The worst advice I ever received

What makes you vulnerable, makes you beautiful”. 

Brene Brown.

I was recently asked to be a guest on a podcast entitled "The Worst Advice I Ever Got” and it got me really thinking, what actually is the worst advice I ever received? Initially my mind went blank; I couldn’t think of any advice I’d ever received at all! But then it came to me; the worst advice I ever received was this…….

“Eat less, exercise more”. 

But why? That advice seems so standard doesn’t it?  And isn’t it based in truth too?  Here I’m going to explain to you why it was the worst advice, but how it has shaped my life and led me to finding my life’s purpose.

I can’t remember exactly when I was told this advice but it began to manifest in my life around the age of 8, when I was told by my swimming coach that I was too fat and needed to lose weight. For the first time in my young life I looked at my body as something that needed to be different to how it was. That seed was firmly planted and throughout my childhood and adolescence this message was reinforced by fanatical exercise presenters, the 90s heroin chic trend, skeletal women gracing the covers of magazines and phrases like ‘eating’s cheating’ echoing around me and my peer group. 

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I had deeply internalised this message, and the constant reinforcement all around me led to this becoming a compass for my life.  I had grown up with sports, health and physique being an integral part of life. As a competitive swimmer and juvenile triathlete I was acutely aware of the need to be fit and conform to a certain body shape and size to be successful at my sports. 

This seemed like something that came so easily to everyone else but I just felt fat, heavy and uncomfortable. This was compounded by the constant comment “you’ve got broad shoulders’; seeming that everyone had a right to comment on my physical appearance, making a judgement about my body's shape with a negative connotation. What teenage girl or woman wants to be told that, swimmer or not? 

The outcome of this was that I gradually developed a hateful, negative and disconnected relationship with my body, feeling constant frustration that it didn’t look the way I was led to believe it should, and so I was easily influenced by the idea of restricting food intake, especially as this was the fashion amongst my peer group. On Friday nights out with my friends we would skip dinner to ensure a flat belly and that feeling of emptiness connected in my young brain to feeling good about myself, more attractive and in control. 

When I left home to go to university I stopped all the sports I had grown up with; having trained and competed for 10 years I rebelled against the ‘healthy living’ message. I partied, danced all night, smoked cigarettes, dabbled in recreational drugs and to my satisfaction, I lost a lot of weight without even trying. The comments from people about how much weight I’d lost, gave me more motivation to continue to associate those behaviours with being skinny and to therefore continue them. 

Without me even realising I became addicted to feeling empty, seeing my hip bones protruding and eating as little as possible, often surviving on cans of ‘full fat’ coke and Marlboro lights to suppress my appetite. It also ruined the lining of my stomach which gave me nausea after eating which I at the time I thought was an added bonus. 

I used to feel so much shame about this behaviour and would never have dreamed of telling anyone, let alone writing an article about it, but looking back now from a place of healing, I can see how deep I was in self-destruct mode, convincing myself I was having fun. Over time I have learned the power in being vulnerable and sharing my story with others, which has given me huge amounts of strength and acceptance; I now see my journey as my superpower.

Occasionally my then boyfriend questioned me about eating and my weight but I'd deny everything, not just because I enjoyed feeling thin, but because I actually thought everyone did it and that my behaviour was pretty normal. I was happy being skinny, partying and feeling empty. It felt good and I gradually sunk into a cycle of weighing myself; watching the scales go down and down gave me a huge sense of achievement and control. 

Resisting hunger is something that most people can’t do, so feeling triumphant over my natural urges felt amazing to me and fuelled my desire to continue. At times when my boyfriend was there for meals I would eat the food and then disappear to purge, in the hope that it would prevent me from putting weight on. This was a behaviour that I decided to stop after leaving university when my boyfriend and I decided to go travelling to Australia; an experience which I had always dreamed of and which transformed the direction of my life.

Despite stopping the purging behaviour the connection between thinness and feeling good about myself was firmly rooted in my psyche and throughout my 20s, I placed my self worth on the number on the scales and what size jeans I could fit into. The neural connections in my brain were firing each time I restricted food, felt empty, or felt my rib bones below the skin to reinforce feeling good about myself. I relied on this feeling in times of difficulty in my life, when I was stressed, anxious, had a party or festival to go to, I wanted to feel as skinny as possible, so I would feel confident and good about myself and my body.

Throughout my 20s I lived in cycles of restricting and minor weight gain which would send me into a panic. I constantly remained vigilant around food, my dress size, my reflection in the mirror and never allowing myself to put more than a few lbs on. I spent so much energy thinking and worrying about it and became trapped in the mental prison that is an eating disorder. I was happy with my reliable companion, which was always there as a support system or coping strategy. 

I never admitted to myself that I had an eating disorder; that was something that happened to other people. The term itself sent chills down my spine and I laughed when questioned at any suggestions that my relationship with food was anything other than healthy. I lied to everyone, but most of all to myself, dismissing the concerned comments from friends and family. 

In the early 2000s (not that it was that long ago but times have changed a lot and there was no social media then) eating disorders were not something that was spoken about or really known about in the wider public. If it was something that happened to you, you looked like a skeleton and went to hospital. So anything less than that wasn’t ‘that bad’ and I never looked ‘that bad’ so I was ok. That was a narrative I had in my head; that I wasn’t sick enough to need help. 

I later learned that most eating disorders do not result in that skeletal appearance. That is why they are so easy to hide. Despite my best efforts, I was never able to get that skinny, which led to frustration and increased motivation to restrict and lose more weight. 

Exercise began to play a key role in my life again towards the end of my 20s as I stopped partying as much and decided I wanted to clean up my health. I began to run and go to the gym to lose weight or maintain the low weight I was satisfied with. The eat less exercise more message would play out everyday of my life; working out to burn calories and then eating small amounts to create a deficit, worked to a certain extent, but when I didn’t see weight loss I felt so frustrated and directed a lot of negative energy towards my body; my stomach and midriff in particular. 

I hated my belly and it never looked as I wanted it to. No matter how much weight I lost I couldn’t seem to obtain the toned, flat wash board stomach that I so desperately wanted to achieve. I now know that the reason for this was because I was creating a hormonal imbalance in my body; something called oestrogen dominance. The quantities of other hormones are not produced correctly due to the body being in a continuously stressed state; the stress hormone cortisol is synthesised at the expense of reproductive hormones like progesterone and so oestrogen remains high causing symptoms including stubborn belly fat and fatty deposits around the inner thighs. 

Over time my symptoms got worse, until for the first time I didn’t get my period. It then hit me that my desire to be thin was starting to affect my health. However, my destructive behaviour continued anyway as I was in way too deep by then. 

Losing my period for the first time was a shock to me; it had never happened before. While I’d been on the pill my body had continued to bleed lightly; my guess is that it was masking over the fact that my menstrual cycle wasn't functioning correctly. It was when I stopped taking the pill around my divorce in 2015 that my main issues with my reproductive cycle began. 

The oestrogen dominance and abdominal weight gain was the first symptom I witnessed at the time. I also felt brain fog, depression and like I was suspended in PMT continually, with no period coming to relieve me. It never occurred to me that all these symptoms were linked. I put it down to not exercising enough, eating the wrong foods or eating too much.

Covid lockdown whilst living in Bangkok, Thailand was my breaking point. I had moved out there in 2017 to teach biology and live my lifelong dream of working and living abroad. I had managed my eating disorder fairly well up until the first lockdown in March 2020. I was living alone in my flat, isolated and teaching online during the day time. 

