I Fasted For Eight Years. I've Done My Time.

She was thirteen. She decided the world would be better without her, and she picked anorexia as the way she was going to leave it. She told her parents she would be dead by sixteen. She went into a treatment center three hours from home with four adolescent beds and a building full of adults detoxing. The program treated her by the number on a scale. Reach this number, you can call your parents. Reach this number, you can go outside. Nobody asked her why she was doing it, and she already knew. Paige Kelly, BSN, RN spent eight years in that illness. She got out at twenty-one on what she calls decision day, on a bathroom floor, with her body failing. She went on to become an emergency room nurse, because chaos was the environment her nervous system already knew how to live in. Then she got on a bike, then she got off it in a crash that showed her what eight years had done to her bones, and a doctor told her to start running to rebuild them. That is how she ended up finishing an Ironman in 10:07. This conversation is not about any of that. It is about what nobody taught her: how to notice the thoughts running her life, how to tell the difference between her own voice and everyone else’s, and how to come back into a body she had spent a decade at war with. Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix. What we get into: why an eating disorder is a decision about the world and not about food the difference between an eating disorder and disordered eating why so many people eat before bed and what the nervous system is actually asking for the “I should” inventory she did with a piece of paper and a pen what to do when someone asks what you love about yourself and you come up empty the day she said hello to her own body and her body told her where to go why she keeps her promises to herself microscopically small, and the one thing she thinks treatment centers should be doing more of.