Latest / Making Muscle Memories / "My 40-Year Journey: From Anorexia to Biomechanics" | Making Muscle Memories with Lauren Eirk

Transcript

"My 40-Year Journey: From Anorexia to Biomechanics" | Making Muscle Memories with Lauren Eirk · Making Muscle Memories

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: After 40 years of work in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength isn't just built through exercise, but through experience.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: We are all building muscle memories.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: One rep, one story, and one day at a time.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Making Muscle Memories Podcast.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Lauren Eric and I will be your host.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, I want to talk with you about how my greatest struggles led me to the work that I feel called to do today.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, before I tell you my story, I want to start this episode by revisiting one of the most pivotal moments of my life.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was 15 years old and my mother and I had gone shopping.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: We went shopping because I was in a Catholic grade school and I needed new uniforms.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: My mother was in the store looking for a different size for me, and I was in the dressing room.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: When she pulled the curtain back to give me my sizes, she, for the first time in a long time, was able to see my back and the top of my pelvis.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now she and my dad apparently had just watched an episode about the concentration camps on National Geographics a week ago, and she tells me that that is exactly how I looked.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: She was horrified.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine as a mother what that would feel like to notice that your daughter looked this way.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what she saw that came crashing into her world all at one moment, which she didn't realize, was something that I was struggling with for years.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I was just covering myself up with a lot of clothes so that nobody knew about it.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to tell you about why this happened by beginning with my childhood.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a little girl, and I can remember being as young as five or six years old, I always felt fat.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: My best friend up the street was one of these skinny girls, and I was not a skinny girl.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I can remember there was a time that we were playing on my driveway, and she was sitting next to me.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: She had these really skinny legs, and I did not.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was a meteor kid.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I looked at her, I didn't understand why I looked so different from her.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I can remember telling her that I really wanted to cut off half my legs so that I'd look better, which is so ridiculous, right?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: But that's how I felt.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: When I was growing up, I felt kletzy.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I felt ugly, I didn't feel popular, I was not picked for all the team sports, and I just always felt somewhat awkward.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: When I became a teenager, of course, every teenager starts noticing their body a lot more, but I can remember there was a moment in my kitchen when I'd come home from school and I was just mindlessly eating cookies out of the cookie jar.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was just hungry.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And my mother, who by the way, let me just say it's not my mother's fault, but this is just what happened, she said to me, Lauren, you better watch how many cookies you're eating.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of calories in those, and you could start putting on weight.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember looking at them and I went, putting on weight?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: It just never occurred to me that I could put on weight eating cookies.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I can remember taking the cookie and mindfully putting the cookie back in the cookie jar, thinking, I'm not gonna do that anymore.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this began me restricting my calories.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as far as exercise goes, and you're gonna hear me talk about this on other episodes, I was born with my hips uh disformed, they were sort of internally rotated, and I was put in ballet very young age, like six years old.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd been doing ballet for many, many, many years.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was not a stranger to exercise.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I liked to swim, I played basketball, I played tennis, and my mother was also someone who exercised.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: I can remember her taking us to exercise classes and leaving us there, jazz or size, whatever.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so exercise and eating, uh restricted eating, became sort of the cornerstone of my life.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: My mother had a record that we played on the record player was the Carol Henson's workout as well as the Jane Fonda workout.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I started doing these after school.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really know why this happened, but it just did.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I saw my mom do it and so I started picking it up.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what happened was I started getting compliments.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: My relatives started complimenting me, the kids at school, my parents.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, you're looking really good.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for me, that was the first time that I actually felt important.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: I felt pretty, I felt noticed.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so what happened?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: I became addicted.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: After school, I would lock myself in my bedroom and I would exercise for hours.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: When the family would sit down to a meal, I would push the food around on my plate, I would spit food out in my napkin, I would go to the bathroom and spit food out, and I started losing lots of weight.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: As I was losing more weight, I didn't want anybody to know any of it.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Matter of fact, if anyone's ever had an eating disorder, they're very solitary.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: You just do it by yourself for yourself.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so my parents didn't know anything about what this was happening to me, but it was absolutely taking over my life, and I did not know how to stop it.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was just like the more that I did it, the more that I wanted to do it, and the more that I couldn't stop.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, this day, when I fast forward to when my mother saw me in the dressing room, this day was very pivotal because this is when my family became very aware of what was happening, and I they knew that I needed help.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Immediately my mom came home from that store and called my dad, and they contacted a physician.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: They told them what was going on, and I was put into a hospital where I had a ton of tests being run because they had to figure out why this is happening.