Ep 35. The Eating Spectrum Explained | My Lived Experience as a Practitioner

I’ve lived at every stage of the eating spectrum - from normal eating, to disordered eating, to recovery and intuitive eating. In this episode, I unpack what each stage looks like in practice, and why recognising the messy middle matters so much in naturopathy and holistic care. For practitioners and anyone curious about the overlap between wellness culture and disordered eating.

We explore:

• The eating spectrum - from intuitive eating to clinical eating disorders, and why most clients sit in the messy middle.
• My lived experience moving through every stage of the spectrum, and how it shapes my practice today.
• How naturopathic and wellness programs like Metabolic Balance (yep, I’m going there!) - along with elimination diets and food sensitivity testing - can look “scientific” but actually fuel disordered eating.
• Why early recognition and referral saves lives
• A sneak peek at upcoming episodes, including a full deep dive on Metabolic Balance.

You'll also hear about my upcoming online course, Disordered Eating for Naturopaths, launching mid-2026. Sign up to the waitlist and receive a bonus when enrolments go live!

LINKS:

Casey's website: https://www.funkyforest.com.au
Casey's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/funky.forest.health
Casey's Instagram: @funky.forest.health

Non-Diet Naturopath Instagram: @nondietnaturopath  https://www.instagram.com/nondietnaturopath/

Jump on the waitlist for Disordered Eating for Naturopaths

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https://www.funkyforest.com.au/a-modern-yogis-bs-free-guide-to-wellbeing.html

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Non-Diet Naturopath. I'm Casey Conroy and thanks for joining me. I'm coming to you today from the unceded lands of the Jinnaburra and Gubbi Gubbi peoples and I want to pay my deepest respects to them, to elders past and present and to all First Nations people. So this episode is called The Eating Spectrum Explained, My Lived Experience as a Practitioner. The Eating Spectrum really isn't just theory. It's something I have walked through myself. And in this episode, I want to unpack what each stage can look like and why recognizing the messy middle matters for practitioners supporting clients with food struggles and to be honest, anyone with food struggles so that they can recognize where they might be on that spectrum. Before we dive in, I just want to give a quick content note. So in this episode, I I'll be sharing some of my own lived experience with disordered eating. I won't go into graphic detail, but if you're in a tender place right now, please take care while listening and step away if you need to move on to another episode. I am totally fine with that and I totally get it. And I also want to say this, sharing lived experience is not necessary for every practitioner. Some of the best clinicians I know don't disclose their own stories and that's a completely valid choice. For me, I do choose to share parts of my story because it helps break down stigma and there's just too much stigma around disordered eating and eating disorders as it is. I also share because it shows that recovery is possible and it keeps my clients and my is not just theory it's something very real it's something I've walked through myself and it's something that now deeply informs how I practice and one last quick note before we dive right in all the resources references and a written blog version of this episode are already up on my website funkyforest.com.au so if you want to read along grab the citations or share this with a colleague or a friend you can head there after you listen So here we go. As naturopaths, herbalists, Chinese medicine practitioners, holistic practitioners, many of us see clients who are quietly struggling with food. And here is the kind of tricky thing. They rarely walk in and say, hi, I think I have an eating disorder. And honestly, would you? Like if I think back to when I was struggling the most with eating and food and my body I would have said that I had gut issues um or I was just really tired um or my triathlon race times were getting slower more about that later my periods are irregular or they've just stopped um or that I just want to be healthier so it's very rarely named outright instead your clients can show up with gut issues fatigue hormonal symptoms or weight and body image concerns. And if we're not careful, the way we respond can either help them move toward healing or unintentionally push them further into disordered eating, especially in naturopathy. So facts, disordered eating is far more common than diagnosed eating disorders. According to the National Eating Disorders Collaboration, NEDC, disordered eating behaviors, so things like restrictive dieting, compulsive exercise, binge eating, these things occur on a continuum and affect a much larger proportion of the population than clinical eating disorders. And I've done like a pretty little infographic. I'm so proud of myself. It's up on my blog. It's on my social media. So if you want to get a visual of this, that's where you can find it. So research suggests that while around 10% of Australians will experience a diagnosable eating disorder in their lifetime, many more folks engage in disordered eating behaviours. So some studies have shown rates as high as 60% of adolescent girls, which is terrifying, and nearly 30% of adolescent boys. which also sucks. And these studies report behaviours like dieting, binging or purging at some point. So if you're listening and thinking, oh, you know, that doesn't apply to my clients. They're just here for hormones or gut health or fertility or whatever. Chances are it does. One of my amazing