Decrescendo of Weight

My name is Dagny and I'm not "pro" anything. my ask and messenger is always open to talk to, please seek out help if you are at risk of suicide or self-harm. Age 27, h: 165cm sw: 170lb gw: 130lb

[empty-staccato]

i hate being so soft. why do i have to feel big emotions. i just want to sleep

[annesmiless]

Some eaiser variations of push ups to help you build the strength to do a traditional one!

[moniquill]

I don’t generally reblog ‘fitness’ stuff but gaddamn could I use some more arm strength.

[the-goddamazon-deactivingsoon-d]

Push-ups are my worst nightmare. I can only do 44 before I pass out on the floor.

[maxxiegalaxy-deactivated2022032]

“I can only do 44” hahaha omg I can’t even do one.

[o-lascaux-o]

yes good

I was always frustrated how my P.E. teachers wanted all of us to go “all-or-none” and basically hurt ourselves without letting us build up from square-one like in the first gif.  Then they’d fuckin yell at us for not doing it right >:|

Knee-pushups is not square-one.

[arkilliandragon]

When I got my first personal trainer, she had me doing push ups almost standing upright in the weight lifting bars so that I could do 15 reps and 3 sets of them. It’s more about the technique of the push up, and if you’re pushing too much weight, you can’t exersize the correct muscles within their tolerances. This post is pretty important tto know cause of that.

[jhameia]

I was introduced to the knee push-up last year and it was such a fucking game changer. I had NO idea it was possible to work those same muscles just with a slight variation in position. 

[personal-scientist]

I wanna just verify that these are excellent for building strength, both as someone who took weights class in high school with a good teacher, and as someone who’s had a lifetime of physical therapy (not for my arms specifically, but I’ve spent a lot of time in sports medicine centers). And again, if the vertical one in the first gif is difficult, you don’t even have to lean into it like that. Start standing, and only lean as much as it takes you to lower towards the wall.

And remember, many exercises can be modified in this way! I did an image search for “modified pull up” and got exactly what I was looking for right away, which is this:

Doing pull ups on a lower bar, or from the straps with handles that gyms sometimes have (called the TRX - they can also be used to support yourself during squats and some balance exercises) is a lot easier than jumping straight into vertical pullups, and lets you build up that muscle with exercises that are still comfortable and safe for you, so you can do more sets of more reps.

As a general rule, always start with lower-strain exercises and practice good form before you work your way up. You don’t want to have to unlearn bad habits that could lead to injury later as the difficulty increases.

[jecook]

@imfemalewarrior I’m assuming you’ve seen this post but in case you haven’t—it seems like your kind of thing

[imfemalewarrior]

Here are push up and pull up progressions! 

-FemaleWarrior, She/They 

[peppervl]

Because I have serious issues with core strength and cannot do a sit up or a crunch without using muscles I shouldn’t and hurting myself, I looked up core exercises for beginners (because modified sit ups just have me ways to make it harder), and here’s what I found.

All from here, which also includes sit ups with the idea that you start up and don’t go all the way down.

[rosslynpaladin]

This stuff on the bottom is some of the stuff I do for physical therapy, can vouch for it

[crewdlydrawn-deactivated2022072]

Having done a few stints with PT myself, over the years, I can definitely vouch for that last set as ones I’ve incorporated into 2020 as “couch potato workout” to help get my core to recover from being out of work and less active. 👌

[the-fox-fae-deactivated20220908]

[melissablogs-deactivated2018010]

Friendly reminder that 1200 calories is the recommended amount for a 5 year old

[rambirb-deactivated20221115]

this hit me.

another fact is that 500 calories isn’t even enough for a new born.

why did I go so long convinced that going over 500 in a day was the end of the world?

[naamahdarling]

Another friendly reminder that the United States used 1,000 calorie diets as torture for political prisoners and justified it using the diet industry.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/17/bush-torture-memos-commer_n_188190.html

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).

And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.

Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call.  It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder.  The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.

Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.

[naamahdarling]

Just bringin’ this back around like I sometimes do.

[to-dance-beneath-the-diamond-sky]

Wow. This really hit me hard.

[radicalduck]

EAT

[bigmouthlass]

Fun fact– calorie restriction exacerbates symptoms of pretty much *every* mental illness.

[crazy-pages]

Anorexia has ~16% mortality rate, slightly higher than acted upon suicidal ideation. It’s more lethal than actively trying to kill oneself and this is why.

