How to deal with a changing body shape?
Hi TwoX. First time poster! :) I know that the issues I'm going to list below may sound a little like problems a lot of people would LIKE to have, but for me they're tough to deal with, so please be kind/understanding. The few people I've tried to talk to about this IRL haven't been very helpful or tactful, and I've seen this community be super supportive and kind, so hopefully I will get some good advice about how to deal with this!
tl;dr - went from nationally competitive athlete to skinny, saggy, unhealthy body pretty rapidly, mostly due to stress and illness. How to deal with resulting health/self-confidence issues?
A little back story. I was a competitive athlete in college and I was in spectacular shape, especially my final year. I worked really hard to build the body I needed to compete at the national level and was super proud of my accomplishments - gaining those last 5 pounds was a struggle, given how much I was working out and my health issues.
I've had trouble with appetite and being able to eat enough since sophomore year in college - I was nauseous nearly constantly for 9-10 months, so it was very hard for me to maintain weight, especially with my level of exertion. I resorted to eating ice cream before bed and drinking Ensures and other weight-gaining drinks just so I could get some calories down and try to maintain weight. Went to doctors, did lots of tests, took medications, didn't figure anything out, blah blah it eventually kinda went away/got to be totally manageable and at this point I just have a bit of sensitive stomach sometimes.
I'm about two and a half years out of school and have "retired" from my sport. I expected to lose some weight now that I wasn't working out so much, and dropped from about 135 lbs (at 5'3") and 18% body fat to around 127 lbs and about the same BF%. Happened gradually over about the first year, still stayed moderately active, etc etc. Totally fine, totally expected and it leveled out and was nice and stable for about a year after that. Now, for about the last two months, I've been experiencing some pretty substantial stress through work, family and personal life - it has hit my appetite really hard and I've been working out pretty much not at all (from working out 3-4+ times a week to... zero times a week). I think I lost 3-4 lbs at first and then in the last month or so, as my stress and anxiety levels have just absolutely skyrocketed and caused pretty severe GI problems, I've dropped dramatically to my all-time low of 114 lbs. I know this is still definitely in the "healthy" range for my age/height, but I'm having a really tough time dealing with my substantially different body shape.
I've always been very muscular and rather busty (30F), especially for someone who was as active as I was, but this recent weight loss has hit me hard. My once ample, really-rather-perky-for-their-size breasts have started to sag and look kind of "empty". My already prominent cheekbones are more pronounced as my face has thinned a lot, and the fat on my stomach has totally melted away (I have NEVER seen my abs, and now I can - a bit of a shock, to be sure). Due to muscle loss (and some fat, but I didn't have much to lose - I don't want to know what BF% I'm at right now), I have loose skin on my arms, stomach and legs, and it's not pretty.
However, people I maybe haven't seen in a while have started commenting on how "fit" and "healthy" I look. It's hard to hear. From the outside, I can objectively see how my clothed body probably looks pretty great right now. However, I feel incredibly unhealthy and self-conscious - I feel weak, I'm getting winded really easily, I'm tired all the time, I've gotten sick four times in the last four months, my bras don't fit and my boobs look terrible, old injuries are rearing their heads, my thighs look like empty sacks as my quads/hamstrings have disappeared (I can grab a double handful of skin on my thigh :( ), my ass is completely gone... It's not fun.
I'm working very hard on addressing the stress issues and making some improvements there, and I'm upping my workouts again. Hopefully that will stimulate my appetite a bit and encourage muscle gain, but it'll be really slow going. To come from such a spectacularly functional body to this... saggy, skinny, weak body is frustrating and confidence-crushing. I've never had bad body image until now and it's hampering my progress in other areas of mental-health improvements.
So, TwoX, has anyone had a similar situation happen to them? Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with body-image issues or how to recover from rapid, substantial weight loss?
EDIT: Thanks, everyone, your advice and perspective is quite helpful. I will work on admiring the parts of me that currently look awesome (abs! chiseled bone structure!), accomodate what doesn't (shapeware! cute new bras!), understand that much of this will hopefully be temporary, and be patient as things settle and readjust. You all made me feel so much better. :)
Posted Dec 2, 2012, 6:54 PM UTC · edited