Eating disorders, romantic relationships, and finding strength with Galey Alix

A week before her wedding, Galey Alix opened up to her fiancee about her eating disorder. 

He broke everything off. 

Now  Galey uses that pain to fuel her incredible platform. Working on Wall Street during the week, Galey flips homes for families at the weekend -- all with a goal of bringing them joy. Along the way, this incredible gal has amassed over 2m followers on TikTok and 1.6m on Instagram. 

Tune in to hear her powerful story of feeling lost, finding her feet, and emerging stronger than before. 

For more info on Galey visit: 
Instagram.com/galeyalix 

Transcript

Intro 00:00

From stretchmarks to self-love, talking out loud explores it all. Tune in to season two for real raw relationship stories and advice. I'm your host in Danae Mercer. and I'm happy you're here. 

Danae Mercer 00:12

Welcome back, guys, I'm so excited to be kicking off season two with an absolutely incredible guest. Joining me today is Galey Alix. She is a woman on Wall Street during the week, but a massive public figure at the weekend who changes people's lives by changing their homes. Galey has over two million followers on tick tock, over one million over on Instagram. And she has a really powerful journey of body image, struggles of a horrible, horrible breakup and of using all of that to feel something even stronger. So, Galey on that note, we are just going to jump on over to you and say hi.

Galey Alix 00:49

I am so honored and so excited to be here with you. I am such a fan of you and everything you're doing for the world, especially for women. And I just thank you so much for having me. 

Danae Mercer 01:00

No, thank you. Gosh, I am blushing again. This is the story of my day, I think. Thank you so much for saying that. And one of the things that I saw and I was like, I need to get this wonderful woman on my podcast because I've been following you for ages. I'm obsessed with interior decorating. But then you did this really beautiful video where you opened up a bit about your body image struggles and relationship struggles and how that has changed your life. So, if you're comfortable with it, why don't you just talk to talk to me a bit about that video and that journey?

Galey Alix 01:35

Yeah, that is that is a loaded request, but I'm here for it. I think that I think that I've spent so much of my life because I'm a perfectionist by fault. And I spent so much of my life trying to perfect myself, probably stemming from extreme insecurity where I don't feel like I'm good enough. I don't look good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not successful enough. I'm not doing enough. And so, I spent so much of my life trying to pick myself apart with negative self-talk to motivate me to be enough to look better, to achieve more. And I went through a really traumatic event where who I truly believed was my soulmate and the love of my life. I never felt so connected to another person. I went through an experience where I opened up to him about wanting help finding a therapist because I had been hiding an eating disorder from him, right. And the eating disorder developed from years of putting myself through really, really hateful, negative self-talk and an abusive relationship I had been in several years prior. And, you know, he felt like I had been dishonest, which I had, because this is a very secretive disease. You don't ask for it, but once you get it, you are terrified to share it and it thrives in secrecy. So, I let it do that. And I, I wasn't honest with him. And understandably, he couldn't handle the fact that I had hidden that. And so, when I made myself vulnerable and I was honest and I asked for help right before we were supposed to get married, we'd been engaged for almost a year. I was turned away and sent home within an hour. And I moved back to Florida literally that day with my two dogs. And I remember thinking, like, I have to change something. What I thought was my best friend, helping me deal with stress, which was the eating disorder and the negative self-talk clearly isn't working for me because this storyline didn't turn out the way I had intended it to. And so, I put myself in therapy. I started with a specialist in eating disorders. I met with a nutritionist who specialized in an eating disorder. And I mean, when you're in your 30s and you're walking through a grocery store with your nutritionist and she is in her mid-twenties and helping you understand how to eat and how to put nutrients in your body and you're a grown woman, there is something so humbling about that experience that makes it makes really hard not to look at everyone as equals and people that are all going through something. And so I came out of that realizing that we are all going through something at some point and the best thing we can do is be honest with ourselves, be kind to everyone else because you don't know what they're going through and to take that energy you are putting into hating yourself and instead put that in to something productive. And so, for me, that was trying to give other people the dream home that I had been trying to create for myself with my fiancée and all of the energy that I was putting into picking myself apart, trying to perfect how I looked, trying to perfectly curate my selfies on social media to make myself feel better about myself, which is just a whole facade you get trapped in. Because then when people even do compliment you on the photos that you posted, you know that they're not legit. And then you feel not only like you're not as pretty as they think you are, but then you feel like a fraud. And that's even a bigger spiral of self-hate that you go down. Right. This feeling like you're dishonest. And so, at the end of the day, I came out of therapy andI realized instead of looking at myself and trying to create perfection out of something that already is perfect because you are perfect as we are, why don't I take that energy and put it into perfecting other people's homes? And this is why I put so much energy and detail and effort and love into every square inch of the spaces that I touch, because that was the same amount of energy, I was putting into critiquing myself. But I'm now doing it into something that I'm creating to make somebody else happy. And the result is not me hating myself. The result is a family being really happy and then me feeling really good about myself and like I have value and like I have worth because I was able to do something that made somebody else happy. And so I completely flip the script on picking myself apart and hating myself and putting that into picking rooms apart until a family will love them. And then we all end up loving ourselves even more. They love their home and they're proud to raise their family there. And I love myself because I spent my time doing something good and not something negative behind closed doors in my head in front of a mirror. 

