Endorphin High

Endorphin High: One Woman’s Journey through Exercise Addiction and Beyond

by Marion Maclean

Endorphin High is a true story, charting my life–threatening battle with Anorexia Athletica: obsessive–compulsive exercise addiction.

My story takes you on a compelling and often painful journey that not only addresses my own experience, but also touches on the complexities of our fixation with physical perfection, eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, and obsessive–compulsive disorders. It also sheds valuable light upon the unquestioned links between diet pills, mental illness and suicide.

This memoir has been a lifetime in the making. And while I began writing it to bring healing and closure to the myriad issues affecting my life, I ultimately want to tell my story to raise awareness of exercise addiction – still a relatively unexplored topic – and deliver fresh hope and understanding to anyone touched by addiction, depression or mental illness.

My journey of self–discovery and healing graphically describes my metamorphosis from an obsessed and depressed little girl lost, to a healthy mother with a blossoming and balanced life.

Punctuated with well–researched data and plenty of humorous anecdotes, Endorphin High is no sob story. It is a sobering, enlightening and consistently hopeful memoir and account of the ways in which our childhoods influence the people we ultimately become. Through my recovery I explore how, as I came to understand my mother’s tragic story, I saved my own life and defeated a secret addiction our society has failed to properly acknowledge.