An Exercise Disorder
This is really hard to say but I will, I am in recovery from an exercise disorder. I self diagnosed this disorder after I came into recovery. It’s hard to see disorders in the moment, partly because when I was living it, I thought it was awesome. And partly because when I came out of it, I had to face a wall that wasn’t easy to get over. But one day it hit me, it hit me hard, really hard. I had a very unhealthy relationship to exercise, a relationship that was filled with guilt and littered with thoughts that I could never be good enough or do enough. I figured since I had come so far from those dark years, I could be recovered and nothing could tempt me back. I was wrong. I am realizing that it is something that can still come back to haunt me.
Most of the time, I go through life feeling pretty good about my fitness and nutrition. But that wasn’t how I felt for a large part of my twenties and into my thirties. For those years, I struggled with how I looked, how the scale told me I should feel and thinking success was being completely exhausted from exercise. I spent hours trying to be good at everything. I set goals in different areas to keep me focused and on track. Running, yoga, weight lifting, there was always something to keep me going and with so many different areas I never got bored.
Now that I am on a totally different path, a path that I thought would lead me far away from my past. I find that I am not as far as I had thought and had hoped. When people close to me start down the path of over exercising, my first instinct is to think I am not doing enough. How can I add a run into my week, maybe start taking a yoga class. When people close to me go on a very strict diet, my first instinct is to think my nutrition is shit. I should cut out carbs or eat less. The road I have been down has had many bumps and ruts, many turns and many hills. But as I am leveling off, I find that I am one pot hole away from heading back down the road to an exercise disorder.
At this moment, I have been struggling with the temptation to go back to the times of my disorder. This disorder started sometime during my twenties, it started with the idea that the only thing holding me back from being 5’8’ and 125 pounds was me. That if I worked out more and ate a strict diet I could get to my goal. It started out fairly innocently, just a few extra workouts every week. But soon I was keeping an exercise log and was averaging 15 hours a week of physical activity. FIFTEEN HOURS, this did not include my walks. I would log anywhere from 12 to 20 hours a week and if I got below that I would feel guilty. I would feel like I was letting myself down somehow if my kids needed me and I couldn’t get in the time, or if I got injured and needed to rest. My log was filled with self hate and punishment. I am really glad I didn’t keep any of them.
The worst part was my diet. I could never get it under control, and now I know it was probably because I was exercising so much. I would be super strict for a few days only to find myself eating brown sugar out of the bag when no one was looking. As I am writing this down, I am being hit with the realization of how wrong I was. But my wrong led me to my right. I have to start with a clear head and try to make sense of the chaos and obsession that I struggled with. There was no specific moment in time that jolted me, there was no intervention, there was just life and me and somehow we came to a better place. It didn’t happen over night. My life was falling apart and somewhere in the chaos of it all I found me. Sometimes the darkest of moments bring us closer to where we need to be.
My path has brought me opportunities I could never have imagined. I have slowed down on my nutrition and stuck with small goals. I don’t know the last time I binged on brown sugar, or anything for that matter. I have taken big steps, steps that were too big for me at the time and ended up falling down. I’ve found that sometimes smaller steps with a lot of self high fives can take me a lot farther and leave me on my feet more than on my ass.
Today, I work out about 5 hours a week. I do 4 one hour strength workouts and then add in a 10 minute circuit once or twice a week. I have been doing this for the past 6 or 7 years. And here is the fucked up part, I weigh FOUR pounds more than I did back then. FOUR FUCKING POUNDS. All of that obsession and work and sacrifice, and my pants are the exact same size. But my point of writing this isn’t to focus on that, each of us can have our own struggles with fitness and nutrition and most of us will have completely different results, varying outcomes. My point, I think, is to shed a little light on the subject, the disorder. I worked so hard, I carried so much guilt, gave up on fun events and ended up bingeing on shit and feeling horrible. I did all of this and it got me no closer to where I wanted to be. Probably because I didn’t really know where I wanted to be.
So here I am in recovery. I am living a life that is barely affected by that past until it is. And once those pieces start to come into play it takes a lot of self control to push them away. For the first time, I am pushing and luckily I am strong enough to keep them far away from the person I have worked so hard to become.