Meet Kelly
Registered Dietitian in CT
Certified Personal Trainer
Friend
“You should probably lose some weight to enhance your performance“
I was sitting in the room with my two coaches for my yearly ice hockey review and I was livid. I was a freshman in college at the time and I was extremely fed up with my hockey experience. After not receiving much playing time and no direction or support, I was mad and my fire was fueled even more when they both let me know that I should “probably lose some weight to enhance my performance” for hockey. During the meeting they gave me instructions to focus on playing hockey everyday, sprinting to increase speed, and lift weights to increase strength everyday during summer time to be ready for the start of the next season in September.
In that moment, the action plan of “losing weight“ hit me in the face like ton of bricks because I CARED SO DANG MUCH about hockey! I loved it! I wanted to perform better and after hearing that “losing weight” will do it, I decided to go for it. The funny thing is, I was never overweight. I just weighed more than the average woman for my height because of how much muscle I carried. However, this always messed with my head especially when I wasn’t hitting low numbers on the BMI chart or rinky dink body fat percent scale.
From that day on in 2015, nutrition and exercise spiraled into something extremely unhealthy for me and I struggled to turn that negativity around for years. That summer I was over exercising and under eating, which is the complete opposite of what you should do to “enhance your performance”. I was falling for all the diet and exercise myths and starving myself just to lose weight.
Unfortunately, my weight quickly became an obsession and turned into a case of orthorexia.
I was:
Cutting out “bad foods” from my diet
Avoiding social situations and showing high levels of stress where the food was unhealthy
Obsessively concerned about monitoring weight gain and entering all foods consumed onto myfitnesspal
I couldn’t stop myself from this obsession because I was tying my self worth to how thin I was. I felt like I wasn’t good enough if I gained weight. The reason no one helped or reached out to me is because I looked fine. I was never clinically or sub-clinically low enough in body weight.
However, I was certainly unhealthy.
My hair was thinning
I had extremely low energy and was “hangry”
Exercising was getting harder because I never took a rest day
Later on, I ended up finding out I had Hashimoto’s disease and the stress certainly didn’t help that condition either.
“I can’t sustain it anymore“
I couldn’t break the cycle until I realized that I was just TIRED of living like this! I was so hungry all the time, low energy and my lifting performance for powerlifting was just straight garbage. (I left those hockey coaches real quick LOL)
I was able to embrace macros and flexible dieting right when I felt this shift in my mindset which changed my outlook on my food choices. I realized I could eat whatever I wanted, I could strength train regularly, and achieve the body of my dreams!
In 2019, I decided I was going to gain weight because I was struggling big time with extreme hunger and not seeing any progress in my powerlifting performance. Over the past few years I ended up gaining 45lbs more than my lowest weight on the scale. I cried, I had breakdowns, I thought I was gaining body fat, but what I realized is that I was exactly where I was supposed to be— HEALTHY.
I got my menstrual cycle back, I was never constantly thinking about food, my muscles filled out, my recovery was fantastic, my hair got super thick and long, my energy and brain power was up and simply put… my quality of life was just AMAZING! Even with the weight gain, I lost body fat and gained muscle mass and felt better when I looked in the mirror. Now, I want the same for you.