Amelia Boone Is Human - And Still a Badass! | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] when I look back on podcasts that I've done in you know like 2015 or as the height of like it's just I'm in such a different chapter now yeah that it just doesn't feel I don't resonate with it at all and I think that I mean it's where I was at the time but I think that if I look back on it now a lot of it was very performative I was only just that was one aspect of myself and I was going to like hone in on that and it just doesn't feel like me I mean yeah it was all about performance and tactics and what do you eat and how do you train and what are your life habits and all of that but from afar I've kind of watched you you know on this arc this like evolutionary path that you've been on and you know we met I think the first time we met was at the mind body green conference like I was like four or five years ago yeah like that yeah and I just remember like being super intimidated by you I was like scared of you like this mega champion I think there was a hike one morning and I was like she I'm scared of that girl man I just but I think looking back on it now I was reflecting on that a little bit this morning and I was like what was it about you yes there's certain like insecurities that I have that made me intimidated about your accomplishments and and what your you're able to do but I think also like subliminally or maybe unconsciously I felt like you also you you like walled yourself off like you were emitting some kind of frequency like don't get too close yeah and it's interesting because I've been told that before people people call me like an ice queen or something um and I don't I never sleep rejected that I think that it's very much I think that that for me comes from place of insecurity myself and not very much so I remember seeing you and I knew who you were and being very much intimidated as well but not knowing that that that kind of air of standoffish 'no static that i may have liked portrayed a lot of the time with my own my own insecurities well I think it's also indicative of you know this disease that we're going to talk about you know somebody who's you know been in recovery for a long time myself I mean our stories are very different but there's a lot of similarities I'm going struggle and all of that and the you know ultra-endurance but and you know I'm somebody who's been steeped in recovery for you know two decades and have worked with a lot of people over the years and and I think you know what it is is when you're harboring that secret like you don't want your your intimacy is your enemy you know so the idea of being open is terrifying to anybody because what happens if they find out right what happens if they find out and for a long time when I when I thought about you know talking about my eating disorder it always in the back of my mind it's like you can't unring that Bell when you do finally talk about it and I've had multiple people tell me that and it's not so much I think that a lot of is that disorder thrives in shame the disorder or the disorder thrives in kind of you know holding it close and not not being open about it but at the same time you also worry about how is everybody else going to view you now now that they know this and are they going to treat you differently and for me to when I've had people say oh you know you're you're a great role model for my child to look up to for my girl to look up to and I thought if I come out about like am I like am I now you know I mean when I've been hiding all of this and so it is very much something that has been you know it has been kind of like this difficult this you know this difficult dance to kind of figure out like yeah once you let it out of the bag you can't you can't unring that Bell but the fact that it's eating away your soul you know it's like it's you're a ticking time bomb right so when somebody says to you oh you're such an inspiration and a role model you're like that pit in your stomach right realizing like you don't really know you know that for that that fraud complex right and you you know you don't you don't know the entire story and so it's it's for me as this this feeling people ask me like why why did you talk about it now and I go it's a lot it's to kind of a lie in my head in my heart and who I am yeah you can't be a fully integrated person right unless you own that and knowing that you know the disease thrives in the darkness and feeds off shame all of that you know it's ironic because you can intellectually understand that and yet it's terrifying to step outside of that right and I also wanted to make sure that I was I was actively in recovery doing things right you know that I and for so long I I kind of told myself that I was but then I actually really wasn't and so did you believe the lie I I knew that I was not in a good place that for how long and probably I would say for at least the past six or seven years I would say for the entire probably the entire time that I was in sport I think very early on in sport I could tell myself that I was doing well and I could think that you know like oh no no I'm just managing it you know like it's there it's kind of in the back of my mind but like I'm doing well I'm competing while I'm winning races I'm winning World Championships um so how bad could it be how bad can it be right like I mean I knew where I had to come from I knew where I was when I was 16 years old I knew where I was when I graduated college and you know I was on death's door for a lot of that time and I was like I'm not there so at this point so clearly I it's not that bad yeah you don't fit the mold or the stereotype or what somebody who has an eating disorder looks like and what I connect with deeply about that is you know look we're both type-a competitive people right we've both had success in our lives and that success at least early on in earlier phases of our you know respective careers was driven in large part by self well right like I'm gonna do this I am self reliant I'm taking responsibility for my path I can't rely on anyone else and I'm gonna buckle down I might not be the fastest or the smartest but I'm gonna outwork that person and you quickly realize when you get results doing that that you can leapfrog over people but if you're also harboring an addiction you can use that facility that you have to rationalize your behavior because as long as you're waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning to go running or you're meeting your deadlines at work and you're graduating summa [ __ ] laude and all of these things you can then say well I don't really have a problem and it perpetuates the condition that then just continues to like foment and grow right because you say well I'm fully functional you know and that's what I said I was fully functional throughout all like the vast majority of the disease you know and so you say okay is this really a problem when I am so high achieving when I am doing all of this but you know when you when I kind of took a step back and really looked at my life and this past you know year or so I said yeah I'm fully functional but it feels so hollow you know it feels so hollow um and I thought that there could be more out there was that hollowness the bottom or what was it the the you know multiple fractures like what brought you to that place and that you know that sense of self-awareness where you were ready to kind of own it in a different way I think that yes it was it was the string of stress injuries it was clearly the string of bone injuries that kind of gave me a wake-up call that there's something there's something not working here but even more so than that it was the fact that I would like come home to my apartment in at night after work after training and then just look around and be like all I have is my disorder and it was much more that I had walled myself off from relationships from being engaged you know I couldn't I would go to all these races but like I wouldn't want to go out to dinner with everybody else the night before because I couldn't it was petrifying you mean you know and I and I had to do my safe thing and I had to be in my safe space and that's just a really really hollow way to live mmm and exhausting very exhausting lonely very lonely and you spend so much time and I'm sure you can relate to this just trying to protect all that to try to do your thing and it's exhausting I was so tired of spending so much time obsessing about food and I just I was ready to be done with that right and then every journalist wants to talk to you about it no and that's why if you ever listen to any interviews with me when I talk about food I always say oh nobody nobody should nobody take a cue for me on food and I have been and I will say this I've I will say that I have been 100% truthful and all the interviews about about that um and you know and I was afraid like what are people going to think of being now that I've like talked about these things in the past and you know talk about me eating pop-tarts and some pop-tarts I do you don't know that's well the funny thing about the the pop-tart thing I mean that's like your signature really great but what's interesting about that like looking back now in retrospect is is the extent to which maybe you're not maybe I'm projecting but it appears as if that that could act as like this foil or this mask like hey I'm so carefree about my diet I eat pop-tarts like it's almost like a defense mechanism right yeah yeah I think it is like a defense mechanism I think a part of me now looking back is a bit over compensation is that I don't want people to think that I have an issue so if your pop-tarts all the time clearly clearly I don't have an issue I'm at bay right yeah you know and I think that also you know eating disorders take all different forms and so it's not just the super healthy like orthorexia person that only eats fruits and vegetables you know like we all everybody within the realm of eating disorders it it manifests itself differently yeah and we're in an interesting time where you know everyone's talking about intermittent fasting and all these you know the diet wars are afoot and right we're very passionate about this and now we're seeing these think pieces coming out that are kind of shining the light on how some of these protocols are really just eating disorders masked right you know if if you it's all about your relationship to them I mean I'm certainly there's advantages to intermittent fasting and good things about it but if you have an unhealthy relationship with that practice it can be another way of shielding like a deeper problem right and I think that in many it for a lot of people that doesn't rise to eating disorders but it could arise to disordered eating so how do what is the the technical difference between those I well yeah I I will say that I will speak you know all of this so this is an in of one for me and so I'm not you know I'm I don't have degrees on this so I but so I just want to get that caveat but I think it really is when it when it rises to like how how problematic does it become in your everyday life you know and so I think an very thing is probably like with alcohol is that does it how all-consuming is it so I don't think that there is like a hard line I'm sure if you looked at the dsm-5 criteria between you know what actually isn't eating disorder versus what's kind of like disordered eating practices I'm sure that there's there's something there but you look around sometimes and you think god everybody has disordered eating if you look at this and I think that that also prevents people and prevented me I think from taking help yeah because it was almost like what's the point everybody seems to have a messed up relationship with food nowadays is there anything that is there anything better can there be quote-unquote normality but that's a function of measuring yourself against other people as opposed to measuring yourself against yourself and whatever you feel is missing like that hole that you were talking about yeah it's like you know everyone gets a DUI you know it's like no big deal you have to get a couple before you know you can rationalize it and that's what I was doing for at least for the past few years was kind of rationalizing my way out of the fact that I knew I was still hanging on to my disorder mm-hmm is that I was was looking around and saying well everybody's screwed up so why am I so different and that was actually reinforced by people when I had a few people where I would tell them about my issues and there'd be like yeah you have an issue with food so does everybody welcome to humanity right yeah well I think you know it's it's a it's a spectrum thing and you know in your case and I I know I experienced this like the universe starts knocking on your door and giving you these little signals like hey you know this this might not be the right path for you little cracks in the art you know the firmament start to happen and if you don't pay attention and you still just blaze that path of like self will forward those dramas become a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger it's like it's testing your pain threshold and you and I like you more than me but you have a huge pain threshold like you can suffer your whole thing is that the queen of suffering so it's gonna have to get really bad before you're gonna you know have a reckoning yeah and I think it has to get really bad but I think it has to if I look at if I look at my trajectory and I look look I have 20-year history with this and that I could have probably white-knuckled the rest of my life through it without seeking more help and I think that there was a part of me thinking that I'm 35 years old like I be able to handle this on my own you know I that