I have an eating disorder. I’ve had it for a very long time. It developed as a young pre-teen girl who was surrounded with horrifying diet culture, Teen Vogue filled with bony, anorexic models and my mother and her friends obsessivly following ever changing diet trends. From Dr. Bob Weigh Loss, to Jenny Craig, Slim-fast and Atkins, every women in America, and maybe the developed world, followed these trends.
By the time I was thirteen, I had started restricting food, taking diet pills and finding ways to rid my stomach of its contents when I over-ate. The dabbling in various ways of weight control and loss led me into a full-blown ravenous eating disorder. I will spare you the specifics as that is not the important part. Over the course of the next 13 years I struggled every single day with it in silence. It ruined every relationship, every healthy endeavor, and became a prison I was locked inside with no key. By the time I was 25, I finally realized that if I did not get help, it would control me forever.
I spent years trying various medications and working with numerous therapists in an attempt to help me reconstruct my obsessive thoughts around food and my body. I finally started to see the lights of recovery at the end of the dark tunnel that was my eating disorder. I found myself going longer and longer without a relapse. However in 2018, I relocated to a new city and I purchased a house. It wasn't long before I relapsed and fell into a tailspin that had me hiding away every day to binge and purge, run to the bathroom after every meal, and exercise with a fervor that would put Olympic athletes to shame.
Back to therapy I went, and found myself back in rocovery. This time was different however. The therapy and the retraining of my brain finally stuck. It’s not that I hadn’t wanted it before, but this time the healing started at the root, not the canopy. I started to actualize a future where I wasn’t controlled by my eating disorder. I started planning new adventures. I was finally out of the woods, and in meadow of real recovery.
Then I discovered thru-hiking.
Once on the Appalachian Trail, I felt amazing. I was eating thousands of calories of food each day, and I loved it. I needed those calories to hike from where I was standing to where I decided to camp each night. I was eating foods I hadn’t dare dreamt of eating for years due to my restrictive eating disorder. I was counting calories to ensure that I was getting enough. In opposition of why I had used to count calories. I yearned for a full belly each night instead of an empty one. Food was fuel. FOOD WAS GOOD. I was finally cured of my eating disorder. Or so I thought.
It didn’t hurt that my body morphed into the body of an endurance athlete. I could eat a pack of Oreo’s each day and still my body shed fat and transformed into a lean, muscular machine. Over the course of the 2200 miles of the Appalachian Trail I happily ate what I wanted, and enjoyed satiating my hunger. Until I touched the northern terminus on Mount Katahdin.
Once I returned home, the real consequences of thru-hiking slowly became apparent. I was HUNGRY. My hiker hunger was unrelenting. Day after day I craved macaroni and cheese, pizza, and bags and bags of gummy candy and other high calorie snacks. I vowed to maintain some semblance of my hiker-body. I started running every day, and forced myself to restrict my diet again. I needed to detox from the “bad foods” I loved while on the trail. I started eating only foods that I deemed healthy. Salads, lean fats, and low carbohydrates. After a few months my body softened, and began to expand back to the pre-trail body I once hated. Suddenly I was suffocated by the intrusive thoughts I had fallen victim to before. Before I knew it, I had completely relapsed. I was right back in the tumultuous cycle of binging and purging, and evacuating my stomach after every meal and snack.
I knew what I needed to do to get back on track and ran back to therapy, where progress was even slower than before. Luckily for me, my next hike was only a few months away. I would forgive my jiggly thighs and soft stomach knowing that in a few short months I would shed it all revealing my rock-hard hiker body. With each thru-hike, I dove back into the cycle of learning to love food while on trail, and loathing myself for relapsing each time I returned home.
That is, until last year. On the Pacific Crest Trail I developed and intense heart burn roughly half way through the trail. I had dealt with acid reflux since developing my eating disorder, but this was different. Every day, I took over the counter Nexium, ate Tums like candy and spent weeks with a burning sensation in my stomach. Once I returned home, I was seen by a Gastroenterologist, and after an endoscopy I was told that some of my stomach cells had actually transformed into intestine cells. I was warned that my trail diet of processed foods and cyclic eating disorder was causing my stomach cells to shift, which can be a precursor to stomach cancer. I needed to make some indefinite changes if I wanted my stomach to heal.
So if you want to know one of the many reasons why thru-hiking has been placed on a shelf for me, this was one of the big ones. That I couldn’t keep thru-hiking and falling victim to my own mental illness. That I needed to stop filling my body with processed foods for months on end. I needed to break the cycle of my relapses.
Thru-hiking is a wonderful experience and I wouldn’t change it for the world. It healed me in so many ways. I helped me dig through my trauma and my pain and emerge a person I can actually say I am proud of. It taught me just how resilient my body is. But it also highlighted that thru-hiking is flawed. In many ways, this being one. That if you struggle with disordered eating, thru-hiking may seem like a wonderful way to teach yourself that food is power. But returning home can be extremely dangerous and that you need to approach it with the utmost care and attention.
For now, I am working on staying in recovery at all costs. To finally find a way to accept my body as it is. To find joy in other forms of purposeful movement. To live a life where I am not waiting for hiking season to feel confident and proud. To find joy in my life, in the here and now.