Back From the Brink

American Fitness, March, 2000 by Christy Heitger-Casbon

My battle with anorexia and compulsive exercise and how I learned to strike a balance for healthy living

A healthy, balanced, satisfying what we all want, isn't it? We bone up on the latest research about nutrition and fitness, buy top-of-the-line health products and exercise equipment and attend the best time management seminars all in hopes of becoming the best we can he. Most of us have such wholesome, sincere, unadulterated intentions. Carrying them out in a health, manner, however, is a different story. It's often not for lack of trying. It's quite the opposite, actually.

There are those of us who go to extremes in an intense effort to achieve the pinnacle of health. However, when you take things To the extreme, that is precisely when you get yourself into trouble. If you cat too much or too little, you feel ill. if you sleep too much or too little, you feel sluggish, if you exercise too much or too little, you harm your body both physically and psychologically. I know because I used to be one of those determined people who took things to the extreme. I still advocate exercise and nutrition, but I don't go overboard anymore because I learned the "lesson of moderation" the hard way.

My Anorexic Nightmare

My story began 14 years ago, when I was 12 years old. I was an awkward middle-schooler who desperately wanted to be beautiful and ached to be popular. It was clear from environmental influences (e.g., peers family and media) that obesity was not acceptable . I heard enough derogatory "fat" comments and witnessed enough pointed fingers while growing up to know that I didn't ever want to be shunned and ridiculed like that. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that to be beautiful and popular, you needed to be thin. Consequently, I started dieting, but I took it to the extreme. Within a three-month period, I had developed anorexia nervosa (a disorder characterized by a preoccupation with thinness and an extremely restrictive diet). Over the course of the summer, I dropped form 110 pounds to a skeletal 73 pounds.

It's hard to believe that at the tender age of 12 I had already headed down a destructive, devastating and addictive path. People may not think of anorexia as an addiction, but in many ways it is. Expert maintain that all addictions are the pursuit or avoidance of a feeling. As a teenager, I wanted to avoid feeling self-hatred and disgust. I grew tired of looking at myself and being repulsed by what I saw in the mirror, so I starved myself in an attempt to drop pounds and pick up friends. I convinced myself that if I were thin, I'd be accepted and like by those around me. My ambition backfired, however. Instead of gaining a social network of friends, I landed in an isolated hospital room. Instead of feeling thin, beautiful and popular, I felt grotesque, awkward and lonely.

Over the course of the next few years, I received therapy. Throughout my teenage years, I slowly gained weight--ounce by ounce, pound by pound. Three years later, I had returned to a healthy weight. Of course, that didn't mean I had fully recovered psychologically. I still had very low self-confidence, and building that would take a long time.

Running for My Life

I needed to find a way to feel good about myself without falling back into the starvation pattern again, but I didn't quite know how to do that. I started by turning my attention toward something positive rather than negative, focusing on my health rather than my weight. For years, I'd been so preoccupied with the numbers on the scale, I couldn't move beyond that. I wanted to find a way to eat without being terrified of getting fat. Needless to say, this process was arduous and frustrating. For one thing, starving myself for so long had royally screwed up my metabolism. Therefore, I couldn't eat as much as the average woman because my metabolism was so slow. I wanted to find a safe way to give it a boost. I'd read about how exercise helps maintain muscle mass and how this conservation of muscle is important in maintaining a normal metabolic rate. Therefore, I decided to give exercise a try.

I can still recall the first half-mile loop around my neighborhood. Boy, was I pathetic. I was a determined teenager, though, and vowed to persevere. For weeks, I huffed and puffed and absolutely hated lacing up my shoes for my two-mile run. One day, about six months later, I realized, "Hey, I'm actually enjoying this!" Before I knew it, an enthusiastic runner was born.

Running produced a wide range of physical and psychological benefits. Sometimes, I'd catch myself thinking, "Wow, who knew that I could find a fun activity that actually reduces my risk of heart disease and osteoporosis?" I also periodically took my resting heart rate when I first woke up in the morning because I found it amusing to count my heartbeats and knew that as I continued to condition my body, my heart muscle was getting stronger, as were other parts of my body. My lung capacity increased and even the steepest hills didn't leave me breathless anymore. One of the best things ever--especially from a former anorexic's point of view--was to look in a mirror at the body I had loathed for so many years and be able to recognize that it had blossomed into a strong, muscular, curvaceous one. Running definitely gave me the gift of life. Three years ago, however, I began abusing that gift when I started exercising compulsively.