Hey! I'm Gina.

Born in California and raised in Colorado, I spent a lot of time outdoors playing with friends, catching bugs, and playing soccer. I was a happy kid and loved to have fun. However, from an early age I remember being deeply unhappy with how I looked. I didn’t think my tummy looked like all the other girls’ tummies – I felt something was deeply wrong with me. My self esteem and self worth was very low and, already influenced by diet culture at a young age, I developed a pattern of food restriction and disordered eating that would continue through grade school, middle school, and high school.

My freshman year of college, after experiencing a horrible soccer injury that left me in physical therapy for over a year, I felt out of shape, weak, and quite frankly, worthless. I was looking for ways to “get my edge back” and get back to playing.

With my years of pre-established restriction and disordered eating, I looked to dieting and exercise as my solution. My well-meant efforts and seemingly innocent goal of getting back on the soccer field would quickly turn into a full-blown eating disorder. I began looking for new ways to restrict my food intake further and exercise more in order to lose weight. I became obsessed with the scale, “goal weights”, and my “ideal body”; based on the “perfect” women I would see on social media.

Counting calories and “clean” and “pure” eating took over every waking second of my life. I would hit one goal weight but it was never good enough; there was always a lower number to be achieved. There was always another food that needed to be demonized and cut out of my diet. I was fit, but never fit enough. My heavy restriction and “clean eating” would inevitably result in binging and shame. Which would then fuel still more restriction and obsession over what I ate and how much I exercised, in order to “make-up” for the binging. It was what felt like a never-ending cycle.

And so for the next 8 years I was in a living hell, struggling with anorexia, orthorexia and exercise addiction.

After 8 years of shame, frustration, sadness, and sickness, I finally had a wake-up call. Although I was still very much in denial of my eating disorder, one day I had a very jarring thought occur to me:

Am I going to spend the rest of my life like this?

Am I going to spend the rest of my life constantly consumed by thoughts of food obsession, hating my body, never-ending exercise, and feeling like I can never just be happy with who I am or how I look? Is this what my life is always going to be like?

What scared me more than these questions was the answer – Yes.

Then I thought about my hopes and dreams. All the amazing adventures I wanted to go on, the things I wanted to see and do, people I wanted to meet. And I asked myself:

Will I ever really be able to do any of these things?

I knew the answer already – No.

Not if I didn’t get help for this sickness that had taken over every aspect of my life.

So even though I was still in deep denial over whether or not I actually had an eating disorder, I knew something was very wrong, and I knew I needed help. It was at that point that I started looking for help and assembling my care team.

Although it was not easy and was full of highs and very low lows, I am grateful every single day for making the decision to get help and choose eating disorder recovery. It saved my life and gave me the opportunity for a new one. A new life filled with pure joy, genuine connection, and freedom – Food freedom, exercise freedom, and the freedom of living my life knowing that I am so much more than simply an athlete, my body, or my Eating Disorder. I am me, and I am free.