My Passion Became My Obsession

Doris Cowan

Description

My name is Doris Cowan (Rake) My current job titles include Activities Officer at RFBI, Owner of “Get Up And Go Fitness” – Personal Training and Founder of 3R’S Homeless Shelter project in Coffs Harbour.
I was born and bred in Orange NSW and left there to try and get away from the memories of my Dad’s suffering before his death in 2005.
Although I still undertake studies on occasion, my highest level of education is an Advanced Diploma of Hospitality Management.
My ideal audience that I would like to target with my written journey on anorexia would be youth and athletes of all ages and patients of eating disorder institutes in an attempt for prevention of anorexia rather than cure, but also hope as once ED takes hold it is very difficult to overcome yet not impossible.
I have many personal goals such as opening a Homeless Shelter to help with the current housing crisis in Coffs Harbour, yet one of my priority goals to follow on from the launch of my book would be to be an advocate for education and prevention of eating disorders on a global level.
My professional goals include all of my current job titles having a similar purpose, and that is to keep learning about the people I work with in an attempt to assist them in becoming the best version of themselves in the present.
I have been fortunate enough in my life before anorexia to achieve many wonderful accomplishments such as owning my own business, completing the Kokoda trail and possible the most rewarding was being a single mum to the most amazing son and daughter any parent could wish for.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris AU
• Date de parution: 16 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669831761
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

MY PASSION BECAME MY OBSESSION
 
My Journey with Anorexia Nervosa in My 40s
 
 
 
 
Doris Cowan
 
Copyright © 2022 by Doris Cowan.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022916582
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-3178-5

Softcover
978-1-6698-3177-8

eBook
978-1-6698-3176-1

 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Rev. date: 09/08/2022
 
 
Xlibris
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Contents
MY VOICE RECORDING – 24 JUNE 2020
MY VOICE RECORDING AS I CAME OUT THE OTHER END OF ANOREXIA
 
 
This book is something that I have wanted to write since my first admission to an eating disorder clinic in 2015. However, until I recovered from anorexia, I was unable to understand the cause of my illness. This is not surprising as it is a mental disorder with causes that are not fully understood. However, I believe that the cause of mine was a traumatic event in my life, where exercise became my escape to not deal with emotional pain. Let me explain the best I know how to before I take you on my roller-coaster journey of this horrible eating disorder that took over and almost claimed my life on several occasions.
Fit and healthy, so I thought. My career in personal training began in 2007, when I made the move to Coffs Harbour from my town of birth of Orange.
The sea change came about as a result of losing my dad to a seven-year battle of cancer. This was a very significant loss for me as my dad was my world. I was one of four girls, and Dad saw me as his “boy” because of I worked with him from a very young age, doing labour jobs, including cherry-picking, colour bond fencing assembling and concreting, as well as brickies labouring. Dad and I had a connection that was unbreakable, and for the first time in my life, I became selfish and packed up my family to move away from all my loved ones in an attempt to ease the hurt surrounding the memories of Dad where I had lived since birth. I did not even consider the impact it had on everyone else. “Life was greener on the other side.” For a while, life did have a distraction and a fresh start. It wasn’t very long after the move when I started to become depressed with having to part from loved ones every school holiday so they could return to family in Bathurst.
I found that exercise helped with this depression, especially going to the beach. This exercise started to not only change me mentally for the better but also physically. Although I was always a tall and slim build because of my love of playing sports, I was suddenly reaping the benefits of building up my muscles and feeling invincible brought about by endorphins. My curiosity for keeping fit with limited time as a single mum led me to studying certificate 111 and 1V in fitness for my benefit. However, around the same time, a fitness business for women on the beach started up, and the owner would often see me running and pull her car up next to me, asking when I would come and work for her.
This was not an intention of mine—to become a personal trainer, nor was it possible for me to start work at 6:00 a.m.—to accept the offer. However, a short time later, my mum moved to Coffs Harbour and was then able to babysit, so I did end up starting as a personal trainer and, from day one, loved to train the women in fitness.
It wasn’t very long before I was living and breathing everything to do with fitness, constantly expanding my qualifications and knowledge as well as taking on my own clients to train. In 2010, I felt that I had enough confidence to branch out on my own, and I started up my personal training business, “Get Up and Go Fitness.” I quickly made a name for myself, and my business became a seven-days-a-week operation, where I trained one-on-one, groups, the overweight and disabled people. This also led me to study nutrition to help people meet their fitness goals, which allowed me to hold nutrition classes where I was able to use my years of hospitality cooking and catering experience to show people food preparation and healthy recipes. My days were always long, but it was not work to me as I really loved what I did. To be a role model for my clients, I kept myself in tip-top shape, training myself for three hours seven days a week ’til it became something I had to do before anything else in the morning; 5:00 a.m. ’til 8:00 a.m. was my time, and nothing got in the way of that, including illness or injury. I woke up every morning fresh and ready to start the day. In 2012, I completed Kokoda trail and was able to enjoy the entire experience because of my fitness level.
 







