Weight Gain, Periods, and 2020: Uncomfy Topics with Olivia

Trigger Warning: This post contains discussion of weight gain/body composition, eating disorders, and health for those with a menstrual cycle. If any of these topics are triggering to you, please feel free to move on and have a good day 🙂 I also want to put another disclaimer in that I am by no means a certified health professional. Please take everything I say with a grain of salt, as my experience and my experience only. That being said, I hope it can be supportive and helpful in some way 🙂

Hey guys! Hope everyone is staggering to the end of their semesters and their years with some amount of grace and joy in their hearts. I’m proud of everyone for even just being here to read this page – you are present, you are doing something, you are alive, you are loved, and that is enough 🙂

I’m gonna be honest – I’ve been procrastinating on this blog post for a hot second lol. You read the title, you know what it’s about. Not only is this stuff really freaking confusing mentally and hard to write about, it’s also confusing emotionally. There’s such stigma around both of these topics, but especially the topic of weight gain (and especially in the ballet world). I’ve pointed it out before, but I don’t think that I ever really realized just how much bias and hate I still had engrained in myself.  I think I’ve been waiting for this magical moment when I will separate myself from the confusing jumble of thoughts in my mind and be able to write definitively and elegantly about this situation, but if you’ve come looking for that, you are going to be sorely disappointed. However, I will say that I’ve come very far from where I was twelve months ago, and that is what I am here to discuss.

Hypothalamic Amenorrhea (HA), Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDS), and the Female Athlete Triad

This post is going to be a little overview of my year and an evaluation of the positives and negatives, mostly in the context of a condition that I have been struggling with called hypothalamic amenorrhea. Although this is a self-diagnosis, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that this is the problem that I had. Hypothalamic amenorrhea is the most common cause of a missing period for menstruators of the appropriate age. It is often spurred by chronic energy deficiency (eating less calories than are burned overall), but anything that can set your hormones off balance, from stress to intense exercise to random periods of “starvation”, even if you think your calorie intake is sufficient. Essentially, what happens is that your body gets spooked, unable to correct the disturbance, and starts shutting down the least essential functions in order to devote its energy to your survival. As reproduction is not nearly as important as, say, your heart or your brain function, it is the first to go, and many of your reproductive hormones are depleted. This can have dire consequences, especially for younger people, and especially for athletes. REDS, or Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, is a related condition of similar caliber, which is spurred by this caloric deficiency and can be diagnosed in both male and female athletes. For those with a uterus, though, the condition is slightly more concerning, as it can lead to a phenomenon often referred to as the female athlete triad. The three elements of this unfortunate “triad” are caloric deficiency, loss of menstrual function, and, the most alarming, a decrease in bone density, which is maintained by functioning hormones. For young adults, not having a menstrual cycle is very worrying for this reason – your bone density develops most during this time. Once you become older, it becomes harder and harder to gain bone density, and instead it is depleted. If you do not have a menstrual cycle, serious complications such as infertility and osteoporosis can be expected down the road. If you are interested in this topic, I’ve linked some resources in the bottom of this post that can get more in detail/explain it better than me.

January 2020

 To me, nothing felt wrong. Except it was. At 19 years old, I still had not gotten my period. Although I consistently ate enough calories on paper and thought myself to be “recovered” from an eating disorder, my mindset was still very skewed. Every day was a constant war with myself – am I allowed to eat this? What time of day am I going to eat? What am I going to eat tomorrow? How does my body look in the mirror today? What are going to be my food rules today? Etc, etc. I was constantly stressing over food choices and restricting my diet, even though I didn’t realize it. This is a pattern that has plagued me in different forms ever since that first brush with disordered eating, and still haunts me to this day.

Food and eating wasn’t my only issue, though. I literally checked every single hypothalamic amenorrhea box. I was constantly subjecting myself to intense exercise around the clock – ballet at school five days a week, open class on Saturdays, swimming on Sundays, a bout of jogging on the elliptical using the “weight loss” setting whenever I could get it in. The fact that I did cardio so much in my cross-training routine showed that my focus was less on strength and engaging/building the right muscles for ballet technique than it was simply on “slimming down”. As it turns out, cardio is the absolute worst thing you can do for your hormones – it stresses out your body by putting it in that “fight or flight” mode and is not recommended for those looking to restore balance in their endocrine system. It’s not even really recommended by most experts for sustainable and consistent weight-loss, but that’s nutrition nerd-y and off-topic. Constant intense exercise with no break, not even one day off during the week: box has been checked.

