My Relationship With My Body
Exercise, food, weight, appearance, and the ability to perform physically have been a big part of my life since I can remember. I can’t remember a single day that has gone by where I haven’t thought about how I look, feel, and am perceived by others. Somewhat of a blessing and a curse, I suppose… It’s just always been part of me.
To this day, when I get out of bed in the morning, the first thing I do is make a fake throwing motion to see how my arm feels (mind you, throwing a baseball has had no value to me in almost 15 years), followed by looking in the mirror and weighing myself.
So where did this all come from? A question perhaps better suited from a mental health professional, but I’ll give it a shot… I grew up in a household where physical fitness and athletic performance were front and center, my Father was a former athlete who worked in the fitness industry, beyond that effort and discipline were always held in the highest regard and in many ways, physical fitness was a proxy for those two aforementioned values. It was the type of household were it wasn’t acceptable to just watch TV or “hang out”, you always had to be doing something and for me that “something” was almost always training. I have vivid memories of watching my Father workout and thinking that I wanted to be just like him, he was my superhero!
I was a chubby little kid and rumor has it that almost every childhood video shows me eating ice cream, I’ve never watched them… potentially because I fear that the rumor is actually true. I certainly wasn’t the superhero that I wanted to be, far from it. By the time I was 8, I was working with a nutritionist and from the looks of the below photo, I can understand why my parents made the decision to send me to one!
Over the years, I shed most of the baby weight and throughout my teen and high school years, I was always in good shape — I really enjoy working out and started to take a lot of pride in the way I looked. I played football, hockey and baseball and while I trained, in part, to be a better athlete; it was always about more than just that.
In fact, I remember training in ways that I knew were not ideal for my given sports, just so I could improve the way I looked, which in turn improved the way I felt about myself. Being in good shape was my thing, or at least the persona I had developed for myself. I was the kid who would get to school early and train before classes started, I would carry a big jug of water around, in retrospect just another way to tell everybody who I was and what I was all about.
Throughout college and immediately thereafter, it was a lot of the same. As an athlete I considered training to be a part of my job, a job I loved. The persona I had created for myself in my teens became even more defined and not much changed.
After baseball was over for me, I continued to take care of my body and continued to take pride in the way I looked and performed. I always trained pretty hard, at least 5–6 times per week and I continued to love it. I loved being strong, there was something about being able to walk into most rooms and know that I was in better shape than anyone else. My physical presence continued to be a way for me to show the world that I was disciplined and that I worked hard.
In my late 20s I started committing to athletic endeavors from time to time to enable me to set my sights on something tangible; running a Boston Marathon, training for a professional MMA fight or a Wall St Decathlon, but like before the real pleasure for me was in looking good and how that made me feel.
When I was about 30, something changed. The persona that I put out into the world was no longer who I wanted to be. I had spent the first ~ 20 years of my life as an athlete and the first ~10 years of my professional career working in the fitness industry, all of a sudden I felt the need to transition from a “fitness” guy into something more. I started to realize that what people valued in others had changed to some extent, or at least my perception had change. No longer did I want to be the “fitness” guy and it even started to create a negative connotation in my mind, I started to see myself as a “meathead”, and felt as though my priorities were off. I wanted to change and that’s what I did. My focus shifted from my body, to my mind. I became obsessed. It became far more important to me to be smart, than physically fit. A large portion of the time I had previously spent working out was now spent reading, studying, trying to learn as much as I could.
Five years later — I’m thinking it’s time to reprioritize a few things. I want to be smart and I want to be healthy and I want to feel better about how I look. I have a funny feeling that the new persona I’m committing to will have a positive effect on a number of different aspects of my life. That said, I think I need some help and that’s why I’ve decided to work with a coach. I started Ladder because I’d seen, first hand, how impactful “coaching” has been for me and I wanted to make it accessible to everyone, in a way that actually made sense.
As of the writing of this post, I’m one week into my relationship with my new coach, Eric. I weighed in, this morning, at 231 pounds and my ideal weight is 205 pound. I’ll be back soon to let you know how things are going.
Brett Maloley / CEO @joinladder / b@joinladder.com
