CW: body image, health anxiety
Because I am deeply unimaginative and when I find something that loosely works for a purpose I tend to just leave it alone. For example for the last 4 or 5 years I have had a bio that ends in the sentence ‘I work out’. It’s just 3 words, but for some reason it is 3 words that I am oddly attached to.
I imagine that is because it’s been there as a nice little final sentence for years and so I’ve just grown used to it.
It’s a short sentence that at the end of the day is very telling as to who I was when I wrote the world’s stupidest bio.
I am an anxious person. I think I always have been for one reason or another. I’ve always been terrified of getting in trouble, I think that is a subconscious thing of knowing that my barometer for fucking up was lower than those around me, because…well melanin. But I was also always terrified of getting in trouble because it would mean that on some level people were looking at me.
I much prefer to just disappear into a corner and say nothing. I’m a tall woman, disappearing has always been difficult for me, but I don’t talk all that much in public settings or in crowds/groups. The most common theme throughout my entire school career at parents’ evening was that I was quiet. Smart, but quiet. I guess if you know the answer then you are just expected to brag about it…
At some point during my uni years, my anxiety morphed into something else and I became fully convinced that I was incredibly ill. I spent a lot of time on my own for two of my three years at uni and so I had a lot of time to spend in my own damn head. And my head decided that the most minute of things was something major. There was a period of time when I was in my on-campus doctor’s every Thursday because it was the only day I didn’t have anywhere to be and I could afford to just sit there and wait for someone to see me while I convinced myself I had meningitis.
I didn’t.
I also don’t know at what point I stopped panicking about it but there was a week where I didn’t make the 10 minute walk to the doctor and then I just didn’t go ever again. I think it might have been because I never actually got anything even close to help when I went. They told me I need to breathe more and maybe try and get some rest. And my personal favourite, ‘just try not to think about it’. They also told me to get a hobby, but my hobby was reading and so it was being stolen from me by my degree and I didn’t have the capacity to get another one. I thought I was dying.
My anxiety turned itself down to a simmer for a while and then when it came back I tried to do everything in my power to avoid going to therapy and decided to try the whole exercise thing as a way to manage it. Read any article about anxiety and it will tell you that exercise will help. I tried spinning, hated it. I tried intervals, hated them. I tried yoga, hated it (kinda). Then I read an article about the best barre classes in London and a studio was right around the corner from where I worked and so I decided to give it a try.
It low key changed my life.
For a couple of reasons, one because I finally found an exercise that I didn’t completely hate and two because it brought Move Your Frame into my life.
There is only so much barre that you can do in a week. The barre burn is real and well, while I hate the notion of cardio I am also aware of its importance and due to the nature of the studio, there were tons of other classes. I found my other true loves through that space, Rebounding (if I had it my way, this would be the only form of high-ish intensity cardio I do, alas that is not currently on the cards) and weight training.
Weight training changed the game. I happened to come to it at a time when it was en vogue to weight train as a woman. It was all about the phrase ‘strong not skinny’ and I lapped that up because I was fed up with being skinny.
Through my own design, I was living on the cusp of what was and wasn’t healthy and despite the fact that I was consistently increasing how much intense exercise I was doing in a week I wasn’t eating anymore.
My anxiety was finding its way back to a manageable level but the thing that I was kind of managing it with was impacting me in other ways.
In hindsight, I became somewhat obsessed with it. Weight training gave me something that was tangible. I could tell a lot about myself from weight training. There were days when I just couldn’t lift all that heavy because I was tired but needed to move. There were days when I was feeling super strong and surprised myself with how heavy I was lifting. 9/10 I could tell where I was in my cycle because at some point every month my balance just abandons me (it is a thing - gotta love hormones).
Weight training taught me a lot about my body as well. It taught me that my legs need to be slightly wider than recommended because I am all leg and it’s just safer. My upper body did not want to get stronger no matter how much I pushed it, but my lower body could take a hammering and to be honest sometimes the only reason I couldn’t lift heavier for lower body movements was because my arms couldn’t rack the weight up.
For a solid 2/3 years, I exhausted my body and although I was no longer passively starving myself anymore I wasn’t exactly fuelling myself all that well. Looking back, I am surprised that I never actually did an injury myself because I was over training and shit at resting even though I convinced myself that I was recovering well. I even added a fifth session into my exercise routine which was yin yoga which is basically just lying down in some postures, all in the name of recovery.
The pandemi lovato was not good for my anxiety and the moment I heard of lockdowns happening in other countries I knew that there was no way that I was going to get through being stuck in my house without some kind of weight at my disposal.
And I was right.
Did I have to play around a lot more with tempo and reps and rests and shit because I didn’t just have stacks of weight within a few feet? Yes. But that didn’t matter because I could exist at some kind of maintenance while we all got through the shitstorm.
