{"id":4258,"date":"2023-05-28T19:26:06","date_gmt":"2023-05-28T12:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/how-i-finally-treated-my-eating-disorder-after-years-undetected\/"},"modified":"2023-05-28T19:26:06","modified_gmt":"2023-05-28T12:26:06","slug":"how-i-finally-treated-my-eating-disorder-after-years-undetected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/?p=4258","title":{"rendered":"How I Finally Treated My Eating Disorder After Years Undetected"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-3711241968723425\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script><br \/>\n<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/mindbodygreen-res.cloudinary.com\/image\/upload\/c_crop,x_37,y_126,w_1119,h_629\/c_fill,w_700,h_400,g_auto,q_85,fl_lossy,f_jpg\/org\/ikvme94w8li4zu2tu.jpeg\" \/><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>After starting college in 2010, the first group I interacted with was the cross country team. While the camaraderie was positive at first, there was a lot of toxic culture around food and body image. In fact, I remember the upperclassmen really emphasized the necessity of losing your period, and running so hard that it was inevitable. Having no other role models in the sport, I took to that goal, and made it one of my own moving forward. When I lost my period, I relished in that fact, rather than flagging it as a cause for concern.<\/p>\n<p>All of us had a drive to be thin\u2014to reach performance goals, feel lighter during a race, or even slim down our bodies to look more like a competitor runner. What began as ambition very quickly became a disease.<\/p>\n<p>Everyone on the team was extremely anxious about food, myself included. I vividly remember the tension when meeting up with teammates at the dining hall. We would anxiously look at each other&#8217;s plates, which never had much on them\u2014usually a light salad, even after running 10-plus miles that day. Everyone was so nervous about eating too much. No one wanted to be the odd one out, and that feeling was so visceral.<\/p>\n<p>There was also so much stigma around breakfast and eating before or during runs. We would never eat beforehand, and after a very long run, we would treat ourselves to a latte. Ultimately we ended up fasting most of the day, despite rigorous training.<\/p>\n<p>I internalized all of these ideas, and they grew tenfold in my own mind. The voice in my head would remind me: \u201cyou don\u2019t need to eat that\u201d or \u201cyou\u2019ve been crushing it lately, but maybe if you lost a couple more pounds, you\u2019d run even faster.\u201d I truly believed that running extremely high mileage while eating very little was what it took to be a runner.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I was left with an extremely unhealthy body with no menstrual cycle, energy deficiency, and a lot of mental fog. I was fueled by my negative body image, and continued to move through unhealthy training.<\/p>\n<p>The problem was, I did start to see some early success in trail running, so I had no tangible reason to change my ways. After undergraduate, I decided to pursue running as a career, rather than go to medical school. While I continued to have success at the beginning, it quickly became a rollercoaster. I would have a stellar race, then crash and burn for a while. I was so in the weeds of being under fueled, undernourished, and overtrained\u2014until my body finally started to break down.<\/p>\n<p>For a couple of years, I stayed broken. My body wasn\u2019t functioning, my mind wasn\u2019t functioning\u2014and in 2016, I finally got to a point where I knew something had to change. Luckily for me, I also studied hormones and performance, so when I started to honestly look at the bigger picture of my health, I couldn\u2019t deny how horribly I\u2019d been treating my body. I needed to pivot if I wanted to stay in the sport and reach my potential, rather than continuing to underperform and just feel like a miserable human.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div data-type=\"_mgwidget\" data-widget-id=\"1675549\">\r\n<\/div>\r\n<script>(function(w,q){w[q]=w[q]||[];w[q].push([\"_mgc.load\"])})(window,\"_mgq\");\r\n<\/script>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After starting college in 2010, the first group I interacted with was the cross country team. While the camaraderie was positive at first, there was a lot of toxic culture around food and body image. In fact, I remember the upperclassmen really emphasized the necessity of losing your period, and running so hard that it &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[180,93,123],"class_list":["post-4258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifestyle","tag-eating-disorders","tag-healthy-eating","tag-invisible-illness"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loudhdtv.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}