Learning how to feed my body, Part 2: it gets better
Wow.
So. That last blog post. Pretty depressing. Yeah.
It may not be obvious from reading it, but that post was emphatically not the post that I had set out to write. In fact, the post I'd meant to write was actually much closer to the one I'm rather hoping I'll write now. So it caught me off-guard. I don't think I was ready for that sort of internal exploration in a pseudo-public forum.
But I've slept since then. Also, I have a loving spouse who popped up on the comments to gently remind me that I might be being just the weeeeeee-ist bit hard on myself in that post.
Okay, true, I was being hard on myself. But I also wasn't really trying to represent The Whole Robyn As She Exists Right Now. I was trying to display the problems (or maybe "challenges") that I have experienced--both past and present--regarding my relationship with food. I will say right out of the gate that my relationship with food is just way healthier now than it was in the past. So if you read my last post and were thinking "OMG, you poor crazy bitch, how can you live like that?!" then you can set aside your fears about my well being (and put down the phone, there's no need to summon help)--I'm making progress. And if you read that post and went "Um... wow.... this sounds sort of familiar... um...." then take heart! It really can get better! You are not destined to live in a perpetual state of war (or detente) with food. But it does take some work to dig oneself out. I've got my shovel, I'm gonna tell you how I've been using it.
So here's one of the first things I managed to finally embrace in my journey:
You really can't. But there's a lot more to this message than just "fix your diet, damnit". Understanding what this means, at some depth, had a huge impact on my overall relationship with food and, surprisingly, with my body. You see, I used to exercise to burn off calories. Hop on the elliptical machine, punch in my weight (quickly so that no one would see it), punish my body for 30min-45min-1hr-whatever, look at the "calories burned" readout, and evaluate my success based on whatever that number was. Which, I should point out, never topped 700 calories. That's right, in two years of running-ragged workouts, I never once managed to burn off all of the calories I would consume in one Big Mac (nevermind the large fry on the side). So the first step on my journey here was to understand that judging a workout as good or bad based on how much food it negated, wasn't helpful. It's not very motivating to think that all of the work I just did for nearly an hour can be completely undone with a quick stop at the snack machine on my way out of the gym. That sort of thinking quickly leads to abandoning working out altogether as a bad deal (because, conceived of this way, it totally is).
So you see, the workout-to-burn-calories model creates a terrible mental space for me. Food becomes the enemy--an evil necessity that I had to battle (ineffectively) daily by employing various forms of torture. Exercise then becomes the counterpart (and hateful) weapon in my battle to have a healthy body, and is constantly losing to food. I honestly can't see how anyone can have a healthy relationship with either food or fitness when mired in a place like this.
The key for me to get out of this Gulag was learning about lifting heavy. Well, actually, the real key for me was finding a form of exercise that I love to do, and for me that happened to be lifting heavy (ymmv). I'm going to set aside discussions of the genuine and wide-ranging benefits that anyone would receive from weightlifting (there are many, regardless of if one loves it or hates it), that will be for a different post. Right now I'm just going to talk about what happened in my world once I started weightlifting.
The first thing that happened was that I had a whole new, non-calorie-burning-dependent reason to work out--killing it in the gym. Yeargh! The journey was the destination, as it were. And then, adding to this, I found that I was evaluating the success of my workouts not based on how many calories it burns (because that's almost impossible to calculate with weightlifting; trust me, I tried), but on how much progress I was making in the gym. I increased my reps! I increased my weights! I used 45lb plates for the first time! Movements that I thought I would never be able to do--e.g., Bulgarian split squats, one-leg Romanian deadlifts (damn those Eastern block people)--became mountains to scale, and then those became successes to record in my workout log, and then those became regular parts of my program as I looked for more challenges. Weightlifting was becoming its own reward. And yes, I was seeing progress on the measurement & scale weight front, and that sure as heck helped me stick with it. But nearly every day I went to lift I could make some new accomplishment, and that just feels good.
Of course, weightlifting is not an ever-onward, ever-upward effort. Regular body fluctuations mean that some days I can totally kill it in the gym, and some days, I can't even lift the plates to put on the bar. And this became a new lesson that I managed to absorb without really reflecting on what it meant--I learned to be patient with my body. I learned to tolerate, and even to anticipate and appreciate, its vicissitudes. I knew my body had accomplished great things, and would go on to accomplish even more great things, but I had to give it space, and recovery time, and patience. I came to understand that I cannot drive my body unrelentingly and expect it to excel. Finally, at long last (really, this has taken me fully 39.5 years) I developed respect for my body, and eventually pride and love.
I finally love my body.
Wow, even typing that seems odd and surprising to me, but it's completely true. Everyone always says how important it is to love your body, but they say it like a command. "You! Go love your body! Now!" Sure, cause it's that easy, obviously I've always enjoyed hating my body, but I'll give this love thing a shot. *snort* They can go screw themselves, love isn't an on-off switch, it's a process. It just took me awhile (did I mention, 39.5 years?) to find my way into that process.
Maybe it seems like my relationship with my body is separate or irrelevant to my relationship with food. Not a bit. However, this post has already gotten long (I like to talk), so I'm gonna cut this off now and continue later with a part 3. You know, blogging is fun. It's revealing all sorts of nuance and connection in my life that I hadn't really explored. So, yeah, good times, man, good times.
I have almost managed to write the blog post I set out to write in Part 1. Yay!
UPDATE: Here's where the story ends....
So. That last blog post. Pretty depressing. Yeah.