eating disorders are a young person's disease that it's something that I I was recognized I have a lot of the sheds that I should have you know gotten over this when I was in college or the multiple times that I was in treatment beforehand but it's just that kind of in the back your mind you're thinking like there could be something more like there could be a life more fulfilling and like more free if I go through this and the cutting and baffling aspect of it is this delusion that you can solve it yourself that you can apply yourself well to this problem because it's worked in every other area of your life like why isn't why can't I you know make it work here that's the more you rely on and your I mean like you told Shane parish like you were talking about self-reliance and it was in the context of not being an entitled person yeah and I understand that but but I couldn't help but think your your your your advocating this path of like you can only count on yourself and at the end of the day yeah people will come in and help you but like it's got to be you and I think that mentality is what keeps people who struggle with this or other forms of addiction stuck in their condition or their disease because they're unwilling to raise their hand and ask for help and then accept that help right and I think that where the disconnect always happened to me because I could look at I luckily I knew what I needed to do like and in terms of you know rehabilitating my body things like that like you know what you need to do you could give me a meal plan you could tell me probably what I needed to eat or like I knew what I need to do but forcing myself to do it on my own I just I wasn't gonna how couldn't do it and what happens when you realize you can't do it on your own you then at least I started kicking myself and getting this cycle of self-flagellation saying Emilia you know what you need to do why can't you do it and for somebody who yes I have been super self reliant in so many areas of my life and to not be able to apply it to this is very devastate yeah it's called a shame spiral right self-knowledge will avail you nothing as they say and and you know what's what's relevant to that is I reached out to you maybe two years ago till I come on the podcast and and you kind of kept me at bay for a little bit and then maybe a year ago you're like I want to come on I have something I want to talk about like you know I have this thing with eating but I'm not ready to talk about it yet so you had that was a while ago yeah I've had this self-awareness the self understanding but you weren't ready to you know either own it yourself completely or or do anything about it until recently yeah I that's that's very true is that I I knew you know and and I had spoken to you that like this is this is a part of me but I don't feel like I'm in a place right now where I'm actually doing anything to kind of to to make myself better I didn't feel like I was in a place of recovery and so I needed to I needed to kind of come to that point where I realized I can't do this on my own anymore and I I need to go into treatment I need to seek a higher level of care take myself out of my life and to do that and so that really was kind of the moment for me in realizing like yes I at one point I want to talk about this but I it can't you know it's not yeah yeah and I was like great when you're ready yeah you know do it but I didn't bug you about it like you have to come to that you know on your own terms like you you have to arrive at that place where you have the willingness to address it and then you know later on like talk about it but it has to be for you right I would imagine you've been foisted into treatment protocols in the past where you're just trying to get people off your back as opposed to really wanting it for your own life absolutely and I mean I think that's when I was much younger that's the case when you're 16 years old and you're thrown in the hospital like that wasn't my doing I was kicking and screaming the entire way or in college I went through the mo get people to just so they wouldn't pull me out of school this time it was no one was telling me like you should seek treatment and most people didn't even know a few close friends knew people from my past you know clearly knew that I'd struggled in the past but didn't know that I was still bothering me so this time is really I remember calling up my parents I was like I'm going to day treatment you know I'm taking a leave of absence and it was very it was a very different place for me to do it all on my own without anybody else kind of like encouraging me they must have been happy about that yeah I think so I mean I think that clearly like they've they've seen me struggle for so long and I I actually realize now you know being in my mid-30s and I'm not a parent but I can I can't imagine how hard it is to watch your child go through that and to be like they you know but she needs to do it on her own you know yeah so the day that you decided you were gonna go to treatment was there something that triggered that or was it just a slow awareness that one day you woke up and you're like today's the day it was a slow awareness it been kind of percolating in the back of my mind probably for the past year or so um and but I kept telling my something like and I don't really need it and I remember it was actually in January I called opal food and body which is the place in Seattle to do kind of just an initial intake eval and then I remember actually they they they were like okay this is great you can come in and then I I I was getting ready prepared to run Berkeley marathons and I was like no things are going well like I want to run I was like we'll deal with this after Berkeley you know so I was I kept finding like I kind of pushed them off and then I finally you know and then I ended up with another stress fracture with took me which took me out of Berkeley and that was two weeks before mmm and that's I called him up and I was like yeah let's do that on now it's a time you know well before I get into what that experience was like I kind of want to track it back to the beginning so yeah as you said this is something you've been living with since you were a very young girl right it began with OCD right when you were like six or seven yeah I was I was diagnosed with OCD probably I was six or seven um it was in your classic like light switch flipping type of cleanliness thing and actually anybody who knows me now would laugh if they heard I was OCD because like I'm a very messy person yeah my you don't have a Tracy Flick like desk no oh no no no no like it's just chaos I'm very very cluttered so I didn't really fit that classic mold but I remember you know even when I was like four or five years old if I couldn't get to sleep by a certain time I would throw a tantrum or if I you know if I had these different like fears and phobias that would come and go and so those kind of started pretty early on and then I think that when I when the food issue started I think my parents just kind of thought and I kind of thought well it's just another manifestation of the OCD and it will go away in a few months kind of like the other ones did yeah it's a phase that that was just another manifestation because all the other ones kind of came and went so this one will kind of come and go so I think we didn't really think too much I didn't really think too much of it yeah until you're like sixteen right when it wins the when was the first that was the first big crisis yeah yeah I mean I don't I try and think about when first time when I had kind of like a disordered thought around food and it was a pretty it was my sophomore year of high school and it was a pretty short timeframe from when I first started having like thoughts about food to you know when I talk like when I got really sick but I remember being a sophomore and going to a sleepover at my friend Kelly's house and we were all sitting around everyone was like eating popcorn and I remember that night all I could do was fixate on that like feeling guilty about eating that greasy popcorn and then the next morning like still thinking about it and thinking about how I shouldn't have eaten that and and then I remember like going my mom and being like I can't stop thinking about that popcorn and I don't know what's wrong with me and so and this had been kind of I mean this food stuff had kind of just been an over a span of a few months yeah where I think that I just got progressively more fearful of it not I didn't really know why it wasn't a conscious I think now we think so much of eating disorders as like a oh well it's a body image thing there was no body image involved for me at the time control it was control it was absolutely I think I was you know going through random teenage turmoil and it was a way that I could feel kind of superior to people is that I could control what I put in my body and it was almost this weird little game for me it was like I could go out and do you know three soccer games on X amount of food and everybody else had to eat more than me and so it became this kind of fixation like that yeah you would think that that impulse to create control in your life would come from a truant like a chaos related trauma in the household like your parents split up whether something happens where your life feels out of control but this is the one thing that you can control but the more I kind of learn about this world it's not it's not as simple as that like you your parents love you and it seems like you grew up in a you know pretty functional healthy household so when you look back on that time like you do you have any insights about what lead led to that impulse of needing to exert that kind of control you know I the sad part is is that I don't and it's I guess it's not sad but I remember being in being and you know recovery the first time when I was 16 and looking around thinking almost feeling bad that I didn't have anything to blame like I didn't have a trauma my parents were super supportive we had very normal relationships with food growing up you know there was never any diet talked there's never anybody on a diet trying to lose weight there was nothing that I could point to and I think in a way that almost made it worse for tonight I wanted I wanted a reason I wanted something to be like this is why I'm so messed up but instead it was just like there I've got it in my head that there must be something then wrong with me yeah that I could have this wonderful life these wonderful parents this functional family yet there are these demons in my head and I didn't know why right it makes you feel broken and also guilty like you're letting down these people who did right by you right exactly I mean my parents the same thing like there was no alcoholism in my house growing up my parents are still in there you know my needs were met and all of that so it's confusing when you can't I did like you're almost like I wish that I could say was this and when you can't it's it's uh it's like it doesn't give you an anchor right you know or agenesis point for this kind of thing and you have nothing external to blame mm-hmm and I think you know in some ways it's so much easier when you can point to something external and be like that's it instead you have to turn it all internal on yourself right and that's been a pattern through my entire life is that I will always find the internal blame first I will never that I don't blame anybody else you know but it's always it's always me yeah I would imagine there is some you know something that happened that you're unconscious of on some level like I had I had gab or mate' on the podcast and you flipped this equation on me and started psychoanalyzing me and you know asking me about my parents and great and it's like you know his thing is all of these things result from some form of childhood trauma by well-intentioned people that you know we may not remember or just some emotional need wasn't being met maybe like you're a hyper competitive person on some level did you feel like you had to be successful was there something unsaid in the household like where you know being driven and and wordly mobile is just an expectation like I don't know I'm you know I don't know but I think it's worth it's worth asking and exploring that but ultimately whatever is there doesn't really provide you a roadmap for getting better and living your life right like if you just focus on the solution like you can go down that rabbit hole but ultimately I don't know what dividend it pays no and I agree that I and I'm sure that I've looked at all different avenues and and things like that but I don't think finding the reason behind your disorder or your you know your your choice of coping mechanisms is actually gonna do any good yeah it's not it's not functional no right all right so one of the things that you've kind of always said is like well I wasn't really an athlete in high school but right that's not the full picture like you were until you developed these disordered behaviors and then that kind of sidelined you from softball and basketball and golf and all these others were that you were that you were excelling at yeah I mean I was I was a very good athlete growing up and I remember like being in like the local newspapers like the fear the fearsome pitcher you know that nobody wanted to face in softball um but yeah I mean I lost a lot of weight in a short period of time and I got very very weak and so and I think that that was that was part part of the start of the demise of sports um and then that you know that clearly led to treatment and led to hospitalization and so yeah I was a good athlete I just became too sick to be able to compete anymore so you have this you have this experience where you're hospitalized between