Now that my health is getting back on track, and my hormone cycles are regulating, I’m starting to notice some patterns. I’ve been feeling down the past couple days, and noticing that I felt down almost exactly one month ago as well. Right around this particular time in my cycle, my body image is low, and the weights feel heavy. A friend shared this article with me a few months ago, and I’ve been noticing this trend in myself too (hello luteal phase!). Things in my life also seem to weigh heavier on my mind. It’s good that I am noticing these patterns, so I can recognize when things are weighing heavier than they normally would.
Author: Bethany
Fat Ands Over Fat Buts
Another great post by Dances With Fat. I have been much happier since I stopped apologizing for my shape, though I could always work on this!
Picture courtesy of the fabulous Jodee Rose http://jodee.deviantart.com
Someone shared a Facebook meme with me that said “I may be fat, but I’m fabulous!” I’ve seen this in any number of iterations: I may be fat but I”m fit, or I may be fat, but I’m not lazy, even though I fat I’m still beautiful etc.
I’ve certainly done this myself in the past and while I’m not trying to tell anyone what to say or think, I do think that this may be worth looking at.
What I realized for me was that when I said “I’m fat but…” or “even though I’m fat…” I (however inadvertently) gave credence to stereotypes about fat people. For example if I say that I’m fat but I’m a good dancer, there is a suggestion that the fact that I’m both fat and a good dancer is a surprise, or that I’m somehow overcoming…
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Body Positive Is For Everyone
Great post from the Ipockolypse.
My husband and I were discussing the blog the other night, while cuddling on couch. He said that someone told him that the body positive movement was only created so overweight people can feel good about being overweight. My husband, bless his heart, said maybe the movement would have more legitimacy if there was more to it.
I tried not to let my rage boil over and burn his face.
First off, and this is truly just a side note, there is nothing wrong with people loving their body type even if it is not ideal. Just because you don’t find something aesthetically attractive doesn’t mean other people won’t. The fact that we need a movement so women can stop hiding in their homes and be out in the world is a sign that it is needed. No woman, no one, should have to hide in shame because of how…
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Body Image Progress
I wanted to share some body positive successes I have had in the last week. I don’t always have “good body image days” (said in the same spirit as “good hair days”). My body positive attitude development has been an exercise in patience, just like my strength development. But I had two experiences last week that showed me that I am making progress in this area, even if every day is not great.
De-load Week Deep Thoughts
Today I noticed that “I don’t feel like it” feelings were kicking in. I didn’t sleep well last night and I didn’t really feel like training when I got up. I did it anyway, because I’m following a training program and if I missed a day, I’d miss the particular work that was scheduled for today too. It was a light, short workout (still on a deload week), and I was glad I did it. Take away lesson: training programs are good. Habits are good, too. Speaking of habits, I am over three quarters of the way to finishing the goal I set this year to do 150 strength workouts! Yay me! It’s August and I’m still going strong on the New Years goal I set. That is huge, right?
Later this week I will begin the final mesocycle of the 12 week training cycle I am doing. This one is different – it’s a competition prep mesocycle. I don’t actually have a competition in four weeks, but it will be good to get a feel for what the training would be like. I’m actually nervous about the volume and time that may be involved. I’m not sure if I will be able to put in the time required, as the workouts are long and I have a kiddo whining at me. I’m also not sure how my body will respond and recover from the increased volume. I’m planning to try the first couple weeks and see how it goes. Feel the fear and do it anyway! I’m trying to remember what it was like 10 years ago when I trained for my first marathon, and we were getting close to the race and the runs were long. I think I took a lot of naps. That’s all I remember.
I actually am interested in competing now. When I first started training at the Barbell Club at my local CrossFit affiliate, and they told me that competing once a year was somewhat expected of most members, I got super intimidated and wrote back that I was not sure if I wanted to compete. Now, I’m getting into the culture and starting to understand the sport more and I think I might! A friend of mine competed in the Bay State games this year and I watched the video footage after the fact, so I could see her performance. And I was surprised to see that I would not be lifting the lightest weight in my weight class! Maybe I could do this. I don’t know that I’ll win any medals, but feeling like I would come in “not last” is a good feeling. Of course, those who come in last are still putting in a great effort too! I don’t mean to put them down in any way. Hopefully you get my intention when you read this. I was just surprised because I assumed that all the lifters would be lifting more than me, because I am so new to the sport is all.
