Workin' on my Fitness

In 8^th grade, I started developing the habits that would lead to an eating disorder that I would deal with for a large chunk of my adult life. I don’t know how to talk about this. For the last year I’ve been on an exercise journey, I don’t know how to talk about that either. As a recovering anorexic, I don’t want to focus too much on the weight loss, though that is a part of it and part of my celebration is that for the first time in my life I went about it without slipping back to destructive habits.

I don’t know if some of my experiences can help others who have been and are where I’ve been. I guess that’s the impetus behind diverging here and creating this post. Last year, my wife and I joined a gym. We sat down together and laid out the bare bones of our plans to get our bodies to look the way we want them to and the fitness goals we have for ourselves. Our plans are wildly different though the basis is the same. We both want to feel good in our own skin. That looks differently for each of us. My wife was an athlete for most of her childhood (and a gymnast specifically for part of that) so her goals reflected a focus on getting her body back to fighting form in that way.

While she was able to pull from her own history in knowing what her body looks like when she is her fittest, I have only unhealthy body memories to look back on. I’ve had to grapple with numbers in ways that she (blessedly) hasn’t needed to. Because of her far healthier habits, I was able to draw on her experience a bit. We sat down together and created a plan that felt good to me. I was never allowed to eat fewer than 1,000 calories on any given day. We downloaded My Fitness Pal and I faithfully entered every item of food that I ate. I’ve done so for over a year now and will continue to do so for a while yet. We also set exercise boundaries for me. I was not allowed to workout more than four days a week. I kept my fitness goals to things I wanted to accomplish rather than just weight I wanted to lose. I held up as role models, women who were strong: Charity Witt, Maggi Thorne, and Megan Martin became touchstones for me in my body ideals.

These limits may sound a bit harsh, but I’ve needed them more than I thought that I would and than I care to admit. There were weeks and months during the beginning of this where I would work out and feel so good afterward that the disordered eating thoughts screamed in my head to not eat and see results faster. “The weight will just melt away,” my brain shouted, “You don’t need to have anything, look at how good you feel.”

It was so difficult to parse through those thoughts let alone curb them and force myself to eat something small to ensure my body didn’t slip into starvation mode. The urge to go to the gym everyday was massive in those early weeks. The high I get from exercising is addictive. Some weeks I went more than I ought. I pushed my body to the point of blissful exhaustion and wound up regretting it in small ways. I had to force myself to conform to the prescribed days that my wife and I agreed we would work out.

One of the hardest parts of this whole process was the comments on my changing body. I wanted people to notice I was shrinking and yet then when they did, it made me uncomfortable. I craved and squirmed under the attention. I marveled at how my wife was able to deal with a new person everyday telling her how good she looked. The implication clear to me that they thought she looked bad before. I know rationally that that wasn’t necessarily what they were implying.

I was envious that she had so many people praising her weight loss. Because that’s how most people are. Society teaches us from birth to praise thin women and villainize women who dare to break that ideal. And yet, I also strove to remind her that she’s been perfect at every size. The destructive part of my brain hated that she received daily compliments on her progress while I received so few. I am now grateful that I wasn’t put in a position to hear those comments daily. It would’ve made me more prone to return to anorexia. Praise can be addictive too.

Through all of this, I tried to notice my body changing. Dysmorphia is a difficult thing. It’s hard to explain to people who don’t experience it. I look in the mirror and see something entirely different from reality. I see a distortion. The scale and my clothes tell one story and my mind sees an entirely different one. It’s like perpetually looking in a funhouse mirror. I used numbers to try and combat what my brain worked so hard to convince me was the truth. My wife and I keep a log of our progress. Once a month we track our measurements. Being able to see concrete evidence that my body is changing helps at least muffle the dysmorphia that tells me I’m not doing enough, all is for naught, and I should starve myself.

Most of the disordered, dysmorphic thoughts quieted as I made my practices into habits. Tracking my meals to ensure my daily minimum (and not go over my personal maximum), logging all my workouts, meeting my water intake goals, and purposely NOT weighing myself daily relegated the shouting of my destructive thoughts to white noise in the back of my mind. It was like this for months. I had settled into a groove. I felt, dare I say it, good about my habits and goals. I was steadily making progress. I was stronger, leaner, more defined than I had ever been in my life.

Then I hit my weight goal. I saw the number on the scale read something it hadn’t since I was actively anorexic. The parts of my brain that I had forced nearly dormant woke with a fury. I ached to see the number keep falling. I was elated. I knew I could keep pressing and pushing and watch that number drop further until it reached where I had been at the height of my anorexia. My skin itched with the urge to press on. It was wholly unexpected. I emailed my therapist almost immediately. I knew if I didn’t do something to curb those thoughts that I would gladly fall face first back to disordered eating and hate myself for it. I made myself eat the smallest lunch I could stomach that day. I didn’t want to eat anything. It felt so good not to eat anything. When my wife got home that night, I told her about what I was feeling. We sat down together and changed my daily minimum to my maintain goal. She praised my success but reminded me that I must eat to keep meeting my fitness goals. Muscles need nutrients.

Transitioning to maintain mode and an even higher daily caloric intake has been torture in a way that I never expected. It was hard enough meeting the daily 1,000 calorie minimum, but now I have to eat at least 1,300 just to support my muscles. I was wholly unprepared for this. The little disordered eating neurons in my brain keep firing saying it’s okay to just go back to the thousand calories. I don’t really need 300 more a day. Every fiber of my being wants to keep losing weight. My wife and I had to sit down together and have another frank discussion about my weight parameters. I came up with a maximum number that I feel like I absolutely will not be able to handle seeing on the scale and a minimum number that I should not fall below. So long as I keep myself within that window, I need to be okay with it.

It’s so hard. I hope, like when I first started this journey, that my brain will even out as I get used to my new normal. It’s only been a little over a month since I changed my boundaries so it’s still new. I am thankful for social media in a way that I didn’t think I would be. Following the accounts that I follow helps me stay grounded. People like Charity Witt, Lizzo, Jonathan Van Ness, Katee Sackoff, Tracee Ellis Ross, and others who post photos of themselves loving their bodies and cultivating their physiques in ways that feel good to them in all of the variances of self-love remind my disordered brain that beauty comes from loving yourself not forcing yourself to conform to the expectations of others.

I am slowly learning to say that I love my body and mean it. I love the muscles I’m developing. I love the strength that I’m cultivating. I enjoy creating plans of action to meet my personal goals which include relearning to do a front handspring (having gymnasts in the family really helps this goal) and being able to do 10 unassisted pull-ups. I’m sure I’ll be posting videos of those things once I accomplish them.

Celebrating myself and my success is not easy for me. I struggle mightily in drawing attention to myself. I worry that if I praise myself that I’ll just wind up falling, failing immediately, and looking a fool. But I’ve worked hard for this. Today I’m celebrating my accomplishments. I am leaner than I’ve ever been. The numbers shouldn’t mean anything. I don’t want them to have as much power over me as they do but I’d be lying to you if I said they didn’t matter. I will share those numbers with someone if they ask but I’m trying not to make them matter the most to me. I weighted numbers as my worth for a long time. I’m learning to measure myself in my strengths, in the muscles I’m developing. I can deadlift over 130 pounds. I can do two unassisted pull-ups. I can bench press around 70 pounds. I can box jump 30 inches. Those are the numbers that I’m nurturing that matter to me now. I am proud of my body. I’ve never felt that way before.