How Fitness Improved My Mental Health- Pt 1
I had a “sled dog mentality” when I was a kid and a teen. I was athletic, and I loved to work. Staying in shape came very easy to me because I enjoyed the training, practicing, the competing, all of it. I never had to worry about what I was/wasn’t eating. I never worried about how my body looked compared to others- I was in shape.
But that doesn't mean that I wasn’t bombarded with messages about diet culture and body image. I remember my mother going on diets regularly as a child, or hearing about the privileges others’ had because of the way their bodies looked. At 18, I remember a family member, with tears in their eyes, begging me not to get fat in college because no “man would ever want me and I would be so unhappy.” I remember my college coach pulling my teammates into meetings with potential recruits to use them as an example of what “the freshman 15” looked like. In my post college volleyball careerI remember living off $40 a week ($100 already deducted for rent and $20 for gas to get me to and from my minimum wage job) and using food insecurity as a bonus to “finally lose that last 10 lbs.” I remember wondering why I could not. stop. eating. at potlucks or large family dinners and being ashamed of myself for how much I ate.
By the time I had established my career, gotten married, and bought a home, I was deep in my disordered eating and incredibly insecure. I often “cherry picked” workout programs based on how I thought they would make me look and trusted fitness information based on how the athlete looked. I was afraid of foods that I thought were bad and would cause me to gain weight. I utilized detoxes regularly but often found that on the weekends or holiday seasons I could not restrain myself from eating foods that I thought were bad. I regularly punished myself for not doing enough or eating too much.
My desire to be thinner and leaner was rooted in the idea that I would be accepted and loved more. If I was smaller, I would receive more compliments, and those would confirm love and acceptance from others. I even thought a fitter, more attractive me would improve the state of my marriage. At one point I realized that until I learned to love myself, it didn’t matter what I weighed- I would never accept my body.
It took a PCS to a foreign county, the loss of my job, and a desire to become “fitter” that led me to pursue a personal training certification. I won’t lie to you- part of me became a personal trainer, because I wanted to learn the “secret to weight loss.’ It was through this certification that fitness improved my (unbeknownst to me) poor mental health and began healing the relationship with my body. It’s difficult to sum up how a 8 month course influenced me to completely rethink what fitness and health meant. Utilizing evidence based practices to implementing fitness caused me to detox (pun intended) from where I was seeking out fitness information and approval.
