My Experience with Disordered Eating and a Fitness Obsession
The Body Positivity era has helped a lot, but it was harder when it felt like you had to be skinny to be worth something.
When I was training for my first half marathon, I ran four to five times a week to build my fitness. I was sixteen, just, and thought I had a clue about health and fitness. I was wrong. I was sixteen. No.
How It Started
I was inspired by hugely successful marathon runners from Kenya, like David Rudisha and Mary Keitany. I watched running documentaries and read the odd blog post by successful runners here and there to inform my training plan. Although I was inspired by their impressive speed and stamina, if I'm being honest with myself, I was mainly admiring their bodies, which I thought looked perfectly slender and toned.
Seriously though, docos and blogposts? I was planning on training for my first long-distance race based only on a few ideas I’d got from such sources. These were athletes at the top of the upper echelon of their sport. I, at the time a young teen, was going through food and over-exercising issues. I was in denial about my motives for such intense training as I was doing, convincing myself and those who asked that it was just “to get…
