After posting my own experience with body dysmorphia a couple of weeks ago I asked my friend Lauren to write about some of her own experiences with this. To me, it’s amazing to read other people’s stories and point of view. Especially when you don’t expect to hear the story, they tell you. If you’d walk into Lauren on the street, you would never guess that she has body confidence issues. But this goes to show again that you never ever can judge someone without hearing their story. And maybe this even goes to show that people who seem most confident about their appearance, usually are the people who have the most amount of confidence issues.

I really appreciate Lauren’s story and I hope you take something away from, just like I did.

A personal story

Similarly, to Kees, I think my body dysmorphia started when I was younger. I was a typical teenage girl who was insecure about not having boobs or a bum, the amount of football I played made me skinny. Joining the gym in my early 20’s, I began to see my body change and due to having low body fat anyway, abs began to appear. I began to receive compliments about my body, which had never happened before, and it drove me to continue to work hard in the gym. I then felt that abs became part of my identity, “the girl with the abs”, this all sounds well and good but I then felt under pressure to keep them. I began to use My Fitness Pal to track my calories and stopped enjoying my crazy weekends. Calorie counting became part of my everyday life and I began to understand how to juggle my maintenance calories and being in a deficit to lose weight.

I used to ‘punish’ myself by going for a long run if I ate too many calories and would feel guilty if I didn’t hit my 5/6 gym sessions a week. I often would look in the mirror after a big meal and think all of my progress had gone to shit. I began to realize that this was an unhealthy obsession, when we eat food, it obviously has to chill somewhere, in the stomach, and by the next day my body was pretty much back to normal.

After joining CrossFit and not being around mirrors and douches bicep curling with their tops off in the mirror, I have never felt more body confident. I have stopped tracking my calories, tone down my workouts when I need to and don’t punish myself for enjoying myself anymore. I have learnt to love the skin that I’m in. I’m never going to be the big boobed curvy person, but I am working hard to be the best version of myself that I can be.

My take away from this story is that I can never assume anything based on the way someone looks. Just because someone has abs or a build upper body doesn’t mean they are confident or happy with the way they look. It takes a lot of hard work to transform your body to this point, with that hard work also comes the fear of losing that. In turn, this can trick your mind into some weird thoughts about the way you think you appear to others versus the way you actually look.

6 nutrition rules to follow, part 2

Welcome back to part 2 of this series, nutrition rules to follow. Really what this blog should be called is nutrition rules that you COULD follow. There’s already enough people out there that will tell you exactly what you should be doing and how to do it. Instead, I just want to give you the…

by kees1996 2 July 202225 June 2022

6 Nutrition rules to follow, part 1

Welcome back to another blog where we cover the wide topic of nutrition. The reason why I keep coming back to different topics related to nutrition is because the nutrition space is filled with false and misleading information. My goal is to simplify the message and give you honest information. I never want to tell…

by kees1996 25 June 202225 June 2022

5 Steps to getting stronger

Welcome back to this week’s blog where we cover a topic that I am super passionate about and that is getting stronger. Why am I so passionate about it? Because it has never come easy to me. Even since the start of my fitness journey I have always looked at other people in the gym…

by kees1996 11 June 202227 May 2022