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I’m a Personal Trainer With Millions of Followers and No One Knew I Was Struggling With Disordered Eating

Not even me. ByKelsey Wells

Kelsey Wells

The first thing I became self-conscious of was cellulite. The fact that I hardly had any didn’t matter. That’s the thing about body image or disordered eating struggles—it often has very little to do with what you look like and everything to do with the amount of mental space it takes up. 

That was how my body-related negative self-talk started, but intrusive thoughts about food and my body followed me for most of my adult life. From my college dorm days to my career as a fitness content creator and trainer, scrutinizing my appearance became my default. While the severity ebbed and flowed, the disordered ideas and habits often came back.

After speaking to a therapist and doing my own research, I’ve learned that I was struggling with various forms of disordered eating since freshman year of college. At times, that merged into an actual eating disorder as distorted ideas about my body and food consumed most of my waking thoughts. 

Whether you’re dealing with the same thing or know someone who is, hearing from others who’ve been there might help you feel more hopeful or less alone. With that in mind, here are some of the surprising truths I discovered along this journey and what they taught me about mental health, healing, and my relationship to my body. 

Diet culture is a bitch.

We aren’t born into this life hating our bodies or feeling like we’re not enough. Self-loathing is learned. Growing up, I felt free and confident in my body. I never thought about what I put in my mouth until I overheard some girls criticizing me before a high school dance. 

After that, I became hyper-aware of what I looked like and wanted to become a smaller version of myself. But it wasn’t until college that I acted on those thoughts. Freshman year, there were a ton of changes happening in my life—positive changes like my sister getting engaged, moving out on my own, starting college, and falling madly in love for the first time—but my body couldn’t tell the difference between good and bad changes. It just felt stressed.  

That stress impacted my appetite. I felt sick when I didn’t eat and even worse when I did. After months of this, I lost a significant amount of weight and my parents asked me to see a doctor. I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. That anxiety was what caused my stomach to produce extra acid and triggered severe irritable bowel syndrome. 

When I became smaller, people started commenting, which made me feel good. So, not long after getting a prescription for medicine that made my stomach feel better, I quit taking it. That was the first time I chose disordered eating over my health. 

Commentary on how I looked seriously influenced how I thought about my body, but I can’t completely blame my bullies or friends for the things they said. They were also victims of diet culture and a societal norm that made it OK to judge my body—and their own. We were all under the same influence of restriction. We thought it was normal to hate the way we looked and to be preoccupied with trying to change it.

At that point, I didn’t know these thoughts and obsessions with my body were symptoms of actual mental health issues—conditions that I didn’t realize I was likely dealing with until more than a decade later. They were also exacerbated by a culture that makes money when we hate ourselves. If I truly understood that, maybe I wouldn’t have gone so far down this path—or started down it in the first place. 

A need for control fueled my disordered eating.

While diet culture and bullying triggered me to fixate on my size, my disordered behaviors were also propelled by feeling out of control. 

As a kid, I experienced various forms of scrupulosity, or what the American Psychological Association describes as, “an obsession with moral or religious issues (e.g., a preoccupation that one may commit a sin and go to hell) that results in compulsive moral or religious observance and that is highly distressing.” It’s also associated with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), both of which can involve perfectionism. I was never diagnosed with OCD or scrupulosity as a kid, probably because in my Mormon church I was counseled that my struggles stemmed from Satan attempting to influence my mind. To fight back, I was encouraged to stay righteous and memorize more scriptures. 

My intense fears and rigid habits affected me to various degrees throughout my adolescence. But after graduating high school, I met my then-boyfriend (now husband) Ryan, and my mental health flourished. Unfortunately, when he left to serve a two-year mission in Mexico on behalf of the Mormon church, the stress and loneliness triggered those symptoms I hadn’t dealt with in years. 

This time, my scrupulosity reached a new high and intersected with my disordered eating. In addition to engaging in intense daily rituals and constant praying like I did when I was little, I tried to prove my worthiness to God by controlling what I ate. I believed that using discipline to control my eating kept Ryan safe and secured our eternal salvation. 

While that might sound like a super specific trigger for disordered eating, researchers agree that a need for control is one of many factors that can contribute to eating disorders.

Disordered eating thrives in isolation. 

As my scrupulosity ramped up and I attempted to control it with prayer and religious perfectionism, I became extremely isolated. Though I was living in a tiny space with six roommates, I never felt or spent more time alone than the two years Ryan was gone.

I spent the majority of my days afraid of evil or consumed by thoughts of becoming smaller. It was like living with a weight on my chest that threatened to bury me. I never reached out for mental health help because I genuinely didn’t think I needed it. If I was super depressed for days or had a panic attack, I turned to the church and asked for a blessing.

Meanwhile, my roommates put “motivational” quotes on the fridge and in the cabinets, using diet culture rhetoric to justify restrictive diets. So no one really seemed to notice that I was channeling my obsessive energy into dieting. And I didn’t reach out to my roommates, friends, or family for support either. Instead, I smiled. I served the church obsessively. 

Thankfully, when Ryan got back from his mission, my mission to please God felt complete. I didn’t feel the need for extreme restriction anymore. Six weeks after he came home, we were married in the temple. We spent so much time together. I felt supported, seen, and safe for the first time in years. 

Out of isolation (and away from people who saw my behavior as normal), my disordered eating and scrupulosity symptoms started to subside. I still compared my looks to others, used exercise to punish my body, and sometimes skipped meals when Ryan wasn’t around, but the rituals of perfectionism didn’t consume me like they used to.

Healing isn’t linear.

