I first became aware of my body, in a pinching and prodding way, just over a decade ago. I can remember standing in front of a mirror and scrutinising my stomach, while feeling a sense of shame that I didn’t have the ‘definition’ that the women I saw online had.
I was 14.
From that day forward, I vowed that I would change, and that I did.
My dad has always been a runner, and I decided to follow suit. I bought the cheapest running shoes they had in Sports Direct, a pair of Karrimor’s, and off I went. All it took was one decision to change the course of my life for the next decade.
After a few weeks of running with my dad, I decided to join my local athletics club. I started entering races and, ever the perfectionist, researched how I could get faster.
I landed at the conclusion that to get faster, I had to run more and eat less.
I cut out all saturated fat, sugar, and simple carbs from my diet. At my worst (or, as I would define it then, my ‘best’), I was eating only fruit and vegetables, and running 50+ miles a week, all the while I was still growing.
My bones became so weak that I developed a stress fracture in my foot, and still I ran. I was later diagnosed with osteopenia, the early onset of osteoporosis. At the age of 15, I had the bone health of an 80-year-old, I was told.
I was referred to CAMHS, the children and adolescents’ mental health services, and diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa.
The rest is a blur of hospital appointments, training sessions at the running track, yelling matches with my parents, discussions (that went nowhere) with my dietician, blood tests and, finally, a section.
It was two weeks before my seventeenth birthday, I was soon to be entering the final year of my A-levels, and I was finally winning the races that I had been training so hard for. On the outside, with the exception of my emaciated body, everything looked like it was going well for me… Yet I was being forced to go to the hospital to receive treatment for an illness that I didn’t even think I had.
‘I’m just disciplined,’ I told myself and everyone else, all the while ignoring the ache in my chest. Alas, I wasn’t disciplined, I was dying, I now realise.
When I was first admitted to the hospital, it was hard. So hard. I felt like I was in a period of grief, almost. Not being able to run and being forced to eat all the foods that I had refused to eat for so long was terrifying. It felt like all the control that I had spent so long striving to have was suddenly taken away from me, and I was scared of what would happen to my body.
For the first few weeks of my admission, I wasn’t even allowed to go for a walk. Had I not been sectioned, there is no way that I would’ve stayed in there, but as I was, I wasn’t able to leave. I had to sit with the discomfort.
I was placed in an anti-ligature room because I couldn’t be trusted not to kill myself. I had to be supervised while I went to the toilet because ‘the exertion could be dangerous’ (it would be laughable if it weren’t true). I vowed that as soon as I could leave, I would.
Fast-forward two months, and following a review with my psychiatrist, my section was lifted. I was informed of my rights — as I was no longer sectioned, I was under no obligation to stay — but to everyone’s surprise, I did.
I stayed.
I was still very fixated on exercise, and the team knew that upon my return home, I would go back to running, so to ensure that I could return to it in a more gradual way, I was allowed to go to the running track when I was on home leave. It was a good feeling. The thing that had kept me going throughout my hospital admission was finally within reach again.
All I could think about was getting home to return to running, but I was more responsive to therapy and, for the first time, able to admit that I was ill and did need help.
I stayed in the hospital for a further four months until, finally, on the 1st of February 2019, after a six-month admission, I was discharged.
Keen to progress with my running, I started racing again after a couple of months. I soon discovered, however, that I couldn’t get back to the level I was at prior to being hospitalised without sacrificing the recovery that I had spent so long working towards.
I felt disheartened, and it wasn’t long until I started to experience the all too familiar sense of dread upon waking up and realising that it was time to go running. This time, though, instead of reverting to food restriction, as I had done before in an effort to ‘get quicker’, I made the decision to stop running altogether, and, in its place, started working out at home. It still wasn’t healthy, though, because I didn’t enjoy it.
Until just two weeks ago, I was still forcing myself to exercise five days a week. But not anymore. Life’s too short to spend it feeling guilty for missing a workout. I don’t want my worth to be tied to movement anymore.
The fact is that if you feel like something awful will happen if you don’t exercise, you don’t have a healthy relationship with it, as I learnt the hard way…
When I was running every day, I hated the reflection that I saw in the mirror. Everyone told me how ill I was, how thin I was, and the weighing scales proved that I was incredibly poorly indeed, but for some reason, when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t see reality. Instead, I saw someone whose size was ‘above average’, and this is what made it so hard for me to recover, and why I was ultimately sectioned, because…
Why do I need to gain weight when I’m already too big?
My brain was gaslighting my body, big time.
The main thing that stopped me from wanting to recover, when I did come to terms with the fact that I was ill, was the anxiety that I had surrounding what would happen to my body if I stopped exercising. I thought that gaining weight was equivalent to losing control. But, in a weird turn of events, I feel better now than I ever have, and that all comes down to ignoring the rhetoric that is pushed on us all by the media.
There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ remedy when it comes to health. What is healthy for you might not be healthy for me.
Since I stopped exercising in such a structured way, I have felt more comfortable and at peace with my body than I have in over a decade.
I walk my dogs every morning, and I go hiking with my dad once a week, but I do these things because I love them. When I’m out in nature, I’m able to, albeit somewhat contradictorily, find myself in the act of getting lost in something bigger than myself. The worries I have about the way the fat on my stomach rolls, or the way my thighs meet, evaporate when I am standing atop a mountain, listening to the sound of flowing water cascading down a nearby waterfall, or watching a flock of birds take flight as they embark upon their great migration for the winter.
When I was sitting in the back of an ambulance on my way to the hospital, aged 16, I never would’ve believed that there would come a time when I wouldn’t need to exercise to feel ‘enough.’ But I am here, finally, and it feels amazing.
It’s taken a lot to get here, and I don’t know exactly what the turning point was, but I can say with certainty that being with my partner has been a game-changer for my recovery.
My partner, Lucy, loves and accepts all of me, and that helps me to love and accept the parts of myself that I have always had such a hard time with. She shows me that I don’t need to burn myself into the ground in order to be worthy of love. I am worthy of love simply because I am alive.
Scrap BMI, to determine your healthy weight, hold out for the moment that you stop obsessing about your body. Whatever your body looks like in that moment is representative of true health.
I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you could have the body of a Victoria’s Secret model, but if all you’re thinking about is food and exercise, then you’re just as unhealthy as someone who is morbidly obese…
I’m not saying that I will never exercise in a structured way again, because I might, and should I want to, in a healthy way, I will hold space for doing so in the future, but right now, I have things that are of greater importance to me than controlling my body.
Art and love over food restriction and exercise. Hope over control… I have finally tasted contentment, and oh, how sweet it is. ❤
Portfolio of Hope 