Heather

My name is Heather, I am one of the Shrink mentors and I am also a personal trainer at Pure Wellness in Galgorm.  I am passionate about what I do and love it with all my heart but if you had have known me in 2011 you would have said this should be the last place I should be ….

Rewind to 1990 and you will find me as a 9 year old happy-go-lucky girl, always cheerful surrounded by a loving family.  Despite my outward cheer a sadness lived inside me; my friends were intelligent, sporty, popular and pretty, I was fat, not so bright, not good at sport and instead of being popular I was the butt of many jokes adults and children alike. Rejection and shame lived large inside, I desperately wanted to be liked by my peers, but I felt that as I was I just wasn’t good enough. So, in my 9 year old head I thought that as I couldn’t do anything about my academic performance nor sporting prowess I would loose some weight so I went on my first diet.  Well, I was right!  The weight came off, the teasing stopped, I was now likable and had finally achieved something but alongside the sense of achievement, fear was rising ‘If I go back to eating again I will get fat again and they will not like me anymore because that’s the only reason why they like me’.  From that moment my relationship with food changed – I feared food, it was now my enemy and my restriction wasn’t driven by a desire to loose weight but driven by fear, fear of rejection. It was this shift that turned my diet into a disorder.

For the next 21 years Anorexia ruled my life.  From the moment I woke till my head hit the pillow, my mind was filled with calories, fat, exercise.  All that mattered to me was how little I could eat or how much I could exercise without anyone knowing.  In my early teens another dimension was added, that of study.  I thought that if I was academically brilliant I would be acceptable so I stopped socializing, stopped everything I loved doing and immersed myself in study.  I felt guilty if I took a break or went out as I ‘should have been studying’ but one good thing about it was that study was an escape from the anorexic voices and the possibility of rejection. Unfortunately things didn’t turn out the way I had hoped.  Regardless of how well I done in my exams it was never good enough and this served as yet another reason to punish myself though further restriction and exercise and reinforced the belief that I was a complete and utter failure and a reject.

It was though these years that hospital became my home and anorexia became my identity.  It controlled every area of my life; what I wore, where I went, what I did, what mood I was in, my health, relationships with family and friends, it was my constant companion and the only one whom I felt I could trust.

However, there was something inside me which longed for a life outside of this. As time went on this hope drifted farther and farther away but in 2011, at the age of 29 I applied to go to Mercy Ministries, a Christian residential home for girls with issues such as mine. Although I was raised in a Christian home and saved since I was 13, I had never actually grasped the extent of Jesus love for me and the fact that I was accepted just as I was.  All this while I had been striving through meticulous control to make people like me, make myself a success, make myself acceptable when all the while I was already loved, there was already a plan and purpose for my life and I was already accepted, just as I was.

On the 18th September 2011, after 3 months of teaching, love and support, I came to the end of myself and I fully surrendered.  I quit all the striving and gave it all over to God.  In that moment HE done something that 13 general hospital admissions, 5 psychiatric admission, 2 admissions into specialist eating disorder units, years of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Cognitive Analytical Therapy, Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, 2 clinical psychologists and 6 Psychiatrists over a 23 year period couldn’t or could ever do.  He took away all my shame, guilt, anger, resentment and insecurities and for once I FELT peace, confidence, strength, joy, security, forgiveness and love ?

But God isn’t just interested in our spiritual and emotional healing but our physical as well.  I had known Estelle for a couple of years from going to Pure Wellness where she was the manager.  I had started volunteering in the gym so we had gotten to know each other well, my weight wasn’t great and she had been helping me walk through it.  Shrink was just about 6 months old and from being in the gym I had seen the fantastic transformations of those who had already done it.  One day she looked at me and said you need to do Shrink – you need to learn how to eat again. You see, although I had been set free from the ‘voices’, I still wasn’t free from the 23 year old eating disorder habits around food which were deeply ingrained.  I knew these needed to change as did my weight, so I surrendered to God’s own eating plan and with the help and support of Estelle, my friends and my family I embraced the peanut butter, nuts, avocado and full fat everything and do you know what, I didn’t find myself fat instead I found myself free.  I went from strength and in 2014 I became a Shrink mentor and in 2015 I started full time as a gym instructor in Pure Wellness.

I was told by experts in the field that because things were so deeply ingrained in me it would be a case of condition management though behavior modification.  But you see God isn’t into behavior modification but transformation.  If I had chosen to accept what the world said about me, I would still be hovering around 7 stone, living a life of meticulous control, unable to hold down a job and still have a bed reserved for me in hospital just in case. But I have chosen to believe what God has said about me and I am now a healthy weight, live in freedom and jump out of my bed each morning to go to my work.

I feel so passionately about what I do is because I know what it is like to live under constant attack from something inside telling you how worthless you are, how ugly you are and how you have no future and no hope.  I know what it is like to live under a crushing sense of fear, shame, guilt, condemnation and loneliness.  I know what it is like to be consumed with thoughts and fears about food, weight, calories and exercise to the point where your world and everything in it revolves around it.

For too many people this is their reality and the majority believe that this is how it will be for the rest of their lives.  They have given up hope of change and freedom but that is a lie. I am no longer tormented by those thoughts, crushed by those feelings and my life is no longer consumed by those fears.  I want people to know and believe that this can be their reality too. All those lies I used to believe are just as a much a lie to you who are reading this as they were to me.  I long to see others set free from their physical, emotional and spiritual chains and I thank God every day for the people I see who are doing Shrink who are starting to see themselves for who they really are and not the lies they were believing about themselves. I know with all my heart that there is hope for everyone, all you have to do is start to believe it.