Last night I called my boyfriend to check in on him. He has a pretty bad cold; in fact, he gave that cold to me. >8( And I, I have an AWFUL immune system. I hate getting sick. Getting sick is one of the worst things in the world. It keeps me from being productive. I hate laying around and pitying myself and feeling horrible. I can’t work out, I can’t work, I can’t sleep, I can’t enjoy food, I can’t enjoy friends, I can’t enjoy reading, etc., etc., The only thing I can enjoy is drinking fluids (that’s assuming I don’t have strep throat which makes drinking fluids painful). I do love drinking fluids. (Side note: My family calls me a “camel” because I drink so much ALL THE TIME). Anyway, my boyfriend was saying that he just watched a movie called “Food Matters” and given that he’s feeling sick right now, it made him really stop and think: “yea, I should take better care of myself.” He said this movie preached raw food vegan diets, if you know anything about these raw food diets it basically preached just that (when in doubt, turn to wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_foodism): raw foods contain more of the nutrition we need and this diet can prevent you from getting sick. After talking to him about this and hearing his zeal to start eating better and taking care of himself, I watched the movie; I drank the kool-aid. Now eating healthy is expensive, but getting sick is expensive too—so I think I will try and find a happy medium. I’m not going to refuse to cook all my meals, because let’s be honest, cooked food is tasty. But I’ll try to make healthier choices in my cooked food. I do enjoy me some recipes from Cooking Light (I even attempted a food recipe blog awhile back which I occasionally update (www.comenshare.weebly.com). I’m also not going to stop eating out because again, I can’t just cease important components of my social life, but I am going to try to eat out less or make healthier choices off the menu. So I’ve decided: after I kick this hell-of-a cold, I’m going to try to eat more raw foods, take more vitamins, and monitor my general health. I hope that keeping this blog will help me stick to this. If eating more raw foods (and organic vegetables), drinking more water, and consuming more vitamins is actually as beneficial as “Food Matters” claimed it to be—it is definitely worth a try! So, for the sake of a blog I’m going to tell you a bit about myself, the role nutrition and fitness has played in my life, and how I hope to change for the better with better nutrition.
I’m a pretty active person. I think fitness is a key component to happiness. I love going to the gym I occasionally am “jonesing” to get to the gym. I’ve always been a believer in good ol’ fashioned exercise. In fact, not only do I do the stereotypical girly exercise of the elliptical machine I also lift weights. Sometimes I’m ashamed of my muscular build because it’s not stereotypically girly. It’s NOT that I’m trying to “get big.” I’m just trying to feel fit. I love the feeling of muscular self-efficacy. I want to be fit so that I can live the longest healthiest life I can and I’ve always had a muscular build, probably because I’ve been an athlete since I came out the womb…
I started swimming around age 4 and became a competitive swimmer around age 7 and then, I never looked back. Well of course, until I quit swimming at the very beginning of my junior year of college. I’m not really sure of all my reasons for quitting. I think mainly I started having an identity crisis.
Pre-college (and pre- the years in high school when you spend time looking at colleges and getting recruited) swimming was always something I did for me. It was not only something in which I could set goals (which I did starting around the age of 8; I would write little notes to myself and put them up on my bulletin board to remind me of my goals). Swimming was also an escape. I would go to swim practice and be surrounded by a peer group that I had something in common with, swimming. I could play and laugh and gossip with those peers, but when it got time to get in the water I could challenge myself with that peer group and achieve things with them and alongside them in which we all could be proud. I would push off the wall and be alone-- just me, the water, the black line on the bottom, and my desire to improve myself. I would get lost in my head, in my goals, in my day, and in my emotions. I would feel pain, happiness, accomplishment, disappointment, pleasure, guilt, basically the whole range of emotion, I would feel it. Swimming was a magical experience for me. Of course it wasn’t always wonderful, occasionally there was jealousy, perceived failures, unhealthy competition and rivalries, and then of course the things that go along with being an adolescent in a peer group got caught in the pool sometimes too: cattiness, crushes (the first experiences or perceptions of unrequited love), and attitude.
Attitude, I was endowed with a lot of attitude. I’m sure looking back, my perceptions and recollections of my attitude, back talk, and disrespect for authority towards my coaches is drastically different than their recollections. I got kicked out of practice an inordinate amount of times (at least I thought so). Unfortunately this attitude of mine hasn’t exactly gone away. I’ve dressed it up a little; I’ve made it a little more appropriate in a work environment. But when it comes to people challenging my work ethic or my intentions my “attitude” still shines through. Sometimes, particularly in challenging situations like sports, I do need that push, but beware, I might push back—it’s my nature.
