Before I begin. I need to express that this blog post could be somewhat triggering for anyone living with an eating disorder. I want to make it very clear that this is merely just my personal experience with bulimia and running, and that running may not be the answer for you in recovering from your eating disorder. Please do seek advice from your GP before using exercise as a means of recovering.
Running was not something I had set out to do in search of “better health”.
Running was not something I had set out to do in search of “clearing my mind”.
Running was not something I should have even been contemplating, given how very ill I was when starting.
You see, when I moved to Oxford, I was still very bulimic. I was starving and bingeing on some fucking whirlwind of a negative “coping strategy” which did not look like coping at all. Not from the inside, and probably not from the outside, either.
When I moved to Oxford to study I was shy. So painfully shy. Socially fucking anxious if I’m being honest with you. I did all that I bloody well could to integrate myself within the realms of drinking and ‘Monday Night Bridge’ and painting a picture of a well put together 19 year old who knew exactly what she was doing. I don’t think I was fooling anyone on the course, and I definitely wasn’t fooling myself.
I developed two very close friendships within my houseshare which helped me find a sense of “home” within Oxford, but those two girls had family that lived so closeby to the city that they would leave every weekend… which inevitably left me to my own devices. Instead of indulging in the culture of such a beautiful place, I found myself indulging in rumination… and with that, indulging in vast, large quantities of food with it. A numbing, if you will, of the intensity of emotion that I felt. I speak more about my experience of bulimia in another blog post.
By this point, I had been bulimic for about 5 years.
I was used to this cycle. I would binge, purge, promise myself I’d do better on Monday (or when the housemates would return), and starve my way through to the weekend again. I couldn’t sustain it, and it was on one of these weekends that my bulimic brain came up with another cunning way to rid myself of the calories being consumed on these binges.
Running.
I didn’t head out with a plan. I honestly didn’t even know what running would feel like. It wasn’t something I had ever really engaged in at school… the sheer thought of going out and doing that one thing terrified me.
I remember considering all the ways my body was going to jiggle and shake and feeling so repulsed by that thought that it drove me to want to run even more.
But then I did it.
And it hurt, and it felt like shit.
Every step of the way, it felt like shit.
I walked, and it felt like shit.
I stopped for water, and it felt like shit.
I tried to break into a run again, and alas, it still felt like shit.
The whole experience totally sucked. Until I got in, and had a shower… and for the first time in a very very very long time I felt something that was not shit.
I felt something entirely new – pride.
This was not a feeling I was familiar with. I genuinely remember standing in that god-awful-in-need-of-a-deep-clean-shower, and feeling pride wash over me. I called my mum and told her I’d been for a run. It sounded like she was proud too.
Pride.
That pride, I carried everywhere with me. That positive feeling that was SO unfamiliar to me, I used as fuel to give the running thing a go again.
I did the same route. A short little way down Cowley Road, down the side street onto a much busier road (that takes you out of Oxford) and into South Park where it was boggy as fuck at the bottom and then had a pretty sizeable climb up to the playground. Usually getting a little overwhelmed by bumping into other humans as I approached said playground so cutting across to the other side of the park and then sometimes crossing the road into the cutest little wooded area.
As time moved on, I’d push beyond the realms of this short circuit that I created for myself. And that pride thing? It just grew stronger and stronger.
And with that pride came a whole bunch of other things that I had never thought would be the very things that would pull me away from the bulimic bitch that resided in my head
Alongside the pride I also found myself…
· An appetite! Like, genuine hunger. I’d been fucking with my ‘satiation’ signals for so long that I forgot what it was like to have a signal from my stomach to my brain that wasn’t being driven by pure upset or a need for numbing
· A sense of identity – I could now see myself beyond my eating disorder. I was more than just bulimic/shy Jess now. I was also “Runner Jess”
· Something to bloody well talk about in social situations – this helped my social anxiety SO much. Whenever things got hairy meeting new people, I found that I could at least talk about running (and how amazing it is) for ages without boring myself
· This one is going to sound corny as fuck, but I found myself a means of self-exploration that I’d never known before. A means of traveling within myself – introspective work to a whole other level. A time to process the utter whirlwind of my teenage years and spend some time getting to really know myself
I can’t say that all of the above stopped me throwing up my food right away. It was, of course, a long long long process.
My best friend Bulimia introduced me to Running, but it was Running that helped me see that Bulimia had never been my friend at all.
End note. I want to remind anyone reading this (again!) that this is merely just my personal experience with bulimia and running, and that running may not be the answer for you in recovering from your eating disorder. Please do seek advice from your GP before using exercise as a means of recovering. If you do want a space to talk about using running as a tool to aid recovery from bulimia I am always happy to chat over email. Jessica@runtalkrun.com - please do reach out for help or seek further support from placed like BEAT if you’re struggling.