Thanksgiving and Christmas when you're 16 right so that's your your first experience with an institution I dunno and so and this was back and I mean this was before there were any types of like residential treatment facilities or like you see these nice houses that are like Spa liked have a treat roadies know this was a children's ward yeah children's ward at the hospital and I was on bed rest for a month um so I couldn't get out of the hospital bed and I mean you try and tell a sophomore in high school that they they can't like get out of bed and wasn't allowed to see my friends that was completely cut off I remember my parents actually snuck in two of my friends to come and see me but they just tried I think because they thought of friends would be triggering I don't know it was a different treatment models that's time your parents must have been terrified oh absolutely I mean they and they didn't tell me until after I was discharged from the hospital but the first night they took me in there cuz I remember so I went to a doctor they when I told my parents you know about my food issues and they the doctor like did a check-up did all my vitals and they're like she needs to go to the hospital right now and that night in the hospital my heart actually stopped and my parents didn't tell me about that until after I was discharged because I didn't know um but I mean they were they they almost lost their daughter yeah and I think that still kind of pains me to this day yeah I mean if your if your heart had stopped at home right you have been a totally different thing so you were really lucky yeah yeah it's it's it's it's scary and it's for real right and and I think what's you know what's interesting about your story is that you're like okay well now its life back to normal like when you get back out right like okay that that happened but yeah I need some therapy but it's all gonna be fine now right I mean was that the kind of approach or yeah I think that so back in the day they would kind of medically stabilized you at the hospital and then you just went straight kind of an outpatient therapy model and at the time I think that was fine for me I was just eager to get back to high school in my mind I was kind of thinking like okay I went down a road that I didn't want to go down I learned my lesson I don't want to be in a hospital for another month or so so we'll do this thing and we'll get over it and and just move on and it seemed to work I think for the most part for a few years yeah well you didn't get back into sports though you know I so I did a little bit once ayat was kind of more stabilized I was able to rejoin my teams but it wasn't the same wasn't it yeah um you I kind of lost a year of developmental time where everybody else is getting faster and getting better and getting stronger and so I came back to the team but I just kind of like rode the bench right too far behind had lost too much strength yeah and and so and that's that's it that's a bitter pill to swallow for sure do you think that you transferred some of those impulses to control your environment on to your academics I think I had always had those control I mean the academics that part I was clearly always like the teacher's pet control kid from a very very young age my parents always like you can get B's and C's it's fine and I was like no straight A's for me solely so uh-huh but yeah that was there I actually I as I kind of tamp down the sports I also went more heavily into like singing and musical theater and things like that right so yeah I just kind of manifested itself at uprise so but you you graduate with great grades you got a you go to college you're you know you're an RA and you're doing acapella and you're getting you know your summa [ __ ] laude and the whole thing like what was the college experience with this college I did my freshman year I I did pretty well in terms of like that I thought at that point I was recovered I would I would tell I remember actually telling my sorority sisters like I recovered from an eating disorder huh Edie recovered in the past yeah in the past recovered done and in the sophomore year I relapsed really hard really quickly once again and do you know what triggered that at the time I think it was like some tumultuous relationships but it was nothing very I mean it was all kind of if I look back on it now it was all kind of your typical young adults turmoil right now but it probably was if you weren't treating it consistently over the years like it was just waiting in the shadows right for an excuse to come back out again exactly and so I won you know once again I kind of wish I had something to pinpoint on it but I don't really in your fault I know it's it is my fault yeah but yeah so in in so I relapse really hard my sophomore year of college and then spent like the next three years just trying to get by and I had multiple interventions from friends from my acapella group trying to get me out of school and so it was visibly apparent it was very I was very very sick so walk me through what it's like to be stuck in that cycle because I think there's so many misconceptions and myths about the experience of being held captive by an eating disorder I mean people just think we'll just get over it like start eating food eat right oh my god if it was only that simple oh thank you very much um that had not occurred to me yeah but one of the biggest misconceptions and I think people have reached out to me and said like I don't know how you were competing not eating and I go okay well people with eating disorders eat I mean that's that's that's you know it's just always it's a very very controlled manner and when it depends I mean I'm my experience has solely been with anorexia so I can't speak for the other for bulimia for binge eating disorder for the other manifestations but it is just it's all consuming food is all consuming and the thoughts of you know how to eat it how much how not to eat it how to avoid detection and it is very much something that as you do get physically emaciated your mental state also starts to deteriorate and it's so part of me I look back and I go god how was i I mean how did I graduate summa [ __ ] laude in my state you know so the but the mental degradation part of it I mean what is that because there's also like a like a weird euphoria when also and that and that goes hand in hand with like the body dysmorphia you look like a mirror and you see you know something very different than what is objective truth yeah well I had a lot of shame actually actually my my I was very ashamed of what I looked like I knew I was very sickly and I would try and hide it so I would I was living and I was in college and st. Louis and being the winners and I would like put on like two or three pairs of tights under my jeans to try and hide it from people because I was so ashamed but I and I didn't like how I looked and I didn't like what I was doing but I just I didn't know how to change it and I think that's one of the things that I that so much of this is also habit so when you start in graining these kind of habits and when you start avoiding something for instance then the more and more that you avoid it the more fearful it be the more like power of power it has so the more you avoid food and restricting or feel full you become a bit and it becomes this cycle and you just can't get out of it I mean you can but you can but I think that that powerlessness is what people have a hard time wrapping their heads around yeah like how why why can't you just sit there and write eat them yell and your answer to that would be I mean I can you if you sit down in front of me and you put a plate of food in front of me like I absolutely can't but like the the what are the consequences of rank eating that meal like what what you know walk me through like what the emotional experience would be for you if you were like actually force-fed something that you didn't want to eat right in that state I mean it's the it's anxiety that just goes through the roof so I mean of not eating the food is the way to cope with the society is the way to tamp down the excitement but if you actually you know went through the process if I sat down to eat that entire meal like heart palpitations the entire time just like thinking ruminating and then afterwards you spend all your time ruminating about that food about what you ate and what's also interesting is that I love food people also think that you know people with eating disorders like don't like the taste of food or don't know fault I mean that may be true it's true for some folks but like you literally at some point in treatment I remember being like it was almost like they gave me permission to eat and I was so happy at the time because they didn't have an option so it was almost like I'm gonna have to eat this relief it was almost like a relief to give that Wow do you know who that you know this person Eugenia Cooney who ain't she's this young girl who's a youtuber who developed a really large audience and and her her eating disorder just became writ large like she just dwindled down and to like a stick figure and she was putting up all these videos and lots of teen girls are following her and people are like you're gonna die like right I mean it's shocking when you see this young girl and this and then she kind of disappeared for a while and last week this big youtuber called Shane Dawson he's like one of the things creators on the platform made a little mini documentary or I went and visited her to like see how she was doing and it's fascinating he goes to her house and he sits down with her and apparently she had just come out of some kind of treatment and he's trying to engage her in what that was like and how she's doing and he's you know trying to say the right things and he's deeply concerned about her but it was clear to me that this is somebody who really hasn't fully owned what's going on like she's young and and she couldn't even say that she had an eating disorder and she's wearing a big sweater and it was clear that she was still you know either very early in her recovery or still not even you know not really in recovery at all and if you watch it with a with an objective eye it's like a I mean second hour-long video on YouTube I'll put a link in the show notes you can see the disease like written all over her face and how baffling it is because she's just not really connecting the dots yeah and I think that in in it's very I mean I look back at times wonder like I wasn't you know connecting the dots and I think that when you're very very sick sometimes it's it's hard to and you can't see objectively and you can't trust your own eyes you can't trust yourself and I stopped trusting my body I stopped trusting everything and that's a very paralyzing place to be you know and that you you just don't feel like you have a way out at all and yet you can you perpetuated this for quite some time like through law schools what like you had some dark experiences in law school yeah law school was so I graduated from college and part of the in college I kind of realized okay I I something needs to be done and so I went to I graduated from college got in my car with my mom and drove cross-country to a residential treatment facility down in Carlsbad and then I was there for a little bit and actually that was the first time where I where I think I finally embraced like fully surrendered like I outed myself on everything that I had been doing to kind of lie and steal and cheat my way through you know pseudo eating disorder recovery so I actually kind of got myself in like a good solid state before I went to law school but probably coming straight out of residential treatment into law school is not a great idea because as you know law school is how long was that treatment experience I was there I think about five I was supposed to be there about eight weeks but I think I only known up being five because insurance ran out right and you know it's like these treatments abilities are like $1,200 a day yeah yeah it's all about like the aftercare like yeah what's your program I'm gonna be when you get out of this right you know and if you don't have that setup and you're not making that your number one priority again you're just you're gonna revert back yeah and so I set up a team in Seattle where I was in law school but it was still very much I mean the chaos of being a 1l and then the whole like your 1l grades count for everything and I mean I almost dropped out of law school like three or four times probably the first and only time my life that I've ever identified as being depressed you know and so it was it was a very tough it was a very very tough transition I'm highly would not recommend that I was there no exercise going on during these years yeah so the treatment mount a lot of the time and probably for for good reason was that or this was the thinking at the time is that you need to eliminate all move men and I was also at a very stage at a physical state where it would be unsafe for me and so I didn't I would say so between hi I graduated my between like my freshman year of college through probably my second year of law school I didn't do any type of exercise none Wow and but I was I I was I was a mover I've always been a mover my entire life you know like I'd like to move and I like to be active so I wanted to figure out how to go back to that but for some people part of their disorder is his movement is actually rise and I was I was fearful that it could it be a slippery slope for me yeah yeah the the the real problem is is the underlying sense of uneasiness that drives you to feel like you have to control your environment yeah that can be manifest in your relationship with food but it can be also manifest relationship with exercise or your studies your academics