Dear 22 year old Heidi

Phew, I bet you're glad 2019 is over – with all the lessons it's taught you and all that you went through. Looking back you can't quite believe how far you've come. You're settled into your new home in Malonno and everyday you wake up and open the window to see the mountains towering above you feeling so grateful to have found your place in the world and to be doing what you love. You feel free around food and can't quite believe how last year you were struggling so much and going through so many mental battles just to put food in your mouth. Now when you're hungry, you eat and yes I know - it feels so freeing. 

But 22 year old Heidi don't get too content, there's some more chaos coming your way. It's not going to hit just you, but the whole world. Covid-19. Lockdown is coming and you're going to have to stay at home for almost two months without being able to run out into the mountains. You're going to have your freedom taken away from you just like the rest of the world. As you run loops around the outside yard you're confined to, you'll begin to question whether you made the correct decision moving to a foreign country all by yourself, hundreds of miles away from your family and not knowing when you'll be able to see them again. The ghosts of your struggles around food last year will begin to haunt you again and you'll begin to realise you're not really okay at all. You don't feel light any more, you don't feel like the skinny athlete you placed so much of your self worth and value on and you don't like it one bit. You're not sure who you are at this point in time and it's all because of the fact that once you start eating you can't seem to stop... 

To start with you'll think to yourself that you're doing okay. You'll feel like because you restricted yourself so much in the past the huge amounts of food you're eating now are justified because your body needs it. To an extent this is true - it's part of the recovery process from RED-s.... But there is a voice in the back of your head that feels disgusted with who you have become. The fact that you can't just seem to eat like a normal person. You won't know what to do, as you cook a whole pack of pasta and eat it all, or eat a whole loaf of bread, open the fridge and eat six yogurts in a row just because they are there and you feel the need to put food in your mouth. Your stomach will hurt so much, but still you'll stand in your kitchen and eat the most random foods, essentially anything you can find in the cupboard. What'll hurt the most is that even though you'll still have a desire to be a skinny athlete , the fact you just can't seem to stop shoving food into your mouth will make you feel worthless and full of self hate and despair. 22 year old Heidi, I'm sorry to tell you but you're going to spend many nights crying yourself to sleep, your stomach like a balloon full of all the food you pushed into your body. You'll vow that tomorrow it'll be different.. you'll start to eat clean or you'll go on a diet, even a water fast... anything to make up for all the calories you've just put into your body. You don't realise how toxic this is and you'll always fail in your attempts to undo your binge episodes. You'll find yourself opening the fridge again trying to fill a gap - a hole in yourself that urges you to just eat and eat and eat until you can barely physically move. What you won't realise for a long time is that this hole cannot be filled with food and fueled by self hate... self love and acceptance is what you'll be lacking. The scary process of healing your relationship with food is much healthier for you than continuing this restriction and bingeing cycle... you'll just not see it yet.

You'll come out of lockdown and you'll start running again in the mountains... only it now hurts you how different your body feels, the fact that people in the street comment on your weight change will only make you feel so much worse. You'll constantly compare yourself to the lighter version of yourself, the successful athlete who could control herself around food. Essentially you'll put too much worth on the old version of yourself... the girl who was as light as a feather and could eat one biscuit without scoffing the whole pack. Even though you'll know that when you were suffering with RED-s you were in a toxic place and slowly shrinking yourself to a breaking point... at this point in time you'd actually rather be that girl. At least she didn't feel so full of self hate and shame all the time - at least when she could control herself around food she felt proud of it. Now you won't feel like you have anything to be proud of - you'll feel like a failure. You'll feel like you've let everyone down. The fact you won't be in any fit shape to run any races or to do any proper training thanks to ongoing hip problems will only add fuel to the raging fire of self hate. You'll try to restrict again, you'll try so hard, mapping out diet plans, even taking all the food out of the cupboards and locking it away in the garage - out of sight, out of mind as they say... but in the end you'll know it'll never work. You'll feel weak. Especially as the failed attempts at restricting will only lead to more and more bingeing. You'll feel like you have no strength left to fight anymore and you'll let go of any ideas to try and run properly again. Food has too much power over you. All you'll want is to be normal - to run wild and free in the mountains, but you'll feel so trapped inside yourself and your obsession with food that you won't be able to see a way out. 