Then there’s the stress. Not much surprise there. University student with a full course load, wonky casting drama, challenging financial situation, family issues, apartment-hunting crises, slowly unfolding global pandemic jutting into my exciting travel plans, oh yeah, and a constant internal dialogue about food choices and body image: box has been annihilated.

I was the perfect case for HA, and I totally thought I was fine! I thought the daily, multiple times a day “body checking” behaviors I did in front of the mirror were perfectly normal. I though getting so freaking bloated every day due to the fact that my digestive system along with my reproductive system was not functioning as it should was normal too, if anything a punishment for eating too much as opposed to too little. I thought that having no curves to my figure of any sort was a blessing, one of the few things I had going for me in an art form that values pre-pubescent body types to a rather worrying degree. 

Early March

 After much procrastination and a little encouragement from my roomates and my doctor, I made an appointment with an OB-GYN at school to discuss the matter. She gave me a blood test and a pelvic ultrasound to rule out any other factors that may be causing the issue. She wanted to get me in for a bone density scan but – surprise! – the hospital closed down to unessential tests and appointments before that was able to occur. However, her prognosis was that I should try eating a little more, gaining a little weight, and see what happened, although she really didn’t give me much information about my condition at all and I was quite skeptical of her advice. I ate plenty! And didn’t she understand that I was a dancer? I can’t just go around gaining rapid weight – my teachers and classmates see me in a leotard every day! It would be embarrassing! They would notice! However, her second option, to put me on hormonal birth control, was not a path I was particularly interested in taking either. 

Mid-March (COVID ssn bby)

Flash forward literally one week – my how much can change in a week lol – and my classmates and teachers definitely would not be seeing me every day for a good long while (at least not in person). Still, I put the advice of the doctor on the backburner as I struggled to finish out my school year remotely and stay in shape to the best of my ability. 

Early May

However, once my zoom dance class were complete and I was staring at least four more months or quarantine in the face, my mindset started to shift. What could I be doing in these endless weeks to make this forced break more productive? How could I take this opportunity – where there were very few people in my social circle who consistently saw me in person from day to day – to do something for me, without the worry of what others would think? Although this pandemic is absolutely awful and its losses undeniable and heartbreaking, it suddenly seemed like the universe was pointing me in this direction. My best college friend and future roommate expressed concerns with a similar issue and suddenly regained her menstrual cycle after years without it. Another highschool friend of mine expressed her resolve to do the same to me over facetime. My favorite vegan YouTuber Amanda Sevilla, whose college vlogs I started watching during dark times with a sprained ankle four years ago and is now a registered dietician, also started documenting her journey to combat her own HA. She began something called “all in”, a proven strategy for hormone balancing coined by Doctor Nicola Rinaldi. It essentially involves a calorically dense diet and a halt to all strenuous physical activity (you can read more about it in Rinaldi’s book, “No Period Now What”). I was able to get a consultation from another favorite account of mine, @thisgirlaudra on instagram, that further clarified my issue for me in a personal sense. My estrogen reserves were depleted due to stress, periods of underfueling, and intense physical exercise with no rest. However, with a break, some good food, a positive mindset, and some dedication, it would be totally possible to make up for the deficit without the use of hormonal birth control, which tends to mask the issue rather than actually fix the root of the problem. 

Long story not-so-short, I decided to take a step back. I didn’t quite do every single thing detailed in Rinaldi’s “all-in” plan, but I resolved to limit my activity to walking and yoga, eat freely (whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and maybe a little more than I wanted), and try to use practices such as meditations and affirmations to change my mindset. I tried to devote time to other activities, such as journaling, drawing, reading, and struggling to play an instrument that I set down some time ago. At first it was kind of fun, but then it started getting frustrating and hard – I’m a workaholic and the endorphin rush of dance and exercise is kind of an escape for me. After about three weeks, I started doing some light virtual ballet classes again because I was going a little crazy without it, although I made sure they weren’t too intense and laid way off the cardio. I think those three weeks off were essential in order to jump start my progress – in that short amount of time, I begin seeing small signs that my body was starting to work again, from raised body temperature to better digestion to small development in my chest area (I don’t mean to be tmi but this is what you signed up for when you decided to read this LOL).