like your job like all of these different things are outlets for that you know sort of ill-conceived compulsion right you have like the the food thing is just how it manifests for you right it can be alcohol can be drugs can be gambling shopping whatever and when you kind of address the relationship with food it doesn't necessarily like you maybe kind of white-knuckling it but if you still have that it's gonna find another way to eke out right and it's interesting how you see so many people in recovery in the ultra world you know there's a reason for that oh no it's like the percentage has to be crazy high it's it's super high and I think what the the problem is that when it comes to for somebody who's in recovery for drugs and alcohol for instance or for sex addiction they would say well exercise is a healthy outlet for you for somebody who's in recovery for an eating disorder all of a sudden those two you have to question yeah is exercise a healthy outlet for you and that's actually a lot of the work that I did when I was at opal was to try and untangle because I had a lot of questions in my mind too and I of whether whether the running you know and whether the athletics was part of the disorder right and to try and decouple those yeah yeah that's that's so hard because you love the sports right and this is making your life better in so many ways so to objectively kind of deconstruct the extent to which it's contributing to your disorder is not only difficult but it has to be like if you come to the conclusion that yes there is a disordered aspect to this then you have to be prepared to dismantle this identity yeah constructed about who you are absolutely and and that in that whole like feeling of grief and loss that goes with that though I do have to say I think being having so many injuries I've kind of have gone through that grief and loss and a separate yeah I actually and I I've said this I said this to my treatment team and that actually one of the best things in terms of separating my justement the eating disorder from sport was being sidelined with injury because I all of a sudden been had to kind of it was like a force separ you've had to reckon with it right I had to reckon with figuring out like Who am I beyond this and then also like is this part of it or is it you know is this a good healthy outlet for me or is it something that's driven you know by disorder yeah yeah and I would imagine that that your answer to that is constantly evolving right yeah right yeah because I don't know I just through my own lens in my own experience when people say to me like oh you just you transferred one addiction for another I'm like yeah you know I can't I just sit to a certain extent that is true like I think people who dismiss that out of hand are not being intellectually or emotionally honest so I'm always monitoring that like do I what is my relationship to this is it healthy is it unhealthy and it's always a little bit of both I think but in the balance of things it's improving my life more than its denigrating it yeah and I think that what I've kind of realized and clearly I still question this all the time but you have to look at your intentions behind the movement and intentions behind what you're doing and I've realized that there are for me there are certain forms of exercise that could be more disorder that aren't as like healthy and then for my mental state and then that's also part of the reason why I kind of moved from like the obstacle racing over like into the more endurance side of things is is realizing that the competitive obstacle racing like circuit for me could be very unhealthy if I got caught up solely in the competition solely in the podium solely in in you know things like that whereas then if I looked at things like doing the Berkeley marathons that where your chance of failure is 99.999 you and you yeah that to me was coming from a very different place then you know the this circuit the Spartan racing circuit yeah that's about winning right and other people and competition and the ultra world is really like these soul explorations you know in certain respects I mean I'm you know you want to win your competitor like you know it's ultimately not about anyone else other than your relationship with yourself yeah and there's something about those training for those races and participating in them that forces you to confront yourself in a really kind of profound way that probably doesn't happen in a more compressed kind of competitive event yeah and it's actually one of the reasons when I first started getting into sport I mean I was 27 28 that I shied away from races that were actually like timed and ranked and judged and had placements you know I started out doing tough matters solely because there was no competitive aspect yeah because I knew that that could be a like a dangerous path for me uh-huh and then look what happened I know well look what happened yeah and then and and then you know and the things that then came along with it's amazing because you became a prisoner of your own success like yeah came so wildly successful in a manner in which you know I would imagine you didn't you couldn't have ever expected but then with that comes shouldering the expectations of suddenly all these other people and sponsors and the media who are like you're the queen of pain and like you're the you're the hardest person and you know like you're so the expectation is like you're gonna win all these races you're gonna beat all the men you're gonna kick everyone's ass and you're gonna suffer more and and so when you line up for every race like just okay like I have to I have to like you know dance for everybody else once again like it's an unsustainable model and I think going back to that first experience of meeting you and and having this sense of who you are at that time like I've watched you evolve from that person like when I read when I first started really getting interested in what you were doing it's like oh yeah she's kicking ass in all these races but like I was like alright you know she's badass but then when you pivoted to realizing that you had to find a way to bring joy into it for yourself and like release the pressure yeah that pressure valve that's when I was like and you started writing about it and I was like oh now now I'm really interested in what you have to say and and that's where I think you know everything that you've done and undergone that you're experiencing right now is a result of like what happened with that right mm-hmm so it was almost like that pressure valve became too much you were compelled to like figure out it how to have a different relationship with yourself in sport that then kind of catapulted to you on this trajectory of personal growth that you know sort of culminating now and everything that you're you're doing and talking about yeah I think I really it is kind of it was a you know a piecemeal process I think that that kind of set me up in in taking a step back and saying okay like I need to reformulate my relationship with sport was kind of the first step to then ending up reformulating my relationship with myself and it was just that the sport aspect was easier to address then you know the the fundamental you know that the eating disorder part of it so I started there but it is very I mean there it's so I wish that I could segment them and and say that they're not it not related but they're completely resource overlaid yeah yeah Wow alright so somehow you get through law school and then you end up in you end up in Chicago at Skadden yes did you you had you worked at Skadden not as a lawyer I was a I was a legal assistant and in New York Scott Norfolk hey right out of college before law school oh no I think and you still lost I know that's what everyone says and that's what I asked this is how disconnected from myself I was like had I was the world's worst paralegal I was that place was so huge yeah I could just hide in my office and like avoid the phone and like pretty much get away with not doing anything and I became a Mike my skill set was like avoiding work I actually knew some associates like that too I mean I worked there for two years and and I had a whole crew of like young you know right out of college friends and we you know we would run around the city and so I had a great time and it's it's not totally fair like I you know I did my job or whatever but it wasn't exactly a fulfilling you know environment I'm like man I can't believe I went I just went to law school because I thought that's what you're supposed to do and I really didn't really occur to me to even explore doing anything else but I was there 1989 291 like I'm like in the middle of like crazy M&A but oh yeah that place was like on fire yeah oh yeah I can't write imagine like being a lawyer there yeah yeah I I know I know um you know I was in the Chicago office which I think that helped look we were not as crazy as I think just the New York culture which for law firms is really really tough Chicago you get a little bit more of the Midwestern vibe and whatnot um I actually loved being out of firm I actually really really enjoyed my time at Skadden it was I was in so I graduated in 2009 so basically right after everything I mean Bear Stearns had collapse Lehman's it collapse and so I went into restructuring in bankruptcy so we were very busy but it was kind of like business is good yeah the schadenfreude of all of that but I actually really enjoyed it I just I think for me I didn't I didn't see i saw partners and i was like that's not what i want to do you know but you how long were you it's gotten six years oh wow yeah so that was you know I stayed another year or two and you were you know that's the partner deal well oh god I know Scott is a single tier partnership so it's more like 11 or 12 but I think I just also I really like in legal work I really like being in the weeds and I really like kind of the drafting and the process and things like that and then I realized like as you get older you look up partners all their time is spent like the schmoozing in the business not all the time but schmoozing and business development and that just I was not I wanted to do like the grit see I would have preferred the other way around I was that person everybody else do all that work like you know you can go lock yourself in that conference room and go through like 300 boxes of documents yeah I'll go out to dinner with the client networking events I would find any excuse to avoid them so it's like that's that's not for me well and this is the period of time in which you reconnect with being an athlete and have all this success and and I remember just reading about you and kind of watching this whole thing unfold and thinking like you're you're winning every race that you're in and you're working and like I I know and appreciate like the pressure cooker environment yeah in which you're practicing law I just kept thinking like she's one of the few people that could actually make a living as a professional athlete and define you know a new way of being a professional athlete and like leave the law and like do this full-time the law is always gonna be there you can you can go back to these law firms and I was confused as to why you you'd like having both yeah I I well I could technically have made a living as as a you know professional obstacle racer but for me it would have changed the character of what I did I mean if I thought I put enough pressure on myself to go out and win World Championships when I knew that I could go back to like you know my law job that if I didn't win the world chairmanship it didn't mean that I wasn't gonna be able to eat the next day so in my mind if I made it my profession it would change the character of what I was doing it which is already a very tenuous relationship I mean if I if the competition was getting to me and I'm just like your ultimate weekend warrior imagine if that was my livelihood so it was a place for me of being like nope nope gonna try and still keep that joy in there which you know had its ups and downs you still had to meet your maker with it right you kept your job I know so I don't I mean I don't know I had it had I decided to to quit and become you know a professional obstacle race but this is also there at the very very early stages that I got in this sport like before anybody would even call it a sport in today some people still won't call it a sport so I wasn't blown up you know it's it's a huge thing and you you I mean you definitely could have stepped out and like made a career outside of the law yeah I made that choice yeah but I never I never actually seriously considered it like beyond just kind of brief moments here are there of feeling well yeah but I'm already almost 30 years old who becomes a professional athlete there's 30 years old never moments though where you're getting ready you know it's Thursday or Friday afternoon and you've got World Championships that weekend or some big race where the partner calls and says hey we're all meeting you know tomorrow Saturday morning at the firm in the conference room I like call it off okay that works yeah I there were I did skip a lot of races last-minute I always booked flights refundable because they just you know never happened around world championship those I actually did make sure that I took vacation time even though we know that doesn't necessarily always mean that you're protected um but yeah I mean there were I remember I would be you know drafting or sending out emails at 10 p.m. the night before a race you know that's just yeah part of it or I would finish the race and then go check my email and be like oh and they're like why aren't you responding this is everything yeah I think I saw it block around that time I know I know you just crawled out of a mud pile