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I know we've got a few people in here besides me with "stories" to tell. I'm hoping they'll be willing to share. I've talked openly about this in the past, but no harm in rehashing in case we've got any lurkers needing encouragement.
I'm not neccessarily looking for total causation here....but I'm sure for at least some of you, getting in the gym and building a healthy body and mind has either assisted some overall life changes in small ways, or been a direct part of the process. For me it was the latter.
When I first found EF, I was a brutally unhealthy 105lbs. On some girl's frames, that might make them look model or ballet dancer thin. On mine, I looked sick. I have a lot of genetic muscle, so I was smaller and leaner at 105 than a lot of girls would have been. Maybe a month prior I had finally started to turn the corner with bulimia, but it was still painfully evident. I didn't look healthy, my skin was dull, a LOT of my hair had fallen out and I even had a couple of spots on my head that were a little bit threadbare if you will. Not really noticeable to anyone who hadn't known what my hair looked like before, but definitely obvious to people who had been around me for the previous year and had watched my physical transformation into a walking dead person.
I knew I needed to gain weight....but I was so terrified of food, so terrified of fat, that I couldn't stomach gaining that weight through eating a lot (literally). I started doing a little bit of lifting but I was still barely eating enough to compensate the extra work. I decided I needed to stop lifting like a "girl" and I needed to start training like guys do if I wanted to add size (forgive this statement, I'm purely talking mindset before I found EF).
I'm not sure why I started out with squats. Probably because when I lost the weight from making myself sick all the time, my rear end went pancake on me. None of my pants fit right, everything hung on my like a curtain. So I did a google search on squat technique. EF was either the first link I saw, or just the most appealing.
The first few weeks here I lurked in the women's forum. I posted in an intro thread that I wanted to gain muscle, but I didn't post a thread or post IN any of the non stickied threads for a while after, I was completely intimidated by all these fantastic women who seemed to have it together and be serious about their sport. But I did plat up and I did search search search. I learned a LOT from EF archives in that time....I learned about eating clean, weight lifting, and a lot of general information about how to really take care of my body.
I started implementing this knowledge slowly at my gym. The golds I was a member of at the time actually had a really legit, non condescending women's section. There were machines and cardio, yeah, but there was actually free weight racks and dumbells that went past 20lbs (lol...being a little snippy here, women's sections in gyms are a point of irritation for me). So I wasn't embarrassed about doing things like box squats with just the bar for a couple of weeks to get my form right, and I didn't have to worry about any guys making comments about me breaking in half or something.
In three months I made a huge transformation. I'd added 20 lbs to my frame, mostly muscle but a little bit of fat too (and frankly, I needed it. You could see my rib bones in my back at 105). I was eating planned out but not obsessively strict clean meals with virtually zero guilt. The problem was far from fixed, it's been a battle since....but I feel like weight lifting not only had a HUGE impact on my relationship with food, and how I went from seeing it as the enemy to seeing it as the thing that gave me energy and life to be able to do the things I enjoyed, but it also assisted in what could have been a miserable process in bringing my body back to health. Plus, I found I really really enjoyed lifting.
I ran into some snags after a few months...I was working too hard, not feeding myself quite well enough. I eliminated cardio from the picture save HIIT a couple of times a week and it has pretty much stayed that way. Cardio is still a danger zone for me as far as crossing that "overdoing it" line, and I'm not competing so it's really not needed unless I have specific endurance purposes for it, in which cases I am carefully structured and make sure I add a proper amount of calories to my diet for the day. There's always a risk that it can become a new form of an eating disorder, but I'm proud that I've put a LOT of things in place to try and prevent that from ever happening. Overall, when I am training at least three days a week, I am healthier both in mind and body. I've learned to love my body, to ditch the scale and all the importance I placed on the numbers it showed me, and I appreciate fitness and health and being good to myself as opposed to abusing myself.
I think one of the coolest unexpected ways weight lifting helped me was the fact that it WILL humble you if you are going overboard. Whether it's DOMS, overtraining, or whatever, lifting also taught me moderation, patience, and listening to the needs of my body (whether for rest, food, water, etc).
It's still a daily battle...keeping my head right, not slipping into old habits, trying to correct years of self taught coping mechanisms that only bring more harm to me. I've been sick more of my life than not. But being in the gym, lifting, is still one of the things undoing all that mess, giving me the energy and motivation to continue to be good to myself.
There you have it....Nef's story, or at least one aspect of it lol.