In other news, I was actually successful at packing a lunch for work today!
Learning Curve: Packing Lunch
This is a scary post for me to publish.
Why?
This quote from Go Kaleo’s post sums it up.:
There’s another, even more dysfunctional factor at work…..women in our culture have been conditioned to associate eating with feelings of shame and guilt. I’ve run into this on my facebook page and here, I’ve had several people make up ridiculous rumors about how much I eat and speculate that I must be taking steroids in order to eat as much as I do and not get fat. This is a response I get for eating a healthy amount of food to support my activity and my weight, and for acknowledging in public that I eat that much. Women are supposed to be dainty and delicate and eat like birds, and in popular media women enjoying eating and eating more than a few bites of food are frequently portrayed as undesirable, and presented as comedy. So many of us have internalized these perceptions, and the result is a tremendous psychological pressure to not eat (or at least to not be seen eating), and highly dysfunctional eating behaviors.
So, I feel nervous about going into my energy requirements in detail, when it isn’t in the context of wanting to count calories in order to lose weight. Especially as a fat person – I feel nervous that I will be judged harshly for not attempting weight loss. I fear that calorie talk in general will call attention to that. I have some anxiety that as a fat person, I shouldn’t call attention to the fact that I eat at all. So, I definitely have some internalized shame and guilt going on about this.
Just putting all that out there, before I go into the actual topic of this post. Why am I publishing it anyway? Because I strongly feel that this culture of guilt and shame around women eating is harmful, and the only way it is going to change is if women are going to make eating more visible/normal.
Now that it is out of the way, here it goes….
I am proud of myself for taking steps to better fuel my body this week. A big step? Learning how to pack meals and snacks for days at work / on the go.
Recovery!
This post is about how I recovered much of my energy levels. It’s a bit all over the place. I’ll touch on a lot of things, from parenting to postpartum adjustment to adrenal recovery to diet recovery to what’s normal and what’s not. Content warning: I discuss my reproductive functions in this post. If that sort of thing grosses you out, stop reading now. Want to skip the story and just read my conclusions? Here they are:
- If you are a mom of young children, and you feel like shit, yes, lifestyle changes can help a lot. But going to your doctor to diagnose and treat undetected medical issues can help a lot too! I put off going to the doctor a long time, and I’m glad I finally went.
- If you are fat and you have low energy, don’t blame your energy levels on your weight. By addressing many areas of my lifestyle, my energy levels and health have increased tremendously in the last 8 months, even though my weight has not changed. That’s a night and day difference, from being low functioning to much higher functioning in terms of energy and productivity, with no recent changes in my weight.
- Even though our culture likes to tell women (especially fat women) that we need to eat less and control our diets, I actually feel much healthier and much more highly functional when I ignore that shit.
- Does adrenal fatigue actually exist? I don’t know. I’m not qualified to say. My science education is sorely lacking. My doctor says yes. Many doctors say no. The blogger on the internet I listened to says “I don’t know” and “I’m skeptical.” I’m just reporting what I did in my own life, and the effects it has had. If you are having problems with low energy levels, my advice (not that I’m qualified to give any!) is to address your lifestyle AND go see your doctor. I don’t think I would have recovered as quickly without doing BOTH.
Keep reading to find out how I reached those conclusions.
Striving (or not) for Pull ups (so I don’t die in a Disney movie)
As I wrote about in Why I Let My Weight Go and Why I Stopped Aspiring to an Athletic Physique, I spent most of my adult life exercising to change how I looked. Sometimes it changed how I felt, but I viewed that as a side benefit, and still would feel inwardly frustrated and obsessed when it didn’t change the way I looked fast enough. I would get discouraged and I almost never continued an exercise program for more than a year continuously.
Now, I am doing something different. I took up weightlifting because I find it satisfying and I love the way it makes my body feel. I realized that I really don’t want to run – running does not feel good at all at my current size. That’s okay! Which leads me to…..pull ups.