Late May

Another big stepping stone in my journey was when I decided to move from home to my apartment in Utah at the end of May. Although my parents knew what I was doing and supported me, they still made comments that were a little toxic and it was hard to be around them sometimes. Being with my roommates, who were nothing but supportive, was a breath of fresh air for me. My full-body length mirror was somehow lost by the university in the move, but I think that was a blessing in disguise, as I wasn’t constantly analyzing my body in it. I was also taking on a full course load of online summer classes and a virtual intensive that kept me very busy. 

It meant a lot that I could spend time with my friends, because I know that during this pandemic, a lot of people don’t get that opportunity. However, I think that overcoming food fears requires more than forcing yourself to eat a food – you have to actually enjoy it, and making an experience out of it by getting it with people you love can make all the difference.

That’s not to say I didn’t have my ups and downs. It was a scary and stressful road, and I didn’t know what was waiting for me on the other side. I really had no idea what I was doing, and to be honest I still don’t really know how it all worked. Hormones are such a strange and complex topic that vary vastly from person to person, and although I am very interested in them I can’t claim to know much about them at all. My sole intention wasn’t to gain weight, it was rather to balance out my body, but of course by nature of my process it happened anyway, with all its glory and stigma. Sometimes, I found myself scrolling through past pictures on my phone in utter despair, full of regret and longing for what used to be. Sometimes I looked at a picture of myself or the image of myself in the mirror and literally felt like crying. But thanks to determination, support, and a quarantine that kind of prevented me from doing anything otherwise, I stayed my course, and my reward came mid-july, right after a beautiful hike in the mountains.

Mid-July

I had my suspicions that night, but I didn’t actually believe them to be true until the next morning, when they really proved themselves, if yah know what I mean ;). It was literally like Christmas – all my work had paid off! I texted friends and family like I’d just gotten a job and they congratulated me as if I was the star of a movie or something. It was a really great moment 🙂

Present! 🙂

That wasn’t the end of it, though. Dr. Rinaldi suggests in her method to keep doing exactly what you are doing after the first cycle until three are complete, signifying that your body is back on track and knows exactly what it wants to do. I worried a little about this, as I was to return to in-person school at the end of August, and wasn’t sure how I would react to the increase in exercise and commitments. However, I am happy to say that I’ve had a consistent cycle every single month since then, even through a highly stressful COVID-influenced semester, a relatively intense rehearsal period for a show, and an exhausting schedule, and I’m so amazingly proud of myself 🙂

My Journey – Positives and Negatives

Of course, I can’t say all this and not address that touchy, uncomfy, stigmatized topic – my weight gain, especially in the context of being a ballet dancer. And, as I’d said before, I don’t pretend like I know all the answers or that I am some reigning expert on the topic that can wave a wand and make all complications and nuances go away. However, I feel that HA, REDS, or just general dysfunctional mindset or body image are issues that far too many dancers face, and I have a duty to at least try to reflect on my experience. 

When looking back and reevaluating my worries and fears about my weight gain as a dancer, I am realizing that they were kind of centered around two points: that my technique would change and that I would be judged by other people. That being said, the slightly more irrational fear of the latter FAR outweighed the slightly more rational fear of the former, and both were relatively unfounded in the long run.

I have discovered that returning to dance with a slightly different body has been challenging, but not discouragingly so. Combined with the fact that I mostly danced lightly or didn’t dance at all for the entire summer, I still can’t say truthfully that I’m fully back to where I used to be. However, as my teachers keep saying time and time again, this is has been a crazy semester, and I need to be easy on myself. I’ve adjusted as much as possible and made great improvements from where I began. Hopefully, with slightly longer and more consistent classes, I will only grow from here. Patience is key.

That being said, beginning of the semester had me FAR more afraid of one thing more than anything else: that people would notice, that they’d care, that they’d judge me. I’m not sure why I had such a blatant and terrifying fear of this. Maybe it came from years training at a school where it WAS pointed out when weight was gained and it was measured from year to year in the way that costumes fit. Maybe it was because I myself am subconsciously judgmental of other people’s bodies, and it mortifies me that people might me thinking similar thoughts about me. Maybe it was because dance culture is literally toxic and if I was in a different scenario weight gain might lead to far more dire consequences in terms of my career (even though this was definitely not the situation I was in). Whatever the reason, this fear is was unfounded and irrational. If people noticed, then they probably didn’t care, and if people cared, they obviously didn’t say anything about it to my face. Only an a**hole would do that. And if they said anything about it to other people? Well, if you can’t read somebody’s thoughts or hear them speak about it, then you shouldn’t care about it. I’m serious. It’s a waste of time and energy. You are worth far more to yourself than that. Furthermore, I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that if someone does go out and shame you to your face about it? That’s toxic and you shouldn’t be in that environment. Oop. Moving on.

