I Fasted For Eight Years. I've Done My Time.

Paige Kelly (0:00)

And I would imagine, I feel like most people with substance disorders or eating disorders are highly sensitive. They are highly aware. We have massive hearts, and that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to live in our bodies, like feeling everything that we feel.

So I would say, yeah, do a body scan, see if there's something tiny that you can appreciate, even if it's like a correlation to it, and then put yourself in an environment that you enjoy and see if there's anything outside of yourself you can notice.

Tim Westbrook (0:28)

Hi, this is Tim Westbrook. Welcome to I Love Being Sober. We talk about life and recovery, mental health, biohacking, alternative therapies, and everything related to living a kick-ass sober life. So let's dig in.

My guest today is Paige Kelly. She is a registered nurse who spent years in emergency rooms and what she does now looks nothing like one. Here's what you should know. She was 13 years old the first time she went into treatment. The facility was built mostly around drugs and alcohol. What she was living with was an eating disorder, and she was in it for about eight years.

She came out the other side, rebuilt her health, and became an endurance athlete. She did Ironman, and she was a 10-03?

Paige Kelly (1:16)

10-07.

Tim Westbrook (1:16)

10-07, which is fast. And she had to learn a second time how to live in a nervous system that had been through too much. Here is why she is in this room. Her work is not about fixing people. That is the whole point. She will tell you your mind and your body are not the enemy. They are information when somebody teaches you how to read them. Paige, welcome to the show.

Yes. Warm welcome to Paige Kelly. Thanks for being here. And I bring up the Ironman thing. The first time I met Paige was at an event a few months ago, and she has the Ironman tattoo. And I was like, Oh, did an Ironman. And she turned around and looked at me and she said, 1007

Which is really fast, just so you know. So yeah, I'm glad you're here. And someone has an Ironman tattoo. Just so you guys know, I mean, anybody that does Ironman, it's you got to be a little crazy, a little excessive, and you got to have some issues. And my friend Larry says you're either running to or you're running from. Would you agree with that?

Paige Kelly (2:18)

To an agree, but my skill set didn't really take off until I learned how to rest. And so it was really useful in realizing like, oh, once I can go full steam, but once I learned how to rest, then I made it to the top. Right. Right.

Tim Westbrook (2:30)

Right. Okay. So you were 13 the first time you went into treatment and the facility was built mostly around substance abuse. What was that like for a kid walking in with something a program was not really designed for?

Paige Kelly (2:41)

Yeah, it was a wild experience. I went from private school, eighth grade that summer and summer seventh grade. I decided like, I remember the day I chose the anorexia is my way out of the world. I had a subjective mindset for long enough, and that was my lens for interpreting the world. And I remember the day that I was like, the world will be a better place without me and like, this is how I'm leaving. And so I was on death march.

So first 30 days, I lost like 25 pounds, was out of town with my dad's family, came back and my mom was like, what happened?

Tim Westbrook (3:09)

Like what happened?

Paige Kelly (3:10)

Like I went from being this size like 30 pounds later.

And so they did the best they could. They didn't know what to do. So I was put in this treatment center that was three hours from home. And yeah, they had like four adolescent beds and the rest were addicts withdrawing. And it was a wild experience. Like there was no like focus on the mindset. It was like for the eating disorder part, it was eat your way out. Like once you weigh this much, you can talk to your parents. Once you weigh this much, you can go outside of the building. Once you weigh this much, you can... And so it was like literally just focused on the fear of gaining weight, which I knew was not my reason. It was like I have an alter... I have a deeper motive. I have something more intense going on, and this is the vehicle that I chose to deal with it. So it was interesting.