[anxietyproblem]

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

I think maybe my ask got eaten. And you've apparently become my guiding light so, no pressure. I'm kidding, I am trying to get help, you've just really made me see some hard truths that were important for me to face. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on weight. Specifically the numbers. The numbers they say in media NEVER go over 120, maybe 125, usually lower. But I'm at 145. And know that I have BDD so I like solid facts, like numbers, to balance myself. But with these it doesn't work. ??

i think it did get eaten, because this doesn’t sound familiar lol. 

hon, skinny people have NO IDEA what normal people weigh. i’ve actually talked to other fat people about this before, because it’s ridiculous. most of us have heard a skinny person in media refer to 200lbs as ~disgustingly fat~ as if it was just unimaginable for a person to weigh 200lbs. 

here, allow me to use this illustration i just found online. see this guy?

this is the same man in both photos, and guess what? he weighs 200lbs in both photos. how can that be? it’s really simple: muscle is more dense than fat. someone with a lot of muscle mass is going to be heavy. and besides, his ‘before’ photo might be chubby, but he’s not unimaginably huge. he looks pretty normal to me.

but again, slender people just have no idea what the realistic numbers of peoples’ weight are. i read these romance novels about huge badass vampire warriors, and they’re all supposed to be like 6′6″ and utterly jacked, just enormous with muscles, and you know how much the (petite woman) author described them as weighing? 240lbs. 

reality check: this is Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, aka The Mountain from Game of Thrones. he’s 6′9″ and one of the strongest men in the world. you wanna guess how much he weighs? go on, guess.

you’re wrong. he weighs 425lbs. 

now, he might be a couple inches taller than those fictional vampires, but let’s compare those numbers. 240lbs vs 425lbs. the disparity between what petite people think big people weigh vs what big people actually weigh is two hundred pounds. just think about that for a minute.

now, okay, you’re not talking about huge, buff men, you’re talking about yourself, and you’re probably a reasonably petite girl. obviously it’s a little more sensitive to parade female bodies around and exclaiming over how much they weigh so i’d rather not do that, but i can use myself as example, dubiously feminine as i am.

first of all, i’m fat. that’s indisputable. but i also have a lot of muscle mass due to my testosterone levels, and between those two things, nobody seems to have any idea how much i weigh just by looking at me. i gained a lot of weigh from extended antibiotic use several years ago and presently i weigh 300lbs, but even at my doctor’s office where i’m a regular and they have plenty of other big patients, the person who weighs me almost always starts the scale measurements around 200lbs and slowly nudges it up higher and higher, like they’re not expecting it.

one time i wrote my weight down on a form for a sleep study, and i actually lied a little bit because that’s when i was gaining weight and felt awful about it, and the male technician who was hooking me to the wires (and therefore saw me sitting in my pajamas) literally called in through the intercom to ask me about the number i put down because he thought it must be a mistake. and he wasn’t even terribly skinny himself, but he saw me and thought the weight i wrote down (which was low by ~10lbs) was so ridiculously incorrect he spoke through the intercom to ask me about it.

all of this is to say that most people have no idea how much real, living humans weigh, and our culture is seriously skewed towards thinking that we either do or should weigh far less than we do. we’re so terrified of being fat we can’t even be accurate about how much muscle weighs. we’re so terrified of being fat that we treat numbers that mean absolutely nothing by themselves (remember the guy who weighed the same both chubby and ripped?) as if they’re urban myths to be whispered about in horrified tones. 

legend has it that this monster weighed two hundred pounds! *ghost noises*

reality check: people all around you weigh 200lbs and more and you don’t even notice. 

reality check: nobody notices how much YOU weigh. nobody can actually tell if you weigh 120 or 140 or 160. you could go out, lift some weights, gain 10lbs of muscle mass, and people would compliment you on how fit you look despite the fact that you gained 10lbs.

ultimate reality check: the numbers we ascribe to our size and attractiveness are not only utterly meaningless, they are actively, nightmarishly harmful. we put random numbers on clothes and then ascribe units of value to which number fits your unique body. we force people to stand on magic platforms that spit out a meaningless number and put so much importance on making that number lower and lower that people literally kill themselves trying to get the lowest number possible. 

stop for a minute and think about how crazy all of this is.

imagine walking up to a human that you love, forcing them to stand on a scale, and telling them that because they weigh 10lbs more than you think they should, you hate them. imagine walking up to a human you love with a measuring tape, measuring their waist, and telling them that it’s an inch bigger than you want it to be, so you’re very disappointed in them and you want them to go hungry to shrink their body. imagine how much it would hurt that person, imagine how unfair it would be, imagine how cruel it would be.

now ask why it’s okay to do that to yourself.