mentors, Fiona Sutherland says, if you see humans, if you see people in your clinic, you are seeing disordered eating. guaranteed well that's my add-on the guaranteed disordered eating is everywhere in practice and if you don't spot it you will miss it and this is why I'm doing this episode this is why I'm doing this podcast and a lot of the work that I'm doing because it kind of drives me crazy that in naturopathy in natural medicine this is such a blind spot like I remember when I was lecturing at one of the major naturopathies naturopathic colleges and I was doing student clinical practicum the words escape me right now I was supervising nutrition students in their final stage of their clinical section of their degree and it was like no formal training in this okay that's not great because it would turn up Almost every time I was showing up for my shift in supervision, it would be walking through the door. It would be in a repeat class. Yeah, it is everywhere. And international studies show similar trends to those teenage studies with dieting and disordered eating behaviours affecting a large proportion of adults as well. Disordered eating symptoms have risen sharply in recent decades and really Reasons why is a whole other conversation. But between the late 1900s and the mid 2000s, that was a fun time for anyone who was growing up then. Super fat phobic time in history. But I digress. Between the 1900s and the mid 2000s, the prevalence of weekly binge eating more than doubled, according to these international studies, while strict dieting and purging behaviors increased nearly four fold. What a the F, alongside declines in quality of life. Well, duh, like if you're going to have disordered eating, your quality of life is going to go down. So this all means that most of our clients are not in a perfectly happy, healthy place with their eating or with food and their bodies. And also, it's really only a minority that have diagnosed eating disorders. Many folks are sitting in that messy middle zone. And this is exactly where practitioners can eat. that cause harm or provide vital potentially life-saving support. So as I've mentioned eating behaviors exist on a spectrum so just in your head if you can't have a look at my beautiful infographic which I'm super proud of just picture a line running left to right there is yeah and there's like five kind of different points on that spectrum that I'm about to describe there's a lot more that can can be said about each of these points but I'm just going to list the main dot points with the resources that you can check out to learn more about each if you wish in the blog. So at the far left of the spectrum sits intuitive eating which is an evidence-based framework created by US dietitians Evelyn Tripoli and Elise Resch. Intuitive eating goes beyond so-called normal eating by actively rejecting diet culture which I am so here for and reconnecting people to their hunger fullness satisfaction and intrinsic values intuitive eating is flexible it's compassionate and it's protective against disordered eating and I can tell you from experience that getting here takes work it definitely took work for me it's not about eating perfectly or meditating over every mouthful or eating mindfully like I don't know anyone who can really do that all the time but intuitive eating is about values and trust I'll probably do a whole episode on this later because intuitive eating is very often misunderstood and actually in some cases used to perpetuate diet culture but in summary intuitive eating is a structured evidence-based model created by these two dietitians who are incredible it goes deeper than normal eating so it's about actively attuning to internal cues. Things like hunger, fullness, satisfaction, emotions. It's this interoceptive awareness that we really focus on in intuitive eating. We really focus on developing that. And the other part of intuitive eating is that it explicitly rejects diet culture and the systems that uphold it. So I'm along with external food rules. Intuitive eating includes 10 principles, so things like honoring hunger, challenging the food police, respecting fullness, and coping with emotions without food. And it's often used therapeutically in recovery from chronic dieting or disordered eating. So an example of intuitive eating, just say you notice gentle hunger, you're just starting to get hungry, and you decide to eat lunch. um you choose tuna pasta for example because it sounds satisfying and you like it and you stop when you feel comfortably full and you don't label the food as good or bad and you kind of just get on with your day afterwards and we don't really stress or worry or even think about that meal um okay so next on the spectrum is so-called normal eating and I put normal in um quotation marks because normal's just you know what's normal but I'm just going to go with it. So this is a term I guess you could say was coined by Alan Satter, who some of you might be familiar with, developed the division of responsibility. He was just on the tip of my tongue model around feeding children. But basically, normal eating, I just see this as balanced, adequate, relaxed eating. There's not much thought or fuss. When I think of the poster child for normal eating I think of well a child you know someone around age three or four who is responding purely to their innate bodily cues but they aren't actively you know resisting diet culture on account of not knowing it exists yet you know people eat three meals a day give or take sometimes more sometimes less sometimes there's dessert sometimes there's not it's good enough eating it's flexible It's socially integrated. But it's not necessarily deeply attuned like intuitive eating is. And that's okay. Not everyone needs