Your body is your home. Love it well
Your body is the only place you have to live when you are on this earth, let's take care of it & nurture it instead of fight it & criticize it.
I have never written my story about my relationship with food & exercise in entirety, so here we go. I am a native Nashvillian and grew up on the standard American diet. I played soccer from age 6-18 & was an active kid. I didn't have food/body image issues at all from childhood through high school. I credit that a lot to my mom, who never once commented on my body or criticized/picked apart her own and never commented on other people's bodies either.
I am truly blessed in that aspect and could never thank her enough for that. My story started after my freshman year in college. The spring of my freshman year in college at Mississippi State (2007) I was involved in a car accident. I fell asleep at the wheel, which resulted in 4 broken vertebrae in my neck, broken hand, thumb, wrist, arm, collarbone, punctured lung, traumatic brain injury, and a stroke. This accident changed my life forever; I could write a whole different story on that. However, I'll focus on food/exercise/mental health for this story. After that accident, I moved back in with my parents in Nashville where we had a hospital bed and my mom quit her job to take care of me full time.
I was sedentary for quite some time and gained about 40 pounds during that next year or so. I believe the weight gain was due to my decreased ability to exercise, increased food consumption as well as depression which set in about 6-9 months after the accident. I was put on Lexapro to help with the depression, but it actually caused me to become even more isolated & gain more weight. After 6 months of being on the medication, I was taken off and decided to try and use other avenues to get myself out of the depression. In the spring of 2009 I ran the Music City 1/2 marathon with my mom. This was a celebration of how far I had come and we wanted to do it together; it was truly amazing. I began to run to get ready for the half marathon and was eating healthier, I noticed my mood changing and was slowly but surely coming out of depression, back to myself. I met my now husband in 2009 & we began dating in 2010. I was in love and eating/drinking like it was a party every night. I began to exercise in order to burn calories. I would run to burn off what I had eaten the night before. Or go to the gym and burn 1,000 calories on the elliptical to "make it even" of what I was eating.
I did not have a healthy relationship with exercise or with food. I am not sure exactly when this started or why. I believe a lot of it has to do with what society portrays as what a woman's body is "supposed" to look like & everyone is an expert in what diet is the best. There is TONS of confusion out there & I want to tell you, do what works for YOU and YOUR body, and if you are living in restriction, then that is not a place to live! The peak of my "food issues" was in 2018. I did a program that drastically restricted a lot of food groups & had lots of things that were "off limits". I did this program for 6 weeks, two week break, then 6 more weeks. It was way too long to be so restricted with my food & resulted in a very unhealthy relationship with food. I believed that I had to be restrictive with food in order to "keep" the body I had worked so hard to achieve. I would weigh myself every morning & look in the mirror and pick apart what I needed to "work on" with my body. I was never diagnosed but during this time I believe I had orthorexia. (Which is an obsession with eating only "healthy" foods). During this time, I even feared the sugar in fruit. I would only allow myself to eat 1/2 of a banana because I believed it had "too much sugar". I would dread going out to eat because I did not know what was put into the food and I feared they wouldn't have anything that I was "allowed" to eat. I would turn down going to certain places because the menu didn't adhere to my extreme restrictions. I missed out on quality time with friends and family due to my relationship with food.
All of this restriction caused all kinds of issues with my gut, energy levels, hormones, food sensitivities, brain fog etc. During that time I would not have been able to tell you all of this, only looking back now, I can see what I was doing was not healthy. During the last two years I have done intermittent fasting, paleo, gluten free, dairy free, etc...all of the things. I am here to tell you that none of those things are healthy/unhealthy, HOWEVER if you go through your day thinking about food all of the time, whatever you are doing is not healthy. Living in a constant state of restriction/reduced calories/cutting out entire food groups may get you a "toned body" but you will not be living a healthy life. The outside of someone's body cannot tell you the health of the inside. I have been in therapy the last 6 months & have truly never had a better relationship with food and exercise than I do now. I exercise because I can, because I enjoy it, because it makes me feel amazing. I eat to nourish my body and don't deprive myself of things that I love. If you want a better relationship with food/exercise and you can afford a therapist, I highly recommend going to talk to someone. We all have a brain and need to take care of our mental health JUST as much as our physical health. You can't have one without the other. In closing, love your body &and take care of it. We are all only given one body, let's start respecting it instead of disrespecting it. Be kind to yourself. You deserve it.
xx, Sara
