SORRY ABOUT THE TEAL DEER.... OHMYGOD THEY'RE BREEDING
Where did yesterday’s post come from? A variety of places. Much internal: I’ve been running a lot lately, as anyone on my twitter has seen, and the more time I spend at the gym the more I think about why I’m doing this (reasons other than “sadomasochism” and “the Akron Marathon” XD). Some external; there are only so many times I can hear people at work referencing “those last three pounds” (gosh, really? Really????) without it driving me into countering musings. I have lots of friends interested in their health in a lot of different ways, and sometimes there is this comparison/competition vibe that isn’t healthy or unhealthy, really, but is worthy of examination. (Yoga’s easy? Really? Try Crow Pose or Headstand and see whether you come home exhausted, cause I sure do.) Plus: it just interests me. I have done a lot of research in the field of health and working out (not compared to someone who works in the field, right, just as a Sally Average Engineer Nerd who cares a little more than usual), and it becomes something I care a little bit about.
There are a bunch of places I could launch off from here. There’s some stuff to be said about appearance, about health, about working out, about size acceptance (HAES? I am still learning terminology here), and there are a legion of posts in my brain about social media and the pressure on women and I think those are still building and compiling themselves at the moment. So let’s start with health, with working out, and with the obligatory tl;dr ramble on ME ME MEMEME.
And to be fair, I’ll identify my privilege here, because I’m wrought with it: I have the privilege of being able to afford a gym, and having a work schedule which lets me fit in exercise trips to said gym without (financial or otherwise) disruption to my professional life and with minimal-to-moderate disruptions to personal life; I have the privilege of being able to afford within reason to eat whatever I choose to eat, healthy or otherwise; and I have the privilege of having a body whose natural size and shape fit within society’s expected norm, meaning that trips to the gym or the mall or the grocery aren’t the experience/burden/hassle they might be for individuals of other shapes and sizes. I try to recognize this as much as one who has privilege can identify and recognize it. (There is definitely another huge discussion to be had about “thin privilege” and society and HAES and expectations for women, and I do want to get into that, but probably not here, as this is long and unwieldy enough and I’d rather research some more and build my own personal toolbox before embarking down that particular path.) This post is about somebody who pays for a gym and gives up her own time to go there. I understand that not everyone can afford that, where by afford I mean in ways both financial and otherwise, and I do not wish to shove my privilege down anyone's throat. I have the luxury of working out as a hobby. It's important to recognize not everyone does.
To pretend that I am immune from society’s pressures to look a certain way would be ridiculous and, in the end, counterproductive. I am sure that when I started working out, paying attention to what I ate, even occasionally calorie-counting - I am sure my motivations stemmed from the desire to “look good”, which was probably defined in my head at that time as “thin”. I am sure that even now, as I’ve transitioned my goals into things I’m pleased with, things that are more specific and meaningful - even now, I’m sure there’s a part of my self, whether subconsciously or just good old self-consciously, pushing through that run so that I look good, so that I fit in that smaller pair of jeans, whatever it is. (Hilariously, I type this as I eat a donut, my third of the week, so, uh. Irony/Bad Life Choices, thy name is Sev Dragomire. Maybe I really just work out because I like unhealthy life choices like alcohol and donuts (can we invent a donut shot???) too much… food for thought.)
But consciously - as in the active, conscious choices that I declare to myself and make - that isn’t why I go to the gym. I have two reasons that keep me on this workout path: one is overall health, and one is challenge.
I want to point out here that the documentation of actual size/weight/BMI correlation to actual overall healthiness is confusing. For every study linking “overweight” folks to health problems, there seems to be another study disproving the link between “fat” and “unhealthy.” The jury is still out on that, but I am not going to propagate the myth of “big people are automatically unhealthy because of their size” any longer, nor will I subscribe to the correlating myth of “skinny people must be healthy because they’re small.” Health and size are two fucking completely different things - every body has a natural range it settles into, and that’s what’s healthy: listening to your body, honoring your body, rather than trying to trick it. Equilibrium is a valuable state. Honor that.
This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t work out, or try to change their diet, or even that saying “I want to be thinner” is necessarily a bad thing (if it’s properly examined as to why you want to be “thinner” and whether it’s not only a realistic goal but a reasonable, positive, self-supportive one rather than a negative, media-image society-induced goal - which is a much bigger step than most people take) - I’ll support anybody’s path to whatever goal they choose for themselves. It’s just… if you’re talking health, there isn’t just physical health to be concerned about, there’s your mental health too, and striving to look some certain way rather than being happy with your natural self isn’t healthy and you can’t lie to yourself and say it is just because “I’m working out” or “I’m trying to be skinny”, especially when that correlates to “Because society told me to.” Nope, not healthy; sorry.
