Entries Tagged 'Fit Girl' ↓

I went see Catherine Gregory, the Mayan Massage therapist whose hands are featured on my dream board.

I had been preoccupied with my belly area. In 2012 I gained a shocking amount of weight. I broke my clavicle and could barely move, in fact, was instructed not to lift, push or pull anything over five pounds for two months. Pounds packed on so fast I couldn’t even believe it. Add to that the incredible stress of getting a divorce.

Stress is the number one fat producer in the country. Seriously, relaxed people can eat chocolate cake for breakfast, ice cream for dinner, pizza for lunch and drink beer in copious amounts and they would still be thin. Stress is a fat manufacturer. And where does stress fat end up?

The belly.

The belly is also the area of creativity. It is the womb area, the place where life literally manifests from the creation of pleasure (at least one orgasm occurs so someone is in pleasure). It is the place, also where food is digested, where we absorb nutrients and eliminate waste. If the belly is out of balance with fat, constipation or indigestion it’s a symptom that the Sacral Chakra is not in balance, that we are unable to digest the events of our life.

The womb is the center of a woman’s being, and it is often where women store emotional pain. Enter PMS, irregular or painful periods, pain during sex, fibroids and other pelvic issues.

Because I am a writer, this chakra is an essential part of my being. My stomach was full of knots, literal knots of tissue where it had been clenched for so long that the fascia was hardened. My stomach was distended and bloated. I was ashamed, embarrassed and self-conscious. And spending way to much time thinking about it, and negatively so.

What you focus on expands. Which means that the more frustrated and preoccupied I was with it, the bigger and more noticeable it got. Hating something brings more of it into your life.

The only solution is to love it away. So, while I didn’t embrace the idea of having a bulging belly, I do spend time massaging it with love and meditating health and vitality and light into the area.

Gregory gave me a seriously healing, releasing massage complete with intuitive visioning. She taught me how to self-administer belly massages for myself everyday. And I’ve been doing them. She also gave me health tips like stop taking progesterone and take Chaste Berry Tree tincture to support my natural hormone process.

I’m loath to admit it but since I took her challenge to go on a two-week gluten fast, my stomach is flattening. My ego got pretty defensive about the gluten bit because gluten is quite hard to avoid.

My stomach is being loved back to flat.

Try putting some love and light into an area of your body that you’re not as in love with as say, your breasts. My breasts are so amazing that I want to have sex with myself every time I look at them. Truth.

Tracee Sioux is an Authentic Power Life Coach, author of Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories; and she blogs at TheGirlRevolution.com. Contact her at traceesioux@gmail.com.

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Guest Post By Amanda Rose Adams

You Need a Bra! 

When Erin Frank spilled the beans about my surprise slumber party for my 9th birthday, all I could think about was how awesome it would be to have all those girls at my house. They rode home on the school bus with me. We danced to music, watched a movie on ye olde VCR, played games, ate popcorn and drank soda. A couple of the girls gave me stuffed animals. I was turning nine, and stuffed animals were entirely appropriate gifts. It was a great night. The next morning in my bedroom all the fun ended when one of the girls caught sight of my bare chest and squealed, “You need a BRA!” I was officially in puberty, something that actually started without my knowledge well before my ninth birthday.

I didn’t notice my developing breasts. Maybe it’s because my Buddha-shaped dad had man-breasts and my chubby little sister and chubby older brother each had fleshy little lumps on their chests too. Even though I was rail thin, I just didn’t notice my budding breasts. Maybe it was because I was freaking nine-years-old. I did notice the sprouting hairs that followed the proclamation of my third grade peers that I needed a bra. Eleven months later, the month before I turned ten, I went to the school toilet, and there was blood. Not a lot of blood, but blood. I was still nine years old. I was terrified.

Are You There God? I’d Like to Be Like Margaret.

Some of my classmates were in the bathroom when it happened, and of course I freaked out. They ran and told our teacher, Miss Omen. Miss Omen (that was her real name) had this terrible habit of turning from beet red to turnip purple when she was embarrassed or uncomfortable, and she was positively violet as she tried to rationalize the blood. Maybe it was poop on the toilet paper? Um . . . no.

