The Most Turbulent Relationship I've Ever Had
The most turbulent relationship I've ever had in my short lifetime is probably my relationship with food. Which sounds stupid, but it's such an important part of physical and mental well-being. Up until college, I never even gave a second thought to food: I didn't think of it as a means of nourishing my body, I didn't obsess about how it would affect my body because I was an avid runner and had been "skinny" my entire life, and I certainly never planned my meals according to fitness goals. But soon enough, after I stopped running competitively all while continuing to have a mentality that allowed me to take advantage of a perfectly healthy body, I began to notice changes in the mirror.
I gradually found my way to different fitness and diet plans. I tried to take up running again but was held up by preexisting injuries and a hectic schedule. I grazed on food six times a day without caring about what nutrients they supplied my body, so long as it could generally be considered "healthy." But for the most part, I remained dissatisfied in ways that I had never felt before. In my mind I was still a size 00 because that's what I'd always been, even though I could never fasten the buttons anymore. I would pick clothes based on how well I could hide the all the new folds of fat and skin, as if they didn't exist if no one could see them.
I eventually took up weightlifting and started to learn about how food works with my body. Beyond just feeling as comfortable in my own skin as I had been in high school, I felt even better. I felt empowered and strong, unafraid and unashamed.
This turbulent relationship is far from over: counting calories and macros is a fast track to obsessiveness for me, while accommodating my feeding windows to life in general can be a major inconvenience. But the most important thing is that I am learning and growing with every step, all while feeling stupidly happy about my physical and mental health.
I am separated by thousands of miles from some of the most important people in my life for most of the year, and so today, when I got to spend a rare day with some of them, I decided that I would throw everything about LeanGains out the window for a day. Because as important as fitness and health are in your life, it's not everything.
And because fitness and health aren't everything in life, I ate...
a kalua pork (Hawaiian pulled pork) eggs benedict before eating all of the leftovers from my friends' plates,
chicken taquitos, a shrimp quesadilla, sweet potato fries, and some li hing margaritas,
and finished off the night with cold and hot filet mignon carpaccio, portobello mushrooms, a metric fuckton of seafood linguine, 10 ounces of pepper steak, oodles of roasted potatoes, and a blueberry cheesecake cupcake. And also 4 glasses of some fine cab.
