I Gained Weight When I Got In Shape
By: Lydia Waybright
Tags: Fitness, Self, Culture, Health, Wellness

I Gained Weight When I Got In Shape

The scale isn’t everything.

Photo by i yunmai on Unsplash

I’ve always been petite.

I wore a size 5T in the first grade. When I started high school, I joined the Speech and Debate team. We had to wear suits for our competitions, but they don’t make suits that fit the body of a 12-year-old. Thank goodness my mother had a sewing machine.

For most of my life, I thought that my skinniness implied that I was the picture of health.

I was wrong.

A few years ago, I started to really take a liking to lifting weights and going to the gym regularly. I realized that I had never really exercised like that before. Moving weight was foreign to my body. The amount of adapting I had to do made it clear to me that I was not necessarily in the best shape prior to that time. It was a huge learning curve, but it was worth it, because I felt great. I loved the feeling of getting stronger.

But then something happened that I was not expecting.

I gained weight. And my pants didn’t fit.

When I started to build muscle for the first time, my body changed drastically. I saw muscles growing that I didn’t even know were there. My arms had tone. I also ate more because of how much energy I burned. My legs grew wider because the muscles were activated and growing. I had to go on a shopping spree to find new pants that would fit around my thighs. The one thing I did not expect when I started exercising rigorously and regularly was that I would gain weight.

I was confused. I thought I was doing something wrong. How could I be working so hard and see the scale going up? Shopping sprees that come as a result of health journeys are supposed to be for buying smaller sizes, right? Even though I was stronger and more fit than I had ever been in my life, my instinct was to see the added pounds as an indication that I was out of shape. Add frustration to the confusion.

I was equating healthiness to weight loss. While weight loss can be a healthy move for people, it wasn’t for me.

That’s when I learned that the cultural standards for beauty and attractiveness are not perfect measures of health.

There are so many toxic and inaccurate standards for health that we as a society place on ourselves and others. For instance, we use the term “ideal body weight” which inherently places a pressure to measure up to the “ideal.” The calculation is based solely on height. According to the ideal body weight calculator, I was healthier when I was a freshman in college eating one meal a day (always with ice cream) and limited exercise than I was when eating three balanced meals a day and exercising five times a week.

We also have to compete with the perfectly airbrushed and edited photos of celebrities and models who society tells us we ought to look like. It’s no wonder nearly 10 million Americans have Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD). It is a monstrous challenge for people to feel confident in their normal, human bodies with imperfections and cellulite when our culture worships skinniness.

Health is most important

At the end of the day, I didn’t love working out so that I would look a certain way. I loved it because I felt good, slept better, had more energy and more confidence. I knew that I was healthier, even though the scale was going up. In my case, gaining weight was the healthy outcome. I had very little muscle and didn’t eat regular meals, and although that made me quite skinny, it did not leave me in good physical shape. It’s an indictment on our measures of health and beauty that my journey into physical fitness made me feel like I was getting less healthy.

In my experience, feeling great about yourself comes more from feeling confident and healthy than from hitting a certain pant size. It’s not easy to break out of the mindset that tells us otherwise though. For awhile, I had to stop checking the scale altogether. It wasn’t good for me, and it was easy for me to become obsessive over it. If I am eating well and exercising regularly, that is enough evidence that I’m healthy. I don’t need to check the scale every day. And if the number goes up, I don’t have to freak out or feel ashamed. It happens. Our bodies change— my weight fluctuates constantly. There is no ideal body. You get your body, and you get to love it.

Right now I weigh more than I ever have in my life. There are more ways to measure health than the number on the scale or the tag of your pants; one of them is by how you feel. And I feel great.