Sports, exercise, and less-structured general activity are all aspects of life I have enjoyed and been passionate about for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I loved running around outside playing various games and sports with my brothers, neighbors, and friends. I tried a number of different sports throughout elementary school and eventually ended up focusing primarily on soccer and basketball throughout late elementary school, middle school, and the start of high school.
This was mostly fun for me, but as time went on, I started to experience more and more pressure internally when it came to sports and athletic performance. I felt I had to be as good as I could be and increasingly feared any sort of self-perceived failure.
Once I started high school, this fear of failure + internalized pressure led me to train even more obsessively for sports, particularly basketball. The girls basketball culture at my high school was also relatively intense, which didn’t help my fears + obsessive tendencies.
The fall of my freshman year I would go to basketball shooting practice before school a couple of times a week, participate in (mandatory) gym class daily, and go to weightlifting or other basketball skills/conditioning training after school a few times a week. I was also still playing travel soccer (practices + games) on top of all this!
This increase in activity at the start of high school (combined with not seriously increasing my nutrition, which was more ignorance at the time rather than an intentional restrictive decision) significantly contributed to my spiral into an eating disorder. While this aspect of my story isn’t the main focus of this particular blog post, I mention all this to highlight how obsessive and unhealthy my relationship with exercise had become by the time I was finishing my first year of high school. As my weight started to decrease, I increasingly felt addicted to and compelled to exercise more and more.
[Side note on this which I hope to explore further in a future blog post: researchers have discovered a similar neurobiological phenomenon (the urge to exercise increasingly more when eating less) in animal models. From Carrie Arnold’s book, Decoding Anorexia: “In the 1960s, researchers discovered that if you limited a rat’s access to food and simultaneously allowed it to run on its wheel as much as it wanted, the rat would rapidly run itself to death, a phenomenon that looked eerily similar to what psychologists diagnosed as anorexia nervosa. The researchers called this behavior activity-based anorexia.“]