Shining to Thrive

First off, I am in no way affiliated with Shine Dance Fitness, I just really love their program and it has changed my life. So I will be mentioning Shine a lot throughout this blog, and I am not referring to the twinkling in the stars or my wonderful personality. When I say Shining, it will be in reference to Shine Dance Fitness, which is my workout program of choice, and my daily dose of motivation to keep doing what I do. If you love to dance, or have ever thought about dancing, I would highly recommend you check this amazing group of women out!

However, my journey started a long time before Shine came into my life. Back before it even existed, I was struggling with all the things that people struggle with when they are in highschool. Body image, self control, motivation. These things, though typical struggles, became abnormal struggles for me.

I’ve been told I was not a *typical* teenager. I always think back to the episode of Frasier where Niles is talking with his family about the “normal” rebellious phase of a teenager, and his dad tells him he never went through that phase. That was me. I was Niles. They kept waiting for it and it never came.

See I never thought anything of it, I just assumed people, especially teenagers, were crazy. I enjoyed living under the radar and not drawing attention to myself so the PMS attention craving, wild eyed teenager thing never appealed to me. And, silly me, I thought it was a choice for people to act that way. I have since learned that this perspective is in fact, skewed.

**For all you people who are sensitive about girl talk, I am giving you a heads up now. It’s high school, periods will be talked about. And not 4th period, but the time-of-the month period that every woman goes through. Aunt Flow, the bloody week, the dark days, whatever you all call it, it will be mentioned and discussed. So bug out now if it bothers you.**

Mine was not normal. In fact, at 13 I had some spotting and I thought oh wow this is it! I got my period, it’s not so bad! What are all these girls complaining about?

That’s because my period wasn’t bad, it was non-existent for the majority of my teenage and young adult life. I didn’t get the *normal* PMS symptoms that most teenage girls go through.  I got symptoms, but they were erratic and hard to pin down, and honestly I never tied them to my cycle until I was in my late twenties.

During my sophomore year of high school, I lost a bunch of weight, and was the lowest I had ever been and have ever been. I was a size 16 in women’s in the 4th grade and extra tall, so I had been incredibly self conscious about my appearance for many years.

I thrived on the attention I got following the weight loss. “Have you lost weight?” “I want to look like Shawna!” “You look so good!”

It was intoxicating!

But people only seemed to notice the weight loss. They didn’t see my pale face. They didn’t see how sick I had become, or notice the small amounts of energy I had. All they noticed was that I was skinnier. Never mind how I achieved it.

When I talked to doctors about my missing period, they told me because I was so active it was normal for me to not have a period. Normal. I moved on.

After a lot of starving, dieting, and extreme workouts, pushing my body beyond its limits, my hard work of losing weight blew up on me, literally. I gained nearly 50 lbs in the next year, and nobody could tell me why.

“Thyroid? No, it’s normal.” ” You must not be doing enough exercise.” “Change your diet, cut back on how much you eat.”

This advice was used to shape my perception of who I was over the next few years. It became something for me to beat myself up over. I used it to motivate me to keep working out, even when I didn’t have the energy. To keep starving myself even though I desperately needed the nutrition.

But the doctors didn’t have the whole picture. I hadn’t told them everything that was going on with me, because it never occurred to me that I was doing problematic things. I thought I was doing everything right. I was cutting calories, exercising, all the things they touted.

I wasn’t eating and when I was, there was no nutrition in the foods I ate. I figured what I ate didn’t matter anyway as I was always feeling sick. I would try to eat normal foods and feel awful. I would eat sugary foods and feel awful, but at least I got the dopamine kick from it. My body was starving and my teenage brain didn’t see it. If I was going to eat calories, it was going to be something I liked, because calories = pounds. This way of eating trashed my metabolism. I will be lucky if I ever get it back.

My physical activity had started to drastically drop as I started getting sicker and sicker. I not only gained and lost large amounts of weight in short time periods, I was having stomach pain every month, and extreme fatigue, and headaches. I went from being a motivated student to not caring. I started losing my hair. I fell asleep in my history class…which was a huge no no for me. I had no self confidence. This continued for 3 years before it came to a head with my first migraine, and then peaked with me having to quit cosmetology school because I was too sick to continue.

I felt like trash.

I was starting to realize I had a problem, and I couldn’t continue to live my life that way. Somewhere along the lines, I ditched the scale. This was the first step I made in prioritizing how I felt over how I looked. This was a pivotal moment for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. Ditching the scale allowed me freedom to eat food without worrying about what the number was going to say the next day. I was finally starting to get some nutrition back in my body… even if it was a pittance.

I have not been able to keep the weight off since this time. My goal weight has always been a goal… and it might always be a goal. Even now as I sit here typing this, I struggle with that thought. It will always be a mental game for me, and though I have come to some conclusions as to why I struggle the way I do with weight loss – not having been able to achieve my weight loss goal after all this time hurts.

You can be strong and do hard things, even when you don’t see the results *you* want. They tell you to trust the process. So I’m going to tell you the same thing. Trust the process, just leave the expectations behind.