When fitness becomes a “cris de couer” that says I want to live!

When we are young, we are hardly conscious of the delight of our bodies.  The natural strength, suppleness, tone.  Later, none of this comes naturally.  It has to be worked for.

We lose 10% of our muscle mass every decade after we turn 20.

Think about that.  The implications are stark.  To maintain the same body delight as we might have in our late teens, we have to work 10% harder to stay in the same place.  The same place.

The same goes for weight gain.  We will gain weight 10% faster if we allow our bodies to follow the natural cycle and become 10% less strong.

The implications?  You have to work harder and harder for what you took for granted.  In a way, I think this is a great metaphor for life.  For what it means to be an adult.  A grownup.  To be competent and capable.

But most of us let ourselves go.  We develop that middle-age midsection.  There are always excuses.  Being busy. Working too much.  The only legit one in my mind is motherhood.  But they all take us to the same place.  We begin to fall apart.

And that process of falling apart is a mark of a lack of self-respect, self-ownership, and discipline.  That may be harsh.  It is even more harsh to say it is lazy.  But when I consider myself, these are the feelings I would feel towards myself.

In other words, this exercise bunny turns to fitness out of self-respect.

What does being trans have to do with it?

One of the curious things about trans existence, and it must be universal, because it comes in the name—that is what trans means—is that we experience a mismatch between our physical body and our gender.  For those who don’t know cis-gender simply means, no disconnect, ie. the body and the gender are in alignment.

I have explored in many previous posts what it feels like to be transgender.  This time the focus is on the body and the importance it takes on.  I was blessed with androgynous looks.  I was gendered female as often as male through my teen years.  I was a model in New York and Milan until I was 22, featured in coveted editorial in The New York Times and on the pages of many magazines, but I mostly did shows, catwalk. [Funnily enough, I learned how to walk like a girl in heels, one foot in front of the other, on a line. I refused to walk like a boy.]  Neither of these two pay much by the way.  For a model to make it, you have to become the face of a brand.  It is advertising that pays.

That never really materialized for me.  I was too weird looking.  Too tall.  Too this.  Too that.   My hair colour was “wrong”. My cheek bones were too strong.  What makes you perfect for editorial, an iconic and unique look, is often what makes you ill-suited to advertising, to brands.

I didn’t really like modelling all that much.  But one thing that never happened to me and that I fully expected to happen to me was that no executive, photographer, designer, or other model ever once made inappropriate sexual contact or innuendo with me.  My mother abhorred that I was “working with gays”, not-so-secretly thought I was gay, brought up all the time how I had to watch out.  How they would take advantage of me. Thankfully I wasn’t living with her.

I had just enough money to scrape by an existence between New York and Milan, spent most of my time taking care of my skin and body, because it always needed to be perfect.  I was sent on “go-see’s” when you pop round a designer, brand, photographer and they take a look at you, take a look at your book, decide if they want to use you or not.  I was with two really fabulous agencies, one in NY and the other in Milan, and they had me scurrying around. The calls were relentless and always “how quickly can you get there?”

I also had time to look for a job or was able to make time.  My first real job materialized as a relationship blew up in my face.  I so often got lost in the women I dated, and she was such a seminal figure for me.  Her parents were psychoanalysts, and it was she and they who got me into deep psychoanalysis.  Therapy saved my life.  Twice.  Once at this juncture and the other a few years ago.

Both times were enormous upheaval: my relationship, my job, and my body.

I write about the modelling and my experiences as an androgyne because those two things saved my life.  That my body, especially my hips and waist, were girlish enough that I could just about imagine myself as I wished to be.  With a tape-based tuck (not recommended), and a pair of panties on, I could look down at my long, skinny legs, see no bulge, and just for a moment feel female.  It wasn’t quite enough, but it bought time.

I was also into extreme corseting at the time, and was all the way through to my marriage.  I was fond of tight lacing.  I often slept corseted even though it was insanely painful at times.  I was trying to crush my ribs, change my shape.  I don’t think I really did, and anyway, soft tissue just slides right back to where it belongs, but perhaps, over time, I did gently re-shape my ribcage.

I have two surgeries that I know I will still have.  One is to shave down my Adam’s apple.  The other is to have my ribs fractured and then body put into a corset for 2-3 months while it heals in a smaller, more hourglass way.  For those of you who have noted the pictures of me in diapers or a bikini that I have posted on this site, you might sensibly tell me that I don’t need to do something quite so extreme.  But I do.  Needs must.

There are many other operations that have been considered and then rejected.  But these are goers, and I can’t wait.

