My dudes. It has been a very long minute since I’ve graced the blog with my presence. Last night after work I felt the inward draw to type up this experience I’ve had for the last two and a half years. It is regretfully not a story revolving around a fun adventure I have recently embarked on but rather a personal experience that I only just came to recognize as an issue. An issue that snuck up on me but something that has roots.
Since end of December I have been complaining about feeling like a blimp. I had been feeling so bloated all. the. time. I was also extremely fatigued all. the. time. My skin looked awful, the skin under my eyes were always black (more black than usual), then sometime around March I started to notice that my gums would spontaneously bleed. I would be out running or driving or grocery shopping and they would just start bleeding. I thought this was odd but also really did not do much about it. Beginning of June I did a training hike over in the Gorge. I was supposed to be summiting Mount Hood and this particular hike closely mirrors the 5,000+ foot elevation gain in 5 or 6 miles that I would have been doing on Hood. After this hike I got home and while washing my hands looked at myself in the mirror. The person looking back was quite shocking – my face was extremely pale, my under eyes were so black it honestly looked like I had been punched. For some reason this scared me enough to take a deeper look into what was going on with my body.
Turns out I had been starving my body for well over a year and a half. Then, it turns out that basically since I’ve moved to Portland I have had unrealistic body expectations for myself. This stemmed from a breakup and things that were said towards the end of the relationship in regards to how my body look versus other people’s bodies. I hadn’t really thought much of it at the time but realized recently how often I think about the comments that were made and how much they actually affected my body image. These thoughts and expectations of how I should look managed to just become a part of my daily routine and programmed themselves into my thought loops. Without intention I have become an extremely self conscious individual lacking confidence in my looks. I have felt SO ugly, fat and unlovable for almost two and a half years. How wild is that!? At one point my weight was down to 149 pounds – which for me is insane, I don’t think I’ve weighed that since beginning of high school. Even at that weight I remember still looking in the mirror every day at my stomach disgusted with how I looked.
Then, last year when the pandemic hit and quarantine went into place and I was off work for almost two months, I refused to gain weight. So I cut more calories and worked out three times a day. My body became used to doing grueling workouts on no calories. I got to a point where I ran 15 mile trail runs in the mountains without eating prior to or during. I would only eat afterwards. I saw myself become thinner and loved it. Once my body got used to this I just kept eating this way. For the last year and a half, on average, I was eating around 900 to 1000 calories a day AND intermittent fasting. I would often go 16 to 20 hours without eating. Then I would eat very minimal calories between about noon and 5pm and then stop eating. I did this all the while maintaining my high level of activity. During the winter months I usually skied for four hours straight – no water, no breaks, no food. Then I would usually climb or do cardio on those days as well. In January when I started to feel so puffy I was extremely frustrated. I could not understand how I felt like I was gaining weight when I was eating next to nothing and doing literally hours of activity per day.
Fast forward to end of May of this year. My friend, Nina, and I went to Leavenworth, where I continued to complain to her about my body (she has had to listen to me complain since December). She saw me eat a bowl of fruit and a plate of veggies before we went on a fairly difficult 8 mile hike. She had mentioned to me before that I probably was not eating enough and my body was most likely holding on to fluid and fat in an effort to essentially survive. In addition, I had seen an old coworker post a photo on instagram talking about not being in a calorie deficit for too long because of health effects it can have on the body (hormone imbalances, thyroid issues etc). About a week after our trip I had some sort of epiphany, I don’t even remember what at this point. But the whole concept of not eating enough started to make sense. I looked back at what I had been doing since 2019 and realized she was probably spot on. I work 12 hour days, I usually work out on my work days and then have seven days off every other week where I absolutely wreck my body with activity…and here I am trying to survive off 900 calories so I can have this thin body that I thought I needed in order to be loved and to love myself.
I finally recognized that my body had changed since January as well. I had skied so much that my thighs and glutes became way more muscular versus when I was just doing straight cardio and had very little developed muscle. I have also been rock climbing way more consistently and my shoulders, back and arms are extremely developed because of that. It has been very hard for me to accept my body for all its strength and muscle. I look at myself and just see a whale of a human. I have started to add 200 calories a week back into my diet and what do you know, my gums have stopped spontaneously bleeding. I also feel better and my weight has gone down. I do not weigh myself, I stopped doing that in undergrad because my body builds muscle so fast that seeing numbers on a scale go down was not really a thing. I can tell by how I feel, how I look and how clothes fit. I have gone from eating 900 – 1000 calories a day to 1800 a day. For my activity level I should be eating about 2200 per day so I have some work yet.
I am also working very hard on accepting my body and how it looks. I am never going to have a flat stomach, I think I would have to have surgery in order to have a flat stomach, my body naturally carries weight in the low belly area (which is infuriating but something I am trying to get over). I am also trying to accept the much more muscular version of myself. My huge butt, my huge thighs (I am getting used to my thighs rubbing together, the last two years I was small enough where they didn’t rub together), my muscular arms and huge, muscular and broad shoulders. The mind is a tricky thing. All these muscles I have now are all muscles I have been working on for years to develop and gain this strength and yet here I am hating myself for it and hating how I am not petite or slender.
In an effort to get my confidence back, over the last few weeks, I have forced myself to wear crop bras and bike shorts or leggings when I go on bike rides or like today, I wore a crop bra to the climbing gym – fully aware that when I started climbing and getting in weird positions my body fat would be exposed. But, I went for it and felt fine. And honestly, I see other women who are larger or curvier than I am wearing these things and I genuinely think they look beautiful. In total transparency, I am often times jealous of their confidence. But then I see myself in the same clothing and hate every inch of myself. Wearing clothes that expose me a bit more has actually helped. I realize that no one cares, no one is looking at me and judging me.
Finally, I am working again towards getting my mental confidence back. Now that I realized I let actions and comments destroy my self confidence I am working towards fixing my mind. I feel like the best part of me, prior to all of this, was my confidence and my feeling of self worth. In an effort to not beat myself up over how silly I have been or how much I let this get a hold of me, I am trying to recognize the positives.
I am unsure why I feel the need to type this out, maybe it is therapeutic for my own mental health. Nonetheless, here it is in the open. Portland, it has been a wild ride of emotions, depression and self discovery. When I leave this city next year I am going to have to remind myself of the good friends I’ve made, beauty I’ve seen and all that I have learned while I have been here because it has NOT been an easy couple of years my friends.
Cheers to positive body image and being a badass chick.
J
Below are a few photos from the archives of cool stuff in 2021
