Feminist reflections on fitness, sport, and health
I’m not actually a plus size woman these days but I am big. I do like that there’s a bit more variety around these days in terms of bodies represented as sexy. Recent efforts mostly focus on including larger women, but I still hate all the comparing.
What kind of comparing?
Well, this.
And this,
But you can celebrate diverse beauty without invoking comparisons. You do you.
I do like this!
And this,
And this,
As we approach the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, we are pummeled with ads promising us that, if we just sign up for some new plan (however loony or expensive it may be), we will be renewed and transformed. Gone will be the extra pounds, the shame of unattractiveness, and the social rejection. In its place will be new-found confidence, social and professional opportunities aplenty, and inner joy. You can see for yourself right here:
We’ll be posting a bit on this blog about the push to turn over a new leaf, start a new regimen, set new goals, and remake ourselves as soon as the calendar year turns over. And we also want to hear from readers, too, about how they are responding to the wave of self-improvement fever.
Not that I’m against self-improvement, or even against enthusiasm about new beginnings. The end of the year is a good time to take stock, reflect on what’s working in your life, what you want to change, and what goals you might want to pursue. However, doing a google search of images related to “new year’s resolution”, almost every image included the following:
Sigh.
We all know (from great posts like these among other places) that losing weight may or may not be difficult, but maintaining weight loss over time is nigh unto impossible. But that doesn’t stop people from wanting it badly.
I do research on weight, weight stigma, health, eating and behavior change, have read and written lots about these issues. But there is no substitute for hearing the stories of the struggles of real people as they try to make a more peaceful and accepting life that includes food.
Two weeks ago, I was invited to attend the last meeting of an 8-week course in Sydney, Australia on weight management run by Ginette Lenham, a counseler, therapist and support group facilitator specializing in weight management issues for women. She counsels women with complex sets of challenges ranging from fertility to gynecological to endocrine to psychological, working on how to respond to emotional eating and other triggers in their lives. Her website is here.
The stories these women shared were not surprising, but they were revealing. Here are some stories, and the underlying messages I am going to guard against as I face the new-year pull to remake myself in a more skinny image. These messages are powerful, but they are not true. The women in that room shared them in order to expose them for the falsehoods they are, and get some help in doing battle against them.
Message: Weight equals worth and status as a person
“You know, your position in a social hierarchy can change enormously with weight loss or gain. When you’re obese, people don’t see you as a person with control or discipline. My friends who have known me a long time (when I was thinner) have more confidence in me, in my abilities, than my newer friends (who only know me as fat). They think an obese person is a different sort of person, not a person like them.”
Message: Weight loss will fix any ailment
“I joined a running club; it’s really helped my motivation and improved my performance. I was having trouble recently with getting blisters and talked with someone about it. She said, ‘oh—after I lost a lot of weight, I stopped getting them’. Argh! “
“One woman in our running club won an award; at the ceremony, all they talked about was how much weight she had lost.”
Message: There are ‘good’ foods and ‘bad’ foods, and it’s never okay to eat ‘bad’ foods
“I used to work as a waitress, and women were always apologizing for their orders. They would say to me, ‘I’ll have this cake but I won’t have any dinner.’”
Message: Eating “right” is a “natural” ability, which some have and some don’t
“I look at my kids to see how they are eating—what they eat and what they leave behind on the plate. I have no idea what to do, or how to eat intuitively.”
“Some people are just stronger and they know when to stop.”
Ginette’s approach is largely about helping people to identify these negative messages and then to set aside those harsh judgments, focusing instead on individual health and life goals. This is a long-term process, and is not about learning to love salad. There’s no gimmickry—no magic pill to swallow, no exercise machine to use. Will it result in weight loss? Maybe, maybe not. What she hopes for her clients is of course some solutions to their complex medical problems, some of which are weight-related, but more importantly, in her own words, “you can learn to be liberated from all the negative self-talk that is associated with your previous weight loss experiences.”
Now that’s a new year’s resolution worth making.
Why, Precision Nutrition, why? I know Sam already said how much she detests the PN photo contest. And I’ve already said how they lost me when they spent a month getting us all prepped for the final photo shoot.
