Eating Disorder Awareness Week
“Flexibility in your food choices is healthy. Eating a variety of foods is healthy. Focusing on enjoying your food is healthy. Not stressing about your food is healthy.” - Unknown
Hello Dear Ones,
This week is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. I know it may be a bit of a surprise to see a message from me about this in your inbox, the truth is, while I’m still passionate about helping women who feel stressed out, exhausted, and overwhelmed manage their stress – I found that oftentimes my clients in this area struggle with a disordered relationship with food.
In the fall of this past year, I decided to get some education about how to help them with that, because I too have had a disordered relationship with food and while the relationship has improved, I wanted actual tools to be able to help others.
Most of us are aware of what anorexia and bulimia are. Beyond that, there’s not much discussion about eating disorders. I feel like this is important to share because many of us struggle with our eating behaviors and our relationship with food. Food is something we need to survive. We cannot cut it out to cease an addiction like smoking or alcohol.
I’ve been humbled by the number of people who’ve shared their experiences with their relationship with food, eating, and how they feel in their bodies with me over the past several months.
I hope this week of awareness can help open the conversation and encourage us to share how we’ve felt in our bodies and in our relationship with food. No one deserves to struggle with this alone when so many people are impacted by it.
The most common disorder is binge eating disorder (BED). People with BED may show some of these signs:
Feel that they don't have control over their eating behavior, for example, they can't stop once they start. It may feel like an out-of-body experience, they don’t even know what’s happening until the food is consumed.
Often eating much larger than usual amounts of food in a specific amount of time, such as over a two-hour period.
Eating even when you're full or not hungry.
Eating very fast while binge eating.
Eating until they're uncomfortably full.
Often eating alone or in secret.
Feeling depressed, disgusted, ashamed, guilty, or upset about their eating behavior.
People with emotional or binge eating disorders may go through periods where they restrict or eat according to a more rigid plan to severely cut back on their eating as well.
It’s also the most gender-neutral of all eating disorders, with 60% impacted being women and 40% being men.
Most people who struggle with emotional or binge eating have some of these traits:
They’re a perfectionist, they find themselves with an “all or nothing” mindset, so they’re either doing it all right or all wrong
They’re people pleasers, meaning they find taking care of themselves at the bottom of their list of priorities and they struggle to think about themselves as being anything but the person who helps everyone else or the “fixer”
They feel shame about their eating habits and have thoughts like, “if they only knew”
Have a deep-seated sense of unworthiness with thoughts like, “I don’t deserve to be happy,” “I don’t deserve to be loved,” or “I don’t deserve to feed myself properly”
Here’s what I’ve learned in healing my own relationship with food, and now getting to help others with this as well. First, boundaries, self-compassion, and mindfulness are essential in helping heal our relationship with food. Second, there’s some real work to do on our mindset and habits related to food, eating, and how we think about and treat our bodies. Third, there is a way to find freedom from the never ending thoughts about food and food rules that so many people live with.
This past week I recorded a masterclass that’s all about how to Feel Good About Food. Because you’re all signed up to get these letters already, you get instant access!
You can find the 25-minute masterclass here.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
If you’re someone who struggles in your relationship with food and you’d like some support, let’s talk. I offer free 45-minute consultations and would love to connect with you and see if I can help. As a second option, I’ve just launched my new Eating Freely Hybrid Program, and you can try the first session for free!
With love and kindness,
Jessica
P.S. The fun thing I’ve done this week is dive into my playlists. As a fun addition to this week of awareness. I created a Spotify playlist for Eating Disorders Awareness Week. You can find it here.
I often turn to music as a stress reliever or to help me work through heavy feelings. This playlist has some body positivity tunes and tunes that get right to the heart of what many of us feel when we’re struggling with our bodies. *Warning some of the songs may have some explicit lyrics so if those are not your thing you may want to skip or skim the list ahead of time. Hope you enjoy!
