I don’t think of myself as an athlete, though I suppose I would be considered one. I play roller derby. I started when my original league formed back in 2006. In all honesty, I was never awesome at it. I could knock someone down easily, but my speed and endurance always was a struggle. About three years ago, I hurt my knee, and began reffing. Reffing was great for me in terms of my self-esteem. I was still skating and I quickly became pretty good at it. In 2010, I was the head ref for my league and was reffing just about every weekend.
But then I started to miss hitting. It is an amazing feeling when you hit the jammer (the point scorer) and knock her into the crowd while you just keep on skating. However, I also knew that my speed and endurance had taken an even bigger dive in recent months. During my last few months as a teacher (in 2010), because I was miserable and being treated poorly, and because I’m an emotional eater, I ate. A lot. So, even though I went to my personal training classes twice a week, in the early spring of 2010, I was often too stressed out to spend the time at the gym and ate horrible food all throughout the day. By July of 2010, I was at the heaviest I have ever been and felt fairly horrible about myself. (See picture from Life After Teaching post)
Three things happened around that time. One, on my 29th birthday, I made a goal to be 80 pounds lighter by my 30th birthday and to finally have a body that I liked. Two, I started attending the newbie practices and working on my skating skills again. In November of 2010, I quit reffing and came back as a skater. Three, I had the fortune of having Kam as a personal trainer, who is a tell-it-like-it-is hard-ass. I had recently started working as a health coach with the Nopalea cactus juice that reduces inflammation, a health product. One day at the gym, Kam took me aside and said something to the effect of, "Jenn, you've been coming to us for over a year and you look the same. (In all reality, I probably looked a little worse.) You're working in the health industry, and you need to look the part. You need to be healthy. You need to make changes in what you eat. This starts tomorrow morning." She told me that I needed to cut out just about everything from my diet except for clean foods. I immediately hemmed and hawed and made a ton of excuses before giving in and starting a few days later. The harshest and best thing she said to me was this: "You eat for your goals. If your goal is to be fat and unhealthy, then you make the choice and eat a certain way. If your goal is to lose weight and gain muscle and be fit, well, you eat a certain way for that too."
Since then, I began working my butt off. I began eating whole, clean foods, I began working out almost every day, and as a result, over the course of a year I lost 60 pounds, dropped 5 dress sizes, considerably increased my speed and endurance, and regained a ton of self-esteem. I also gained muscle tone. I'd always been really strong. But all of a sudden, I began love that my muscles were becoming more defined, especially in my arms and my calves.
But then I started to miss hitting. It is an amazing feeling when you hit the jammer (the point scorer) and knock her into the crowd while you just keep on skating. However, I also knew that my speed and endurance had taken an even bigger dive in recent months. During my last few months as a teacher (in 2010), because I was miserable and being treated poorly, and because I’m an emotional eater, I ate. A lot. So, even though I went to my personal training classes twice a week, in the early spring of 2010, I was often too stressed out to spend the time at the gym and ate horrible food all throughout the day. By July of 2010, I was at the heaviest I have ever been and felt fairly horrible about myself. (See picture from Life After Teaching post)
Three things happened around that time. One, on my 29th birthday, I made a goal to be 80 pounds lighter by my 30th birthday and to finally have a body that I liked. Two, I started attending the newbie practices and working on my skating skills again. In November of 2010, I quit reffing and came back as a skater. Three, I had the fortune of having Kam as a personal trainer, who is a tell-it-like-it-is hard-ass. I had recently started working as a health coach with the Nopalea cactus juice that reduces inflammation, a health product. One day at the gym, Kam took me aside and said something to the effect of, "Jenn, you've been coming to us for over a year and you look the same. (In all reality, I probably looked a little worse.) You're working in the health industry, and you need to look the part. You need to be healthy. You need to make changes in what you eat. This starts tomorrow morning." She told me that I needed to cut out just about everything from my diet except for clean foods. I immediately hemmed and hawed and made a ton of excuses before giving in and starting a few days later. The harshest and best thing she said to me was this: "You eat for your goals. If your goal is to be fat and unhealthy, then you make the choice and eat a certain way. If your goal is to lose weight and gain muscle and be fit, well, you eat a certain way for that too."
Since then, I began working my butt off. I began eating whole, clean foods, I began working out almost every day, and as a result, over the course of a year I lost 60 pounds, dropped 5 dress sizes, considerably increased my speed and endurance, and regained a ton of self-esteem. I also gained muscle tone. I'd always been really strong. But all of a sudden, I began love that my muscles were becoming more defined, especially in my arms and my calves.
The picture on the left is yet another super unflattering example of me at my worst. The photo on the right was taken during a roller derby bout, of me about 60 pounds lighter, wearing the same bottoms. Check out the beginning of my shoulder muscles. (Also, I should mention that in the picture I was legally shoving my teammate into the opposing jammer, not illegally pushing an opposing player, which it kinda looks like I'm doing.)
While I am so proud of how far I have come, I have also gone through plenty of setbacks and struggles. I have been a part of three two-month weight loss type challenges, and done very well at them. However, in between challenges, I struggle and eat food I shouldn't and gain back some of the weight I have lost.
Back in September, my partner Candy and I decided to move down to St Pete, Florida. While moving was absolutely the best decision for us (both our families are here, we work with my family, we have an adorable home with a pool and a hot tub just five minutes from the beach, and we now get to skate with Tampa Roller Derby, a league I have looked up to since the beginning of my derby career), moving is also very stressful. Selling my house in North Carolina was not fun. We literally spent a solid week make it look like a model home, painting my cute purple trim a less flattering white, and clearing out enough stuff to fill a 26 foot truck (For real, 26 feet. Lucky for me, Candy drove it down to Florida.) Then we moved all our stuff into storage. We lived at my folks guest house for two months while house hunting, which meant we didn’t have our own space. We also didn’t have a set routine and are just now starting to have one again.
From all of this, because I am a stress eater, because I need clean eating to be easy for me, and because Whole Foods and the vegetarian drive-thru are no longer 5 minutes away from me, I began to eat crappy foods, and surprisingly enough, I have gained some weight back. Like 30 pounds. So, now I need to get to a point where I am ready to make changes and get my weight back down.
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