Wellness and Fitness When Perfection Is Part of the Picture
Progress is more than a number on a scale. Body composition tracking gives you a clearer picture of what your training and nutrition are actually doing over time. Tiffany Mercer uses real data points like this to adjust your program so results keep moving in the right direction.
There is a conversation that has been happening quietly in the fitness world for a long time, mostly in the space between what clients say out loud and what they are actually carrying. The all-or-nothing approach to training. The inability to take a rest day without it feeling like failure. The rigid food rules that have no real origin story but feel like law. These patterns show up regularly in people who would never use the words eating disorder to describe themselves, and that is exactly why this conversation matters.
I sat down recently with Amy Jordan, a licensed clinical social worker and eating disorder therapist at Peak Wellness Therapy, to talk honestly about the intersection of eating disorder recovery and the fitness space. Amy brings something rare to this conversation: she is both a therapist who has spent nearly a decade working with eating disorders at every level of care, and someone who teaches fitness classes, practices yoga, and is currently working toward her personal training certification. She understands both rooms. And what she has to say is relevant whether you have ever received a clinical diagnosis or not.
This post covers what Amy has learned after years of working with people navigating these patterns, the five things she cannot unsee after a decade in this field, and what she says about building the kind of support that actually makes change possible. If any of this sounds familiar, you are not alone and there is more support available than you might realize.
What Eating Disorders Are Actually About and Why It Matters for Wellness and Fitness
One of the first things Amy said in our conversation was that eating disorders are about so much more than wanting to be thin. That framing is part of why so many people go unrecognized, including some of the highest-performing, most disciplined people in any room.
What Amy sees underneath most eating disorders is a response to feeling out of control. When life feels unpredictable or unsafe, the eating disorder arrives as something that offers a sense of order. She describes it this way: it becomes a coping mechanism that helps people feel like something in their life is figured out when everything else feels completely unfigure-outable. Sometimes body image is the entry point, and sometimes it has nothing to do with appearance at all. The body becomes the territory where control gets exercised because control feels unavailable everywhere else.
This reframe matters enormously for anyone who works in the fitness and wellness space, or who has struggled with their own relationship to food and movement. Understanding that the behavior is serving a purpose, that it arrived to help rather than to harm, is not a reason to keep it. It is the beginning of understanding what would need to exist in its place. Amy puts it simply: we have to figure out what the eating disorder was doing for you, and find more adaptive ways to meet that same need.
The fitness industry, with its morality-laden messaging around discipline and eating less and moving more, has not helped this picture. As Amy pointed out, the traits that eating disorders love to latch onto, perfectionism, high performance, rigidity, the ability to push through discomfort, are also the traits that get celebrated and rewarded in athletic and professional contexts. People who are struggling often look like they have it figured out. That is one reason they slip through the cracks.
The Patterns That Show Up Even Without a Diagnosis
Amy was clear that you do not need a clinical diagnosis for any of this to be relevant to you. The black-and-white thinking that characterizes eating disorders shows up across a much wider spectrum of human experience, and the fitness context is one of the places it surfaces most visibly.
She described it as rigidity of any kind becoming primary. The need to hit an exact step count, where 9,999 steps means none of it counted. The inability to take a rest day without it feeling like the loss of everything you worked for. The impulse to keep moving between sets rather than rest, because stillness feels like going backward. These are not signs of exceptional dedication. They are signs that the nervous system has tied survival to a set of rules that no longer serve the person following them.
The second pattern Amy named is one she finds both telling and surprisingly comforting once people recognize it. The eating disorder, she says, tells you that you are different. That the rules apply to everyone else but not to you. That your body just has more energy, or that you just do not need rest, or that the things other people require are somehow beneath what you need. She is honest that this feeling can seem appealing in the moment. Being exceptional, being the one who needs less, can feel like superiority. But as she said directly: it is really lonely at the top. And when people recognize how much they have been starving for genuine connection while othering themselves, the desire to be different often softens on its own.
The third pattern is one that catches people off guard during recovery: the eating disorder screams before it dies. When urges intensify or difficult thoughts resurface during a period of real progress, most people interpret that as evidence of failure. Amy sees it differently. She describes it as the eating disorder pulling out all the stops because it is afraid of losing its hold. The intensity is not a sign that recovery is not working. It is a sign that it is.
What Recovery Actually Looks Like and What Amy Wishes More People Knew
One of the most honest things Amy said in our conversation was that the goal of recovery might not be to be fully recovered in the way most people imagine. She shared that she, as an eating disorder therapist who talks about body image every single day, still has hard days in front of the mirror. She said she cannot in good conscience sell the idea that one day there will be no difficult thoughts about food or movement or the body. We are human. We live in a culture with relentless messaging about bodies and what they should be.
What she offers instead is a reframe: the goal is not to achieve a perfect, arrived-at state. It is to be able to manage these thoughts and patterns without letting them run the day. When recovery stops being another perfectionistic goal to achieve and becomes more like a living practice of small adjustments, something shifts. The pressure releases. As I said to Amy during our conversation: balance is not a noun. It is a verb. It is the continuous small act of coming back to what actually matters.
The fourth pattern Amy named is that the rules are completely arbitrary. One person's fear food is another person's safe food. A rule that came from something someone saw on the internet fifteen years ago got worked into a belief system, and now it feels like fact. She has seen this play out in every direction, including on the fitness side. A client of mine had been eating spinach, walnuts, and blueberries every day because those foods were supposed to be healthy. He was sensitive to all three. When we made a change, his energy, mood, and progress all shifted. There is no food that is universally good or universally harmful for every body. Listening to what your specific body is communicating is more useful than any rule.
Building the Support That Makes Real Change Possible
Amy's clearest recommendation for anyone who recognizes these patterns is to stop trying to manage them alone. She recommends a team that might include a therapist, a dietitian, a medical doctor, and a fitness professional, not because juggling all of those relationships is easy, but because these patterns intensify inside the echo chamber of our own thoughts. The moment we start speaking them out loud to someone, they begin to lose their grip.
She also made something clear that I want to pass along directly: you probably already have some of these people in your life. The first step is simply starting to talk, and specifically starting to talk to people who model a different relationship with movement and food than the one you are currently in. Someone who takes rest days without spiraling. Someone whose relationship with their body is one of cooperation rather than control.
Who and what you surround yourself with matters in a way that is hard to overstate, Amy said. The fitness studio you choose, the relationships you prioritize, the online spaces you spend time in, all of it shapes what feels normal and possible. You cannot always choose every influence in your life, but you can be intentional about building a foundation strong enough that the harder influences become more tolerable.
If this conversation opened something up for you, the next step is a conversation of your own. You can connect with Amy Jordan directly through her Instagram at @peakwellnesstherapy or through her website at peak-wellness-therapy.com. If you want to explore what a fitness approach that is genuinely responsive to where you are and what your body needs would look like, you are welcome to reach out to me at tiffanymercer.com/contact. The conversation is free, there is no pressure, and you do not have to have everything figured out before you start.
As Amy said at the end of our conversation: do not live alone in the silence of your head. It can get scary in there. You are not as different from everyone else as the patterns want you to believe.
Watch the full conversation below:
