On recovering from compulsive over-exercising
I walked into the YMCA last night and saw an advertisement for some 15-pound weight loss program. Not surprising given it’s the holiday season (and weight-loss companies or “wellness companies” want your money.) I gave that sign an eye-roll, cursed diet culture, and walked into yoga and straight into child’s pose. And as I moved through class, I was totally overcome by a deep sense of gratitude for the relationship that I now have with exercise and my body. And I thought, I should write about that! Because if I rewind 10 years, and even 3 or 4, my relationship with exercise was not true wellness—it was nothing more than a socially accepted form of self-punishment and self-criticism.
I started compulsively exercising during the onset of my eating disorder, in 2011. I wanted to lose weight and word on the street was that running would get me what I wanted the fastest. So, I started to run. And I liked it. It made me feel good because endorphins make people happy. And hear me say this right now—running is not “bad” and not everyone who loves running has a distorted relationship with exercise and food. [Runners get a bad rap sometimes. One of my dearest friends is a badass runner who just qualified for the Boston Marathon. She has such a genuinely healthy and balanced relationship with running. There are also some really unhealthy runners who promote really unhealthy things. And there are yogi’s who do the same thing, so like, no one type of exercise needs to villainized, mkay?!]
But for me in this particular season of life, running controlled me. I ran because I hated my body. I ran, not because I was being kind and loving to my body through movement, but because I was ashamed of it, and I thought that running was the golden ticket that would help me lose weight and become attractive and finally feel lovable. I ran because it was something that I “had” to do, not something I was choosing to do. I ran compulsively. I ran on empty until I was told that it was medically necessary that I stop.
While in recovery from anorexia and while weight restoring, I couldn’t run anymore. Well, I guess I could have, but my doctors scared me, so I didn’t. Then I hit pseudo-recovery, and my relationship with exercise had improved, but I absolutely still used exercise as a way to “burn off” what I had eaten the day before. It was still a compensatory behavior, something that I did to undo or compensate for eating, even when I was at a “healthy” weight. I exercised less and less intensely, but my motivation was still about keeping myself in “check” and making sure I didn’t gain weight again. If a missed more than a day or *gasp* even two, my anxiety would soar to Mars and back. But I wasn’t “sick” anymore, which made me think my relationship with exercise and movement was “healthy.”
If I ate a big meal or a “cheat food” or *gasp* ice cream, there was still that ED voice telling me that exercise would certainly “cure” my guilt, my badness, and my indulgence. Exercise would take the anxiety away. Exercise would help me “get rid of” a part of me that was still unwelcome in my body—the part that had fun, who was free, who valued living and loving more than the size and shape of my body.
Towards the end of college, I ran, swam, and weight trained. I said that I enjoyed these things, and sometimes I authentically did. Yet, I still believed in my core that I needed to choose those exercise types because they were attached to certain weight-loss or weight-maintenance outcomes. From a neuroscience perspective, those neural pathways were well-traveled—they were loud, automatic, and strong. Running and swimming would burn calories and weight training would help me get toned arms and abs. The point is, I was still exercising out of fear and guilt, not because I was truly free.
In 2016, I became a Body Pump instructor, in part, because doing Body Pump played an integral part in my journey towards a healthier relationship with my body and the gym. I loved the group fitness energy. I loved how my instructor was genuinely having fun as she taught, encouraged us, and lifted heavy things. I looked forward to going to class because the music energized me, and the workout challenged me, and (thank God) my instructors didn’t make comments about bodies looking any certain way. They pushed us, not because it meant more calories burned, but because it meant that we would feel a sense of competency deep within ourselves that we could do hard things. So, I went through training and got certified to teach.
During my certification, my trainer asked me what my “why” was—why was I doing this? Why was I getting trained to teach this fitness class? And my response was, “So I can quit teaching elementary school and become a full-time bodybuilder, duh.”
Just kidding. If you laughed at my cheesy joke, well…then I feel seen & known.
What I really said was, “So that I can prove to myself that I can do hard things, and so that I can inspire the people that come to my classes to respect their bodies as they are right now.”
What led me to get certified in Body Pump was, in part, because getting paid to work out sounded fun, but also because I wanted to NOT be another human in the fitness world who promotes disordered eating and body shame via promoting “wellness” and “health.” That shit is toxic and it’s everywhere! And as I started teaching at the YMCA, I heard it constantly. Comments about “earning your food”, because somewhere along the way so many of us learned that was actually a thing. I saw scales all over the place, heard people talk about numbers and calories, and saw so many exhausted, over-worked humans “making it to the gym” so that they could check it off their box.
But see, people are like mirrors. And I had such strong reactions to these things not because of them but because there was still so much of this unresolved in me.
So, I did what I always do: I got to reading. And I learned about things like “diet culture”, “wellness” (which is sometimes *okay, most of the time* just disordered eating in disguise), weight stigma, thin privilege, and how toxic the fitness world can be.
And the scales fell from my eyes. And I started doing some work. Some excavating. Some—let’s get really honest with yourself, Rachel. What is actually ironic about the timing of this is that, right around this time, I stopped teaching Body Pump. Not because I didn’t love it, because I did and I still do, but because I was starting graduate school and could make way more money tutoring than teaching group fitness. At that time, I was in tune enough with my intuition, and it felt like it was time to quit.
So, as I started to really dig and get brutally honest with myself about my relationship to working out, what did I find? A whole lot of backward and twisted beliefs about exercise that had previously been hanging out in my unconscious world. I realized that what was holding me back from practicing, let’s say…yoga—something I’d always been interested in but didn’t create space for—was because I didn’t think that it burned enough calories to “count.” I realized that what was holding me back from cycling and walking was because I didn’t think it was a “good enough” cardio workout compared to running. There were so many faulty cognitions that I had around exercise, STILL!