Also, BMI is fucking garbage. About three or four years ago when I was ~15lb heavier I looked up my BMI and went, “Well, gosh! I’m only two points away from overweight, holy crap.” First of all, two points away from overweight means YOU’RE NOT FUCKING OVERWEIGHT; each BMI range is only a few points wide anyway so a two-point difference is definitely significant, self. Second, BMI is absolute fucking crap.
Here’s the thing. I have weighed the same 135-140 lb for the past two years. Two years ago, I was pushing hard as heck to run a 5K (3.1 mi), lifting weights on weight machines, still doing elliptical as cardio, and thinking that was awesome. And at the time, it certainly was! Dude, anything’s awesome! But I keep improving: Last week, I ran 16.2 miles total, including an 8 mile run; attended a yoga class in which I held a headstand; and worked with barbells and freeweights to do squats that were an actual challenge. Am I in better shape right now? Yes. Could you postulate that this means I’m healthier? Sure. Am I the same fucking weight and therefore the same BMI? GUESS WHAT: I AM. And can I throw this one in there to screw with people’s brains: do I “look better”? Possibly maybe. (#1, it’s hard for me to say so as whatever changes might have occurred in my body have been gradual as hell; #2, define “better”, people.)
I just don’t believe in BMI, sorry, and the number one thing you find out when you start reading actual articles and communities and doing research is that BMI isn’t a great number to use even for average-sized people, let alone active people with high muscle mass (or, say, marathon runners, who - let’s face it - have a tendency to look like jerky <3 ). Plus, it’s arbitrary. So a magical formula spits out a number and says you’re “overweight”. I bet there are a ton of people who are BMI-overweight who eat way better than I do, drink less, and have fewer pre-existing health conditions, which would make them - *GASP* - healthier than me.
See, here’s the thing. It’s the difference between “weight” and “health” and “in shape.” Health is its own category, in which both weight and in shape play a role - but also things like diet, lifestyle (one I fail at - another beer please), and things people don’t often acknowledge: activity, sleep schedule, as well as, say, preexisting health conditions! Health is so much bigger than how much you run or how many donuts you eat in a week (3~ this week! *SUCKS*) and the correlations are all over the place in so many people’s minds. I’m not trying at all to say that I was healthier three or four years ago when I was near-binge-drinking all the time and eating takeout Chinese food and running maybe a mile once in a while. I think I’m trying to say that I wasn’t healthier back then, but it didn’t have much to do with what I weighed at all.
One of the things that I really believe - I think I always have, it’s just that yoga put words to it - is about respecting and honoring your own body. Understanding it, accepting it, being comfortable with it, rather than trying to pressure it into some shape it wasn’t meant to be. In yoga, the teacher discusses “honoring your body” in terms of poses, only stretching a pose as far as it is comfortable for you to do so, and focusing on finding and keeping your breath within the pose. It’s a reminder that not all bodies are made to do the same things, or to make the same shapes or motions. It's also a reminder that each individual has strengths and limitations. For example, I have a bum toe, did you know that? My brother broke it when I was young and hiding behind a door and my toenail fell off. I thought it had healed just fine. I never would've known until I started yoga and realized I can't do certain upright-foot kneeling poses because of it.
Anyway. Like I said, two reasons: the first is health.
I actually have a lot of minor health problems! I don’t talk about them a lot, for a myriad of reasons: old-fashioned selfish privacy; not wanting pity or sympathy; not wanting to be challenged over whether or not something real in my life constitutes as a “real disease”; not wanting to self-diagnose; etc. But it has more to do with problems that have manifested in me; it’s also about prevention.
I have, directly in my family history: cancer, lung disease, osteoporosis, diabetes. And that’s just immediate family (parents and grandparents). Warning signs have already manifested: I’ve been through procedures for cancer screening I won’t talk about outside of F-Lock; I’m pretty much guaranteed to be osteopenic because of my mum and gramma; I’ve got asthma and fought chronic bronchitis as a kid, which means I’m 2/4 on my way to COPD; and I have mild hypoglycemia already. The thing is, I sure as fuck don’t want any of these diseases. Watching my grandmother crumble has been hard. Watching cancer is something I still don’t talk about. Whatever I can do, I want to do.
And weight-lifting is one of the best things to do in your 20s and 30s to strengthen bones and resist osteopenia and osteoporosis; yoga’s another. Aerobic exercise and running will never get rid of asthma, but strengthening my lungs is a good thing no matter how you look at it. Active lifestyle is one of the “counters” to diabetes and blood sugar problems. There are a lot of good things that will happen to me later on in life because I exercise now - or, really, maybe, some bad things that *won’t* happen to me. I know the future’s hard to predict, but I am an engineer and we err on the side of safety in all things.