Miss Omen had to tell my mother because God knew I wasn’t going to do it. My mother had never said a word to me about periods, ever. Honestly, had our class not gone to the Denver Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Life just a few months earlier and had a male classmate not asked the tour guide about girls’ periods (his parents were artist types) I wouldn’t have even known what menses was. After Jamie asked that very public question, I read “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret.” Being all of nine years old, I thought that if Margaret was worth writing a book about, then I should want to be like her. So, being a very good little Lutheran girl who went to a very tiny Lutheran school, I prayed and prayed for God to give me my period. God obliged.

I Do Need a Bra!

I had already spent the second half of fourth grade being tormented by eighth grade boys who wanted to know if I stuffed my bra. Despite my friends all declaring my need for the garment, my mom dismissed their grade-school wisdom and refused to buy me one. I got some hand-me-down training bras from a sympathetic neighbor girl, but I quickly outgrew them. My grandmother wanted to buy me a bra when I stayed with her over the summer between third and fourth grade, but I wanted pom-poms. I was nine; I wanted pom-poms.

My mother fought any notion that I needed bras as long as she could and only broke down and bought me one after her adult friends popped her delusional bubble. The subject of monthly blood was not something I could even imagine discussing with her.

Are You There God? I Take It Back! 

The day after my first period, which lasted less than an hour, my mother drove us all home from school and made me wait in the van while my brother and sisters went inside. With her back to me, from the driver’s seat she handed me back a grocery sack containing a box of maxi-pads. She told me I had to use those, and she also told me she was angry that she had to hear it from a teacher and how embarrassed she was. . . This didn’t exactly leave the door open for further conversation.

My period did not return the following month, April, when I turned ten. So, I thought that I had prayed it away just like I prayed it there in the first place. I possessed a great faith in the power of prayer given my success so far. I gave my mom back the pads and told her I didn’t need them. I feared everyone would think I was lying. Then, just in time for Track and Field day the first weekend in May, my period came back . . . for three whole days. I told no one; not my classmates, not my teacher, not my mom. I’d given away the pads and was too scared to ask for them back. I used toilet paper and lost my favorite polka dot panties as a casualty to unpreparedness. I prayed it away again, and low and behold the summer Olympics came and went and no period all summer.

I really thought I had a direct line with God. Then, I was sitting on the couch when I started feeling a sharp pain in my lower belly. I smelled this sickly unmistakeable Field Day smell, and bolted to the bathroom . . . it was back, and it didn’t come late, didn’t miss a date for the next eighteen years. From August 1984 to August 2002, I was as regular as an atomic clock.

A Period Worse than Labor

I told my babysitter to tell my mom. I couldn’t do it. I got the pads back, and quickly went through them. Once regular, my cycles were heavy, cramped and lasted an average of eight to twelve days at a time. I never talked to my mom about this. I didn’t know until I was an adult that twelve day periods were not normal. I would complain of cramps only to be told that my mother had had four children without medication and to stop my “belly-aching,” an expression she learned from her own mother. I never got so much as a Tylenol or a kind word even as I cramped so badly that I cried and once even vomited yellow bile. I spent hours in the bathtub refilling it with hot water and missed school. I missed trips to the mountains with my friend and a trip to Bear Country when staying with my Grandparents, but my mom always treated me like I was a big faker. She accused me of trying to get attention, when all I wanted was to hide.

I’ve since had two children, labored for fourteen hours with one before having an emergency c-section. I can honestly say that the menstrual cycles I had from age ten, intensifying around age eleven through sixteen, were more painful than the early hours of labor or the recovery from my second scheduled c-section. Yes, my pre-teen periods hurt more than my second c-section, that is until I put my adult self on the pill. Oh, glorious pill, how I love you and will honor you all the days of my life.

To be fair, that day in March of 1984, my mother (who had me, her second child, exactly one week after her nineteenth birthday) was only twenty-eight years old. I’m sure she didn’t imagine she’d have a nine year old who could get pregnant. I don’t even know what must have been going through her head, and while I suffered for her lack of skill, I cannot judge her for it. When I was twenty-eight, I was pregnant for the first time, not raising a child entering womanhood.

