This is part two of my story. In part one, The Crazy Little Rainbow Girl, I wrote about growing up undiagnosed with AuDHD, how masking shaped my identity, and how understanding my neurodivergence finally helped me make sense of my Atypical Anorexia. This is what came next.
I want to start by saying something: at the time this was happening, I was unaware. It’s only in recovery, with the language I now have, that I’ve been able to look back and see how my eating disorder manipulated almost every part of my life. At the time, I genuinely thought I was just doing what I needed to do to get by.
This is the story of how the eating disorder didn’t disappear; it shapeshifted. And for a long time, exercise was exactly where it hid.
Age 16: The treadmill and the revision book
I never did sport as a child. I did PE, but always felt uncomfortable, bigger than the other children, lacking ability and never picked for the school teams. I didn’t know what movement for joy could feel like, because I’d never experienced it. When my eating disorder arrived, exercise arrived with it. Not as something I could enjoy, but as something I could use.
I’d jump on a treadmill or head out for a run, all alone, so there was no one to compare myself to. None of it felt good. But then it wasn’t meant to. It was purely a way for me to burn calories and achieve the one thing I felt I was good at: shrinking myself.
During my GCSEs, I remember taking a revision book to the gym and reading it on the treadmill. I obviously wasn’t taking any of it in, but I couldn’t allow myself five minutes away from revision.
I think about that girl now, and I feel so sad for her. She was living and breathing out of pure fear. Whether it was revising, losing weight, or muting herself, she was terrified of failing, and of people seeing her as lazy or stupid or not enough. Every action she made was fear-driven, as though if she stopped, something terrible would happen. That was her logic: keep going, keep doing, don’t stop.
And now, looking back, I know exactly why she didn’t want to stop, but we’ll come to that in a bit.
Age 18: The guise of “connection”
I finally did it. At 18, I got a boyfriend. I had shrunk myself enough to be loved by a boy and get the validation I needed. I thought this would be the icing on the cake, the thing I’d always dreamt of… the highest level of approval. But it wasn’t enough. Having a boyfriend was great, but now I needed to be good enough to keep him. I muted myself further, changed the way I dressed and did my makeup. I was a shell of myself, all to try and be the girl I thought I needed to be.
We started going to the gym, and I told myself it was to spend time together. And maybe part of it was. But looking back, I can see how the eating disorder was already shapeshifting, latching onto anything it could find to stay relevant.
That’s one of the most insidious things about it, and something I really want people to understand: the eating disorder didn’t stay still. It moved, adapted and grasped at every opportunity to keep going, because I didn’t yet understand what it was actually doing for me.
I didn’t know then that the reason I couldn’t let it go was because I couldn’t navigate my emotions without it. I couldn’t sit in discomfort. I didn’t have words for what I was feeling, so I just kept quiet and distracted myself with exercise. The eating disorder wasn’t a choice I was making. It was the only coping mechanism I had, and it was very good at disguising itself as something else entirely.
Age 21: “Hannah the powerlifter”
University brought powerlifting. And for a while, it felt like I’d finally found my people.
I joined the powerlifting society because it was the only sport where I felt truly comfortable, as I knew how to navigate a gym. I could find focus, improve measurably, and be recognised for something. I was known for being unusually strong for a 5ft 1 girl, for being able to push myself into places others couldn’t go. That identity felt like solid ground beneath my feet.
What I couldn’t see was that the eating disorder had just changed its costume.
The rigidity around food was still there: tracking my macros, restricting food groups, eating on the clock, rules that couldn’t be broken. I missed out on socials and shared meals with my flatmates. When I went home, my parents had to make sure they had certain foods in for me. I cut weight to compete in a specific weight category, cutting out food groups before a competition, lying in a hot bath to sweat, all the while believing I would only be successful if I hit a certain weight. This was all normalised, all in the name of sport. That cover gave the eating disorder somewhere new to hide, and it hid very well.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: my identity had transferred. I had gone from being Hannah with an eating disorder to being Hannah the powerlifter, the crazy strong girl (I still wore my rainbow socks to compete!), the one who, no matter what was thrown at her, just kept going. The idea of stopping was incomprehensible.
Exercise had taken over the job of the eating disorder, but I couldn’t see it. It was harder to spot than the eating disorder itself, because from the outside it looked like health and discipline. It was glorified by everyone in my community, and even by people outside it, who dreamt of having the same dedication as me.
But it was all-consuming, and I couldn’t go a day without it. If I missed a session, the guilt and shame were immediate and overwhelming. My thoughts would spiral. I felt like I was going to lose control, lose everything I had worked for, lose the respect I had come to depend on from others. Without exercise, who was I? I genuinely didn’t know.
Age 25: COVID arrives, and HIIT workouts consume
If there’s one thing I can say about myself, it’s that I’m adaptable. When lockdown happened, the gym closed. A lot of people, rightly so, took to the sofa and played video games or watched Netflix. Not Hannah.
