Tag: eating disorder

by Libby

5 Nutrition & Exercise Goals to Consider (Other than Directly Pursuing Weight Loss)

Something I talk about with clients a lot is the idea that we can’t DIRECTLY control our weight or body size… however difficult that may be to accept, we can’t go out and magically choose to automatically be our perfectly desired size.

That doesn’t mean throwing all care about our health and wellness out the window… far from it!! On the contrary, I see pursuing life-giving healthy behaviors (which we can generally control) as the best path to improved health, not first and foremost fixating on weight loss or changing your body size.

Letting go of fixating on weight is not the same as letting go of caring about your health!

Actually, I see fixating on weight as generally being detrimental to health. You can read some more about my thoughts on weight here.

“Weight loss” or “body change” are not actions we can go out and directly “do” or make happen. Nor do those things necessarily mean improved health! When we instead choose to focus on caring for ourselves well physically through behaviors we can actually do and control, we can trust we are on the path to improved health. When combining this approach with addressing any underlying root issues (such as environmental toxins, hormonal imbalances, gut issues, etc.) that are preventing our bodies from being in balance despite healthy behavior changes, our actions are likely to lead our bodies to the sizes at which they are the healthiest. This could mean losing weight, gaining weight, or staying roughly the same. I see the point as better health, not a specific weight or size goal.

I am all about self-improvement and setting intentions. Not focusing on weight does NOT mean “giving up on health progress.” Instead of pursuing weight loss as a goal, here are 5 behavior-oriented nutrition & exercise goals to consider! Maybe one or two will resonate with you depending on where you are currently at in your own health and wellness journey.

5 Nutrition & Exercise Goals to Consider (Other than Directly Pursuing Weight Loss):

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by Libby

4 Indicators of a Healthy Relationship with Exercise

Sports, exercise, and less-structured general activity are all aspects of life I have enjoyed and been passionate about for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I loved running around outside playing various games and sports with my brothers, neighbors, and friends. I tried a number of different sports throughout elementary school and eventually ended up focusing primarily on soccer and basketball throughout late elementary school, middle school, and the start of high school.

This was mostly fun for me, but as time went on, I started to experience more and more pressure internally when it came to sports and athletic performance. I felt I had to be as good as I could be and increasingly feared any sort of self-perceived failure.

Once I started high school, this fear of failure + internalized pressure led me to train even more obsessively for sports, particularly basketball. The girls basketball culture at my high school was also relatively intense, which didn’t help my fears + obsessive tendencies.

The fall of my freshman year I would go to basketball shooting practice before school a couple of times a week, participate in (mandatory) gym class daily, and go to weightlifting or other basketball skills/conditioning training after school a few times a week. I was also still playing travel soccer (practices + games) on top of all this!

This increase in activity at the start of high school (combined with not seriously increasing my nutrition, which was more ignorance at the time rather than an intentional restrictive decision) significantly contributed to my spiral into an eating disorder. While this aspect of my story isn’t the main focus of this particular blog post, I mention all this to highlight how obsessive and unhealthy my relationship with exercise had become by the time I was finishing my first year of high school. As my weight started to decrease, I increasingly felt addicted to and compelled to exercise more and more.

[Side note on this which I hope to explore further in a future blog post: researchers have discovered a similar neurobiological phenomenon (the urge to exercise increasingly more when eating less) in animal models. From Carrie Arnold’s book, Decoding Anorexia: “In the 1960s, researchers discovered that if you limited a rat’s access to food and simultaneously allowed it to run on its wheel as much as it wanted, the rat would rapidly run itself to death, a phenomenon that looked eerily similar to what psychologists diagnosed as anorexia nervosa. The researchers called this behavior activity-based anorexia.“]

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by Libby

How to Know if You Are at a Healthy Weight for Your Body

We all have a unique, largely genetically determined, weight range at which we are generally likely to be our healthiest. I might be healthy at my current size but it would almost certainly be unhealthy for me if I were to lose or gain a significant amount of weight.