The three and a half years after I got married were the healthiest of my adult life up to that point, but when I got pregnant unexpectedly things changed. I was terrified of gaining weight, so I ate as healthy as possible for a few weeks before realizing it wasn’t sustainable. Gaining weight was inevitable, so I set it aside as a problem for future me. Still, I felt a lot of shame around eating in a way most people would call normal.

After having my son, I was so distracted by my perceived flaws that I missed the miracle of growing life in my body. I remember catching a glance of myself naked in the mirror and seeing my greatest fear; I couldn’t recognize myself. Bonus: I was slipping into severe postpartum anxiety, bringing me to a new mental low.

At my six-week postpartum checkup, I filled out a mental health questionnaire. I tried to answer the questions in a way that made it seem like I was doing great, but my doctor caught on. I started sobbing and she recommended I find a therapist or psychiatrist or both to help, but I refused. I was still a devout Mormon and thought I should be able to pray my symptoms away. I asked for other options and my doctor suggested I try exercising to ease the anxiety. If that didn’t work by my next appointment, we’d have to try something else. 

That was the very first time I started exercising in an effort to help myself heal instead of out of hate for my body. I started by simply pushing my son around the block in his stroller each day. I was surprised how quickly I started to feel better. My days felt manageable.

The next time I met with my doctor, she said she recognized a positive change in me, and that motivated me to keep going. 

Exercise alone isn’t enough. 

Eventually those mental health walks turned into strength training, and I started working toward physical accomplishments that had nothing to do with what I looked like. I wanted to heal my physical body and I wanted to be strong. I noticed my anxiety continued to subside and the negative thoughts about my body became less intense. Yes, I was losing weight too, and, yes, exercise can be part of disordered eating or eating disorders. But during this part of my life, physical transformation and mental transformation happened in parallel.

To be fair, I can’t say whether I would have felt the same if my body never changed postpartum. There’s no way for me to know that. What I do know is that I was way smaller in college and never had the confidence or sense of self-love that I did just months after giving birth. This was the first time I understood that the motive for movement matters the most.

But that’s not to say that exercise magically healed my disordered eating. I was doing the mental and emotional work too. After I started moving my body for the sake of my mental health, I realized I deserved to speak to and view myself kindly. I began by spending time just looking at myself naked in the mirror while repeating positive affirmations. 

I also fought back against negative self-talk. Ryan wanted to support me on my journey and suggested that if I said something negative about myself, I could follow it up with three positive things. I was hesitant but agreed and was amazed by how much it helped. The more it worked, the more I wanted to keep it up. I was slowly building my mental health toolkit.

Right after my son turned 1, I discovered the Mormon church was not what I thought it was, and I suffered an extreme loss of identity. This remains the most excruciating and informative period of my life. 

While I was struggling deeply, the small habits I’d implemented in the last year became my saving grace. Exercising for empowerment and positive self-talk felt like a tether back to myself.

Also, I claimed the freedom to express my body differently in clothes that would've been frowned upon (to put it extremely kindly) in the Mormon community. I felt ownership over my body, unashamed, and empowered in ways I’d never felt before. 

Even though I was going through hell in other ways, my disordered eating and distorted body image were healthier than ever.

You really never know what someone else is going through. 

During my faith transition, I started a fitness Instagram account. I was desperate to find a safe space to show up as myself and connect with like-minded women who wouldn’t judge me based on my religious background.

I was more vulnerable and open than I ever thought I would be. I talked about exercising for empowerment and how it changed my life for the better. I wanted to be the voice that I didn’t have postpartum. It became a creative outlet where I could be my authentic self. 

Soon after, I became a certified personal trainer. Over the next few years, the account grew to hundreds of thousands and then millions of followers and—along the way—I signed with Sweat to bring my fitness programs to life on the Sweat app. I felt amazing and wanted to help people see that working out can be great for our mental health. 

But once I became a fitness professional and my platforms continued to grow, I started putting too much pressure on myself. The disordered thoughts started creeping in: Who the fuck was I to be a trainer with such a large platform if I’m not in peak shape? If I don’t look exceptionally fit, women won’t trust me and the industry won’t respect me. 

It didn’t help that control had always been one of my biggest coping mechanisms, and I was under a lot of pressure. I had this big new career and I didn’t want to let anyone down. I didn’t see it at the time, but in hindsight some of the very tools that I used to fortify my physical and mental health (like eating healthy and exercising regularly) I began taking to an extreme.

Self-awareness and self-acceptance were the missing pieces.

When I got really sick with Covid in October of 2020, I had an epiphany. I came across a picture of myself from a big photo shoot in 2018, and memories flooded my mind. The version of me in that photo was so hard on herself and did not see herself clearly. I realized my extreme discipline had morphed into a new form of disordered eating.

Lying in bed with my phone, I broke down. I was overcome with sadness. My platform was built on self-love and using exercise for empowerment—in that moment I felt like a hypocrite.

With this new awareness, I was able to accept that I was struggling again. That enabled me to consciously bring my mental and emotional health back to the forefront. 

I refocused on the positive habits I learned postpartum, like meditating, gratitude journaling, writing poetry, and (most importantly) exercising with positive intent. I leaned on my husband instead of isolating. My mental health toolkit also grew to include talking to a coach, learning breathwork techniques, and energy healing.

There are still days I wake up picking myself apart, but those are the exception instead of the norm. Rather than focusing on how I look and how often I exercise, I now pour my discipline into living a present and authentic life. This mindset requires that my mental health always comes first. 

For a long time I felt shame around these parts of my story, but now I’m proud of every past version of myself. Looking back, I feel an abundance of gratitude for every part of my journey because it brought me here today. Whether you relate or your struggles look different, you always have the power to change your life for the better through self-awareness, self-acceptance, and intentional action (aka self-love).