Category: Eating disorders
-
Letting go of food restriction is like leaving a toxic friendship
A must-read for health professionals supporting restrictive eaters You don’t need to have gone through the same disordered eating issues your clients have in order to help them. But it can be difficult to understand how they’re feeling, so you can easily get frustrated when their progress stalls or they push back against your advice……
-
The video that got me put in Instagram jail
What do you think? Was I out of line with this take on eating disorders? It was going viral, of course. Raking in hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of days. Every time I opened the Instagram app on my phone, I was flooded with hundreds of notifications of comments, likes, and shares.…
-
Being good all day then binge eating at night? Try this
This tried-and-tested binge eating hack will transform the way your clients (and yourself) perceive binge foods “I’m really good for most of the day. It’s the evenings where I lose it. I’ll open a packet and it’s like I can’t stop eating until it’s all gone. I try really hard not to keep those foods…
-
Are eating disorders contagious?
From tics to fainting, strange behaviours can spread through social contagion. Eating disorders are not exempt. How can we combat the spread? In 2011, a cheerleader at a small high school in the small town of Le Roy, New York starting twitching and spasming on and off. A few weeks later, the captain of the…
-
Self-worth and the algorithm
Social media use and disordered eating patterns often go hand in hand. Why is that, and what can we do about it? We’ve all done it. You watch one social media clip that shows someone’s before and after of losing weight… Next thing you know, What I Eat in a Day videos keep appearing on…
-
The missing piece in coaching disordered eating clients (and how to find it)
If you’ve ever felt unsure when coaching disordered eating clients, you’re not alone – there’s just a key piece you haven’t been taught yet With two degrees under my belt and having healed my own relationship with food, I thought I’d find working as a dietitian in the community rewarding and meaningful… But I was…
-
Overcoming the fear of weight gain
Many clients struggle with the fear of weight gain if they are not restricting food. Here are some practical steps to overcome this. Many of my clients already know they’re stuck in a disordered eating pattern. Talking it through is helpful for them to pinpoint how the restrict-binge cycle is affecting them, but knowing it…
-
BMI is broken – and it’s hurting people
BMI is a flawed proxy health measure, but its frequent use can feel out of your control. What can you do to mitigate the harms of BMI? Once upon a time, a woman in her 30s nervously shuffled into her doctor’s office. Her obsession with her weight was at an all-time high and she knew…
-
The power of neutral food language
Health professionals have the power to either plant the seed of change, or to reinforce diet culture, with the language they use around food Have you ever caught yourself saying something about food and then low-key regretted it straight away? Maybe you said that chips were your “guilty pleasure”, or that you’d “earned” that slice…
-
Disordered eating signs no one taught us
Dietitians, nutritionists and health coaches often get zero training on disordered eating, so not knowing the red flags is actually normal When I was studying, I was told that disordered eating was a specialty and if I wanted to learn more about it, I would have to pursue that myself after I graduated. Considering it…