To understand how I have got to the point I am at now, you need to understand where I started from, so humor me while we go back to my most unhealthy time. Most people now know that I used to be overweight. At my heaviest I was around 82kg, the top end of overweight and upsettingly close to obese. It was at this point I decided to go on a diet. I did a 2 week juice cleanse which caused great weight loss until I stopped, when of course most of the water weight I'd lost went back on. So then I decided to try Slimming World. I'm not sure there's an Asian equivalent of Slimming World but basically you go once a week and pay them money to weigh you and they either clap if you've lost weight or frown if you've gained any.
Most healthy foods are 'free' meaning you can eat as many of them as you want and most 'unhealthy' food had a certain number of points and you could only have so many points in a day. I lost about 2 stone using Slimming World, mainly because it made me eat more real food and cut some of the processed crap I was eating on a daily basis out. It was also good to finally be held accountable. However, being free at the same time every Monday to go and be weighed was inconvenient; locating the number of points for a bag of crisps in the 'syns booklet' was annoying and the cost was adding up. So, I did some research in to calorie counting and decided I could do it myself, my Slimming World days were done.
The next few years were quite a journey. I started going to the gym to help with the weight loss but it didn't come easily (In hindsight my gym sessions were mostly strength based and I often didn't break a sweat so they certainly weren't burning many calories). I spent hours pouring over different studies and research and became more educated about nutrition, macro and micro-nutrients. I even unofficially learnt and sat the test for Sean’s nutrition course but there is no single answer when it comes to nutrition and everyone has an opinion so I struggled to sift through the information to find what worked for me. As a result I think I've tried every macro split out there. I've tried IIFYM and low carb diets that included 0 calorie noodles made from some odd form of seaweed. I even convinced Sean to join me on a 2 week 'cut' that featured only oatmeal, chicken, broccoli and sweet potato. That was actually pretty effective but by the end of it we were utterly miserable, bored of food and to this day Sean still can't eat broccoli.
In the last few years I've realised that enjoying food is important and I love cooking so we now have a nutritious and varied diet, but my food scales were the most used item in my kitchen and until a month ago I was still weighing and tracking everything I ate on MyFitnessPal, convinced that if I didn't I would immediately revert back to being grossly overweight. This might seem silly to anyone who has never been overweight but although my parents are both blessed with a great metabolism, I am not, and I'm often told that my biological dad's female family were all 'larger ladies' so I had a real fear that if I didn't have full awareness over every calorie I was consuming I would certainly revert back to my 82kg self. This focus and control became even more important when I started OCR racing and the more serious I got in the sport the more serious I needed to be about my nutrition, which to me meant dropping my calories and religiously filling in MFP, but last month a book totally flipped my thinking.
I will read anything I can get my hands on, especially if it falls in to the category of fitness or nutrition. So when Sean came across Matt Fitzgerald, we ordered a number of his books. The one that flipped the switch for me was ‘Racing Weight.’ I read it cover to cover in a day and then went back and read it again. The biggest take away for me was that I needed to be fueling for performance, not for weight loss. For years my identity had been losing weight, and running away from the unfit, overweight person I had become. Honestly, I still find it hard to accept myself as an athlete, I have big time imposter syndrome there and all I could see was that I was one of the bigger athletes in the field so being smaller was key and the only way I knew how to do that was by being in a calorie deficit - hence the calorie counting. But this book introduced fueling for performance, by intuitive eating (which did and still does terrify me) and by tracking your weight so you can start to look for patterns… what was your natural weight when you performed best? What did your body make up look like? What were you eating? It also talks about the typical body shapes of different endurance sports and has sample diet plans of big time athletes, both things I found so interesting.
I took a step back and realised I'd been getting it all wrong. I have totally learnt to ignore if I am hungry or not, I eat because I have it plugged in to my day. I eat the things I had mapped out the night before, not the food my body wants and if I’m honest I would sometimes cheat the system. I would avoid using oil or eating nuts and seeds because they were too high in calories but then I would try and save calories for the end of the day and then normally eat them in the form of peanut butter m&ms… a poor choice to fuel for performance, the nuts would have been a much better choice but it didn’t matter because I still had calories left…
So I’ve ditched the food scales and bought a pair of regular scales. I know weighing yourself isn’t for everyone and I questioned if it would be a good idea for me to weigh myself every day, I can have a very obsessive personality. But, I am seeing this as a step forward in my athletic performance, not for how I am going to look in a bikini so the number on the scales helps paint a picture towards me being the best athlete I can. I am now trying to retrain my body, to listen to it when it’s hungry (which is bloody hard when you follow a teaching schedule with a set break and a 11.30 lunch time) and to make the choices that are full of nutrients, not just the lowest in calories. I have only been doing it for a few weeks now but I feel really good about what I’ve experienced so far. The book has a handy scaling system that gives positive points for good foods and negative points for anything processed or refined. I am not recording it but I am being mindful of the choices that I am making when I am hungry and trying to always default to the real food choice first, then assessing if I am still hungry, rather than eating for the sake of it because I had calories left over.
The exciting thing is that I am currently sitting at the lowest weight I have been in my adult life, so I don’t really know what else my body is capable of. The book gives you some calculations you can use to find your hypothetical weight and I am still a few kg from that so it will be interesting to see how my body changes and if my performance does indeed improve with it. If nothing else, it’s quite freeing not to have to log everything in to MyFitnessPal and it was certainly time to listen to my body more. This is just another step in the journey so it will be interesting to look back in a few months and see how I’ve changed.
Jessie x