Both of us attest that there are some good things about the PN program. But the photo contest certainly isn’t one of them. This week, we both got links to the women’s and the men’s finalists’ before and after shots so we could vote on the most amazing “transformation.”
Some of them do appear to amazing. But what’s so irritating is that all through the program they say it’s not about the numbers on the scale or even about the way you look — it’s a change in attitude and approach.
What’s the big change? It’s a habit-based program. And what it really encourages us to do is take up healthy habits. I know that for a lot of people the reason to take up healthy habits is to lose weight and get lean. It is, after all, called “The Lean Eating Program.”
So what did I expect? What’s so bad about a photo contest? Why do I despise before and after shots?
First of all, if you know anything about “before” and “after” shots, it’s that they’re not always indicative of the truth. There was that thing awhile back where people took “before” and “after” shots within minutes or hours of each other.
Remember the Australian personal trainer, “Mel,” who did a 15-minute “transformation”?
Andrew Dixon wrote “Seduced by the Illusion: The Truth about Transformation Photos” for The Huffington Post, where he talks about marketing campaigns that use before and after photos as a major selling point (sound familiar?):
Before I claim it’s all bullshit, I want to make it clear that there are definitely some very impressive, genuine physical transformations out there. What I do take issue with are the transformations that are manipulated with Photoshop, professional lighting, postures to degrade or enhance their look, pro tans, sucking in or pushing out a bloated belly or flexing muscles vs. not flexing to obtain an optimal look.
This is just the sort of thing PN encourages (not necessarily the gut sucking and so on, but definitely the professional photo shoot. Dixon decided to experiment:
I decided to take my own transformation photos to see what was possible with just a few easy tweaks. About six months ago I was around 185 pounds and about 16 percent body fat. I was feeling particularly bloated on the day, so I asked my girlfriend to take a before shot. I then shaved my head, face and chest and prepared for the after shot, which was about an hour after I took the before shot. I did a few push ups and chin ups, tweaked my bedroom lighting, sucked in, tightened my abs and BOOM! We got our after shot.
Or there’s this instructional video about how to fake your before and after shots.
What this says to me is: be skeptical. Be very skeptical.
I’m not saying that no one in PN changes and that it’s all smoke and mirrors. But there is a lot of information missing from the contest. Like are they repeat-customers (“VIPs” as PN likes to call them)? How did they do with the habits?
And the million dollar question: maintenance. This is where so many people hit the wall. When the focus in largely on weight loss, that’s sort of the easy part. The struggle is keeping it off. The merit of a habit-based program is that you are supposed to be developing new habits for life. So you would think that the main indicator of importance would be how well those habits stay once the program is over. Or do we have to keep paying hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with those good habits?
I also don’t like the fact that PN uses the photo contest as its main marketing tool. It’s free advertising for them and they spend about a month trying to get the clients, who are already paying hundreds of dollars each month, to shell out for a professional photo shoot.
Of course photos from a pro shoot are going to be more flattering than the photos everyone took on day one, with their smart phone camera, at the beginning when they felt crappy about themselves. I don’t know. That part really gets to me — the way they kept telling us “it’s worth it” and “you’re worth it” when really, more than anything else it’s worth it for them when their clients get the pro-shots and turn them over to PN for inclusion in the photo contest. We pay, they get to use the pics to get new clients.
I didn’t get a professional shoot and I didn’t give them permission to use any “after” shots. In fact, for me, the monthly photos were the worst part of the program because I was trying to get away from using appearance as a motivation for healthy habits.
So here we are again with the photo contest. And it happens to coincide with the “pre-sale,” which is an early sign-up that gives you 20% off of an unspecified amount and enables you to register a day earlier than everyone else for the January program.
My cynicism is not just because a year after the end of my PN experience I’m still struggling with the same stuff as I always have. It’s not just because I feel the need to find other bench marks because getting leaner eludes me. And it’s certainly not because I myself wouldn’t have ever been a finalist even if I had wanted to be considered for the contest.
It’s more because I wish there was a way of selling healthy habits without selling appearance-based “transformations” and without taking advantage of everyone’s susceptibility to being “seduced by the illusion.” I also think it’s just kind of embarrassing, in a way I didn’t used to, to put yourself out there to be judged on your appearance and your weight loss by countless strangers.
