Exercising with ED

I have been athletic since I was seven years old.  My first sport was tennis; the summer eve of starting second grade was spent at a low-key tennis camp at the public middle school in town.  Over several years of this, I was good and I loved it.  Being a perfectionist, I gave tennis my all and was known for being a power hitter.  I could stroke through a forehand down the line, blast a volley into the corner, leaving my opponent tripping to catch it.  I was not know for strategy – who needed that when I could just channel all my energy into one fast shot?  Summer tennis camp became a staple – I enjoyed it because I excelled, and the game fascinated me.  

I also played basketball in middle school though I really couldn’t stand it.  Let’s just say it was not my natural talent like tennis was and I spent more time practicing my cheers on the bench than my foul shot.  However, when it came for practice time and the few moments I was put in the game, I gave it my all, so much so sometimes I would throw up on the court from running so hard.

These are traits I carried into my ED, most particularly when I discovered exercise could be married to my restricted food.  They worked together to get me thin - a perfect relationship.  Work hard, exercise harder and restrict the hardest of them all.  When I discovered this, exercise turned into an activity that had one goal – get skinny, get fit/buff and surely look like those models on the cover of all the fitness magazines.  Fitness had a look to it and I wanted it.

My ED took hold in high school.  I still played tennis (no longer basketball, thank goodness!) but suddenly the upcoming season was an opportunity to become skinnier.  I also convinced myself being thinner would make me a better player, which it did not of course – when you’re not eating right, there’s no energy to suffer through a 3-set match.  The tennis team was no longer time to make friends and enjoy the trip to McDonalds on the way home from a match.  Instead, it became an anxious nightmare of how I was going to not eat the fast food after burning the calories from the match.  It was about no enjoying the cookies the girls brought onto the bus to enjoy and more about comparing my body to the other lithe girls on my team, wondering why I couldn’t be skinny like they were.

I took up exercise in other ways, including following fitness shows on TV and turning on some music in my bedroom and dancing around to it until I was completely exhausted.  Then I would go back to my studies until bed.  Don’t even ask about friends, there was rarely time for them.

After starving my way through high school, I developed the other ED  - binge eating my way through college.  I still participated on the tennis team, thinking that the fall season was the only time I was fit all year, and then hating myself the rest of the time because I was not exercising but instead doing other things such as, you know, socializing, making friends and kicking ass in my courses.  Fast forward to my twenties.  Tennis was over – I had no organized team to join and it was difficult to find someone my age who wanted to have friendly competitive matches every once in a while.  I started going to a gym and running on a treadmill and then, as a surprise to myself, I discovered running.

And did I ever.  Not only did I run the 5k, I did a 10K then a half marathon.  I joined a running group, made friends and thus started my “it’s complicated” relationship with running.  Running gave me freedom and felt great.  The accomplishments of finishing big races gave me a satisfaction I had never felt before.  The friends I made were something very special and wonderful.  When people asked why I ran, I told them all this, neglecting my number one reason to run: “It keeps me skinny”.

When I decided to run my first 5K, it was after a relapse where I wasn’t eating much.  I lost ten pounds that way through restriction, and when I started running, I “allowed” myself to eat a bit more and thus my weight leveled out to a satisfactory number on the scale – the same exact number I starved myself down to in high school.  Yes, I really did weigh the same at 25 when I was 16.  What an accomplishment, right?

The other thing my ED loved about running was the numbers.  Number of miles, the time run, the calories burned, the number size of clothing I wore because of the running.  It was great – another set of data I could judge my self worth on.  I remember a particularly difficult half marathon I ran where I cried at the end because I didn’t meet my number goal.  It was as if my running failure put the brakes on me as a person, and I didn’t like it (but in the end, I still burned those thousands of calories or so – perhaps not all was lost, I thought then)

Along with running long distances, I started doing aerobics tapes again that would get me into even more shape.  Sometimes I was working out twice a day – run at 4am, boot-campy workout at 7pm.  Athletes are supposed to refuel after a workouts to maintain strength; I drank water and kept my food to the minimum calories.  My days were spent literally in a daze of exercise and starvation high.

Sure enough, the injuries started.  My first injury left me in a panic – how was I going to not gain weight?  It was more terrifying than whatever was wrong with my foot.  The first injury led me to my worst relapse in years and I dipped below to a weight I hadn’t seen since I was in middle school.  My period stopped, I was obsessed with getting it even lower.  I was in trouble.

This is why I had to find recovery.  I knew I loved to exercise and working out – where was that 7 year old girl who loved to hit the tennis ball as hard as she could past kids twice her age?  She disappeared along with everything else my ED was taking from me, including my health, my relationships, and me.

Two years later in recovery, I am still having foot issues.  It’s frustrating, but maybe not because I can’t workout to be thin, but because it's hard to just walk around!  I really do miss my friends and I miss the energy that moderate exercise affords me.  Before the latest foot problem, I was discovering what exercise meant to me.  The less I was able to run the long distances, the less important it has become in my life.  I'm happy with a moderate running lifestyle, not slave to a training plan.  I discovered my love for cycling charity riding which benefits great causes, no matter how many miles you accomplish or the amount of time out on the road.  I found that I liked lifting weights at the gym because it made me feel strong coming out of the grocery store and lifting heavy bags without effort.  Taking a walk during lunch was a good way to get my eyes away form my office computer and give me fresh air, not to add to my exercise/calorie expenditure log.

And here’s the strange thing happening right now.  I’m still figuring out how I can love my body and the way it looks – it’s the part I still struggle with so much.  But when I look in the mirror now, it's true that my body is flabby and not so great in my eyes, but I am not working out, so what should I really expect?  And it’s ok - in some strange way, the less I workout, the less I feel bad about my body.  I've trained my mind to think working out will automatically result in looking a certain way, and I have a lot of work to do to tell myself that fitness does NOT have a look, but rather a feel.