Someone has injected hot fire into my leg-ular area. Oww. I’m not sure how, after nearly a year of pretty intense lifting and substantial strength gains, I can manage a workout that leaves me this sore the day after. Muscles, aren’t you supposed to be adapting to this kind of thing?
Anyway, just about any sort of cardio is right out for today (no I am not running that is the worst idea) so I figured I should at least go to the gym and do some brief yoga and spend some time with the foam roller. Warming up and getting to a low lunge with a quad stretch felt like pretty much the best thing ever, but the foam rolling afterwards was exquisite torture.
(tw: body and weight stuff, “good fatty”) Lately I’ve been turning over in my head how stubborn my body is! Gingerzingi’s post about her boss and Fit, Fat and Feminist’s post “What Works For You, Will Not Necessarily Work For Me” (links!) relate how people in their lives make the assumption that because their small lifestyle changes easily led to weight loss, people who remain fat must be doing it wrong.
If you read back over the last ~4 years I’ve been writing this blog, you’ll find a whole lot of activity. When I started C25k, I was completely sedentary. Adding 90 minutes of walking and running a week was huge for me, and my body did change in response to that. I lost ~10% of my body weight, a couple dress sizes, over a bit less than a year. That wasn’t enough to make me not-fat, but I figured it was logical that as I kept being active, my body would keep changing.
Well, it has… sort of. I’m way fitter, way stronger. (Can’t say way more flexible!) I have some terrific muscles, and my shape has changed. But I weigh the absolute same, despite 3 more years of activity that’s ramped up to be pretty darn rigorous and much more frequent. My stubborn body wants to hang on to my belly, my hips, my butt and thighs. And I’m inclined to let it. Part of the bargain I’ve made with my body (with myself) about all this activity is that I would trust my body; it tells me what it needs, and I push it gradually harder but pay attention to how I feel.
And that’s where I’m at. It’s not perfect; I still struggle with my body image and if I’m having bad feelings that’s where it tends to manifest. Sometimes I feel like I must be doing it wrong, because my body defies the common knowledge. But I’m willing to stand here and be defiant.
(Now, can someone just make a pair of pants that fit both my hips and my waist? I swear that would relieve a good fraction of my body angst.)
Running While Fat 
All of this ^
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My body also defies logic, and apparently several laws of physics. I can’t count the number of diet adaptations or exercise programs that were supposed to produce xyz result and did little, nothing, or the opposite for me. It can be frustrating – because it gives me the sense that I’m doing something wrong or not doing enough or whatever, and it puts me into a state of failure all the time. Not a healthy place to be, mentally. So it’s always wise to focus on your fitness accomplishments, and not on something as transitory and unpredictable as weight or inches.
But we already knew that, right? :-)
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muscle weighs a lot more than fat. most people who are muscular fall into an overweight BMI. This is because BMI does NOT account for the amount of weight muscle carries. It expects you to have little fat AND little muscle tone.
I am sure if you have muscle definition and need a bra, you will probably weigh in at technically overweight. At my smallest I was only a few pounds shy over overweight, and eating a dangerously low amount while exercising excessively. If you see shape and muscle definition, you should just know that your effort and health mean way way more than what the scale tells you :)