For all the pronouncements that it’s “an inside job,” the final photo contest just makes the program seem sort of shallow and the contestants desperate for a stamp of approval from others. Really? Do we have to keep doing this?
The other day I checked my year to date distances with Strava.
I saw that I’d ridden 3942 km this year and 3675 km last year. I had a goal of riding 5000 km this year and despite doing two weeks of riding in South Carolina and Arizona during the winter, didn’t make it. Damn that canceled Manitoulin Island week of riding!
But I was anxious not to miss the 4000 km mark and so started planning a 60 km Boxing Day ride.
Then last night I remembered that Strava doesn’t count my commutes because I don’t use the Garmin on the multi-use pathway. The commutes get added, when I remember, manually to Garmin. So I checked my Garmin year in review. YAY! I’ve ridden 4,317 km. Now I’m feeling a bit better.
So it’s short the commutes but the Strava toolbox still has some nice info.
This year, I logged
124 rides
It means an average of
10.33 rides per month
Or, if you prefer, it equals
2.43 rides per week
More precisely, it is exactly
0.35 rides per day
In terms of distance, I totalized
3942 kilometers
They can be converted in
2449 miles
But please note that the kilometer
is the only official distance unit for cycling!
It is roughly like riding from
New York
to
Los Angeles
(which is exactly 3940 kilometers as the crow flies)
This is exactly the
9.84%
of earth’s circumference
My average distance this year is
31.8 kms per ride
It translates into an average of
328.5 kms per month
And obviously it means
77.3 kms per week
Basically, you can say I’m riding
11.2 kms each day
My total riding time this year is
8 days
4 hours
33 minutes
16 seconds
This is the
3.48% of my life
excluding an average sleep time of 8 hours
My average speed this year is
20.06 km/h
It can be converted in
12.46 mph
Again, you should start to learn
how the metric system works.
Talking about elevation,
this year I climbed exactly
175.5 meters per ride
Or, from another perspective, an average of
1813.5 meters per month
Yeah, it means that I climbed
426.7 meters per week
All the above is just to say21762 meters
Approximately, it’s like climbing
Olympus Monsx1 times
In fact, it is 21230m high from the surface of Mars
and it’s the highest peak in the Solar System
At about 12000m I would have passed
the tropopause and entered the
stratosphere
This is the highest atmospheric layer
that can be accessed by jet-powered aircrafts
Strava is one of the greatest invention of mankind. If you are an athlete and especially a cyclist, it can definitely change the way you train. It does not matter if you ride on the road or if you prefer muddy trails: by recording and analyzing all your GPS data and adding a touch of competition, Strava motivates you to train more and ride faster. Like any good online service, Strava provides a set of API to access its huge dataset and create awesome websites and apps, growing the pleasure of being a Strava-connected rider. This is what this Strava Toolset does: it connects to your riding data and provides additional reports and stats that are not offered on the original website. Enjoy it, and feel free to keep me posted about any issue, comment or new features request!
I was diagnosed with breast cancer this summer, and since then have had a double mastectomy and two courses of chemotherapy that have left me breastless and bald. For a woman who had large breasts and long hair, it’s been a big change. But I’m finding I’m strangely comfortable with my new appearance, shocking as it may be to others.
I’ve written on this blog about how I was really looking forward to my double mastectomy, and I followed up with this post after my surgery about how much I love my post-mastectomy body. The latest change in my appearance came from my chemo. My hair started falling out three weeks after my first treatment, and was a patchy mess when I went in for my second. Shortly afterwards I had a friend buzz my remaining hair off with barber’s clippers, leaving me bald.
I thought I was ready for it (I’d had the same friend buzz my hair in a very short pixie cut before my chemo started), but it was still a shock. Bald heads are a sign of maleness in our culture; very few white women willingly go bald, and are considered outliers if they do. Long, thick, shiny, straight hair on women is prized by people of European descent. The few times in my life when I’ve purposefully cut my hair very short, I’ve been chastized for it, by both women and men. Bucking the cultural norm is definitely not okay, and even makes news.
