Purge My Mind.

I was once a gymnast. 

Gymnastics was my world - my work, my dream, my hobby, all wrapped up in one. 

I would finish my day at school, then carpool with Lizzy and Hamish and eat yoghurt and dried fruit and pull my hair into a really tight, really high bun and run in and get changed and start training for my fourth time this week and this week has only had three days. I would work really hard and bruise little bones. I would bend really far the wrong way and cry because I did my routine wrong or at least not perfectly right and wake up early to train again the next day. I would fly to a new city to win third place, and I’d watch the older girls that would win first place, their legs that went on for days, and the way they would turn to the side and somehow disappear momentarily. 

I remember forming a quiet belief that if I wanted to be a success, I needed to be thin. I’d look at the winners and the way their ribcages protruded out through their leotards, and I’d look down at the way the skin bulged out the side of my bent knee or at my stomach rolling over itself. I didn’t like that my body did what it did, and I didn’t think my body could be that of a winner. I was eight.

Fast forward almost eight more years, and I was a retired gymnast with a broken body that weighed ten kilos more than it had a couple of years prior. I wanted success and perfection, but I was now busy living life outside of the gymnasium and my body had just changed. I tried to eat less and exercise more, but nothing could compete with my old training regime, and the body I desired felt unreachable. So I starved myself. Then I gave up and ate everything within reach. Then I made myself throw it all up, and started the cycle again. Starve, binge, purge, repeat. 

My weight never changed, though I obsessively checked it. I hid my habits, my addiction, and was overrun with paranoia and shame that everyone knew what I was doing to try and get my old body back. Afraid of people finding out, I gave up the daily purge, but still ’dabbled’ from time to time. 

A few years on, I had grown to my heaviest weight yet, though I had barely reached overweight. I felt like I had no control over my eating habits, unable to turn down a treat, holding out as long as I could but powerless to stop once I’d begun. I travelled the world at age 20, and in the most wonderful places, I was riddled with anxiety about how to get smaller and get my mind off of the croissants in the kitchen and the Ritte Sport chocolate someone gave me even though I told myself I was done buying it - and then I eat it all and feel terrible, and try to get rid of the calories before my body absorbs them, quick!

And then I reached Prague. One night, I just had to get the delicious pastry I was seeing everywhere - after only eating capsicums and apples all day - and it was just so sweet that I felt sick in my stomach. My head felt sick with guilt too, so I purged and went for a walk. 

And then, looking out at all the lights from Charles Bridge, I felt the grief of God over me. 

“Is that how much you think you are worth?” I wept as I understood how little value I had been placing on myself to believe my worthiness could be measured by the scales. I knew I had been breaking God’s heart each time I purged, that when no one else could see what I did in that bathroom stall, he could. He could see his precious daughter hating her body in every photo she saw, and stripping herself of her dignity as she bent over another toilet bowl. 

I made a vow to stop, and I was done. 

Five years on, I was finally ready to do the work to overcome all that was left. I had broken the worst habit, but the mindsets and behaviours were still there: the restricting, rewarding, hiding, binging, running. I knew I was bound and needed change, so I began to share with others who understood, to recognise my faulty patterns in the moment, and to repent. 

I repented for the way I was hating myself, my beautiful self, sinning against my body physically and emotionally, pushing it to extremes and giving myself rules I couldn’t and shouldn’t keep. I repented for trying to take control of my body that God had made, and to tell him it wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t working right, and it wasn’t lovely. 

And then, I started to eat. I started learning to know my hunger and my fullness, and respond to it. I let myself enjoy, and learned not to switch off my cues out of guilt or greed. I started to know my body, and to see it as more than a number and a measurement of my failures. I began prioritising the good things, and choosing strength over skinny, and health over beauty. 

I remember sharing with a friend long ago, about something I felt God revealing to me within myself that was stuck and unlovely. “How wonderful,” she said, “that there is even more freedom for you than you’ve known before!” When we are confronted with our brokenness, we are gifted conviction. We are invited into the freedom that has already been granted us. You and I, we have a shared shame, from our different struggles with our behaviours and habits of sin. We repent and we pray for our shared salvation, that God might heal and change and rewire us, that we might live free and walk in the newness of life.

And he answers.