Exercise is great. I love exercising simply because I have a body and bodies are meant to move.
As soon as I could walk, I started taking dance lessons. My (half) sister was nine years older and already enrolled at the studio so naturally, I wanted to be just like her.
Thursdays were the best day of the entire week for me. After school, I had three classes and we had an hour of stretching in between the first and the third.
I ran the mile in my gym class (wearing converse of course) in nine or ten minutes. I certainly was not the fastest, but I was definitely the second-fastest among the girls.
To be perfectly honest: I’m still not sure how I pulled that off. I remember thinking to myself “okay sprint along the straights and speed walk around the curves to catch your breath” and was so surprised with my time that I was seriously considering joining the track team.
Just for the record: I’m 5’9″ (maybe even 5″10″) and I wore a size 2 or a 4.
However, all good things must come to an end (as the saying goes). I started taking birth control and gained enough weight to be “healthy”.
But I also started taking SSRIs.
For those of you who don’t know: SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) are the most commonly prescribed antidepressant in the pharmaceutical industry. I should know. My dad used to be a pharmacist.
Unfortunately, they come with a plethora of side effects including (but certainly not limited to) feeling agitation, anxiety, loss of appetite, and weight loss and weight gain.
The craziest part is some of them have side effects that you might not be aware of.
Case in point: Wellbutrin. It has a moderate interaction with tobacco and caffeine, but alcohol is by far the worst. I can’t handle more than one drink or it feels like part of my brain is shutting down.
I’m ten years older and wiser now. I know enough about myself to have a halfway decent idea of what I need to do to take care of myself as an adult.
Just before COVID, I was really starting to get back into a halfway decent routine. Nothing too crazy; just some light exercise.
But then burnout hit fast and hard. I didn’t want to do anything anymore, but not a single one of us enrolled in college at the time cared much about anything either.
If you’re clinically diagnosed with an eating disorder, you’ll know that the odds of relapse are crazy high.
There probably isn’t a single woman walking on this earth who hasn’t had an eating disorder (or at least some sort of disordered eating pattern).
The beauty standard and societal pressure to live up to the expectation that is forced upon us the second we are born into this world is…insane.
Take a second to think about the portrayal of women’s bodies in the media. Advertisement, magazines, movies, books, songs…the list goes on and on. If you have the time and patience, Google “Killing Us Softly”.
See what I mean?
I want to be healthy and take care of myself and my body in a realistic way. I was born to run (my legs are like…crazy long).
I just don’t want to die trying.