(Okay, sidetrack: diet’s another huge portion of this here, and does not deserve to be overlooked. However, it’s complicated, and it’s also something steeped in privilege. I’m just going to say that it’s also important in terms of both health and preventive health. It’s totally worth its own discussion.)
This has become a very important part of my workout, as I watch aftermath from things and combat my own aging and asthma and other shit, and watch my gramma decompose. It’s a lot more about this for me now, knowing that I make a choice that might suck some now (don’t get me wrong: as proud as I am of doing it, I am actually not a big fan of running 16 miles a week) for benefits later.
In terms of health, honoring my body has been a really big part of learning for me. My body’s unhealthy and for a long time I’ve been trying to get diagnosed with something so that I can change it. Example: I have hypoglycemia and I hate the way it makes me more emotionally unstable, more easily exhausted, more irritable, more unbalanced, than any one else in my life, so that I feel like the weak one, the one who can’t cope, who fails at life, and I’ve wanted for years for a doctor to say “oh! You have X! here are some pills” and then it all gets better. When really, it’s about understanding my own chemistry, taking the vitamins that will help and keeping the granola bars in my purse, and acknowledging that this is me: I work differently, and that’s alright, because I honor the messages my body is sending me. So what if I eat four pieces of pizza when everyone else has two; this is me. I honor my body’s needs.
The second reason is challenge.
I like getting better at shit. Who doesn’t? And I like getting better at shit that I think is both important and impressive. Again, who doesn’t? We all like to look and sound awesome, right?
Running is hard for me. I have a bum ankle (my left ankle has like less than 50% of the ligaments in it working and un-torn, har har). I have asthma. I’m generally a bit of a wuss. Running? It’s a challenge. And it’s a challenge I can overcome with training and hard work. That’s pretty cool!
I set goals for myself in everything; things like getyourwordsout, cockeyed_art, Beacon, fanfiction, words-per-week, etc etc… you’ve all seen them (and you’ve all seen me fail pretty hard at some of them). I set goals in workouts as well; I have a training plan I’ve spent a lot of time on helping me improve mileage and time for my 8-mile leg. I’ve got yoga routines I plan on starting at home. I like watching the totals go up on the weight machines. It’s a physical challenge, seeing just what my body is capable of.
The thing is, it’s the kind of goal you can really only set for yourself. For a long time, I ran with Jeff, and that was super frustrating, because he is male and tall and he’d be on the treadmill jogging at 7.5 mph, and I’d try to make myself go even 7.0 mph and then have a huge asthma attack that ended in breathless tears and pain, in the corner of the room, where I collapsed. I wish I were joking, but this is a true story! And it happened multiple times, because I am apparently a slow learner.
Something else I learned about honoring my body is to listen. I can’t do what everyone else can. But I can do what I can, and that’s a lot, and that’s pretty awesome. You don’t have to be better than anybody else to make working out worth it. Is it enough to make your body exhausted-happy, endorphin-rich, slow-sluggish with the work you’ve put into the workout? Are you sore and proud? Did you sweat? Honor that.
I think in the end that both of these reasons tie into self-image. I do workout for myself. And that’s alright. Because it’s not a self-image that’s tied into appearance, into shape or size, and it’s NOT a self-image tied into someone else’s expectations. It’s tied into me, and my self-image being related to standards I set, shit I decide. My own self-image likes that I’m working out to keep myself healthy, to ward off future health problems and try to deal with present ones. And I’m proud as hell of the fact that I can run 8 miles, not because it makes me look any certain way but because I’m a fucking asthmatic with a bum ankle running 8 miles: that’s pretty awesome.
And I wish people in general could pick up on parts of that: being proud of what your body can do in all ways while still challenging it to do more; being happy with your level of health rather than tying it to something unrelated.
There is a preoccupation with how you look, in working out and exercising, much related to size but also related to shape, or "tone" (to use a word many muscle-builders mock). Now, if you want to set that as your goal - "I want to be a pants size smaller" - fine, alright. (I'd hope you'd maybe examine why that's what's important, but hey, I don't get to pick what you do.) But that doesn't mean it's healthier. If your body isn't naturally that size, and you have to cut calories to get there, is that healthy? Really?
And this is getting into the messages from society about being thin and pretty, and that's another post entirely. So yeah.
To be continued, as thoughts appear.
[EDIT] As a precursor to a post I'll write later, I'll just throw this out there: think about girls who look like Tifa, or like Tifa would look like in real life: ass-kicking muscles. Strong thighs, big shoulders. I could totally get into that. Who picked "skinny" as the default connotation for "healthy"???