This is the second guest post of our newest blogging candidate, Nomchelle. After her next post, we will vote on her inclusion.
Trigger warning: Discussion of exercise as a weight loss tool.
My 13-year-old thighs redden as I round the penultimate corner of the cross-country race. Somehow I’m ahead. Way ahead. I’ve hauled my chubby body across the fields and up the lane and now, back in the school field, I’m yards from the finish line. I’m finally good at a sport — well, if you ignore the burning limbs and the metallic taste in my mouth. And not so much good at sport as better than the others in my physical education (PE) group, the Mixed Group, made up from the dregs of boys and girls deemed too hopeless to be able to train with the rest of their gender.
No matter. I am first. It’s a bright, clear day. I’m miles ahead. I’m first. I reach the final cone and collapse onto my back, smiling. It feels amazing. I’m a winner. Rolling my head, I notice the second place runner nearing the finish. I smile, he looks past me. Hang on, he’s running past me. He rounds the cone and runs right up to the sports teacher, not more than ten yards away, who thumbs his stopwatch. “First! Well done.” They both give me a sideways glance.
Now, I’d love to say that I jumped right up and demanded to know what the deal was. I’d love to say that my PE teacher laughed with me when I told him that I thought the cone was the finish line and that we all agreed I was the winner. The truth is, all I can remember from that glaring day is the knot of utter embarrassment I felt. How could I have thought I was good at running? Clearly, just like all other sport, I have no clue what I am doing and I’m just a loser — even when I come in first. Shortly after that (and sometime around the point that I started walking up to hurdles and kicking them down before stepping over them), my mum wrote a note to school and I was excused from PE for the rest of school entirely.
My intention here isn’t to give you the anecdote that explains why I hate exercise so much. I am sure a less anxious child would have just brushed that off. And I am also sure that my relationship with sport was damaged way before that incident, but it’s one of the memories that never fails to pop up whenever I talk to somebody about exercise or to explain how much I dislike it. And I really fucking dislike it. The cross-country race is just one of the many times I’ve associated moving my body with feeling like shit.
Like many of us, I have spent a huge amount of my time on this planet fully immersed in a damaging diet cycle. Many (but not all) of these diets have featured me doing an exercise as a way
to lose the weight. I’ve got one of my diet diaries in front of me from 2003. In the front I’ve written a list of rules:
- 1,200 kcals or fewer per day
- Practice some aerobic exercise at least three times a week, preferably every day
- Practice yoga every day
- Drink more water
With rule number one, no wonder I was unable to stick with rule number two (or, indeed, with anything at all). And as somebody with perfectionist tendencies, I often end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Incidentally, I was 205 pounds when I started this diet, I lost 17 pounds in two-and-a-half months, and about three years later I was about 250 pounds.
Of course, the exercise I was doing was joyless. I had my first child at age 20, so going out on my own was basically impossible. I had an old, secondhand exercise bike that I dusted off periodically, expecting myself to achieve self-imposed challenges like “cycle the length of Britain.” Later, I started watching fat-umentries on TV while I cycled in the hopes that exposure to skinny people shouting at fat people might give me the motivation I needed to pedal faster. Nearly a decade later (and considerably heavier), I was still cycling that damn bike, this time to “my dream wedding dress,” which I’ve sold since.
Walking has always been problematic too. I know that loads of HAESers get joy and well being from getting out and soaking up some vitamin D. I wish I felt like that. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a car so I had to walk everywhere. In fact, I didn’t get a licence until I was 25 after many years of trying, so walking always felt like a punishment to me in a way for being too “lazy” to learn how to drive a car. The lazy myth was compounded by my first husband, who, being a skinny man, appointed himself to the pedestal of health and virtue, from which he looked down and criticised me. I was too fat, too lazy, and why the hell didn’t I enjoy hiking with him and his family, most of whom also treated me like crap.
But now it’s now. I’m older and wiser. I’m further down the path of self-acceptance than I have ever been before. I haven’t dieted in over a year (and never plan to again), and I have a wonderful, caring, truly loving partner. And I need to exercise. I know and believe that the missing piece of the Health at Every Size® (HAES) jigsaw for me is moving my body. I have spent the last few months coming to terms with the fact that I will almost certainly never lose a significant amount of weight. I have mourned the loss of my Fantasy of Being Thin.
I don’t want to exercise for weight loss anymore. I want to do it for my health. Reams of reading and HAES research have fully convinced me that doing so will improve my lung capacity, my immune system, my insulin resistance, my skin, my sleep, my mood, and my mortality. I completely believe that. So why can’t I just do it?
I am really hoping that by writing all this down and by sharing it here I’ll be able to start pulling apart the Velcro that is inhibition:exercise. I want to discover a joyful way to move my body. I want to learn again what it is to feel every sinew and every muscle of my body. I want to inhabit myself. Hopefully in a later blog I can come back to you and explain what I have tried, what has worked, and what progress I have made. And I’d love to hear the ways in which you move with joy and love for yourselves.
Who knows, maybe I can go back and finish that race one day.
Filed under: DT, DW, EX, FH, Guest Post, MBL, WL
