Lifestyle changes, maybe, whatever

"My boyfriend wanted a meal plan. REALLY wanted one. 
Me, not so much

Luckily, I got a 15 day Barre3 free trial, which I recommend to anyone who's even remotely interested in ballet, yoga, or pilate. This plan included not only videos, but a meal plan.

'Okay. Show me said meal plan,' I said."

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That was the start of my "fitness" blog I quickly forgot about completely 3 years ago, as I discovered this week while going through every bookmark on my stupidly cluttered bookmarks tab dating back to 2017-- a much better year for many reasons. I have ADHD-inattentive type, therefore just saying it was "a lot of bookmarks" is a gross understatement. It's the kind of project you need time off from work and social obligations to even begin to tackle. 

Oh, how the universe provides... (insert joke about the year 2020)  

That post --if you can even call it that, seeing as it's just an intro-- centered around my reluctance to box myself into an eating plan when my own "plan" (or lack thereof) allowed me to rock a nice 6 pack up until that point, which was, admittedly, probably due to undereating slightly. Ironically, I wrote the entry (if you can call it that) about a month before developing a case of binge eating disorder that really hit my self esteem to an extent that's pretty irrational. 

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So, to update you: I'm 3 years older, 35 lbs heavier, my abs are nestled under a blanket crafted from a couple years' worth of compulsive eating, and still no meal plan to be found. 
Also, I no longer have a boyfriend, i.e. someone to urge me to eat real meals instead of being a little mouse, snacking on various things at unpredictable times. I'm no good at being an adult (an adult human, anyway).

What makes this worse is that my fitness regime isn't going great, seeing as my gym is closed because of a deadly worldwide pandemic. 

Boy, life can really suck. 

Life comes at you fast

But you know what? It's not so bad (and I'm not just referring to being "self partnered" while quarantined). 

If there's anything I've learned these past few years as a singleton, it's that putting all my self worth into my physical fitness and body shape is not practical or healthy, mentally or physically. The media we consume might tell you that you should pride yourself on having year long shoulder striations and an 8 pack, while somehow also eating ample amounts of every little micro nutrient necessary through "easy" meal prepping while "living your life" and also achieving all sorts of "success". It's laughably impractical due to the sheer amount of energy expended and cost for the vast majority of us, who don't have limitless resources at our disposal and/or a cocaine habit.

Fitness, while healthy in theory, can be extremely stressful to downright unrealistic and unachievable when we put the whole "after" picture up on a pedestal, making that our target no matter what life obstacles come about because of the whole "no excuses" mentality,. I beat myself up and caused myself undue stress due to this all or nothing attitude that is prolific in the fitness community. 

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Back when I was a fitness diehard in my early 20s, when my joints were young and more flexible (and my abs rivaled those of fitness models year-round), I used to live and breathe the gym and put probably 4-6 hours into my meal planning and prepping weekly. I missed out on events and probably stunted myself socially, including not being particularly adept at  making and keeping friends or dating, let alone being a good, supportive partner in a long term relationship. The latter is something I very much want in life, and have been about as successful at finding (and keeping) as I have been keeping up with a blog. 

I drove myself crazy because trying to balance this level of fitness and college coursework was absurdly demanding of my time and energy (particularly since I didn't have a cocaine habit).

Then, at 25, I stopped because I got too tired. By "stopped", I don't mean stopped going to the gym and "eating healthy", though I became a LOT more lenient about it. With my workouts, "lenient" meant more forgiving and not beating myself up if I had to miss a workout, and more flexible. However, with my diet, that meant more sloppy. 
This was good in some ways, because it kept me from being constrained by my own meal plans and falling into orthorexia traps such as "clean eating", which is easy to fall into compared other eating disorders because the way you look and eat is actually reinforced by much of western media. The previous statement, admittedly, sounds like a cross between a thesis statement from a Women and Gender Studies essay and a admonishment of "the media" from a paranoid knucklehead who thinks they're enlightened because they haven't been "brainwashed", but stay with me. 

The reason unregimented eating was bad for me is because I was definitely undereating, to the extent that my (now-ex) boyfriend expressed some concerns for my well-being, which is part of what prompted the whole "meal planning" discussion in the first place. 

Looking back, I have to admit that I underate sometimes to maintain my slender frame. My reluctance to even try to eat 3 squares (or 5-6, if you're one of those tupperware people, you know who you are) was because trying to "plan" anything is hard for me, and meal planning used to take up life to an unhealthy extent. Besides, for the time being, lack of structure worked for me... until it didn't. 

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We see fitness as a black or white, either you're fit or you're not. It took one time where I "slipped up" and overate, enough to gain over 5 pounds overnight (which is just water weight and maybe 0.05 pounds of fat) to send me into a constant pattern of "slip ups". Slip ups meaning, for example, eating a whole box of something I just bought, in secret, followed by regret and self loathing. This took a major toll on my self esteem, which, when I look back, seems a little absurd when you consider just how much this one victimless habit harmed my view of myself. However, although seemingly absurd, is logical when I think about why that alone was enough to make me hate myself.

It's only recently that I realized I had built my self worth around, to put it bluntly, not being fat-- a blatantly foolish and trivial thing to be that proud of. It's ridiculous, if you think about it, to have any sort of superiority complex when it comes to one's physique. My own hypocrisy is evident when I want to consider myself "body positive", when I'm really not. Sure, when it comes to other people, I'll lambaste any prick who wants to fat shame others, meanwhile I'll tell myself the same things and worse every time I look in the mirror. It takes some cognitive dissonance to think the rules don't apply to one's self, because, even though the criticism is aimed inward, it's still rooted in the belief that my body is shaped a certain way, therefore I'm better (or worse) than others. Back when I was an athlete, I could say I wasn't inherently better than anyone else, but still, subconsciously, I felt like I was better. This is psychologically incongruent with the fact that someone else's shape and size doesn't actually bother me, although, come to think of it, it would be more nonsensical if it did bother me, because it is silly to believe that if one's body is shaped a certain way, they're better than anyone else. Conversely, it's silly to believe that, because I'm not the leanest I've ever been, I'm somehow worse. 

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Fitness culture doesn't often encourage us to be kind to ourselves. It's something that I would want to change, yet I can't take that stand without revealing my own hypocrisy, because of the awful things I tell myself all the time. Fat shaming, as you (hopefully) know, doesn't help anyone; predictably, fat shaming myself,  hasn't helped me at all, in fact it has hurt my relationship with food, my mental health, and has bled into other areas of my life due to my lowered self confidence and self worth. 

It doesn't have to be this way.

My hope is that I can at least get to the point where I don't hate my body even when I'm not "fit" (ie thin, if I'm being fully honest with myself), or at least that it becomes less relevant to how I see myself as a whole. There's other more important things to beat myself up over (just kidding). 

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I'll touch on some of these points more in depth in future posts. I'm tired. I just finished a monumental task of defeating a staggering disarray of toobar icons and sifting through the remains, carrying the pesky lingering links off to be sequestered into their own perfectly labeled folders. It was treacherous. 
Cut me a little slack. ㋡