Understanding Disordered Eating: For anyone whose relationship with food feels harder than it should

The journey of recovery from an eating disorder is filled with fear of the unknown, anxiety of the future, and lots of bumps in the road.  Today is all about finding and embracing your WHY for your recovery, especially in those moments when nothing seems worth it. We have TedX speaker Alana Van Der Sluys sharing personal insights, tools, and acronyms (so many acronyms!) to help you along your reco...

Starting off with a loaded question I keep asking myself (& you keep asking me): Did we take intuitive eating too far? Today's episode is a follow-up from last week's with Dr. David Wiss, all about ultra-processed foods. I stand by the content of the information and data shared last week, and I know David only speaks about information he can completely back up. However, I do want to reiterate the...

Today we are talking about ultra processed food with Dr. David Wiss. David became a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN) in 2013 and founded  Nutrition in Recovery , a group practice of RDNs specializing in treating eating and substance use disorders. He earned his Ph. D. in Public Health with a minor in Health Psychology from UCLA by investigating links between adverse childhood experiences an...

Dr. Risa Fridy is an adolescent and young adult medicine physician who practices in a solo, private medical practice in New York City. Dr. Fridy founded Tribeca Adolescent & Young Adult Medicine, where she provides adolescent and young adult patients with personalized, highly-attentive, and comprehensive medical, as well as emotional, care – the optimal strategy to prevent and/or overcome an eatin...

Jenn Friedman, MA, MHC-LP, is a Mental Health Counselor, author, and musician. She provides therapy at MTZ Counseling, drawing on psychodynamic and cognitive principles. Jenn is the author of Veganism and Eating Disorder Recovery (Routledge, 2022), a book that aims to improve the discourse about veganism in the eating disorder field. She writes, records, and performs music, which she considers a s...

What is the difference between an eating disorder and disordered eating? To be honest, I don't care that much about the difference since if someone's relationship with food is subjectively distressing, that's enough of a reason to take it seriously. But there are different ways of going about working through ED or disordered eating that make it helpful to differentiate. This episode will cover spe...

Ever wonder how your attachment styles are connected with your relationship with food?    In this episode we talk about: Different attachment styles How our way of "attaching" is developed  The significance of the culture by which we are surrounded  Working through attachment stuff Practical tips A bit about our guests: Kathryn Garland, LCSW-S is a licensed clinical social worker and supervisor in...

Secrets are a central theme of eating disorders. But what came first? The secrets or the eating disorder?  In this episode, Kathryn Zerbe and I discuss how secrets and eating disorders are woven together and what we can do about it. Kathryn Zerbe, MD, FAED, FABP is Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst, Oregon Psychoanalytic Center and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Oregon Health Sciences Univ...

Is Emotional Eating ever okay?    This is exactly what we will be getting into today! I will talk about Emotional Eating from a few different perspectives: practical things to do, ways I understand Emotional Eating, and obviously how we can go deeper into Emotional Eating (my MO, of course 🙂)   LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who may need this podcast by sharing this episode. Be sure to sign up for...

Do you love stories? I LOVE stories!   Stories are awesome.  Besides being incredibly entertaining, they have the power to be completely transformative. And I mean that literally.  Today, we talk about the impact that stories and metaphors can have on your journey to heal your relationship with food. And we talk about why it works, the neuroscience and psychology of it all.  Dr. Anita Johnston- Th...

So what if your journey through your eating disorder recovery isn't going the way you had thought it would go?  You made huge strides with eating- you eat all the macros, eat way more frequently than you had before, and you challenge yourself with foods, but you still feel obsessive and anxious; you just feel you are not quite there yet.  You feel something is off. For sure, it feels a lot better...

Ever needed to get a DEXA scan but not sure what that has to do with your relationship with food?  Join  Dr. Marci Goolsby and me for a riveting conversation about bone health, hormones, and female athlete triad. (Yes, riveting is serious, she's incredibly interesting!)  We'll answer questions like: " Is there such a thing as too much exercise?" and " Is birth control being used in a harmful way?"...