Being able to do a pull up has been my personal holy grail of fitness for a long time. I couldn’t do them in those elementary school fitness tests. I always fell for the siren song of the gravitron at the gym. The assisted pull up. I could work my way up to an unassisted pull up, I told myself. I never got too far and I didn’t actually enjoy the feeling of the gravitron. The handles were too thick and difficult to grip. Etc.
When I was in my 20s, I was following nutrition and fitness coach who asserted that any truly healthy person should be able to run a mile and do a pull up (among other things). At the time I could run a mile but I could not do a pull up. The assertion that I should be able to do one stuck with me, however. I mean, look at all the action scenes in the Disney movies, for chrissakes. So many characters would be dead if not for their grip strength and their ability to do a pull up. Aladdin. Beast. Simba. Quasimodo. Prince Hans of the Southern Isles. All dead if not for their pull up abilities, right?
When I started doing CrossFit in 2011, the coaches showed me how to do ring rows. Ring rows are used as a scale-able alternative to pull ups in CrossFit. You can make them more and more difficult and use them to build strength if you cannot yet do a regular pull up or assisted pull up. I was excited. I was finally going to be able to pull myself back up onto a bridge should someone chuck me off, Disney villain style.
When I was four months pregnant, I found myself way too exhausted to keep going to the evening CrossFit classes. I bought a set of gymnastics rings so I could continue the ring rows on my own. I think I ended up using them twice during my pregnancy.
A few years later, I dug them out again when I started doing CrossFit on my own earlier in the year. I did lots of ring rows between January and May. I was no longer focused on my weight, but I still had the goal of wanting to be able to do a pull up in my mind.
And then I started training for Olympic weightlifting instead. My body felt 100 times better when I stopped doing CrossFit style metcon WODs. I switched to a Catalyst Athletics weightlifting program…..and still incorporated some pull up training (ring row training, in my case).
But the weightlifting training is both time intensive and tiring, and I realized that if I was going to focus on that, I might have to cut out other training (pull up training), because I needed to have energy for the rest of my life, too. My kid, my marriage, my job, basic functioning. I felt nervous about cutting out pull up training…..until I realized I was doing it on autopilot. Do I even WANT to be able to do pull ups? I don’t know! If so, WHY do I want to be able to do pull ups? I don’t know! It’s just what I have aspired to for the past 15 years….but I am a very different person than I was 15 years ago. I don’t need to have the same goals. It’s okay to move on. I may never be able to pull myself up after hanging on the edge of an icy staircase, Prince Hans style. And I’m willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, that could be an unrealistic goal for me in the present moment.
So, I decided to take a break from pull up training, at least until I figure out the answer to the question “do I actually WANT to do this?” My body is working hard at other things, and I know that if it turns out I actually do have my own inner motivation to one day do pull ups, I’ll be able to accomplish it that much more easily, because I will be more dedicated to the goal.
Or….maybe I can make a habit based goal, not an outcome based goal. 3000 ring rows in 2016….and just see what happens. That’s an option too!
Why I Stopped Aspiring to an Athletic Physique
I have a long history of aspiring to an athletic body type.
When I was in high school I bought a book called “The NYC Ballet Workout: Fifty Stretches and Exercises Anyone Can Do For a Strong, Graceful, and Sculpted Body.”
That’s good marketing, isn’t it? As a vulnerable person, I believed it. Until I got discouraged and somehow forgot about the book and moved on to something else. I don’t remember what became of the effort to look more like a ballet dancer. Nothing dramatic or memorable, and obviously it didn’t work.
Then there were the various women’s bodybuilding books. Then the yoga. And the two marathons. And the frustration that came with not having a “runner’s body.” Surely if I persisted and kept at it long enough, I might look like those distance runners?
Then one day in 2011, I watched a video of a talk by Tom Naughton, Science for Smart People. In this talk, Naughton uses an example of correlation that involves athletes bodies (skip to 24:45 in the video). He talks how, if “everyone knows running makes you thin,” because marathon runners tend to be thin, does that mean that “playing basketball makes you tall, because elite basketball players tend to be tall?” No. As Naughton says “Basketball players are tall because being tall makes you more likely to succeed at basketball, and the fact that competitive runners are thin doesn’t tell us anything, except perhaps that being thin makes it more likely that you will take up running.”