to be an intuitive eater. So with normal eating, there's no obsession with rules. But it's, as I kind of alluded to, it's also not necessarily deep in terms of body awareness. It's good enough eating. It's adequate. It's varied. It's relaxed. So another example, you eat toast and eggs for breakfast. breakfast you might have a sandwich for dinner oh sorry a sandwich for lunch um a tuna pasta for dinner and sometimes you overeat at a birthday party sometimes you skip a meal when you're busy but overall it kind of just balances out and so notice how normal eating isn't about green smoothies or macro tracking or intermittent fasting it's the kind of flexible relaxed day-to-day rhythm that many of us had as kids before diet culture and raised its ugly little head all right we're up to disordered eating so let's just pause on the messy middle here that is disordered eating this is what I'm most passionate about this is where most of our clients are sitting and I did say most um maybe that's not a fair you know it just depends on your practice is where most of my clients are sitting I can say that um even if they don't realise it. And here's the uncomfortable and tricky part. It often looks a lot like what we, as naturopaths and herbalists and nutritionists, have been taught to recommend. I know, eek. So just think about some of the diets that get packaged up as scientific, personalized or clinical. I'm going to start with metabolic balance. Yes, I'm going there. Metabolic balance is marketed as an individualized nutrition plan. But in practice, we've got rigid food lists, weighing every portion, strict meal timing rules. If you've got a client already struggling with food and body image, this is like throwing Karo on a fire. And I'm actually planning an entire episode on metabolic balance soon because it's been pissing me off for a long time. Because while it's super lucrative and it looks professional, it is basically dieting in a lab coat. And that annoys me. So stay tuned for that one. What else have we got in the disordered eating realm within the Troubly? We've got things like elimination diets without reintroduction. So, you know, there are many clients who are left, you know, years later, they're still avoiding gluten, dairy, FODMAPs or entire food groups, carbs, for instance, because no one ever supported them to bring those foods back in once the gut healing work is done, if it was ever completed. And I'm not pointing my finger at practitioners here. I mean, clients move around. Sometimes they come for one or two consults and they don't come back and you don't know why and And off they go and they've been put on an elimination diet and oh my effing God. But this can be a slippery slope because these elimination diets, which are meant to be very short term because they're so damn restrictive, they can become long term restriction under the guise of gut healing. And as we know, or as you might know, this is not good for microbiome health. We need variety and we need a lot lot of variety for gut healing we need carbohydrates we need um yeah we we need to be able to form short chain fatty acids and all of that is made harder on these restrictive elimination diets what else have we got we've got detoxes and cleanses so this is a little more on our radar now as naturopaths um maybe not so back in the old days when people were doing liver cleanses and pooing out hundreds of rabbit pellets by eating gallon drinking gallons of olive oil and all this weird shit but um nonetheless it's still on our radar these things they might be framed as wellness rituals like doing a i don't know a seasonal juice cleanse or um you know a three-day detox of some sort where we are just eating vegetables and not much else um but these things they often end up being socially acceptable starvation and i've seen so so many clients bounce between, you know, spring juice fasts and intermittent fasting and then binging and then feeling like they're failures when their bodies rebel against the deprivation, which of course most people's bodies will do eventually. And then there's good old food sensitivity testing. Don't even get me started. I have a whole email series devoted to this that I'm actually going to take off my website soon because I think I want to get that information out in a more like easy to access way but basically you know a client might ask for food sensitivity testing or it might be recommended by a naturopath they get this big list of pretty color printouts backs like 14 pages of foods that the clients are told to avoid it's a really long list they're told to avoid them indefinitely and it can be exciting and like kind of curious because you know you see this really pretty list that clearly delineates oh these foods are what you should avoid when really yeah I have a lot of thoughts about that. I won't go into that because I'm going to try to stay focused on the main topic but obviously this can become bad because when your life is ruled by fear and avoidance of a bunch of foods that obviously is not a great place to be. So the tricky thing about all these is that these programs for the most part look professional you know printouts metabolic balance where you you know your recommendations are apparently based on blood tests which by the way to me is not naturopathic practice you need to look at the whole person not just blood tests but again I digress I have to like hold myself back there there'll be another episode devoted to that um you know these things look professional they wear the kind of lab coat of science but underneath they're the same rigid fear-based rules okay that drive clients further into disordered eating why does this matter um because if we don't stop and critically examine what we're recommending we risk