How to Accept Your Body How do you accept your body when you don't really like your body?   I get this question SO often, and the reason I haven't addressed it sooner is because there's really no magic answer.    There's nothing I can say in this episode that will revolutionize your body image – but I'm hoping it can help your brain start to think about it a little differently.   If this episode r...

Health at Every Size is a hot topic right now. But what exactly does HAES or HAES-aligned actually mean?  Health at Every Size (HAES) is NOT at all suggesting that someone is healthy at every size. In fact, if someone says that HAES stands for "Healthy at Every Size," then they really don't understand what they're talking about. Yes, the one letter makes a difference. Now read this paragraph again...

The mother-daughter relationship can be an extremely complicated one, especially as it pertains to eating disorders. How do you make sense of it, and start to make real change in your life today?   Today, Judith Ruskay Rabinor and I dive into this loaded topic. If you don't know Judy, she is a clinical psychologist, author, speaker, and supervisor at CSAB (Center for Study for Anorexia and Bulimia...

Advice is never universal or one-size-fits-all.   This episode is for you if you're the kind of person who reads or hears someone give advice and you think, "Should I do that?" and you always implement it (or think you should).   Let's be real: how many of you are searching online for "how to be healthy" or "ways to lose weight" and read about that one secret food that will change EVERYTHING? Yeah...

When you feel like bingeing or restricting "just happens," how do you begin to uncover how you got there… so you can take steps to make it stop? Believe it or not, an eating disorder has a purpose.    That purpose might be to manage emotions that feel intolerable, whether that's anger, sadness, or yes, even desire. But how do you begin to name WHAT you're feeling, and resolve it? How would you eve...

Join legend Jessica Setnick and me in a conversation discussing the recent AAP guidelines . The AAP has suggested weight loss medication as young as 12 and weight loss surgery as young as 13 for children they deem "obese." Naturally, as eating disorder clinicians, we'll have a reaction or two to that. Jessica never disappoints, she's highly entertaining and delivers really important information fo...

This is the breakdown you need to begin to understand your hunger and fullness cues. If you've had a long history of dieting and disordered eating, chances are this isn't something you've paid that much attention to. So how the heck do you do so? Stay right here!    Before we get started with today's episode, I wanted to take a second and let you know that although there are a couple of weeks left...

Why do we get angry? What's the point of anger, and how do we deal with it when it feels SO overwhelming and intolerable?   This week's episode was born out of an idea that popped into my head while reading an emotions book for toddlers. I know, right?    The book identified four different emotions: anger, sadness, frustration, and happiness. The whole premise of the book was teaching children to...

Are you the friend who has it all together? Does it seem to you that since you know others have it worse, you can't possibly need help?   If you're listening to the episodes in order, this episode is a very interesting juxtaposition to last week's episode on the neurobiology of recovery with Dr. Jeffrey DeSarbo , where we scratched the surface on Severe and Enduring Eating Disorders (SEED). In con...

What happens to the brain when someone recovers from an eating disorder? Is it really possible for EVERYONE to recover?   In today's episode, I'm talking with Dr. Jeffrey DeSarbo to answer exactly that. If you were with us for Episode 23 on the Neurobiology of Eating Disorders , then you've already met Dr. Jeffrey DeSarbo once before! Today's episode pairs well with that one, so go back and listen...

You've probably heard it said: "Eating disorders are a way to maintain control." The connection between control and eating disorders is a phenomenon people talk about all the time. It's not untrue, but honestly, I'm not the biggest fan of it. Here's why.    The biggest problem with the idea is that it's so vague. What does "control" mean? Control of outside events? Control of how we feel? Control...

"Why don't you endorse intentional weight loss?"    This is a question I get SO often – from random people, from clients, and in messages from you guys (by the way, keep the questions coming in my DMs and by replying to the newsletter ! I'd love to do podcast episodes answering your questions!).    The entire world has seemed to endorse weight loss, and especially as a means toward health. It's be...

We talk about positive body image all freaking day. But how do we actually get there?? Body image is something so many of us struggle with, and it's no wonder: we live in a world that is obsessed with thinness. But it's so much deeper than just how you see yourself in the mirror and how you feel in your skin. It's really intertwined with  self-esteem. And it can be representative of deeper dynamic...