Jimsy Jampots #163 - Right, move
Jimsy Jampots #163 - Right, move
In which I get overexcited because I've managed to do a little bit of exercise
Things I think
Content warnings for discussion of exercise, body image, weight, health and disordered eating. Fun!
I’m starting one of my semi-regular flirtations with exercise, again. It all started when I had a meds review for my Citalopram, which I started again a couple of months ago. The GP and I discussed in depth how I’d been getting on and if we thought it was helping or not, decided to up my dosage to 30mg, and at the end of the call she casually asked “Do you do any exercise? I know it’s tough, but it really can help.” I huffed and rolled my eyes and said something about everything being too busy and overwhelming for me to fit it in, to which she made understanding noises. And then, being the good little girl that I am, I booked in to go swimming that very same evening.
My relationship with exercise is bad because my relationship with my body is bad. It has been for as long as I can remember, starting from when I moved from Wales (where we’re all built to go down mines and/or carry children on our hips while fighting off the English) to Warwickshire (where they’re all built to waft around fields reading poetry and/or ride horses naked through the city to protest unethical taxation) when I was 7 and immediately becoming a bully’s dream for my accent, my general weirdness, and for being “fat”.
I wasn’t fat. But I was different, and bigger, and sprouting D-cup boobs and rounded hips (to carry the aforementioned children) at 11 didn’t help matters - kids don’t understand concepts like “early development” and “somehow has the body of an adult woman at 11”, so I carried label of “fat girl” to secondary school with me. My friends tried to help. They took my lunch money so I couldn’t eat, and my bus money so I had to walk home, and they made me give them piggybacks everywhere to burn more calories. And people tried to be kind: a PE teacher once pointed out in front of everyone that it’s hard for “bigger girls like Amy” to run, and a popular boy once said, when asked, that he’d rather marry me than the school bully because “I know she’s chubby but she’s got a nice personality,” leaving me feeling a sick combination of shame and gratitude that stuck in my throat and burned.
My body was the cause of all of my problems - if I wasn’t fat then my friends wouldn’t treat me so badly, and I wouldn’t be bullied by everyone - and I hated it for it. So, I tried to change it. I exercised intensely, only thinking of how many calories I was burning as I did so. I dieted. When that didn’t work, I didn’t eat anything for days in order to make myself thin, and when that didn’t work I ate until I felt sick to punish it. I ended up dropping the starving myself, but unfortunately kept up the overeating as a form of both coping and self-harm well into adulthood, until I actually did get fat. The irony is not lost on me.
When I left school and my body stopped being such a frequent topic of conversation - although not entirely off limits, as proved by my first boss, who commented on my large boobs being “unprofessional” - I stopped hating it for it being the reason I was bullied, and instead started hating it for how it made me lesser than my friends. My beautiful, slender friends, who were all multiple sizes smaller than me and could always find something to buy when we traversed the vintage shops of East London. My beautiful, fit friends, who were able to run half-marathons or do Crow pose when we did yoga together, or do a Boxercise class without being sick in a bin afterwards.
I longed to be able to wake up and do a casual 5km before work, or be fit enough to cycle in from home, or do yoga, or pilates, or circus skills, or fucking anything. I didn’t harbour any aspirations of being an Olympian; I just wanted to be able to have exercise as part of my day to day life in a way that made me feel happy, like them, rather than angry and resentful towards the meat sack I existed in.
Every time I tried to get fit, it made me miserable. I hated how I felt. I hated how heavy and painful moving my body was, I hated the shame and guilt I felt for being so bad at exercise and how it never seemed to change, no matter what I did. I hated my body so much a round of CBT ended up, on my therapist’s advice, becoming a round of EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy - basically, therapy to help you heal from trauma) specifically focused around my body and how I felt about it.
There are two times in my life I’ve actually managed to obtain some decent level of fitness and/or exercise: once when I was training for a half-marathon and had gotten up to running 9 miles at a time, and once when I found a public pool that was on my way to work and started swimming in it three or four times a week. I had to stop running because I got bursitis and was becoming unable to walk. And then, just as I’d settled into a happy routine with swimming, my pool burnt down. I couldn’t decide if the universe was giving me a sign, or just a good kicking.
The real killing blow to the relationship between my body and I came during pregnancy. Or rather, pregnancies. My first, where I miscarried after a few weeks. My second, where my baby and I almost died from sepsis at 7 months pregnant. My third, where I caught an ectopic pregnancy early enough that I didn’t die, but still lost both a fallopian tube and a tiny embryo with a beating heart. And my fourth, where I ended up in and out of hospital with pre-eclampsia before the birth and in and out of hospital with everything from a Mirena coil that fell out of my cervix to pneumonia to a double pulmonary embolism after it.
What was the point of my body? It didn’t look good. It didn’t work well. It didn’t feel good. It couldn’t grow babies without it attempting to kill one or both of us. It steadfastly refused to change when I put the work in to make it work better, feel better, look better, be better. It felt like it had brought me nothing but misery and pain for my whole life, even when I rationally knew that wasn’t true. I got to a point where I just stopped caring about it, stopped caring about being unfit, stopped caring about being unhealthy, and decided to live with a body I didn’t really like but didn’t devote any time or energy towards changing. And for a few years, it was solidly fine. I didn’t care about my body. I let it be unfit and I threw such rubbish into it it may as well have been a bin, but I didn’t think about it so it didn’t make me sad. I was able to just get on with things.
So, what’s changed? Why am I started to exercise again when it has, historically, made me feel so desperately shit?
