Singapore #Fitspo of the Week: Meghana Sridhar

Life goes beyond the digits on the scale and your body is capable of so much more! Yahoo’s #Fitspo of the Week series is dedicated to inspirational men and women in Singapore leading healthy and active lifestyles. Have someone to recommend? Hit Cheryl up on Instagram or Facebook!

Name: Meghana Sridhar (@megsridhar7)

Age: 31

Height: 1.68m

Weight: Carried enough weight of the world!

Occupation: Legal Investigations Manager at Meta

Status: Married

Food: Ovo-vegetarian

Exercise: I strength train five times a week and ensure I get recovery time and stretches over the weekend to help ease my muscles. I try to book myself in for a sports massage at least once a month to get relief and relaxation from spurts of intense workouts.

Q: When you were younger, were you active in sports?

A: I was a very active, skinny and sporty kid. My favourite day of the year in school used to be Sports Day. I loved being in the sun, hearing cheers, sweating and beating the boys in running race. I participated and represented my high school in athletics as a 100m sprinter, but did not pursue it further.

I loved dancing too and took that up all through my university years with Shiamak Davar’s Institute of Performing Arts. In parallel, I took up fashion modelling as a hobby. I lived a very busy double-life between studies and photoshoots, which entailed a hectic, active lifestyle in general.

Fitness only really became a thing for you during the pandemic. What made you pick up an active lifestyle then?

Building a consistent routine, workout routine and educated eating became a thing of my lifestyle during the pandemic. As someone who’s high energy, extroverted and active, everything shutting down and being locked up in the constraints of our homes was a nightmare, similar to how many others in the world felt.

I needed something to channel my frustrations, boredom, lack of social stimuli and extra time on. That’s when I decided that I wanted to give fitness as a sport, a shot. However, commercial gyms, hiking trails, parks, classes – all of these were fully shut for over a year in Singapore. But condominium gyms and online coaches still kept going. I decided to really go for it this time, and just use what I had.

I came across my virtual coach (@sheenafit) on Instagram and learnt amply about strength and weight training for women through her posts. Also, the myth busting education around fast and fad diets were eye-openers. She was one of the very few people, even to date, in the Indian and Asian context who coaches and talks about weight and muscle gain for women, instead of obsessing over weight and fat loss.

I signed up without an idea of what to expect, but I did have one goal: I wanted to change the way I felt in my body and get to a place mentally to feel at ease and peace with the way I fully looked without external validation. Ironically, the world around me said I’m skinny and lean, and that I’m so lucky to not have visible body fat! And that I looked great in all kinds of clothes and girls were envious of my body type.

On the inside, I felt the opposite. Physiologically, I felt weak and dependent on my partner for the most basic activities like carrying 10kg grocery bags for 200 metres and could not keep up on hikes with him, which affected my silent-competitive confidence. I needed a challenge, I needed time, I needed focus, I needed something to bring discipline into my life, I needed to call something my own and needed a push. The pandemic was it.

I embarked on the solo journey, with a phone, where my virtual coach lived. Ever since, there has been no looking back. It has felt like the caterpillar evolved into a more confident butterfly with biceps.

You used to do modelling for extra pocket money when you were studying. Did that have any impact on how you viewed your body?

Not at first, but I would understand how it did affect me much later. I understood the real impact of what the modelling industry standards for girls had done to my mind and discovered my inner feelings and insecurities that had built up over the years, while unpacking my feelings in a therapy session (again during the pandemic).

The way I saw myself and the way others expected me to look even after I gave my modelling career a pause; the way I compared myself to every other girl whom I thought looked better than me; and the years of pent up Indian societal toxicity that expects girls and women to be a certain way based on the archaic patriarchal culture, and brings women down by drawing comparisons, impacted me in more way than anyone other than my partner and best friend know. And now you do!

You took part in Miss India too!

I did take part in the Miss India South Zone pageant, the winners of which make it to the national pageant, in 2009 in Bangalore. The experience was simple and humbling - they expected smarts, strong command over the English language, a “model-esque body”, and for me to show up in a basic tee and denims. Which I did and impressed. This not only gave me a lot of confidence as a 17-year-old because of the glamour involved, but also because I went up in a public forum larger than I’d ever experienced and answered questions in a very smart and witty way, which made me feel so good about myself on the inside, not only on the outside.

After all of this was the swimwear round. As a girl brought up in a humble, then-middle class family focused solely on academics and merit, yet being the daughter of a rebel in the family who let me get into the modelling industry, I hadn’t even owned a bikini up to that point; forget wearing one and flaunting it on stage.

When I did, and I remember it like yesterday, it was the most vulnerable I felt in my life, yet I walked the ramp like I deserved to be on the cover of a swimwear magazine. After the round, when the results came out for the top three to be selected for the national pageant, my name was out of the list, and that’s where my Miss India journey ended.

