Athlete shares her struggle with eating disorder

by Bob Florence
The StarPhoenix

March 28, 2005 - She stands on the podium in her racing suit, gold around her neck and glitter in her smile. Her shoulders are double-wide, her legs muscled and toned.  Behold the champion athlete.

Look closer.

She is constantly injured, chronically fatigued and feels worthless.  Her smile is forced.  It masks a serious eating disorder.

Sometimes she skips supper.  "I'm full," she says, "I had something to eat a little while ago."  Her little lie.

When she does eat, she purges soon after.  In the bathroom she forces a finger down her throat and retches.  Her secret.

Looking healthy, competing strong, a national caliber athlete in six different sports as a teenager and world-class as an in-line skater now, who knew Saskatoon's Meaghan Buisson, 25, has been battling this demon for a dozen years?

"It's easy to hide," she says.

No more.  She is bringing it out in the open.  By shining a light on eating disorders, Buisson hopes she can help someone else avoid the same dark path.

"Twelve years wasted," she says.  "The pain I've caused my family, the friends I've lost - how can I not use my experience to help others?"

"This gives those 12 years some meaning."

Her problems started as she was entering her teens.  Developing early physically made her feel uncomfortable; made her feel different from the others at an age when fitting in holds such importance.  She took to wearing hoodies to conceal the curves.  She ran for miles, trying to shed the woman and become a girl again.

"I learned to hate myself," Buisson says.

Sports became a passion and food an obsession.  Eating dissolved into a cycle of binge and purge.

"Every night I'd write in my journal that I'd never do it again.  When I did do it again I hated myself that much more."

How she has managed to become Canada's top in-line skater - competing on the World Cup circuit and winning a marathon-distance race last year in Lille, France - how she could achieve high-performance results when the engine is wracked and the fuel line ruptured is something she can't answer.

All she knew is she couldn't go on this way anymore.  Lat last fall, she was admitted to the Westwind Eating Disorder Recovery Centre in Brandon.  She was there three months.

"For all my (adult) life, living with an eating disorder is all I've ever known," she says.  "My body finally broke down. When I think of the damage I've done to my body it terrifies me.

"Now I'm learning what life can be.  Now I know what healthy is .  Am I there yet?  No.  This is a really hard battle and I'm not 100 per cent.  As my coach, John Monroe, says, 'You're pushing a big rock up a big hill and you don't know now much farther you have to go.'

"It's hell, and I live with it every day.  But even my worst days now were my best days before I went to Westwind."

She is eager to resume competing and to find out what she can achieve when healthy for once.

More than that, she wants to start visiting schools around Western Canada - she is from Winnipeg - and she wants to talk to youths about a problem that isn't going away.

"It's one-person guerilla warfare against eating disorders," she says, and she laughs.

"(Eating disorders) scare people, which is even more reason why I want to get out and talk about it.  It's a huge problem and there's real nothing being done about it."

The statistics are sobering.  Disordered eating and related medical complications are the leading cause of death due to psychological disorder in North America.  Anorexia nervosa is the No.1 killer of females between the ages of 15 and 25; one in every nine girls in high school has a clinically diagnosable eating disorder.

Time to get this out in the open, Buisson says.  Here's my plan, she says, and together let's see if we can do something about it.  All she needs now is a sponsor.

Buisson has experience as a speaker, is bilingual, plays well to an audience. The message she wants to deliver is a variation on the theme she has been presenting to school groups for the last couple of years.

"I have a saying:  'Be unique, be special, be yourself, because who else is better qualified?'

"I don't want this to come across as some tragic story.  It's more like 'This is who I am and this is what I've gone through.'

"There are girls dealing with the same low self-esteem and body image problems I had.  If by talking about it I can help just one girl, if she doesn't go through what I've been through, it will all be worth it.  I'm not going to change the world, but I can make a difference."

No more secrets, no more little lies.

"I've lost too many years," Meaghan Buisson says.  "I'm winning this time."

© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2005

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