A Vulnerable Target

Yet, it felt like my parents punished me for my body, like it was something I could control. Certain items of clothing were taken away from me. Once my dad thought the shorts that my own mother had sewn for me were too short so he made me go change and bring them too him. Then he cut them to pieces with a knife. When I was ten, a thirteen year old boy asked me to go to the arcade at the Boys and Girls Club. My parents ran him off and then berated me for talking to him at all. I was forbidden to play outside until he moved away. He was really a nice little boy who was smaller than other boys his age. Knowing what I know now, I really think he just wanted to go play Pac Man with someone who was nice to him. Ironically, though my parents were suspicious of all little boys, they left me alone with a convicted felon whose wife was a friend of theirs. He took full advantage of my then sized C eleven-year-old breasts and rubbed himself against the small of my back until I locked myself away in a bathroom. I got in trouble for not helping clean up the cookie-baking rouse he’d used to get a very literal hold on me.

Of course I couldn’t tell my parents about that. I couldn’t even tell my mom I’d had my period, how could I explain the unexplainable. I spent the net few years being seen by strangers as much older than I was. I’d shot up to 5′ 2″ in fifth grade and immediately stopped growing. People always thought I was fourteen or sixteen when I wasn’t even out of elementary school. When these incidents happened my parents got angry and their anger seemed directed at me. They lacked the skills to deal with me changing shape so soon.

When the boy I liked most in the whole world ganged up on me with his older friend at the pool and put their fingers inside my swimsuit, inside my body, I did complain to my mother that they wouldn’t leave me alone. I didn’t tell her what they were doing, exactly when they dragged me under the water and pulled down the top of my swimsuit and reached up the bottom. But I wanted her to make them stop. Instead, she claimed I liked the attention and if I didn’t want them grabbing me to stay out of the pool. I stopped going in the water.

Still in the fifth grade, bleeding, budding, breaking down, an eighth grade girl terrorized me. One day she insisted that I prove I wasn’t stuffing my bra. I’d already been molested by a grown man, I wasn’t interested in pulling up my shirt in the library for the older girls to gawk. I refused, and I cried. Everyone in the school said I stuffed my bra, and the irony of ironies was that I wasn’t even wearing a bra that day. I only owned two at that time, and they were both dirty. If I wasn’t being accused of stuffing my bra, I was being called Dolly Parton. I was terrified of grown men, and I thought no boy would ever like me. It seemed everyone wanted to punish me for changing and all I wanted to do was disappear. I felt like a freak.

Body Shame

In my teen years I did disappear. I started harming myself with tweezers, gouging at my skin leaving deep scars and creeping scabs that I pulled off and watched bleed. The bleeding was how I dealt with my suicidal thoughts; it was how I stayed alive. It was a blood I could control. I gained a several pounds by tenth grade. I hid in bulky clothes so no one would see my hips or breasts. I hated my breasts. which were a D-cup by high school. My sister and I always had the cheapest $2.99 Wal-Mart bras with straps that came undone and my mom refused to believe me when I said they were too small because then I would need larger bras than her. I had many miserable walks to and from high school with the world’s worst bras and my melons for breasts, straps flying free beneath my bulky sweaters.

I learned early on to be ashamed of my body and what it did. I never talked about it. I learned early not to trust men or boys and I hid my body and covered my face with hair, hiding in the stairwell at lunch, hiding from living. I believed I was too ugly to be loved. I wanted a boyfriend who liked me, but I was terrified of boys. I was so embarrassed about my very being. Sometimes, I instinctively revert to those feelings of shame, so deeply ingrained was my loneliness and self hatred. It’s like a song you haven’t heard for years but still know by heart.

Evolved Parenting

Yet, I’m trying to take that basket of tangled memories and knit a new truth for my children. When my eight-year-old daughter or my nine-year-old son asks me questions, I tell the truth and invite more questions. I always use the words penis and vagina with both of my kids since potty training. I’ve told them that they can touch themselves but only in the privacy of their own room, but that no one else can touch them. I’ve preached that secrets are bad. I half fear and half long for my daughter’s coming of age. I fear it will come too soon and so soon like my own, so I have never bought or served hormone-treated meats or milk and seriously limit the kind of crap food that causes the obesity I fight myself. She takes gymnastics to stay active and healthy. I’ve done all I can in our environment to delay the inevitable, but I don’t control genetics. My little girl will be nine six months from today. Could she be the girl with the too-soon lumps? Will she bleed before she’s ten? I pray and pray and pray that she won’t be like me, but I’ve long given up faith that I hold sway over the higher powers.

