Category: Disordered Eating

The Wellness Diet Cycle

17/7/2019

The typical person I see in my clinic is female, in her 20s, 30s or 40s.

She goes to yoga and only shops at organic markets. She makes her own bone broth, vegetable juices, and paleo "treats" (because gut healing is good, and dairy and sugar are "bad").

She spends a small fortune on vitamins, probiotics and herbal supplements.

She is very health conscious, sometimes bordering on being obsessively so.

She has seen numerous health practitioners prior to seeing me.

And despite her utmost efforts to be healthy, she has long list of seemingly obscure health conditions. The list of signs and symptoms I see in these women goes something like this:

Headaches, migraines, intense cravings, cold hands and feet, sleep problems, rough dry skin, brittle hair, hair loss, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), dizziness, brain fog, low energy levels, low body temperature, constipation, low libido, bloating, indigestion, frequent need to urinate, anxiety, panic attacks, loss of muscle mass, heart palpitations, frequent colds and flu / thrush / UTIs / herpes outbreaks, unpredictable emotional swings, severe PMS, irregular periods, missing periods, infertility.

The woman in question usually doesn't have every single one of these (although some do), but she will have a significant number (around 80% or more) of them.

By the time they've come to see me, many of these women have attributed this long and baffling list of symptoms to candida. Or a food intolerance. Or simply "being too fat".

And they've come to the conclusion (via Google or some health guru) that the obvious solution is to embark upon yet another restrictive diet. Anti-candida, low-carb, paleo, keto, GAPS, SCD, vegan, intermittent fasting, and raw are the usual go-to's right now.

And herein lies the root of the problem.

The Big Thing most health-conscious people are missing (that's ruining their health)

Most of the women I see in clinic do NOT have a food intolerance, candida, or an allergy to grains. I should add that I have been trained to recognise and treat food sensitivity and intolerance so am well aware of what that looks like. Although it is a valid and very real issue, about ninety percent of the time, food intolerance is NOT the causative factor.

The root of these women's problems is this: They are trying too hard to be healthy and as a result, they are eating too restrictively.

The biggest mistake I see women making today is trying too hard to be healthy.

Intermittent fasting - is it for me?

26/6/2019

Intermittent fasting (or IF for short) is so hot right now. In fact it's been hot since it rose to fame with the arrival of Michael Mosley on the television and book publishing scene in 2012.

Basically, it means going an extended period without eating. Sounds technical AF, right? (Unlike plain ol' healthy eating and regular movement, which is clearly not sexy enough to attract the attention of the masses!)

IF is fancy-sounding enough to get the attention of those who want the next magic bullet that will help them lose weight and/or get healthier.

So, nearly everyone.

But especially those who already have issues with weight concern, body image, disordered eating or eating disorders - the folks I see the most often.

In actuality, almost all of us intermittently fast. Every night. When we are asleep. Not so sexy, I know. So let's talk a bit about the sexier, newer, more restrictive version.

periods, fertility & eating disorders

21/5/2019

"I have my period. So I mustn't have an eating disorder."

For years I thought that if a woman was menstruating regularly, she was displaying one of the ultimate signs of health.

I thought that if a woman had a regular period she must be well nourished. That the moment her caloric intake dipped below her requirements, her body would stop ovulating and periods would disappear.

That Mother Nature never lets our bodies grow babies - a highly energy intensive endeavour that demands massive amounts of resources - in a perceived famine.

For years, I was wrong.

In my time as an eating disorder dietitian, student naturopath, and having lived through an (undiagnosed but still very harmful) eating disorder, I have learnt a thing or two about periods and under eating. Here I'll attempt to bust some common myths around periods, fertility and disordered eating.

Body peace and permaculture: the parallels

4/3/2019

For some years I've been interested in organic gardening, particularly permaculture. Recently I've taken a deeper dive into this method of 'natural' farming within which is embedded a deep reverence for, and trust of nature. And I've realised that permaculture has some uncanny parallels to the non-diet approach and Health at Every Size movement I am so passionate about in my clinical practice. For the last 7 or so years I've been working with people with weight, food and body image concerns, from wanting to lose a couple of kilograms to life threatening eating disorders.

One of the greatest teachers of this method of farming is Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One-Straw Revolution. In this book Fukuoka describes his discovery of "do nothing" farming, where he creates situations where nature will do the work with the minimum of interference on his part.