What did that teach me? The 17-year-old, confident, fierce Meg thought it’s their loss (hah!) and bagged her next modelling gig two days after, but the 29-year-old Meg during the pandemic, in multiple therapy sessions, uncovered the impact that experience left me. I uncovered how I viewed my self-worth because of someone’s assessment of me not being worthy of competing for that crown.

What are your fitness goals now?

To continue being vegetarian yet hit my protein goals like a boss; to progressively lift weights heavier than I have so far; to improve my technique (it’s a sport after all); to continue to do full-range pull ups which is more about the empowerment I feel rather than anything else (so much so that a PT in the gym once used me as a benchmark for a client he was training); to encourage and inspire other women to strength train and be confident not just as meat to the eyes, but also in muscle and substance; to keep up with my partner (more like, beat him) to his hiking endurance and time; to carry 10, 20, 30kg grocery bags with ease for the rest of my life with no dependencies; and to have a very healthy body and mind irrespective of when the physique disappears as a result of age.

When you were younger, did you experience any incidents that made you feel insecure about yourself?

I could write a book (or give a TED Talk) about the toxic experiences and traumas of being a girl and growing up as a girl in this world AND in the Indian society, but I’ll let that be for a wordsmith and spare you my already on-going verbal diarrhoea (sorry for the visual, my imaginative friends).

But the shorter version is, I absolutely had tons of insecurities growing up. Who doesn’t? Which person who identifies as a girl doesn’t? Ever since I remember the earliest days of my childhood, there were comparisons drawn to my sisters, girlfriends, neighbour’s daughters, and random strangers – in height, skin colour, body hair, body shape, academics, marks cards, femininity, you name it.

My rebellious parents and us (my sister and I) were always looked at as the whacky family – my progressive parents just let us kids be, let us play cricket, let us wear bermudas like the boys, let us cut our hair short, let us have experiences, and have a life beyond our gender norms! My home with my parents was the normal for me and the outside world was the trap. Many of my insecurities to a large extent were nipped in the bud by my parents. Which is why I was always the confident kid, who built a tough exterior. They gave me the wings and the empowerment to be me without even making a mention of it, irrespective of what the outside world or aunts or uncles or teachers expected of me (as a girl).

And then came adolescence and adulthood (now I get why we yearn for the early, simple years of our lives). The larger society, university and work life felt like it had been built in a way to pit women against one another, encourage being a “bro”, play on our insecurities, create false notions and expectations to live up to. Set by whom? Not women!

The other big wing I grew in my late 20s that got all the more amplified after I got into fitness, after I started looking inward, started having an appreciation for my privilege and fully seeing another individual for who they independently are, was the really hard, intentional life-value of being a girl’s girl.

Did you ever struggle with your body?

I’d never put it in the effort to read into my body weight or BMI until I started getting into the habit of annual health check-ups in my mid-20s and until I met my fitness coach. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve never struggled with it as a psychological stressor, however, since the time I’ve started lifting weights. It has become a key factor and indicator to get stronger, which is a positive reinforcement to gain weight.

Can I just say how fantastic a time we are living in right now that women gaining weight and building muscle is finally looked up to and not just as a masculine trait.

Are you satisfied with your body now?

That’s a tough question and I’d be lying if I said yes. I’m an ambitious person whose goal posts in all aspects of life are always moving. I’m never fully satisfied with everything I do and want to do more, only because I come from a mind space of wanting to be a better version of myself and not settling for any standards that have been set. I’m content and grateful for the fact that I have an extremely healthy, functioning body and worship it each day ever since I’ve made fitness a part of my lifestyle.

Trust me, when you pull that muscle or feel the pain of that rotator cuff injury or struggle with gut issues, you are really brought down to earth and drowned in humble sauce enough to know how important and rare it is to have a fully functional-healthy body. Therapy as a self-care mechanism made me realise how much my inner and physical body do for me, get through for me, and recuperate. It’s extremely important to be self-aware and grateful, but equally important to care for that body in the form of nutrition and exercise, and not get complacent for what it’s doing on autopilot.

Have you ever received any comments about your body?

Always! Be it as a skinny kid, or as a teenager taller than most girls in class, or as a puny model who for some projects needed to be “bustier”, or now, getting asked if I’m an athlete for having visible abs, arm veins and noticeable biceps as a woman.

In all honestly, it was the more forgiving side of body judgment to be on, because none of these comments affected me or my self-worth, because skinny was the way to be, skinny was aspirational. Now let’s make wholesome, well-built, and healthy-in-any-shape aspirational.

If you could change anything about yourself, would you?

I absolutely would, and that would be the way I talk to myself on bad days. I would want me to talk to me with kindness, compassion and love, just the way I would talk to my sister or my best friend if they came to me for comfort on a bad day.