It also forced me to stop treating exercise as a personality trait. I put sticking to my routine above being a normal person sometimes. The number of times that I had to run up 3 long escalators to make a train that I had given myself 20 minutes to make (it was from St Pancras, I was coming from Old Street) was insane because I wouldn’t give up my Friday night session and my ex-boyfriend insisted on seeing me on a Friday night - but I couldn't stay overnight because my sacred Rebounding session took place on Saturday morning. So I would make the 90-120 minute journey (after midnight) home just so I could make that. Then on a Sunday, I would travel for an hour to do an hour of yin yoga on a Sunday afternoon and then do the hour journey back.
Don’t get me wrong, I tried desperately to cling onto it. It had been a key part of who I was for so long that I wasn’t actually sure who I would be without it. I don’t know if you remember but one of my goals for this year was to qualify as a PT to add to my ETM and Pre/Post Natal qualifications because before the shit hit the fan I was sure that it was my career calling. It felt like something I could be good at. I had come to love exercise in a space that pretty much rejected all the bullshit - they didn’t pedal the idea that there was no gain without pain. They didn’t talk about getting the body summer ready. It was always about the vibes and having fun and getting a good workout in to a killer playlist. That was the attitude that I wanted to embody.
But clinging to that as a personality trait is exhausting and the longer I tried to cling to it the more I realised that it was not serving me. The exhaustion was just settling a little bit deeper into my muscles. I was no longer finding joy in the majority of the workouts that I was doing. I was just kind of plodding along and keeping up my routine because I needed something to cling onto.
For most of this year I have unpicked my relationship to exercise. Where I once did structured exercise 5 times a week I now only do 3. If I can get away with it the sessions are never longer than 25 minutes, but they sometimes are 40. I try and make sure that I shove an extra 10 minute cool down at the end of every session. If I miss a day then (for the most part) I don’t lose my damn mind and I don’t try to make up the session on a different day of the week.
I have taken to enjoying sleeping in on a Saturday and knowing that when I do roll out of bed that I can just hop straight in the shower and don’t have to make myself work out. At the beginning of the year, I took weights completely out of the equation and focused on low impact cardio only (because my knees do not like the jumping on the floor thing - on a rebounder fine, solid ground, do one). I bought a middle ground pair of dumbbells because it’s just unrealistic to think that I can go from 6kg to 10kg and it not be struggle city. I took a phased approach to strength training when I did eventually get back to it and even then sometimes I ended up prioritising other shit before it.
And here’s the craziest thing that happened (for me personally anyway), for the first time in literal years I made upper body strength gains. That I didn’t even know I had made until I bicep curled my usual weight and realised that it was too light. Oh, and I also made my weight goal which I set as an arbitrary number like 4 years ago and checked in on periodically over that time because I am not mentally capable of weighing myself regularly without there being repercussions. I hovered between a certain range for ages because although I can lose it real quick I am incapable of gaining weight and well hovering was better than losing so I just focused on that. But after I’d done the unpicking and completed an 8 week cardio programme (ya know cardio, the thing they bang on about when it comes to weight loss) I weighed myself and there it was.
Who knows when I will remove ‘I work out’ from my bio, but one day I will and it won’t return.
Jumpin’ Jumpin’
What I’m reading - I didn’t finish a book for over a week and then I finished 4, yes 4, in the space of 3 days. The Hacienda, Hide and The Lost Apothecary were all finished on Monday and Tuesday and then I hopped back on my romance novel bullshit because I needed to feed that beast. And also, when I found myself killing time in Foyles on Saturday they actually had a copy available which I have not been able to find in person anywhere else. The book I am talking about is Boyfriend Material - Alexis Hall.
What I’m watching - It’s is my favourite season of the year. And I am not talking about summer. I’m talking about Variety Actors on Actor season (I think there are two a year…). The pairings this season have been next level. So many great discussions. Personal favourites include Viola Davis/Samuel L Jackson, Quinta Brunson/Adam Scott and Andrew Garfield/Zendaya. Although I did also find the Josh Brolin one hilarious.
What I’m listening to - I don’t think I’ve gone off about George Ezra’s latest album, Gold Rush Kid. It just feels like summer. George Ezra’s music feels like summer. And also I am a fan of any album that includes multiple strings versions of their songs. I love me a string section.
Oh, and also, it should be a given, but Beyoncé - Break My Soul. She did what she needed to do and now I want to go outside.
Title Inspiration - Who remembers LMFAO? Well you will now, the way he says ‘I work out’ lives rent free in my brain. It’s from Sexy and I Know It
I've struggled with motivation to lift weights the past month (although I have been rowing more). But this motivates me. Thank you!