The writer is a vice president at Best Fitness. March is National Nutrition Month, and the first week of March also marked National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.
I am fitness professional. I am a certified personal trainer. I teach, train and certify personal trainers. I am the VP of sales for a chain of health clubs in the Northeast. I am a Spinning® instructor. I am a marathon runner. I am anorexic.
Though considered to be “recovered”, I will be the first to tell you that it never really goes away. I will never be “better”. I will never be “normal”. The whisper in the back of my head that tells me to check out my mid-section in the mirror is constant. The wave of panic that washes over me when I walk into a dinner party or a restaurant where I know I’m about to overeat still occurs occasionally. The scale still taunts me some mornings and the food in my refrigerator calls to me in the middle of the night like it once did.
But that whisper used to be a scream. That wave of panic wasn’t intermittent, it was relentless. The number on that scale would dictate my mood for the entire day or until the next time I stepped on it, an hour after the first, in hopes that something would’ve changed.
Every day I woke up in fear. I was afraid, not of the heart palpitations that were a regular occurrence nor of the fainting spells that were happening more and more frequently, but of the calories I was going to have to resist that day and more importantly, the ones I couldn’t.
I fantasized about being “normal”. In my mind, normal was eating a bowl of cereal without having a panic attack. Normal was showering with the lights on. Normal was wearing shorts when it was 100 degrees outside. Normal was thinking about anything other than food at any point during any day. I was not normal. I was a 20-year-old woman in a 12-year-old boys body.
I’m not sharing this story so you can look at me and say “wow, she used to be that unhealthy?” nor am I looking for a sympathetic hug or a congratulatory pat on the back.
I’m sharing this in the hopes that it might reach someone who is going through something similar. I wish that I had known that I wasn’t alone, as it might have helped me turn down the volume earlier.
I’m sharing this because maybe as you are reading this you are thinking of someone who is struggling with a similar issue. I want to shed some light on the fact that it is not something that your friend or family member can “snap out of” and by telling them to “just eat” you are driving them deeper into the lie that is quickly becoming their life. They may not be ready to accept help. They may push you away and you may lose them as a friend if you approach them about their issue. They may lose everything if you don’t.
I want to assure those who are suffering as well as those who are watching someone suffer that it can get better. It will get better. It will never go away, but it will force you to become stronger than you have ever imagined. Looking back, the cliché that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger holds so true to life. Anorexia almost took my life, but almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Instead, in the end, anorexia made me who I am today, and I am thankful.
