exercise Archives | The ManifestStation

Canada Geese

September 12, 2023

I live in a leafy northern suburb of New York City, and I am blessed with trees and ponds, deer, chipmunks, and songbirds galore. There’s a big pond about a mile from my house. When my gym shut down in March of 2020, I resorted to walking as recreation, and I chose the pond as my almost-daily walk’s destination. Since I live in a warren of cul-de-sacs, there is no block to walk around, as in “take a walk around the block; you’ll feel better,” one of my late mother’s favorite bits of advice. So, at some point I have to simply stop, turn around, and head home.

The pond has become my turn around point.

It’s a big pond, maybe two or three acres big (I am terrible at estimating such things) and sits on town land, about ten feet back from the road. In good weather I sometimes stop for a bit and look around, feel the breeze in my hair, listen to the cardinals scolding, the woodpeckers and titmice chirping, the tree frogs chattering. There’s a bird that sounds like a rusty swing: seeee-saw, it whistles. I like to watch the surface of the water, looking for the wide mouth bass reputed to hide out in the shallows. Last summer a big bull frog would protest if I tossed a stone in the water, bellowing like a moose.

All through the first Covid year, I turned around at the pond, then the next. Now here I am again, two years later, spring 2022. I toss a pebble, and there is silence; the bullfrogs haven’t emerged yet from their muddy hibernation.

Yesterday, two Canada Geese greeted me at the near side of the pond. The pair waddled toward me a little, then stood silently, watching me pass by – I was aiming for the far end of the pond that day. I found myself wondering if they are the same pair who nested here last summer. Two Aprils ago I wrote in my journal,

Little pond looks still

then tall brown grasses rustle—

a goose making a nest.

All through that first COVID spring, summer and fall I watched them. First just the pair, with their sleek brown-feathered bodies and black velvet neck and head, the wide white stripe near their eyes. There were several days when I saw only one goose, and I hoped that meant the female was on the nest, back on the far side of the pond, where a stand of tall, dried marsh grasses and cattails stood. And then came the day when I saw the adults leading three fuzzy goslings for a swim. By late summer five look-alike geese lolled at the near side of the pond, munching on grass or snoozing in the dappled shade from a nearby oak. For a couple of weeks midsummer, they were joined by an egret, who kept to him- or herself at the opposite end of the pond, a white statue posing motionless on a fallen tree trunk, which I bet made a great spot for locating fish. In early October, I counted seven geese. I suspected that my goose family had been joined by two northern relatives stopping by on their way south for the winter.

And then all seven were gone—off to the Carolinas, I supposed.

And then my younger sister Grace died, just as suddenly, struck by a burst aneurism while eating dinner. A seemingly healthy, happy woman., she was gone in less than five minutes. The quiet pond over the next few months echoed my feeling of emptiness. For most of the winter it wasn’t even cold enough to freeze over. When it did, we had a few days of kids ice skating. But various logs and tall grass stalks interrupted the icy surface every here and there, making skating difficult. The kids gave up before the ice did.

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As the days move through the seasons, warming up, then growing cold then warming once again, the pond has become somehow a reminder of Grace. It seems to not change at all for weeks at a time, then suddenly after an absence of a few days, everything seems different. It has frozen over; it has thawed. The geese arrive; a heron visits for a day or two. The leaves on the trees turn red and gold. And Grace is not here to see any of it.

And now, it’s spring again. I wonder if the geese at the pond this spring recognize me. But, of course, all Canada Geese look alike; it could be any two random birds there. I am struck that we humans are interchangeable like that.

I feel bad about my sister’s life being cut short. I already miss her, with her sincerity, her astute observations on people; her love of laughter. Her coaching clients will miss her wisdom. Her grandson will miss his Grandma Grace and her annual visit from California at Thanksgiving. Her daughter, given up for adoption when Grace was just a teenager and lost to us for so long, will miss her new-found birth mother. When the eligibility age for COVID shots was lowered last year, I thought for a moment, oh good, Grace qualifies now. And then I realized that she won’t get to see the end of this pandemic. Sometimes I wonder if any of us will.

Grace died in October of 2020, and already she’s starting to blur. I sometimes get little snatches of memory –me back in high school, yelling at her because she’d been into my lipstick and mascara (we shared a room and she was four years younger) – or the time we entered a contest to win tickets to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium by drawing the biggest Beatle Picture – pasting together reams and reams of newspapers and drawing a copy of the Beatles album cover with Magic Markers. I climbed out on the roof of our house to take a picture of her standing next to it spread out on the grass. (We didn’t win.) Or the way she looked sitting on my couch back in Buffalo, where I was in grad school. She was so young, seven months along, playing with the kittens someone had left on our doorstep in a big cardboard box. But now there’s no one to share those memories with.

