Tag: disordered eating

by Libby

6 Reasons Why Yoga Can Help Improve Your Relationship with Exercise & Your Body

I still vividly remember the first yoga class I ever took 15 years ago…

When I was really struggling with my eating disorder and my relationship with exercise, I randomly decided to try a yoga class, thinking that this might be a better alternative to my obsessive workouts at the gym. I also was looking for a new routine / activity to fill my after-school time.

I didn’t know ONE yoga pose and couldn’t even come CLOSE to touching my toes!

The entire class, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. It was all kind of confusing and a little overwhelming. BUT, there was something about this new-to-me form of exercise that had me intrigued enough to continue coming back.

A decade and a half later, yoga remains an integral part of my life. Not only have I seen tremendous gains physically, but also in my relationship with exercise and my body. Not to mention, stretching and sweating (I especially love hot forms of yoga) feels absolutely amazing! I always find going to a great yoga class to be a helpful physical and mental “reset.” My body is sweating out all sorts of toxins, I’m focused physically, and my mind and emotions tend to settle by the end of the class.

(Note: when I talk about yoga, I’m simply referring to mindful stretching and breathing. I don’t personally engage with the religious elements found in some forms of yoga. I’m a Christian and see mindful movement and breathing as another way to connect with God and be more present with myself.)

I recommend yoga for EVERYONE, but especially anyone struggling in his or her relationship with exercise / body image. I’d love to share with you 6 reasons why!

6 Reasons Why Yoga Can Help Improve Your Relationship with Exercise & Your Body

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by Libby

7 Questions to Consider When it Comes to Your Exercise Routine

Something that a number of my clients have shared with me is that it has felt to them like other eating disorder professionals / dietitians have conveyed the idea that they are “automatically being disordered” if they want to exercise or be physically fit.

Hmmm. *Skeptically scratching head.* I have to say I disagree!

I do think this is a tricky line to walk, as exercise and fitness intentions can certainly come from a place of being “mostly disordered.”

That being said, I don’t think that NEEDS to be the case. It’s all about your RELATIONSHIP with exercise, and your motivations for doing what you are doing. If your relationship with exercise IS currently disordered right now, we can work towards HEALING and CHANGING that. You can pursue physical fitness and exercise in a way that is genuinely and holistically healthy.

I am all about fitness and physical health in my own personal life, and love when clients and blog readers are passionate about this, too.

However, this wasn’t always the case. When it comes to working one’s way out of a completely unhealthy relationship with exercise, I GET YOU if that’s where you are at as you find yourself reading this blog post.

Based on my own personal experience and my work with clients, I have a lot of insight into what typically goes on emotionally and psychologically when it comes to a healthy versus unhealthy relationship with exercise.

Whether you are regularly exercising right now, taking a break, or thinking of getting back into it, here are 7 questions to consider when it comes to your exercise routine.

7 Questions to Consider When it Comes to Your Exercise Routine: 

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by Libby

7 Reasons to Eat More (or Enough) Dietary Fat

Out of the three macronutrients — fat, protein, and carbohydrate — dietary fat has to be my favorite! Give me all the nut butter, grass-fed / organic beef & eggs & butter, and plenty of dark chocolate (obviously) :).

Some of my favorite (daily) ways to consume dietary fat include peanut butter & whole-milk yogurt on my breakfast bowls, walnuts/cashews in my energy bites & bars, olive oil-based dressings & nuts on salads, oils & butters for dinner veggies & rolls, meats & eggs w/ dinner, and evening dark chocolate & other delish sweets to cap off a nourishing day of eats.

Thankfully the low-fat craze of the 90s seems to be less of a thing now, but so many people still seem to fear eating dietary fat!

Like all things food-related, not all foods are of the same quality, and therefore the “same food” can be healthful or less-than-healthful depending on its quality. High-quality, preferably organic sources of dietary fat (including saturated fat sources!) are EXCELLENT and NECESSARY for optimal health.

That being said, you all know I”m all about balance and I’m not going to bat an eye about eating processed desserts, non-organic meat/eggs, or seed oils once in a while. Unless there is a valid health reason to be totally black and white about a certain food, I’m not going to concern myself with eating “less-than-ideal” options once in a while. I know my body can handle this and it is perfectly fine!

We need to look at the big picture of our health, food patterns, and overall toxic load, and not miss the forest for the trees by obsessing over the store-bought cupcakes or non-organic ground beef we ate yesterday.

Dietary fat does NOT “make you fat.”

