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Health & Fitness

Did I Go Too Far With the Muscles?

We all have our internal struggles. Meet one of mine.

Last summer I was 12 months post-baby when I first attempted to put on a bathing suit again. Of course, it had to be a tankini, not a bikini. (Covering up the most skin with the least grandma-like suit was the goal.) I had been running like Forrest Gump, so the majority of the weight was gone. But it didn’t matter. No woman feels good about her body after having a baby. Period. And so the morning my husband and I decided to go to the pool with the kids was a tremendous mental marathon for me.

I went in my room and said to myself, “You can do this. One step at a time. First, find a suit you’ll be willing to wear.” Like those tennis ball machines that shoot balls one after another, I tossed everything out of my bathing suit drawer. I was stunned that there was even a time in my life when I fit in some of the suits I pulled out. Yikes. But eventually, I found one. It was my official post-baby bathing suit. The elastic was just shot enough to not dig in anywhere. The straps could hold up a rhino. And the color was dark. Perfect. I slipped it on, shimmied into a cover-up and grabbed the diaper bag. But when I got to the pool, I spent the majority of the time there worrying about what I looked like. It made me sad. My friend told me I was crazy. And my husband said I looked great. But I just didn’t feel good.

This year I decided I wasn’t going through that again, so I started working out with a trainer. Sure, I can motivate myself to work out every day. And aside from my unhealthy obsession with rice cakes, I have a natural propensity for portion control. So one might think I could achieve this bathing-suit-ready body all on my own. But I knew I needed help with the last stretch. The trainer transformed me. I dropped a bunch of weight. I tightened up everywhere. And this morning while working out with my trainer I looked in the mirror as I was lifting the INSANELY heavy dumbbell he insisted should be easy for me, and I noticed something. It was a muscle. And it was sticking out. And I didn’t like it. It made me look like a man. Panic set in. I went too far!

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I tried to explain to him that he was getting me in too good of shape. I begged him to make it go away. But he looked at me like I was crazy and handed me another weight. I obsessively babbled about my clearly masculine physique throughout the remainder of my session. And as I was leaving the gym, I stopped to talk to a friend. She told me how she wanted to do “something” the next day but was wary of what people would think. I quickly and boldly said, “Who cares what other people think?”

That’s when it hit me. I was so worried about how other people saw me on a physical level, that I hadn’t even given myself a minute to feel good about what I had accomplished. How silly. Who cares, right? Totally. So I tucked in my manly muscles and strutted out of the gym as if my bikini was already on and no one else in the world existed. And you know what, it felt great.

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