Grace’s clients will find a new life coach. Her daughter will carry on as one of the elders now, someone with her own recipe for banana bread and her own methods to remove stains from carpets. Grace will fade to a distant, if cherished, memory. And I wonder, is there anything I have done in my life that will have made any sort of difference in this world? I’ll die or move on to an assisted living facility and a youngish couple will move into my house. They’ll change out the paint color in the living room and redo the kitchen. They’ll take their children for walks to the pond and try to catch the long-mythologized wide mouth bass. And it will be as if I never lived here. I’m just another Canada Goose, indistinguishable by my plumage, making a few last circuits of the pond before it ices over.

The days are getting longer. The forsythia have bloomed and cherry trees are showing off their pink and white blossoms. Still no sign of nest-making at my pond. The sun rises higher in the sky, and the water is still. I guess the geese have found a new home somewhere else. The rusty-swing, seee-saw-calling bird sings out from its hiding place, seee-saw, seee-saw. I turn and walk home.

Katherine Flannery Dering received an MFA in 2013 from Manhattanville College. Her memoir, Shot in the Head, a Sister’s Memoir a Brother’s Struggle (2014, Bridgeross) is a mixed-genre book of poetry, prose, photos and emails about caring for her schizophrenic brother. Her poetry chapbook is titled Aftermath (2018, Finishing Line Press.) Her work has appeared recently in Inkwell, RiverRiver, Cordella, Adanna, Goatsmilk, Share Journal, and Landing Zone Magazine, in addition to The Manifest Station. Her website is www.katherineflannerydering.com.

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, exercise, Humor

If Virginia Woolf Had a Peloton

June 15, 2022

Last week at the New York Public Library I saw Virginia Woolf’s walking cane displayed among other artifacts of the literary world. The cane shows her to be a real person, who walked regularly and needed support.

I used to only think of her scribbling in a solitary room, and her call for other women to have “money and a room” in order to be creative thinkers. But she was also a person in motion, who sought the means to move independently, something as rare for the women of her era as a room of one’s own.

A dark brown curve of bamboo, the cane bolstered her after she wrote a note to her husband and headed to the Ouse river, picking up stones on the shore to fill her pockets, and then deciding to breathe water instead of air. Leonard Woolf found her cane floating in the river. It was all the evidence left until her body washed up three days later.

The cane was unremarkable. When my son leaned in to read the card about it, he quickly moved on. If it had been Tolkien’s, he might have lingered. At nineteen, he’s lucky not yet to need to think of frailty or ways to find stability in a rocky world.

Seeing the cane, I recognized my own search for a merger of movement and mental space. Lately, I find it on a bike that goes nowhere.

On my Peloton, I leave without leaving. I climb switchbacks in the Alps from a corner of my home that used to be part of the garage. Over the last five years, I’ve pounded away hundreds of miles without fear of falling or being smeared on the asphalt by a careless driver. I lose myself in the steady rotation, in the music, and often in the encouraging guidance of an instructor who gets me to push that little bit further. These wheels of my own give me an immense sense of freedom for something so stationary.

If Virginia Woolf had a Peloton, I started to imagine walking down the library’s massive steps, she could have let herself sweat. She’d have had a bike of her own to push back at the heavy world, one pedal stroke at a time. “An immense pressure is on me,” she wrote in The Waves. “I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries.” With a Peloton, she could have spun a fifty-pound wheel with her own two feet. She’d have watched the miles, and those burdensome centuries, roll off her shoulders with digital ease.

If Woolf had a Peloton, she would have ridden it in the room of her own she built onto Monk’s House, the sixteenth-century country cottage that was her escape from London. To her specifications, the room only had a door facing to the outside. So if she had a Peloton, she never would have disturbed Leonard if she rode without headphones and belted out “Minnie the Moocher” or crooned like Fred Astaire to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” during an Epic-Sing-Along ride.

Even with Woolf’s infirmities, she could have built up strength, starting slow with low-impact rides. After a time, she’d conquer high-intensity intervals and hill climbs. Perhaps she could have freed herself from that cane altogether, never allowing it to have been the vehicle that supported her on her way to the riverbank that day.

And if Woolf had a Peloton, the exercise endorphins could have mollified her moments of extreme self-doubt. Endorphins are far superior to the barbiturates and force-feeding she endured, a more natural balm for the horror she internalized. Some Woolf scholars claim she didn’t suffer from mental illness but that she failed to find a way to cope with a world gone mad or find a place of calm within it.

