Thoughts From Three Months Under A Barbell

I started seeing a trainer last year. This is a function of making more money than I used to but also giving up years of hyperfixating on cardio, which I obsessed over. I used to go to the gym for a couple hours and not get off the elliptical until it felt like the calorie output number was high enough that there was no way the food I would consume the rest of the day would surpass that number, leaving me in a calorie deficit for the day (I did not know anything about calories then. I have deprogrammed myself now to not fixate on calories as a goal or even a metric I track). I was tinier than I had ever been at any other point in my adult life and I was completely miserable. This was not sustainable, which is why I would crash and burn after a few months of this until I stopped entirely, gained back the weight I lost, and then re-enter my manic exercise era. In 2020, stuck indoors and unable to replicate these patterns at the gym, I got a Peloton and basically did the same thing on the bike in my home, since I wasn’t doing anything else anyway.

Last year, sick of anything that reminded me of 2020 and preparing for a hiking trip in Utah, I decided to cast off my unhealthy old ways of being and invest in becoming stronger instead of trying to become smaller. After about a year of full body workout training, training my core to become stronger, and doing 437893797 planks and squats, I decided this year that I would move my goals even further away than what they used to be: instead of just learning the basics, I wanted to lift heavier…