my time on the treadmill… it was a pain, but at least it was ‘healthy’, so good for me… I guess.”

The missing piece of the puzzle was something I’d been pushing away all along, because no one had ever taught me that it had any value: my own experience and how I genuinely felt.

I needed to start trusting myself enough to get out there and figure out what was good for me, so that I could be empowered and happy with the choices I could make.

Our Vision

In the next few sections, we’re sharing more of our perspectives and experiences, through a carefully crafted holistic approach, kept sweet and straight-to-the-point.

These reflections are the condensed results of years of personal experimentation, research and systemization, based on what has grown to be our most valued indicator: how good we genuinely feel in our bodies, minds and lives.

Experiencing Our Bodies

The way we look at it, as human beings, we get to experience our bodies along the following aspects:

• There’s aesthetics, for which we tend to desire what we call beauty.
• There’s structure and function, both with the inner workings of our bodies, for which we desire health, and their outer performance, for which we desire fitness.
• There’s also how we feel in our bodies, for which we desire physical wellbeing.
• And all these aspects also result in a specific, and personal, mental body image, a way we tend to think of our body and the relationship we have with it, which is also something that we are more or less happy with.

And, when it comes to our bodies, and to accessing beauty, health, fitness, physical wellbeing, and a body image we’re happy with, we’ve found over the years that there is actually something at the core of it all…

Something we had overlooked for a long time, and acknowledging it changed our experience of our bodies altogether.

The Central Process of Digestion

The way we see it, digestion is a process central to life as we humans experience it.

• It’s central in its necessity: it provides us with energy, so we can, you know, move around, and matter, for body composition, so we actually have a body to move around. And it also ensures waste disposal.
• It’s also central in terms of space and time: it literally happens at the center or core of our bodies, and it’s happening all the time: at any given time, there is something being digested in my system.

And, yet, central as it is, the process of digestion seems to go overlooked by many. We will say that a great part of digestion does happen without us having to think about it, making it somewhat of an autonomous process.

But, in our experience, digestion, though autonomous to a degree, doesn’t happen just like that. Though it does seem pretty magical, unlike magic, it isn’t instantaneous, absolute or undifferentiated: it’s not like we can eat instead of sleep, or digest rocks, or never drink water, and still be okay…

So our bodies do not have infinite plasticity, and there are some natural rules and requirements to digestion that we do not have control over.

Systemic Digestion and Metabolism

Speaking of natural rules and autonomous aspects, from a slightly more clinical point of view, we tend to think of digestion as a process which includes the following steps:

• Starting with our mouths, through mechanical chewing of food with our teeth and chemical action of our saliva.
• Down the oesophagus and into the stomach, where gastric juice and stomach movement help dissolve and break down food to even tinier blocks.
• Then, through the small intestine, the interface where broken down nutrients go from our digestive system to our bloodstream, so they can be carried through our entire bodies and sustain us.
• Ending with the large intestine, where unused matter re-solidifies, and travels to then be evacuated, around at least 24 hours after being ingested, and possibly more, depending on how easy evacuation ends up being.
• As for liquids, they are filtered through the kidneys and travel to the bladder before being evacuated.

And, personally, we also include in the idea of digestion:

• the wider metabolic aspects of it, through its synergetic connection with breathing, for aerobic metabolism, and the extra transformations of nutrients happening in our liver and muscles;
• the constant regulation of our blood sugar;
• even the evacuation of some amount of waste through skin and sweat.

Our Lifestyle

Digestion and Our Daily Habits

From this overall perspective of digestion, as such a complex and pretty amazing process, it’s not hard to imagine that different behaviours in how we use our bodies, could actually have an impact on this ongoing process, and make it either easier or harder…

Well, in our experience, that’s actually the case: there are behavioural aspects of our lives, within our control, that greatly influence the digestion process, making it easier, more efficient and more pleasant, or unfortunately, going in the opposite direction.

Such aspects include:

• eating / food / diet, whatever you may call it
• using the bathroom, which is associated with the waste management part of digestion
• movement or physical activity, exercise, and posture
• breathing
• sleep
• even showers, sex, massages, and how relaxed we are

And for all these aspects influencing the process of digestion, we’ve experienced time and time again that not all behaviours have the same results, depending on how we eat, how we move, how we breathe, how we sleep, and so on.

This experience has led us to acknowledge the existence of such external factors physically influencing the efficiency of our digestion.

Our Bodies’ Capacity for Adaptation

And on top of these external factors, we also get to experience one of our bodies most amazing abilities everyday.

Indeed, our bodies are constantly aiming to optimize themselves according to how we use them — i.e. our lifestyle — thanks to digestion, and its resulting energy output, body composition — including body fat and muscle mass — and waste management.

So much so that we’ve come to call this phenomenon our bodies’ autonomous adaptation.