Initially, I built a garden gym. I collected paint pots, logs, rucksacks filled with rocks, anything I could use to train outside. Over time, I realised it wasn’t enough. The voices in my head got louder, and I needed something more powerful to consume the noise.
So I moved to online HIIT workouts in the lounge. Sometimes I’d do them in the garden so my partner didn’t hear, thinking I was being secretive and getting away with it. All the while, I had no idea that he was upstairs, terrified at what he was seeing and with no idea how to help me.
One a day became two. The pressure I put on myself kept climbing, because the gap the gym had left was enormous, and I had nothing else to fill it. There was so much time, so much quiet, and very little external accountability. Cutting back, even by the smallest amount, felt catastrophic. I have never experienced an addiction, but if I had to put it into words, that’s how I’d describe this. I was completely addicted, and the withdrawal was more than I could bare.
Age 27: The world starts to open up
At 27, I started recovery for the fourth time. I found a therapist who, honestly, was the first person I ever spoke to who made me think, “wow, they get it.” I didn’t know it at the time, but I was using my eating disorder as an emotional regulator. She spoke about emotions and mentioned neurodiversity, and something began to shift.
The more I stepped into recovery, the more my world began to open back up. My relationship with my partner started to deepen again. I saw friends, I visited family, and the sparkly Hannah who had been muted started to show her face.
Coming from powerlifting, I didn’t want to let go of sport entirely. Despite the turbulent relationship, I genuinely loved the community and the space, and now that I was recovering, I wanted to fully immerse myself in it, rather than working out alone. I started CrossFit. I trained in a community. I wasn’t alone in a room anymore, trying to outrun my own nervous system. And weirdly, the comparison I used to feel started to fade.
I found a coach I could genuinely trust, someone who got to know me well enough to spot when things were becoming too much, and who would pull things back when I couldn’t do that for myself. I want to be honest: I couldn’t have done that alone at first. The self-awareness wasn’t there yet. She helped me build it, slowly, over time. Having someone in my corner who understood me and wouldn’t let me run myself into the ground was more significant than I can put into words.
And then I walked into a cheer class, which was something I never saw as part of my recovery. I am a terrible dancer. Everyone in class had been dancing since they were tiny, so I felt like a complete fool. But I also felt something I hadn’t expected: joy. Genuine, uncomplicated joy. The glitter, the music, the ridiculousness of learning something I had no natural talent for whatsoever. It used a completely different part of my brain. It connected me to myself in a way I hadn’t experienced through exercise before. I wasn’t comparing or criticising, I was just there, beaming my great big smile, and absolutely loving it.
I think that was the first time I understood what it could feel like to move for the joy of moving.
Age 29: Learning to sit still
Now I’ll be honest with you, this is very much where I am right now. Sitting still is very hard for me, but it’s important that I don’t let the eating disorder shapeshift into using my AuDHD as a new reason to keep busy. I know that I struggle to regulate my emotions, but that doesn’t mean I need to fill every moment with exercise, work, social commitments, and screens. In fact, I am now at a place in recovery where I feel I need and want to sit with it sometimes.
It’s uncomfortable, but that’s the point. Because the part of the journey I’m in now isn’t about finding a new way to avoid feeling, it’s about learning to stay with emotion instead of immediately moving away from it.
There’s a difference between movement that is genuinely mindful, where your attention is on your breath, your body, the enjoyment, and movement driven by a fixation on numbers, your reflection, and how clothing feels on your skin. I’m very much still learning this, but I have come to realise that I love to learn. I’m grateful for how self-aware I’ve become through this journey, and I’m hopeful I never have to stop learning.
What I have now that I didn’t have before: a range of things I genuinely enjoy. CrossFit, cycling, walking, yoga, dancing, hiking, a coach who knows me inside out, a community to show up for, and new skills to learn. My AuDHD brain feels fulfilled by novelty, variety, and connection in a way I wouldn’t have predicted. These are things my AuDHD brain loves, but the eating disorder had hijacked and narrowed them down to one rigid, relentless thing.
The moral of this rainbow girl’s story
Exercise is not inherently bad. I want to say that clearly, because I think it’s important.
But if you can’t take a rest day without your thoughts spiralling, if missing a session fills you with shame, if your self-worth has quietly become tied to what your body can do, it’s worth pausing and asking what the exercise is actually for.
The eating disorder shapeshifted on me for years, and for a long time, I genuinely didn’t see it. It’s only with the understanding I now have, of my AuDHD, my nervous system, and why I’ve always needed structure, control, and external validation, that I’ve been able to see it for what it was and, slowly and carefully, find something different.
Recovery for me wasn’t about stopping, it was about understanding. And that understanding didn’t come from pushing myself harder… it came from finally coming home to myself.
Hannah is part of the marketing team at Altum Health and has her own lived experience of an eating disorder. She is also the host of Full of Beans, an eating disorder awareness podcast. Listen on Spotify.
