Morning Time

The mornings are my time. I wake up, take my vitamins/supplements, get dressed, put on my running shoes and go. I love it. I'm up before most others. Outside it is quiet, calm, cool, and I feel powerful. Nothing can get me, nothing can stop me, and my feet begin to glide quickly, silently across the pavement. Ah the relief of my morning run. How can something so calming and serene also be considered the thing that could possibly kill me? I say this because I must admit, I am addicted to exercise. With that addiction comes an extremely low resting heart rate, abnormal heart beats, and very low blood pressure. I am required to wear a heart monitor when I exercise in order to assure I won't drop dead of a heart attack at any given moment. Cool. Exercise, at least in my mind, was always something good for the body, mind and soul, but now it is almost the enemy. My recovery team wants me to stop working out completely, but the thought of that terrifies me. There is an interesting piece to this as well though. I am required to take at least two days off, which I generally choose to be Saturday and Sunday (always Saturday and usually Sundays, but sometimes I just can't help going on a quick run). Even when I do run on Sundays, I don't do it for the calorie burn or the miles, I do it for me. These runs are the best. Back to info on my "off days"...those days I have the least amount of stress/anxiety. I am able to sleep in, plan out my days, am less anxious/focused on food, and surround myself with friends and those I love. This past weekend, I moved into a new place, and couldn't work out for those two days. Weigh-in occurred on Tuesday, and I was 100% positive I would weigh more...to my surprise, I had lost. I'm starting to trust my body again. I wasn't the best with my food intake while moving-in (come on, its hard to constantly think about eating when you are thrift store, ikea, and target shopping as well as building furniture), but I still had lost weight even eating what I normally do (for the most part). I know this worry of gaining and eating regularly comes from my past of bulimia. I used to skip breakfast, and then binge and purge throughout the rest of the day. I was never happy with my body, and truthfully I was a little over-weight. When anorexia took over, I didn't even realize how quickly I was losing weight. I was still not eating breakfast, and now not lunch, and when I would eat dinner, I would purge it back up. This began while I was home for Christmas break from college, and my mother started to catch on. In my fear of her forcing me to get help or addressing the issue, I stopped eating all together. It is in no way my mother's fault, but I must admit, this fear was what pushed me even further into anorexia and restriction. I'd only eat if I knew I would be able to purge later-on without anybody being home. I was proud of this control I had. When I was bulimic, food controlled me, but as an anorexic, I controlled it. I look back at my mindset and thinking then, and am shocked I could even function. Shocked I was able to go to school, finish my college courses, and even obtain A's in my classes. How could someone who spent 95% of their day thinking about food, working out, food, calories, weight, etc. succeed in anything else in their life? Those times were dark. I began weighing myself multiple times a day, when even just a few weeks before I hadn't even owned a scale. It all happened so quickly. At one point I was bulimic but functioning, the next I was anorexic and crazy.