'Skinny Fat'

Just came back from my Tuesday morning workout. It was good! Got the heart pumping, the muscles burning, and now I'm ready to start my day. If you had told me even a year ago that I would be getting up before 6 am 4-5 mornings a week to work out, I would've said you were crazy! But here I am doing exactly that. I am also in the best shape of my life. Even my family is amazed.

I never really did a whole lot of working out in the past. I was blessed with a super fast metabolism and was painfully skinny as a kid (which I hated). But by the time high school rolled around, and then college, being skinny wasn't so bad, especially since I had developed nice curves in all of the right places. But this was something God blessed me with--I did nothing at all to work on keeping my figure, or even just excercising to stay healthy--I didn't have to, or so I thought. Then I had 3 kids and as the years went by I was still skinny, but not very toned. When my oldest was in high school she started running track and I started running too. I ran steadily for two years, but I never liked it, never ran enough to get that 'high' everyone talks about (does it even really exist or is it a myth!), and it made my knees hurt.


I had taken a year off from running for no real reason other than I didn't want to do it, when I started CrossFit. I really thought that I was going to be fine because I was thin and in relatively good shape, and I had lifted some with my husband at the local globo gym. My neighbors were both trying to lose weight, although they were both college athletes and I think they thought it wasn't going to be too hard for them either. Lol--we were delusional. One of my neighbors has excelled at CrossFit. She is amazing and kills the WODs and is super strong.  But it was still hard for her at first, and she excels mostly because of her mental toughness. My other neighbor stopped going after just a few classes--the lifting aggravated some issues she had with the veins in her legs and she ended up having to have vein surgery. I don't know if CrossFit was to blame, but I would highly recommend checking with your doctor to make sure you have the ok to start. I struggled and still struggle with everything. The cardio just killed me, I was weak, and I am not mentally tough. Even though I was skinny, I was totally out of shape--my muscles were non-existent, and even squatting was hard for me. One day in the beginning we were doing back squats and I thought, "oh, I've got this", because I had done these before with my husband. Wrong! My coach watched me do one and told me my knees were too far forward over my toes. A big no-no, because it places too much force on your knees and can really hurt them. I tried to put my knees back, but even with an empty 35 lb bar on my back I felt like I was going to fall backwards. My coach was perplexed, then told me I must have "dormant glutes", lol (what? I thought). My glutes had been inactive for so long that they didn't know how to fire properly and my quads were doing all of the work. So I was demoted to air squats for a long time until I could get my glutes to fire. I understood why, but it was humiliating. I thought I was fine, because I was thin, but I wasn't--I was weak, my muscles had been under-utilized for years and I couldn't even squat 35 lbs with proper form. I was 'skinny fat.'
Now, after a year of doing CrossFit, I am a lot stronger. I can back squat 90 lbs (with the proper form!) and my glutes are no longer dormant. Everything I do is easier--carrying in the groceries (especially the cat litter), working in the yard, even running. I'm doing CrossFit because I believe, as my first coach always said, that Fitness is Freedom.