Since getting clean and actively participating in my recovery, I have found that it is not enough for me to just stop using drugs and alcohol as a way to cope with the world around me.  In order to effectively live life, I need to be willing to change the way that I relate with myself, with others, and the world around me.  The person that I was before will no longer suffice in the world that I want to live in today.

For me, part of the way that I can amend my past behavior is to take care of my health.  I neglected it for so many years and did so much damage to my mind and body that today I strive to live a different way of life.  I can’t change the way I behaved in the past or the decisions that I made, but I can do something better today, something different.  I no longer have to disregard my health and can choose to make it a priority today.

I smoked cigarettes on and off starting when I went to college.  Today, I choose not to smoke.  I used to sit on the couch and eat gallon containers of Cold Stone ice cream and barely go outside.  Today, I pay attention to the foods that I eat and actively try to make exercise a part of my life.  I used to pollute my body with too much alcohol and too many drugs.  Today, I don’t.

Even though eating well and exercising may seem like a positive thing, for someone with an addictive nature such as myself they can just as easily become a negative.  It has happened more than once that these things became my new drug and doing them was actually detrimental to my well being.

While I was living by myself and attending pharmacy school, I became fixated on the outside being an accurate representation of how I was doing on the inside.  I have found that the worse I am feeling on the inside, the harder I concentrate on fixing the outside.  If I look ok to you, then you will think I am ok.

I exercised obsessively and monitored everything I ate.  I counted calories and denied myself anything I deemed “indulgent.”  I would find myself doing squats and lunges in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep and would tell myself I didn’t “do enough” earlier that day.

Looking back, I realized that the time I looked the best on the outside was also the time when I felt the worst about myself on the inside.

About a year and a half ago I had similar behavior creep back into my life.  I had picked up running again and had joined the gym.  As time went on, I started pushing myself to run farther each time and would feel tremendous guilt if I missed a gym class.  I kept a separate calendar just for running and made sure that each week the number of miles was increasing.

This is how I suffered my first injury that took me out of commission for 2 weeks.  I was hurt and I pushed myself to keep going and doing more until my body did what my mind and my willpower couldn’t do.  It broke down.

It is imperative that I remain vigilant as to the motivation behind my exercise and eating.  If I am not paying attention to the way that I am feeling, I can start to think that fixing up the outside will somehow fix the inside. It has taken me a long time to realize that the two do not correlate.

In Part 3 I will talk about my struggle with disordered eating.  I have recently come to accept that this is something that has been a part of my life for a long time.  Since I didn’t have a formal “eating disorder,” I didn’t feel like the way I managed my eating was a problem.  Check back with me to find out how I managed to change that pattern of behavior.

Part 3