Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “The resistance that you fight physically in the gym and the resistance that you fight in life can only build a strong character.” I wish I’d understood what he meant thirty years ago. Would have saved me a lot of miles and a broken metabolism.
The gym terrifies most people. Bright lights, mirrors everywhere, that paranoid feeling that everyone’s watching you struggle with a machine you can’t figure out. Spoiler alert: nobody’s watching. They’re all too busy staring at themselves or wondering if they’re doing it right too.
For me, the gym wasn’t the scary part. Exercise was my thing. I ran miles and miles, endless pavement pounding that started when I lost my grandmother at seventeen. Back then, we didn’t have phones to scroll through when life got hard. Counseling wasn’t really encouraged either. The message was simple: get over it.
So I ran. And ran. And kept running until it became more than grief management. It became an identity.
When Your Coping Mechanism Becomes Your Prison
Two marathons. Six half marathons. Countless other races. I was that person who always had a race bib pinned to something. Running saved me in a lot of ways, but it also taught me some dangerous lessons about my body.
Growing up in the nineties and early 2000s meant absorbing some truly terrible fitness advice. The formula was simple: endless cardio plus as little food as possible equals fitness. The waif look was in. Heroin chic, not healthy. As a former chubby teen, I noticed that losing weight got me attention. In my adolescent brain, that was validation enough.
What I didn’t realize was that I was building a mindset based on restriction, not resilience. And that mindset would haunt me for decades.
Fast forward thirty years. Add multiple pregnancies, jobs, college, and all the beautiful chaos that comes with lifestyle on an acreage. The weight doesn’t just slide off anymore. Each pregnancy left behind a few pounds that refused to budge, like unwelcome houseguests who won’t take the hint.
Years of undereating and overtraining had destroyed my metabolism. I don’t mean too few calories necessarily. I mean garbage food choices. Lots of carbs, not enough fat or protein. I genuinely thought bread and Diet Coke could sustain me as a young woman. Spoiler: they could not.
The Body Keeps Score
Then life threw some real curveballs. A nine-month battle with histoplasmosis that made just existing feel exhausting. Then an ankle fracture, probably not from the horse that bucked me off but from years of undernourishment and stress on my body that had weakened my bones.
The ankle kept me sidelined for months, right over the holidays. Christmas cookies on the couch became my new workout routine. And just when I thought I was recovering, I had a thyroidectomy last year after a thyroid cancer diagnosis.
No wonder my body was confused and angry. I’d spent decades punishing it with restriction and excessive cardio, then wondered why it wouldn’t cooperate anymore.
Through it all, I tried to stay active. But often it was just going through the motions. I’d watch influencers doing light weights and high reps to “tone” and fell right into that trap. Lies. All lies. You can’t tone what isn’t there.
The running that once saved me became something I dreaded. It’s hard to find joy in running when your ankle won’t bend properly and your body feels like it’s actively fighting against you. I had always been able to run off extra pounds. That trick stopped working somewhere around pregnancy number three.
The Gym Bros Were Right (I Hate Admitting This)
Eventually I hit a breaking point. My husband had been lifting weights and eating high protein for years. And guess what? He wasn’t struggling. Granted, he didn’t experience four pregnancies, lucky bastard. But it got me thinking.
Maybe what I’d been missing wasn’t motivation. It was muscle. Actual muscle, not the fake kind you supposedly get from pink five-pound dumbbells.
So I humbled myself, did the research, and realized I had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about fitness. The truth hurt: lifting heavy doesn’t make you bulky. The “bulk” most of us fear is fat covering underdeveloped muscle. Building strength builds shape, confidence, and power. Not size.
How did I miss this for so long? And why was I fed these lies for years? Maybe not lies, just misinformation. But I’m a nurse. If I couldn’t figure it out with my medical background, how are regular patients supposed to understand the science of body composition?
Walking into the gym again felt awkward even when I knew the exercises. That little voice whispered, “Maybe you don’t actually know what you’re doing.” I had to tell her to shut up. After a few sessions, my body remembered what it could do.
But the hardest part wasn’t the workouts. It was my mindset.
Unlearning Thirty Years of Diet Culture
For three decades, I believed I had to be smaller. Now I was learning to be stronger. That shift was not easy. Eating to build muscle felt wrong at first. After decades of restriction, accepting that food is your friend requires reprogramming your entire brain.
Real food, not diet soda and low-fat everything. Actual protein, healthy fats, complex carbs. To gain muscle, you must fuel your body. You must trust the process and let go of the fear of the scale.
Some days I nail it. Other days I fall short. But the difference now is grace. Growth takes time, and strength is built one rep and one meal at a time. This is frustrating when we’re all promised we can be shredded in twenty-one days by some influencer selling a business model disguised as a workout plan.
Now lifting heavy things makes me feel powerful, not punished. It’s not about chasing a number on the scale or fitting into my twenty-year-old jeans. Those jeans were from a different person anyway. It’s about showing up for myself and proving I can do hard things.
What Nobody Tells You About Getting Stronger
The gym has become a good place for me. A place of peace, motivation, and escape. Kind of like running used to be, except now I’m building my body instead of tearing it down. This means I feel better mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s all connected in ways I didn’t understand before.
I’m thankful I tried something different. Thankful I was humble enough to admit I didn’t know everything about health and fitness despite decades of doing it wrong with confidence.
Because Arnold was right. The same resistance that tests you also transforms you. And sometimes that transformation begins the moment you decide to pick up the weight, both literally and metaphorically, and refuse to put it down.