Exercise: Rebuilding my relationship
“Exercise is good for you”, “exercise will fix your mental health”, “exercise will make you feel better” - we hear these statements every day. But what about when compulsive exercise is a symptom of your bad mental health? What if the compulsion to exercise has been the thing destroying your life and making you feel terrible for years? This is the situation I was in from the ages of fifteen to eighteen. My disordered brain forced me to exercise even if I was ill, exhausted, ridiculously busy that day. And even though my excessive exercise was bad for me- I was applauded for it. Everyone admired my “dedication”- reinforcing that I SHOULD be training all the time. People told me they wished they could train like me. It made me feel sick. I gained a status as someone who exercised- fitness became part of my identity. This increased the pressure to never miss a workout.
When I was given a diagnosis of Anorexia Nervosa and told that I needed to stop training in the gym, that my body was too weak to exercise, it felt like my whole world came crashing down around me. It felt like my identity was being ripped from me. In the last lockdown, there were a thousand jokes about fitness bros losing their personality when gyms closed for Covid- well, that was me during my Anorexia recovery. I had built my entire life around my next workout as well as ingesting as little food as possible. Now that both of these things were ripped from me, who was I?
I got through recovery, and at one point in my recovery I got THE green light. I could start working out again. It started with being permitted to exercise being once a week, and then it slowly increased little by little. When I was discharged from CAMHS I was finally in charge of my own workout routine. So how was I going to ease into a workout routine in a way that was healthy? Because I did enjoy working out. How could I make sure I didn’t overdo it and make myself ill again? How would I learn to appreciate the difference between pushing myself and pushing myself too far? This blog will detail my continuing journey to do just that. And I say continuing journey because it still is something I’m working on- I continue to have disordered thoughts around exercise. But if you are interested in learning about how I personally combat those disordered thoughts and how I re-learnt how to exercise, this blog will detail just that. My eating disorder recovery journey, my fitness journey as a recovered anorexic, as well as fitness tips and any other significant issues.