Hello there lovelies,
You may or may not know that I am cheating on The Boyfriend with my treadmill. That confession aside, since The Boyfriend's parents gave us the treadmill two months ago I have lost four kilograms. But the way that I feel about it got me thinking about my relationship with my weight & health/fitness, and how it has changed in the last few years.
When I was 17 I weighed the most that I have in my life. When I was 20 I weighed the least that I have in my life. I am now sitting comfortably in the middle. I have been every clothing size between an 18 and an 8, but this is the only time that I have felt completely at home in my body. My weight loss first started when I had an operation on my jaw not long before I turned 18, and I was put on a liquid diet for two months. Eating is a tiring venture when you are recovering from surgery, so I ate a lot less in recovery than I did before my operation. Then, I started exercising in order to burn off all the extra energy I had from laying around the house all day. I was surprised by all the things that my body could do, and all the ways that my muscles worked that I didn't know about before that.
But it all went a little pear-shaped after that. I noticed that people complimented me more every time I lost more weight. People seemed to pay more positive attention to me. It seemed like I suddenly made new friends, suddenly got invited to parties, suddenly had guys wanting to ask me out. When I moved out of home to go to university I lost more weight. I also met the man who would turn out the be the love of my life, absolutely loved the subject I was studying, and aced every assignment/exam/project that came my way. I don't know how, but I came to attribute all these things to my weight, instead of my confidence levels. I became determined to lose more weight, because if thing started going well when I started getting skinnier, then I just had to keep on getting skinnier, right? When I was at my very skinniest, I felt like I was waging a war against my body. Every push-up, every squat, every lunge was me attacking my body and willing it to be just a little bit thinner. I really and truly believed that as long as I kept being a size 8 that nothing bad would ever happen to me.
Then, I hit the beginning of the major depressive episode that would eventually spur me to start this blog. I lost my motivation to study, to exercise - hell, to even get up in the mornings. I lost my part-time job, and The Boyfriend lost his full-time job. There were days when The Boyfriend had to drag the sobbing mess that was me out of bed, pretty much dress me, and drive me to my university classes so that I would actually end up going. I fell out of love with the subject I was studying. But again, rather than seeing these things as the result of depression, I believed they were happening to me because I had let myself gain weight. I believed that I deserved the way that I was feeling because I had let myself gain weight. Unlearning that association was one of the hardest things I have ever done - even harder because after going through that period of depression, I had to learn to take care of myself again.
I think the biggest thing that worked in my favour was that I wanted to get better. I wanted to be happy again, even when I couldn't muster the energy (or care factor) to simply shower. I think I'm doing well now - or at least, I'm on the right track. Repairing yourself after these things takes a long, long time. You have to relearn how to care about your health & your personal hygiene. You have to relearn how to tell if you like, or enjoy something. You have to learn that, even once you've learned these things, some days you just won't be able to remember. But in learning these things, I have also learnt a new appreciation for my body. My body can do amazing things. It can take all my terrible treatment, and it can recover. It can hold all the pain & suffering of depression, and it can help pull me through it. Even when I absolutely hated my body, it still did everything it could to keep me healthy and happy.
These days, I like to think of my body as my partner instead of my enemy - I'm trying to work with it, instead of against it. If my body feels restless, then I do some exercise. If that exercise doesn't make it feel good, then I find a different type. If a food makes me lethargic, or upsets my stomach then I don't eat it. If I find my body really craving something in particular, then I let myself have it. I go to bed as soon as I feel tired, and get up when I don't feel like sleeping anymore. I fill my fridge with all different types of fruit, and then pick whatever my body feels like in the morning to take for lunch. Now that we're working in tandem, I don't see how I could have ever hated my body, or blamed it for the things that were going wrong in my life. Shit happens, and it happens all the time. Sometimes it happens for a reason, sometimes it's just random chance. But, however shits' going down, and despite the struggle to get here, loving my body for exactly the way it is is much easier than hating it for the way it isn't. And, as far as I'm concerned, so long as my body feels fit & healthy, the weight part doesn't really matter anyway.
Until next time, xo.
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