I have my own unique body size / weight range and you have yours. Which is why, in the absence of further context, fixating solely on weight is not usually useful when we are trying to understand our own or someone else’s health status. The same weight may be healthy for one person and extremely unhealthy for another.

If knowing your weight alone isn’t necessarily helpful, what are other contextual markers and potential clues we can use to discern if we are at a generally healthy weight for our own unique genetics and overall well-being?

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by Libby

Some Thoughts on Fullness + Thanksgiving Recipe Ideas!

Happy Wednesday! How is your week going so far? We went to one of my friends from high school’s wedding on Saturday and then church + celebrating Alec’s bday with my side of the family on Sunday. It also went from 60s/70s/sunny to 20s/30s/snowy/cold rain in the past week… I suppose it is goodbye to fall!

Can you believe it is already Thanksgiving next week? We have plans to spend the week in Iowa with Alec’s side of the family. I always enjoy getting away for a few days and seeing family (+ meeting our newest nephew!).

How do you feel about Thanksgiving? I know for some of my clients and for many people in general, Thanksgiving can be a source of stress, anxiety, and discomfort. For anyone struggling in their relationship with food, the holidays can be a tough time to navigate. (On top of any usual family and/or disruption of routine stressors!)

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, I wanted to share a brief post today on some thoughts regarding FULLNESS. (Plus some fun Thanksgiving recipes!)

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by Libby

A Few Things That Helped Me in Recovery

Recovering from an eating disorder was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I don’t even think there is a particularly close second?? There is a reason recovery rates for anorexia are generally estimated to be below 50% (and I would argue probably considerably lower, depending on one’s definition of “recovery”), and that it is the mental illness with the highest mortality rate. Not only is it a severe mental illness, but unlike other mental illnesses, the sufferer is literally physically starving themself to death as a result of the internal mental and biological processes gone astray. To make matters worse, the person generally doesn’t realize they are even sick (at least not initially or for a while), and the “anorexia brain” causes the person to not want to get better and to maintain the eating disorder at all costs (again, at least initially).

IT IS A TERRIBLE THING, LET ME TELL YOU! And I have tremendous compassion for anyone reading this post who is suffering or who knows someone who is.

From my own experience and considering the experiences of other people I have talked to or read from, the downward spiral into full-blown anorexia is usually very sharp and sudden. While I have a lot more insight now, when I broadly look back on my experience, it is like I was walking…walking…walking…going about my life, and then suddenly it was like I fell off a cliff and was helplessly consumed by this devastating thing in my mind I had no control over and didn’t even realize was there. Anorexia, from my experience, was like this out-of-body, dissociative experience of devastation taking place inside my mind with drastic physical consequences. While the downfall into anorexia is often sudden, the full climb out is long and challenging, taking a tremendous amount of motivation and perseverance.

However, I believe that full recovery is possible for anyone, no matter how serious the illness or how long it has been a problem in your life.

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by Libby

Exploring Different “Types of Hunger”

When many people first hear of Intuitive Eating, they tend to think it is simply about eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are full. While this is certainly an important part of being an intuitive eater, eating intuitively goes well beyond responding to our physiological hunger/fullness cues. In this post we will explore some of the other kinds of “hungers.”

This concept of “types of hungers” is introduced in the Intuitive Eating book and I will elaborate and expand a bit more in terms of how I tend to think about it. Of course, generally when we think of feeling hungry we are talking about a physiological drive to eat. Everyone experiences physiological hunger in slightly different ways, often some combination of a grumbling stomach, lightheadedness, irritability, difficulty concentrating, etc. For the purposes of this post, we will explore hunger as a concept of various drives/reasons to eat including and beyond just physical hunger.

Let’s explore some of the different types of hunger!

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by Libby

What is Intuitive Eating?

This post was first published on January 13, 2021. As many of you are newer to the blog, I wanted to repost it today as the principles of intuitive eating are relevant for much of my nutrition philosophy! 