And yet I really love my bald head. Many of my friends have commented that my skull is a nice shape. The artist in me thinks I’m more beautiful than I’ve ever been in my life, since going bald. I love looking at my head, and touching it. Part of me wishes I could keep it bald, even after my hair starts growing back. It’s so easy to care for, so minimalist.
My struggle has been going out in public since losing my hair. Until recently I was still working full-time, as a fundraiser for a nonprofit. I felt physically well, but didn’t want people to assume I was sick. (I figured they’d guess I had cancer as soon as they saw the bald head.) Before my first business meeting after my hair was gone, I vacillated: should I wear a scarf on my head? A hat? Did I need to explain my appearance? To be honest, most of the time I forget I look different – I still feel like the same old me on the inside.
(The business meeting? I wore a hat because it was cold out, but took it off as soon as I got inside. I explained that I was doing really well physically. It seemed to be a non-issue.)
Then one night I was passing by a mirror in my apartment, and caught sight of myself out of the corner of my eye. I was shocked – I really looked like a man. To be honest, I thought looked like my dad, who had been bald. My mom affirmed it when I posted this photo on Facebook.
For many women going through breast cancer treatment, this part – losing the external signs of womanliness – can be very hard. At every step along my cancer journey, health care professionals have assumed that I wanted to mitigate this loss with prosthetics and wigs. And I’m not diminishing that need that some women may have. But I’ve been very clear with myself and others since my diagnosis: if anything, I want to be the poster girl for normalizing the realities of breast cancer treatment. I want it to be okay to be breastless and bald if you’re a woman. I want it to be okay to work through illness, if that’s what you want to do. I want it to be okay to be who and what you are, to be flexible in the moment, and do what you need to do to be well and whole (be it a take a nap, or go for a walk, or have a good cry.)
But I can’t deny it’s been fascinating – and a little disconcerting – to explore the emotional and spiritual landscape of ambiguous gender appearance. I feel like our culture has become more open to considering gender identity since celebrities like Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner have shared their transgender experiences. But each of those celebrities seems to have settled on a gender appearance that puts them very squarely within the norms of their identified gender. I wonder if society is ready for people who are openly gender-ambiguous, even if only in appearance.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m a woman and I love being a woman, but I’ve been wondering what it would be like to live the rest of my life in the No-Man’s (and No-Woman’s) Land of asexual appearance. Where I could be mistaken for a man (or transgender, or a lesbian) sometimes, and that would be fine.
I also wonder if I would feel differently if I were younger, or in a relationship with a conservative partner. Maybe part of my comfort with ambiguous gender appearance comes from being near menopause and single – and happy with both of those conditions. I was already knowingly entering a part of my life where my appearance and desirability were becoming less important. I’d heard from older women that you become invisible after “a certain age”. That didn’t seem like a bad thing to me. There’s a reason that contemplatives take a vow of celibacy – the pursuit of sex takes up a lot of energy. What if looking gender-ambiguous saves me from superficial and superfluous flirtations and drama? What if I can focus more time on my work and my creative projects? What if I can have more authentic relationships where people look past my exterior and value the person I am inside?
Part of me still worries about being labelled strange, however. About being ostracized for being different. If I were another 10 years older, I would laugh it off, because by then I’d be facing my 60s, and I know it really wouldn’t matter what I looked like. But I’m finding I’m thankful for activities like aikido, where everyone (male and female) dresses the same for practice.
Honestly? Breast cancer isn’t turning me into a man – it’s turning me into a pre-pubescent girl. (This will become even more true when I begin taking hormone-blocking drugs after my chemo.) And if I remember correctly, my 10-year-old self was pretty awesome. Who could complain about that?
___
You may also be interested in these blog posts by Michelle about her breast cancer experience:
Michelle Lynne Goodfellow works in nonprofit and small business communications by day, and also enjoys writing, taking photographs, making art and doing aikido. You can find more of her work at michellelynnegoodfellow.com. Michelle has also written about her breast cancer journey on her blog, Kitchen Sink Wisdom.
Christmas advice for cyclists…
How to wrap presents while riding the rollers
For your average person, riding on the rollers is no easy feat. Neither is wrapping Christmas presents. But Sir Chris Hoy is not an average person.
The six-time Olympic gold medallist has pretty decent bike handling skills, but when challenged by an Evans Cycles customer to wrap a Christmas present while spinning on a roller the Scot had his work cut out.