For a start, being told to do something by a nice woman in a position of authority elicits instant obedience from me, which is something I should probably bring up during my next appointment with my therapist. But if I hadn’t been thinking about it for a while, that wouldn’t have been enough to spur me on to actually do it, and I have been thinking about my general health and fitness for the last few months. I turned 34 in April and I’m aware that any work I do to get myself fit and healthy now is going to benefit me most in 10, 15, 20 years, when menopause and osteoporosis and general physical decline start coming a-knocking. The idea of getting fitter has been niggling in the back of my mind as something I should probably start doing again.
Plus I have two very energetic kids. Currently I can run with them and pick them up and swing them around because they’re 18 months and 4 and a half, so they weigh nothing and they’ve got tiny little legs. That’s going to change, and I’d quite like to be able to charge around with them for years to come. It’s worth getting over my own selfish hatred of my corporeal form for that alone.
But the reason I’ve got hope it’s going to stick this time is that significantly - and absolutely astonishingly - I don’t hate my body at the moment. In fact, I quite like it? The first six months of this year have been transformative in a number of ways, and this is one of the biggest: I can look at myself in the mirror and not feel that sickening mix of sadness, guilt and shame. I still don’t love everything about how I look - my stomach has contained both two enormous babies and an awful lot of Toffee Crisps so now has that flappy effect at the bottom, and I automatically contort myself into an odd shape when I see myself naked in order to avoid back-rolls - but overall, I like my body. I like how I look. I am soft, and round, and squeezable. My body is curvy, nice to touch and fun to play with, and just right for sinking your fingertips into in the most pleasing way.
I’m feeling myself, basically. I’m having fun dressing up in bright, bonkers clothes, outfits that confuse my male colleagues, in their uniform of t-shirts they got free from work and jeans, but delight the women who follow me on Instagram. I went to an awards do the other week, got back to my hotel drunk at 4:30am and woke up the next day surprised to discover I’d done an impromptu photoshoot of me in my bra, pants and sexy tights - and even more surprised to realise that I looked really good in the pictures, staring into the camera with the “fuck you” confidence that, I have discovered recently, I get when I drink more than one glass of red wine. I don’t suck my stomach in when I walk past reflective surfaces any more. I walked back from the beach to the hotel pool in just my swimming costume when I was on holiday, and felt sexy doing so.
Before, it’s always been that my body is a problem I’ve been trying to solve - I want to make it smaller, I want to make it run faster and longer, I want to do something to make me feel in any way better about how awful I think it is. Now, I don’t think my body is awful. I think my body is fun, and I like doing things with it, and my goal is to keep it being fun and working well, and enjoy existing in it more.
I’m also not doing the exercises that I think I “should” be doing (like running) just because everyone else does them, but moving it in a way that makes me happy, or feel good. I’m going for brisk walks with my friends and swimming at the start or end of the day with no thought to shaving seconds off my length time. I got over my own mental block of exercising in front of colleagues and signed up to the gym at work. I climbed on a Peloton, and eschewed the classes that everyone I know does in order to take a scenic virtual route around San Francisco at my own pace while chatting to a friend. My colleague Jo, who lifts, has promised to take me through beginner strength training, because I’m strong and like picking up heavy things, and I’m going to stop trying to like Yoga with Adrienne just because everyone else does, and instead find a yoga/stretching video to loosen the tight calves that are seemingly causing so much of the pain and discomfort I get with movement.
It feels good. And the GP was right - it’s helping my head, too. I can feel myself riding dopamine waves for the 12 hours or so after I do something, ticking things off my to-do list with ease and babbling at a bemused Garry, bouncing from one topic to another, feeling my brain sparking to life with excitement and creativity again after weeks of dull fog.
It’s early days - it’s literally been 10 days since I first did something I could class as “exercise” - and I’m very scared that I won’t be able to keep this up. I probably shouldn’t be writing about it in case I have to slink back with my tail in between my legs in a few weeks saying that I’ve returned to vegetating on the sofa with a tub of ice-cream and the Scrubs boxset, but a) I needed to process how I feel about everything, and I do that best when I write it down, and b) when have I ever been able to have a thought without telling everyone about it? Let’s all just keep our fingers crossed for me that this flirtation doesn’t end up in heartbreak, and that for once in my life I can keep doing something that I know is good for me, even when it gets hard.
Things I liked
I finished Lauren’s new book, Probably Nothing, this week. It’s just as good as I knew it would be, but somehow even more complex and richer than I expected. And beautifully biting. She’s very good, that Lauren. It’s out tomorrow! Buy it, read it, love it! And now I’m reading Experienced by Kate Young, which is fun and sexy and just as glorious as the woman herself.
I put a photo of my legs post-gym on Instagram and had a lot of compliments on my leggings. I was given them by my Chief of Staff, Harriet, who accidentally ordered two pairs and gave the extra to me because she is a sweetheart. They sadly seem pretty sold out everywhere, but if you want to trawl Vinted, they’re these ones!
Permit me a moment of self-promo - it’s five years tomorrow since my book came out. I have complicated feelings towards my first book, but I’m still very proud and pleased that this silly little thing exists in the world. If you like reading these newsletters and haven’t read it yet, then maybe give it a go?
And I’m watching The Traitors US S2 at the moment, which is obviously total trash, but fuck it’s good trash. Compelling and perfect for having on while embroidering, or playing Marvel Snap/Two Point Campus. It’s a real high-brow time in my life at the moment, as you can tell.
Love, Amy xxx
Hard relate to the 'early development = fat' head mash. But I wanted to comment on finding good calf stretchy yoga - I never got comfy with Adrienne, but Paula at yoginimelbourne seems to work for me. Just the right kind-to-body vibe and I find her easy to stick with.
thank you for the shout out and thank you for writing this, and thank you for being nice to your body because we’re all big fans xxx