Finding Johanna

On Sunday, I completed my second marathon. I finished this marathon with a slower pace than my first marathon, but I also finished this marathon a lot happier. In 2018 I started training for my second marathon and quit because I hated it. I thought I hated running, but I have come to realize I was really just struggling with my image. I came to believe that running was responsible for making my body smaller and to keep myself skinny I needed to run. I also started to believe that in order to be a real runner or feel like I was good enough I had to run at a certain pace. I put a lot of pressure on myself to PR marathon number two in 2018 and when I realized those paces were not coming it made me start negative self talk and the constant negativity around running wasn’t about the running it was about my thoughts. When I started working on accepting my body no matter what size I was and accepting my running no matter how slow I was, I found peace in the process of marathon training. I nev...

  I have been a fan of Kelly Roberts and following her for years now. Kelly is the amazing runner girl in new york, she is the creator of the badass lady gang and promotes running for all body sizes. She also started the #sportsbrasquad to encourage women to feel comfortable running in whatever they wanted to wear that they felt comfortable in regardless of how their body looked. ie: if you’re big but you don’t want to wear a shirt because it's August and 95 degrees on your run - then take your shirt off!!!    She has a podcast called “Run, Selfie, Repeat” and she talks about all kinds of running stuff and even has some episodes that are guided running intervals etc. In November she ran an 8 week series that was about ditching diet culture during the Holidays with her friend and dietitian Kayla Reynolds. I had already been on the anti diet path so I was stoked to see her talking about the subject. She enjoyed it and had more to say so now she and Kayla are running a new s...

  When I lost weight I got so much attention, praise and validation. People really treat you differently - it felt like the promise weight loss makes to everyone- your life feels so much happier and better! It really was for a while ... and then it wasn’t. It only lasts for so long and then it just becomes so much worse because now you have the huge pressure to maintain it and not be a failure. People tell you "you’re such a motivation" and "you're a real inspiration" and now you feel like you have to live up to other people’s expectations of that person. Society has completely bought into the idea that you’re a better person if you’re smaller. This is what most females learn and internalize. It has permeated our culture and it is something that most people have internalized and perpetuate either knowingly by actively participating in it or maybe subconsciously. The problem is I truly believed that, but then I was a smaller person and ... I was the same person. ...

I can be very type A - I often display perfectionist behaviors. I have spent most of my life trying to lose weight to gain praise, approval, and validation and achieve perfection.  We’re fed the image of the perfect woman and when we don’t match that (*spoiler alert: we never will) we feel completely inadequate. I engaged the type A perfectionist traits towards my food and fitness to control my life and ultimately the size of my body. I would obsess over making lists and meal prepping and having a certain goal of mileage to run for the week or amount of time I had to spend in the gym. I had to have a perfect plate and a perfect fitness routine.  The productivity narrative is really impossible to achieve. You don’t have to hustle for worthiness or complete a long to do list of shoulds to prove you’re  worthy. You don’t have to do more or be more you can just be! The constant to-do list that I had around my food and fitness all for the sake of weight-loss seemed to giv...

I finally realized that in order for me to fully recover my mental health I have to heal my relationship to food and admit that after a while I was suffering from Orthorexia and had seriously disordered eating and it was completely because of Whole30. Whole 30  is perpetuating the diet cycle and making people’s relationship with food worse. The way many people are using the program is just another excuse to yo-yo diet, binge eat, and it perpetuates the attachment of morality to food and continues the shame spiral. A lot of whole 30 marketing states that “it’s not a diet it’s a lifestyle change” and “it’s a 30 day elimination protocol and is not supposed to be done forever.” BUT the book specifically states that you can continue longer than the 30 days if your body needs more time in the elimination phase. It’s turning into a lifestyle change that people are trying to adhere to forever, doing Whole100’s, Whole365’s, or doing a Whole30 multiple times a year. I think I completed a Who...

WOMEN: We’ve learned  that our bodies are wrong and we should be constantly trying to change the way it looks. We’ve learned our body defines who we are and that thinness is the only way to be successful and desirable. We can only obtain happiness through the pursuit of thinness and the size our body determines our social currency.  Treat yourself with respect, kindness and compassion because dieting is actually disrespecting yourself with cruelty and mental abuse. By saying we cannot accept our bodies until we’re a certain weight or size - we are saying that we cannot be happy and we will never feel contentment with who we  are EVEN if we get to our ideal weight or size.  T he problem will never be how much you weigh and what your body size is -the problem will always be how we talk to ourselves and how we value our life based off of societies views of what we should look like. Society has really fucked women up because essentially it has taught us from a very you...

  There are things in your life that have purpose and value outside of your body. I don’t want to spend my life obsessing over how my body looks. I’m a good person I don’t have to qualify by being a certain size and I don’t owe anyone my thinness.   Body dissatisfaction and coping through righteous eating and creating a disordered eating mindset is directly linked to mental health issues. I didn’t know I had a problem until I recognized my mental state was so bad. I had severe anxiety and started to have depression symptoms. I was mentally exhausted hating myself and trying to find self love by eating perfectly and getting as thin as possible. Your body is the longest relationship you’ll ever have and it’s diet culture that makes you believe that at some point there’s this end where you just suddenly don’t have to take care of your body or have these conversations of dissatisfaction because you made it to a certain weight.  If you talk about hating your body what you’re r...