I do believe in the therapeutic potential of kink.  It is the strongest thing that draws me to it.  Ex-Mistress did me a solid one day when she forced me to look at my body in the mirror and to tell her what my body did for me.  She was quite forceful about it, and for the first time I acknowledged and articulated that my body had saved my life.  That is what this post is about.

All my time as a model, which was an incredibly difficult time for me to be me, was filled with the profound affirmation of being paid for what I looked like, of being told hundreds of times a day that I was beautiful.  I know that the popular narrative is that being a model is so self-destructive towards body image, and so on, but that was not my experience.  It affirmed me.

And back then I didn’t need to exercise to be lithe and lissom.  But my corporate years did something to me that turned me from an androgyne to a man.  And eventually, what became the life I have described on this blog, took over.  Before my gender dysphoria came back to crush me and to liberate me, I began to exercise.  At the time I did it because I felt that I would die if I didn’t.  This time it was from my punished schedule.

I was working as the CEO of a company in California and another in Germany.  I was commuting between the two.  I had to stay on 4 am wakeup time in California to be reasonably in sync with Germany.  And I was flying back and forth, two weeks in the US, two weeks in Europe.  It was physically punishing.

There was a real practical motive to taking up running.  But there was also the underlying issue of feeling that I wanted my body back.  At first, I just wore crappy men’s running gear.  But as increased the frequency and the distance, and my body came back to me, I began to buy women’s running clothes, and slowly, this became a new source of motive and pleasure.  

I lost my middle-aged male body, and became the slim that I wanted and needed, and began to feel at home in my skin again.  At peak fitness was when Ex-Mistress had this chat with me, and because my original motive in hiring her was to help me through the judicial use of corporal punishment, get this “she” inside of me to take over.

My exact words were, “I don’t know what it is that it is inside of me that has to come out, but I need it to be beaten out of me.”  And she obliged.  

The therapeutic power of kink.  

We never worked on “gender”.  I only began meeting her in skirts or similar towards the very end of our relationship, but she was a co-author along with me and my therapists, of getting me to come out, by sampling letting me be without judgement.

My gratitude for the part she played in that process will last forever.  Her replacement in my life picked up the baton and held me as female, seeing me as I needed to be seen, from the very first time we met.  My Queen was my first sister.

The exercise served a vital purpose.  In retrospect, from 2018 to 2024, I prepared my body for surgery.  I lost almost every ounce of body fat that I had.  And this is lucky, as it is fat that gives us gendered shape.  So when I went on hormones, my body began to put fat in female places.  There really was no male fat anymore, so my body settled into something which just felt really good.

I have continued to exercise and did so right up until the day before surgery, at roughly the same pace: 4 runs per week minimum of 10k.  Ballet 4 days each week.  Yoga once a week.  Floor exercises—booty and belly strength training 3 days each week.  One day off.  And in the final 3 months I hired a personal trainer who had me really focus on core and booty strength.

Through all of this, fitness was never the goal.  It was to be and feel as fit-female as possible.  To be skinny and toned.  To take my body back.

And it worked.  I am writing a book about the dietary aspects of healing from surgery, the parallels with pregnancy and birth are profound, and that shall be the topic of a future post, but here, exercise is what helped my body to heal quickly.  My surgeon said, “your scars look like someone who is one year out, not three months out.”  That’s why.

Once I had my operation, the importance of a fit body to keep me from killing myself was gone.  I didn’t need that crutch anymore.

But as I recover from surgery and gradually seek to regain my fitness, there is something else that has grown in to take its place.  It was as if I held my breath my whole life, and for the first time I can breathe.  I wished for a teen girl body for so long.  I missed a life in a real girl body.  But now that I have a female body in the ways which matter to me, have gravity defying boobs, and what is shaping up to be a porn-perfect vulva, I am motivated and exulting in the potential. 

Perhaps I have lived half my life.  I don’t look forward to being old, but I do want exercise to create space for me.  And I wish to push my body the greatest youthful feeling and structure I can possibly muster.  

And this is rippling through my life.  The motivation to work out, to exercise, to take care of myself, what I eat, how I live (and this includes giving up alcohol—not completely, but pretty much meaning just not drinking anymore.  It also means giving up any form of added sugar).  I want to live for as long as possible.  I want to celebrate my body.  I want to give her a complete life, a chance to shine.  I just want to live.

For someone who lived without touch when touch was my primary love language, lived without acceptance of my body, it is impossible to understate how important it has become to treat my body as a temple.

To be in my own body as if I am in the presence of the Goddess.