after carrying a log through a lake right I don't feel like I'm sorry we didn't have any so and that was the issue a lobby's races there's no cell phone service we're so then I'm sitting there thinking like oh my god am I getting email from somebody that Korea time war anxiety absolutely just checking it yeah and what was the food relationship like when you were competing and at your best and during this phase um I think that I was kind of rationalizing everything that I was doing in terms of Adina's like a well and performing well so it doesn't really you know Matt I was like I'm doing well so what I'm eating must be okay yeah and doing well is an understatement I mean you're suddenly you're on the cover of all these magazines and you're getting all this attention like the accolades are just raining down upon you so I would imagine that's disorienting when it comes to really taking honest stock and inventory of your behavior yeah and I think that I to be totally honest my eating habits were probably have probably been very similar these through the entire time it's just that it took that many years for it to catch up to you yeah probably I mean that's that or instead of it's like you can delude yourself in your mind for so long that you are doing fine but the body doesn't forget as easily and you know after a while it starts to catch up and I think I also probably didn't realize at this point you know that I was like not getting periods and that my bones were deteriorating things like that and so it just it became a after a while your body will break yeah well you were diagnosed with osteoporosis when you were in high school yeah so when I was 16 I think they did they did a DEXA and you know all the z-scores at the time I they don't call it osteoporosis at the age they called League osteopenia um but it had so I was diagnosed with I'm gonna 16 I had another one done when I was in my early 20s and I'd gotten better and so I think that they were like okay it can reverse and and you know increase from there but I didn't know you know I have a history of this and I broke a lot of bones when I was even a little kid because I have just had a small bone frame right oh so you're coming off this you know streak of just winning all these races and then suddenly injuries start to appear that means that how it kind of begins well first there's the there's the serve reconciling with the pressure yeah yeah well where was the time line so what happened was that I basically at the end of 2015 I had just won like my third world's toughest mutter and I remember I was ready to walk away like I was ready to walk away from the sport just because I just it was I just felt overwhelmed by the pressure and I almost thought like maybe we should just go out on top you know like one these these titles and just sail off into the sunset and I think I was kind of just tired of the circuit and then I actually discovered ultrarunning all right that kind of thought about that to give it a go at this point I'd also this was when I I'll of Skadden moved across country to go to Apple what was that decision about that decision was I think I in my mind it was partially to have a better lifestyle more suited to competing in terms of that I worked actually just as much now as I probably did at the firm but it was just thought it's on a more regular type of like hourly that in-house lifestyle a little bit more conducive also I knew I wasn't gonna be a partner was I was pretty middle-of-the-road associate and was not on my radar and it's not freezing cold and then um I also wanted to get back West you get back out west because I'm born and raised in Portland and so that was part of all that went into and I remember coming out to California and seeing like the beautiful trails the trail had like ten minutes from the Apple campus and being like yup there I'm there I am and so I started getting targeting ultras and I ran Sean O'Brien down here 100 K in 2016 got a golden ticket to go to western states and I was like whoa we started training bunch more and knew nothing about how you should like increase coach right no no coach yeah smart yeah wrong with you I know no coach well because in with obstacle racing the vast majority my training was actually CrossFit and then I ran maybe like 15 to 20 miles a week but it was nothing and then we thinnest I look actually my training log cuz I did kind of keep one and I went from running 15 to 20 miles a week - then prepping for western states and running like 80 90 miles a week and like two months yeah so that's when I broke my femur yeah so that was the first injury anyone would have broken you know and so and I think that the the femoral stress fracture I was able to write off as kind of like a the training just was not dialed in and so with one bone injury you can probably do that but when they start to pile up longer so you have this femoral fracture which is no small thing but you don't I mean it's impossible to get you to sit down for five minutes like you're just doing all kinds of crazy training around it yeah I eight mile crutches hikes and whatever funny thing is people people talk about that Spartan Race that I did on crutches and that had nothing that was that was mainly for I still I still I'm glad that I did that because that was for like the adaptive athletes and seeing a different experience that wasn't about trying to race but yeah I mean I as soon as I was cleared to do anything which was literally the day after I got the diagnosis I was in the pool with a pool buoy and between my legs trying to so I'm trying to do anything and I could to like still be an athlete and I think also at this time all of a sudden I had been managing my eating disorder but then I was then looking at four months of no running and I didn't know how to feed myself right because part of part of the managing your eating disorder met an exercise routine like you know your calculus about what to eat is very much informed by how much you're training right and when you're benched suddenly that equation gets thrown out the window and you got to figure out a different way of dealing with it yeah but I also I think that I could write I go well so many my other athlete friends have that exact same feeling too when they all of a sudden are injured and they go I don't know how to eat or like I should probably stop eating as much and so for me I sat there and thought okay well that's just normal that's not an eating disorder they don't have eating disorders so does that mean I have an eating disorder or like you know so I was part of that mmm rationalization it's hilarious that you're confused about asking yourself that question though well I thought I said well I mean I did have an eating disorder but is this part of it now and I think that that's really hard to untangle yeah Elan yeah so it becomes indelibly clear though when when you suffer the second fracture right like when you finally are able to kind of train again and then you fracture your sacrum yeah um I I mean the the femur stress fracture is hard for me because I was trying to do everything I could to stay in shape and to get back for World Championships and I didn't realize it at the time but I dropped a lot of weight when I was injured which and I it was not intentional and and I think a lot of it I also a body type that and I've realized this too is that when I run I actually my body gets larger I put on muscle and things like that and vs. and I build it really easily but yeah and so I got so I dropped a lot of weight and then it ended up with a sacral stress fracture which was clearly like a psycho stress fractures can be training our errors but they're generally like there's something going on your body that's not right and that was when I kind of started to think like this is getting out of control again because also what happens is when you when you know when you start to when you start to like lose weight you can also then unintentionally get back into like the mental states that there there's all this research about how about you know setpoints and people in their set points and that when you go into like a starved state you're like the obsessions become that much worse you are you aware of the key study mm-hmm I don't think so okay so back in the 40s is the Minnesota starvation experiment where they basically took you know a group of healthy adult men and they starved them and that you can't do this nowadays because I mean like clearly there's a lot of reasons there's a constitutional amendment right but these men volunteered to be housed and basically sorry I know can't remember how much food they gave them but it was so minimal and they started exhibiting all of the traits that you see people with eating disorders oh right I can actually provoke it impede you kind of provoked it if you starve people down and they I think they saw very much because the point of the study was actually to figure out what was going on in like the Nazi concentration camps but it's still to this day one of the best studies and the only really study that we have about the effects of starvation on people and what that does to their mental state so what is that specifically like what they become more body dysmorphic or more like fearful of food yeah so the more that they you actually like withhold food from people then they they will become fearful or they'll start hoarding it I mean all those salt rationing it so you see with a lot of people - eating disorders that they may take a very long time to eat a meal or something so these men would be like well I only get this amount of calories a day so I will stretch it out they would start obsessing over cookbooks recipes you know nowadays you probably see this on like Instagram people looking at food porn and they would just by not feeding your body then all of those things became so much worse right and it's funny actually the first few weeks that I was or the first week that I was there at Opel and I remember finally like I was full like really full and I go you know it's funny I have stopped obsessing over food because I'm not hungry when you're [ __ ] hungry like you obsess over everything it's amazing that when you actually feed yourself thing the thoughts don't go away yeah it's not as simple as that but yeah so it's an interesting it's interesting what actually just the physical starvation will do to your mind mm-hmm and it doesn't have to be you know it when people think starvation they think zero food but it would be interesting to to apply a similar study to what goes on neurologically during intermittent fasting or the seven-day fad because it's so the rage right now and you know are we having the real conversation that we need to have around this like you'll hear a lot of anecdotal evidence that I'm more mentally focused or you know I can pay attention better but what is happening hormonal and neurologically that's contributing to that and how much of that is healthy versus you know leading you towards that you know disordered relationship with food well and I think that the more that you get you see people do that then with like their cheat days and then they just go like hog well you know they'll restrict restrict restrict restrict their food intake and then just like one day a week go hog wild and then go back to so it's just this I don't understand I call and you know and and I think that i think that it's tough because I don't think diets and things like that cause eating disorders but if you have a predisposition to that kind of stuff that's clearly not helping and you know we've we're taught so much that we should not listen to our hunger cues or that that we should you know we do anything to like suppress our appetites like when did have an appetite become a bad thing yeah you know there's so much about the culture right now that's tough and I think with with the you know the diet Wars that we're seeing or the way that people talk about diet on social media and on YouTube etc it's it's it's easy for people with disordered eating proclivities to hide behind whatever protocol they're advocating whether it's vegan or paleo or keto or you know fad whatever it is you can kind of become you see people who you can kind of tell like this person has a [ __ ] up relationship with food and they're they're just you know like singing from the rafters about how great a certain diet is but beneath that is an unhealthy obsession like this obsessive kind of thing that's driving the whole machine yeah absolutely and there's a lot of there's a fair amount versus that is that show that if you you know if you forbid certain things in your life you're seriously going to then clearly crave it more and more and so the people who say you have to make it evil right exactly and and or you can only eat between periods of time and we are creating this machine and it's really just this entire the thing is in now and now it's not even people say it's not a diet it's a lifestyle change and I'm like no no that's still diet culture just under a different like yeah that's a good point and you look at a so many of these diets are consumers selling products they're selling things to us it's amazing when a new kind of diet comes on you know online and how quickly the marketplace comes in to like fill it with all of these products and it becomes like co-opted and packaged in a certain way and then market it and sold to us absolutely I mean if you look at now everything on the shelves is keto this you know that you know and then and it's no different than growing up in the 90s it was low-fat fat-free everything and I think that's really hard for people to kind of like sort through a lot of the times especially when we have to eat yeah like I can just not drink hey I do drugs and it's you know obviously this is elementary but like you have to eat