Any dispiriting feelings Woolf might have had of failure or mental exhaustion on a Peloton ride would end simply with calories burned rather than a conflagration of her soul. And she had so many possibilities for an awesome Peloton leaderboard name — ToTheFuckingLighthouse, WoolfWhistle, InSheepsClothing, WoolfPack, RedRidingWoolf.

Though she didn’t live to see it, I think Woolf would have found this bike that goes nowhere far preferable to a bike that goes somewhere. Though many of her peers likened the bicycle to an optimistic element of the modern world, Woolf called it one of the “common objects of daily prose” – along with her distaste for the ever-present, noisy and gas-belching omnibus. The bike was not fit for poetry, she chided.

Woolf preferred long walks. She only cycled to and from the train station for convenience.

But if the quotidian bicycle was too proletariat for the queen of the modernists, then surely she would have embraced the Peloton, with its four-figure price tag and its air of privilege. (One also needs a permanent residence, wifi, cycling shoes, and dare-I-say padded cycling shorts, the likes of which can cost a hundred bucks if one doesn’t want seams that chafe, and Woolf certainly would not have wanted seams that chafe). Even at the Peloton’s cost, Leonard could have supported it to save her from dangerous solo wanderings.

Peloton rides are both solitary – and not. I can be motivated to climb on the bike by the connection to a community of other cyclists doing the same thing in rooms across the globe and by the inspiration of a favorite instructor. But more often what keeps me pedaling is the quiet ability to listen to my breathing. I enter the roads of my mind, the miles spilling out like a Jackson Browne ballad.

I can ride full of joy, shaking my shoulders with Lizzo or swinging a sweaty ponytail to some throwback Van Halen. But in these last several years I am more likely to unburden the kind of raw emotion that sweat and adrenaline release. Freed from the cacophony of the other minutes in my day, and even from concern over balance itself, I let myself blubber on a tough hill climb to that song from the Pretenders that makes me ache for my dead mother in a way no other combination of chords can. When the song and the guided ride ends, I press down on the red lever to halt that fifty-pound wheel. I wipe my face, feeling stronger in all ways, and better able to consider Woolf’s challenge. We have to “face the fact,” she wrote, “for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone.”

I dare to counter that in our era we need rooms of our own and rooms of connection. And if we need to cling to an exercise machine – well, dammit, let’s cling. We need bikes that can carry us to trains to ride into the larger world – and ones that are stationary, that exercise the wheels of our psyche as much as our physique.

If Virginia Woolf had a Peloton, I think it could have been one small way to free herself from the cage of her mind and strengthen her body from the inside out. If I were her contemporary, we could have given each other Peloton high fives while riding intervals to swing tunes from Guy Lombardo or Bing Crosby. We could share in that particular freedom I find when I pedal furiously on a bike that carries me forward, even when it actually goes nowhere.

Deborah Claymon, a recovering business and technology journalist, is working to crack the code on her own fiction projects. She’s a reader for Zoetrope: All-Story and her work has been published in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Mercury News, Salon, Forbes, National Public Radio and more.

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Mental Health, Guest Posts

Walk This Way

December 17, 2019

By Sarah Boon

If you’d told me last summer that I’d be training for a half-marathon this summer, I would have laughed hard and loud. Not because it was funny, per se, but because of my mental illness and the crippling grip it has on me.

In 2014, my psychiatrist diagnosed me with bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. The former is when your mood swings from euphoric highs during which you feel invincible, to deep lows during which you feel the world is going to end – something I realized I’d definitely been experiencing over the past five years. The latter is an underlying condition that I recognized as soon as he diagnosed it: I have been anxious since I was a child, always worried that something bad is going to happen or that I’ve done something wrong, and it’s coloured my whole life. He explained that this combination of illnesses is one of the most difficult to treat, adding that cognitive decline, or changes in your ability to think, is common among people with bipolar disorder.

I tried over a dozen different drugs to manage my illness. One required that I stay close to the bathroom, another sent me to the ER with a migraine so terrible I thought my head would explode. Some medications knocked me out to sleep in minutes, while others led to nausea and vomiting. I got used to experiencing a range of unpleasant side effects, until we finally found a mix of medications that made life a little bit more manageable.

All this is to say that I’ve spent the past seven years being held hostage by my illness. It tells me when I need extra sleep, when I need to avoid groups of people, when I should adjust my medications and, if there’s anything left, when I’m able to be sort of normal. It’s not clear on which days I’ll feel okay versus days when I feel terrible, and there’s no easy way to correlate certain activities or events with a specific emotional or mental response. I still have highs and lows, despite my medication being delicately balanced in an attempt to avoid these swings.

