My wife talks a lot about fitness.
She has a whole awesome blog on it here …
I don't talk about it much, because …
I'm embarrassed.
I listen to trans-people every day
with far bigger problems than the ones I'm having.
I don't want to be a whiner, or to
feel like I'm complaining about the wrong things.
But after I broke down crying in the
gym last week, one of the things that really helped was reading a
trans-lady marathoner's blog post of how transition impacted her
fitness regime, so I guess I feel I ought to add my voice, if I can.
I'm looking at the race results of a
little local 5K I ran in April. The top 10 runners are all
male. The fastest man, beat the fastest woman by over 4 minutes (an
both beat me by over 14m). And in general, the males ran a lot
faster than the females. I haven't been to a local weightlifting
competition yet, and I can't find a posting of results. But suffice
it to say, again, the males lifted a lot more than the females. This
is not an anomaly.
Why?
Testosterone.
Testosterone gives people with
male-style hormone profiles a HUGE advantage over folks with more
female-style hormone profiles in the muscle building (and maintaining) category. And consequently in cardio-vascular endurance. And in
running speed. And in lifting. And in lots of physical athletics
issues. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of women who are
strong, fast, fit, skilled etc. Far fitter than me. I have run zero
marathons in my life. Like most things on gender there are two
largely overlapping bell curves, and hard work, or smart work, can
definitely effect where you are on them. But we very rarely have
females directly compete with males, because that turns out not to go
well for the women and girls. Unfortunately, when the “male” you are
competing against is your own self a few months ago … well that can
get tricky, psychologically...
A woman can lift weights and not need to worry about getting “bulky” because at female levels of
testosterone it is very hard to get bulky. You'll build muscle, get
fitter, get many health benefits, but you won't get “bulky”
(unless you are very specifically trying to get bulky and work your
ass off). But the down side is that if you are on a feminizing
hormone regime, you are going to slowly, steadily lose muscle for a
while, while your body is adjusting and that is going to have a lot
of effects.
I knew all this, intellectually,
before I started hormones. Frankly, several of the problems I'd
worried about with transition, when I started, haven't really
materialized. People have remained remarkably polite to me even
while I've been visibly in transition, for instance, which is not the
experience many trans people have. But I have been surprised how
much the slow steady declines in my speed, strength, and endurance
have ground me down. I think the issue is not the declines
themselves, there is a sense in which I don't really care how fast or
strong I am. I'm not really competitive, even at the local level.
Rather, my slow steady declines have messed with my motivations for
working out, and with the psychology segment of my fitness regime.
Ok background ...
I was a runner back in the day,
sorta, barely eeking out my High School letter in cross-country.
Running was a nice chance to think and be outdoors and push myself.
I was always running against myself. I knew I had no hope of really
competing against the other runners, but hey self-improvement was the
whole point any way, right? Mens sana in corpore sano, and all that,
right? When I was a professor, I walked several miles to and from
work each day. I'd organize my thoughts, have some alone time, but I
still got got a decent bit of exercise. But as a housewife, for the last several years, I rarely
exercised much at all. In 2013 I tried to get back into running, and
managed to jog occasionally, but irregularly and without any plan,
and it got pre-empted more and more as my schedule got crunched.
I decided 2014 was going to be
different. I asked for and got a new jogging jacket for my birthday
in Feb 2014, so I could start jogging early in the season and get
into good habits. I was actually kinda excited to get back into a
real regime. I had joined Fitocracy and interacted with people far
more serious than I, but also with regular Joes and Janes trying to
get back into fitness like myself. I saw a lot of motivational
memes. I exercised 3 hours a week mid Feb-May, and in June my wife
convinced me to start in the gym too. From June until now I
ran/walked 4 times a week for 45-60min in the park, and did 2
hour-longish sessions with weights at the YMCA. (OK the outdoor
stuff got cut for cold weather a lot in the winter). It was by far
the most exercise I'd had since high school. In several ways my diet
improved too, and it was already not too shabby. Like my wife, I
slowly steadily lost weight from Feb to August. I seem to have lost
fat. My times and lifts were slowly improving. I was enjoying it,
and optimistic. Things were looking up. I looked forward to working
out, and was pretty well motivated in my average non-athlete sorta
way.
 |
| Fairly typical Fitocracy motivational meme ... |
Then from late August until early Jan
2014 it all reversed. I slowly began to put back all my weight. I
put back on fat. My speeds slowed. My endurance declined. My
strength deteriorated. I got slowly steadily weaker and slower and
more ragged. Running and weightlifting became discouraging rather
than uplifting. The fight to get dinner made after I was done my
workouts became more and more awful. Pleasant exhaustion had been
replaced by simple dog-tiredness. It seemed like I was eating more
too. I was demoralized in the gym or park, and especially when I
faced the scale. I'd gotten two new high-end workout outfits as
gifts for Christmas from people who wanted to encourage me. I like
wearing those and they certainly gave me something to look forward to
in early Jan, but by mid Jan I was pretty down. Twice I gave up in
the middle of routines I'd been OK with a few months earlier. And
when a well-meaning gym patron tried to correct my form on a lift I'd
only done a couple times, and I couldn't understand what I was doing
wrong, I stiff upper-lipped it until she was gone, then went to a
corner and lost it crying.
What the fuck happened?