Danae Mercer 07:24

Wow. I literally started welling up at one point because you could hear the, I guess the struggle of some of the things you've gone through in your voice. And now you mentioned when you finally opened up about your eating disorder and by their very nature, eating disorders are so filled with shame and so secretive. And, you know, I've gone through that journey myself. And you feel you feel dirty, you feel horrible, you feel all these awful things. And so, you hide it. And I cannot imagine what it would be like to tell someone about that struggle. And then that person sort of pulls back instead of saying, like, hey, I see you, I love you, let's get you help. Which is what I had. I it would take such strength to go through what you experience. Like, how did you find that strength to say, no, I want to get better, I'm going to get better.

Galey Alix 08:20

I mean, it's interesting, right? Because I genuinely believed that this person loved me to my core. We were getting ready to make vows in sickness and in health. So, I believed that in sickness and in health, he was going to be my best friend and help me find a therapist and be proud of me for being honest and sharing my struggle because he had shared some very difficult mental health things that he'd been through in his life. And so, I thought, this is my turn to share mine. And it went very wrong. And I was I was not met with the person who I thought I had been in love with. And part of the strength I got in going to therapy, I'll be very honest. I actually believed that if I could just and I did feel like it was my fault, like, how dare I hide my disease from him? How dare I get sick? I can't believe I got sick. And then I ruined I ruined us like I ruined the best thing that ever happened to me because I got sick. I'm so awful for getting sick. And I was blaming myself. And then I was like, OK, if I can just go to therapy and do all the right things right. I'm an overachiever, perfectionist by nature. So, I was like, I'm going to overachieve at this. Like, I'm going to go to therapy, I am going to get better, and then he's going to love me and want me back because he's going to see how healthy I am and how much better I am. And I'm doing this for us. And meanwhile, he got married just a few months later and I was still going through therapy and I realized, like, OK, I don't have that to work towards anymore. Now I'm just going to do this for me. And that was the turning point for me, where it was like, OK, like, I'm going to get healthy for me and I'm going to live the life that I won't regret when I'm on my deathbed looking back at how I spent my time. I don't want to I don't want to be on my deathbed looking back, saying like, oh, I'm so glad I spent so much time picking myself apart, running myself ragged and controlling food and not thinking I'm enough and not thinking that anyone is ever going to be impressed by me. I don't want that to be my thought on my deathbed, I want to be on my deathbed and look back and be like I served a purpose in that short span of time. I was on this earth. I did something with my life that added value to others. I did something that I can look back at and feel so proud of how I spent my time. And it had nothing to do with who I married or if I got my fiancée back or even if I became a mom, it had to do with how I spend my time. And that was where I really started to make a turn with my life and where I spent my time. And none of it would have happened, honestly, if I hadn't met him and I hadn't gotten rejected because at the end of the day, without him and without this experience, I would still be sitting here, just a girl on Wall Street who looks successful and happy on the outside and looks like her life is great on Instagram. But in reality, she's dying with her eyes wide open as soon as she closes her door and is home alone at night.

Danae Mercer 11:59

And yeah, well, there I mean, eating disorders are the deadliest mental illness and it takes like to transition out of it. It is it takes such strength and such courage. And it is this incredible battle. And you can hear you can hear in your voice like that determination, that kind of steel of I'm going to get better and I'm going to help other people, too. So tell me a bit about like when was the first time you transferred someone's home? Like, when did that that first time happened?