Anyway, swimming was my baby. And I loved it…but slowly, as I approached high school, my love for swimming began to fade. Part of that fading love was that I went through about 5 coaches in a period of 2 years and that is tough for any athlete. As an athlete you have to depend on, trust, and respect your coach. And if you are serious about your sport, you have to believe that your coach is there to help you and push you to achieve your goals. When you experience that much turnover in coaches it’s hard for you to believe that anyone cares to help you, and you question the help they attempt to give (this is probably, in part, where my attitude toward my coaches came from). I had a love for the independence of swimming, but it never feels too good to be in something completely alone. I tried joining the water polo team, and I fell in love with that, but for completely different reasons. However, the aquatics director made me quit. Yes, you read that right, MADE me quit. (His reasoning: I was the best swimmer on the swim team in my age group so when I told him I wanted to spend more time practicing polo than swimming he said the swim team couldn’t lose me and made me step off the water polo team, I played no role in this decision). When a 14-15 year old competitive athlete is made to quit something that they love, more often than not, rebellion ensues. My times started slipping, I started gaining weight, and I did not have a strong foundation or a strong team to support me. I never lost the lust for competition, but I started thinking of swimming as a chore. A chore I had to do to get into a good college, so that I could swim there. If that’s not backwards thinking I don’t know what is. For me, the love was gone and it never really came back. There were glimpses of that past love, there were little reminders of why I fell in love in the first place, but all in all, I had moved on. Swimming no longer had the same intrinsic value. It no longer made me feel good; it was a means to an end. Then when I achieved that end and got into college, I was redefined. As I said, as I struggled with my identity and appreciation for this sport I once loved I started gaining weight and I think it is this time in my life when I created my emotional connection to food. So before getting back to swimming we’ll pause to talk about my relationship with food (which is relevant given that this blog is about my journey into nutrition).
One thing that I’ve often neglected is the way I eat. I’ve ALWAYS had a sweet tooth. I’m well aware of when I shouldn’t be eating something, which almost makes it tougher…because when I do indulge I know that I am failing my body. In fact in my struggle for fitness throughout my life and as an athlete I’ve always looked for ways to make my mind only want to eat healthy foods. I’ve occasionally succeeded, but not for long. Now don’t misunderstand me, I eat mostly healthy, if you took my average meal, it’s a well-balanced one. But I’m also a very emotional eater and if I have a bad or stressful day I will eat what is not in my best interests, and a lot of it—that emotional connection to food is the hardest challenge for me but one I have to overcome. I also have an unnerving fear of failure and when I fail myself or my goals the recovery process is a tedious one. Another thing that I am working to change, it will just take a lot of hard work.
Predictably, my relationship with food and swimming worsened in college. I was not by any means fat when I entered college but I was certainly not as fit as I should have been. And my college coach took no time at all to point this out. Now keep in mind that I am competitive female athlete, going to an out of state college with no friends from home and a brand new freshman. The first week on the pool deck my coach exclaimed to the whole team (girls and guys) to my horror: “Now that Annie Dawson, she needs to lose a few pounds if she wants to keep up with this crowd.” Now I wasn’t the only girl the coach said these things too. In fact he instituted the “Calorie Club,” which comprised a group of girls he deemed needed to lose a few more pounds and cut a few more calories. These girls would have to stay after practice and take part in his boot camp or cardio and callisthenic exercises. These exercises were in addition to the NCAA regulated practice hours, which we regularly violated anyway (They say only 20 hours and we practiced about 24-26 hours a week). Luckily I wasn’t in this cardio club, but I was in the distance group, and distance was NOT my thing. Throughout my swimming career I was always a hard working practice swimmer, and I usually could hold my own with intervals. And I did hold my own for the first 2 weeks of college training but then I was physically beat and I never really recovered. I started swimming slow in practice and I was ALWAYS tired. Not only that but I was continually told that if I were just slimmer I’d be faster and it was the fault of my weight that I stopped keeping up in practice. My coach was obsessed with the entire women’s team weight and made us do weekly weigh-ins, and as a result I became obsessed with my weight and food as well. After my struggles in high school, however, I was well aware of the emotional damages this could cause; the emotional bond to food is always an unhealthy one. Women athletes that are as competitive as the ones that compete at a D-1 level will do almost anything to get better. Weight loss is hard for someone who is already pretty fit, particularly when you are on a workout regimen of 24 hours a week of a swimming and dry-land program. But when the coaches encourage weight loss with vigor and instill the fear of failure at your sport into the hearts of competitors, girls will do some unhealthy things. Some of the fittest athletes on our team became plagued with disordered eating. At least 5 girls on the team secretly developed forms of anorexia or bulimia (thinking, as the coach intimated, that this would give them an edge in the pool) and one girl had to be suspended from the team on doctors orders until she got her weight up. This is to give you a glimpse into the mentality I was given when I went to college.