every day yeah so you're you're forced to confront you're conditioned in the most you know tactile way three times a day at least yeah and I and it's what's interesting and I've told you that you know I have a history of going to a oh hey because back you know 10 15 years ago a lot of people treated eating disorders like an addiction because that was a you know model that we had you know that a model worked very well I remember going to a lot of a oh a median stirring during college or during law school and thinking like man this a thing doesn't seem to be working well for anyone and I think because there's a different a works great because you guys like or you know you can be with other people and not and be around alcohol things like that doesn't work for food because you have to eat to live you know and so it's not as simple as just avoiding it and a lot of the mindset has gone away from treating food like an addiction that it's not and it can't be treated like an addiction and so I don't know the the science is still morphing on it and the the treatment models but yeah I mean I don't I don't suffer from that condition and you know I I don't have a scientific opinion on it but I think that the if there is a disease aspect to it it's not the food it's the impulse to control like I'm talking about before and and twelve stuff whether it's Oh a or a a is all about like getting you to you know turn your gaze inward and do an inventory of how you're behaving to get clarity on on who you are and like make amends and and you know be able to get you know clear on what your character defects are and then have this community that holds you accountable yeah and and that's it was actually kind of sad for me when I remember looking back into treatment a you know two or three years ago because I loved the 12-step culture and I found it very very helpful for me and I'm being like wait no one's really doing that for eating disorders anymore friends that are in Oh a yeah yeah yes you should do yeah we have some bang for a long time they get to be helpful I've never been to a know a meeting but you know a lot of them are people who are cross addicted like they're like what I know from a they just go to both mm-hmm you know it's all the same thing like the more I kind of you know live on earth I start to see all of these things as one thing and something that every single human being you know can identify themselves on a spectrum yeah we're all guilty of behaviors or thought patterns activities substances whatever it is that we compulsively do on some level maybe it's minor for a lot of people but that we can't seem to stop ourselves from doing even though we're suffering adverse consequences like hey why do you why are you constantly dating [ __ ] you know whatever why do you have to go to the mall three times a week or why you know why are you watching soap operas it at 11:00 a.m. like all of us you know have our little vices and you know in certain respects the person who you know can't pull the needle out of their arm is the easy case because the problem is so easy to diagnose and treat whereas somebody food it's harder you know the relationship thing it's even hard it's like it's really hard to like deconstruct what the actual problem is but I think they're all manifestations of something very similar that we all share just in being human absolutely and I think one of the things that I've realized with the number of people that have reached out to me and you know after I you know open up about this a lot of people would start an email saying like I don't have an eating disorder but I have XYZ or I've struggled with x y&z I'm like it doesn't you know food was my coping mechanism we all have a co-payment right um you know if food was food was that for me and so but it's underneath it's all the same language you know and then a part of me and then I get in my mind and I'm like why like then why are we I mean a nerd I'm like what is it about the human condition then that like we're all currently in this day and age it seems that everybody seems to be struggling with these something underlying this yeah I don't know maybe life's is too easy and comfortable you talk about beautiful people talk about that's why you know why that's what marathons is why this whole world exists yeah people have to figure out how to inflict some pain on themselves and I'm part and parcel of that you know alive I know you know frame well you've had you know your journey through this from super-competitive to finding joy in it and now this you know like latest chapter how well first actually first I want to get it I want to I want to get into like what actually happened it ovals so you go you go to the you go to the treatment center like what is the experience like what is the protocol of trying to understand how to you know resolve this issue and get you on a better path yeah I mean every treatment facility is a little bit different so I was in a day patient so it was like 8:00 to 8:00 to 6:00 p.m. and then you do all your meals and your snacks there and it really is ten hours a day of talking about your feelings which I actually think is incredible actually here is how I think the world this is how I think the world is gonna be a better place everybody needs to go talk about their feelings for 10 hours a day everybody should go to treatment I know what that's like anybody who identified from treatment you get to like opt out of your life and just go to this place and all you do is work on yourself yeah anytime it is but I think that I finally what I needed to do was I had to create space for myself to finally actually confront everything and you know the first few days I remember kicking and screaming I remember calling up my parents call them friends being like no this place not for me I might use those yeah well it wasn't I say with my sister so it was it was 8 to 6 p.m. and then I had oh I slept at I was wondering cuz you were like posting on social media routes yeah yeah I didn't some people got mad at me that I didn't clarify that I wasn't in a residential or inpatient facility by right but I think I didn't want to I didn't want to spend my time being like this is a partial hospitalization program and it's you know it's 50 hours a week but yeah so I I didn't warrant the inpatient level of treatment but I think that a lot of what they used at opal and treatment Allen is radically open dialectical behavioral therapy which is for people with diseases but over control which really spoke to me because everything in my life has been about that over control peace and then just trying to take a step back and when you when you strip away all of your coping mechanisms so you strip away the ability to control food I stripped away you know the exercise sport piece which you know I'd kind of I'd kind of done the work on exercise sport piece through injury and through rediscovery and joy and then all of a sudden you're sitting there and you're looking at yourself and you're like okay now this is me like I've gotten rid of my coping mechanisms and you kind of like you feel very very raw and you know I'm sure you can relate I'm super vulnerable what about the illusion that you're in control at all yeah let's start there yeah whole like impulse to control is actually just a fabrication yeah I mean you can control what you put in your mouth but you're not really in control of anything you like decoupling that relationship is like the big puzzle piece yeah I think and really just like embracing the fact that like you're not in control and that the path to healing is about letting go and surrender yeah which for a type-a personality who's holding on to everything and it's trying to will their way in the world that's like telling somebody that you have to you know just wave the flag of defeat so it's a very difficult pill to swallow and to really just even grok yeah and and it's also it's so humbling too because for the first few days there I'm like wait I can't go to the bathroom self you know like I somebody has to go to the bathroom and flush the toilet yeah you're in a mental institution right and that you you you I and there is so much like okay like I I just fully surrender and it is something that is so humbling in so many ways and I think that that's the and I'm I almost I almost like you get that fight-or-flight response and after that first week I was almost like Patton I'm packing it I don't need this packing up going back down to San Jose but I'm so glad I stuck through it and then by the end of my time there I was almost like no wait but no I don't want to go I just want to tell stay yeah this is when it gets scary to go back into the world yeah it doesn't I think that that would make my own decisions there was part of my thinking it was actually part of the things that kept me out of treatment I think for a while and like seeking treatment because I was afraid that or I had seen stories of people who almost like there's just like a revolving door of treatment facilities because like then you don't know anything else because the big bad world is scary out there well it would be great if we could all sit around and talk about my feelings for 10 hours a day but that's not how life is so it's almost like you know not staying there too long at the same time so what is the protocol now like how do you make sure because you've been in you know treatment centers before yeah and have seen what has happened when you haven't had like active you know aftercare and you know really made your recovery a life priority yeah you know it that I mean I think that's the greatest unknown and that's so you set up I set up as much guardrails and support as I could coming back here I started work initially part-time and then I was still doing more like an intensive outpatient so it was kind of doing the - and then you so you slowly stepped down and then right now I have kind of an outpatient team mhm and then really just setting up a support network and for me that I have a great support network but it's making sure that I actually use it and actually reaching out of being saying like hey I need help and this thing that we talked a lot about that treatment is outing yourself I'm just saying like hey guys I have to out myself right now I'm having really bad disordered thoughts and I just need to tell somebody and put it out there cuz when I put it out there then it doesn't hold as much power over me yeah and you have to do that in real time when it's occurring because the tricky thing is when that moment arises when you're you know staring at a plate of food and you're thinking about like not eating it it's too late like then they're like call somebody but that that train left the station a long time ago maybe months ago like it's it's about the daily habit of checking in with people and people who know you and can monitor like hey you're a little off today what's going on and kind of compelling you to be honest yeah exactly it's having that support system and network and and really for me fully owning that there are some things that I can't be completely self reliant on right now you know and and that's a bitter pill to swallow for somebody who likes to be fully self-reliant but there have been times and coming back to the bay area and coming back to work where I realized like I need to set up like I need to set up dinners with folks right now to like go out and eat with them because it's better I do much better in like a social scenario than that then when I'm by myself right well now you're publicly on the hook I know the entire world right so it's I mean it's a double-edged sword because I did have some people reach out to me and say oh well now everybody's watching me you can't screw up uh-huh and all of a sudden my heart was like like I'm human I'm gonna screw up I've screwed up like we're all gonna ask her us and I think it's you know with with alcohol or drugs it's very easy to name your screw ups because it's like I did the sub sensor I didn't do the sub sense food it's very very super he's not binary no it's very it's like did I restrict that meal a little or did I am I really eating you know so gotta really be in touch with yourself and and you know be willing to have that kind of honest dialogue going on all the time like it's about your intentions as much as anything else right but you know the the the authenticity and the vulnerability with which you you know kind of have offered this up to the world I think is honorable and and and super courageous and I don't say that in a perfunctory or light way like it was I know it was a move that like you you know had a lot of consternation about like should I show you know should I talk publicly about this you don't have to you have no obligation to you made that decision I was on the I went to the website for Opel because yes this is about and they they had like a there's like a slogan on the home page that is beauty in imperfection and authenticity and that's lovely right because we're all imperfect and I think the the path towards being that fully integrated person who's not living with that kind of dissonance requires you know the courage to be authentic in real time you know and to be human and to be you know exposed on some level and you know I can't imagine what it felt like after you wrote that blog post and you like hit you know publish on it like walk me through that it was actually the most freeing experience and I've ever had I sat down and I bawled my eyes out for the next half an hour or so as you were writing it or after you after I said I mean I sources the catharsis cuz I had been writing it you know over like a span of since I mean I left treatment at the end of June and then so it took me like a few weeks to kind of wrap my brain around it and I was so anxious I remember that day before I was