By Kristen Nickelatti, Pop Sugar
It's no secret that fitness is a pretty important part of my life,
but it hasn't always been that way. I stumbled onto it during a
difficult time when I was transitioning out of a long-term relationship
and into single life. I had little confidence or self-esteem and was
using drinking and partying as a way to cope. In the midst of my
unhappiness, I stumbled onto strength training and fitness, and while I
didn't know it at the time, it would soon become the catalyst I needed
to change my life and finally find happiness (and strength, and
confidence, and peace within myself, but we'll get to that).
The College Years
During college, I took full advantage of my newfound freedom and
spent my time partying and living off pizza and fast food. The drinking
and unhealthy eating started to catch up with me during my sophomore
year. It wasn't a huge increase, but my self-esteem was already low and
insecurity about my body began to creep in.
[post_ads]To combat it, I cycled back and forth between barely eating and doing
hours of cardio every day in an attempt to cancel out the food I ate. I
was developing a seriously unhealthy relationship with food and exercise, but all I cared about was being skinny and partying.
That lifestyle
continued in the years after college, although to a lesser degree. To
accommodate the 9-to-5 lifestyle of a working adult, I limited my heavy
drinking to the weekends and drank wine a few nights a week to unwind
from work.
I was religious about getting in my five to six hours on the
treadmill or elliptical every week to try and keep the weight off, but
despite regular exercise and restricting my food intake, I struggled to
make any progress. I was getting so frustrated — I was sure that calorie
restriction and cardio were what I needed to "get skinny" and I
couldn't understand why it wasn't working.
I resigned myself to the fact that as I neared my mid-20s, my
metabolism was slowing down and there wasn't much I could do about it.
The Turning Point
At 26, after a particularly wild weekend of partying, I spent a full day on the couch nursing a hangover
and unhappily recalling my drunken antics from the previous night.
That's when it hit me: I didn't want to do this anymore. I hated the
fact that I was using alcohol as an outlet for my unhappiness, and more
significantly I didn't like who I was becoming. I didn't want to
continue being this party girl, but I felt lost. I wanted to change, but
I didn't know how.
A few weeks later, the gym I belonged to was offering two free personal training sessions
to members. Although I had no desire to work with a personal trainer (I
just wanted to go to the gym, get my cardio in, and leave), they were
giving $100 gift cards to anyone who completed the two free sessions, so
I decided to go through the motions and get my gift card — I had big
plans to use that free $100 for a massage.
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I considered myself to be in shape from all the cardio I was doing,
so I went into my first training session with little enthusiasm.
However, after one 30-minute session, I was quickly humbled. I was sore
for an entire week; everything hurt! Even walking and laughing were
difficult from my sore legs and abs.
We had done a lot of very basic moves like push-ups, lunges, and
squats and I couldn't believe how sore they had made me. I meekly began
to consider that maybe I wasn't in as good of shape as I thought and
that incorporating some strength training into my cardio-only routine
might be a good idea.
I had no clue how to work out with weights, so I purchased a few more
sessions with my trainer to learn the ropes. She had sparked my
interest with her style of strength training. It wasn't the slow,
low-intensity workout I had always pictured it to be — she pushed me
hard and I was always sweaty and exhausted after that 30 minutes.
While the workouts were tough, they left me feeling accomplished and
with a desire to get stronger and improve (and not simply a desire to
burn calories). I don't take for granted that I ended up with a trainer
who had a profound ability to motivate and inspire me. Life has a funny
way of gently pushing you in the right direction, and this was my push.
Finding Myself Through Fitness
As I learned to incorporate strength training and circuit training
into my routine, my confidence grew. My relationship with food and
exercise also began to transform: the workouts I was doing were tough,
but they left me feeling empowered and strong. In the past I had always
looked at exercise as something I had to do in order to burn off the
food I ate, but with my new workout program I was starting to get stronger.
My motivation for working out slowly shifted: I cared less about how
many calories I was burning and more about getting strong.
I also started noticing how much better my workouts felt when I ate
good food and enough of it. Eating 1,000 calories a day meant I couldn't
get through these kinds of workouts, so I stopped restricting calories
so severely and began to focus on eating healthy, nutritious food instead. My viewpoint was beginning to shift: I started to see food as fuel.
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Four or five months into working with my trainer, I was regularly
strength training and circuit training and I loved how good my workout
program was making me feel. Still, I continued to spend my weekends
partying, which meant that Saturdays and Sundays were spent hungover on
the couch. I started to resent the fact that I was nursing hangovers
every weekend when I could have gotten a workout in and felt energized.
Though it happened slowly, I was coming to an important realization:
fitness made me feel better than partying.
Over the next year, I slowly cut back on drinking and started finding
other things to do in my free time. I started dating someone who fully
supported my decision to spend less time partying, and we found other
things to do on the weekends: hiking, movies, local festivals, etc. I
didn't give up alcohol completely, but was learning to enjoy it in
moderation.
Looking back, strength training became the foundation on which I
rebuilt my life. It was the catalyst I needed to stop burying my
unhappiness with drinking and partying and find the strength to live
life fearlessly. It became a stepping stone for building self-esteem and
confidence and has transformed me into the fit, strong, confident girl I
am today.
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