Feel free to comment or ask questions, but I'm hoping others will chime in here with personal experiences (you don't have to be as detailed or long winded as I was haha).
I'm not neccessarily looking for total causation here....but I'm sure for at least some of you, getting in the gym and building a healthy body and mind has either assisted some overall life changes in small ways, or been a direct part of the process. For me it was the latter.
When I first found EF, I was a brutally unhealthy 105lbs. On some girl's frames, that might make them look model or ballet dancer thin. On mine, I looked sick. I have a lot of genetic muscle, so I was smaller and leaner at 105 than a lot of girls would have been. Maybe a month prior I had finally started to turn the corner with bulimia, but it was still painfully evident. I didn't look healthy, my skin was dull, a LOT of my hair had fallen out and I even had a couple of spots on my head that were a little bit threadbare if you will. Not really noticeable to anyone who hadn't known what my hair looked like before, but definitely obvious to people who had been around me for the previous year and had watched my physical transformation into a walking dead person.
I knew I needed to gain weight....but I was so terrified of food, so terrified of fat, that I couldn't stomach gaining that weight through eating a lot (literally). I started doing a little bit of lifting but I was still barely eating enough to compensate the extra work. I decided I needed to stop lifting like a "girl" and I needed to start training like guys do if I wanted to add size (forgive this statement, I'm purely talking mindset before I found EF).
I'm not sure why I started out with squats. Probably because when I lost the weight from making myself sick all the time, my rear end went pancake on me. None of my pants fit right, everything hung on my like a curtain. So I did a google search on squat technique. EF was either the first link I saw, or just the most appealing.
The first few weeks here I lurked in the women's forum. I posted in an intro thread that I wanted to gain muscle, but I didn't post a thread or post IN any of the non stickied threads for a while after, I was completely intimidated by all these fantastic women who seemed to have it together and be serious about their sport. But I did plat up and I did search search search. I learned a LOT from EF archives in that time....I learned about eating clean, weight lifting, and a lot of general information about how to really take care of my body.
I started implementing this knowledge slowly at my gym. The golds I was a member of at the time actually had a really legit, non condescending women's section. There were machines and cardio, yeah, but there was actually free weight racks and dumbells that went past 20lbs (lol...being a little snippy here, women's sections in gyms are a point of irritation for me). So I wasn't embarrassed about doing things like box squats with just the bar for a couple of weeks to get my form right, and I didn't have to worry about any guys making comments about me breaking in half or something.
In three months I made a huge transformation. I'd added 20 lbs to my frame, mostly muscle but a little bit of fat too (and frankly, I needed it. You could see my rib bones in my back at 105). I was eating planned out but not obsessively strict clean meals with virtually zero guilt. The problem was far from fixed, it's been a battle since....but I feel like weight lifting not only had a HUGE impact on my relationship with food, and how I went from seeing it as the enemy to seeing it as the thing that gave me energy and life to be able to do the things I enjoyed, but it also assisted in what could have been a miserable process in bringing my body back to health. Plus, I found I really really enjoyed lifting.
I ran into some snags after a few months...I was working too hard, not feeding myself quite well enough. I eliminated cardio from the picture save HIIT a couple of times a week and it has pretty much stayed that way. Cardio is still a danger zone for me as far as crossing that "overdoing it" line, and I'm not competing so it's really not needed unless I have specific endurance purposes for it, in which cases I am carefully structured and make sure I add a proper amount of calories to my diet for the day. There's always a risk that it can become a new form of an eating disorder, but I'm proud that I've put a LOT of things in place to try and prevent that from ever happening. Overall, when I am training at least three days a week, I am healthier both in mind and body. I've learned to love my body, to ditch the scale and all the importance I placed on the numbers it showed me, and I appreciate fitness and health and being good to myself as opposed to abusing myself.
I think one of the coolest unexpected ways weight lifting helped me was the fact that it WILL humble you if you are going overboard. Whether it's DOMS, overtraining, or whatever, lifting also taught me moderation, patience, and listening to the needs of my body (whether for rest, food, water, etc).
It's still a daily battle...keeping my head right, not slipping into old habits, trying to correct years of self taught coping mechanisms that only bring more harm to me. I've been sick more of my life than not. But being in the gym, lifting, is still one of the things undoing all that mess, giving me the energy and motivation to continue to be good to myself.
There you have it....Nef's story, or at least one aspect of it lol.
Feel free to comment or ask questions, but I'm hoping others will chime in here with personal experiences (you don't have to be as detailed or long winded as I was haha).