being complicit in pushing clients along that spectrum from maybe from disordered into diagnosable eating disorders or subclinical eating disorders and this goes directly against the naturopathic principle of first do no harm. And I get it because so many of us were exposed to disordered patterns from childhood, whether it's like parents passing their diet mentality onto kids, kids who were started on Weight Watchers at age 10 or 12 by a concerned parent, almond mums, you know, sadly these parents were also products of diet culture themselves. But we've got to remember that dieting is one of the evidence to show this and while often nowadays these diets are marketed as healthy lifestyle or science-based you know it's dieting and research shows that dieting increases the risk of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder as well as chronic disordered eating. So in summary here are the things that might be clues your client is experiencing disordered eating. They're driven by dieting, food rules and or weight preoccupation and again this is a bit tricky because some of us practitioners if we're honest we're also somewhat driven by dieting food rules and or weight preoccupation it is so common I have seen enormous conversations on naturopathic facebook forums and private groups where we're talking about our own personal weight loss journeys and just oh it worries me um yeah that's a whole other thing but i digress again i'm gonna stay on track so other behaviors other clues your client might be experiencing disordered eating chronic dieting restrictive eating fasting strict intermittent fasting repeated juice feast i hate that i hate that term juice feast is not a feast you're starving on juice okay binge restrict cycles compulsive exercise frequent detoxes or cleanses These, hopefully, we already know are red flags. But it could also be a bit more subtle. It could be that eating seems seemingly normal, but that eating often comes with guilt or shame or even some rigid control rather than flexibility. You know, a client saying things like, oh, I ate these biscuits. I was so bad. That was so bad. And it's like, my ears prick up when someone says, I was good today or, oh, it was so bad last night. It's like, oh, I'm going to start like looking a little more closely into what their relationship with food and their body might be like there. They might have GI symptoms, so bloating, reflux, constipation, gastroparesis. These are often linked to under fueling or anxiety about food. That is a huge area and it's not always flagged first as disordered eating. You know, we might go down the SIBO pathway or you know some other kind of functional or structural GI issue but then maybe we forget about some of the behavioral things also disordered eating is just normalized in our culture right so just gonna point out the elephant in the room here clean eating intermittent fasting I know I've mentioned that a few times juice cleanses sometimes disordered eating is normalized by medical professionals in the case of over prescribing GLP-1 medications. I am seeing this a lot. GLP-1 medications used as a first or second kind of option when it comes to weight management and that makes it harder to recognize these behaviors as harmful for our clients or for us as well. Okay so even when the person's behaviors don't meet diagnostic criteria for an eating disorder, disordered eating can still damage physical health, mental well-being, relationships and self-esteem. It's so normalised in our culture that people often don't see it as a problem, right? Until it intensifies and pushes them further along the spectrum toward a clinical eating disorder. So we're getting towards the right side of our spectrum line here. We're at subclinical eating disorders. So just before diagnosable eating disorders is the category of subclinical eating disorders. These clients experience significant distress and impairment, but they don't meet all the DSM-5 criteria for a diagnosis. And because of this, they often slip through the cracks of healthcare. They may think they're not sick enough to deserve support, to use the words of the wonderful Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani. And yet their suffering is very real and very sick. And honestly, this is one of the most heartbreaking spaces to see clients in because they often feel invisible, like they're too unwell to function properly, but they're not unwell enough to get help, if you know what I mean. And that's why as naturopaths, noticing and validating this stage is so powerful and so important. The other shit thing is that not everyone with an eating disorder can access a formal diagnosis. That's a whole other conversation about accessibility that we will have to have at some point so it's vital to remember you don't need a diagnosis to deserve help if eating is rigid if it's chaotic or if it's tied up in shame support is warranted so how have I seen this show up in practice okay I think of a client who was binging you know two to three times a month rather than the diagnostic threshold of once a week but nonetheless less they're feeling intense guilt, significant distress, very poor quality of life. Someone who restricts food heavily for example might be another example but they don't meet the BMI cut-off for anorexia and yet they're still physically and psychologically very unwell. Atypical anorexia nervosa is something I educate GPs on often as it's the most common form of anorexia yet it's called atypical which is just a joke at this point but again i digress um so what else have i seen maybe a client who purges occasionally not that often and not frequently enough to meet criteria for bulimia nervosa but still like it's pretty distressing to make yourself vomit right