Reading Time: 8mins
TLDR: Jog on then.
Hello to all my adoring fans,
This is Week 2 of my blogging attempts which means two things: my consistency of showing up is at a whopping 100%. I haven’t yet received a Cease and Desist notice.
So once again, I offer no commitment about the quality of what follows. If you hate it, please don’t tell me ’cause I’m too new to this blogging lark and I’m still a little hungover from Barbelle’s 2nd Birthday party.
On the flip side, I actually received a good few positive reviews from Blog #1. So if you’ve got those kinda things to say then keep ’em comin’.
Right, we’re off!
The plan this week is to dive into the uncomfortable stuff: those Body Image insecurities that I’m feeling; why they are there, a bit about my history in this area and what I plan to do about it. I won’t lie this one made me a bit emotional. I’ve never put my timeline on paper before and it was a hugely vulnerable experience.
***Please note this might be triggering for some people so please decide for yourselves if it’s right for you to read on.***
I doubt I’m unique here but I’m pretty sure I can pinpoint the time when I first knew that my body wasn’t deemed by others as The Acceptable Type.
I was in 3rd class and my teacher was weighing us for “maths” or some shit excuse like that. She put us all on the scales, one by one. Most girls skipped off and sat down, giving little approving smiles to each other. When it was my turn, my face went red as sly girly giggles filled the room and my teacher called out the number with something close to distaste in her voice.
I don’t remember what the number was, all my little 9-year-old brain knew was that if you don’t weigh the same as other girls you got mean nicknames like “Ellie the Elephant”. I completed my first diet in the summer after 5th class; I think my mam might have been on one too.
Since then, there have been many diets in my Quest for Thin Enough. There was the diet of ’03 to be acceptable for secondary school. The diet of ’09 to be acceptable for the debs and to join the Sports Science course in college. The slimming world phases through college. 2016’s “detox”. 2018/19 ‘s aim to drop 10kg so I’d look like a proper Personal Trainer.
I really shocked myself on that last one actually, so much so that I haven’t dieted since.
I was newly qualified as a PT and working part-time in a commercial gym in Dublin. The people I could see doing really well in the industry all had One Body Type and had amazing Transformation Photos of themselves and by extension, of their clients. I decided that I needed to follow suit if I was going to be of any use to my own clients, be taken seriously by other PTs, and ever turn this into a full time gig.
I thought I was doing it safely; my calories were high (2500kcal per day), my food was good quality, I was dropping 0.5-1lb per week and I was hella organised!
My wake up call arrived one day after taking a micro-nap in the gym staff room before my lunchtime classes. I was wrecked and needed food so I consulted MyFitnessPal to check if I had enough calories to eat an apple! I could barely look at the screen as it showed me the answer I feared. No apple for Ellie.
I remember getting home that night and hugging my partner as I came in the door, and for the first time ever he made a remark about my weight: “Where have you gone?”; I felt like I’d received a punch in my almost-near-visible abs: he thought I was too thin even though the scales said I had 2kg more to drop to achieve The Right Body.
It was my first time realising there was a disjoint in my understanding of the world. People are supposed to like you more when you are thin; but my body was now a cause for concern in the person I am closest to in life. The same change that others were praising, was a worry for him. Was I actually Acceptable as I was before the diet? And why didn’t I know that?
I hope you can see here that body shape changing for me was never about health. I was deeply insecure from too young of an age and the Quest for Thin granted me approval from others. Dieting gave me conversational topics; and helping others with fat loss made me feel useful. Dieting was my way of Belonging.
If anyone had ever asked me for “My Why” in the past, I’d have said something vague like “I just want to feel better in myself” or “I’d just like my clothes to feel nicer on me”. I either didn’t know what lay in my subconscious, or, more likely, knew that I couldn’t say it out loud.
Today, after years of learning and unlearning, I realise that dieting was a deflection for me. Something that I could think I had control over when tackling emotions such as anger, loneliness, self-love, self-compassion and vulnerability were too scary and not permissible in the society in which I found myself.
I created this mental mantra “Vulnerability takes courage and strength and I am a courageous and strong person”.
I sought out lots of ways of being vulnerable: talk therapy, getting a life coach, journaling, asking a work friend out for lunch to build a friendship, changing industry, sharing my feelings with my family, joining a pole dance studio, being OK with belly fat, not advertising weight-loss as part of my PT services, opening my own business, and openly talking about fatphobia & body diversity with people who started coming to my gym. Now, starting this riveting blog!!
For the first time in years, 2023 has me feeling the pull of dieting again to lose some fat. It coincides with a period of time where my focus was nearly exclusively on growing a business and getting through college which led me to deprioritise eating regular meals, sleeping & exercising – so naturally, my body outwardly reflects those decisions.
I have to say, in the last week, I’ve enjoyed the return to exercising and I’m excited about some goals that I’ve set for next year. But at the same time, I’m really curious about this resurrection of mild insecurity.
Part of me feels excited at the thoughts of taking progress pictures, getting the measuring tape out and setting weight-based targets.
A louder part of me is concerned; can I do that AND advocate for body neutrality and body diversity at the same time? If I have a Body Positive or Body Neutral Gym, can I track my weight or does it go against “the ethos”? Is my body insecurity really about how I look or is it serving a deeper purpose (like it has done in the past). How many of my members want to lose weight for similar reasons to me? Am I really helping them if I hand out diets OR is this kind of shitty inner work really what they need help with? Maybe there’s a middle ground that I haven’t quite yet found. Maybe this is not a big deal at all and I’m going bananas.
I don’t have the answers to all of those questions right now and for the first time ever I’m going to try figure them out before launching into a weight loss pursuit. For now, I’ve started to exercise with a bit more consistency. I’m literally just focusing on getting 2 x runs, 1 x pole and 1 x gym session in per week. In the food department, I’m trying to not skip meals, drink water and take my vitamins.
While a lot of those actions could help me lose weight, I’m refraining from focusing on weight loss, or even checking what my body weighs /measures.
This week, I’m going to contact a professional I know who is way more knowledgeable in this field than I am and I shall report back on the conversation via Blog #3 next week.
So yeah, sorry if you read through all this and are disappointed to not have answers or a plan for your own journey. Generally, people in this industry only blog on things when they’ve come out the other side (probably to avoid sounding stupid). I’m trying this new thing where I write stuff and try figuring it out at the same time. Wild right?
Looking forward to hearing your (kind) thoughts on this one! Do you think I should be putting this kind of stuff out into the ether or keeping it to myself? Do you think differently about me or Barbelle now, or does it make sense ? If you are a member in Barbelle do you feel unable to come to me with your weight loss goals and what is it that you think I’ll say?
Until next time,
Lots of love,
Bye, bye-bye, bye, bye …. bye!
