Antonia Bernardin

TW: Discusses diet and exercise, please skip this blog if these are difficult or triggering topics for you! 

Disclaimer: I am not a fitness or health professional, nor do I have any background in nutrition, this is just a personal, observational anecdote.

You can find part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here

The short version of the background behind these posts is: I have a long history of minor injuries (plus whiplash from a car crash), which all colluded together in 2019 into a trapped nerve, in a similar spot to the sciatic nerve. This caused an electric shock feeling spasming down my leg, which was excruciating. It got well enough for me to stop having physio just as the U.K locked down for COVID and when we emerged, my body that had always been athletic in build (even with a little extra chunk here and there) was not recognisable. It could not do what it used to. It did not look like it used to. I could not trust it anymore.

And since I have always been sporty, I did not know how to train that type of body, so I enlisted the help of an amazing PT. Over the last couple years since then, I have been making posts marvelling at how different it is to exercise when the primary focus is not dieting, or weight loss but in the joy of movement and feeling good.

I am in a different place to when I started this ‘journey’

(Journey is in quote marks because I hate that phrase but also couldn’t come up with a better one!)

This past year has been very stressful, I was made redundant, change jobs twice, was the new person twice and I couldn’t afford to see my PT for most of that year. Before losing my job, I was making really good progress and was finally starting to see the body I had pre-injury coming back, as well as the fitness level.

And as much as this was about being able to move and enjoy myself again and not weight-loss, which would have happened regardless as a natural consequence of being more active. I liked my body moving back towards the toned, athletic build I used to have.

Because my training had moved past injury recovery to working towards actual fitness goals, I forgot the place I started this from: unable to crouch, or comfortably walk up hillsides, or stairs, without pain.

It felt like I had taken a million steps back from what had become an acceptance of my new body post-injury and enjoying exercise for the sake of it- for the love of simple being able to do it again, rather than chasing inches lost.

It felt hypocritical as someone who has written 3 blogs spanning years reflecting on an exercise journey without weight-loss as a goal, to be pleased by my body becoming smaller/ more toned and then subsequently really struggling to feel confident in my looks when I wasn’t able to exercise as much as before and was eating differently because of stress and a busy lifestyle.

Now that I have been able to get back to my old routine, I find myself impatient to return to the point I was one year ago, because it wasn’t my choice to stop the progress I was making – life happened.

Also, thanks to stress I suppose, but unusual for me as someone who has always enjoyed exercising, I had absolutely no desire to go to the gym for a lot of this time. Even swimming, which I added to my routine because I enjoyed it so much, become a chore.

The drive to work out only recently came back to me and until then it felt like herculean effort to do anything. It made me admire people who go to the gym when they hate exercising a thousand times more.

So yeah, at the moment, I am trying to approach exercise with the same neutrality as eating my veggies: it is something I need to do because it is good for my health, both mental and physical. But I think it would be disingenuous this time to say there’s no part of me that isn’t hoping to lose some inches and return to where I was before the job shenanigans began.

It is, however, not the sum total of my drive to have an exercise routine, it is still a different approach to the days when I’d look up 1000 calorie burn workouts on Pinterest and do them 5 times a week. I am still working to fix the lasting damage from my injury but otherwise I am mostly like any other able-bodied 30 year old and I think I had forgotten to revel in that fact.

I am still anti-diet culture and have recently been working on re-learning how to feed myself a balanced diet, as that goal has transitioned from trying to eat 3 meals a day, whatever that might look like, to where I’m at now, trying to eat what will fuel my body, whilst still enjoying what I eat. I still fiercely believe that food is neutral, there is no good or bad food and it is about having things in balance and moderation. I carry no guilt for, nor do I believe in, having a ‘bad week’, if one week I ate food that was ‘junk’ a lot, it isn’t followed by a strict week following as punishment. In that sense, I don’t think I’ve slipped backwards in how I’ve repaired my relationship to food.

So, I don’t think I have a neat conclusion this time, I think unpicking the way we were raised to think about our bodies and nutrition in the 90’s / early 2000’s is harder than I thought. It snuck back into my head even when all I was focusing on was trying to take better care of myself. All I know is I think I’ve been equipping myself for the past few years well and I think the rest will fix itself now my life is more settled.

Once again, I will emphasise that I have no expertise in diet/ nutrition or fitness, this just a story from my life and about my feelings. I am a single adult with no children, so while I’ve tried to write this with generic enough language, it is still written from the perspective of someone who does not juggle exercise with other responsibilities.

If you’re usually here for the book-ish nonsense, don’t worry, this is just a random post, your regular book worm content will be coming next.