um a person who's obsessive clean eating causes major social isolation and stress putting my hand up here i have been there um but at the same time they don't tick enough boxes for an official diagnosis my years wasted of missing out on potatoes it just kind of makes me sad and then there are you know clients who cycle between dieting and overeating but they just describe it as I'm just I've just got bad habits or I have no willpower and again this always breaks my heart as often these are some of the most accomplished and disciplined people I have ever met which I like to point out to them When they maybe bring up, oh, for the fifth time, I have no willpower. It's like, well, you've completed four degrees and you just finished a PhD. So I think you've got plenty of willpower. Yeah. So as you can see, these are not mild problems. They're significant struggles that impact health, relationships, quality of life, and they deserve support. So it's only now at the far right end of the spectrum that that we arrive at. eating disorders, clinically diagnosable eating disorders, you know, what people commonly think of, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, ARFID and OSFED, which used to be called EDNOS. These conditions meet strict diagnostic criteria and usually they require medical, psychological and dietetic care in a multidisciplinary setting. So, So what might this look like in clinics? So besides the clear symptoms of, you know, anorexia, binge eating disorder, ARFID or whatever they're presenting with, their eating behaviors dominate their daily life, their health and probably their identity. There's possibly some medical instability. So amenorrhea, periods have stopped or are just really irregular, but not always. Not a reliable sign that someone has an eating disorder. I'll be clear. I have a blog out all written all about that. They might have electrolyte disturbances or they might be fainting or there's dizziness or rapid weight loss. In my upcoming course, Disordered Eating for Naturopaths, I will be providing resources with all kinds of things to look out for and the different, you know, how serious each stage is for practitioners. That has helped me a lot in practice. You have to remember that these folks may not understand identify with the label eating disorder, but the severity is pretty evident and they need urgent referral to a GP, an eating disorder specialist psychologist and a dietician, ideally all three. I won't go into much more detail today on this, but it's important to remember that by the time a client is here, their eating disorder is rarely just about food. It's a serious mental health condition with significant medical risks and urgent, specialized support is needed. So if you're a naturopath, herbalist, you're seeing signs of medical instability. So those things I mentioned before, this is not a let's try some herbs moment. And I have a personal story about that that I'll share in a sec. You know, often, not always, but often the first thing that many naturopaths think of when amenorrhea is showing up is PCOS, right? Polycystic ovarian syndrome and I've seen this backfire terribly when the actual cause has been restrictive eating this came up um you know when I was supervising in the student clinic I remember it coming up again when I was an actual student in clinic and it's just like oh we're so trained to look for PCOS or like these um big like shiny diagnoses that we're all comfortable well relatively comfortable with maybe um whereas we might not be as comfortable with the fact that this person's been restricting their food for six months but they haven't shared that with us um so this is an urgent referral moment it can be anyway you're part of a team but you're not the whole team and we need to remember that it's it's good to have support and it's more than okay most clients in naturopathic and herbal practice won't identify with the words eating disorder i sure as hell didn't when i had one um but nonetheless even if they don't have a clinical eating disorder they're often sitting in the disordered or the subclinical zones and this is where practitioners need to tread most carefully so I'm going to talk now about my lived experience across the eating spectrum because remember the eating spectrum for me at least it's not just theory it's something I've lived it's in my memory I've despite my full recovery over a decade ago, I remember the high of starvation, the endless running, like it was yesterday. Like it was, you know, it's very clear in my memory. Um, I clearly recall the eerie peace that comes with eating only raw veggies for dinner or better yet skipping dinner. I know, like I just don't even, Oh, I'm just sending so much. love and compassion to that younger version of myself. And all of this deeply informs how I now work as a naturopath and a dietitian. So I guess from childhood to around age 15, for me, I was, as a kid, I was a pretty normal eater. You know, meals were regular, food was social. I didn't think too much about it at all. Around 15, 16 years of age, there was this like spark of health. Health in inverted commas. And I was like, And maybe like a lot of other teenagers who are into science and biology and health, I started flicking through the body and soul lift out in the Sunday mail. Does anyone remember that? Any elder millennials remember that? Anyway, that's when I first became interested in nutrition and I started adding more dairy in the form of cheese into my diet because I'd read that it was healthy. Despite cheese never being a real staple in my household because my mum was Asian, is Asian. and it was innocent enough but it really planted a seed you know I was a sensitive pretty anxious little kid I was pushed hard to succeed academically