Every hit I've chased was doing a job. It wasn't really about the food, or the miles. It was about how I felt, and how badly I wanted to feel something else.
For me, underneath was years of low self-esteem. Bullying. Snide remarks that stayed long after they were said. None of it happened all at once. It was a slow drain, until I'd shut myself away from the world.
The hit was the quickest way I knew to turn those feelings down. It worked, for a few minutes. Then the feelings came back, usually with shame on top. So I needed another hit. That's the loop.
Feeling, hit, relief, shame, feeling. Round and round.
What broke it for me wasn't more willpower. It was honesty. Sitting down and taking a proper inventory. Not of what I ate or how far I ran, but of what was going on inside. The resentments I was carrying. The fears. The stories I told myself about who I was and what I deserved.
Writing it down mattered. Journaling made it real. And saying it out loud to another person mattered even more.
Shame grows in the dark. Once it's spoken, it gets smaller.
Over ten years ago, when I wrote a programme for change, I shared my story once, in a crowded room. There's something so powerful about an adult being vulnerable. It connected. Honesty with yourself and with others, sometimes total strangers, is always powerful.
I also had to learn to feel my feelings instead of eating them, or starving them, or running them off. That sounds simple. It was the hardest thing I've done. Listening to my heart, my mind and my gut. That gut feeling had been trying to tell me things for years.
You can't change what you won't look at. But once you look, the hit loses some of its grip.