The Aftermath, pt. 2

<Drum roll please>

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Here it is!

This is what I look like now - or over the weekend in Vegas.  I posed by the same elephants as when I was there a few months ago.  

I'm still lifting weights and doing cardio nearly every day.  I've been running again and I've incorporated Bikram's yoga into my workout routine.  I am stronger than ever and more muscular than ever and frankly, I feel pretty great.

But it's taken 2 months to say that.

Let's go back to where we left off in the last entry.  My event was pretty much the last category to go at the San Jose Competition so it was really late at night by the time I was done.  All I wanted was red met and a cocktail.  Being in San Jose on a saturday night is an experience all in it of itself.  There's this strange combination of tumble weeds and a ghost town atmosphere to turning a corner and being surround by frat-style partying.  We miraculously found something open and something serving food.  I had a manhattan and a burger (without the bun of course - I have celiac's) and proceeded to get obliteratingly drunk from the one drink that evening and violently ill for the next day.  I should've taken this as a sign that going back to "normal" wasn't going to be simply, "oh, i'll just eat like my body didn't go through any of this at all."

My "normal" is still healthy.  I eat about half raw and half cooked.  I eat a lot of kale, fish, fruits and veggies and I still love eggs (there was a point there where I was eating so many of them a day I wasn't sure if I could ever eat them again!) and chocolate, and wine, and steak.  I eat good nutritional food that makes me feel like it loves me when I eat it.  Except that for about 2 months, my body freaked out at just about anything I put into it.  Rebalancing my body would take a lot longer than I expected and it was a lot harder and more traumatic than I ever imagined.      

Right after the competition, I went camping and ate all raw and vegan.  It was an amazing cleanse and my body was craving the nutrients.  What I didn't expect was that because I was feeding myself in a more rounded way, all of those vitamins went straight to all of those muscles I had spent the last 7 months building and inflated them like a balloon!  I gained 20lbs in 2 weeks.  It felt awful!  I went from everything being way to big to everything fitting me like i was poured into it and I was leaking out the sides.  It was CRAZY.  I felt heavy and big.  Had I known it was coming, I might've been better equipped to handle it, but as it was, it all hit me like a brick wall at 70mph.

My hormones were a mess and I felt like I was PMSing for over a month.  I felt bloated, woosy and totally all over the place.  The crazy thing was that before the competition, I became obsessed with reaching this "perfection."  I wasn't eating enough carbs to keep my level-headedness and my grip on reality was tenuous at best.  Instead of magically clearing up when I was getting the nutrition I was craving, my body was just as broad-sided as before.  I still couldn't SEE what I looked like.  I looked in the mirror and had no idea what I was looking at.  I knew I was bigger, much bigger than before and I couldn't make sense of it.  All I knew is that I STILL felt like shit.

It took awhile for my stuffy head to unpack and separate big/fat/muscular/perfection/ideal.  Even though going through it was a total roller coaster, deep inside I was trying to give myself the love I needed to heal through this whole new set of deep rooted problems.  Now, in hindsight, of course it makes sense that it take awhile for the body to equalize.  My trainer said the same thing, yet somehow I didn't accept it.  I needed to give myself the patience to regenerate in the same way I gave myself the patience to build all of this in the first place.

Finally, FINALLY, it all started to make sense again.  I am still lifting weights and doing daily cardio.  I enjoy the workouts now because I have the strength and power to do them.  I am bigger than I am normally used to being.  My clothes are a little tight.  My butt has taken on a life of its own.  I have biceps and my shoulders are hefty - like a "surfer's body" as I was told.  I'm cool with that.  My old thin, untoned size 2 is a bulkier, 20 lbs heavier size 4.  I'm not complaining.    It's taken a lot for me to get here and even more to get used to it.  Obviously it's what I wanted.  Obviously I needed a better relationship with myself, to be in myself and my body again, to feel connected with my body that grounds and centers me back into myself.  It seems like such a perfect foil for 2 years of heady intellectual indulgence at grad school.

So that's the art.  The grounding of the body in which we lie.  The striving and achieving an ideal - the struggle to get there and the struggle to return to "normal," realizing that is something I can never be either because normal doesn't exist.  This was a transformative practice, something really life changing in any ways - and I emphasize: not just for the personal transformation, but the amazing interactions with people that all of this has facilitated.  As I said in my video, this is more than about me.

As I consider this piece finished, I embark on something new.  This has inspired me to turn all of this outwards, to reach out and help others find the grounding within their body - to reconnect with our physical being that we have such an easy tendency to ignore.

And that's just for fun.  It's amazing to me that they are both ME.  How many Me's do we go through in our life?  Kind of amazing what we can do.

Oh.  And then this happened.  Her and her friend were from Oakland and were so excited that we were from the Bay too.  She said I must've heard of the "Air Chair!"  I have now.  Have you?

#airchair on instagram.

Love Vegas.