My Story

Why do I care?

My name is Ellen Moseley-May and I am an exercise physiologist.  I have been the owner of Moseley Gymnastics for the past 23 years and I’m here to talk to you about health and wellness.  In order for me to do that I need to share a little about how I got here.  As many of you know I am the daughter of a professional football player and Hall of Fame Nominee, which sounds really glamorous and fun at first thought, but in actuality there is a lot of pressure that comes with that to be good at sports.  Growing up I was a gymnast and I placed a lot of pressure on myself to excel due to the fact that I felt I had to live up to our “athlete” reputation.  I wasn’t super talented, so I had to work really hard to be average at it, and back then the sport of gymnastics was very much centered around body image.  If you were little you could jump higher, tumble faster and swing bars better, so I developed a very unhealthy body image and eventually an eating disorder because of it. 

I struggled with that for years and when it came time for me to enter college I decided that the only thing I was really good at was staying thin so I decided exercise physiology would be the best route for me to go and I did really well at it.  The problem was that I continued to struggle with my eating disorder.  When I got pregnant with my daughter, I ended up very frustrated and after the first few months of my pregnancy I decided it wasn’t worth the struggle anymore and I gave up.  I ended up at 210 lbs and kept most of that weight for several years.  I still hated myself and my body but being fat was way easier than struggling to stay thin so I lived on a roller coaster of fad diets and crazy ups and downs in my weight, but I did manage to get and stay between 160 and 170 for many years and had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to just deal with it.  The good thing was that I wasn’t starving myself anymore so that was a plus. 

The years went by and I just lived day-by-day hoping that one day I would find a solution.  What I didn’t realize was that God had a plan for me and he wasn’t going to let me mess it up.  I received a phone call one morning early that my Papaw had an accident and had been killed.  We all grieve in our own way, but for me it was a control issue.  I started to obsess over food again and began to fall into my old eating disorder habits.  Within a few months I was back down to 102 lbs. and again I was dying inside.  The really bad part was that my family and I didn’t discuss it.  It was like it was some dark secret that we had to keep quiet about so that somehow it wouldn’t be real.  We would spend our dinners talking about anything but what I wasn’t eating and I would make excuses as to why I wasn’t hungry.  “I have a tummy ache” or “I ate a burger on the way home from work.”  We all knew it was a lie but no one was willing to admit it.  I was running 8-10 miles everyday, and living on a few pieces of lettuce and a half of a powerbar.  One day I reached to put on my dogs leash to go for a run and got very light headed and fell down.  My husband saw the whole thing and got very angry.  He picked me up, put me in front of a mirror and said he wasn’t going to sit back and watch me kill myself anymore.  He told me if I didn’t stop he was going to make me go to the doctor.  I was so angry with him that I don’t think I spoke to him for 3 days.  I wasn’t angry because of what he said, but I was angry because I knew that he was right.  You see, the very thing that I thought was keeping me in control of my life, was the very thing that was causing it to spin out of control. 

I spent the next three days creating an awareness of the person I had become.  The person that was constantly trying to be the opitomy of health for my customers and students but yet I was dying inside. It was at that moment that I decided I had to make a change.  It was the moment of awareness that my life was a lie and I couldn’t keep living this way.  My realization that skinny didn’t mean healthy was what brought me to me knees and somewhere among all the crap that I had created, God managed to pick me up and fix me. 

This is the first step to making any kind of change in our life, whether it be changing our health, changing our marriage or any other situation.  We have to become aware that there is a problem and stop denying it.  Once I accepted this I was able to make a decision to change.  By making a decision to change and by creating a plan of action to get to the point I needed to be for my health and for the health of my family, I was able to move forward.  You see, that is the second step, making a decision to change and creating a plan.  Decide on the best course of action to get where you want to be and then create a step by step plan to get there.  For me it was to create a balance of exercise, nutrition and supplementation to get control of my health and wellness.  For you or a loved one, it may be something completely different, but the process is still the same.  We must become aware, make a decision, create a plan and then the final step is to follow through. 

It didn’t matter that I had a plan if I wasn’t willing to implement the plan and be consistent in carrying it out.  I won’t tell you that it was easy, and it took a lot of planning, commitment and prayer to get me to where I am now, but I will say that it was worth every bit of the effort that I put into it and my family is also committed to health and wellness now too which has made it even more rewarding. Thin does not mean healthy and being bigger doesn’t mean we are unhealthy. 

This is a story about health, not weight, and my challenge to you is this:  take a look at your health, and the health of your friends, family and all the people that you love.  Spend time creating an awareness of the things that might need to change and then create a plan to make those changes happen.  Start within yourself and as others see the changes you are making they will want to follow.  The reality is that there is a huge lack of health in America.  We as Americans eat more, diet more and take more supplements than all other countries combined but yet 90% of us will die of a preventable disease.  Why?  All the propaganda out there says we need to look a certain way to be healthy, but the truth is that all we need to do is to be aware, commit to change and then follow through with a good healthy plan and all the other stuff will fall into place.  It starts with you.  We don’t have to go around the world to change the world.  It starts in our own community, with ourselves and within our families. Together we can reach out to our community and start making healthy changes that will last for many generations.  So I guess the moral of my story is that we all have something that we can work on to lead a healthier life. 
Whatever that is, begin to choose it today and you will reap the benefits tomorrow.

ME!
HEALTHY AND HAPPY AT 40!