Holiday party advice: How to talk to non-cyclists
“Rule 5. Don’t tell them the truth about how much your bike cost
Few people ever own anything that works, fits, or looks as well as a truly well-built bike. And yet, when they find that your bike costs as much as their high-end computer or mid-range stereo, they will fake a heart attack, guaranteed.
The solution? Tell non-cyclists you paid $499.99 for your bike, no matter how much you really paid for it. This number has been scientifically formulated to sound like more than a non-cyclist would pay for a bike, without otherwise drawing attention to itself.”
How to pick to pick up a Christmas tree with your bike
Organize a Christmas Day bike ride
Yes, it’s an odd day for a ride except, and here’s the great thing, you pretty much gets the roads to yourself. Also, this year, it’s going to be warm enough even here in Ontario.
If you’re in London, England you can join this ride.
Carol of the Spokes
I don’t know about you but when I think about running my thoughts quickly turn to long, and for me, boring, injury-making, distances. I’ve been there and done that. From 5 km to 10 km to training for a half marathon to stress fractures. Twice!
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
I mean the 5 km is pretty awesome. I’m training for one now. See Training for the Pride Run 5 km.
But it turns out that even 5 km is unnecessary to reap the big health benefits of running.
See A Shockingly Small Amount Of Running Can Boost Your Health. How small?
If you can’t imagine running for longer than 10 minutes, you’re not a lost cause in the running world. In fact, running for just 10 minutes, five days a week could be all it takes to reap running’s big benefits.
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have found that running for about 50 minutes each week — or approximately six miles — can protect the body from risk for stroke, arthritis, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and even some cancers. A little bit of running might even teach you a few things about life.
Maybe 10 minutes is too much. Turns out that even 5 minutes has huge benefits, Running 5 Minutes a Day Has Long-Lasting Benefits.
Running for as little as five minutes a day could significantly lower a person’s risk of dying prematurely, according to a large-scale new study of exercise and mortality. The findings suggest that the benefits of even small amounts of vigorous exercise may be much greater than experts had assumed.
This makes me feel even better about my mile a day running streak. I’ve missed just a few days so far. I haven’t run on the days I’ve done long bike rides and on another day I’d walked about 5 km. I’m not that fast but I’m getting faster. And so far, fingers crossed, no injuries!
Let’s face it: 21st century air travel ranges from mildly unpleasant to horrific on a biblical scale. As a person raised on the Jetsons, I fail to understand how we have been reduced to being herded like cattle from Pittsburgh to San Diego, Sydney to Melbourne, London to Hamburg, Ottowa to Vancouver. Seriously, I thought we were promised jetpacks by now. As it is, we don’t even get free snacks on board anymore, much less this:
Of course, in those days air travel was long, risky, expensive and available only to the privileged, as we can see in the photo above.
Why is airline travel no longer glamorous or exciting, but instead tedious at best and infuriating at worst? Part of the problem is this: there’s less and less room allotted per passenger on planes. Below is a table from a UK article that includes both pitch (how far seats recline—higher numbers are better) and seat width in inches.
So what do we see? Lots of seats that are less than 18 inches wide with less legroom. That is a reduction of at least 1.5 inches over the last two decades. The shrinkage of seats along with airline practices of cramming as many seats as possible in an already-small space makes everyone more territorial about the itty-bitty amount of personal space they have. This does not make for a congenial atmosphere. Of course you could spend $18,000 USD for this on Etihad airlines:
But that’s not an option for almost all of us.
For people who are larger-sized, flying can be a huge hassle, filled with uncertainty and disapproval, judgment and embarrassment. Why uncertainty? Well, here are some things fat fliers need to know:
1) What aircraft will I be flying? (e.g. Boeing 737, Airbus 320)
2) How wide are the seats on that plane?
3) Will I/how will I fit in those seats?
4) What are the policies for the airline I’m flying regarding seating of larger-sized passengers?
5) What is that airline’s record for implementing those policies? Are they feasible? Are they always/usually/occasionally/never enforced?
6) So what’s a fat flier to do? I can’t drive to Germany!
Let’s look at each of these.