going to publish it was all done it was sitting it was ready to go and I remember actually going to the pool to swim that morning and then just like it was like the best one of my life because it was just like anxiety or something like that fueled but in in putting it out there it finally I just I cried because it was just I finally felt true to myself mm-hmm and what was the motivation behind doing that honestly a lot of it I hate to say that there was a selfish motivation because it was it was almost a an alignment for myself yeah you know people are like oh would you were you you're so great you're inspiring other people and I'm like that's okay discomfort of living in that kind of dissonance becomes intolerable exactly and and I don't I can't say why exactly I felt the need to a load it to the entire world as opposed to just because I understand there are portions of yourself that you can keep close you know and you don't have to let everybody know your dirty laundry but for me it was very important to have that be a part of my story considering I've been so open and vulnerable about many other things but not this and then that kind of selectiveness didn't sit well with me right and just to be able to be feel free I felt very very free after I apologetic day and I was like I was the most just free feeling and then people start giving me negative feedback and then that went away well 24 hours was great I don't know I'm sure you know well look first of all shame can't survive the light right so whatever shame you were harboring the only way out of that is to do exactly what you did and I'm sure there's trolls out there whatever but like all I saw was this overwhelming like outpouring of like love and support like it was like it would be it was like a viral moment in the in the endurance sports world I did I honestly will say I expected a reaction I did not expect that type of attention to it and I'm blown away in the best way possible I mean I I was it was amazing like I mean I get kind of like choked up thinking about it because people were so supportive and so great I'm still like sorting through emails to respond to people and I think for me it was very important to talk about it to you at a time where I had not recovered and and that was that was that's a bit tough because I think that you see so many people talk about their disorders in the past or their addictions in the past but it comes from a recovered perspective and I you know I got a lot of feedback saying like thank you for being open before you're there you know because it's not as simple as that and and I go back and forth on whether like total freedom is possible I feel like the voices get quieter thing things like they get easier the further and further like you get into recovery but I think that you always kind of have to be vigilant and I maybe you can speak to that - yeah I mean I'm of the mind that that there is no recovered there's recovery there's being active in your recovery I would never consider myself recovered ya know and and you know I had a relapse eight years ago after I've been sober for thirteen years like I'm very aware of how fragile it is and how how it requires you know constant attention and focus and you know that's not to say that you know your situation is the same you know it's different but I would be curious about it like is there a sense like that there is a recovered when it comes to relationship with food I just feel like that impulse is always there and and keeping it at bay you know is important and there's tools for doing that but to fall under the belief that it could disappear altogether and never reappear I think is dangerous yeah I think there's different mindsets um I think some people think that if you don't give if you don't believe and that fully recovered is possible then you know you're never going to get there but I maybe this might be more of the unpopular opinion but I do kind of similarly believe to what you do is that you know like you can be in a very very good place of recovery but you still need to be mindful of things and especially the longer you know like this has been 20 years of my life and a lot of this stuff has become so ingrained and automatic in me and so it's almost in some ways like exposure therapy and unlearning habits and things like that that didn't happen overnight you know yeah and it's all about where you are in the moment like my relationship with this is like what am i doing today like where where is my recovery like in the middle of this experience that we're having right now because I know people with 30 days of sobriety who like are super sober and I know people who've been sober for 35 years who are out of their minds right they may not drink but they're not they don't have they don't have like emotional sobriety which is really kind of like where there's no there's no there's no destination for that because you can always hit a rate and improve on you know who you are as a human being so it's less about where are my cravings for alcohol right now then than it is about like what's up with my character defects like being married to my wife like I don't want her to leave like so I I have to like be on top of this [ __ ] it's funny when as soon as as soon as I started to realize that like the food was no longer like the the scary issue and I was god now I have to work on myself right it's like now I have to like kind of like underbelly things that is the point versus driving you like this is this is all about that right and I and I think my big thing is that I I'm a thinker and I've always like no no no I know my feelings for so many years I was really good at thinking about my feelings like really really good like thinking about my feelings but not actually feeling anything and I think that actually in our society we prize a lot of thinking over feeling you know a lot of people who fall like the stoic like philosophies and things like that and and once I finally started to like tap into what am I feeling right now and like then just like not even not even a signing and like not assigning judgments to that but and then just actually like being like feelings are valid too it doesn't all have to come from the mind yeah you know yeah I think if you're you know things like stoicism art great for like corralling your emotional statement but I think when it comes at the cost of of valuing your you know emotional landscape then you're missing a bigger picture of what it means to be full of fully integrated human mm-hmm you know and the thing about feelings is they change right so when you feel like you're gonna die or this is so painful that you can't go one more minute without picking up the drug or vomiting or whatever it is your thing is to be able to just be be with it and feel it and experience it knowing that it will go away like it will dissipate it will morph into something else yeah and that you don't need to use your coping mechanism of choice to to get rid of that to manage that fear because you're so terrified of feeling that feeling that you'll do anything to numb it out to change your state right and then longer that we go without feeling those feelings then the more scared we'd come up them right so it's not entirely exactly that entire avoidance and so that's why I've been a huge fan of just like exposure therapy in a lot yeah well one of the things you do everyday and you share it a lot is effect gratitude last yeah I do that has been and that actually is started my friend Matt Davis who's actually a fellow podcaster but he in recovery himself and kind of started this movement and it's just on Instagram and it's 10 things a day that you're grateful for which actually seems like a lot and it can be a lot but it's been very kind of like a it's different it's a tool in my toolkit no on a daily basis yeah yeah I mean that's a big 12-step thing yeah yeah absolutely because it's one thing to kind of intellectually grapple with gratitude but feeling it is like a practice like I don't I'm not like inclined to walk around grateful I have to you know what I mean like I'm like thinking about what I don't have you know all the time so and that's not healthy you're good yeah like I have to go out of my way to go what am i grateful for and not just go oh I'm grateful for this this and this like let me try to feel that yeah like its foreign it is foreign I think there there is a part of me though that with the gratitude a lot of people are moving towards I mean the power of gratitude it's great but I also think that there are there's an issue that if we then feel like for ungrateful or if we have negative feelings and that's not right because we've so much that we should be grateful for and then we beat ourselves up that we are you know exactly exactly but it is a very good like daily practice yeah we should be grateful for all our human flaws right I suppose so alright so you were in the treatment center for like 90 days yeah so I was it was about three months ago yeah I think that's the appropriate time yeah I mean I everybody should at least three months everyone's journey is different I think that they say in terms of like neural reprogramming and things like that I think three months this is probably like is a good period of where you can start to actually like you know change those neural pathways I was in for a hundred days yeah just like down the street from where you grew up oh really you know Newburgh yeah yeah yeah about that later so here you are you've emerged from this experience you've shared it and transparent you've been open and now you're kind of being perceived in this new light like now the it went from like oh you're so inspiring for what you do athletically like oh it's so inspiring that you you know allowed yourself to be vulnerable like the strength and vulnerability that's really connecting with a lot of people and I think this is really it is whether this is your intention or not like it is this amazing opportunity for you to be of service to a lot of people I mean we have an epidemic of disordered eating and eating disorders there are so many people that struggle with this that suffer in silence and to be you know this sort of beacon of hope in in all of its you know flaws and all of that given that you're early in this process I think is you know is is really a beautiful new you know chapter for you yeah and I you know I don't I look I I don't have a crystal ball to let you know like where I'm gonna be and but it is you know for me it's really an opportunity to kind of live all parts of my life like I like I said I think I said I was like I don't I don't want to be like the eating disorder recovery girl I don't want to be the athlete I don't like this is just me like I'm super flawed I'm super complex just like everybody else out there and this is just another piece you know so I'm just trying to live authentically and stumbling through and figuring this all out and to me it's been very very connecting to so many different people yeah well what I hear on that is a healthy relinquishment of control like you can't control whatever the media narrative is going to be around this and but you do have the ability to reframe your own story to make it more expansive than Amelia the the you know obstacle course champion or Amelia the ultra athlete or Amelia the the the attorney like you're a spiritual being having a human experience and all of its you know wondrous beauty and and pain where this goes we don't know but I would imagine this has now put you in a in a situation in which you have to figure out yet another relationship with sport right like how are you now kind of venturing forward in in that world yeah so I spent a lot of time and a lot of my work and treatment was kind of was being very curious about my relationship with sport and about my identity as an athlete and where that where that fits in in my life and so I'm still I still have a pole to sport it's not going anywhere I think for me it's very much more for the experiences now I I have I haven't heard she compete and I actually I think I went to one portion of myself or I went to like one side or I used to be all about the competition in the winning and then I moved to this it doesn't matter Whitney doesn't matter a competition doesn't matter I'm gonna enter these races where nobody finishes right yeah and now I'm kind of recognizing like my therapist told me she goes you know wanting to win a race isn't a bad thing it's just what you do when you don't win that race and so I still I spent a lot of time you know working and evolving that that relationship with competition and lots to say on that at some point I'm sure but so now I'm I'm I'm looking you know to get back into racing and again and get back into sport just probably not you know I kind of just things that kind of light my soul on fire when I talk to my coach about it he's always and I talked to about a race and he goes well does it light you up and I and that's kind of my my gauge about where I really want to go with this and I so I've kind of taken a step back in the early stages of recovery from competing just because I'm glad you have a coach yes yes he has he has been with me from I mean he inherited me with the well inherit like I started working with him and then a week later I ended up with my stress femur stress fracture and that was not his fault at all I'm clearly because it was already there but has actually been like the greatest source of me really you know owning this journey and seeking treatment and recovery and went on are you physically like cool now is everything yeah aside from when I kicked a bench in the sonim my toe the other day that was annoying but physically beyond that yes I am I'm healthy and it's as I told everybody running feels great when you feed yourself properly my calcaneal stress