From the outside, Jana Pittman was a picture of health: a world-class athlete composed of 6 feet of strong, lean muscle mass and barely an inch of fat on her body.
But behind closed doors, it was a different story. The world champion hurdler was trapped in a private, toxic battle against her most feared enemy: food.
Pittman — who is an ambassador for Australia’s first institute for eating disorders, which opened in Sydney on Monday — has only recently gone public about her 15-year battle with bulimia nervosa, which started when she was just a teenager and continued to plague her behind the scenes throughout her international running career.
It started when she was just 18, a young woman trying her best to straddle a fine line between performing as a top athlete, which came with pressure to keep her weight down, and being a normal teen who wanted to go to the movies with her friends and join in as they gorged on popcorn and candy.
Then, one day, she thought she had struck gold — it seemed like she could have her cake and eat it too.
“I had this one night where I went to the movies with a bunch of girls and they ate chocolate and popcorn and I wanted to do that too and unfortunately after that I learned there was a way to remove that food from my system to keep my weight in check and also be a star athlete for Australia,” the 35-year-old tells Whimn. “For many years that’s how it started, I thought it was just something I had control over, but I realized it completely had control over me.”
What started out as a “weight control mechanism” eventually blew up into a serious eating disorder in which, at her worst, Pittman found herself “bingeing and purging” up to eight times a day. “I didn’t eat any normal food anymore, breakfasts, lunches and dinners didn’t happen, I was just on cycles,” she recalls.
At first, she turned to Google for support, but whenever she brought herself to actually make an appointment at a treatment clinic, she would subsequently cancel it, convincing herself she didn’t need the help. Another vicious cycle began.
That was until 2008, when she finally “hit rock bottom.” She recalls: “I couldn’t run, I didn’t want to eat. Everything fell apart — my marriage fell apart, I lost a baby, it was an awful year. It was a very hard mental year. I was just very, very hungry and angry at life and basically, I decided I just didn’t want to live like that anymore, I didn’t want to be beaten by something, so I spoke out.” She finally confided in someone, her mom, who helped her find a local psychiatric department, which specialized in eating disorders, where she started getting regular help.
After six years of treatment, Pittman, who is now studying to become a doctor, says she finally feels like she has won the battle, albeit one she will never entirely conquer.
As an ambassador for the new InsideOut Institute, a collaboration between the University of Sydney and Sydney Local Health District, Pittman hopes to help others by raising awareness and breaking down the stigma associated with eating disorders, which affect roughly 5 percent of Australians.
At the institute’s launch, director and clinical psychologist Sarah Maguire said they will aim to drive change on four key pillars — research, clinical innovation, education and public policy — by working collaboratively with researchers and clinicians at every level.
“We’re ambitious,” she said. “We want to transform the eating disorder landscape and find a cure.”
The institute will aim to ensure every Australian living with an eating disorder has access to the best possible care by rethinking eating disorders from the “inside out.”