Personal Trainers: this is why you shouldn't be afraid of weight gain

I use to be obsessed with overexercising and afraid of reducing exercise intensity and frequency because I was afraid of gaining weight. Lo and behold, during this time my hormones were a wreck!!!

When I speak to other fitness coaches who are just starting to learn about hormone balance and are coming back from a period od overexercising, the fear that I most commonly hear is…“I’m afriad to gain weight” if I stop exercising as often and as hard as I do.

My hope when all you personal trainers watch this video is that you trust your body and it’s capacity to find balance - and that you practicing this trust in your body will also help your clients too. This is my story of developing trust in my body and my body’s journey of finding balance and healing my hormones. 

My name is Omega, I am a former nationally ranked bikini competitor, exercise scientist, and founder of the Confident Menstrual Cycle Coaching Academy where I help personal trainers optimize and balance their own hormones and help them become confident doing the same for their clients. If continued education as confident menstrual cycle coach is something that you’re excited to do too, you can learn more here.

So I started training for my first figure competition when I was 18, then by the age of 19, I won 3rd place in the bikini category at nationals. 

If you’ve watched my video on my history of disordered eating you know that my desire to be in these competitions stemmed from an eating disorder. And if you’ve watched my other video on how fitness screwed my hormones, you know that my coach during the season of my life when I did compete was completely incompetent when it came to me losing my period.

I gained 30 pounds in 3 months after finishing my first round of bikini competitions. And I truly felt as if my body had betrayed me. But what was really happening is that my body was finding balance. Because here is what was happening - I was on a 1400 calorie diet and exercising intensely most every day without giving my body time to heal.

On a metaphysical level, I was being too masculine. I wasn’t resting enough and I certainly wasn’t nourishing properly. During this 5ish year period I never listening to my hunger cues - I ate when it was time to eat. I weighed all my food and I didn’t even enjoy food. I didn’t enjoy much of anything in life aside from being in the gym. 

So when that 30 pound weight gain happened, the pendulum was swinging…I went from being like 10% body fat to being much closer to 20%. I went hypothyroid during this time too. And I said this in another video and I’ll say it here too…I was normalizing around this time. My body was finding balance and it was on the way to finding a new set point.  In my experience what was happening with my body was finding balance…and weight gain was an inevitable part of my journey.

And this is how weight gain healed my menstrual cycle: Firstly, it slowed me the fuck down. And that in and of itself felt more feminine in hindsight. Gaining weight also helped me have a period again, so my natural hormones estrogen and progesterone were coming back online. And I’m a big believer of when hormones are in balance the body can find balance again.

So when I started exercising again, I wasn’t pushing it nearly as hard and I wasn’t restricting myself either. And what happened? I got to my “normal” weight again while doing the movement I love (working out) and having balance within my lifestyle. Weight gain healed my cycle because it was the first step in healing my cycle…

If I had stayed on the same path with working out and decided to lose weight by reverting back to exercising and restricting food, then I would have been looped back into the same unhealthy cycle. Since I decided to walk on the path of tapping into my feminine and prioritizing fitness activities that helped me find joy, like - long walks in nature with friends, waffles on a Saturday morning with my boyfriend and eating foods that made my body, mind and soul feel good…my body was able to feel literally SAFE.

I wasn’t having the constant rushes of cortisol because I had to do my workout, or because I couldn’t eat this food or that food. And when our body feels safe and cortisol is no longer running the show, our hormones can produce naturally. You see all female hormone production starts in the brain, at the top of the HPA axis. When the body is in fight or flight (when it feels unsafe) cortisol tells the body, “it’s not safe to reproduce” and it shuts down hormone production and menstruation.

But when the body feels safe, the HPA axis sends it chemical signals to the ovaries that tell the ovaries to mature an egg and ovulate. I think we live in a world that celebrates masculine work ethic and undervalues feminine aspects of life - rest, relax, restore and to joyful things simply for the purpose of feeding your own happiness. When we, as female personal trainers, go from a place of pushing our bodies to their limits to allowing our bodies to rest in the feminine, our body finds a new set point and we empower our clients to do the same, while becoming healthier.

My body found a happy medium, where no - you can’t really see my abs anymore, but I feel both voluptuous and lean and more importantly - I feel better in my body. My body feels healthy, my body has found hormonal balance and I listen deeper to my body and that has created a beautiful reciprocity between me and my body that my body actually gives back more. 

So if you are a personal trainer who feels like your hormones are wrecked and you’d like to find hormone balance and know how to optimize your hormones and be in a place where you can teach others too, consider applying for the Confident Menstrual Cycle Coaching Academy. It’s an invite-only program for personal trainers who are excited for continued education in hormone optimization.