Over the past year and a half, I’ve done some serious reprogramming of my beliefs around exercise. Has it been hard? Yes. Has it been truly one of the best gifts I’ve ever given to myself? YES! We don’t have to stay enslaved to the dominant cultural messages about fitness and exercise. We have a choice. There is another way. We don’t have to exercise for weight loss or even for weight maintenance. We don’t have to exercise to “earn” our food or “deserve” certain foods. We don’t have to exercise to “be good” or fit into the dress or the jeans. We don’t even have to exercise when we don’t feel like exercising. We deserve a paradigm shift, people. Because in my not so humble opinion, exercise was never meant to make us more stressed out and more addicted than we already are.
Over the past few months, going to yoga on Friday mornings has been my sanity, my saving grace, the way that I get back into the body that I so quickly flee from because #anxiety and #gradschool. It’s not hot yoga and it’s not even advanced yoga—it’s freaking awesome-sauce, gentle yoga that combines Vinyasa flow with restorative poses and stretching and meditation. And no, I’m not going to become a yoga teacher (though, if I had an infinite amount of money and time, I totally might). I’m not even going to tell you that you need to do yoga or that yoga is going to solve all of your problems (because it won’t). Yoga, for me, hasn’t been about yoga really at all, but about the lessons it’s teaching me about how movement can be joyful and slow and so incredibly life-giving. Yoga is teaching me that I can be not good at something and still have a ton of fun doing it. In a beautiful and embodied way, it is teaching me to practice, literally what I believe is true, that we must root down to rise up. It is teaching me to be grounded, to stay grounded, in my identity as a beloved child of God.
Hear me say this—I love movement and exercise. I think it’s awesome. I think people should do it. And do it often, whenever your body is telling you, “Hey you, you’ll feel better and less stressed if you go take a walk and move a little!” But I also think that you need to be able to take days off, even a week off, without feeling guilty. I think that fitness culture needs a super huge paradigm shift towards being about our minds (brain, body, soul), and not about weight or body size. I think that we need to let movement be a way that we honor and respect our body, not harm and demonize it for not meeting some expectation about the way it should be or look.
All really awesome things (like movement) can become not so great things if they become the things that are going to keep us safe and worthy of love and belonging. Call it an idol, an obsession, an addiction…it’s all the same thing. Maybe it’s time to think about why you move and exercise the way you do? What happens if you don’t do it? What are the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors associated with skipping the gym? Or with resting and just being still. Perhaps that’s the muscle that needs to be strengthened—it certainly was for me.
It’s really easy to stay trapped in unhealthy exercise (and eating) patterns because, let’s be real, it’s the way the majority functions. Like, it’s actually cool. Which is sick and twisted, but it just is what it is. It’s pretty counter-cultural to not have an unhealthy relationship with food/exercise these days, and in many ways, it’s not our fault. How many times have you heard people at a party say, “I worked out today, so I earned this (insert *seemingly bad food*!” or “Good thing I’m going to the gym in the morning.” These are acceptable, and in some social circles, idealized things to say. We have got to wake-up to how harmful these seemingly harmless but totally culturally conditioned remarks can be.
You were truly made for more than to spend your whole life trying to stay fit and small and attractive. Can you allow yourself to let exercise be a celebration of what your body can do? Can it be an act of respect, an act of love? Are you willing to show up for yourself with compassion and lose some of the criticism and harshness that is not serving you anymore? Are you willing to get really honest about the stories you tell yourself about yourself…perhaps it’s time to start doing the work? Because it really is possible to unlearn the brainwashing that is fitness and diet culture. It’s certainly the path less traveled these days but let me tell you it’s a much more abundant and lively path.
I wanted to share some mantra’s that have helped me over the past year and a half. They’ve helped me renew my mind, to form new beliefs and patterns. I hope they might also encourage you.
I am not a machine that needs to “burn” anything.
I do not have to earn my food.
I get to exercise in a way that celebrates my unshakeable worth.
I get to take days off.
Just because I skipped the gym today doesn’t mean I have to go tomorrow.
I get to try a new form of exercise that is outside of my comfort zone or routine.
My worth does not depend on my weight or body size.
My goodness is not determined by how much or how often I exercise.
Joyful movement makes me feel good and gives me energy.
It’s okay if life gets really busy, and I have to skip the gym for a few days in a row.
I can honor my hunger and fullness cues no matter if I did or did not exercise today.
I can trust my body—it will tell me what it needs when I attune to it.
Smaller bodies are not better bodies; larger bodies are not bad bodies.
P.S…sometimes people push back on this idea. I know, exercising for true wellness and not weight loss is pretty radical. And I’m not being sarcastic. It legitimately is. I’ve had people tell me— “if I don’t go to the gym every day, then I’ll just turn into a sloth (*which is usually code for “weight gain”) and never want to work-out ever again, and that’s not healthy either!” You’re right—that’s not healthy either. But neither is not being able to trust that your body will tell you what it needs. And not being able to trust our bodies is usually because we’re disconnected or disassociated from them and thus the feelings and sensations that go on within us. So maybe that’s where we need to start. Or, maybe we need to start with the cognitive distortion that is all-or-nothing/black-and-white thinking. So many of us, including myself, were conditioned to think very dichotomously. But the truth is, things are rarely dichotomous. If you quit being obsessed with exercise, it doesn’t mean that you’ll never do it again. We need both things, rest and movement. And we need a balance of both.
Be empowered, friends.
Xoxo,
Rachel