In fact, I would argue that avoiding high-quality sources of dietary fat puts you at *greater risk* for unhealthy weight gain (beyond YOUR body’s natural healthy weight range), due to the effect that not getting enough dietary fat has on things like our metabolism, hormones, and overall nutritional status.

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by Libby

7 Ways to Channel Your Driven Nature OTHER Than Your Eating Disorder

If you are like the vast majority of people who have experienced anorexia nervosa (in the past or present), I’d venture that there’s a good chance that you would use all or (at least) several of the following personality traits to describe yourself…

  • Organized
  • Hardworking
  • Diligent
  • Dependable
  • Perfectionistic
  • Intentional
  • Empathetic
  • … and Driven!

In general, many traits (including the ones listed above) can be good and fulfilling and helpful when they are channeled in the appropriate direction and with the appropriate intensity.

The same traits can also be harmful when channeled in the wrong direction and with too much or too little intensity.

Take being organized, for example. It can be a great quality to be an organized person, provided you aren’t completely obsessive with this to the point that it is negatively impacting your life and those around you, and that your organizational goals actually make sense.

We can channel our amazing organization skills towards keeping our home nice and tidy and staying on top of our household to-dos (while also being reasonably flexible with this). Or we can obsess over needing to organize the extra toiletries in our hallway closet for the third time this month.

There are two sides to every coin!

When it comes to drivenness, I think that being a driven person is a quality that can be AWESOME. I consider myself to be a very driven person and love to be inspired by the passion and intensity of other driven people.

But for all driven people, an important question to ask oneself is, where are am I driving?

And who is driving?

When it comes to anorexia nervosa, we are ferociously driving towards things like control of body size and food intake, and the suppression of distressing and uncomfortable emotions. Ultimately we are heading towards isolation, captivity, physical and emotional harm, and possibly even death.

It is our compulsions and fears who are in the driver’s seat, not our healthy, authentic selves, unhindered by suffocating grips of the anorexia.

In today’s blog post, I’m sharing 7 ways to channel your driven nature OTHER than your eating disorder.

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by Libby

Intuitive Eating — 10 Principles in Action

Today I wanted to do a post revisiting the topic of Intuitive Eating. In case you aren’t familiar, Intuitive Eating is a framework for eating developed by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elysh Resch. There is nothing inherently fancy or “new” about Intuitive Eating — it is essentially relearning how to naturally eat and be in tune with our bodies, dismantling and untangling the (largely unhelpful) outside voices and influences that may have negatively impacted our relationship with food and natural ways of nourishing ourselves.

Intuitive Eating is 10 principles summarizing a process of how to do that — relearn to eat in a natural, intuitive, and life-giving way.

You can read one of my earlier blog posts sharing more about the nuts and bolts of Intuitive Eating here!

In TODAY’s blog post, I’m going through recent examples of how the 10 principles might organically show up in my everyday life and eating. When we are relearning how to eat normally, I find it can often be helpful to see examples of how others go about this.

When I’m eating and going about life, (outside of client sessions) I don’t really *think* about the specific and individual Intuitive Eating principles per se at this point in my food journey. BUT they definitely make regular and continual appearances even if they are mostly integrated on autopilot.

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by Libby

Question to Challenge Your Disordered Eating: What Would Make This Better?

When it comes to experiencing any degree of disordered eating, often we might feel this urge or need to cut anything out of our daily eats that feels “unnecessary” or “extra.” This tendency to “do without whenever possible” can become more and more extreme over time.

Salad on my dressing? No thanks.

Dessert after dinner? Definitely not.

Cream in my coffee? Nope.

While the focus of today’s post is on a question to ask yourself to challenge this facet of your disordered eating, it is important to point out that there are MANY and varied benefits to NOT cutting out every last thing… from needing to eat enough to have a healthy metabolism/body/brain/hormones to feeling less obsessive and chaotic around food, when we pursue SATISFACTION in our eating, both a healthy diet and a healthy relationship with food tend to fall into place. 

There are many factors that go into making a food or eating experience satisfying. Some of these include eating enough, eating when we are decently hungry most of the time (versus famished or full), eating enough fat/carb/protein, and allocating enough time to eat and prepare our food.

Additionally, a key component of satisfaction in eating is seeking to eat foods we genuinely enjoy (at least most of the time — not every eating experience will be tasty and delish and this is also perfectly normal), and eating foods in a way that they taste good/best… elevating what we are eating from “fine enough” to truly satisfying.

