Q Hi Ruth, I'm in need of some advice and a serious wake-up call, as motivation meltdown has struck me badly. I read Run, Fat B!tch, Run in 2013 and couldn't believe the effect running had on my mind and body; it was unbelievable. Even though I've had to force myself to go out jogging on plenty of occasions, I really reaped the rewards, and felt great. But now, recently, I feel as if I'm coming to the realisation that no matter how much healthy eating or running I do, my body will still look horrible.
I've had two kids and with them came stretchmarks, flabby skin, the lot, and it feels as if all the exercising and healthy eating is in vain. It's making me feel crap, and lo and behold I'm sitting around eating crap. As a mother yourself, do you have any advice for me? Caitriona
A Hi Catriona, I’m right there with you: some days, I feel as though all this healthy eating and exercise malarkey is too much like hard work and I’d rather sit around feeling sorry for myself and eating crap.
But the problem is, when I do indulge in lounge-around-and-eat-crap mode, I really do start to feel crap too, because the crappy food somehow starts to eat away at my energy levels and then my motivation wanes. I become more tired and grumpy, more apathetic, more magnetised to that bum-shaped sofa dent until I start to think I may be glued to it permanently.
When we abandon our commitment to being healthy, we end up not just looking and feeling crappy (while of course stuffing our faces in a vain attempt to feel less so: surely the very definition of futility?), we wind up with a crappy attitude to ourselves.
And this is where you are: a low ebb, focused on those stretchmarks and flabby skin as though they are immovable barriers to your self-esteem; impossible defects that you cannot erase or turn around, no matter how hard you try. And along the way, those defects have become magnified in the absence of the key tools that diminish them: your regular running and healthy eating.
Mind and body
Remember how you felt about yourself, your body and your life when you were running and eating healthily? You do, because you express it so clearly in your letter: that the effects on your mind and body were unbelievable.
But it wasn’t easy and, as you identify, you forced yourself to do it.
Not just sometimes, but a hell of a lot of the time. Try to bring to mind how you felt after a run, and put yourself back in that place of positivity, energy and happiness, and acknowledge that it all began with stepping outside your front door in your trainers.
And that the reason you did it in the face of your excuses and objections – and kept on doing it – was because of how it made you feel afterwards and the injection of energy it gave you for the rest of your day.
What you might have been hoping – naively – is that somehow through regular exercise and healthy eating your body would be made perfect, and that media-dictated-stretchmark-free banging bikini body would be yours.
That there is an endgame, a result, a body to attain that will always seem to be just out of your reach.
And along the way you have forgotten what the magic of running is, how it really makes those stretchmarks and flabby skin vanish: it does this through the radical transformation in attitude it brings to your body, including a profound gratitude for all the hard work it is still able to do.
I’ve been at this running and healthy-eating game for the best part of 20 years. Does any of it impact on my stretchmarks and flabby-mother-of-twins-carried-to-term- with-combined-weight-of-13lbs-tummy? Not one bit, but it makes me care a lot less about them.
Stretchmarks are there for a reason: a badge of honour marking out those nine months of heavy load-bearing. They mark us out as mothers. Stretchmarks, I’m afraid, are ours for life, so we may as well make friends with them. Be proud about them even, we’ve earned them after all. As for the flabby skin? I’ve always been a big fan of Spanx, thanks.
Flabby skin
If you are really zealous about toning up flabby stomach skin, you can always get yourself to the gym for some targeted core strength training, high-intensity interval training, or just start doing some planks of your own at home to build strength into your core muscle groups. This will tighten loose skin, to an extent.
As for me? I shan't bother. I will just continue to run for all the mental strength it brings to my day and, with each mile, laugh a little louder about everything, including my mum tum. Ruth Field is the author of Run, Fat B!tch Run, Get Your Sh!t Together and Cut the Crap. The Grit Doctor's Summer Food and Fitness Plan is available on iti.ms/1H3sewR
