For most of my teen years, I imagined I was chubby. I’m not really sure if I actually was, because, well, who really defines what chubby is? Every time I watch Love Actually, I get so confused by Hugh Grant’s love interest being referred to as the chubby one. If she was chubby, then I definitely count (along with most of the women I know). Anyways, it doesn’t really matter, the key point is that I rarely felt comfortable within my own body.
The reason I mention my high school weight is to bring up a mistake that I think happens far too often when talking to people who we perceive as overweight or obese. A few times, when I brought up problems to people that I trusted to help me find solutions, the answer was often, “you should just exercise.” As an adult, I’m aware that they had the best of intentions. I even agree, to some degree. I have not hidden the fact that my life has become far better since I became dedicated to making sure activity is a part of it, and I suspect that for many people, adding it in can only improve their overall quality of life. I don’t, however, believe that all of life’s problems can be solved just by going for a run, regardless of how much I want to believe it some days.
But, the overall accuracy of the “just exercise” advice was not the problem. The issue was what it told me about how my body was being perceived by the world. All I heard was, “You’re fat, and if you weren’t fat, you wouldn’t have these problems.” Again, it was never anyone’s intention for me to feel like that, but, that was all I could think.
The big problem for me was that this didn’t help me find out how amazing exercise can be. In fact, it moved me away from active living, because it can often be a terrifyingly public act, whether you are running or biking in the streets, lifting at the gym or joining a team sport, when you are uncomfortable in your own skin, the idea of moving quickly in front of others in that body is the last thing you want to do. For a very long time, I would only run at dusk, because I didn’t want people seeing me. I imagined that, at best, they would pity me and wonder why I was even trying.
In hindsight, I also wonder if exercise and activity were far too tightly linked to the body that I felt so out-of-place in. The way it forced me to interact with my body was not appealing, so any attempts to start usually ended pretty quickly when my outside aesthetics did not change at the rate I wanted them to.
I wish I could pinpoint the moment my relationship with weight and exercise and my body all got turned on its head. It was after I was at the point that I called myself a runner, for sure, because that fear of being seen was there for the first few months for sure. I think the only reason I was able to fight through it was that I’d changed the focus of my exercising from what my body looked like to what my body felt like. I wanted to be stronger, to be faster, and to be able endure more of it every day. I do remember that the first day I ran 10km, I remember walking to meet someone for dinner and thinking how proud I felt to have legs that could get me anywhere I wanted to go.
I’d be a massive liar if I said I’m never concerned about my body image, but I know that at the moment I’m working out, I have trouble caring what my body looks like to other people. The reflection at the gym doesn’t bother me anymore, because what I see is the muscles that are doing work for me (even when it’s just my noodle arms struggling through the last few reps). When I see pictures of myself running, I can laugh at my awkwardness, instead of thinking that I shouldn’t be out in public like that.
It wasn’t an easy change, but it wouldn’t have occurred if I hadn’t actively worked to tease the benefits of exercise out from the talk of burning calories and “toning”. When I started focusing on the function instead of the aesthetics, I found what I’d been looking for all along: a comfort with my body that I hadn’t had since I was very young.
Eating My Own Advice 