
Law Made me fat (and other lies I told myself)
I generally rock a mix between a dad bod and someone who has done too many curls. At times in my life I thought Law made me fat, but health and fitness, martial arts and beating yo-yo dieting, have played a massive part in helping me find my mojo, and it can help you as well.
You may have picked up on a core principle of Beyond Billables; the need for action. For me, that action has manifested in somehow becoming a Martial Artist. I say somehow because like going into “Big Law”, getting into recruitment, becoming a career manager, or starting a podcast, it was never a long-term personal goal. It is generally a surprise to most when I say I have spent the last 10 years doing a combination of kickboxing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. But I have and maybe my story can help you find something you can be passionate about as well, or reclaim something you’ve lost.
But what has this got to do with moving my life beyond billables?
The way I see it a lot of issues we think are about our work are actually just about how we are managing our life and about our own internal values. That’s not to say a lot of work places aren’t terrible and need changing (and I’ll write a lot on that in the future!), it’s just that I’ve found I had plenty of issues independent of the workplace to deal with as well. For me, waking up to the fact I needed to take care of my health as well as work hard was a big lesson. I’d ignored the “life” part of work / life balance, and was paying a price. Until I work up to that I blamed my work, as both a lawyer and as a recruiter. But really the problem started with me.
You see sometimes we find ourselves unhappy, unsatisfied and unfulfilled and need to take action to fix it. Sometimes we don’t know why we feel this way, and this was very much the case for me. To start to work it out though I knew deep down the best place to start has always been with better aligning what I do with what I truly want, and taking responsibility for how this will play out in life. That meant paying some hefty short term prices, it meant leaving bad environments and facing up to my self esteem issues, but it was crucial in clawing back the chance to do more of the the stuff I love.
The dark past
I used to look in the mirror and see someone fat and horrible, even when I wasn’t. I did that from my early teens until my early 30’s. It was debilitating, personal, and completely impossible to communicate. Then I had a conversation with my trainer (and future sensei) about getting off the rollercoaster and it changed everything.
Body image is something so personal that discussing it is always going to be controversial. One person’s idea of a positive body image is another person’s fat shaming. All I know is that I managed to single-handedly fat shame myself, without anyone else’s help, while never even being that overweight to start with. Through my training and a number of challenges, I was able to finally come to terms with the real me, the strong, lean, competent me who could do whatever I wanted physically.
Winding back the clock further, even as a chronic asthmatic I was a super active kid. No hospital bed or four nebulisers a day could hold me back from playing every sport under the sun and generally living the quintessential active kids existence. Cricket, rugby league and union, tennis, golf, surf lifesaving, basketball, swimming, touch football, soccer. You name it, I did it — generally in a massively mediocre fashion, but I was the kid who tried his guts out nonetheless. Not being blessed with anything particularly helpful in the sporting skills department didn’t seem to matter, I just loved the challenge of sport and it’s fair to say, before I started studying law, it was the one thing I could completely commit to.
So I loved to be active, but something went wrong along the way.
Confident? Me?
Now, most people who know me get the impression I’m a confident guy. Externally, maybe, internally, not so much sometimes. For me, the fat shaming started when I was about 13. Starting high school, I just happened to start growing out instead of growing up. You could say I was a “late bloomer”. I was also teased rather constantly about my “coke bottle” glasses, my weight and my size, and because I had been on TV in a few ads (I was an easy target!!). Or that’s what I thought it was about at the time. Putting aside a long future post about bullying, my reality is that I developed low body image through my teens and into my 20s.
Incredibly, I was never really that overweight, at any point, but I thought I was.
Law made me fat?
Even though I perceived myself as overweight, I really wasn’t. However, the reality started to catch up to my percapetion in law school!
Working 2 jobs, studying 5 subjects a semester and going out 2 nights a week resulted in me becoming less active and developing some amazingly bad eating habits. Dinner at my evening job (Blockbuster or the pizza restaurant!!) generally involved one of three takeaway options. Lunch was a few toasted sandwiches or a pie, and then I got to the weekend and “treated” myself… Factor in at least two $10 student drink cards (which would buy you 10 drinks!!), and suffice to say I had no idea about diet. I was also terribly spoilt and never had to do much cooking at home, nor any real shopping, so there was a pretty big disconnect for me around diet.
