| Queen of Crepidice
Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: The U.S. of FRIGGIN' A! Age: 25 Posts: 424 Rep Power: 35 
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Thanks for sharing your stories. I think i'll share mine.
I got picked on for being ugly as a kid. Whether or not it was true, that was the way things happened. By fifth grade, i earned myself the lovely nickname "dogface." What can i say, kids are cruel. Puberty found me not much taller, but chubbier. I thought a lot about my looks, especially my body. Sometime around middle school, i decided that if i couldn't be pretty, i wanted to be strong. Not just to defend myself from the bullies, but to feel like i had accomplished something, that i was worth something more than what my peers and beauty magazines told me to want. I had the right attitude, but it would be over 10 years before i found the right way to go about it.
I started taking tae kwon do classes, which made me feel strong, but it was very aerobic activity, lots of running and jumping around, and even as a kid i felt i didn't have the energy to keep it up. Around high school, i learned how to do pushups, and i did them a lot. I loved feeling like i had muscles underneath my chub, it felt much more productive than killing myself on a treadmill, feeling like i'd burn a hole in my lungs. I did over 100 pushups a day, until i started experiencing problems with my left elbow; it made this sick, crunching sound when i did them. After many doctor visits, x-rays, MRI's, and finally an arthroscopy, they told me i had osteoarthritis. I asked if i could still do pushups, and my doctor told me the joint wouldn't support my bodyweight. I was crushed, and fell into a slump for a few years. This wasn't helped by the discovery of tendinitis in my knees, accompanied by a familiar crunching in my right knee. Around college, i picked up aikido, which is a much more useful martial art that can be very effective even if used by small, frail people. I then got into kendo, which is a martial art that uses a sword, and i really felt like i was getting stronger. Unfortunately, it too involved a lot of aerobic activity, and the medication i take for arthritis makes me feel kind of asthmatic, so i eventually stopped that as well.
Things might have been all well and good if i'd kept up the aikido after stopping kendo, but my last year of college was really tough financially and i was barely scraping by. I starved away all my lovely kendo muscles, being only able to afford two packets of instant noodles a day for food. I finally weighed a "healthy" weight, 125 pounds for the first time since middle school, but i never felt sicker in my life. Thankfully, after i graduated, i moved in with my dear fiancee.
Whereupon i ballooned up to 170 pounds! I guess it's true what they say about people gaining weight after marriage, lol. Interestingly, this is when i stopped feeling ugly. I guess having a supportive husband who loved me no matter what i looked like had something to do with it. When i looked in the mirror, i saw a perfectly normal-looking plus size model. lol. As pretty as it was, i knew it wasn't really "me." So began the journey to reclaim my old self!
Around this time i found out about all the health benefits of weightlifting and decided to give it a try with some dumbbells. I started straightening out my diet when my parents commented about my weight, coincidentally right before thanksgiving. (Dieting during thanksgiving dinner was actually easier than i thought it would be!) Soon after that, we saved up for a barbell and bench, and i'm sure you can guess the rest!
Sorry, that turned out kind of novel-like, lol. I do tend to ramble on. I guess it ended up being more about body image than bodybuilding, but i think they're very closely related. Well, that's my story, and if you didn't get bored with this wall of text, thanks for reading! It made me feel better to share. Ahh, squishy estrogen feelings! How i long to squash them. |
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