Should I give up exercise?

To those happily unacquainted with the ins and outs of eating disorders, the answer probably seems obvious. What one may not know if they’ve never received professional treatment for an eating disorder (i haven’t either, but I have many friends who have and who have passed their information on to me) is that exercise and eating disorder recovery do not go well together. This is because exercise and eating disorders themselves go together spectacularly, disastrously well. 

In the oxygen-context of EDs, magnesium-exercise-addiction burns blindingly bright. I used to run 16km every weekend even when I finally admitted to myself that I had to put weight back on and stopped exercising every day. (I have a particularly fond memory of my mother force-feeding me cashews after catching me going for such a run, screaming “DO YOU WANT TO HAVE CHILDREN ONE DAY!?”) Not only is there the motivation of burning calories (at least in the case of restrictive eating disorders), but the addictive personality that tends to underly EDs also latches on to exercise and the endorphins produced.

I’ve never really shirked my exercise addiction. I don’t act on it, but it’s still there, not-quite-dormant in my brain. I just have a massive complex around exercise. I view it as this moralistic activity, almost like going to church. Having exercised (and intensely, of course), I will feel accomplished and like I’ve done something good. That feeling is only allowed to last the day, maybe even the day after if I’m sore, but then the possibility of exercising again has cropped up, and because it’s an opportunity I have not taken, I feel guilty again. The sense of accomplishment ekes out throughout the week, and once it’s been exactly a week again, because I’ve decided that in the context of eating disorder recovery it’s okay to exercise once a week, I feel like I HAVE to exercise that day. If you don’t relate, you can’t imagine how horrible you feel if you don’t do this ‘required’ exercise. I can feel - sometimes imagined, sometimes not - the energy pent up in my legs, slowly being converted into fat.

Because there’s this moralistic element to exercise, there are many things I can’t to unless I’ve exercised that day. This includes eating certain foods, watching certain youtube videos or TV shoes, even wearing certain underwear or clothes - because nice things become only rewards for exercise. And if I go against an irrational rule, I feel wrong - fat, lazy, greedy, all that. I’ve managed to gradually loosen and disobey these rules since I was 16, but they’re still there. I still think about them.

The sad thing is, I really like exercise. My family’s pretty athletic - my dad and aunty are marathon runners (thought of course the addictive personality gene is probably in their chromosomes too). I used to swim, do gymnastics, play tennis, all that. I was a national cross country runner. 

But this was mutated into a weird, neurotic love-hate relationship. And while I’ve improved a lot, that complex still exists in my head. I still feel guilty if I don’t run exactly once a week, at least. Vaguely exercising the day before I’m due to do this weekly run makes me anxious, because I worry it will take away from the intensity of energy I can give the run. So I know I’m not just exercising for pure enjoyment and health and fulfilment - it’s still dictated by my ED.

I know how to cure this. I have to stop exercising for a long, long time. To the point where my guilt about exercising is completely gone. Then I will be able to tell if I actually want to exercise, and only exercise when I do.

There are two complications to this. The first is that, despite the Complex, I do actually like exercising. It helps to purge all the anxious energy I have - as well as all the other benefits of exercise that we know and love and have read in our grandmother’s old copies of Women’s Weekly since we were 8. And that brings me to the second complication. I’m sure most people with a healthy relationship with exercise don’t actually like it. I’m sure they don’t wake up in the morning going, gee, I’m so excited to be out of breath and in pain for at least half an hour! But they do it, because they know it’s good for them and makes them feel good after. So, if I wait until I really, genuinely want to exercise, am I over-correcting? That might not be normal and healthy either.

A recent development is that I’ve started to really enjoy exercise. I find myself wanting to do it more often, even if less intensely, putting less emphasis on the one D-day a week. This thrills me; I think it often has something to do with the Instagram stories I’ve seen from girls like Summer Mckeen, pretty and flush-faced, ready to start the day proper and fluorish. So this orries me, because it makes me feel like I’m slipping into exercise addiction again - I can’t tell if I’m improving or regressing. So I don’t know what to do. I think I’ll just follow this urge for a while, see what happens. Wish me luck.