Ceejbot

I gots shoulders.

I’m not sure I had shoulders before. I definitely have shoulders now. And I don’t just mean “my shoulders are wider”, though they probably are visibly wider than they were. I mean that I, as a person with a body, am conscious of having shoulders in a way I’ve never been before.

There’s muscle in them. Bulk that I can feel moving. Muscles in my back, making me stand up straighter than I ever have before. Muscles I can flex as I sit here in my chair.

Muscles that are sore after yesterday’s kettlebell extravaganza.

Body image check time.

There’s been another drastic (well, drastic to me, anyway) shift in how my body looks. I doubled my weight loss, pretty much, in the months since I quit my job. I have much better control over what I eat now; no snacks and candy sitting everywhere. My only indulgence is the weekly dinner out with David, when I let myself eat too much sushi. And my body seems to have muscled up even more, so even though the weight isn’t gone, the composition has changed.

I was reading in the bath earlier today, and noticing that it took forever to fill the tub with hot water. (BPAL Gula bath oil, by the way. Yum.) And then when the tub was full, I was rattling around in it. I am smaller. There’s no overlooking it any more. I don’t think of myself as athletic but when I look down at my legs I have to reconsider that. They look so different from any way they’ve looked before in my life. Yeah, there’s pudge still, but there’s also muscle definition. Wild.

It’s taking a long time and it’s a lot of hard work. I enjoy the work, at least, and I really love how good I feel these days. I feel bouncy and energetic. I run up stairs like they’re not there. My posture is fabulous. But I guess it took me ten years to gain this weight, so it shouldn’t shock me if it takes five years to get it off again. This time I hope it comes off in a way that stays off.

Remind me to try climbing again this week. I think my toes can take it.

Black and blue.

I look like a disaster area today, thanks to:

• Poor form with kettlebell cleans. Bruises on shoulders and forearms. (Unlike most people, I have great form with snatches and horrible form with cleans.)

• Klutziness with other gym exercises. Today I was starting a Tabata interval with no weight on the leg press and got careless. I was shoving so hard and fast that the sledge was rising away from my feet, and then my feet slipped. Hello heavily bruised shins! My left shin has a nice knot on it now, about 2 hours later.

• Clumsiness when rock climbing. Heavy bruising on elbows and knees. I’ve been walking around for days with a bruise the size of Montana on my left elbow.

• Rock climbing in general. My fingers have calluses all over from gripping holds, and a really neat raw spot on my thumb from the rope when belaying. My palms have had rough spots for months from weightlifting.

The weird thing is that none of this bugs me. Mostly I don’t even remember whatever it was that caused any particular bruise. Though I’m going to remember the carelessness with the leg press sledge for a while. Ouch.

Other than smashing myself up, today’s workout was most notable for the usual kettlebell fun. Most fun single workout involved 12kg snatches, 3 - 6 - 9 reps, alternating arms. The hardest was a barbell lunge variant with a light barbell: swing the barbell around and to the side on the way down, then swing up as you rise so your arms are held straight in front of you at the top. This one slaughters me every time.

Muscle continues to disconcert.

I’m disconcerted by the upper-body muscle I seem to be developing. My shoulders feel like they’ve never felt before— there’s some bulk there. Crossfit hits the shoulders pretty hard, which means they develop fast. My biceps are even more present than they were the last time I mentioned this. And now forearm muscle is starting to emerge, visible because unlike with the rest of me, there’s not a lot of pudge on my forearms.

Secretly I think this is cool. I wish I were thinner already so that it wouldn’t be just more bulk on the body. (Though I am far more compact than I was when I started.) The net effect right now is maybe to make me even more intimidating than I was before by giving me the shoulders of a linebacker.

Exercise rocks.

I was thinking more about the reversal of the usual middle-aged body trends that I’m experiencing: yes, I’m now in my mid-forties, but my body is working better now than it has in the last decade. Regular exercise is why.

Regular exercise fucking rocks.

Look, I know that people have been telling you to exercise for ages. I know that they’ve been telling you to exercise to lose weight. Screw that motivation; it might happen or it might not. The reason you should exercise is that you will feel fantastic. Trufax.

Do your shoulders hurt? Do you get tension headaches? Do your wrists bug you after long sessions of crouching over a keyboard hacking? Get to the gym and do some back exercises and some ab exercises. Most of us programmers have no upper body strength whatsoever. We’re out of balance. My shoulders don’t bug me any more, and neither do my wrists. And my posture is now fabulous, but not because I tried to make it so. It’s just a cool side effect. Core body strength rocks.

Do you get winded walking up a few flights of stairs? Just one flight of stairs? Dude, don’t put up with that. You can fix that. One hour of moving around, three days a week. You don’t have to spend ages on boring treadmills, though hey, if you like that it’s a great way to get some reading done. This morning I ran up four flights of stairs and noticed at the top that I was breathing hard. Then I said, wait, I just ran up four flights of stairs without pausing. A year ago I would have taken the elevator because I knew I couldn’t have made it. Cardiovascular fitness rocks.

Do you have a hard time moving furniture or picking up heavy boxes? Here’s where the weight-training comes in. I love weight training. Oh man, do I love it. My body feels capable now. It feels like it can do things. I can pick things up. I can lift things up and hold them in place. My body works.

I think this is something that women might be surprised by. Men tend to assume they’ll have lots of strength to fling heavy boxes around just because they’re male. Women can have that confidence too, with a little bit of work. You don’t have to turn yourself into a bodybuilder. I sure don’t look like one.

I’m a fan of all this stuff.

I’ve finally started to lose weight after nearly a year of this. I had to switch to smaller jeans just a couple months in, but the scale didn’t budge. This isn’t unusual. Some people even see their weight go up. I put on a lot of muscle at the same time that I shed fat. So I was the same weight, but smaller. Now, finally, the weight is creeping down. I wish it were faster. Can’t lie. I hate being fat. But it’ll end soon.

Physical changes.

I have biceps. Okay, I’ve always had biceps, in the strict sense of “the muscles that contract to bend my arm.” But now I have biceps that visibly bulge when I do so. And there’s even more of that bulge thing when I flex. I’ve never had that before.

It’s disconcerting.

First, I’m a woman. Women don’t have the same experience with muscles and flexing and six-packs etc that men do. We’re not supposed to have visible muscles. Though athletes generally do, and honestly I think it looks great.

Second, I’m still not thin. This means I am built approximately like a small Italian peasant tank with these shoulders, biceps, forearms, and calf muscles of doom. If I were in a James Bond movie, I’d be the funny-looking woman with the spikes in her shoes.

Fat, forty, and funny-looking. I’ve been funny-looking all my life. Forty is something I’ll never get to be younger than again. But I can do something about the first one. So yay muscles!