Influences and Manifestations’ Time-frame

All these factors influencing digestion, both physically and through our bodies’ autonomous adaptation, mean that we can actually notice tangible and significant results from many of our lifestyle behaviours anywhere from instantly, to only 24, 48 or 72 hours.

Our Results

Uncovering Connections

So, which results are we talking about?

Well, through the combination of the autonomous aspects of digestion, which we have no control over, and the behavioural aspects influencing it, within our control, such as eating, moving, and breathing, we found digestion ends up having many ramifications into our experience of our bodies, our minds and our lives:

• With the efficiency of detoxing linked to digestion, comes improved skin clarity and reduced body odour.
• With the combination of the kinds of foods we eat, and our physical activity, digestion results in either storing or burning macronutrients, and therefore determines our levels of body fat and muscle mass.
• What we eat, how we breathe, sleep and move, all factor in how easy digestion ends up being, and the resulting energy levels, aerobic capacity, mind clarity and serenity we end up experiencing.
• While a digestion made laborious can lead to tensions, aches, pains, mind fogginess, increased stress, unpleasant moods and mood swings.

Several Dimensions for One Single Experience

These are some of the tangible connections we’ve experienced, between our behaviours, the autonomous digestion process, and the aesthetics, fitness, and physical wellbeing that we end up experiencing with our bodies, and which promote a certain personal body image.

And yes, feeling good in our bodies has also led us to another major reconnection: we realized that when we make our bodies nice places to live, we feel much better in our minds as well.

Which makes a lot of sense to us, from the perspective that nothing comes and goes through our minds which doesn’t go through our bodies first: everything we sense, see, hear, touch, taste and smell happens through our bodies before being acknowledged, processed and interpreted by our minds — and who knows what our minds become without a body?

Who’s to Blame? The Numbing Effect.

In our experience, the fact that many of us aren’t aware of such connections between behaviours, digestion, and results, is due to what we now call the numbing effect.

It means that our perspective on what digestion does and can do is blurred, limited, and often reduced to the binary of… “Can I poop or not?”.

The way we see it, this numbing effect comes from 3 major factors:

• A certain cultural disregard for the process of digestion, due to perspectives like “I have this fat to muscle ratio because of my genetics”, or “it’s normal to have headaches”, “mood swings are inevitable” or “I have bad skin, that’s just how it is”, etc. Unfortunately, we witness daily that such perspectives are also actively spread and maintained by different entities around us: education, peers, not to mention countless institutions, corporations and individuals who, it seems, don’t always have our best interest at heart. Sadly, it seems others’ agendas are not always about our own personal empowerment and satisfaction.
• The various stimulants one may resort to on a daily basis: coffee, painkillers, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and antidepressants.
• The physiological numbness our bodies tend to develop from daily laborious digestion: just as we can get used to a smell and stop smelling it after a while, we’ve found our bodies tend to tone down sensations connected to digestion so that we aren’t constantly in pain, or at least not acutely.

The combination of these 3 factors contributes to keeping us in the dark when it comes to digestion, in a subsequent state of relative disconnection from our bodies and their possibilities.

Because of this numbing effect, many of us just don’t realize that we could experience happier results with our bodies, in aesthetics, fitness, and physical wellbeing, with a lifestyle more digestion-friendly.

Our Takeaway

How Acknowledging Digestion Has Changed Our Lives for the Better

After spending years trying different diets, exercise regimens and lifestyles, the resulting emergence of the concept of digestion in our relationship with our bodies has allowed us to rediscover the connections between eating, moving, health, fitness, beauty, etc.

And what we previously thought of as separate aspects of our lives now appear to us as one single reality.

In fact, we’ve come to call this life-changing approach the digestion reconnection.

So, all this means that, as we pay attention, and actively look for the connections between what we do, what we get with our bodies and how we end up feeling, things open up in pretty spectacular ways. Ways to be happy about how we eat, how we move, how we look, … and how we feel.

All it takes is a little mindfulness in our choices and behaviours, as we acknowledge, make sense of, and behave to improve what stands at the core of it: our digestion.

For Us, Health is Enjoying Our Bodies

Feeling good in our bodies thanks to happier digestion has really given us a sense of purpose and meaning in how we deal with life.

It anchors and relaxes us, cleanses our focus, and satisfies us in a unique way, like nothing else we’ve experienced. It makes everything feel easier and more enjoyable.

And it has allowed us to bring a new meaning to health altogether, as the ability to enjoy our bodies.

An overview of our experienced-based approach to health and body enjoyment

And so, for us, being healthy only has to mean one thing: feeling good in our minds and bodies, as much and as often as we possibly can.

It is our firm belief that our bodies are innately made to function properly. That we aren’t meant to feel sick all the time, or be in constant pain; these are our bodies’ ways of telling us that there’s something wrong.

