One thing I need to do in the new year, is to take care of myself better. Specifically, take care of my body. I know this seems like a weird statement coming from me because I’ve written several times about my successful fitness journey over the last year or so, but there are still some things out of balance. And I’m going to be super honest about this with you here.
Too often, I starve myself. Not always on purpose. Usually, because I haven’t prepared well enough ahead of time to have convenient food available to me when I need it. Which means my body has become accustomed over time to ignoring and suppressing hunger signals until they’re an absolute emergency, at which point I overcompensate and then binge eat. Which is why my body holds on the fat the way it does. It is like someone who survived the depression and now can’t let go of the ten thousand dollars in 100’s it has stuffed into a mattress. My body can’t trust me to feed it properly. I must break this habit and be better at feeding it at more reasonable intervals.
That said, I don’t think this rises to anything clinically wrong here. I do not have anorexia. This type of dynamic is common with neurodivergent people. There is a little bit of a ‘if I don’t eat, I will lose weight’ factor going on here, but I do not have an actual eating disorder, just some unfortunate tendencies exacerbated by ADHD.
That said, weighing myself regularly and tracking my calories trips me into a pattern of trying to make those numbers as small as possible. Give me a metric and I will try to hit it. Give me a calorie budget and I will stay under it, even if I know the budget is a floor as well as a ceiling. So, for the next couple of months, I’m not going to weigh myself or track my calories. I will eat at least every four hours, concentrating on protein and nutrients, avoiding empty calories. I’m not going to stuff myself.
Maybe, once my body trusts me again (if it ever has), it will be a little easier to get it to release the fat that it is holding onto. It might take several months for that to happen, but I need to give it those months. My body needs to trust me in a way it never has before because so far, I have not proven trustworthy.
And at a time when I am actively trying to build muscle, my body needs protein, carbs, and other nutrients to do that. The muscle won’t develop without food. (Gym bros would tell me I am in a bulk phase? I think?) I need to focus on my protein intake and avoid empty calories. I also need fiber and carbs and fat. Fat is not the enemy, it’s necessary. These things are not a ‘nice to have.’ They are necessary to build the strong, vital body that I want, and to stop feeling as weak and shaky as I often do. I also don’t need to be super restrictive with my diet because that’s dangerous for me. Focus on actual food with actual nutrition, even if they are somewhat processed. That is better than what I am currently doing. Any attempt at ‘clean eating’ or whatever will trip me into a pathological zone of restriction. I can eat the foods I like to eat. I’m not a big sweets person anyway. In reasonable portions.
I’m focusing on overall health and physical strength. Since I’m not weighing or calorie tracking, I’ll pay attention to how my clothes fit. If I stay in medium shirts and 31-inch waist pants, I’m good. I suspect I probably will.
In the past I have been socially rewarded for losing weight and being ‘skinny,’ even when I was nowhere close to being healthy. When you lose weight, people fall over themselves to tell you how good you look. And yes, I realize this problem is much bigger socially for women than it is for men, but it hits men too. But from now on it’s more important to me to be strong, capable, and healthy, whatever that looks like. It’s better to hold on to 20 extra pounds and be able to do 100 pushups in a given day than to look good but not even be able to do ten. Besides, muscle weighs more than fat does anyway.
So, I guess this is my new body manifesto. I work out, but I’m not a gym bro. I will never have visible abs and that’s ok. I need to have a better relationship with my body. It needs to trust me to care for it, as it’s taken care of me all these years.