It may not be obvious from reading it, but that post was emphatically not the post that I had set out to write. In fact, the post I'd meant to write was actually much closer to the one I'm rather hoping I'll write now. So it caught me off-guard. I don't think I was ready for that sort of internal exploration in a pseudo-public forum.
But I've slept since then. Also, I have a loving spouse who popped up on the comments to gently remind me that I might be being just the weeeeeee-ist bit hard on myself in that post.
Okay, true, I was being hard on myself. But I also wasn't really trying to represent The Whole Robyn As She Exists Right Now. I was trying to display the problems (or maybe "challenges") that I have experienced--both past and present--regarding my relationship with food. I will say right out of the gate that my relationship with food is just way healthier now than it was in the past. So if you read my last post and were thinking "OMG, you poor crazy bitch, how can you live like that?!" then you can set aside your fears about my well being (and put down the phone, there's no need to summon help)--I'm making progress. And if you read that post and went "Um... wow.... this sounds sort of familiar... um...." then take heart! It really can get better! You are not destined to live in a perpetual state of war (or detente) with food. But it does take some work to dig oneself out. I've got my shovel, I'm gonna tell you how I've been using it.
So here's one of the first things I managed to finally embrace in my journey:
You really can't. But there's a lot more to this message than just "fix your diet, damnit". Understanding what this means, at some depth, had a huge impact on my overall relationship with food and, surprisingly, with my body. You see, I used to exercise to burn off calories. Hop on the elliptical machine, punch in my weight (quickly so that no one would see it), punish my body for 30min-45min-1hr-whatever, look at the "calories burned" readout, and evaluate my success based on whatever that number was. Which, I should point out, never topped 700 calories. That's right, in two years of running-ragged workouts, I never once managed to burn off all of the calories I would consume in one Big Mac (nevermind the large fry on the side). So the first step on my journey here was to understand that judging a workout as good or bad based on how much food it negated, wasn't helpful. It's not very motivating to think that all of the work I just did for nearly an hour can be completely undone with a quick stop at the snack machine on my way out of the gym. That sort of thinking quickly leads to abandoning working out altogether as a bad deal (because, conceived of this way, it totally is).
So you see, the workout-to-burn-calories model creates a terrible mental space for me. Food becomes the enemy--an evil necessity that I had to battle (ineffectively) daily by employing various forms of torture. Exercise then becomes the counterpart (and hateful) weapon in my battle to have a healthy body, and is constantly losing to food. I honestly can't see how anyone can have a healthy relationship with either food or fitness when mired in a place like this.
The key for me to get out of this Gulag was learning about lifting heavy. Well, actually, the real key for me was finding a form of exercise that I love to do, and for me that happened to be lifting heavy (ymmv). I'm going to set aside discussions of the genuine and wide-ranging benefits that anyone would receive from weightlifting (there are many, regardless of if one loves it or hates it), that will be for a different post. Right now I'm just going to talk about what happened in my world once I started weightlifting.
The first thing that happened was that I had a whole new, non-calorie-burning-dependent reason to work out--killing it in the gym. Yeargh! The journey was the destination, as it were. And then, adding to this, I found that I was evaluating the success of my workouts not based on how many calories it burns (because that's almost impossible to calculate with weightlifting; trust me, I tried), but on how much progress I was making in the gym. I increased my reps! I increased my weights! I used 45lb plates for the first time! Movements that I thought I would never be able to do--e.g., Bulgarian split squats, one-leg Romanian deadlifts (damn those Eastern block people)--became mountains to scale, and then those became successes to record in my workout log, and then those became regular parts of my program as I looked for more challenges. Weightlifting was becoming its own reward. And yes, I was seeing progress on the measurement & scale weight front, and that sure as heck helped me stick with it. But nearly every day I went to lift I could make some new accomplishment, and that just feels good.
Of course, weightlifting is not an ever-onward, ever-upward effort. Regular body fluctuations mean that some days I can totally kill it in the gym, and some days, I can't even lift the plates to put on the bar. And this became a new lesson that I managed to absorb without really reflecting on what it meant--I learned to be patient with my body. I learned to tolerate, and even to anticipate and appreciate, its vicissitudes. I knew my body had accomplished great things, and would go on to accomplish even more great things, but I had to give it space, and recovery time, and patience. I came to understand that I cannot drive my body unrelentingly and expect it to excel. Finally, at long last (really, this has taken me fully 39.5 years) I developed respect for my body, and eventually pride and love.
I finally love my body.
Wow, even typing that seems odd and surprising to me, but it's completely true. Everyone always says how important it is to love your body, but they say it like a command. "You! Go love your body! Now!" Sure, cause it's that easy, obviously I've always enjoyed hating my body, but I'll give this love thing a shot. *snort* They can go screw themselves, love isn't an on-off switch, it's a process. It just took me awhile (did I mention, 39.5 years?) to find my way into that process.
Maybe it seems like my relationship with my body is separate or irrelevant to my relationship with food. Not a bit. However, this post has already gotten long (I like to talk), so I'm gonna cut this off now and continue later with a part 3. You know, blogging is fun. It's revealing all sorts of nuance and connection in my life that I hadn't really explored. So, yeah, good times, man, good times.
I have almost managed to write the blog post I set out to write in Part 1. Yay!
UPDATE: Here's where the story ends....
So true! We really have to eat right to remain in good health. I know when I eat chips I don't even have any motivation to exercise or anything.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I actually have a *lot* of things I want to say about eating and such. Hehe, good thing I have a blog. =D
DeleteIronically, I'm about to go out and buy some chips, too (which is super-weird, not a thing I normally ever do).