The Real F Word
I’m not going to lie to you, weight loss and body commenting are icky topics for me. It’s challenging to change the narrative of fitness equals weight loss, but I’m here to be real, and that includes having the real hard chats.
As a training facility, we face the regular hurdle of challenging people’s beliefs around why we believe training is important. Our views on training as a vehicle to improve mental health come from both lived and learned experiences. I can’t and won’t speak for the experiences of our other trainers, but I can be brutally honest about my own.
My first training experience was as a teenager, when I joined the local gym in an attempt to be skinny. As much as I dislike that word as an adjective and it's not one I use now, that was very much my mindset 20 years ago. I wanted boys to like me, and, back then, the boys I liked at the time liked skinny girls. Training for me was literally all about how I looked, and my routine consisted of relentless cardio and undereating. I wouldn’t classify myself as having an eating disorder, but I can certainly see in retrospect that my views on exercise weren’t healthy. I smoked cigarettes at the time and binge drank every weekend, activities which didn’t lend themself to a particularly healthy mind or body. But hey, I was skinny, and boys liked me.
Fast forward five years and my unhealthy habits got a fair bit worse. My binge drinking led to drug taking which led to an ice addiction. My weight and mental health plummeted, at my lowest I was 45kg and actively suicidal. My relationships, leisure activities and general state of being were toxic and tumultuous. But I was skinny, and boys liked me, or they liked the activities I would engage in. When I rediscovered training a few years later, I still hadn’t quite shaken the body image issues I was experiencing, and I experimented with yo-yo dieting, which, by nature, resulted in fluctuations in my body weight and therefore overall poor self esteem and mental health.
When I became a personal trainer in my late twenties, I began to adapt my routine from excessive cardio to weight training. Despite this shift in focus, my early training diaries contain obsessive lists of what I had eaten that day, along with self hating tirades of criticism and disappointment. This thought pattern of more = better was truly set in stone, with the exception of things like food, and self compassion. My addictive mentality turned to a fairly addictive ‘sport’, and I spent the next five years training myself into the ground in some misguided attempt for validation (whose, I’m not really sure). I was an ambassador for an activewear clothing line at the time, which involved photoshoots and concurrent dieting to feel like I met the beauty standard required. I trained until I cried, until I lost my period, until I was completely consumed with myself and how I looked. Somehow my attempts to be fit and strong had again resulted in me becoming sucked into yet another cycle of self abuse and extreme behavior. Boys were the least of my worries.
So what changed? Honestly the answer is both nothing and everything. I’m obviously still a trainer and my life is very focussed around the training of others and my own. I’m a competitive Olympic weightlifter, and until recently lifted in a weight class that involved me cutting weight by 2-3kg for each competition. This process was mentally and physically challenging, and I could recognise obsessive behaviors around my calorie intake and energy expenditure rearing their heads again. It felt hypocritical and counterintuitive to run a trauma-informed training space, preach about the dangers of diet culture, and then go and weigh my food and my body multiple times a day. In an industry where looks are unfortunately still a major factor when it comes to being the face of a training facility, I found it incredibly hard to put this concept aside and just focus on what felt good for my body.
It’s been a really slow and painful process to try and shed the years of disordered eating and training which I wore under a cloak of health and fitness, but it’s these experiences that have made me so passionate about the values of the training space we now have, and the importance of changing the narrative of training for aesthetics and body image. This extrinsic motivation is a slippery slope, and I now make it my mission to speak up when I hear anything resembling toxic diet culture in our training space. My self imposed mission is to help people recognise their strengths, both physically and mentally, and embrace who they are without necessarily needing to see this effort and progress reflected in the mirror.