My illness dictates how my days and weeks go, and I often resent it for that. If, as Annie Dillard said, “how we spend our days is how we spend our lives,” then my life is a combination of excess sleeping and trying to maintain a stable mood, like sitting on a children’s seesaw and trying to hold steady in the middle. This is definitely not the life I wanted or expected to live.

My illness has also made me less than active, and that – combined with the unfortunate but common side effect of the medications – has led to significant weight gain and reduced fitness. I haven’t been able to commit to regular exercise or joining a fitness club because my life is so unpredictable. Physical deterioration is not discussed much in mental health circles or stories. As Virginia Woolf writes in On Being Ill, we tend to focus only on the mind, “the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe. [We ignore] the body in the philosopher’s turret…Those great wars which it wages by itself…against the oncome of melancholia, are neglected.” But having a body you don’t like is just one more thing that feeds depression.

Then last January, something changed. I experienced one of the highest high moods of my life: so high that I had to increase my regular medications and take copious amounts of a new medication to manage it. I felt like I could do anything. I wasn’t sleeping. I was writing essays in my head at all hours of the day. I was purchasing all sorts of things online. I was pitching freelance pieces left, right, and centre. I was back to my former state of juggling more balls than I should have been able to manage. And I loved it.

When you’re used to being depressed, submerged under an immovable weight that just can’t be lifted, a bipolar high feels like a gift, even though you know it’s going to end badly and have serious impacts on your brain function and mood. Indeed, I did a series of cognitive competency tests shortly after one of my earlier high episodes to see if I could go back to work, and I failed several of them – likely due to a combination of cognitive decline and mental fuzziness caused by the medication.

One good thing came from this high, however – I decided that I needed to be more in charge of my life. I wanted a sense of personal agency, something I’d been missing as I was tossed around by the vagaries of my illness and the side effects of the medication. I wanted goals, and a series of steps to reach those goals – steps I’d chosen myself to track my progress. I wanted to be more fit, to be active like I used to be, when I hiked and skied in the Rockies, swam 3,000-4,000 metres every other day, and lifted weights every second day.

What did “taking charge of my life” mean in practice? It meant walking the trails around my house again, something I’d done when we first moved in but dropped during a depressive phase. It meant committing to writing a book about my field experiences as a research scientist. It meant deciding to do the Lake-to-Lake Marathon.

I first heard about the Lake-to-Lake Marathon last year and was intrigued. It follows a gravel railbed trail for 42 kilometres from Shawnigan Lake to Lake Cowichan on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, crossing several old train trestles along the way. I liked the idea of walking on gravel rather than asphalt, and checking out the view from each of the different trestles. I didn’t think about the training so much as I envisioned a lovely walk in the woods and crossing the finish line.

People with bipolar disorder are notorious for promising the world during a high phase. We have a tendency to take on more than we can manage, and that impulse collides with the inability to do it, leaving us holding the pieces and wondering what went wrong. During that high earlier this year, I promised several writing assignments and ended up having to cancel one and not do as good a job as I’d planned for another, which made me feel like a terrible writer. But I never lost that idea of wanting to walk the marathon.

Some people would have happily chosen a 10-kilometre race, but I wanted to challenge myself with something longer and more difficult, something that would allow me to enhance my fitness levels. I wanted to force my body to listen to me and do as I asked, to push me strongly over the finish line. As my high mood declined, however, I realized that there was no way I could do a full marathon. So I switched my sights to the half-marathon.

In June I got serious about training and started walking longer distances than my usual 3-4 kilometres. My plan was to just walk farther each day until I hit close to marathon length. My longest walk as of the middle of July was 14 km. But walking is time-consuming, and it’s difficult to fit a 2.5 hr walk into an already limited day. I’m up at 8.30 am and back in bed at 10 pm, with a 2.5 hr nap in the afternoon. Within those hours I not only have to walk, but I also have to eat, wrangle dogs, do house and garden chores, run errands, and keep up my writing – especially now that I’m working on a book.

What happens if I have a bad day (or week) and have to stay in bed? Like the day after that 14 km walk, when reality came back to bite me and I had to sleep all day? It’s made me realize that my training has to take into account how my body and mind feel, that I have to consider not what other people do, but what I’m able to do. I can’t afford to re-injure my knee, or to draw too deeply on my limited energy stores while training. I have to walk at my own pace, not the pace set by the faster walkers on the course.