I was doing so well …
My wife is chugging along, diligently
making slow steady progress and I was too, until I wasn't and my
continuing diligence in the gym and park wasn't making any
difference.
Why was I bothering?
Why was I wasting my time with this
crap?
I'll never have a body like these
other folks in the gym … I can't even maintain the little progress
I made in 2014 … this is already the longest I've maintained a real
regime since high school ... give up … give up ...
* * *
So what happened? - Lots of
spironolactone (a testosterone-blocker), that's what happened.
I started HRT in April, and loved it
right from the first. My doc started me on low doses which helped my
dysphoria, but body changes were slower. He slowly upped the doses,
and my spiro dose went way up in late August. And that means my
testosterone went way down. My tests this month show I have on the
low side of female normal levels of testosterone now, although my
body is still adjusting. I like my breast growth. I like being on
HRT pretty much all the time, except that a little part of me is beginning to resent it when running or lifting. Like
many people, my appetite went up a bit, as my estrogen levels went
up. Not hugely but noticeably. (I've also totally craved and eaten a
LOT more pickles than ever before in my life, too, I don't know if
that's hormonal or not, not that pickles are high calorie). So I
have to fight against my appetite often now, to stay within my
macros, whereas before, my appetite rarely bade me to eat more than I
should. Similarly the estrogen/testosterone balance shifting
probably means my BMI is going up (I have a the calipers, but they're
actually pretty hard to get accurate readings with, at least for us,
similarly the online body fat estimator calculation results seem to
vary erratically from month to month for me). As I lose muscle and
gain fat my body spends fewer calories on daily activity apart from
workouts.
Continuing to work out regularly
probably IS good for me on many fronts, even during transition. Its
probably helping delay my pre-diabetes from converting to full blown
diabetes. Working out is probably slowing my muscle loss. I'd
probably gain even more weight, and lose even more endurance, if I
wasn't keeping up with my workouts. I know that intellectually.
But at the level of daily motivation …
I'm sure that part of what helps Robyn
keep being so awesome in the gym and at the table, is the regular
feedback of progress. We were taught, and agree, that you should
measure in lots of different ways, so we weigh ourselves a fair bit
(here's R's discussion of that), and measure our bodies with tape
measures once a month. And track our lifts and run times. That way
if you plateau for a while in one dimension, maybe you'll see
progress in a different dimension. If you don't make much progress
on weight this month, well, maybe you PRed on deadlifts, or your
waist improved a little, or … And as she agrees, one of the
psychologically transformative things about weightlifting for her,
has been that for the first time her mind is focused on being “more”(stronger), rather than being “less” (in weight) while working
out. And for her, like many women, that makes all the difference.
But notice the refrain, “progress”
“personal record” “competing against yourself” “being more”
…
For the last 6 months I've seen slow
steady regress, personal decline on almost all the metrics I'm
tracking, despite lots of diligent work. I just can't compete with myself from a few months ago.
When my wife has to try to decide whether or not to add 5lb to this
lift, or 10lb to that lift, I have to decide whether or not to go
down. And I resist going down, which means I get more and more
exhausted even with routines that I could do a month ago, and my form
gets more and more ragged …
Eventually, I will “bottom out,” my
body will be adjusted to having a female hormone profile and I'll
probably start making gains again. There are plenty of women with
comparable hormone profiles in far better shape than me. Then I can compete only against my own female-hormoned self, and try to ignore my PRs from the days of testosterone. If I can
stick with it that long. The trick is just finding ways to motivate
myself until then. It may well be another full year of no progress. As Dick Talens argues, even 2 months without perceived progress often causes someone to quit, if they don't already have a lot of faith in the process they are using.
The hard truth is that psychology is
one of the most important part of your fitness regime. Your diet and
exercise are not going to be good consistently or long-term without a
lot of psychological back up. And many, many things in our culture
undermine good psychology of fitness. I've seen many people
undermined on the diet and exercise front by stupid theories about how willpower works that our culture keeps trying to promote for
example. And like diet and exercise, your fitness psychology
strategies need to be tailored to you, there is no one-size-fits-all
psychology of fitness that is going to work well for everyone.
I don't really know how I am going to
craft a good psychological regime for fitness for myself yet. A lot
of the standard advice just doesn't seem to work for me, or to be
actively counter-productive. There are definitely things I like. My
body IS looking better. My fat is shifting in ways I like. It is
hard to know how much is the hormones and how much is the gym work.
And there aren't good metrics here. Similarly, maybe my gym work
means I'm losing less muscle than I otherwise would, but we don't
have good estimates for “normal” muscle loss during feminizing
transition, except that it definitely seems to happen, and
theoretically ought to happen. Again I don't know how to craft a
metric there. I don't know good ways to give myself little
psychological bennies for when I do well in the gym. It's hard even
to know what counts as doing well for me. Everyone ages, and learning
not to compete against your younger self is a lesson many folks have
to learn in their 40s. It's just usually not learning not compete
against yourself from a few months ago. I'm sure people on chemo, or
other extreme health interventions often face similar declines, but I
haven't talked with any to see how they coped with staying motivated
in the gym through those sorts of issues.
So I don't really have answers, and I
don't really want to whinge. But I want other folks going through
feminizing hormone transition to know that they aren't alone, if this
kind of thing is frustrating or demoralizing them too. It is
difficult to keep working hard long term with consistent negative
feedback. It just is.
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| Also, a fairly typical Fitocracy meme ... |
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