Galey Alix 12:31

Yeah. So one of my friends, Carrie, she had seen the videos that I had been posting of my house in Connecticut with my then fiancée. And that was the first time I was really decorating. I mean, I have no background in design. I've been in finance my whole life and I've never watched a design TV show. I've never read a magazine like it was just I just we got this ten thousand square foot dream home. And I was like, I just want to impress him, and I want him to be the insecure person in me. It's like if I can just make this home beautiful, he'll love me even more and we'll have an even better marriage. And I was always trying to impress him and everyone around me. And so, I started making these videos of me decorating these rooms and I posted them on Instagram. And an acquaintance at the time, her name is Carrie. She's now one of my best friends messaged me and she's like, can you do what you did in Connecticut to my house now that you're back in Florida? And I was like, sure. So I went and saw their home. It was completely empty. They hadn't done anything in in four years, I think, of living there with their two little kids because it was just overwhelming, and they didn't want to make the wrong decisions. And so, I came in and I the rooms just spoke to me. They told me what to do the second I walked in there. I can't really explain it. It just I just see it the moment I walk into a space. And so, I went home, I started ordering everything. And then and then when it arrived, I said, you know what? I want to do a surprise. And they were They said, you know, we trust you. Like what you did in Connecticut was so great. We don't need to approve anything. And I ordered everything. They left it all in boxes and then they moved out for a weekend. They went to Disney World and I moved in with my two dogs. And I didn't sleep for three days. We literally did not sleep. And I just went manic in there in the most creative way. And I did the whole main house. And they came back a few days later and I recorded them walking in. And I'll tell you when I finished, this is such a crazy thing. When I finished that house, I had gone a weekend before and taken a bunch of photos of their kids just on my cell phone of them jumping in the pool and then running around with their dog they had just adopted. And I made them into black and whites. And I did this big photo wall of black and whites that they weren't expecting they didn't know about as one of their surprises. And when I was leaving after seventy-two hours of no sleep and I was getting ready to drive home, I walked through that hallway and I saw the pictures of their kids in black and white. And I remember leaning against the wall and I just melted down onto the floor sobbing, crying. I mean, I was beside myself and I think. I think it was because I saw for the first time what I was really capable of when I was healthy, I saw that I could transform an entire house with my creativity and with my mind being able to work through problems and problem solve. And I was looking at the photos of their kids and I was thinking about how they're going to walk into this house tomorrow that they never would have recognized before. And they're going to make so many family memories there for the rest of their lives as their kids grow up. And I was a part of that. I was a part, sorry, my dog is like my emotional support jumping all over me, and she can tell I'm shaking a little bit. But I, I just I was, I was sobbing uncontrollably, and it was like what I was releasing, it was like releasing all of the pain from the breakup, releasing the pain of years of an eating disorder, releasing all of all of the pain and negative talk I was putting on myself. And I was saying, this is what you're capable of Galey. This is what this is what you can do when you're healthy. You're not achieving things because you're punishing yourself or else or else you're not going to achieve it. You're achieving despite all of the negative things you were doing yourself. Look what you're able to do without the negative talk when you believe in yourself, when you're healthy. And I could physically see the result of what I am capable of. And I knew that at that moment, something in my life was about to change. I didn't know what it was, but part of the release was like I something in my life really big is going to happen. And this right here is the turning point. And that video ended up getting 30 million views. And it was what sent me from nine hundred followers to 1.6 million on Instagram that that moment right there. It's like I felt it as it was happening. And then it happened right after. And that was the first home that I did.

Danae Mercer 17:48

And it sounds like, in a way, by you helping other people, by you creating homes for other families, for their other friends, it sounds like you are just constantly reminding yourself of how incredible and how wonderful and how powerful you are, how powerful we all are. 

Galey Alix 18:08

It's so interesting because people say, you saved our home, you just you saved this place, and the reality is like your home saved me. Your home is reminding me that I can achieve that I can accomplish when I'm healthy, I don't need to tell myself you're not enough. You better go harder. You don't deserve this. You're not you're not enough. You're not pretty enough. You're not young enough. You don't have a family yet. No. I'm telling myself like they're trusting me blindly with their entire home and their savings. What an incredible thing. Right. You have to feel so, so good about yourself. If somebody else can give you that level of trust because it means they believe in you, they believe that you are capable. And so then there's that layer. And then the other layer is I physically do it. And then I'm like, I did that, I, I did that with my mind and with my hands. And the first forty-two spaces I did completely by myself and I'm just like I am now. I have a team which they're amazing. But seeing what I did it just helped fuel my recovery and fuel myself love and sense of self-worth.

