Cheesy mirror selfie to celebrate the return of my calf muscles! 🙌 For almost a decade and a half I hated my calves. Back in high school – I must have been about 14 or 15 – I still remember being on the bleachers in assembly and overheard a boy behind me making fun of how massive my calf muscles were, sniggering with his popular mates about it in a voice audible enough that I knew it was intended for me to overhear.
This almost insignificant event that only happened over a couple of minutes gave me a complex about my calves – about my own body – that caused me to try and avoid wearing shorts, togs, above the knee skirts, anything that showed them off for many years afterwards. Perhaps I should have been more resilient as a teenager and brushed it off, but the fact is that throwaway comments have the potential to really cause damage when it comes to self body image. It changed the way I thought about my body. It changed the way I dressed. It changed me because for the first time I really started thinking about how others looked at my body. And this doesn’t just happen to teenagers.
I dipped in and out of being okay with this, but it wasn’t until I started rowing when I was 30 years old (almost 5 years AFTER I had started personal training) that I really started to appreciate my calves for what they could do and the strength they had, and with that came confidence in celebrating the way they looked. Then when I was flat on my back for almost 5 months in 2017 and they wasted away a lot, I MISSED them.
Moral of the story? There’s no need to pass comment on someone else’s body. You never know how it will be taken. And while we’re at it, lets teach this lesson to our kids as well 💖