This all, of course, further complicated my relationship with the sport of swimming.
Now, returning to why I quit this tumultuously-emotion-packed sport I once loved. Like I said, it was in part due to an identity crisis. I was a swimmer. I now hated swimming. Vis-a-vis, I hated myself. I do think that my second year of college came with it a depressed episode or two. I wasn’t happy. I didn’t get as good grades as I have come to expect of myself, and I wasn’t swimming as well as I had the year before (which by the way was the fastest swimming year of my life for some of my events- in fact, I made finals at the ACC Championship swim meet and was the highest point scorer of the freshmen women). My identity was shattering. Now of course swimming was something that all of my friends and all of my family knew as my identity too. At Christmas all my extended relatives would greet me and then without hesitation ask if I was still swimming, then impart how proud of me they are. My mother raised me as a swimmer and went to all my swim meets feeling, I’m sure, as invested in my swimming career as I. All my friends in high school knew that the only reason I sacrificed my relationships with them was because I was swimming, and swimming was time consuming. I couldn’t just quit, could I? What would they all think of me? Would everyone I knew and loved be disappointed? Would they think I was a quitter? Would I think I was a quitter? Could I accept that? Well I decided that if I was going to have any kind of life that I could call happy I was going to have to do something. After my sophomore year I decided that I would swim with my college team that summer and if I somehow fell back in love with the sport I would stick the 4 years of college swimming out, but if I felt miserable throughout that summer I would take the shame and humiliation that I might feel from quitting, and just do it. That summer swimming went well. I was back to going fast in practice and finally felt less beat down and constantly fatigued, swimming that way I was predicting a great year of swimming for myself to come. Problem is, I didn’t love it and I didn’t love me. So at the last meet of the summer I went to my coach and I told him I had enough. For me, swimming was over. I’d have to face my identity crisis. My identity was a swimmer, that which I no longer was, now I would have to create a new one. I have never regretted this decision.
The pain that swimming left with me was: not appreciating my body and not appreciating working out. So I did just junior year. I didn’t work out and I didn’t value my body. On some levels my happiness was improving, I was beginning to find my niche academically. I declared my major. But I didn’t have the self-worth I felt when I was younger, and I needed to figure out where I went wrong. Fourth year I realized I didn’t have to completely abandon ship, there were some parts of my past identity I COULD keep: I could still be athletic without being an “athlete,” and I could take care of my body without hearing my college coaches voice in my head “Annie’s too fat to swim.” So I began the process of redefining myself. I took to my studies and began a distinguished majors thesis, I learned about my religion (focusing on the importance of a moral grounding, as I am a Secular Jew), and I continued to pursue that which I once loved, athleticism. I joined the water polo team which revitalized my love for feeling fit. I went from not being able to run (not because of a lack of cardio vascular health but a bone problem which resulted in at least 2 doctors tell me that I “wasn’t made to run”), to running a 4-miler this past April. I’ve gotten back in the pool, though I still feel a lot of animosity toward swimming laps. I occasionally train with the water polo team. And I try to work out at least 4 times a week, but optimally 6 times a week (of course I don’t work out when I’m sick, or on vacation, or when laziness takes over, but my goal to work out does not waver). And I continually build up my knowledge of fitness. And fitness continues to be a very important part of my life. Exercising makes me happy; it revitalizes my sense of self worth. It makes me feel capable, and that’s important and something everyone should feel. I’ve even considered being a personal trainer at the suggestion of many of my friends. I would love to share my compassion for exercise with others.
Now the challenge is my nutrition. Swimming, and the erred mindset it left with me, certainly has scarred me with remnants of body dimorphism that will probably never completely vanish. But I believe what “Food Matters” preached: you are what you eat and you control what you put in your mouth. The challenge for me will be to try and not care too much, but if I can do that and I can eat super foods, I think it will make me a better, happier, super person (Particularly if it helps me minimize that which I hate most, sickness). I’m going to give this a try and I hope keeping this blog will help me stay motivated. I will try and keep it up to date with my progress.
