Today I sat sweating on the lat pulldown machine at my local YMCA and scrolled back in my calendar, looking at an event that took place every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday called LIFTOFF. It started back in February, which means I’ve been doing it for about six months. I think the ‘going to the gym to lift weights’ part probably started more like five months ago, but who knows. It’s the longest I’ve ever done a workout program besides when I was in high school on the swim team, so it’s the most consistent workout I’ve done in the last decade plus.
I haven’t lost weight or gotten skinnier doing this workout and I’d be lying if I said I was fully okay with or happy about that, but I’m trying to be. Years and years of people telling me how good I looked at my most depressed and emaciated is burned into my brain—I know that I’m playing the thinnest, tiniest violin by complaining about being skinny. But that’s how it went, and maybe that’s why I avoided anything that seemed like it could make me ‘bulky’ for so long.
There were brief phases of barre classes and at-home pilates and Kit Rich videos (those do feel good and she seems legit, I will say that). I had a grotesque phase of quarantine that involved me doing Insanity™️ workouts every single day and injuring myself every week—'but I’m burning so many calories!’ I would think, forging on with a stabbing pain in my chest or hip, hobbling through my day-to-day activities. I experienced the brief euphoria of losing weight that I actually wanted to lose instead of dropping it because of stress, but it was immediately spoiled by another pain in some other place. I don’t think I actually achieved the thinness I wanted until I got stressed about work and became unable to eat as much, which was the usual pattern.
Before I started LIFTOFF, I was seeing a physical therapist/pilates instructor who charged $150 per session and complained that her ADHD made it hard to remember what we did in our previous session: she’d scamper around the studio telling me what to do to relieve my ailments, a stretch here or a strength-band exercise there. Then she’d use cupping on my back and neck in order to ‘bring life’ into those muscles, leaving me with what appeared to be XXL hickies all over my torso. I stopped just before my wedding in October since it wouldn’t have been a good look.
I never went back. It was too expensive, obviously, but I also knew that I wasn’t getting anywhere physically. My main mode of exercise was getting as many steps a day as possible, walking around for hours even though my back and shoulders became extremely painful anytime I walked for more than fifteen minutes. I spent every night laying on our hard wood floors and complaining to my husband that there was something wrong with me. He listened and held himself back from begging me to go to the gym and lift weights with him, something that had helped him with similar problems. I’d gone with him once before and left almost in tears—yes, seriously—because I felt so uncomfortable and inept in a gym. It’s cringe, but it’s true.
And then I found LIFTOFF: promising that I wouldn’t have to actually go to the gym for the first few weeks (I’d use a Swiffer mop bar and videos to learn basic movements first), it sold me on what creator Casey Johnston called the couch-to-barbell process. In eight weeks, she wrote, I could be in the gym feeling competent. I didn’t think I’d like it and I believed I might be unable to do it because something in my back was fundamentally broken, but I figured I could give it a shot.
Smash cut to now: I have zero pain in my back and shoulders after walking around, if ever. My legs and torso were likely so weak before (years of hunching over a desk and not strengthening them at all, duh) that my back was doing all the work—its pain was a true cry for help, honey. Parts of my body are bigger than they were when I started, but of course they are—my whole body is much stronger than it was when I started. I can deadlift 85 lbs! I used to struggle to hinge at my hips at all, let alone pick up something heavy while doing it.
The experience inspired me to find a good physical therapist (covered by insurance) who helped me understand that I have hyper-mobile joints, especially in my shoulders and back, which makes it more likely for me to have pain there. It’s not a huge deal and it’s easy for me to address it with strength training, but it made sense of some things that made a big difference in how I understood my body, like why sitting on an exercise ball as a desk chair makes me feel like I’ve been hit by a truck or why I hold a pen so weird, etc. etc.
It’ll take my brain a while to catch up to the health of my body. I still look in the mirror and think that I have to be more thin. But then I counter that thought with the gratitude I have for my pain-free state, for the fact that I actually have some semblance of an ass now, for the way I can pick up things without struggling (my incredibly dense 18 lb dog included). I try to listen when people say I look healthier because I know it’s the truth—I’m trying to trust the way I feel and not the way I think. One day that’ll be stronger too.
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