Find Your “New Normal”

What is “normal” anyway? Sometimes we seem to use certain words without thinking much about their meaning. Normal can be defined using statistics by a bell-shaped curve of “normal” distribution. Whatever falls within the middle of that curve, where most individuals exhibit a given characteristics, we often call “normal” or “average”. But are the areas outside of the middle section really not normal?

Source: McLeod, S. A. (2019, May 28). Introduction to the normal distribution (bell curve). Simply psychology: https://www.simplypsychology.org/normal-distribution.html

To make things more complicated, bell-shaped curves may have different shapes! Some of them are more skewing to the right, some more to the left or they seem to be much flatter than the sample picture above. It means that more of the population is either more in low or high end of the measure or that the population is quite evenly distributed in almost all measures.

Regardless of the exact shape, I think the terms “normal” and “average” should stay in the realm of statistics. We could perhaps find a better word for what we mean when we say “normal”. There is so much advice out there on what normal is. Normal sleep? 8-7 hours a day. Normal weight? Calculate your BMI. Normal cholesterol levels? Sugar levels? Caloric intake? We measure everything, find some average and then propose it as a “norm”.

Do you remember a term that got popular during the Covid pandemic? Everyone was saying it: new normal. I think that’s what we all need to do in our diet-recovery process – we need to find our new normal. As in Sonya Renee Taylor’s words quoted below – we have an opportunity to make our own “normal” that is aligned with our beliefs, values, and goals. We can find our new normal, where we trust ourselves to make the best choices for us.

“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stich a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” Sonya Renee Taylor

For most people it sounds like a heresy: to trust your body to guide you in finding out what is best for you in terms of taking care of that body. How much to sleep. How much to eat. How much to move. How much to rest. How to manage any health concerns. All of it can be quite an intuitive process if we learn to listen to our bodies. Some people function perfectly well on 5 hours of sleep, while others need even 10! Why do we expect it to be different with eating or exercising?

The only way to find our “new normal” is to change our deeply rooted beliefs first. Accept that we are all individuals and what is normal for one person, is unlikely to be normal for another. Once this reality is fully embraced, we can drop down into our bodies and finally listen. It is sometimes difficult to imagine it before you hear it for yourself – but once you hear that internal voice, you will never go back to “normal” – the dieting, the exercising, and pushing yourself to meet some health/thin/fit ideal. That “norm” becomes obsolete, and you can find your own gentler “norm” that helps YOU thrive.