Body Image

Role Models Part 3: Self-talk and Self-Listening

/ Bethany / 2 Comments

This is the third post in a series about role models. (You can read the first post and the second post too).

One of the reasons I chose habit-based goals instead of outcome based goals is that I wanted to keep myself open to whatever outcomes may come as a result of adopting healthier habits. I did not want to attempt to force certain outcomes on myself, which I ultimately could not control anyway.

One of the really nice outcomes I’ve been experiencing as a result of walking away from weight loss pressure is getting a lot more practice speaking to myself kindly – the way I strive to speak to (and listen to!) my own kiddo. I want to care for my kiddo as best I can, and that includes a sense of a emotional safety. Why would I want to do anything different for myself?

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Study: Diet Culture is Screwing Up Five Year Old Girls

/ Bethany / 2 Comments

“We can make this stop. I think the solution is to talk about the health of all children, instead of the size of some children. I think it’s helping kids develop a strong relationship and sense of trust with their bodies, it’s helping them understand their bodies’ needs instead of being terrified of being or becoming “fat.” I think it’s helping them try out lots of types of movement and giving them a chance to find something they enjoy instead of insisting that if they don’t like getting dodge balls hurled at them, or playing organized sports, or being judged on their ability to do a random group of exercises once a year (for which they get no training the rest of the year) then they deserve to be ridiculed. There are lots of things that we could do if we really cared about kids’ health, and talking about their weight isn’t even close.”

Another great post from Dances With Fat.

Ragen Chastain's avatarDances With Fat

grade on curveIf you were looking for proof that our culture is unbelievably messed up around dieting, health, and weight, you need look no further than the fact that a study has come out called “Dietary restraint of 5-year-old girls: Associations with internalization of the thin ideal and maternal, media, and peer influences.”

Yes, we have reached a point where we are studying dieting behaviors and thin obsession in kindergarten girls.  So what did the study find?

RESULTS:

Thirty-four percent of girls reported at least a moderate level of dietary restraint. While most girls were satisfied with their body size, half showed some internalization of the thin ideal. Girls’ dietary restraint was correlated with weight bias favoring thinner bodies, and greater internalization of the thin ideal, media exposure, and appearance conversations with peers. Media exposure and appearance conversations were the strongest predictors of dietary restraint.

That is straight up horrifying…

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Why We Need Fat Role Models

/ Bethany / 4 Comments

When Tess Holliday was featured in May 2015 in People magazine, I saw some commentary discussing whether Tess was a “good role model.” I felt very uneasy when I saw this.

Not even getting into the arguments that we can look up to people for their talents or accomplishments without wanting to look like them.  Not even getting into the fact that people seem to always be quick to point out that happy fat people could be construed as “promoting obesity.” Not even getting into the fact that if a thin or average sized person becomes famous for their accomplishments or talents, nobody questions their body and whether it compromises their worthiness as a role model.

Not even taking any of these things into account, I’m going to go so far as to say that we NEED fat role models. Yes, I said it. Not just “it’s okay that they exist.” I’m saying that I’m glad that they exist, because we need them.

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Overthinking: Kid-Friendly Alternatives to the Porch Gym

/ Bethany / 2 Comments

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.

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Body Image Progress

/ Bethany / 8 Comments

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.

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Learning Curve: Packing Lunch

/ Bethany / 7 Comments

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.

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Striving (or not) for Pull ups (so I don’t die in a Disney movie)

/ Bethany / 1 Comment

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

/ Bethany / 2 Comments

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!

Strengthening My Patience Muscle

/ Bethany / 11 Comments

Patience is a most useful and important mental skill, and an area of deficiency for me in the past.

Some background: I got through school with good grades because I had a naturally good memory and didn’t have to study much. Unfortunately, it means that I didn’t develop patience as a habit and a way of life like some of my friends did. That worked well for me in the younger school years. As the high school years went by I was put in more and more difficult classes as a result of my previous good grades. I didn’t do as well in some of those classes, because I had almost no experience or patience with studying. Still, I did well enough that nobody had any worries about my study skills. I absorbed and remembered things quickly enough in general that I didn’t raise any red flags. All through school, I tested well, but sometimes would lapse on keeping up with homework, especially if it was particularly tedious or repetitive.

I was not naturally talented at sports, and you know how mean kids can be about that…. so I didn’t join any sports teams or cultivate patience that way. I did play musical instruments, but I was naturally talented and so I enjoyed practicing, for a while. I actually was interested in possibly joining the swim team, but I wasn’t the fastest swimmer, and I got discouraged rather than asking a coach how I could improve my speed. As most people do, I gravitated towards areas where I had natural talent. Hence not too much opportunity for cultivating patience.

Fast forward to my kid’s first and second year.