For 1) and 2), you can go to seatguru.com to look up seat maps and aircraft assigned to particular flights. It will give you seat width and pitch for legroom. However, this isn’t guaranteed, as aircraft get substituted for maintenance and scheduling reasons. So you might get stuck with some other plane with a less feasible seat configuration.
For 3), the answer is: there’s not a way to tell ahead of time whether you will fit in the seat on your flight. Numerous bloggers and commenters about this topic have made the following completely reasonable suggestion: airlines have standards for carry on bags, so they have something like this for you to check to see if your bag fits.
However, airports don’t have sample seats for people to try out before they proceed to the gate. And, since seats vary in width and pitch, this would be hard to do. Of course a natural suggestion would be, “how about we standardize this, eliminating that uncertainty?” Airlines don’t agree, as they are constantly looking for ways to squeeze more passengers into aircraft. In fact, this “saddle” seat has been proposed for some short (less than 3 hours) flights for ultra-dense packing.
No comment.
For 4), the airlines have policies posted on their websites, and on this site the information is collected for many airlines (it’s only current to January 2015, though). Most airlines say that customers must a) fit in the seat with the armrests fully down; b) be able to fasten the seatbelt, with extender if need be; and c) not “significantly encroach on the adjacent seating space”.
Of course, because of the problems with 1) and 2), you may not know whether you meet these criteria.
But for those who think they might not, the general policy is for those customers to purchase another seat. For the record, the consensus is that Southwest has the best policies (found here ) for what they call “customers of size”. You buy an extra ticket in advance (and there are instructions for how to do this online—it’s trickier than it sounds). Then, after the flight, you can request a refund for the extra seat you bought (this is also trickier than it sounds, but people have reported that it does work). Other airlines are less clear and less forthright about refunds, but knowledge is power, so looking it up ahead of time is a good thing.
For 5): Sigh. On all sorts of blogs about this issue, people report that airline employees commonly break every rule in the policies—they will seat people when the armrests don’t go all the way down, they will try to seat passengers in the extra seat purchased by a larger person, and if any discussions get confrontational, the squawking customers get escorted off the plane and maybe arrested. This causes uncertainty, embarrassment, anger, and major discomfort for everyone involved. This seems in large part avoidable through better training of airline employees, better information offered to passengers of all sizes. And, (call me a cockeyed optimist, but) if businesses promoted an atmosphere of professional courtesy and civility, maybe more people would follow their model. I know, I know. But a girl can dream, can’t she?
For 6), Ragen Chastain of the great Dances with Fat blog offers a bunch of suggestions for airlines to follow. They are very clever and creative (you can read them here), and include ideas like making seats of different widths and charging more for them. Another is letting passengers check a box if they don’t mind sitting next to a larger person, with possibly a small rebate. The nice thing about her suggestions is that they also solve the problem of tall or big people whose shoulders are wide—they don’t just focus on hips and waist measurements.
So even though one seat size doesn’t fit all, there should be some better ways to carry us all to our destinations with a modicum of comfort and dignity. It’s time for the airlines to put together some humane, feasible, simple and comprehensive policies about transporting people of different sizes and shapes home to Grandma’s house or wherever they are going. And then to train their employees to follow them. And also to inform ALL their customers so they can fly with fewer worries.
Although I’m still waiting for those jetpacks.
While my many years of grappling with depression seem now to be behind me I now get to unpack my anxiety and other mental health challenges.
Exercise has done wonders for my confidence. I’ve tried things, they work out or not, and nothing bad happens.
The weird thing is I can have a great week of running bracketed by a really crappy bike ride. Smiling and feeling great mushed around crying and negative self talk.
I had a pretty shit 60 km bike ride a couple weeks ago with Victor, Sam and Michel. I was tired. I hadn’t biked at all for 2 months and it was colder than I had the gear for.
I want to say that the first half was fine but I had a huge anxiety attack as we left town.
What am I thinking? I can’t do this! Who am I kidding? I’m lazy and stupid and there’s no way I can do a 600 km ride next year. Nope. No way. I’m an idiot.
I admitted to Sam I was having a moment. It quickly passed and the ride up into Ilderton felt good.