One question to ask yourself to challenge your disordered eating is, “What would make this better?”

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by Libby

Allowing the Different “Parts” of You to Have a Voice in Your Eating Choices

While we are, of course, cohesive beings, it can sometimes be helpful to conceptualize the different “parts” of our personalities, or of who we are.

We often talk with this “parts” vocabulary in everyday life.

One part of me would like to relax and watch TV all evening, while another part of me feels like getting these chores done would be helpful for the rest of my week.

Part of me wants to say “yes” to dinner with friends this Friday, and part of me wants to stay home and have a chill/quiet evening instead.

We are all complex, multifaceted, and nuanced individuals. We have various needs, desires, and preferences that sometimes are at odds with one another!

In general, I find it can be helpful to “consult” these various parts of ourselves when it comes to decision making, not letting one part dominate or run the show 24/7.

If ALL I do is stay home and have introvert time every single day, I probably wouldn’t have many (or any) friendships. If ALL I do are chores and other tasks in the evenings, I would almost certainly feel burnt out.

When it comes to your food decisions, are you letting multiple parts of you weigh in on your decisions? Or is one part of you calling ALL the shots?

For the purpose of this blog post, we are going to consider two “key parts.”

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by Libby

True Health (Including Fitness/Nutrition) and Recovery are NOT Mutually Exclusive

A common dynamic I’ve noticed in the eating disorder recovery world is this idea that if you want to eat a nutritious diet and be physically fit you are clearly disordered in your food/exercise approach.

There is a fine line (that looks different for everyone) when it comes to what is disordered or not in someone’s food/exercise approach.

Just because you care about nutritious eating and being physically fit does NOT mean this is inherently problematic!

(In other words, how you are relating to nutritious food and exercise may be disordered right now, but it doesn’t have to be that way).

I find that dietitians and other eating disorder professionals who approach their work with clients in such a black-and-white way tend to turn off and lose trust with a lot of clients who genuinely care about these things, even if they are struggling and experiencing health and fitness in a disordered way at the current moment. This can manifest from everything from direct interactions with clients (“you are disordered for wanting to eat/be healthy” vibes) to marketing (i.e., always showing photos of eating disorder dietitians eating cupcakes, as if anything else would be “disordered.”)

Maybe you are someone who truly does enjoy training for races and going to the gym, but these activities have become overly obsessive and disordered in how you are engaging with them. That does not mean that these activities are inherently bad, need to be “off-limits” for forever, or that you can’t engage with them in a genuinely healthy way in the future.

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by Libby

5 Recovery Challenges to Consider This Summer

If you are in the midst of recovering from an eating disorder (or any degree of disordered eating), summer can be a good time to challenge yourself a bit when it comes to your recovery journey.

While summer certainly isn’t always this way, oftentimes we might have a little more energy, space in our routines, and motivation to intentionally focus on something like our mental/emotional and physical health. Maybe you are a student in transition between semesters or school years, and your schedule is more open compared to the fall and winter. Maybe your job is a little less busy this time of year.

Any way you slice it, I encourage you to use the mood-boosting effects of all the sunshine, longer days, and summer outdoor-beauty to lean into your recovery more intentionally before the fall is here!

Today I’m sharing 5 recovery challenges to consider this summer. If you are walking through anorexia recovery, working on your relationship with food, or trying to prevent a relapse, then this blog post is for you!

5 Recovery Challenges to Consider This Summer:

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by Libby

Different Factors in Eating Decisions 2.0 {Beyond Hunger & Fullness}

Today we are talking about different factors that go into eating decisions BEYOND just our hunger and fullness cues.

(Note: I wrote a similar blog post on this topic about a year ago. If you’d like to read my previous post, here it is). 

Listening to our hunger cues is important. If we are hungry, this is a clear sign our bodies are in need of nourishment. No questions asked! We are also more likely to feel satisfied with our eating when we eat when we are reasonably hungry most of the time.

That being said, there are also other factors to take into consideration when it comes to the “when” and the “how much” of eating.

From my perspective, especially for teens and younger adults, if you ONLY eat when you are hungry, you are probably not eating enough!

Not eating enough can lead to a slowed metabolism, hormone imbalances, loss of a period, lack of energy for sports/studying/daily life, and a chaotic/obsessive relationship with food.

IF you are looking to avoid these outcomes, I recommend considering whether you are truly eating enough each day. This likely means eating beyond what hunger cues alone would lead you to eat.

What might those other factors be? That’s where today’s blog post comes in!

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