What the Fat?!??!: Does my physical therapist think I’m fat?
What is the difference between these two photos?
Okay — I am heel hooking with different legs. And I have slightly better flexibility with my right left (left photo) because my hip is more flexible, but my left leg (right photo — so confusing!) is actually stronger because , and if I let go of my leg that side would stay up longer.
But that’s not what I zoom in on. I much prefer the photo on the left side of the page because the photo on the right side shows off my baby fat.
I felt your eye roll through the internets.
That’s the thing, though — even when I’m at my thinnest, there are spots on my body that retain fat. 23andMe tells me that I’m likely to carry more weight than normal (thanks, genes!). The medicine fact sheets tell me that I’m likely to gain weight with the medication I take to manage my anxiety (thanks, SNRIs!). And even when I was at my skinniest in recent memory (6 years and 20 pounds lighter — I wasn’t eating or sleeping very much during my divorce, so I was skinny AF but not healthy), I still had my baby fat.
Do you have that pair of jeans like I do that fits completely differently depending on how your weight is fluctuating? I have some jeans that are a bit more forgiving (read: stretchy), but my favorite pair by J Brand is the perfect length but has less spandex in the blend.
So, these jeans. When I’m eating well and hydrated and not bloated, they are amazing. I was none of these three things a few weeks ago. I was finishing up some major work for The Company and it just wasn’t coming together the way I had hoped. I might have been both hitting the chocolate a little too much and not getting in a lot of steps and parking my butt in my chair instead of using my standing desk. Oh yeah — and this was after spending three weeks of four on the road.
And I made the mistake of wearing these jeans to physical therapy.
Let me back up for a second. Because you might have just thought, “Wait, physical therapy?”
Yes. Physical therapy. I’m in Year Four of the Make Sarah’s Life Great Again project (otherwise known as the Climb Back from the Anxiety Crash of 2014 — but I prefer the positive frame). I’ve had chronic headaches and neck pain for the last decade, and then recently injured my hip and lower back, which finally pushed me into physical therapy. To keep a long story short, I tweaked it doing barre wrong (see photo).
I went to physio with the intention to fix the hip and leave, but the experience was so great that I decided it might be worth spending time to rehab my neck and head. Maybe you love physio. I don’t. Until the current stint I hated it. I went once in high school (injured my back by lifting boxes like a noob), once in college (injured my knees and had to learn to run differently), and once about eight years ago for my jaw (who knew that I was opening my jaw wrong?!? I am not qualified to own a body!). None of these were pleasant experiences. I had snippy physical therapists — the jaw physical therapist actually berated me for things I wasn’t consciously doing!
But this experience was different. For starters, the practice, which has several offices in the greater Seattle area, was set up very differently. Instead of a shorter appointment or time with an assistant, patients get a full hour with a physical therapist — 30 minutes to focus on manual physical therapy, then 30 minutes to do strengthening exercises in “the gym.”
It’s pretty intense. And because the office always feels like a million degrees and I get hot and sweat so easily (thanks, Fetzima, for that fantastic side effect!) and my gym time always includes lifting weights I usually wear workout gear. But for some reason, I ended up at the office in my favorite J Brand jeans with a poochy belly and a shirt that, when lying on my side, was just a bit too short.
I’m not shy about my body. I’ve been getting regular massages for almost 12 years now, and I have no embarrassment getting on the table. And somewhere around thirty I stopped worrying about changing rooms or going to the no-clothing, all-female Korean spa for their amazing body scrubs.
But, ah! One more important detail — my physical therapist, Matt.
I consider him the me of physical therapists. He is obsessed with what he does and, even though he is young, he’s extremely competent and takes pride in his work. During my first appointment I asked what I thought was a simple question and I got a soliloquy about fascia. The guy reads medical journals “for fun.” A doctorate wasn’t enough, so he added a post-doc fellowship just to learn more stuff.
Oh yeah — and he’s won two NCAA national championships as a rower and turned down an opportunity to row at the Olympics to get his doctorate in physical therapy.
You’ve seen rowers, right? They are made of bone and muscle and nothing else.
Anyway. So I’m on my side on the table when I realize that I’ve made a horrible outfit mistake. And I realize what about to happen— he is going to start manipulating my shoulder to help increase the range of motion. He hooks his arm through mine and starts lifting my shoulder up and away from the rest of my body and I regret all of the extra chocolate (and tortilla chips) I ate in the last few weeks.
“It’s looking better,” he says, as he circles it around. “It’s gliding more smoothly, and the fat is lubricating the joint.”
Wait, what? Now I know I’m sweating. “The fat?” I ask. “What do you mean?” OHMYGOSHMYBACKFAT!!
“Oh,” he says. “Fat is goooood! Fat is so good for the body!” And as he commences a five-minute monologue about how fat helps joints I notice that my stomach is escaping my jeans a little more than I’d like and my t-shirt is a little too short and both of these mean I’m sweating a bit more. If I was going to wear jeans, why not the 7 for All Mankind Boyfriend Jeans? And why not one of those flowing (and forgiving) tops?
The fat monologue ended (summary — having fat is a good thing for your body) and we ended up in the gym where I sweated awkwardly and complained about the heat and then skipped back to the car and let myself cool off.
Why do you ever care? I asked myself. You’re not trying to impress your physical therapist!
But that’s sort of a lie because I look forward to the midpoint evaluations every eight weeks so I can showed “marked improvement” and get a good grade (last Wednesday I got an A- from Matt, which was probably an A, but he didn’t want to give me an A because “that might be demotivating,” which is funny because unless it was an A+ I would remain incredibly motivated. Future topic for blogging — my eternal struggle against perfectionism).
But he’s not grading you on fat — he’s helping you deal with chronic pain and be healthier.
But wouldn’t it be nice to be free of chronic pain and excess fat? I think it would! What sort of thing will get rid of baby fat and help my cervical spine gain mobility? Sign me up for that!
Just as I’ve learned that my anxiety is the new normal, I’m starting to accept that a bit of fat, whether actual fat or just a little bloat, is the new normal. I remember being horrified when I realized that cellulite was a thing and it wasn’t going to go away. And I assume I’ll continue to have these discoveries from time-to-time.
But for now? I’m trying to not care why my physical therapist thinks about my body type. For today, that’s enough to work on.
xo, Sarah
P.S. In the next episode of What the Fat?!??! I’ll talk about another big change I’ve made since my bodyfat scan, and that’s eating salads. And I’ll also talk about why I refuse to give up chocolate and a (very) occasional cupcake.
