Hey there đ
I was going to send this to you in a text, but I was wondering if there was a text limit on iMessage?
So I’ll just get straight into it here.
I want to come back to training but I’m afraid.
I don’t know how many days it’s been since I’ve stepped foot into a gym – August last year I think, since our last session.
It was time for me to take a break from the training – not because I didn’t enjoy our conversations – homeschooling means conversations at home always have a child involved. Uninterrupted, real conversations with another adult was something I looked forward to every week.
No, I stopped because my body was rebelling – I was dreading coming to the gym to do the work and it was showing up as feeling exhausted after training, excessive muscle soreness, little joint aches and pains and illness that made me want to cancel every session I had coming up.
So I stopped.
And I waited.
While I was waiting to feel the need to get back to the gym, I started reading articles and listening to podcasts to learn all I could about how to heal my thyroid and feel like a normal, energetic person again.
All that I’ve learnt in this past year from Ray Peat has been eye opening to say the least.
Every article I read, every podcast interview I listened to smashed some previous strongly held belief – it’s shaken up my world completely.
When I first started reading Ray Peat’s articles, I thought it all made sense. But the more I read and the more I implement, the more I realise there was so much more to learn. The human body is amazingly complex.
I’m joining the dots and seeing how so many all of my health issues are intertwined and all stem from long standing thyroid issues – at this stage I can track back to issues in my early teens related to an under active thyroid, but it may still go back further than that.
Given all of this, I know I need to be kind to myself but I’m finding that really challenging right now.
All I’ve wanted for the past 20 years is to lose weight. 20 years ago it was a small amount, now it seems insurmountable.
So many years dotted with low carb, metabolism damning land mines of information from different people that at the time, I thought made so much sense.
Instead it was all layer upon layer of me feeling so useless because I couldn’t stick with it. I’m not saying it doesn’t work for some people for a period of time, but for me, with an already damaged thyroid, it just made the weight easier to hang on to and increase.
After doing effectively the same thing over and over with different people, expecting a different result, I finally went searching for new answers.
I didn’t want a hard-arsed, arrogant trainer that would force me to do things I hated in the gym and berate me for not following a crazy meal plan.
Thank goodness I found you.
When I started training with you, I committed myself to at least 12 months to give myself a solid chance to actually lose a decent amount of weight permanently.
It didn’t happen because (I know now) just training isn’t enough.
I got stronger (which was great) but I didn’t lose weight đ
I had thyroid issues (confirmed when I went and had pathology tests done) and when your thyroid isn’t working well, your adrenals try to pick up the pace but instead get completely trashed.
I know you took it easy with me and didn’t push me as hard as you could have. I’m thankful for that.
But crappy sleep habits, trying to still eat paleo (meat and nut breakfasts Poliquin style), limiting fruit because Poliquin says you have to “earn your carbs” and then rebound bingeing on starchy foods when what my thyroid really needed was some sugar, meant the weight didn’t shift and actually kept increasing.
I couldn’t keep doing the same type of eating (& beating myself up when I didn’t have the willpower to stick to it) and hoping that the training would get the results I was after.
So I stopped everything.
I stopped taking fish oil and threw away all the nuts and seeds in my pantry.
I stopped the high fat scrambled eggs with cream & meat and nuts breakfasts and instead switched to boiled eggs, orange juice and coffee with milk and sugar in it. I started having more milk again, eating fruit and drinking orange juice.
Mentally, I felt so much better. Adding sugar back into my diet from fruit and OJ funnily reduced my craving for a stress relieving glass of wine at the end of the day.
But 12 months of no training and such a drastic change to my diet and even. more. weight (although only 3 kg compared to an increase of 4kg in the previous year).
It’s difficult to reconcile this increase because mainstream thinking is telling me what I’m doing isn’t working. And in a way it’s right – how I’ve implemented the changes hasn’t been as effective as I wanted it to be. I’m still learning and refining my understanding of the really complex interplay of different foods and what effect it has on my body. But I truly believe I am now on the right track.
So now to the final point.
I want to come back to training, but I’m embarrassed and afraid (& this is making my mind think crazy things, like postponing coming back to train with you).
I feel such deep shame that I have been so unsuccessful in getting the strong, fit and healthy body I so desperately want – it truly makes me feel like such a failure – all I want is to be slim again (unfortunately that doesn’t package up very easily as a Christmas present). I wish I could hide away and magically lose the weight and then come and train again. Crazy thinking, I know.
I’m also afraid to go back to training, put the time and effort in and not get results because it’s still behaving as a stressor for my body. But on the flip side, our weekly sessions were like amazing therapy sessions for me and I’ve really been missing that. So I’ll just make sure I have oj with gelatine in it during the training session, to keep the glycogen levels up and keep the stress response as low as possible so I’m not sabotaging my efforts.
Anyway, I had to share all of this in writing, so I could just get it out of the way and start training in a few weeks. I know I could have said all of this to you in person, but I may have cried and felt super awkward, so this was so much easier.
Oh, and no more HIIT – hate it and apparently it isn’t great for my thyroid. Let’s just stick to weights and slowly increasing how much I can lift đ