Yet, my child runs around naked and shameless, something I could never do, and I would have it no other way. She knows more about health and the human body at eight than I did at twelve. I would never, ever leave her alone with a strange man. If a boy grabbed her body I would tear his head off. I would never blame her for what her body does. I leave plenty of room for conversation and no space for secrets. I hope and pray that when her time comes to bloom, that I will do everything for her that I wish had been done for me. I will do whatever I can so that she blooms beautiful and not broken, and maybe then I will bloom beautiful and become unbroken too.

Amanda Rose Adams is the author of Heart Warriors, A Family Faces Congenital Heart Disease, and has written for Scrubs, a nursing magazine, and the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Bioethics. Her publication history varies between poetry and science and she is eager to complete her next two books, one about adults who were born with heart defects and one about growing up in a trailer park while attending a parochial school. You can follow her on twitter @amandaroseadams or at her blog www.amandaroseadams.com/blog.

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This evening at 6 pm Mountain The Girl Revolution will be appearing on Holy Hormones Honey radio show on KRFC.

Holy Hormones host Leslie Botha is a hormone and menstrual health educator, author and radio show host. She is a leading expert on women’s hormone issues from first menses to menopause and everything in between.

We will be discussing my book Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories. We will also discuss ways to create a warm and loving environment for girls, welcoming first menses by creating ritual and celebration, marking this wonderful right of passage. Regardless of how old your daughter is when she experiences crossing over this first threshold of womanhood, mothers and fathers can create a positive experience for their daughters.

Listen up folks!

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So you know, I’m getting a divorce and my husband and I were living in the same house for four months during this proceeding, because basically he cut me off financially and we had not decided who would keep the house. He also cut me off my gym membership, the gym being a place I went for at least an hour daily to manage stress and be fit and healthy. It wasn’t very nice. But, hey we’re getting a divorce and lots of people think this gives you carte blanc to be a jerk.

As you can imagine this was very stressful for everyone. Me being me, I decided that I had been working out religiously for six years and was in pretty good shape. I thought my body would let me slide for a few months until I had my finances back together.

I was simultaneously having a difficult time buying supplements that help with weight, nothing weird, just fish oil and that type of thing. I also quit taking my bio-identical hormones, also an expense. Add to that I was having difficulty buying the fresh, healthy food I had a habit of eating.

Then I just started eating crap. Well, this giant bag of Doritos won’t hurt, or this giant bag of Robin Eggs, or this box of cheap Milk Duds. I was drinking a bottle of Brianna’s Asagio Caesar Dressing every week, it’s on fruits, veggies and nuts, so the calories don’t count I lied. I pounded calories like a drug.

There was a mass quantity of beer in the house every day, also a serious issue in my marriage, which I started consuming more than I wanted to, more than I should, which too makes a person bloated and fat.

Essentially, all of my habits went out the window. And it’s all the teeny, tiny, seemingly insignificant habits that keep a person healthy and fit, as opposed to flabby and tired.

And I was hard on myself. Giving myself shit the entire time. Stepping on the scale and making excuses, oh it’s only 5 pounds, I can still wear my jeans. Until I couldn’t. Then it was only one size, until those got too tight. I am now wearing sundresses everyday, not only because I love them, but also because I am not surrendering to the next size up in jeans.

“Give yourself a break Tracee, you’re going through a divorce,” I told myself over and over and over as a way of calming my anxiety and guilt and anger about my body’s refusal to forgive a few months of poor habits. “As long as you don’t start smoking again you’ll be doing great.” And I haven’t, started smoking again, of which I am very proud. This is the first personal crisis that I have not smoked my way through.

“Give yourself a break, Tracee, you’re going through a divorce.”

So I did. Give myself a break. 

I flew off a pink Barbie razor scooter and broke my clavicle fiercely. And took pain killers. And laid in pain, without any activity at all for two weeks. And my weight went all sorts of crazy, skyrocketing back to my post-Zack weight.

Suck. It’s so unfair that it took me six years of hard work and dedication to get fit, and only about five months to put everything back on. How is that fair? Why won’t my body just do what it used to do when I was in my teens and 20s?

Then the other day it occurred to me that in my 20s I didn’t eat food. I was poor, poor, poor. I would go the entire day without eating anything and then stop at whatever fast food restaurant was having a sale and eat a .99 burger. Or I would starve all day long and then eat yogurt or Raman for dinner. I was broke and needed to spend as little money as possible.