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: They thought that maybe there was something wrong with my pituitary gland, my growth hormones, something like that.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I remember having so many uh syringes from from blood being taken from my body.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I just had like tape all over my arms.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what they found was I was doing it to myself.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: There was nothing wrong with me.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: This was voluntary starvation.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I was put into intensive therapy.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought I was home-free because I didn't have to stay at the hospital.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But this particular therapist was, I looked back and what did he know?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: There was nothing in Louisville that really dealt with this problem.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knew what anorexia and nervosa was at that time.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: So this therapist, his way of dealing with it was to threaten me with if I didn't gain X number of pounds each time I saw him, it was a weekly appointment.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was bi-weekly, but we weighed in every week.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if I didn't gain the weight, I would be put into a hospital with a feeding tube, which, you know, looking back on that, that was like the worst thing he could have ever done.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you don't deal with an addiction, whether you're overweight, underweight, alcoholic, whatever, it's not the it's not the addiction so much as it is there's a problem that caused the addiction that you have to find.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: But that was really not the issue because I was dying basically.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was getting so thin, they wanted me to be healthy.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I would do, and I'm not proud of this, but I would drink lots of water before my appointments.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: I would put ankle weights on my thighs, I would load up my pockets, and I would weigh myself to make sure that I had gained the weight that I needed.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I kept this from everyone for a long time.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was really sneaky.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was no different than a druggy going behind a building and trying to get a hit.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I am telling you this because I hope this helps somebody else that's struggling right now.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um I am pretty successful at this point in my life, but at one point, I was pretty much a mess.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: So what happened was eventually I was found out.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: They found out that I was not telling the truth, and now I was cooked.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was put in a situation where I lost all that control that I thought that I had, and I started to become controlled.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: My parents told me to pack a bag, and this is what the doctor told them, and I was taken to a hospital.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, at the time, I there was nothing in Louisville to take me.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: There was no place.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: We now have something called the women's pavilion where women like myself could have been treated, but then I was like the first documented case.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, that's a badge of honor.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so they took me to a mental hospital, and I can remember walking in, and there was a young teenager in restraints with schizophrenia, talking in multiple voices.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: So here I am, this young girl with straight A's in a middle-class family with everything she could have ever wanted.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I'm in, I'm now sitting in there in a mental institution with kids that had been drug addicts, kids that had escaped from foster care, people that had some real serious problem.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: And here I was, the the girl that just wasn't good enough, right?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't feel good enough.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so what the doctors advised is that my parents leave me there, and that's exactly what happened to me.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here I was at age almost 16.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was basically put into a situation where I had to stay in a room.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: They took my shoelaces, they took a lot of the things that I that I packed because I wasn't allowed to have those things, and I had to earn privileges to even get out into the hallway.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was given intensive therapy, both one-on-one as well as group therapy.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine these other kids, they had no idea why in the world that I had these problems.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: I can remember them putting a hospital gown on me, and I would be paraded in front of all these kids every morning to become weighed, and I got down to 85 pounds.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm 135 right now.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: So you can imagine I'm I was very thin.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was given supplements, I had a dietitian, I was told that I had to eat X number of calories, I was given someone to help me stop and start exercising.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: I went through a huge withdrawal from exercise.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was throwing up, I was having body aches and shakes and everything else.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the worst thing was here I was a teenager and I couldn't even talk to my parents.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to grow up really fast.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I, if I didn't do the work, I wasn't ever gonna leave.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can imagine, I think that was probably one of the biggest traumas of my entire life.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was such a mess, and my people told me that my parents wouldn't tell people where I was.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: They just told me that I'd gone away.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that really shaped my life.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I didn't have the normal childhood that a lot of people have.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't get drunk and go to parties and do all those things.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was dealing with serious, serious problems.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: I stayed in that mental institution for a number of months and eventually, through a lot of hard work and a lot of failures, eventually I learned into the transition of going into inpatient, outpatient.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now I changed schools.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: I went from an all-girl Catholic grade school, excuse me, high school, to a public high school where this was sort of, I would say, more the upper class of Louisville, Kentucky went, but there were girls and boys, they all had really nice clothes, really nice uh cars, and their parents were pretty well off.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And here I was being transported from a hospital into school with no friends and no skills, no, no, no social skills because I had just been in my addiction.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, I was already starting to have joint pain.