Now, as a parent, I realize that patience is a skill I would do well to develop. Not just in a “don’t yell at your kid too much” sort of way….but in a “respecting that everything will come in it’s own time” sort of way. In a “I don’t control the world and I harbor no illusions that I do” sort of way. In a “sometimes you don’t get it on the first try, and it’s still worth doing” sort of way. That last one is the one that comes least naturally to me, but I very much want to cultivate that mindset in my son.

I have made some progress in developing patience. For example, taking up a habit based approach to health is an exercise in patience in and of itself. Every habit I am working on is over the course of the year, not the week or the month. I specifically chose that time frame in part to teach myself patience.

The fact that I stuck with my own personal habit approach for the last 7 months is proof that my ability to exercise patience is improving. That my “patience muscle is growing stronger,” if you will.

At the same time I was starting some of these new habits, some friends were attempting drastic lifestyle changes (it was the new year!). I knew in my heart that those approaches were not for me. I knew that my approach could be slower and less dramatic….but I also knew that it was likely that their drastic lifestyle changes would be abandoned in a matter of days or weeks, and I was almost certain I could stick to the habits I set. I told myself “who cares if it takes a year to make all the changes I want to make? Or longer? I’ve got nothing but time. What I DON’T have time for is more cycles of extreme ‘healthy living’ followed by ‘f*ck it all, it’s too overwhelming and it sucks anyway.'” That approach hadn’t served me well and I knew that whatever the outcome, if I had the time to spend 30 plus years getting it wrong, eating green vegetables and committing to weight training for a year couldn’t possibly do any harm.

That is also proof that my patience muscle is growing stronger.

When I decided to start learning Olympic weightlifting this spring, I thought I would be good at it, because I was pretty strong. Once I learned more and realized that speed was also a huge part of it, I questioned whether it was worth doing, because I “wasn’t any good at speed or power.” I caught myself thinking that maybe I should just abandon the idea. And I responded to myself that even though my previous way of living was to only try things I was instantly good at, it was okay to try something that I would have to work at. It was a good idea, in fact. The very best athletes in the world did it. I told myself that this was an opportunity to, for the first time in my life, consciously choose to work at something because I enjoy it and find it satisfying, not because I am “the best” at it. I thought of my son watching me do this. And I stuck with it.

This is also proof that my patience muscle is growing stronger.

And I think the way I have approached my training has shown patience, too. I had no sense of embarrassment starting at the bottom, with the training bar. I know some people with previous strength experience get impatient about that. I am taking care to focus on my form now at the lighter weights, so I don’t develop bad habits to unlearn at the heavier weights.

This is also proof that my patience muscle is growing stronger.

Know what I’m really struggling with in terms of patience, though? My body image.  Yup! It’s like I have two separate minds on this issue. One mind is all in on body positivity and Health at Every Size. Indeed, my health has improved greatly. The other mind is struggling with Fat Acceptance….not of other people (at least not consciously), but of myself. I love the strong feeling I am developing in my legs, arms, and back. And I am feeling very frustrated lately with size of my belly. It is more difficult to find pants that fit well on a body that is proportioned like mine, and that feels frustrating. I know that where a person stores fat is largely genetic, and that is the case here. Both my mother and father have lean, muscular legs at whatever size they are at the moment. If they gain weight, it goes right to their bellies and backs. Me too. Even at over 100 pounds lighter than I currently am, my body held fat in my belly and back. So this is something I will need to change my mindset on, not my body. And yet, my patience muscle is apparently not yet strong enough for this one.

So, here is another opportunity to work at something that I am not instantly good at. Body acceptance. Positive body image. Sometimes I get it. Sometimes I don’t. That’s okay. And it’s also okay, and encouraged, to keep working at it, instead of abandoning ship because it didn’t come instantly.

I know I can do this. My patience muscle has come so far already.

Feeding the Wolves

/ Bethany / 6 Comments

This blog is mostly about positivity, but I know that in order to be credible I also need to be real. So I am being honest today. I am having a challenging week. My patience with my kid is challenging. My marriage is challenging. The weights feel heavy and my body is fighting me on my technique with the lifts. My mind is full of self doubt and judgment. I want to run away from my family sometimes. Even though I passionately believe in loving oneself as is, I am frustrated with the size of my belly and have a hard time diverting my attention away from that this week.

I was on the fence of whether I even wanted to share that last sentence here. I want to put forth a message of positivity in the world. Do I “be real” and share the bad along with the good? Or do I subscribe to “the one you feed”?

A Parable

An old grandfather told his grandson: “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, and resentment. The other is good. It is joy, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and bravery.”

The boy thought about it, and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?”

The old man quietly replied, “the one you feed.”

So, I’m sharing my internal struggles today, but I’m choosing not to delve into them in detail. I want to feed the good wolf.

Hoping a good night’s sleep will feed the good wolf too.