Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Welcome all! I suppose I’ll start our posts off here with a little background on “my story” as it pertains to issues with diet and exercise.
(And to the upper-right you will see a lovely picture of me...just to give you a face with the story. As you'll find out, this is me a few months ago before I started with the weights again.....clearly)
Though my fascination with eating healthy and staying fit began when I was a sophomore in high school, I will pick up with how I have dealt with it through college since this lifestyle can seem less permitting of such a way of life.
My first year and a half is rather stereotypical. I met a lot of friends, went to a lot of parties, managed to eat decent considering the food provided by the school, but did manage to put on, say, the freshman 7. To be honest, hour-long aerobics classes 1-3 times a week were not enough to keep up with the heavy amount of recreational drinking I was doing.
Then….I met a boy. He wasn’t too keen on drinking and I was very keen on him, so I stopped. Entirely stopped. I spent the summer at home with my parent’s treadmill at my disposal. I ran on that 4-5 times a week for between 30-60 minutes. No alcohol, more running, and an excellent diet was a decent concoction to trigger some weight loss. And so it began…
My third year started up. School, rather than parties, was my only focus and I became obsessed. Long story short, I lived at the school library and kept so busy with studying that I managed to never find time to eat an actual meal. I spent my day living off of like 600 calories that I consumed by random snacks here and there. Over time my body mass vanished. Here I was at 5’6” weighing 103 lb without ever having to obsess over what I was eating and never working out. At first I was stoked about the whole thing because it seemed so effortless and I was thinner than I was in high school.
NEWSFLASH: If you were never overweight to begin with, that is not a good thing to be able to say.
After months of family, friends and acquaintances directly or indirectly making joking comments (though there was clear concern behind them) to me about how they never noticed how skinny I was, that I was a waif, or a concentration camp survivor, and that they needed to begin a Feed Margot Foundation, I started to realize that perhaps I could never find jeans that were long enough because people my height weren’t supposed to be a size 0 or less.
Honestly I didn’t mind being that thin, but I did want to shut people up and rid the idea that I had an eating disorder. I started using weights and eating a lot of protein to help put on healthy weight. After a while my arms, legs and torso were toned. I loved watching these muscles grow that were never there before and I began getting compliments from friends about how good I looked. I also made time for meals and soon I looked like a human being again, not a stick figure.
Since then I had stopped consistently working out for one reason or another, but managed to keep eating. I did gain a little more weight than I like to have on me so for the past few months I have been dong cardio and weights for 60 min a day, 3-5 days a week. I’ve always had a relatively good diet so that only needs to be tweaked a little bit here and there. It is hard to keep a consistent schedule with work and school. It gets too exhausting at times. But I have lost some pounds and my weight routine is toning up my muscles just where I like them to be….and maybe beyond since I have been oddly hardcore about it lately. This is my last semester of school so I am looking forward to having a less turbulent schedule that will allow for a consistent workout routine.
I am a long-winded gal so I promise my next entry won’t be nearly as long. I guess this is just a basic overview of my personal weight/health struggles over the years. Don’t fear. I have a lot of specifics and advice that will come later.
Take care,
Margot
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