 
Life was enjoyable and very busy. My son was 14, and he decided that he wanted to go and live with in Bathurst with the family there as he did not have a male role model in his life. This devastated me, yet I did not acknowledge the emotions, I just used the extra time to take on more and more clients. This is around the time my knowledge about nutrition was taking over my choices in food, and without realising it, I was cutting out whole food groups whilst training up to eight hours a day seven days a week. My energy levels started to dip, and my clients were noticing my weight going down.
There was a segment on A Current Affair about a runner, Vanessa Alford, who wrote a book called Fit but Not Healthy . The book is about a young woman’s obsession to be the best at any cost, even though her behaviours were very destructive, mentally and physically. The day after the interview was aired, I had at least 20 of my clients e-mail me, telling me that I should watch it as the author’s behaviours were similar to mine when it came to obsession with exercise.
I could not believe the similarities. An example of this is when she was matron of honour for her best friend yet did not attend the bridal party breakfast as it interfered with her morning exercise routine. I missed out on my close relatives’ christening morning as I chose to run 30 kilometres instead. This is when alarm bells went off for my family, and they knew I had a problem. The other similarity that I had to the author is that I no longer had periods as my body fat percentage was too low. Even though this is a blessing to most women, the lack of oestrogen production leads to osteopenia—brittle bone disease. For Vanessa, the drive to get better was to start a family because loss of period can mean infertility. After reading Vanessa’s book, alarm bells did start to go off, and this is when my fit but healthy life took a turn for the worse.
I attended the annual fitness expo, enrolling in as many physical events as possible. Day 1, my body was so depleted that a minor fall resulted in me breaking my wrist. However, because of my obsession, I was determined to compete in day 2 activities. By the end of the day, my pain was getting worse, and I had to take myself off to a Melbourne hospital. This was my first-ever time in Melbourne, and I spent majority of it in hospital.
The doctors confirmed the break and told me that it required surgery, where pins and plates would be put in. They suggested that I get the surgery done in a few days when I returned home. This news sent my mental health into chaos as all I could think off is not being able to conduct my boxing classes and may not box again myself for a very long time. On the plane trip home, I was in tears and did not know how I was going to cope. My destination was Coffs Harbour, home, yet when the plane landed in Sydney for changeover. I decided to go to my sister’s house in a hope that she would be my rock as she always was.
Soon after, I had the operation and, only a few days later, was out running with plaster on my wrist, and I decided to stop at a park to do push-ups, demonstrating once again that even though I know the consequences of not letting an injury heal, my obsession for keeping fit took over. This was very devastating, physically and mentally, as little to my knowledge, I contracted osteomyelitis, a bone infection that ended up eating all the bone and tissue around my wrist. This was discovered as my wrist was not healing and I was losing weight without trying. As a result, I had several operations, and now my wrist is permanently fused.
Within the six months of discovering t