Of course, there are the passive aggressive comments too, and the well-meaning ones that turn out to actually have a detrimental effect. I really didn’t get any of those either. My dad did tell me I looked “healthy”, which I’m sure he meant as a compliment without realizing that some people with disordered mindsets might straight-up interpret that  as “fat”. But, I was able to handle it without much difficulty.

Comparing those weak negatives with the positives of balancing my body, I’d definitely say that the positives win. The obvious and kind of the whole point: I have my period back. My body works properly. My bones aren’t deteriorating at a rapid and worrying pace. I can regulate my body temperature. I’m not bloated all the time. I have actual hunger cues that are actually real and that I am able to interpret. My body isn’t at such a low and unattainable weight that it doesn’t fluctuate every time I have and ice cream sundae. I have energy to actually focus on my technique in class rather than feeling like I’m grappling with fatigue and trying to hold on to my last brain cell. I have a sex drive. Yay.

I also have a change in mindset. Before, my mind was constantly thinking about food, my body, food, my body. I remember talking to my dad when we were on a walk at the beginning of this summer and suddenly having the realization that I don’t recall what my internal monologue was like before I got so hung up on food and exercise. Ever since that first brush with an eating disorder it’s been a constant cycle of planning and overthinking that I accepted it as normal. But talking to him about it, I realized that it wasn’t. He told me that I always had some story in my head when I was little- some character, some fantastical adventure. I realized that this was the reason I was initially drawn to ballet – the stories, the otherworldly, magical nature, not the fitness of the dancers or some unattainable body aesthetic. Now that I plan less, eat more intuitively, and use much less of my brainspace on food, I am realizing that young Olivia’s passion for a good story is returning. Sure, I pretty much use all that freed up brainspace to fangirl over YA fantasy novels now, but I’d much rather obsess and cry over Crooked Kingdom than a cookie, so I think we’re getting somewhere.

Therefore, no regrets. I’m living my best life. Taking on my demons one day at a time. There are good moments, and there are still really bad, awful moments, but I am just doing my best. We all are. A huge thank you to all who helped me along the way, knowingly and unknowingly. To the Hannah, the best most supportive roomie ever. To all the internet accounts that came at the exact right time to help me out (I’ll link them all down below). To the faculty at the U of U school of dance for being so understanding, caring, and nurturing (especially those who believed in me and casted me in pieces this year – it meant so so much to me to feel like a real dancer onstage again. I felt at times that I would never be one again). To the costume shop that crafted costumes that fit you despite how your body changed :). To every friend of mine that gave me love, congratulations, and encouragement. And to you, especially if you made it to the end of this longest post in the history of posts – you a real one lmao. 

So, in conclusion, if you’re still here reading this, I don’t have all the answers. I can’t tell you what you need to do. But if this year and this experience has taught me anything it is that you and your health are ALWAYS worth it, and you shouldn’t let ANYONE tell you otherwise. If you have any questions or just want to talk, my door is always open. These issues are common, and I want to do my best to be a support to anyone who is struggling with them, even if I haven’t completely conquered them myself.

One last thing and one last trigger warning, I included a few images for reference down below. I’m not sure how my body will change in the future, but I can keep you updated if it’s something you’re interested in. I also included a lot of the resources that helped me a ton on this journey – they are out there if you look!

Love, Light, and Health Always,

Olivia ❤

(Mirror Pic from November 2018 vs Mirror Pic from December 2020)

Resources that helped me personally (this is by no means exhaustive)

Instagram: @ausdancersoverseas, @thisgirlaudra, @amandavsevilla, @noperiodnowwhat, @tothepointenutrition

YouTube: Amanda V Sevilla, Stephanie Buttermore (she’s done an “all-in” journey that didn’t have to do with her menstrual cycle but she has amazing videos on body image, weight gain, etc)

Podcasts: This Girl Audra, In The Flow (run by an athlete who is passionate about combatting REDS)

Books: “No Period Now What” by Dr. Nicola J Rinaldi