When we got out in the wind I was quickly chilled to the bone and was miserable from Ilderton home. Openly miserable. Crying. We got into London and I was shivering, cramping and really tired. We were in traffic and I totally lost my shit, so much so I had to go up onto the sidewalk and wail. I cried and sobbed so hard Michel asked if he should get the car. I couldn’t stop crying and wailing. It was so embarrassing. Thankfully the heavy traffic drowned out my ruckus.
I got back on my bike and we toddled the rest of the way home.
It took my a couple hours to warm up and be ok.
After food, warming up and showering I put my tiara on and got on with my life.
I don’t know why cycling taps deep into my anxiety or why when I really push my comfort zone I’m reduced to a wailing woman who sounds like a six year old. My body adapts quickly to activity but it’s the head game that I struggle with.
I only got back on my bike this week for two short spinning stints on my trainer. I’m trying to be kind to myself and realize it’s going to be ok. Of course I can train up to do the PWA 600 km Bike Rally for Life. I went from cycling 20 km to 60 km in two months, I got up to 100 km and did 3 or 4 of those this season.
So when I feel like this:
I need to remember I also more often feel like this on my bike:
And if you ever see me losing my shit on the side of the road, don’t worry, it’s ok to not be ok sometimes. I’ll ask for help if I need it but sometimes I just need to wail a bit before I move on.
I think it is safe to say that most women, regardless of background, have at some point come across those ads commanding us to do something about our bodies.
It used to start in March or April, with the terror inducing demand we get started on making our body bikini-ready for summer. Then weddings got in on the trend, and as part of the ceremony planning, nutrition and body-shaping sessions were booked along with the photographer and the caterer.
Winter vacations were not to be left behind, so then the ads started clamouring for us to become beach ready or cruise ready in January. But perhaps what really took the dessert plate was the ad I saw a couple of years ago that said it was time to get Christmas-dress ready … in September.
Today it seems the demand to alter, shape, change, tweak our physical selves is year round, and there is always some part of our bodies that needs adjustment: chest, arms, legs, waist, butt. The list is endless.
One of the ways we are supposed to make our bodies fit the image of the desirable female is through exercise. I should note fitness isn’t necessarily part of the foundation for this effort, but it is the basis of much of the marketing behind the countless programs on offer.
I will wholeheartedly admit that one of the reasons I did not announce my fitness strategy was because I wanted to stave off the questions and comments about weight. I’ve always been a bigger girl/woman and while there were many times in my life when weight loss was a huge focus for me, once I hit 40, I realized I wanted to get off that train once and for all.
It was my work with a non-profit network focused on promoting positive body image that started me reading about the principles behind the Health At Every Size (HAES) approach. It led to a significant change in my thinking about how we define health and how we use fitness as the prop (or stick) to achieve health.
When I first met with my trainer, he asked me what my goals were for starting training. It was a useful question. The fact was I didn’t care about body shaping/toning and I wasn’t worried about “bulking up” as a result of any effort in the gym with weights. Since weight loss was not a goal, what was left for a woman who wanted to be fit and not hurt herself in the process?
As a communications professional, I look to quantifiable results for my work. I establish measureable objectives and then evaluate the success of my program. The key measureable results offered to women who embark on a fitness journey are pounds and inches lost. The goal there is to be skinny, thin, svelte etc – that is smaller than when you start.
When I applied my communications planning approach to my fitness work, I realized my goal was to live well and as healthily as possible. That meant I wanted to be able to move without assistance (now and in the future), to live free from injury, and to make activity a regular and enjoyable part of my life.
It wasn’t easy though shaking off some of the attitudes about what makes for an appropriate shape for women. Working with a trainer who focused on form and correct execution led to my looking at outcomes differently and finding the new measures that would help assess my progress in the gym.
Today, one of things I most appreciate about working towards achieving my goal to live well and be healthy is the fact that you are always working towards fitness. Fitness is not a six-week effort to achieve a better fit for your dress or swimsuit. It’s not a destination where you say “here I am, I am fit” simply because you can wear a bikini or a body-hugging sleeveless dress. Fitness is a process, and a way of life.
But if you want to be swimsuit ready, here’s a hint: put the swimsuit on. Now you are ready.
Martha Muzychka is a writer and consultant living in St. John’s, NL.
