In the gym, there is often a focus on losing weight and reaching a specific weight goal in the pursuit of becoming healthier. It’s important to remember the scale doesn’t tell the whole story and bodyweight isn’t always reflective of a person’s health.
Below, Cheryl Van Haeren tells her own story about goal setting in the gym, and how sometimes gaining weight can lead to a happier, healthier body.
Cheryl's story:
I have spent the better half of my life chasing a weight goal and comparing myself to others.
To be honest, weighing myself has never been beneficial for me. If I weighed too much, I would tell myself I might as well eat a whole pizza! And if I was under in weight I thought to myself should celebrate with a pizza!
After cleaning out my library, I discovered over 20 different diet books all promising that I could hit some magical number on the scale. Only eat cabbage, a 1200-calorie diet, Paleo, Keto, tracking—all methods of torturing myself in order to seek approval from the scale.
Two years ago, I sat down with my Personal Trainer. I had worked with plenty of personal trainers before and I was prepared for the usual measuring, weighing, and ‘before’ photos that I had done in the past—but this trainer was different.
“You don’t need any of those things,” she said. “You have trained for a decade with the same goal and have never been happy. What if we tried a different goal?”
I didn’t understand her at first when she told me that the goal would be to feel confident in the gym, to feel like I belonged in a squat rack, and to focus on strength instead of inches. However, we started and the results came pouring in. My body felt tighter, stronger and leaner, and inches dropped. Despite these positive changes, I couldn’t overlook the fact that my weight climbed.
Mentally I went backwards a lot. “I keep gaining weight, we need to change the program, I need to be 123 lbs,” I’d say. But my Trainer persevered, so I persevered.
I realized the biggest change was not going to be in my body, but in my mindset. Could I love my body and how it looked even if it was 35 lbs heavier than the goal I had worked toward for 20 years? The mind shift took time. Retraining my brain to forget all that the media has told me for most of my life is not an overnight change.
My trainer introduced me to Olympic lifting, a sport I had never done before. Suddenly, I wasn’t going to the gym because I had to burn off the pizza I had eaten the day before. I was going because I wanted to work on my lifts, get stronger, improve my form and increase my numbers.
This mind shift also applied to my eating habits. I met and learned from powerful women who taught me to focus on what made my body feel good, and to delete my past habits of labeling ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, binge eating and restricting.
I am proud to say, this is the first year of my life that New Year’s Eve came and went, and I did not set a resolution based on my body weight. I set a resolution based on lifting weights. Not what the numbers said on the scale, but what the numbers said on the plates I was lifting.