So instead of spending hours ploughing the soil or spending money on adding chemical fertilisers to his crops, he simply chucks the rice straw back on the ground after harvesting it and scatters chook poo over it. Occasionally he sows clover to use as a green manure.

And that's pretty much it.

And rather than seeing everything turn into a wilderness and watching helplessly as the prickles take over, Fukuoka actually equals the yield of farms that have had these modern high intervention inputs applied to them, with a fraction of the investment of labour and resources.

What 'natural' farming can teach us about maintaining a "healthy" weight, naturally

Of course by "healthy weight" I don't mean what the BMI deems healthy. I adopt Dr. Rick Kausman's description of your healthiest weight being the most comfortable, natural weight for you - the weight your body naturally arrives at and maintains when we provide the right "soil" (see number 2). So here's what I gathered together in my current understanding of permaculture principles and my more deeply rooted understanding of HAES and the non-diet approach. The biggest parallels between permaculture, and the non-diet approach and HAES as roads to body peace, are:

Witches don't diet.

6/9/2018

It's 6am, and I'm tired but excited. My 8-month old baby girl, with whom I co-sleep, is up at 5:30am every morning crawling around our bedroom. As I type this she's pulling apart my pile of yoga props and dismantling the crystals, candles and oracle cards that decorate my bedroom altar.

But she's not the main reason why I'm particularly tired and simultaneously excited this morning. In the middle of the night I was up for over 2 hours as a bunch of information and the backbone of this blog, among other things, was downloaded seemingly out of nowhere into my mind, demanding to be written down. It happens from time to time. It's the only time I feel sleep deprived and am cool with it.

So.

Witches don't diet. Let me explain the title of this crazy midnight-inspired blog. Starting with the "witch" bit.

Witches

Up until recently I've felt really uncomfortable with calling myself a witch. My concept of a witch was someone who was a wise woman or man, and a respected elder of years past. One who was a healer, a shaman, a master of herbalism. One who helped and served others in his community. One who understood nature at a deep level, who communed with nature and viewed herself as a part of it, not in command of it.

In our climate of cultural misappropriation, and of hashtags like #witch, #witchvibes, and #blessed, it seemed cliché, cutesy, and just icky to label myself as a witch. I rejected the label and the bastardisation I believed (and still to some extent believe) went with it, much in the same way I once rejected yoga culture, hard.

Sure, I align my energy with the wheel of the year; I observe the sabbats, seasons, and the cycles of the moon.
I use multiple tools to connect with and sharpen my intuition, including but not limited to meditation, embodied practices like yoga.
I love nothing more than to spend hours wandering by myself in the forest - although these days I'm usually accompanied by little people.
I use divination tools such as oracle cards and occasionally scrying.
Despite being scared of ghosts, I feel the presence of long dead loved ones and communicate with them, not frequently but from time to time.
Most mornings I cast a circle, set an intention, burn sage, commune with my ancestors, journal, and/or read oracle cards.
I have had visions of past lives, my own and those close to me.
I have created multiple altars and sacred spaces around my home. My family is just used to having weird stuff including talismans and many sage sticks lying around the place.
I work with the elements of nature and use herbs daily, and crystals sometimes. The main reason I am undergoing a degree in naturopathy is to add clinical herbalism to my tool belt, yet I also talk to plants and try to connect with plant spirits.
I cast my first spell at age 17 and it worked so well I got frightened and didn't cast spells again until my late twenties when I decided I wanted to get pregnant. That, too, worked incredibly well.

Despite all of this, I have long rejected the label of witch. Not wanting to frighten my Christian friends, or freak people out, and not wanting to further disrespect the archetype of wise healer and elder I hold in my mind.

When my spiritual teacher unflinchingly pointed out that I was, indeed, a witch, I immediately recoiled. I told her I didn't feel comfortable with that term, that I felt it was overused and misused. Perhaps at some level, collective long held negative connotations and echoes of painful ancestral memories sounded through my psyche; the centuries when the word 'witch' led women to be tortured, drowned and burned at the stake stored as warnings in my cells.

She gently reminded me that "witch" comes from the word wicca, which means wise. Witchcraft in ancient history was known as "The Craft of the Wise" because most who followed the path were in tune with the forces of nature, had a knowledge of herbs and medicines, gave counsel and were valuable parts of the village and community as healers and leaders.

