I Returned to the Gym After Bulimia. The PT Said I Wasn't 'Excellent'

"You're at 27 percent right now. That's 'Good.'"

He pauses. "But don't you want to get here?" He slides his finger down the chart to where it says: "Excellent".

"Hah," I scoff. He lets out a nervous laugh.

"I can help you get here," he tries to offer, tapping his finger on an image of a slim body with a neon green halo around it. Not like the "Good" body which only has a yellow halo. Or worse, the "At Risk" one: Red halo.

I look away from the laminated chart, away from the row of desks where other personal trainers are having similar conversations with potential clients.

I lock eyes with a palm tree outside, a whole row of them with fronds draped like curtains framing lifted pick-ups and lowered sports cars, the parking lot like wings we pass through to enter and exit this stage.

I wonder how to say it without sounding too dismissive or condescending. Poor kid, just trying to make his money. Oblivious to my woes. Ignorant of the fact that he wasn't even born when I had first started experimenting with how to get my food back up junior year.

How to go long stretches without eating, but without passing out. How to cut grapes in half, count them into ziplocks, stuff them into pockets with half a granola bar in case I started feeling hungry. But not a whole granola bar—too scary.

I couldn't trust myself not to devour the whole thing, especially when my stomach would growl and I would start to get all lightheaded and dizzy in class.

Then I would eat too fast. Then I would "go over calories". Then I would scramble to find a bathroom. That was back when I had tried my hardest to be "excellent".

I wanted to look excellent in my prom dress. Excellent in low-rise jeans. Excellent in the locker-lined hallways. Excellent in the lunchroom. Excellent in bed with my boyfriend. The most excellent. So excellent that nothing bad would ever happen to me.

That no one would ever cheat on me and no popular girl would ever make fun of me and no coach would ever wonder if my puberty weight was to blame for slower times on the track or in the pool.

However, the more I tried to control it all, the more it all spun out of control. By senior year of high school, my eating disorder had become an all-consuming nightmare.

My parents finally took me to the doctor—probably figuring the worst was over and that it was all downhill from there, but I was just stepping onto the trailhead of a long, uphill battle toward recovery from the bulimia that would maintain its grip on me for another four years.

The doctor-prescribed antidepressants helped at first, but the weight gain that resulted most certainly did not. That's about the time I went off to college and discovered binge drinking—a decent way to block out the humiliation and helplessness I felt inhabiting un-excellent skin.

It took years of being away from campuses and classrooms and gyms full of peers to break out of that mentality—to stop living in fear, in numbers, and in comparison. To stop imposing so many wants upon my body and to start listening to what it wanted from me. What nourishment it wanted, what rest it wanted, what movement it wanted.

"What if I don't want to 'get here'?" I lower my gaze back to the chart.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, what if I'm good with "Good"?"

He scrunches his eyebrows. "Well, then, why are you here?"

I scrunch mine. "They made me sit down with you when I signed up for a membership."

"No. I mean, why did you come to the gym? What are your fitness goals?"

I look away again, this time at the pool area. Do I tell him that was the whole reason I signed up for this membership? That I don't—and can't afford—to care about max reps or pulse rates or calories burned?

That, at 40 years old, I finally saw a pool and did not feel triggered or afraid of a relapse? That I was finally happy, and ready, to come back?

To tug the suit up my legs and slip my arms through the shoulder straps; to wrangle the silicone cap onto my head and stuff the loose ends of my hair up into it; to press my goggles tight to my eyes like I used to do before my races.

Focused. Powerful. Immune to my own thoughts.

Do I tell him how good it feels to get into a pool without an agenda? Without a time to chase? Just the feeling of your palm pulling the water and pushing it behind you, gliding down the lane with no desire other than to feel you on the water and the water on you. To feel content in your healing.

Do you think he would understand? A personal trainer chasing muscle definition with a stopwatch and a pen? None of this is on his clipboard. None of this is on his chart.

"This is more of a wellness thing for me," I decide to spare him the details.

His eyebrows raise this time.

"Maintenance. Routine," I explain. "Just need to get out of the house, post-COVID, ya know?"

"Gotcha." he scribbles notes on the intake form.

"So how often do you want to meet then? Just once a week?"

"I thought I was just here for the complimentary session. No offense," I say.

"But how do you know how to structure a workout?" he insists, "You'll need help with that."

"Honey," I shake my head. "This isn't my first time in a gym."

A trainer at the next desk looks up at me. I feel the heat of both their stares. I am the kind of patron they probably complain about in the break room. The kind that doesn't fit the sales script. The kind that doesn't boost commissions.

"Alright," he sighs. "Let's go."

We walk over to a roped-off area with mats and kettlebells, jump ropes, and resistance bands. He guides me through a few sets of squats and burpees.

He checks his phone while my breath quickens. He watches girls in spandex shorts exiting the spin room. He wants to be anywhere but here, but I did not ask for this. I do not want to waste his time. Or mine. I am just trying to get through this 45 minutes so we can go our separate ways.

I'm just trying to get through this life in this body—the daughter of a father whose Irish genes seemed predisposed to diabetes and hypertension and a mother whose Italian famiglia was round and stout in that Campagna way.

I was born "at risk". Grew up just trying to stay on the good side of "at risk".

"20...21...22...."

He leans forward pressing his hands into my sneakers as he counts my sit-ups. I rise, think about how much time and money I've spent on therapists. My abdomen pinches. I lower back down, think about being 27 percent in a world that has always wanted me to be 21 percent.

How doctors told me it was all in my head, all in my power. In my power to tell myself that societal expectations shouldn't matter. In my power to ignore percentages and proportions and pictures in magazines. In my power to disappear the fear.

"23...24...25. All done."

I exhale it all. All of those years working to convince myself the chart does not matter only to end up in the musty corner of a gym with a guy trying to tell me how much it does.

Then again, he doesn't know that it is in his power. To kick up old dust. To shift weight upon old bruises. To rub salt-laced sweat into old wounds while he checks his watch and rolls his eyes.

"Thanks," I say, forcing a smile. He forces one back. "Good luck," he says, in that way luck can be good but does not have to be excellent.

On the way out of the locker room, I catch my reflection in the full-length mirror. There are still things about my body that I sometimes wish I could change, or hide, or scoot into different columns on charts; shrink into different bubbles and checkboxes.

But when I look at my face I remember how hard I fought for her and how long it took to find my way back to her, and I remember that he does not know her. That nobody else does. That nobody else can smile at her in this silent knowing.

That nobody else can look back at me as if to say: "Thank you, for being good to me."

Joan Barker is a writer based in southern Maine. She is currently writing a memoir about overcoming an eating disorder and finding her voice. Barker's previous work as a teacher in Afghanistan inspired her to write a series of op-eds when Kabul fell in 2021. Her work has appeared in Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, Military Times, and Stars and Stripes.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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