and so I started running through the bushland that I lived nearby for stress relief and to the surprise of myself and most other people who knew me as a total nerd this won me cross-country and athletics age champion titles in senior year which I found really exciting you know I saw very clearly the benefits of focusing more on my diet and exercise for health and performance and that was new to me, it was novel, it was cool. When I hit university, so like I was just turned 17 when I started uni but between like 17 and 20, my first degree was veterinary science so I don't use that degree directly today but it did teach me a lot about mainstream medicine, pharmaceuticals, surgery and I still respect those fields very deeply. Nonetheless vet school was a medical degree and it was intense so it was full-time study plus I had several part-time jobs and around this time I discovered Buddhism and yoga and I became part of a vegetarian community in Brisbane it was like the big smoke I moved from a very rural area a very um you know far north Queensland tiny coastal town to the big smoke of Brisbane and I came across all these incredible communities and there were such beautiful parts of this you know the community, other people like me, meditation, compassion but it also opened the door to orthorexia and keep in mind that this was the early 2000s, the age of skinny is everything and clean eating and the emerging wellness industry. A good friend at uni went vego with me and we would attend Buddhist courses together and it was so much fun and on the surface it looked healthy but beneath it was for me the beginning of very rigid rule-bound eating. So by the time I was 20 I was all in in the world of triathlon and long distance running and even I did a half Ironman in my final year of vet school. My boyfriend at the time was into raw veganism and fasting and juice cleanses and I just followed suit and looking back I was clearly in disordered eating at that point, if not a diagnosable eating disorder. Knowing what I know now, I'm not a doctor, so I can't diagnose, but knowing what I know, having worked with people with eating disorders for the last 10 years, I will likely have been diagnosed as having atypical anorexia nervosa with orthorexia mixed in, just for good measure. My intake was super low. My training was extreme, like we're talking hours a day. And my stress levels were through the roof. And probably comes as no surprise that my period stopped for nearly a year, which is never a good thing, right? I injured myself constantly. And despite eating so little, I actually gained weight due to, well, high levels of cortisol, I would say, and my body being super intelligent and adapting to semi-starvation. But as you might guess, that only made me restrict harder and feel like more of a failure. And again, at the time, I didn't think I had a problem. I thought I was pretty healthy, very healthy actually, that I was disciplined, that I was doing everything right. And that's exactly how your clients may present too. The only issue that I eventually sought advice for was the missing period. I just thought this is so convenient. I can do like off-road triathlon and not ever worry about period stuff but oh my god if only I knew what I know now at the height of my eating disorder I went to see a naturopath for my missing period I was prescribed false unicorn root and a handful of other powerful herbs to bring my period back which they did within like two weeks herbs are powerful so I just thought sweet problem solved and around the same time I saw an aromatherapist who gave me some beautiful smelling essential oils in a blend. I still have the bottle 15 years later and it smells beautiful. It's got clary sage and like other lovely things in it. And while those things had their place, none of them touched the root problem, which was my relationship with food and my body and my mental health. And that's what I want practitioners to know here is that when we only treat the symptom, and I know we bang on about this as naturopaths, like don't and treat the symptom, find the root cause. Well, guess what? Lots of naturopaths still treat the symptom. It's not always bad. Sometimes we need to treat the symptom. We need to calm the inflammation. We need to reduce the acne or whatever and then get to the root cause later. But sometimes we only treat the symptom just like GPs, just like we accuse GPs of doing. And in this case, it was a missing period. And the naturopath just did not deeply investigate what was happening for me or didn't know how. And they missed the deeper issue You know, the root problem wasn't a lack of false unicorn root, which by the way, super endangered herb, not suggesting you use it. It wasn't a lack of herbs that was my problem or even just like a little bit of stress. I had been missing my period for nearly a year and it was because I had highly disordered eating, probably an eating disorder. So let's fast forward to age 25. I ironically started my master's in nutrition and dietary And it was motivated by a really unhealthy obsession with food and a secret hope of learning the tricks to finally lose weight. Oh my gosh, just less I. It was very much diet culture disguised as professional ambition. And the fat phobia reinforced throughout that degree really did not help me heal from my disordered eating, although I did learn some nutritional science that started me questioning my limited and haphazard food choices. choices but not real enough to change you know by the time I was 26 27 I think that's when I reached the turning point so about a year after I graduated as a dietitian and spent my first year selling weight loss in a colonic hydrotherapy clinic uh I know anyway a lot of us have been there but anyway