My teacher showed me that in my haste to retract from cultural misnomers and in my disdain of anything trendy, I had perhaps forgotten what a witch really is.

In the words of author Lisa Lister, a witch is "a woman in her power. She is wise, a healer, someone who is aligned with the cycles of Mother Nature and the phases of the Moon."

A witch is a woman in her power. Her intuition is strong and she listens to it and trusts it. She sharpens her intuition like a knife and uses it to cut through cultural bullshit, allowing her to stay true to herself. She knows the difference between intuition and the voices of fear.

I know many wise, intelligent, heartfelt people who meet this description. Social and environmental justice warriors fighting for gender equality, opposing weight stigma, and lobbying to stop deforestation. The fiercely compassionate and scientifically justified proponents of the Health at Every Size movement. Herbal medicine masters who are fighting to grant cancer patients access to plant medicine that could save their lives in a medical climate where natural medicine is viewed with suspicion and derision.

They are all witches. And so am I.

And if you're still reading this, chances are you are, too.

Intuition

I agree with the notion that a witch is a woman (or man, but I'm mainly talking to women within my platforms) in her power. And a woman can only be in her power by regularly listening to, honing, and trusting her intuition.

Intuition is rooted in the body. Think of the words we use to describe intuitive hunches: I had a gut feeling. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I felt it in my bones. I knew it in my heart.

Think of the times your intuitive, instinctual nature has kicked into gear. When somebody has stepped into your space and something feels "not quite right". When you know your child is in danger and you check they're still in their sandpit only to realise they're about to cross the road by themselves.

When you sense the presence of a loved one who has passed on, something around 75% of us report having experienced. When you recognise a soul mate or lifelong friend by how your heart feels and the tingles running down your spine. These are usually gut feelings, a body sense. Not calculations you've made in your head.

Dieting and the religion of thinness have cut down many a modern day witch, leaving a gaping hole in our collective wisdom and capacity to heal ourselves and others.

Dieting

Intuition is rooted in the body. Food rules keep you up in your head, disconnected from your body.

Food rules keep you up in your head, disconnected from your body. It's hard to notice your witchy hunches and intuitive body-felt messages when you're mostly in your head thinking about food, eating, and/or your body.

When you're spending hours googling gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free recipes instead of doing your practice, whatever that practice looks like for you.
Calculating, compensating and calorie budgeting instead of nurturing your innate gifts, talents and skills.
"Saving yourself" all day for a dinner out with friends and starving in the process, dwindling energy stores that you could otherwise have spent honing your craft.
Being so cut off from your hunger and/or fullness cues and your body, that intuitive messages seem a distant memory or a far off concept, rather than a daily normal experience.

It's hard to stay connected to your spidey senses if you've skipped breakfast AND lunch, all you can think about is how hangry you are and how you could probably hold out for another hour before you really "need" to eat.

So many women I know (myself included) do a bunch of weird shit that has the capacity to - consciously or otherwise - sharpen our intuition. We wear crystals, read oracle and tarot cards, journal, meditate, practice yoga... all in an attempt to "be more intuitive". Or more accurately, to connect us to the wisdom and intuition we already embody.

But food rules pull us right back out of our bodies and into our heads. You can wear a bone necklace made by a Hopi shaman, burn sage until the neighbours call 000, and do a three-hour headstand atop a giant piece of clear quartz... but as long as you're still stressing about how much sugar you ate yesterday, you're going to stay largely shut down to your intuition.

Intuitive eating

Intuitive eating, intuitive EVERYTHING.

For women whose slavery to the thin ideal has cut them off from their full witchy capacity, intuitive eating is a way to open a doorway to intuitive living. As I once heard another non-diet advocate say, "Intuitive eating, intuitive EVERYTHING."

Intuitive eating asks that we begin listening to the hunger and fullness cues of our bodies. But that's not all. It also offers ways to reject the diet mentality and let go of the religion of thinness so pervasive in our cultural and inherited conditioning.

One caveat: If you've been chronically dieting, or you're in a semi-starved state, listening to and honouring your hunger and fullness can be difficult and complicated. This is where getting help from a non-diet practitioner can be of great value to re-nourish your body first so you can begin to receive and interpret those messages correctly.

Witches don't diet

Witches don't diet. It's impossible to be deeply connected to your intuition while you're still tracking macros like there's no tomorrow, you're not eating enough, or you're deadly afraid of carbs.

