After reading a similar blog post about bodies changing after sports, I wanted to share my personal experience. My whole life I have been involved in many sports. I started club soccer when I was 6 and played up until high school, while also playing a variety of sports alongside soccer. Then in high school I played a sport in the fall, winter, and spring alongside club volleyball outside of school. I was always seen as the “skinny” kid because I was constantly active. The biggest change for me was when Covid-19 hit and put a pause on all sports. Being left stationary at home with no sports was a huge change for me. I saw a huge change in my body, going from this “skinny” girl to a girl who was not as skinny. This created a huge hate in my body. I would try to skip meals and look up quick weight loss meals. I was one of the many people who tried doing Chloe Ting workouts from YouTube during Covid. If hating the way my body looked was not already detrimental to my mental health, when we were finally allowed back to sports, that’s when I realized there was more about me, I hated. Stepping back on the volleyball court for the first time and realizing I was not the same player was hard to come to terms with. For a while I blamed it on being “rusty” and “not in season”, but as time went on, I realized I would never play the same. There are still days that I get really self-conscious about my body but then I realize, I can’t have the body I had at 14 because I am maturing, and my body has these natural changes. Body image is a detrimental thing that a lot of people deal with, and everyone’s experience with it is different.
Unruly Bodies 
Listen, I feel THIS!!!!!!!!! I LITERALLY had the same feeling the other day. During covid I felt like I was going crazy because I couldn’t train or my team wasn’t training because of covid. I feel like the pandemic really made me start feeling older and my body changing. After the pandemic it took awhile to start getting the rhythm of exercising. So I totally feel you because it’s like, everything isn’t accessible because of the pandemic so I don’t believe either one of us is at fault because the pandemic made us stay indoors. I remember target and certain stores were running out of dumbbells and exercising equipment. Lovely/relatable post!
I’ve never been a sports person, but I also gained 30+ pounds during quarantine. I had just been getting back into weightlifting when everything shut down, and I felt that hit hard. Being unable to even comfortably go on daily walks anymore (because of the stay-in-place orders) really limited my movement, so it’s no wonder the “covid nineteen” existed for so many people.
I just listened to the “You’re Wrong About” podcast episode for obesity–it’s a really interesting dive into how our bodies work, and I actually feel a lot better about my new weight after listening to it.
It is hard not to look back at pictures of when I was 20 and think of how skinny I was, but I know that if I obsess over it, I’ll miss how beautiful I am now. The old ladies in my life were right, turns out, when they said that it’s a never ending cycle of self-hate; you will always wish you were “as skinny” as when you were X years old.