Disciplined or Disordered?

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

My, oh my isn’t that a fine line?

Let’s start with an easy example. When it comes to correcting misbehavior (say, of a child), there’s a big difference between punishment and discipline. While punishment focuses on making a child suffer for breaking the rules, discipline is about teaching him how to make a better choice next time. When punishment is self-inflicted though, we turn the corner into self-destruction, disordered behavior, or even abuse.

When recovering from my eating disorder, there was a lot of tension between being disciplined and engaging in disordered behavior. Some of the best athletes of all time have undoubtedly toed this line, so I figured, what’s the problem? Where is the line drawn and when has it gone too far? If you find yourself toeing this line, only you know the answer. For me, discipline became disordered when I wasn’t fueling my body for it’s workload, when I cared more about avoiding weight gain than about being healthy, when I sacrificed performance to uphold the self-inflicted rules of my eating disorder, and when my disciplined nature resulted in profound unhappiness and severe health issues. But before it got really bad, it was only sort of bad. The slow spiral is hard to stop once it’s started.