Getting a balanced, satisfying and adequate intake of food can ease mood swings, panic attacks, anxiety, and mild depression. Mental health takes a dive when we're in a state of semi-starvation as the body struggles to construct all the neurotransmitters it needs to remain healthy. Intellectual clarity and intuition is improved when the mind receives proper nourishment.

It's time to stop wasting your energy on the illusion of weight loss or maintaining a low weight as if that's the most important thing in life. It's not.

Sister, we need you. Now is the time to hone your craft, shine your light and offer your healing gifts, and dieting is only stopping you from reaching your magical potential. The world needs your witchy-poo self, and it needs it now.

Author

Casey Conroy is an Accredited Practising Dietitian, eating disorder specialist, herbalist in training, yoga teacher, and coming-out-of-the-closet witch.

I'm recovering from an eating disorder: can I still be VEGAN?

18/10/2017

I work with a lot of yoginis and yogis, alternative lifestyle leaders, animal rights activists, and environmentally conscious folks. I also work in the field of disordered eating.

So naturally I often find myself in the situation where I'm chatting with somebody who is very keen to heal their troubled relationship with food... but they don't want to budge on their vegan ideals.

This person may have been through the psychological hell that is a full blown eating disorder...

... OR they may fall into the spectrum of disordered eating on the end of the continuum that wouldn't be classified as a clinical eating disorder, but disordered eating and disordered body image - an issue that faces a significant number of women in Australia.

OFTEN, they've experienced both.

The big question here is, "If I'm actively recovering from a clinical eating disorder - or any other form of disordered eating - can I be vegan and still get better?"

Dieting your sex drive away?

21/7/2017

Who doesn't love vagina cupcakes. Image courtesy filmjamblog.files.wordpress.com

I have a question for you.

Which one factor is absolutely fundamental to women having a healthy sex drive?

Is it having "the ideal body", which we're convinced will make us the desire of every man?
Is it owning and wearing the most exquisite lingerie you can buy?
Is it being a yogi - gymnast so you can act out the entire Kamasutra without breaking a sweat?
Is it re-training your brain to think, breathe and live sex by mulling over your sexual fantasies and doing libido-boosting visualisations daily?
Is it having a sexually adventurous, Samantha Jones-esque personality and not being afraid to search sex shops far and wide for the latest and greatest toys?
Is it being comfortable with and well-practised at masturbation so you're familiar with what your body likes?
Is it being assertive and vocal in bed, and being able to confidently ask for what you want?

It's NONE of these. Whilst some of these are important ingredients to a healthy sex life, there's a HUGELY fundamental sex drive-promoting necessity that's glaringly absent from this list.

The most important thing you can do as far as your desire for sex goes?

It's having enough fat on your body.

Yep, having enough or ample fat, not as little fat as possible.

If, like most women, you're weight loss dieting... if you're partly starving and/or overexercising your body to get down to or maintain the levels of body fat approaching that of fitness and fashion models (the official body type desired by the average woman in our culture because we think it will buy sexuality)...

... then your fertility, your sexual desire, your fitness, your energy levels, and of course your overall health, will actually suffer.

And without these things, even the most dedicated Kamasutra practitioner, sex toy aficionada, "perfect" figured gym-bunny, or modern woman with sex communication skills of steel will not be able to get it on... let alone get off.

Pregnant? Don't take this celebrity trainer's dietary advice.

20/7/2017

Warning: this article mentions specific caloric quantities and specific weight loss diets. If this is likely to be a trigger for disordered eating behaviours for you, please don't read on.

I recently came across a celebrity trainer's 12 week weight loss program that really got my goat. Nothing new there, same old shit about restricting calories in via dieting and doing mega workouts to "burn calories off." Same old cheesy marketing and aesthetically pleasing presentation of just enough accurate information intermingled with bullcrap to confuse the majority of consumers who are not savvy about diet culture's sneaky AF ways.

But what really upset me - even more than the same old rubbish - was that as an extension of this dreadful program there were weight loss plans for pregnant and postpartum women. Complete with daily caloric "allowances" for these groups of women.

There is so much wrong with this I don't even know where to start. The quest for "body after baby" is massively prevalent in our society and it's harmful to both women and their babies.

Pregnancy is not the time to try to lose weight. And postpartum is one of the riskiest times in a woman's life for developing or worsening an eating disorder.