This sounds like the simplest concept in the world, but that fact that it blew my mind is…well, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about THAT.
I did have one more instance since then when I fell for the whole “if I do x, I will look like people who are successful at x.” I did CrossFit for about 5 months in 2011 and early 2012. I really admired the bodies of some of the other athletes in the gym, even more than any other kind of “athletic body” I had seen before. And once again, I felt hopeful that *this* would be the thing that would change my body.
I stopped CrossFit when I was four months pregnant and exhausted. So I didn’t have a chance to draw any conclusions about the effects consistent CrossFit would have had on my appearance.
But eventually it sunk in. I took a few years off of athletic pursuits when I had my son. I suppose my brain had time to process everything I had learned so far.
Earlier this year, when I set a goal to do weight training, 150 times, I remembered how much I enjoyed CrossFit, so I took a CrossFit approach to my programming. But CrossFit involves Olympic weightlifting, I knew I needed some coaching, as the Olympic lifts are highly technical. So, I went on USA Weightlifting’s website to find a local weightlifting club. It turned out that the weightlifting club local to me was at a CrossFit affiliate.
This time, when I walked into the CrossFit affiliate and saw some beautiful, athletic looking women, I didn’t think to myself ” I’ll bet I could look like that if I worked hard at CrossFit.” I knew that, odds were, those women weren’t coming from the same place I was. They had different genetics and circumstances. They almost certainly did not walk into the gym on their first day looking like I did. Now, I’m not making any judgments about whose body looked “better” or “worse” on their first day; I’m simply acknowledging that we all looked different. And therefore, if I worked hard at CrossFit, I wouldn’t look like The Really Cut CrossFit Chick in My Gym Who I Just Met. I would look however *I* would look if I worked hard at CrossFit….whatever that means for my particular body and genetics.
To confirm my thoughts on the matter, I asked The Really Cut CrossFit Chick in My Gym Who I Just Met how long she had been doing CrossFit, and if she had played any sports prior. She said she ran track all through high school and college. My suspicions were confirmed that we did NOT walk through the door on our first days looking the same. I knew a big shift had taken place in my mind, because I wasn’t judging or comparing the other women’s bodies to mine, or mine to theirs. I simply noticed that we were all different, and I go there every week to do my work, and I don’t stress over how my body compares.
When I realized that focusing on Olympic weightlifting exclusively felt better to me in my present health and circumstances, I was able to let go of CrossFit pretty easily. I knew that CrossFit wasn’t going to do anything magical to my body. My body would be limited by my own strengths and weaknesses, and while I could certainly work on weaknesses if I chose, it wasn’t going to do anything magical to my body…..so I would be happier if I set myself up for realistic expectations. I work on Olympic weightlifting because it’s a fun challenge and it makes my body FEEL good. Whereas I ran because I thought it would change the way I LOOKED.
I’m not at all suggesting that people should only do sports that they are genetically suited for. I’m suggesting that if your underlying reason for participating in a certain activity is to change your body type, you will probably be disappointed, unless your genetics happen to be inclined towards that body type anyway. If your underlying reason, however, is having fun and feeling good…..you will probably have a rewarding experience, regardless of whether your body changes. Like these women.
It is my hope that by sharing this perspective, that other women who hold the same beliefs I did will open their minds a bit, allowing them to choose activities they enjoy over the ones that they hope will change them. If you are feeling discouraged with your choice of activity, it’s nothing wrong with your body – find something else that feels great to do!
Nervous for Clean and Jerk Day
I felt nervous about today’s training. I’m still don’t feel incredibly solid on my clean and jerk form. Last Thursday was such a frustrating day and form just wasn’t happening. Saturday was a better day. I am still working on my speed in the clean, and on catching the bar in the correct position. So, I’m usually a little nervous for clean and jerk day.
Yesterday was supposed to be a rest day for me. I felt tired and slow. Then I unexpectedly had to fill in for someone at work at a CSA pick up and farm stand. Lots of heavy lifting and restocking in hot weather. My back did not want to do that stuff at all, and my lower back muscles kept cramping up as if to say “you said this would be a rest day!”
Power, Peace, and the Porch Gym 