Hey brothers and Sisters in Iron.
I want to talk about an uncomfortable topic that is very personal to a lot of us, Depression.
I'll start with my own story. About 3 years ago my life started to unravel in all areas. Personal, professional, financial, family and health, all started to suffer extremely at the same time. I think back and it all revolved around a rather nasty knee injury. I hurt my knee right after I placed top 5 in a physique competition and was training for the big boy NPC show that was coming up. I had to take a lot of time off from the gym during rehab. That's when it seemed like the wheels fell off.
Suddenly I seem to have no direction, no motivation, a shitty outlook on life and it was rubbing off on people around me. I started drinking more than I should have,(which for me is more than a couple drinks a week) put on a lot of weight and lost a ton of muscle. My friends stopped calling and my career tanked. I started having all these weird medical issues, being in the medical field I kinda didn't take them seriously. Lastly, everything I enjoyed in the past I absolutely hated, the gym being one of them.
I was almost resentful of working out, my life has always revolved around fitness. My mental health was terrible, I had zero hope, no optimism and made very poor decisions on almost everything Big or small. I just kept sinking deeper and deeper into depression. I would like to say that I recognized what was going on and I Did, but I didn't care.
One day I thought to myself that I need to get my shit together. I couldn't figure out where I went wrong until my girlfriend mentioned something to me about how I was when I was working out a lot. That's when a lightbulb went off. I thought back to all the really difficult times in my life and one common theme popped up. Everytime I was in a bad spot, I was not working out consistently. Which, makes perfect sence since I started working out to escape the hurt and frustration that built up from being the poor skinny kid from the country and being picked on for it.
What I did, I got my butt back in the gym and got back on a healthy diet. It was very hard at first. It was easier to eat junk food, watch TV and hide from the world. My right leg was half The size of my left leg, I had this weird foot ulcer that I was going to wound care to treat with no affect, I also had these weird skin lesions that were popping up all over my body. My chronic back injury was the worst it had ever been, thankfully I had discovered Kratom to combat that. There was also a time before I decided to make the change that a day didn't go by that I didn't contemplate killing myself. But once I got back into the gym and started making gains again, my life started to make gains as well.
My sleep and mental health were first to improve. I went from hardly sleeping to great nights of sleep. I went from multiple times a day of suicidal thoughts to once a day to once a week to basically not at all. My foot ulcer started to heal almost immediately and my skin lesions disappeared. My knee pain went from constant knife in the knee pain to mild soreness to nothing at all now. My right leg is also about the same size as my left. My Gut problems also improved, i would feel Gasy and would always feel miserable after I ate, to now I rarely have gas or GI discomfort. My confidence also came back dramatically. I recently saw a friend that I hadn't seen In over a year, before I got back on the horse. She told me I had my old glow about me. She remembers thinking that the last time she saw me that she thought I had pneumonia or something.
Now I know from my medical studies that exercise is the single most effective thing to combat depression and mental illness. But what you don't learn is how fucking hard it is when you just want to die to get into the gym and make those changes. This is very hard for me to talk about, I have wrote this post out 5-6 times now only to delete it each time. My hope is that maybe someone will read this or other here will share a story or experience that will help someone out there. Or maybe spur someone to talk or not feel like they are alone. I shamed myself for being a weak bitch for a large portion of that time. I didn't do a lot of things right at the time.
One thing I must stress, when I finally got my butt in the gym and going. I waited nearly a year to run a cycle again. I hadn't cycled in 3 years up to recently. I wanted to get my diet and training down and my mental capacity sharp. I didn't want AAS to be my crutch past unhealthy habits. I wanted to build my base physically and emotionally speaking first.
To be cont...
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