Once the school day ended I was isolated and lonely; the only thing I had to keep me occupied and distracted was my old friend; the obsession with my weight and body shape and size. I thought I was coping ok; working out religiously, practicing yoga and meditation (I had become a yoga teacher in 2018 which helped me cope with life often) and eating ‘sensibly’, until one morning whilst listening to the BBC news on the radio, I heard an article discussing the expected weight gain during covid; that most people would gain weight due to lockdown. Hearing that put the fear of God into me. There was no way that was happening to me!  

Thus began a panic driven and fear based cycle of extreme restriction and over exercising, until one day I broke down in frustration. Why wasn’t I losing weight anymore? I was working out twice a day and eating hardly anything, but I felt like I was gaining weight around my belly and inner thighs, not achieving the svelte like body I so desperately craved. 

Each time I looked in the mirror, anger and frustration flooded through me and I directed it all at my body; a wave of negativity and hatred for myself. I broke down in tears and a tiny voice inside me said ‘Sammy, you’re near 40. How long are you going to keep doing this?’ At that moment I instinctively knew it was time to make a change.

The breakthrough moment for me was going to see an Ayurvedic doctor to rebalance my hormones and get my menstrual cycle to start again. What blew me away was that a programme of nourishing foods, light exercise, breath work and meditation were all it took. Within 14 days of following this guidance, my brain fog lifted, the depressed thoughts slowed down, my energy levels elevated. With the deep desire to feel better, and the right support I was finally able to slow down and reduce the panic stricken behaviour I had got into. 

And then the best thing happened. My period started and I just cried; ‘thank you’ I said as I savoured that feeling, the balance I felt was immense, and I promised myself I would continue to heal this damaging behaviour. I began my eating disorder recovery only 1 month later and firmly committed to healing this part of myself so I could escape the mental prison and get my life back. 

Healing my body with such simple dietary and lifestyle changes shaped my pathway so fundamentally and I just couldn’t understand why the ‘healthcare’ systems weren’t helping people to heal naturally, but instead prescribing medication that doesn’t tackle the root cause of disease (I now know it because it is a multi billion dollar industry). I promised myself then that I would share that message with people and help them to naturally bring balance back to their health and their lives. I experienced first hand that food is medicine and with the right nutrition we can heal many health conditions. I also knew that before I could help others, I needed to heal myself. 

Through my eating disorder recovery I realised how intrinsic the nature of eating psychology is that is driving our behaviour around food. Becoming an intuitive eating coach after qualifying as a nutritionist has taught me to guide clients to dive deeply into the subconscious and find out the why driving the behaviour that is impacting their health, enabling huge shifts in their healing journeys. 

It took me a long time to appreciate my eating disorder as my super power and realise how important that part of my journey has been. When I found my purpose and looked deeply into my story, I realised that everything that I’d experienced was preparing and enabling me to be of service to others in the best possible way; from a place of knowledge, experience and healing. 

I am proud to say being open with others about my story has helped me heal deeply; I no longer feel shame or guilt around my eating disorder and can speak about it freely, thanks to the help of my amazing therapists, friends and family, who each supported me on different elements of my healing journey. My biggest struggle was vulnerability, worried about what people would think, disappointing my parents, projecting my own judgement onto others. 

I’ve learned that vulnerability is a sign of strength and healing not just for yourself, but for the others you share your story with, making them feel less alone and trapped. It's my hope that by sharing my story with you, I have inspired you to move away from shame, admit to yourself if you need help and move towards vulnerability and healing, whatever your journey is. I have no regrets about any of it, just empowered understanding, compassion and deep love for all the different versions of me that have been and those that are yet to come. 

Bio 

'Let food be thy medicine' underpins my foundation as a nutritionist and intuitive eating coach. My business Natural Nutrition (www.naturalnut.co.uk, IG: @natural.nut_), combines science, psychology and spirituality to provide holistic healing at the root. My Total Health Awakening Programme for those living with hormonal or metabolic health conditions brought about by an unhealthy relationship with food, creating

sustainable behaviour change, healthy habits and mental freedom by rejecting diet culture and reprogramming the mind.