If we stop reaching for painkillers every time we feel pain, we have an opportunity to listen to our bodies and maybe make a change.

What We Recommend

In this article, we are fully acknowledging digestion, and the happy results it can give us access to, as doing so has really changed our lives for the better, no doubt about it.

And so, this is the best piece of advice we could possibly give to anyone looking to feel better in their body:

Regardless of any study, influencer, hearsay, or peer’s opinion or message, YOU alone hold the ultimate piece of the puzzle of your health and your enjoyment of your body: how YOU feel. Results can happen super fast, empowering you to get in touch with how you feel, and discover the tangible connections between behaviours and results, between what you do and what you get.

And yes, we do realize the apparent irony of us recommending not overzealously listening to others, when that’s precisely what we are! But, really, listening to what others have to say is completely fine in our eyes, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of listening to how you genuinely feel.

To us, considering someone’s opinion and taking it as such — an opinion, computing it and using it to challenge our own can be a fair and growth-inducing thing to do, but never at the expense of our own feelings and personal life experience.

Now, the way we see it, new results require trying new things, whether in how we think or what we do.

So, if you’re looking to feel better in your body, we really recommend starting to experiment with the following tips AND paying attention to the noticeable results connected to these behaviours, emerging in a matter of seconds or a few short days:

• How you eat: experimenting with food types (meat, eggs, dairy, grains, vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes, …), by dropping a given food type for a few days, or focusing on another, can really give a new perspective on what eating can do for us. For example, we personally tend to stay away from dairy and gluten, not based on hearsay or trends, but on our own tangible experience with those, while we enjoy fresh ripe fruit daily for digestion-promoting fiber and water. Taking our time to eat and chewing sufficiently — our stomachs don’t have teeth — have also helped us greatly improve our digestion!
• How you move or exercise: we verify daily that how we move influences peristalsis, the movement in our guts that helps move digested matter, or chyme, through our system. And regular full-body movement throughout the day, from relaxed walking to dedicated workout sessions, has turned out to be key to easier and happier digestion for us. Conversely, a happier digestion makes exercising easier and more enjoyable by providing us with more energy and more favourable mood.
• How you bear yourself and breathe: a slouching posture constrains our airway, making breathing less efficient, which in turns brings our mood and energy levels down, and slows down our digestion. And cumbersome digestion will in turn make breathing harder and affect our posture as well. To get out of this vicious cycle, we remind ourselves to regularly check our posture, and take some deep revitalizing breaths.
• How you sleep: in our experience, getting as much sleep as we need not only helps keep us refreshed, but also relaxed, promoting peristalsis and easier digestion, and resulting in better mood, energy and mind clarity. It also helps regulate our hunger, and makes exercise much more enjoyable as well, which in turn facilitates the whole virtuous cycle of happy digestion.
• How you use the bathroom: what we eat greatly influences how regular we can be, but that’s not the only factor we found. Going when we feel the need to, instead of holding it, as well as taking our time, really relaxing, and even adjusting our position: these can all go a long way into experiencing happier digestion.
• How you feel: in our eyes, the ultimate indicator and guide in one’s journey to feel genuinely good. Practically speaking, we found that laborious digestion can, for instance, create tensions and discomfort, heavily affect our mood, and even lead to aches and pains in our joints, backs, or heads. So, every time we experience some sudden body pain, discomfort or mood shift, rather than reaching for pills, we always try to relax and trace it back to the 5 types of behaviours we’ve listed above, to understand what we can do, and instantly improve how we feel.

Keeping in mind the ongoing process of digestion, at the core of it all, and happening within our bodies at all times, as we try to connect it to how we feel in the moment, makes experimenting with our behaviours, understanding their connections with results, and subsequently adjusting our lifestyle, much easier and empowering.

Moreover, from experience, it does get even easier the more we do it, as we become more attuned to new sensations in our bodies and minds.

Finally, something we’ve found quite helpful in keeping us on the path to figuring out what genuinely works for us, despite much of the ambient cultural noise and solicitations surrounding fitness and wellbeing, is this little mantra:

“I have the power to feel good, satisfied, and happy with my body every day.”

And so, for us, experiencing the digestion reconnection has been the key to genuine and durable satisfaction with our bodies.

Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed our take on what health, fitness, and wellbeing can mean, based on our personal experiences.

If you’re looking to get more enjoyment out of your body, we hope you find inspiration in these few words and what we’ve spent years experimenting with and putting together.

And, of course, feel free to share your thoughts and experience by leaving a comment!

Until next time, stay safe and stay happy!

About Us

We are two brothers who have made feeling genuinely good a priority in our lives. We only share personal experience, of things we’ve done, and things we still do, in open, transparent and practical ways, because we believe that others can enjoy them as well, and that there’s value in trying! You’re welcome to check out our different outlets by visiting our website at cyrilandty.com.