I am a fully qualified personal trainer and up until 7 months ago that was how I spent most of my time – training people in the gym, teaching gym-based classes and training myself. However I only did that job for around 18 months after quitting my corporate job in finance before I realised that while I thought I had made my passion my job I had actually made my obsession my job and it got pretty unhealthy very quickly (read more on my story here).
Coming to Bali was supposed to be a brief break from London living, get some sun, sea, sand and space. I never envisaged my whole life changing, definitely not going from training nearly everyday to not at all for 2 months. I used to live in the gym, literally. At one point I had memberships to 3 different gyms. I was completely obsessed, addicted even, it was my whole life.
Exercise was my escape, my release, my ‘me-time’. It was my meditation, it was what ‘kept me sane’.
I see this all over social media – we use exercise to ‘de-stress’, to forget about our problems for an hour, to make ourselves feel better. For a lot of people this can be totally healthy, but for anyone who has struggled with food or their body image, has emotional trauma from their past (or present) they are trying to run from, exercise as an escape is just another way to not deal with your life. Another way to avoid feeling what you need to feel in order to be ok, in order to accept who you are. When everything around me was falling apart and I got bored of dieting I made exercise my absolute compulsion. I claimed that it was good for my mental, emotional and physical health.
However it got to the point that anytime I went to train in the gym I would get physically ill. I would train and then have to lie in bed for 2 days after as I was completely exhausted, suffering from flu-like symptoms. I went to the doctor and tests showed my kidneys were not functioning properly, unable to cope with the strain I was putting them under with my lifestyle. At this point I had cut my training down to once or twice a week, or even less. I was definitely not over-exercising by any stretch of the imagination.
But exercise was still hurting me. And not just physically.
The gym had been another place I went to escape from the things in my life which I didn’t know how to deal with, like my parents divorce. I had absolutely no tools to deal with any difficult emotions in my life, so I avoided them.
The stress of storing all of my negative emotions in my body on top of a gruelling fitness regime I had put myself under for the previous 3 years led me to completely crumble.
So I quit everything. I quit every single thing I was doing to avoid my emotions and instead started feeling them. Quitting the gym was one of the toughest because I am naturally an active person (…I was a Personal Trainer!), but also because there is a powerful message coming from the media that exercise is a healthy way to handle your emotions. I was left feeling like such a failure that I couldn’t exercise. I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I saw so many messages from fitness influencers saying exercise was so good for their mental health/anxiety/depression. It felt like I lost part of my identity and one of my main coping mechanisms.
But actually while I had to give up a big part of my life for a few months I didn’t realise that this was the best thing I could do for my relationship with myself and with exercise.
The beauty of dealing with my real issues, feeling into them rather than trying to escape them with exercise, is that I have been able to come back to exercise with a fresh perspective. Coming back to it I am now able to enjoy it in a new, different and much more liberated way. Actually enjoy it for what it is, which is a way of keeping my physical body healthy so that I can enjoy a long, happy life.