I started to pile on the kilos late in law school and when I started working as a graduate it all went downhill at a rapid rate.
4 biscuits (chocolate on Tuesday and Thursday!!) with my morning and afternoon coffee… Why not 5?! A burger or pizza for lunch? Yeah, sure. It was Poor Eating 101. Coupled with decreasing self-esteem from being so disconnected in practice and making no time to play sport, I put on about 8 kilos in 18 months. Law made me fat, I told myself.
The reality though was that I hadn’t taken any responsibility. I hadn’t changed my lifestyle, I hadn’t learned to be more disciplined, and I used a lot of things as excuses.
Getting off my “fat-coaster”
When I moved to Sydney, I decided I’d better get my weight under control and get active again. So I joined a gym, and at the end of the year, I started a food delivery service. Over the next 6 months, I dropped down a bit. I was still on the chubby side, but I was on my way and was learning a lot.
The thing I kept struggling with was yo-yo dieting and riding the fat-coaster every few months.
I’d lose 12 kilos, put it back on, loe 10 kilos put it back on, lose 8 kilos… You get the picture, right? See, even when I was riding high on the fat-coaster, I was still not happy with myself. There was still something missing. And then one morning my trainer and I had a little chat.
She asked me if I wanted to keep riding the roller coaster, for the rest of my life?
No one had really asked me that before. Did I want to keep thinking like this about myself for another 40, 50, 60 years? The reality of that struggle started to get through my thick skull. It was ok to ride the ups and downs for now, but forever?! So I said no. And I proceeded to train hard but didn’t really get off the rollercoaster. But I had my mind open to both the opportunity to get off, and the horror of staying on.
I ended up taking another few years to action my dismount from the fat-coaster. It happened in stages — I did a 30-day challenge with a group of awesome girls, and that was super empowering. I started to kickbox and then I started Jiu Jitsu and felt like I was physically quite capable. I picked up the running bug and did a few City to Surfs and a half marathon. And at some point, I stopped caring.
For me, the key was proving myself as physically able to do what I wanted to do, no matter my weight. It was breaking the bond of my perceptions that had held me back, which ultimately let me kill the fat guy in the mirror.
I realised this year, at my heaviest in 5 years, that I had actually jumped off at some point without even really knowing it. I guess it helps when weight is so handy in Jiu Jitsu but more than anything I just stopped caring so much and embraced the beauty of never getting back on that ride again.
Why is this important for moving beyond billables?
If you haven’t worked it out yet, we’re all about helping lawyers unlock time, get the freedom and feel worthy of doing more of the stuff they love. For many of us, our own personal issues can hold us back from doing that. While it is important to reflect, it is vital to start taking small actions if you want to make things better, feel more content, and have the relationship to work that you want. If that’s you, here are a couple of take home tips that can start the action process:
- If you cry inside at photos of yourself, it’s ok. You can make a change if you want to. Start something new, try different things, give yourself permission to learn and you’ll find what works.
- Go and do something you used to do before you started working and re-ignite a lost love.
- Try something really different. Go indoor rock climbing or commit to doing a fun run or go for a walk in the bush/ forest / along the beach with friends. I love to go for a swim in the surf… Whatever it is that makes you feel alive, let yourself do it and see how you feel again.
- Sign up for a food program, become a vegan or try going Paleo. Lots of diets work, give yourself 30 days and try it out. I’ve done everything except giving up sugar, and that’s on my list this year! Trying will make you feel more connected and help you learn. Maybe the first thing you do works, or maybe the 5th — just commit to giving it a crack.
- Stop eating all the chocolate biscuits at work!! Or maybe that was just me….
- Share your stories with others in the Beyond Billables Facebook Group. People need to hear them so they can feel like they too can do it.
Are you a lawyer feeling a little bit stuck in your career?
Check us out at www.beyondbillables.com