[roach-works]

queer pride

so, in honor of pride month: please remember that ‘queer’ has been a fully reclaimed, non-slur identity for decades now, and queer studies is a legitimate academic term, and it’s only been in the last decade that TERFs have pushed to reclassify it as a ‘slur’ starting in online spaces. 

because ‘queer’ is such a broad and flexible term, it’s much harder for bigoted, trans-exclusive, bi-phobic, a-phobic people to interrogate the queer community and try to divide it into who deserves respect and who deserves to be expelled. the queer community is extremely diverse, extremely accepting, and it’s entirely opt-in. no one can say you’re not really queer, because if you say you’re queer, you are. 

this is extremely frustrating to terfs, who want a very narrow and rigidly policed LGB community (minus the T, A, and Q+, of course), so they have been working to reclassify queer as a slur. they target young isolated girls online, and take advantage of their earnest desire to be helpful and unproblematic, and they get them to repeat ‘queer is a slur’, and it’s incredibly sad and frustrating for us queers to deal with.

lesbian, gay, and queer are all slurs. they’ve all been used to insult us. and they’re all reclaimed. people that don’t want to be called queer don’t have to be, but tagging posts with q*slur is an insult to everyone who identifies as queer. breaking into posts where queer people call themselves and each other queer and refer to the queer community of queers who call themselves that to let us know that ‘queer is a slur’ is itself bigoted, TERF-aligned behavior. 

please reblog this post, and accept that queer is a valid term with decades of history and millions of proudly self-identified people. the next time you see someone say ‘queer is a slur’, let them know that phrase is manufactured and propagated by TERFs as an attack on the queer community. we’ll all have a much happier pride month if we stand up for each other against the real sources of hatred, rather than letting them get us to chew on each other for another year. 

[lovelyblackthoughts]

Why is it so easy to feel unloved, but so hard to feel loved?

[inkdot-deactivated20200219]

no shit.

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

[haleyincarnate]

Quote by unknown

[heavyweightheart]

my friend said that whenever she has a bad feeling about her body/appearance, she asks herself “who profits off of this emotion?” and i really love how simple and incisive that is

[wisdomenlightener]

[dogboynecromancer]

me logging on to this hellsite

[jehovahhthickness]

Ladies, don’t believe men who say that you’re too ugly or fat to have high standards because they treat these conventionally attractive women like shit too!

Don’t believe that just because you don’t look a certain way, you’re not worthy of being loved, cared for or cherished.

[skinny-capricorn]

my new roommate said that her last roommate had an eating disorder and then talked to me about her clean eating and weight loss goals and how she buys clothes that are a little snug to motivate her to lose more

and like honestly? i have anorexia but this is why i constantly talk about the dangers of the “health and fitness” industry and diet culture bc we have essentially normalized certain symptoms of disordered eating but it’s ok if it’s under the guise of health i guess???

like how is calling it “clean” eating NOT a way to moralize food

how is intermittent fasting NOT the same thing as skipping meals

how come when i buy clothes that don’t fit, it’s something i have to tell my therapist about because it means i am putting pressure on myself to fit into them, but if a “normal” person does it then it’s just motivation for them?

where is the fucking line???

and more importantly when are we going to start acknowledging that the entire world is pro-ana but that’s too harsh of a description so we slap some health buzzwords on it to make it palatable

when are we going to take responsibility for encouraging disordered behavior instead of labeling those of us with EDs as the crazy/imbalanced ones

your fucking Whole30 or keto or whatever “clean” diet you’re on is just as restrictive as the diets we create for ourselves due to our disorders. but we are the crazy ones, right

[i-am-peanut]

This.

[bold]

reminder that being suicidal is a SERIOUS problem. i know this website has normalized the idea that having suicidal thoughts isn’t something that requires medical attention, but i promise it is and if you’re frequently having suicidal thoughts then it’s crucial for you to seek help.

[notcaycepollard]

reminder that suicidal ideation often doesn’t mean actively wanting to/planning to kill yourself but looks like constant low-level wishing that you didn’t exist or that you could just be hit by a bus so you could stop being alive, and that if you’re having those thoughts fifty times a day you deserve help too

[an-ace-up-your-sleeve]

Reminder that it also includes having no plan to live past a certain age and if you’re actively avoiding planning your future because you don’t think you’ll make it there you deserve help too

[neo-soulless]

I told my friend I wanted to get back with my ex a couple years ago and she told me “like a dog to it’s own vomit 😔” and theres still a patch in my scalp

[witheredsonnet]

@ba3slut edit