Thank goodness I’ve found a half-marathon training program that allows for two days off a week, and includes only one long walk a week (like my 14 kilometre walk), with shorter walks at faster speeds or a session of repeated hill climbs during the rest of the week. Suddenly things seem much more manageable – I can fit most of my daily walks into an hour or two, and I can recharge on the days off. This also allows me to manage bad days – I can just shift my days off. I can also use the extra time for writing.

I’m proud of myself for sticking with the training so far, and am starting to see some benefits like reduced resting heart rate and some weight loss. The half-marathon itself will be tough, but it’s almost tougher to make sure I get out at least five times a week to train. I enjoy my training sessions, though. Walking gives me a way of thinking through life issues, plus writing and book ideas. It’s also a way to zone out and let my feet do the work. As Antonia Malchik explains in her book, A Walking Life, walking helps re-centre ourselves in our body and in society, heal hurts and organize thoughts, and remember the past and aim for the future. That’s exactly what I need to help me balance both my mental and physical health, and is similar to advice I’ve read from other prolific walkers.

I’ll never get rid of my illness, but I can do my best to take charge of it and work within its physical and mental limitations, and to focus on the positives as much as possible. As Anne Giardini writes, “The days cannot be stretched, but they can be shaped.” I can shape my days around my walking goals, with the understanding that they may need to be modified at times, depending on how I’m feeling. I can walk that Lake-to-Lake Half-Marathon. Crossing the finish line after having committed to all that training will be the best gift I could give myself.

Sarah Boon is a Vancouver Island-based writer whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, Longreads, Hippocampus, The Millions, Hakai Magazine, Literary Hub, Science, and Nature. She is currently writing a book about her field research adventures in remote locations. Sarah Boon is a Vancouver Island-based writer whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, Longreads, Hippocampus, The Millions, Hakai Magazine, Literary Hub, Science, and Nature. She is currently writing a book about her field research adventures in remote locations. Find her on Twitter at @SnowHydro

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exercise, Guest Posts, Health

Getting Up Offa That Thing

March 11, 2019

By Nina Gaby

Before we start, the trainer asks me if I can get up and down off the floor. We are standing in front of a contraption known as PF360. As I am devoted to the idea of changing my life right now and keeping the dark shadows of my mood on the periphery, I force a good-natured laugh. “Now why are you asking me that? Do I look like someone who can’t get off the floor?”

Well yes I probably do. My white hair flies out from its clip, my left arm trembles a bit from the exertion of the Matrix machine that I’ve just done again for the first time in a year, and my numb right hand can be pretty worthless as evidenced by having just dropped my iPhone again. I’m pale from insomnia and worry and disappointment. And then there’s the belly, an appendage with a life of its own. I’ve already been called “hon” and “dear” by staff twice today. No one ever called me “hon” or “dear” until I hit sixty-five and now I rue every condescending sweetness I ever bestowed on any old person in my life. It’s a micro-aggression, I want to tell them, but off course I don’t. At least they are trying to sprinkle a little kindness in an inhospitable world.

Dexterity and stamina suspect, I surprise the trainer by holding plank for 45 seconds and being able to synchronize “dead bug” and move on to the ropes and pulleys without incident. “I do yoga” I tell her. “Not well,” I add. “I used to exercise all the time…” I trail off. She is glancing out over the football field sized Planet Fitness and worries that if anyone else shows up for the training she won’t make it out in time to pick up her kids from day care. She is a working mom who doesn’t have time for my reminiscing. We move on to the kettle bells. Continue Reading…

Eating Disorders/Healing, Grief, Guest Posts

Down The Rabbit Hole Into Paris: Healing After The Death of My Sister.

November 29, 2014

By Kate Sutton.

I was sleep deprived, having not slept a wink on the plane. It had been an eight hour red eye and although I had tried too sleep, I couldn’t. Thoughts racing through my head. Love, loss, anniversaries. It was all painfully there. A huge hole in my heart that didn’t want to heal.

Part of me hadn’t wanted to go to Paris. But, as I stepped off that plane and breathed in the French air, I was struck with the sudden sense of freedom. It came as a shock. It was a feeling I hadn’t expected.

The last two months had been a calamity of vomiting, drinking, vomiting, drugs, binging, vomiting, blacking out and more bingeing and purging. All in an attempt to forget the emotional pain I was in, which was only made more brutally aware, as I approached the first anniversary of my sister’s death. Continue Reading…

Eating Disorders/Healing, Guest Posts, healing

My Journey with Disorderly Eating.

November 12, 2013

My Journey with Disorderly Eating.

By Lynn Hasselberger

Food is an important part of a balanced diet.

Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life, “Food for Thought and Vice Versa”

Count Chocula was my favorite cereal. I’d save the marshmallows for last.