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I had to go through quite a bit at that age, and eventually I became to where I was completely discharged from the hospital and I was fully in high school.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I did end up making some friends, but my body, it was unraveling.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was a teenager and I was already having knee problems, foot problems, and shoulder problems.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: I had a horrible car accident when I was in a senior in high school, probably because I didn't didn't have any business driving.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I will talk with you more about that with other episodes.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: But needless to say, the injuries that I was having because of the voluntary abuse that I put against my own body was horrendous.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not to mention my dental care.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've had lots and lots of implants and whatnot, as well as cavities, and I've had to go through quite a bit to even get my teeth the way that they are today, which I'm very proud of how they look now.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a lot for a young kid to have to go through.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now there was another transition when I went into college, and because I was going through another, going from high school to college, I went through another bout of anorexia.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we guess what my doctors said to me?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: They said to me, don't go into exercise for work ever.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Don't ever go into the health and fitness field, and don't go into the nutrition field.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Don't ever go into the food and beverage field.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So guess what I did in college?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: I taught fitness classes and I weighted tables.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: In my opinion, I believe that God told me before I got here, you are going to teach people how to be comfortable in their bodies because I was put in a really awkward situation and I lived it my whole life.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when I finally got to the point where I had to have my first knee surgery, I was teaching up to 30 classes a week, many of them step aerobics, and of course, this fed my addiction.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: But when I started having these injuries, and which by the way, I was also presenting at the time nationally, I was going around and teaching other fitness instructors about things like stability ball training and yoga.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: I had my first knee injury, and this was a surgery, and I realized I'm a mess.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what I'm doing.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I was in master control.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: I had read books from cover to cover about injuries.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: I had gone to workshops, I had been in the fitness field, I had been being a personal trainer, I was in group fitness, and my body was literally falling apart.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is when I put a stop to everything that I was doing and I started really studying.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was still teaching classes, but I quit presenting for a while and I started going out and studying biomechanics.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: I met one of my mentors, Greg Roskoff.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: I started studying muscle activation techniques and I learned how muscles work.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: I learned how my body worked.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: I learned how to accept my body through understanding the laws of science.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I do believe that had I had any other childhood, any other way of growing up, I would have never been interested in the field that I was interested in.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I do disagree with what the doctors told me about never going into exercise.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: I am so thankful to have suffered through so much of anorexia and bulimia, because it led me to where I am today.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to say for anyone that is listening to this podcast, and certainly I know this is a very personal story, if you're dealing with an addiction of any kind, whether that being overeating, under eating, drugs, alcohol, these are just symptoms of something else going on inside of your body.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And many times it's a lack of self-esteem and a lack of love for yourself.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, getting a life and learning how to love myself came through studying science.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: When I learned that everyone's hips aren't the same, I realized why I couldn't get into certain yoga poses.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: When I realized that not everybody has the same athletic abilities because of their genetics and their neurological capabilities, it gave me permission to be who I am.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And also, when I became to realize how important nutrition is and proper exercise is to the health of our muscles and our bones, man, it changed everything about how I work.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And now here I am, a business owner with an app, Fitness Integrated Science on Demand, with this podcast, having trained thousands of instructors, having written programs, having so many certifications, and work with what I consider some of the greatest minds of the fitness world that I we have today.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: I can definitely tell you that I am ready to launch this podcast.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: I want to help you to age more gracefully.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want to help you to avoid some of the egregious mistakes that I have made in my own body.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to tell you right now, you're okay.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: The body you've been given, the abilities that you've been given are perfect.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to figure out the right plan to fit your body instead of trying to force yourself to fit into some plan.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I see all the time people coming to me when they were, they did maybe not as severe as what I did, but they did a lot of stuff when they were younger, and now they don't understand why they are there, why their body is sort of uh falling down for them when they're getting older.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: I get it.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: I get it in so many ways I can't even tell you.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And there are real reasons why your body is gonna change as you age, and a lot of it comes from how you treated yourself growing up.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: I am here to tell you that there is a way out, and I'm gonna share with you anything that I can to try to give you permission to age and also help you to learn to love yourself a little bit more.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope that you enjoyed hearing about my story.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is a very personal episode.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comment section.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And also, if there's anybody that you know that I can help, please forward them this episode.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would love it if you could subscribe to this.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be giving you lots more information about aging, muscles, joints, and biomechanics.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for watching.