The caloric allowances allotted to these vulnerable groups of women on this particular diet plan are scarily misinformed, and dangerous. This is the kind of stuff that sets women up for deteriorating body image and developing eating disorders during and after the vulnerable time that is pregnancy.

But before we get to that, let's start with why calorie counting in the first place is a waste of time.

Firstly, calorie counting is generally pointless.

As a non-diet dietitian who loves food, you won't be surprised to hear that I rarely talk calories or kilojoules with my clients – unless its to point out they need more. There are so many flaws with the general idea of counting calories, including:

calorie counting grossly over-simplifies the ways body weight is determined and encourages subscription to the "just ensure calories in is less than calories out" mentality towards weight control. With this polarised lens, we forget the many other factors that influence body weight just as much if not far more than food and activity, including genetics, stigma, socioeconomic factors, stress, sleep deprivation, hormonal imbalances, environmental toxicity, gut bacteria, etc
calorie content (calculated in food laboratories by bomb calorimetry or indirect calorie estimation) reported on packaged food labels can be off by as much as 20% due to variations in manufacturing, season, and suppliers.
similarly, the calorie content of whole foods is wildly unpredictable. Two similar-sized Fuji apples can have vastly different calorie contents due to the soil and climate they're grown in, the time of season they're harvested, how they've been handled after picking, and how they're prepared.
calorie counting doesn't take into account the type or quality of food you're eating (and it matters.)

calorie counting is far more difficult and inaccurate than people think, whether in regards to calculating food intake or calories used in exercise. Under or over reporting is common and human.
calorie counting does not factor in the immense individual variation in metabolic rate. BMR calculators can be off by 20% or more, in which case, is it really worth calculating?
calorie counting is also complicated by variations in individuals' muscle mass, amount and type of physical and mental activity, and many other totally random and unpredictable genetic factors that we may not even be aware of, let alone have the capacity to plug into a caloric requirements calculator.

Then of course there's the elephant in the room: that weight loss dieting - whether by calorie counting and food restriction or some other method - does not work.

But myths abound over how much women should be eating. In conversations with women with weight concern, I notice a lot of magic calorie numbers being thrown around when it comes to how many daily calories they think they should be eating: 800? 1200? 1500? 1800?

And just how much more do you need to eat when pregnant or breastfeeding - "because this celebrity trainer says it's x" (P.S. she's terribly, dangerously wrong.)

So just this once, let's talk frankly about calories.

The SSSW ideal: What it is & why it hurts women

3/7/2017

It's mindful eating misused as a weight loss technique in a "Meditate Yourself Thin" program.

It's crash dieting rebranded as a juice cleanse that's an "integral part of your wellness journey".

It's a 12-week yoga shred challenge that focuses on making you lean, toned and taut, rather than preparing you for seated meditation (the traditional purpose of yoga asana).

It's a $5000 program that promises to "reveal your inner goddess" and make you happy, sexy, spiritual and confident all in one weekend... because once that goddess is unleashed, every man will want to be with you and every woman will want to be you.

It's a female sexuality course, a yoga training, or a detox program that teaches you how to be female - the "right" kind of female: Sexy, Slim, Successful, and let's not forget the one caveat that makes it all cool: Spiritual.

For years this has bothered me. As a yoga teacher and health professional, I've innately felt that there's something really icky about this kind of marketing, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. "It's just business, honey," I imagine the creators of these taglines would tell me, "It's the nature of marketing. It's just smoke and mirrors. Take a deep breath and exhale that negativity! Don't get your knickers in a knot."

Clearly, I only felt uncomfortable with this kind of marketing because I was "not ready for success", or deep down I "didn't think I deserved it."

And so, I'd uncomfortably push it to the back of my mind, tell myself I was being silly... and swallow the bile that had involuntarily made its way up into my throat.

detoxification: so NOT about juice fasts & colonics

21/4/2017

When you hear the word "detoxification", what springs to mind? Juice fasting and colon cleanses? Coffee enemas and starvation? Health spas and slimming teas? For years, this is what I thought when I heard that oh-so-sexy-sounding word, and practised, much to my body's distress.

For the vast majority of people, these things are totally unnecessary - and they can actually set a person up for disordered eating and eating disorders.

When it comes to optimising your body’s detoxification processes, just doing a 3-day juice fast or a colonic – then going back to your normal diet – won’t cut it. It’s time to understand how our bodies really work, and what you can do to gently detoxify every day.