Our cabinet was loaded with sugary cereal—Quisp, Honeycomb, Sugar Pebbles, Frosted Flakes. But Count Chocula was my favorite. The marshmallows soaked in the milk while I ate around them. Their mushy texture at the end was such a treat, washed down with the sugar-laden chocolatey milk. Great start to any child’s day!

You can do a lot for your diet by eliminating foods that have mascots.
~Ted Spiker

Lunch was typically white bread with Jif peanut butter. Occasionally a hard boiled egg. And a Twinkie or Ho Ho. My drink of choice was Coca-Cola or root beer with milk. And cookies for dessert. Homemade or Double Stuff Oreos. Gasp!

A mid-afternoon snack was typically more cookies or a sleeve of Ritz or saltine crackers. Maybe a slice of good old American cheese. Meat and potatoes with overcooked vegetables or iceberg lettuce was typical dinner fare. And always a humongous bowl of ice cream drowning in Hershey’s chocolate sauce for dessert while the family sat down to watch The Love Boat.

In high school, I wasn’t really as hungry for breakfast, so I’d drink a Carnation Instant Breakfast. Our milk was raw, straight from the cow. I used to love the chocolate kids sold for charity so I’d buy a huge caramel filled chocolate bar and consider that lunch. Maybe I’d buy a chocolate milk. There were vending machines that sold soda so I’d be sure to get my fill of grape soda—one or two cans a day. I’d return home for some—you guessed it—cookies or crackers. And then back to the usual meat and potatoes and ice cream dessert.

I was “shy” growing up. But maybe I was just anxious and depressed.

I could not even begin to open my mouth to talk to a cute boy. I also found it hard to articulate in general, even if I was comfortable with someone. (Was I ever comfortable?) I had extreme dental problems that didn’t help my confidence.

Surprisingly, I was not fat. (Can you believe it?) I couldn’t get over a hundred pounds in high school and friends would ask me why I was so skinny. I was a late bloomer with a stick figure. That and the fact that I was mute meant the phone was not ringing off the hook with boys in hot pursuit. I had no concept of “exercise” or even being fat or thin. I tried to gain weight when I was a high school senior by eating McDonald’s for lunch. That didn’t work.

When I went away to college, food choices expanded greatly. The buffet in the dorm cafeteria was exciting to me—such variety and I could pick anything I wanted! I partied practically every night, attempting to keep up with my friends who were more used to drinking and typically weighed more than I. There was pizza delivery to the dorm! That was soooo cool. There was no pizza delivery in the small farm town where I came from. So Dominoes made its way to our dorm room at least once a week after a night of imbibing on cheap beer. Or we’d head to Spud & Sub at midnight, where they served baked potatoes drenched in butter and other fabulous toppings. I loved how the melted cheddar cheese would stretch as I shoveled each forkful into my mouth, finishing every last bite.

In general, mankind, since the improvement in cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.
~Benjamin Franklin

I had a boyfriend or two (not at the same time), acquired during parties where I was suddenly able to talk, thanks to beer. I would get wasted! And I continued to engage in late night—and overall very poor—eating. The fact that I gained weight (finally) really didn’t bother me. Even though it gathered at very odd places—my face and knees mostly. (I burned the photographic evidence from those years.) But I didn’t really care. I wasn’t conscious of extra weight being a “bad” thing. I also wasn’t familiar with the reason for exercise. Activity had always been a normal part of my life with gym class at school, riding bikes, general running around and swimming in the summer, shoveling manure on our little farm.

My best friend from high school did sit-ups sometimes while we talked on the phone. I didn’t really understand the purpose of it. In college, a group of us would meet in the dorm lobby occasionally to do a Jane Fonda workout and one of my friends emphasized the importance of squeezing the butt muscles when walking around campus. But, again, I really didn’t give it any thought. I was just happy I had finally put on a few pounds (more like 25 or 30).

I don’t recall why, but I decided to eat better—well, less—the summer after freshman year. Maybe I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror. I’d start out the day by eating a not necessarily healthy breakfast. Skip lunch. Then eat dinner. No ice cream!

Then I met a guy. At a bar. Yes, I was drunk.

We fell in love. My first real love ever. I had never even told a guy I loved him before this. We were inseparable all summer long. I continued to skip lunch. Maybe even breakfast. I wasn’t really hungry because I was, after all, in love. He thought I had a fantastic body—I did look damn hot in a bikini.

I just remembered that, after junior year of high school, a guy from my class came up to me at the beach and said, “Wow! I didn’t know that was you. And that you had such a great body!” I had spent most of my high school years wearing my older brother’s hand-me-down jeans so my body was hidden. This is turning into a therapy session!