Danae Mercer 19:30

Well, it really the part where you said it, it's, it's not you saving their home, it, it's, it's their home saving you. That really resonates with me. I mean, one of the comments I get the most from the lovely community that I have is like, oh, you've changed my life. Oh, you've helped me feel better. And I'm sat on the other side of it and I'm like, no, I can't say this enough. Like, you have literally changed my life. You have made me feel better because it's that kind of to a relationship where it's that if you are Perfectionist. If you're always tearing yourself down, it just helps so much to know that you're doing some good. So, what advice would you give to someone who maybe is going through a really awful breakup or who is in a similar place to where you were before you found your feet again? What would you say to them?

Galey Alix 20:21

I would say if you can give your pain a purpose, it doesn't feel as painful. And what I mean by that is think about the mothers who go through the most horrific experience of having a child with cancer. Right. They end up usually being some of the highest fund-raising advocates for cancer research. And they help progress research. And they take the pain that they went through with their child. And they give it they give it a purpose because it's so hard to go through something painful and then to sit back and think that happened for no reason. That makes it so much more painful. If you can say that, this pain I'm going through right now, I don't know what the purpose is yet, but I have to trust that this is happening for a reason. Take the most horrific thing you can imagine. And if you can just believe that at the end of the day there is a purpose for it, it helps you get through. And for me, what helped me was finding my passion and typically your purpose in life. I think it's going to be fueled by your passion. So figure out what you're passionate about. And I get that question all the time. Well, how do I know what I'm passionate about it. If if I haven't found it yet. If you haven't found it yet, that's OK. I didn't find it until a year and a half ago when I started decorating and creating. I had no idea this was a passion of mine. And it's completely consuming my heart now. Right. So, if you haven't found it yet, that's OK. Don't give up on it. But the easiest shortcut to finding your passion is think about what is it that you do, and you feel like time just disappears. Right. Is it painting where you start painting at nine o'clock at night and all of a sudden you look up and you go, oh my gosh, it's three a.m. I thought it was only eleven for me. That's what happens when I create. I start building something or I'm walking through HomeGoods or I'm wallpapering and I look at the clock and it's four a.m. and I could have sworn it was still 07:30 because time just completely disappears. It evaporates. And it's because when you're doing something that completely in raptures, your mind, your heart, your soul, you forget everything else in the world. It just stops. And it's because you are in your element. You are doing what you love. You are doing what fuels you. It might be playing with your kids or playing with your dogs. It might be playing guitar, cooking, whatever it is. Pay close attention when you're doing something. And time just seems like it evaporated because that is probably linked to your passion. And if you can find your passion, you will live your most purposeful life.

Danae Mercer 23:05

That's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful advice. And I'm going to ask you one more question. For people who maybe haven't found a place that feels like home, what do they do? How do they make it? How do they make it their home? 

Galey Alix 23:19

I love that question. And the first thing I would say is don't force it. I think a lot of people, when they move into a new space apartment house, they feel this proclivity to just go out and just get everything. I need a bed. I need a rug. I need a mirror. I got it. I got to get this done. And they actually force themselves into settling. And you also end up wasting money. The financial adviser in me sees that happen. And I cringe because if you're forcing and buying all the things you see right now that are available and you're just making it work so that you have a room done and you can check that off your list, you're going to end up replacing most of those things in the next year or two anyways because you don't love them. And so now you just spent double the money. I say be very, very patient and just go room by room, piece by piece. Do not force anything. Do not buy something unless you love it. And then what will happen is over time, not only does your house keep feeling new and exciting every couple of months because new pieces are coming in that you're getting to appreciate and you're kind of staggering. That new house, new room experience, but also, you're guaranteed to love each of those pieces and that is going to make it feel like home. It's not going to feel like you just want to target and bought everything you could that could fit into that room that day because that's not you. So, invest in your home by being patient. It saves you money. It saves you extra work. And don't stress yourself out if it's not done. 

Danae Mercer 24:49 

Beautiful. I feel like I'm going to start investing in my home. I love that. Where can people find you?

Galey Alix 24:56

So right now, Instagram and Tiktok both are @galeyalix, and yeah, I'm just I'm so thankful to have had this experience with you and I'm thankful for social media because it's how I met you through Instagram. So, I love it all. And thank you to to all the people who do who are I don't like calling them followers. I call them hearts because each of you is a heart who is following this journey with me. So I'm appreciative of every one of you.

Danae Mercer 25:30

Well, thank you so, so much for joining me today. And thank you, everyone for tuning in. We will have another episode out next week and I will link to Galey’s information down to the comments below. Speak to you soon. Bye.