Today I want to spend some time discussing what intuitive eating is, as this framework of eating underlies much of what I believe and talk about when it comes to food. When I first learned about intuitive eating towards the end of high school, it greatly helped me in my recovery from an eating disorder and in improving my relationship with food.

The intuitive eating framework was developed by two dietitians, Eveyln Tribole, M.S., R.D.N., and Elyse Resch, M.S., R.D.N. The first edition of the book, Intuitive Eating, was published in 1995, and the fourth (and most recent) edition was published in June of 2021. The book goes in depth on the ten principles of intuitive eating (which I will describe more below) and is a resource I would HIGHLY recommend if you are interested in learning more! (*There is also a workbook that you can get to go along with the book that is also really helpful!) Since the publication of the book, there have been over 100 studies on intuitive eating, validating its effectiveness when it comes to improving one’s overall health (both physical and mental), including one’s relationship with food.

Intuitive eating is a way of eating that focuses on tuning into your own internal bodily cues, mind, emotions, and overall intuition. It places emphasis on the reality that our bodies know best what/when/how much to eat – better than an app or calorie tracker, a meal plan, or a diet (or “lifestyle/wellness plan”) – YOU yourself innately have the ability to eat in a way that cares for YOUR body and YOUR specific needs at any given point in time.

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by Libby

Bringing Awareness to Food Rules

If you have been trying to diet for any length of time or experience any degree of disordered eating, you likely have a number of food rules that you follow, whether you are conscious of them or not. Creating food rules is an anxiety and fear-driven way to try and “manage” one’s eating. If you follow your food rules (however arbitrary they may be), you are doing “well'” with your eating and your anxiety is minimal. If you break any of the food rules, you “messed up,” ate “badly,” “cheated,” and/or experience guilt and anxiety.

Examples of food rules include the following:

  • Only eating dessert once a week on your “cheat day”
  • Excluding entire food groups
  • Only eating what you measured/planned even if you are still hungry
  • Refusing to eat what other people prepare (out of anxiety / not being able to control or know for sure what’s in the food)
  • Only eating ____ calories per day and obsessively tracking this
  • Only consuming dessert if you plan to “work it off” later
  • Only eating at set times, even when you are hungry at other times

Of course, it is helpful to have some structure to our eating. I generally eat at similar times each day and have other intuitive, broad patterns to my eating. I would consider this normal, and also helpful so that we are not constantly “starting from scratch” completely wondering how and what and when we are going to eat each day. In addition, some people follow certain “rules” for medical/health reasons that are not rooted in fear or anxiety – for example, a type 1 diabetic counting her carbs, or someone mindfully avoiding less sugar right before bed because she knows she is prone to not being able to sleep otherwise.

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by Libby

Moving from Restriction & Obsession to Freedom with Food

We have all likely noticed from experience that when something we want or need is in short supply, or even perceived to be in short supply, we can become anxious or obsessive in our thinking about the thing that is limited (or perceived to be limited). This can apply to many areas of our lives, whether it is money, time, relationships, food, clothing, or other material items.

I know for me, I find myself struggling with this a lot in the area of time. I tend to too often live in this perpetual “emergency, fight-or-flight state” of feeling like I don’t have enough time, even though there is generally plenty of time to do the things that I want or at least need to do. When I feel like time is in short supply I end up feeling anxious and obsessive about time. This leads to unpleasant side effects like jam-packing my days, running through the day at too fast a pace, and a lack of margin, rest, and presence. When I was studying for my RD exam, I perceived and experienced such scarcity of time (whether that was self-induced or not is another question…) that even when I had a bit of time to rest on the weekends it was hard for me to fully rest and relax because I was anxiously and obsessively worrying about the lack of adequate time to rest!

This type of thinking is what can be thought of as a scarcity mindset. A scarcity mindset is when you are experiencing or perceiving a lack of something, leading to obsessive thinking about the thing that is limited (in actuality or in your perception). While time is one of the biggest ways I experience this now, I certainly used to experience this a lot with FOOD and still can from time to time (albeit in more normal and at times, unavoidable ways).

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