My confidence—something I never possessed—escalated. By day, I still had a hard time talking to this boyfriend. Come to think of it, we didn’t really talk much. We made out a lot.

And then summer ended and we had to say good-bye. Our colleges were six hours apart. It was heart-breaking.

I returned to school and fell into a deep, deep depression. I also returned to eating. Binge eating myself into a wallowing state. Specifically I remember enjoying my roommate’s Hamburger Helper (gag me!). Did I mention I continued to party every night?

My boyfriend surprised me with a visit and he acted, uh, less infatuated with me. He told me I wasn’t as cute without a tan. And noticed my weight gain. He actually used the word flabby. What a jerk, right?

You thought I was depressed before!

I stopped eating. I’d walk to my morning art class with a diet soda. Have a package of gum balls at lunch time (weird, I know). Sometimes I’d eat an apple. Dinner would consist of soup or popcorn. I lost weight. Lots and lots of weight.

I’d wake up hungry in the middle of the night and and snuck up to the apartment above us, where I they had Honeycomb (their pantry was outside their door at the top of our shared back stairway). I’d make my way all the way back downstairs with the box, fill a bowl and return the box. I was a stealth cereal snatcher and I’m guessing to this day they wonder where all their Honeycomb went. Couldn’t have been me—I was sooo skinny.

My best friend began to tell me I was getting to thin. She was worried about me. I’d laugh it off, telling her I’d always been skinny.

My boyfriend returned for a visit. This time he was mad at me. “You better not have anorexia. My last girlfriend had that,” he said in so many words. I denied having any problem and he continued to act less than loving. In fact, I think he left earlier than he was supposed to when I was still sleeping.

At one point, I decided to eat again (donuts and other crap). And exercise so the weight would go back on in the “right places.”

After gaining some weight, I finally hopped on the scale. Ninety pounds.

After gaining some weight, I finally hopped on the scale. Ninety pounds. Keep in mind, I had gained weight. Not only that, but I’m five foot six and a half. In the meantime, my long-distance relationship with that nice boyfriend was deteriorating.

I wasn’t returning back to “normal” weight-wise or otherwise.

One night, after an exceptionally filling dinner, my roommate and I were kidding around about how full we were. Oh, how sick we felt. It was worse than Thanksgiving. Then she let me in on her secret. Throwing it up was her answer. She’d been doing that since junior high. And off she went to purge, laughing about it afterward. She suggested I try it. “It’s easy.”

There’s nothing I hate more—to this day—than throwing up. I hardly ever got the stomach flu. Yes, I had thrown up after drinking too much beer and eating far too many hot dogs freshman year in college at a party, hugging the toilet in the frat house bathroom swearing off hot dogs for the rest of my life.

But I did it. I purged. Because in the back—make that the very forefront—of my mind was the fact that my boyfriend didn’t love me as much because I had gained weight.

And thus began my journey with bulimia.

I won’t go into the gory details, but suffice it to say, I’m pretty sure I could have died. I had hallucinations. My ears rang. Food was my enemy.

It lasted for three years.

I knew it had to stop. I devoured articles and books about health and food and fitness.

One time, someone noticed me binging on food and said, “I think you might be a fat woman trying to get out of your skinny body.” I may not have been super skinny when she made that comment since purging doesn’t rid your body of every single ounce of calories you’ve inhaled.

The truth was probably more like: I was trying to physically fill a painful hole in my soul.

And a need that never got met because what I really needed was proper nutrition. That was probably the case all along going back to the days when I thought sugar was a staple. What goes into the body has an effect on how you feel. It’s not just calories as fuel, it’s vitamins and minerals (duh!). Early on, the high levels of sugar was a form of self-medication. It fed my depression and I’d enjoy a temporary high only to crash in a spiral that could only be thwarted by more sugar.

I remember as a young child, climbing on the counter when nobody was around and sneaking a spoonful of sugar from the cabinet. Also vanilla extract. Later, I snuck Popsicles and ice cream bars when I was supposed to be in bed. And, like many children I’m guessing, I’d take sugar packets from restaurants and eat them on the way home in the back of the station wagon. That might explain a lot of my cavities.

I can’t explain how I did it without some serious therapy, but I quit. It was a gradual process with the occasional set-back. While I hadn’t completely figured out the right combination of nutrition and exercise yet, my bulimic period came to an end when I was on my own, living in Chicago in my 20s.