fracture healed in record time when I was there treatment you know putting nourishment in your Bo exactly yeah yeah well I think I told you this before but I think that you and Buerkle should do ohto well cuz is super fun you know and it's so different and like there would be no expectations and it's difficult and it's cold and miserable and awesome and you know that's a lot unlike anything you've ever done before yeah and to do it with a teammate also makes it not really about you and your performance right and I think you I think you know with all swimming you've been doing that could be fun I want you guys to do that I want it we've we've talked about it I know they have a race down here which I think would be kind of a good like testing of it I'm doing my first ocean swim tomorrow so with a nice Caroline right yeah with Caroline and but in that that's very different ocean swim then you know the race are yours going down because I haven't done I've not really never saw him in the ocean before but it's like a nice warm summer ocean a little you know but you know I'm like I'm not a great swimmer nobody's ever actually watch me swim but I wouldn't worry about it yeah well I wanna I want to kind of round this down by talking a little bit about you know for people that are listening who either are suffering from this or they're a parent who has a child suffering from live so they have a family member or something like that I think it could be really instructive and helpful to kind of walk through you know how how you know people can manage this like what to look out for you know how to try to help somebody who is in this condition and like what not to do yeah well I think first of all one big thing to recognize is that it's not about the weight and I think or when you if you up in terms of approaching somebody that you never know how people are gonna take it if you say hey notice you've lost a lot of weight or you've like you know like so it's very it's more about pointing out to people like behaviors or them withdrawing or just really just checking in on them being like I notice you've been kind of like not showing up to group runs or group dinners or you know like what's going on because as I know my doctor's always told my parents is like you can't recover for her like you can't force her to recover until she's ready but it's kind of just that like reinforcement that you are there for them and that you know in checking in on them and I think that sometimes though when things are dire like if it does seem to be like a medical necessity state sometimes you have to be the bad guy I mean I might when my roommates intervened with me in college I didn't speak to them for the next several months like literally was so angry but they you know helped save my life and so in situations like that sometimes if you're willing to be the bad guy it can be very useful to just go straight for it the tough love thing the tough love and I'm sure and you know like anybody who's ever had an intervention done for them like you hate everybody in that moment but it can be completely necessary yeah it can be and sometimes it works and often it doesn't because that person isn't willing so I think for anybody who's listening who's considering intervening on somebody else's situation it's important I mean there may be a good reason to do that and it might be advised but I think it's important to have a healthy relationship with outcomes and not be attached to whether it's gonna work right yeah no absolutely and no into going into it that you know there's a risk that could completely implode your relationship and but eight you know it's it's yeah I look back at all of this now and like man you know I'm trying to figure out like what actually like stuck you know the times that people what people said and there's no rhyme or reason to be totally honest because I've had interventions or people say things to me at times where it didn't it didn't resonate and then other times where it's just an offhand comment not mm-hmm yeah timing is a weird thing with this site right you have to you have it's like you've got to live your life in a certain way and get to the point where you really want to do something you know and and nobody can compel that willingness no no and I think it well unless you clearly have like a minor child or things like that or are there are situations but you can't make somebody want it no I mean you can make somebody go to a place right and you can you know get them set somewhere but you can't actually catalyze their desire to actually be healthy no and and they'll go through the motion and I did it I went through the motions I did everything that you know you you said I should do and you know God discharged and went on my way and so and then I've had people say okay well then Amelia what's different about this time then you know and honestly I I could say well who knows but I think that for me it's this time it came from myself and that's really like the key difference you know as opposed to somebody else kind of pushing you towards it yeah yeah well I think the thing for you is just like I said before like is really having a setup that holds you accountable like a community of people that you talk to and you know a protocol that's keeping you on on the path yeah yeah I think that's it's so so important and and with you know anybody and going through any type of recovery from any type of mental illness or mental health issue what are the signs to look out for like what are some things that the people that are in the grips of this thing yeah do like early before it's obvious before like if a parents listening to this and like what should they be looking out for um I will say I'm aware it's hard to generalize because they are so different but I would say Skippy meal times are like finding excuses this is my own experience so finding excuses to not eat with people you know subtly kind of like restricting food intake being very kind of secretive around food is something to look out for body image talk things along those lines that well but and that's tough because there's so much worried we're in crazy town I know I know and so it is tough to say like when somebody like pokes out themselves and I was like I don't like how I look I'm like is that is that the news order is that right are you like looking at the Kardashians all day long in your Instagram feed right what are you doing right yeah I mean as a parent of two daughters like we're you know we're in the middle of all this right now with our 15 year old like she just deleted everybody she's only follows her friends now good for you know and that's a big part of it I think that's huge I think that and I know me personally I have unfollowed anybody who's like seems to be promoting that type of like diet culture and and that you know anything that wouldn't be that wouldn't be conducive to like my own recovery but I do think that you know with with teenagers and you know with kids the probably one of the best things that you can do as a parent and I say that's actually not as a parent is just being a role model in like in how you how you approach food you know and because people don't realize that kids pick up on a lot of stuff you know so if you sit there and demonize certain foods or you know a lot of diet talk like kids can pick up on that and I say this and you know like that was never that was never in my family my family didn't have any of that disorder or diet Hawk yet I still have an eating disorder so at some point for parents I think it's also that you know it's it's not always on you you know it's it's not your fault as well and I think as an athlete like in in the athletic context it's very easy to hide your disorder yeah you know under the mask of like training and performance and I think that there's you know there's a lot of people you know amateur athletes and endurance sports and other sports that are actively in the throes of this and you know it's just not evident it's it's harder to spot it's harder to spot because you can frame it in terms of like well I'm but I'm doing it for performance I'm imagining right yeah just a female absolutely and I think it's even it's even tougher for men because I think it's not as I don't say socially acceptable to have any of you sort of but if there is like you know what they're not as many men speak out about it it's a little bit of there's a weird like kind of like tinge of taboo around yeah yeah and there are there are some Mario fairly as like spoken out about his and whatnot um but I think that you know and in in the athletic world yeah it's it's absolutely difficult and what's unfortunate is that some of the times that I think that I have actually been struggling the worse have been the times where I have looked the most health like the most quote unquote normal outwardly and that there are many people in normal size or larger size bodies who are really really struggling but because they don't have the physical manifestation of it it's harder to pick up well no one would identify it right and luckily the you know the even sort of treatment model and everybody in the industry is finally started to realize that you can have any disorder of an any size body so that's been very important so I think in terms of picking up it's picking up you know signs it's it's mainly about behaviors because body size is not it's not gonna indicate anything yeah the social what you're all to I think the social withdraw yeah in any time and I think really you know avoiding mealtimes keeping that kind of stuff is is a is a big red flag yeah all right well let's let's land this plane right and final question which is is there anything that like you want to say to like is there anything that you feel like is misunderstood about you and this story that you want to like make clear like I feel like it's been completely embraced but I'm not you so I just want to make sure that you have the opportunity to like really speak your truth and not be misunderstood I am aware that there are folks out there who believe that like I should not be engaging in sport and also be in recovery and I understand I think that that's can be a completely valid concern it is also something that I've worked through a lot like with my with my treatment team and everyone's relationship with movement is entirely different and so for some people it shouldn't be a part of the recovery for others people it can be and I continually it's part of mine now but you know I continually every single day constantly question that and very very always curious and like and as we've talked as you talked about and that you know my trading one compulsion for another but I think the key is just to be very curious about your intentions and your motivations behind things and you know it's I'm always a work in progress as we all are he says otherwise don't trust them I mean I'm just like I don't I don't have anything figured out I'm just stumbling around like putting the pieces together and how your parents doing very good I think about their I I love my parents they're so fantastic and they've just they've been kind of those like silent supporters that that will be there for me and I think that they're they're really they're excited to see me not so much I mean yes like you know be in recovery for that you know sort of but just to be more like living person every scene life that's what that's the way I kind of look at this whole thing from 10,000 feet like you're on this journey to becoming a fully integrated actualized you know authentic human being and you had to take these disparate you know puzzle pieces and find a way to put them together so like you're assembling yourself in a new way and I think the more you create that alignment and that consistency in all these various areas and you know writing this blog post and being here today are a big part of that it's gonna just it's gonna lead to something like amazing and beautiful because the pout there's so powerful to be in that place of truth and honesty or you're not shying away or feeling shame or feeling like you know you have to like couch your words because you don't want to say this or that like now you can just be who you are and stand in that and what people in the eye and that's just like a it's it's like a very powerful place to be so I think whatever's coming next for you I'm super excited to see what that is thank you I am excited as well you know I think I'm hopeful I'm hopeful cool all right well I think it was courageous of you to come here today and share all that so I acknowledge you for that and I thank you for that and I think it's gonna be helpful to a lot of people so I appreciate it all right and if you want to connect with Amelia Amelia Boone Racing calm Millie Boone on all the social platforms separate Instagram oh hey are viewing AR Boone 11 what happened there somebody take your name no um I was very late to the Instagram game and I also didn't expect that I mean sorry I'm should give it to you I tried a million beer in Silicon Valley you can't get that sorted out I tried to get a million com2 and that person didn't know it's that person Wow he keeps it for his granddaughter or something like that I'm serious I've tried to hunt him down and pay him for it alright well come back and talk to me again peace food [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 89,770

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, Amelia Boone, obstacle course racing, Spartan Race, Tough Mudder, The Queen of Pain, red-s, amelia boone eating disorder, eating disorder podcast, relative energy deficiency in sport, barkley marathons, how to treat eating disorder, recovering from eating disorder, anorexia podcast

Id: D1yv6xK82Y0

Length: 124min 46sec (7486 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019