Starting Out

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love writing. I don't get to do it as often as I like, and I've always wanted to start a blog to let that piece of me free. The problem with starting a blog is figuring out what you want to blog about. There are so many things I could talk about, but are they things others would want to read? I don't know. But we'll certainly find out.

Thanks to the encouragement of some lovely ladies on a fitness forum I follow, I'm going to start off by writing about my personal journey with fitness.

Growing up I was never thin and never heavy. I definitely had a baby-fat stage around puberty, but even that wasn't over the top. When I was 15, I started going to the gym occasionally with my mom, but neither of us were terribly fitness-oriented. When we went, we usually spent 30 to 45 minutes on the elliptical and called it a day. That was exercise to me.

This is funny looking back because my parents were really in to weightlifting when I was a toddler. Looking at pictures, they were ripped. It worked for their bodies. But they pushed too hard, and that phase eventually faded, leaving them relatively healthy but not fit.

So growing up through high school and into college, my understanding of fitness and health had a lot to do with the scale. The scale and I had a trying relationship at best. This is silly because at my mom's thinnest and fittest, she weighed 135 pounds at 5'2" (BMI just under 25). I'm four inches taller, but I was convinced that I should definitely be in the 120s because, BMI, obviously. 

I tried fad diets, but overall I just did not eat well. I wasn't overweight, but I definitely wasn't healthy. I topped out around 160 pounds senior year of high school. When I started college, I started eating healthier and lost 20 pounds in the first year. I started a weight loss challenge at a local YMCA, and lost 10 more pounds. This challenge encouraged an hour a day of exercise and a 1,200 calorie diet. It wasn't healthy. It certainly wasn't sustainable, but I got down to 128 pounds at my lowest, and that number mattered to me. The scale mattered to me.

Once I stopped doing weight loss challenges, my number slowly but surely went back into the 140s. I know now that I starving my body for a number.

In the past year, I figured out that my body likes being in the 140s—the high 140s. And my body needs almost double the calories that I was giving it at my lowest.

So now I eat to nourish my body and my mind. I have a lot of work to do on a healthy diet, but it's infinitely better than it was. And I lift because that's what my body responds to. And I do high intensity interval training because it's fast, and my body responds to it. And I weigh 152 pounds. And I love that. Because I'm living strong.

So let's see where we go from here.