Rachel Forsyth: article on her ED & recovery

Oct. 13, 2023

Once upon a time, Ann Arbor Pioneer's Rachel Forsyth looked like the next big thing in Michigan girls distance running.
After finishing second at the Division I state cross country meet as a freshman, Forsyth easily won the race as a sophomore and appeared headed for bigger things in the outdoor track season that spring.
But Forsyth, the third of six Forsyth kids, didn't compete in the outdoor track season; last November, she finished a distant 62nd at the cross country finals.
What happened to what appeared to be a brilliant running career over the course of one year?
Everything.
"I had an illness," she said. "There was a scare that my heart was going to stop. I was in the hospital, with a feeding tube."
The illness was an eating disorder, which are more commonly found in girls from ages 13-17, but can affect people of all ages.
But after an agonizing seven months without running, Forsyth is running again and is posting times that would rank her among the top girls in the country.
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In the winter of 2022, Forsyth was competing at the indoor nationals in New York and her parents thought something might be wrong with her.
Ian noticed her track uniform seemed looser, but initially wrote it off to her intense training routine.
Despite her training, Forsyth wasn't running well, but that was only half of the story.
"We noticed she wasn't acting like herself," her father said. "She was super-irritable, not being a great friend or teammate and didn't seem like herself. And soon after that, she started losing a noticeable amount of weight. It was a pretty quick turnaround before we realized something was really the matter."
As good a runner as she was, Forsyth was also a wonderful teammate and daughter. But soon everything began to change, and life in the Forsyth family was turned upside down.
"The reason we put her in the hospital in the first place is because it was getting dangerous," Ian said. "She'd get hostile and violent possibilities with her mother and the little kids. Once we got there, they realized she was severely deficient and was dangerously close to dying."
The behavioral change in Forsyth was shocking to the family, but they eventually learned it was typical of someone with an eating disorder.
"When they're so malnourished their minds just ... they're not coping," her mother said. "There's no reserve — no patience, no nothing. The way she was behaving was not her normal self then and isn't the way she behaves now."
Looking back on it, Forsyth understands how the eating disorder held her body hostage.
"I think it was mostly putting a lot of pressure on myself to be as fast as I could," she said. "Me thinking that I had to be lighter to be as fast as I could, that's how it occurred, which I don't think is the case anymore, but that's what I thought at the time."
The desire to be lighter hijacked her brain and her thought process. She didn't realize how sick she was becoming because she was becoming lighter, which she thought was a good thing.
The Forsyths had her examined, and that is when she learned her heart was in serious danger.
"They said it was beating really slow," she said. "I don't know how slow it was, I just know it was too slow."
At that point, her parents were about to lose their minds.
"It was a nightmare," Jessica said. "It was literally a life or death situation."
That led to hospitalization at U-M's Mott Children's Hospital; she then was admitted to the noted Eating Recovery Center (ERC) in Northbrook, Illinois, just north of Chicago.
While many people with eating disorders don't want to enter a place such as the ERC, Forsyth never fought her parents when it came to leaving home.
"They also knew in order for me to get better it had to be myself doing it so they thought the best thing was to just send me away," she said. "I was OK with going because the other option was to keep doing what I was doing and not run."
It was a difficult adjustment for Forsyth because she was losing what little sense of control over her life that she had.
A lot of kids, especially during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, felt helpless. With all of the restrictions and so many school closings, students often felt the only aspect of their life they could control was what they ate, which led to eating disorders.
"There was definitely a sense of control," Forsyth said. "So it was also hard because you lose the control because you go away, that's also hard because then it's like nothing is in control.
"If there's a lot things going on in your life, and you're saying the only thing you can control is what you eat, once you go into treatment you don't control it anymore, so that's hard also."
At the ERC, missing meals was not an option.
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She had a reason to shoot for recovery — running.
"For me, I was in a different position than other people in the center because I run and my incentive is I want to run," she said. "That was really good for me because I needed the incentive to help me get started."
Forsyth was at the ERC for a month and then there was a two-week period where her mother went to Northbrook and stayed with her.
"The trick as parents is to help her find other reasons to embrace recovery," her mother said. "We're multi-dimensional people. We're trying hard to help her to appreciate all aspects of herself and see her true value as a human being, not just a runner. That's a work in progress.
"For herself personally, that is a huge motivator for her, and we're just really glad that she has an inspiration that can invest herself."
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No one is more familiar with extremes than Forsyth. She has experienced the high of winning a state championship and the low of being told she can no longer run.
She has worked incredibly hard to overcome her eating disorder, but she also realizes that this is something she will be fighting to overcome for years on end.
"It's an illness so you just can't say everything's going to be perfect at some point," she said. "I think it's always going to be something that I've had to deal with in the past and then use rational thoughts to overcome things that aren't true.
"It's not perfect, but every day it gets better."