after that year everything shifted I stumbled across Rick Kaussman if not dieting then what and later the work of Evelyn Triboli and Elise Resch and for the first time I even remember where I was when I read Rick Cousins book I read it in half a day I remember where I was I was under this huge fig tree near my rental house that I was living in and it was the first time that I saw my own behaviors clearly I saw that what I was doing was not health it was harm and it was not serving me the way I had hoped for so long that it would so not long after I began therapy I connected with non-diet dieticians and I was inspired by their courage and their fire non-diet dieticians if you're listening to this you will know how rock solid and just friggin hardcore and epic you guys are it's just yeah it It really, really inspired me. And I also discovered feminism and I started seeing diet culture as part of a larger system of oppression. And I got really angry. I just got really pissed off and that anger really came out and it fueled change. So sometimes anger can paralyze, but in this case, it fueled change for me and positive change. I stopped overexercising I broadened my diet and I began the long process of healing. By the time I was in my late 20s, I was really relearning self-nourishment. At 29, I became pregnant for the first time and my body made its needs very, very clear. My iron levels were absolutely shocking and they plummeted even more when I got pregnant. And I remember making this liver pate, just knowing that it was high in iron, having never touched red meat for over a decade and then suddenly whipping it organ meats. I know. But it made this liver patter and I was so grossed out. But I put it in the jar once I'd blended it all up and I got a spoon and I was standing over the sink and I took the first spoonful into my mouth and I don't remember anything after. It was like I almost like blacked out. The next thing I remember was I was standing there and the jar was empty. I just smashed it. My body went I wanted more. And that was the moment I dropped veganism. I'm not by any means promoting like go primal or paleo, like fuck that. No. But for me specifically, I needed animal protein and specifically high iron stuff like liver. So I dropped veganism and that moment was really humbling. I just realised, you know, wow, my body knows what it needs if I'd only listen. So... Pregnancy, early motherhood, they're what finally taught me to nourish myself deeply. They were like another brick in the wall but an important one. And I stopped restricting and I stopped punishing myself. Into my early 30s, I had a personal trainer friend. So once I had my baby, he introduced me to strength training and I would bring my little boy who's now nearly 10, I would bring him along with me. me to my friend's strength training sessions which were really cool because he like was really skillful with what he did he started very very gentle and did a really good assessment of where my body was at which was basically quite weakened and overly elastic and flexible because I'd just been a yogi for so long and done nothing else but besides injuring myself a lot in long distance sports but for the first time the focus was not on shrinking my body it was on building it up you know thinking about strength and vitality and energy and power and this was such a revelation I'd never seen myself as a particularly strong powerful person but I was starting to and it felt incredible and it was yeah so helpful so throughout my 30s I continued my own psychotherapy I immersed myself in various counseling modalities eating disorders and chronic diet trainings I began working with clients bringing my lived experience into practice in tiny little drips and drabs and I finally learned what it meant to be an intuitive eater so flexible values aligned and actively giving the finger to diet culture like really pushing back and yeah that that just has lit my fire and it's it's still going my fire is still very much burning bright so why do I share this I've lived at every point along the spectrum from normal eating to full-blown orthorexia to recovery and intuitive eating and that journey is why I care so much about helping other practitioners recognize this messy middle and why I believe we can do better than simply repeating diet culture under the guise of wellness it is old and Yeah, it is time for change. If today's episode sparked ideas or you'd like to go deeper, I've gathered all the references and resources into a blog post on my website, funkyforest.com.au. You'll find everything there in writing along with links to further reading. And while you're there, don't forget, if you're all keen and if this is, you know, really firing you up, join the wait list for my upcoming course, Disordered Eating for Naturopaths. If you subscribe early, you will get a bonus when enrolments open. And by the way, I think this is the last thing I'll mention. I've got some more juicy future episodes planned, including one all about metabolic balance. Yes, I'm going there. Plus part two of this series. I might make this a three-part series, actually, because there's a lot to cover that I want to share with you guys. In part two, I'll show you the five red flags flags to look for in clinics I'll go into that more deeply signs that your clients gut complaints or their fatigue or their diet goals may actually be disordered eating in disguise so if this resonates please hit subscribe so you don't miss them and together let's change how naturopathy does eating disorder care because it's about time thanks guys sending lots of joy and excitement over sharing this with you with you beautiful listeners and until next time take

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