About Us

Aanii/hello, I'm Sophie,
 

Something I share on the homepage and on the intro to the Musclebound Mama Podcast is that I have fallen victim to every trap of the diet industry. Sadly, that started at a very early age, like many of you, when society began dictating to me what women were supposed to look like. It wasn’t a message I wanted or needed, but it was one I got and one that we collectively receive daily from various sources, isn’t it? My experimentation with disordered eating began at 13, and the primary symptoms would vary depending on the volatility of my environment. In my early to mid-20s, that volatility would become critical, and so would my disordered eating. It became an eating disorder, and would be hospitalized to recover from purging-type anorexia. 

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Several years following my recovery, I became a mama. A few years after my daughter was born and I recovered from PPD (post-partum depression), I decided to start exercising to lose weight. I was quickly swept into the world of parasitic coaches and competitive bodybuilding, which I had convinced myself was a healthy choice. It was not. I stand firmly behind the position that it is competitive dieting. I was training 6 days a week, sometimes twice per day, often training through injuries. 

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Working hard in therapy, I was building resilience, self-worth, and self-esteem and transitioning to powerlifting, which focused on eating to perform rather than dieting. It was an extremely empowering transition. I was focused on getting stronger, increasing my calories, and getting rest. I spent several years successfully competing in the sport of powerlifting, setting and beating PRs, and achieving things I never imagined when I was in bodybuilding. It was during this time that I decided to expand my family, and we welcomed our youngest daughter a few months after my last powerlifting meet when I was 39. 

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My daughter’s birth was exactly what I wanted. It was midwife-attended and intervention-free, but that child came out of me like a rocket, and that took a toll on my 39-year-old body, though it was in the best condition of its life. I made several attempts to return to lifting but ultimately had to reconcile that the days of pulling 300lbs off the floor were behind me and find peace with it. Even women who are not athletes face this experience when they reach perimenopause, as I would just a few years later. It feels as though you wake up one day, and your body, from the neck down, is completely foreign to you. Your digestion has changed, your heart has palpitations, your temperature cannot regulate, your weight suddenly feels unmanageable, and so much more. The process of reconciliation feels unbearable because, as women, we were never taught to love or value ourselves - and frankly, no one was taught to value women or women’s experiences. See the problem? I do.

 

That’s why Musclebound Mama evolved. It used to be my Twitter handle from when I was a brand new consumer of the fat loss industry. Then, after falling into all the traps, I educated myself and built a better system. Today, I have educated myself again, this time with a BA Honours in Psychology and a *at the time of this writing, future* Masters in Counselling Psychology to help you navigate your relationship with food. Because, it has never *just* been about food.