You'll get to a breaking point, you should reach out for professional help but like before when you were suffering with RED-s you'll feel too proud to admit how much you are struggling. It'll hurt you so much that such a basic thing we humans need to do to survive is causing you so many issues and so much pain. Eventually, you'll send a message to your Dad saying you think you need to go back to Wales. You'll think running away from your kitchen in Malonno is the solution, but like your father will tell you... it's your habits around food that you need to change. Trying to restrict yourself in order to loose weight is only detrimental as it only leads to an inevitable binge... your mind will focus so much on food that you'll reach a point where you'll open the cupboard, pull out a packet of biscuits and just sit down and eat every last crumb... you'll open a tin of tuna and then two and then three and then even a fourth and feel so sick but you'll keep going... you'll take a spoon and the grated cheese in the fridge will be gone within seconds. And this is all because before you have been depriving your body of food - essential nutrients needed for your survival. It is only obvious that you'll reach a point where you'll have to eat. You're not weak... it's only a natural response. Your body is just trying to survive. 

It's then that you realise you need to find self love rather than self hate. That in fact this binge eating and your out of control feelings around food were probably only inevitable after a long period of restriction and that holding onto this superior image in your head of the athlete you used to be when you were suffering with RED-s is only doing lasting damage. Binge eating is a natural human response - It's just that nobody had ever talked to you about it. You'll feel broken, alone, full of despair and you won't be able to see a way out of it... you'll know in the back of your head that two or three times a week your body and mind are just going to tell you to eat everything in the kitchen and you'll feel powerless to stop putting the food in your mouth. 

You'll know something has to give... there has to be more to life than this. And it is there that you'll begin to realise you need to stop placing so much of your self worth on your weight - hating yourself and where you are right now is not the way out of this dark hole. The only way out is acceptance - even if right now you can't love yourself and your body - right now you just have to accept where you are and the journey you are on. You have to want to break the cycle and the only way to do that is with self compassion. 

And you'll have to come to terms with the fact that in order to get over this you need to completely change your relationship with food. You'll need to stop seeing food as the enemy and start seeing it as a friend. You know food is fuel, but you need to see it as more than that. It's something to be enjoyed and not feared. You'll have an appointment with a sports nutritionist who works within the same team as your coach and she'll help you map out a structure to shape your eating habits and take some healthy steps forward. Starting to eat three proper meals a day and a few snacks in between you'll slowly begin to hear the voice in your head that tells you to open the cupboard and eat everything get quieter and quieter with every passing day as you work hard to change your attitude around food. The urge to binge won't fully go away and you will find that sometimes even when you set out with good intentions to eat only a few squares of chocolate or just a slice of bread - you'll slip up and eat all of what's there. You'll have to learn to forgive yourself for this, it's all part of the process. You can't just go from bingeing three or four times a week to a completely healthy and normal relationship with food overnight. When you do find yourself in the middle of these less frequent binge eating episodes, you'll find yourself wanting to restrict the next day in order to try to compensate and be good again. But you'll know this isn't the way forward... this is what caused you the big problems in the first place. The most important thing to do after any binge eating is to move on. Accept what happened and tell yourself that it's okay to make mistakes sometimes. You are human after all. You should feel proud of yourself for how far you've come. Pay attention to those small wins, because they are the ones that matter. Nobody heals their relationship with food overnight. It's a series of changes that build up over time, until one day you'll realise you're capable of so much more than you thought. Food won't hold so much power over you anymore. 

Just before you turn 23, your relationship with food will have changed so much and you'll look back over the past year and see all that you've been through. You won't feel the need to follow a completely rigid meal plan from the nutritionist anymore and you're mostly able to eat three good meals a day and snacks without feeling the urge to binge all the time. You'll look back on the past year and see it as the most difficult of your life - living by yourself in a foreign country and struggling through all these problems mostly alone. You'll look back and know how strong you are. 22 year old Heidi hit rock bottom, well and truly - but rock bottom teaches us lessons that mountain tops never do.

23 year old Heidi will be ready to put all these problems of the past three or four years behind her and move forward even if she wonders whether she'll ever be fully healed. Here is 23 year old Heidi - speaking her truth - even if her voice shakes. 

No matter how hard it hurts, 23 year old Heidi knows how important it is to share these issues and to share her struggles over the past years - because this is the only way we can bring awareness and start conversations about these topics. The only way the next generations do not have to suffer in silence. The only way we can break down these walls - do you see how toxic these past four years have been for me? I don't want that for anyone else. I don't want the next generation of athletes - young girls to think that in order to run fast and strong they have to be super skinny, loose their period, become obsessed with their body and food and feel so alone in the process. I don't want people to think that in order to be a champion, they have to loose part of themselves. I've lived my own journey through these struggles and I've seen it far far too often in other athletes too. There has to be a better way, I'm sure of it. We have to be the people to help create this change. Because if not us and now ... then who and when?