Strong is beautiful.

Source: i yunmai, unsplash

My friend Megan came over and cooked up lunch with me this afternoon. We started making a salad from one of my recipe books and quickly realized it was lacking in a number of areas so we decided to zhuzh it up with some chickpeas, a little more mustard, and some kale. While we were sitting there enjoying the fruits of our labor I took a moment to reflect and said, “You know it’s funny… I spent so many years of my life focused on starving myself to look good when the only thing I care about right now is to be strong.”

In my 20s I was never thin enough. I spent so much time obsessing about my weight, the size of my waist, how my clothes fit, and constantly punished myself when I missed a workout. What started as weight loss from being a chubby kid evolved into a full blown eating disorder that took years of work to shift my context around how I feel versus how much I weigh. I now look back on that time as a lesson in letting go of control and to love myself for the state I am in now, but the road to get there wasn’t pretty.

I’ve been feeling a lot lately. The week after I was diagnosed I laid on my couch dissecting every twinge, bubble, or cramp and questioned whether I could feel the tumors growing inside me. The stomach I tried so hard to shrink in my younger years feels hard and painful to touch in some spots because my organs are inflamed. The ever present feelings of disappointment because I can’t walk more than 15 minutes without getting winded or feel like my heart is going to explode from my chest. Eerie considering 60 days ago I was walking, hiking, cycling, and doing all sorts of things we Californian’s do. The constant back ache that gets worse when I stand for too long. The feeling that the same body I spent years punishing and judging is now one I hope will bounce back when I heal.

Weight is no longer a goal, but simply a data point. In my previous life I poured over metrics, KPIs, and data and am honestly a little excited about how this experience is going to give me a ton of data to monitor about myself. It’s not every day the average healthy person gets to become a lab rat. Maybe I’m fascinated by this because I come from the generation who has all of the information in the world in the palm of our hands. Who knows. What I do know is that I will use it for what it is and focus on what is fundamentally important which is to just stay strong.

-Brynn