Then as I got richer, and was able to afford more food, I got bigger.

Maybe, just maybe, my natural weight is bigger than it was in my teens and 20s. Just maybe eating food, even healthy food, is going to make me a larger, healthier, fitter person. Certainly starving all day is not “health.”

I’m back on track and have lost about 10 pounds in a couple of weeks. Most of it was water weight, from pills and inertia. I am walking the dog an hour a day. I still can’t hit the gym for another month due to the clavicle. I started tracking calories to give myself a reality check on my consumption.

I’m also under less stress, though still grieving.

Now, I’m focusing on taking care of myself. And instead of instructing myself to “give myself a break,” I am simply telling myself, “I love you Tracee, I love you.”

My body is not going to let me slide. I just have to accept that. It just is. The other thing I have to accept is that 80% of it is food. I hate this. I love to exercise and I love to eat. But, again it just is. I have to forgive my body for this. 

I will love myself back to fitness, back to great health. With good food, good exercise, lots of rest and meditation and some joy mixed in. The difference this time is that I’m returning to habits I have already established. I already know it’s the tiny habits that make the difference longterm, not binging and dieting. Which makes it easier.

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Who knew there were loads of organizations with a focus on menstrual health? Not me. I’m not even sure that I knew “menstrual health” was a thing.

Since the New York Times story I’ve been contacted by several organizations which focus on menses.

I had a chance to speak to Dr. Greg Smith, director of education for You ARE Loved, a non-profit which is dedicated to educating people about Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS). The organization was started by a family who’s 20-year-old daughter, Amy, died after exhibiting flu-like symptoms. They didn’t connect her time-of-the-month to her symptoms soon enough.

TSS is the dreaded tampon disease. Actually, it’s the ingredient viscose rayon, which has all sorts of great uses but is evidently not meant to be put in your hooha, which is believed to cause toxic shock. The major tampon manufacturers — Playtex, Tampax, OB and Kotex – all use this ingredient, says Smith.

Alternatives to traditional tampons that You ARE Loved recommends include organic tampons from companies like Seventh Generation or Natracare and reusable products like Instead Soft Cups or Diva Cups and disposable and cloth pads.

The reusable cup is the part that I am interested in. I, personally, have not purchased a pad or tampon in about three years. I switched to the reusable silicone Diva Cup. It sounds gross because it’s new, but it’s actually far less icky than wearing a diaper, I mean pad, or pulling a bloody stick of cotton . . . you get the grody picture. It’s an option that I would love for my daughter to embrace for the simplicity, the affordability, the convenience and yes, the environment. But, how young is too young?

Smith, a dude who is spending his time educating women about their periods because “every significant female in my life has had menstrual issues from a very young age and I’ve learned more about it than anyone would ever want to,” says he is aware of children as young as seven using period cups exclusively, and girls as young as six using them periodically. SIX and SEVEN. Good Lord. I had assumed it would be too hard, but then I remembered that when no one told me how a tampon worked I wore the applicator too. Then jumped on a trampoline and . . . TMI. (I’m starting to feel like Edgar Allen Poe.)

Only Diva Cup (silicone), Keeper Cup (latex), Moon Cup (silicone) and Lunette Cup (silicone) have passed the voluntary testing the United States gov. recommends, notes Smith. Smith also pointed out that there are many cheaper knock-off cups now that reusable cups have gained popularity due to price, but their safety has not been tested.

Price? Let’s look at the math: you could buy tampons every month for the rest of your pre-menstrual life (some sexuality geeks actually did this math, I found it on Google) OR you could shell out $25 for a reusable cup.

Tampons – $3,072.30
Maxi Pads – $3,557.40
Cloth Pads – $200.05

So, like, who is so cheap that they would buy the $15 sub-par, untested-for-safety cup? We’re talking about your vag. people. It’s kinda important and has to last a lifetime. This is not a hard choice, at least not for me. Of course, I’ll give my daughter choices, but there’s no one stopping me from passing on “mother’s wisdom,” when explaining that tampon use carries the added risk of the “tampon disease” that could actually kill you.

These Lunettes are so cute I may spend another whopping $25 to get that orange one for myself when I go to buy one for my daughter.

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