My bread transitioned to mostly wheat—but I wasn’t yet aware of the importance of whole grain. More salads made their way into my meals. Bran muffins I decided were good for me (compared to breakfasts of my past, they were a definite improvement). I drank a lot of coffee and still imbibed in alcohol socially. I decided in my late 20s/early 30s that no fat was a good idea which, of course, it wasn’t. No protein whatsoever with lunch I could later attribute to my fatigue. And binging on Hershey’s chocolate and Bit-o-Honey and/or ice cream during the peak of my PMS cycles was not unheard of.

In my mid-30s I had the opportunity to work with the sports nutrition company EAS and learned the philosophy of its founder Bill Philips who also wrote the New York best-seller “Body for Life.” That was a turning point for me. I learned to eat more frequent “meals” which was supposed to consist of an equal combo of protein and carbs (he recommended a fist size portion of each, six times a day) with one day each week of eating whatever the hell you want in any quantity. The change in my eating habits alone resulted in a higher and more stable energy level that lasted throughout the day. I felt better than I had ever remembered feeling.

I adopted a form of Bill’s exercise program which I use to this day (outlined at the end), which includes a combination of strength-training and cardio. I learned proper form from the EAS physical trainers who also trained some of the Denver Broncos. On the downside, I took the EAS creatine—a powdery, synthetic version of a substance created in the liver and kidneys which increases muscle mass—and my muscles transformed into high def. The stuff was free and, fortunately, I only ingested it and some of the other processed and probably very unnatural supplements for about a year. Hey—I was still learning (and still am)!

While my depression/anxiety overall had improved tremendously, I still suffered from PMS. It was getting worse (my husband refers to me as the tarantula) with age. The fact my body had been pumped full of hormones for six consecutive rounds of in vitro fertilization during my early 30s probably threw my hormonal balance off-kilter. Someone recommended the book Prescription for Nutritional Healing—an A to Z reference to drug-free remedies using vitamins, minerals, herbs and food supplements. Who knew I was supposed to be eating whole grain foods?

Fast forward to today. I just turned 49 and am basically a health nut (some might argue that being such a health nut is its own form of eating disorder). I look healthy, not emaciated, hovering between 115 and 120 pounds. I eat and I eat well. I have a nutrition packed smoothie every morning, eat loads of nuts and whole grains, tons of fruits and vegetables, fish, free-range chicken, cage free/free range eggs… and most everything is organic. I eat all meals—breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, another snack before bed. It’s rare for me to eat red meat and I keep sugar to a minimum (although I must have ice cream, it’s only once a week). I would eat more sugar, believe me, if it made me feel spectacular and/or did not cause wrinkles.

I feel great. Sure, I still suffer a bit from depression and anxiety. But it’s not as extreme or frequent. Though whenever I eat crap or drink more than one glass of wine, I feel completely off the next day.

I should mention that I’m on a small dose of medication to reduce depression and anxiety, although I’ve tried really really hard to be medicine free. Believe me. I’ve been on and off the stuff over the last few years and blown loads of money I don’t have trying to find the right combination of holistic remedies. If I didn’t eat right, my meds dosage would have to be increased. The good news is, I’m not numbed by the medicine—I feel icky when something bad happens like anyone else. But I digress.

And while I limit the junk in my house—absolutely no Count Chocula—I love food. It’s my friend, but not an obsession. I allow my 12 1/2 year old son to purchase junk food with his own money and am teaching him that food is fuel. I’ll admit, I lecture him on all the bad chemicals and other nonsense that’s in the junk food any chance I get.

My relationship to food continues to evolve—I’m ashamed to admit that processed foods like the oh-so-convenient chicken nuggets and Trader Joe’s microwaveable burritos occasionally end up in my shopping cart and follow me home. What can I say?

There’s a lot of peer pressure to eat junk—when I turn down that brownie, I get a look and a “You can afford it!” Not to worry. I get my pint of Ben & Jerry’s every weekend—sometimes a Culver’s (gasp!) large concrete mixer with Oreos—and you can bet I eat cheese and douse things (not my ice cream) with olive oil.

Limiting the crap might make me “weird” to some, but it makes me a happier person. Please just accept that.

Originally published on elephantjournal.com.

Lynn Hasselberger lives in Chicagoland with her son, husband and two cats. She loves sunrises, running, yoga, chocolate, reading and writing, and has a voracious appetite for comedy. Lynn is currently working for the documentary film Unacceptable Levels. In her spare time, she writes for her blogs I Count for myEARTH and LynnHasselberger.com and other publications. A treehugger and social media addict, you’ll most likely find Lynn on twitter (@LynnHasselbrgr, @myEARTH360 and @IC4ME) and facebook. She hopes to make the world a better place, have more fun, re-develop her math skills and overcome her fear of public speaking.