Let me tell you a story about me (Natasha), your mind-body nutrition and eating psychology coach, and independent health researcher:

Through puffy, red eyes after another full afternoon of crying, I said to my husband: “am I doing this right? This figuring out life stuff? There’s heaps of stuff and help out there for getting through an eating disorder and ‘learning how to eat’, but there aren’t any books about the afterwards. What do I do now? Who am I?”

And I distinctly remember using air quotes around the ‘learning how to eat’ part- because, after a few years of self-driven recovery pivoting around what I couldn’t do (can’t restrict (though I was if I’m honest), can’t eat this/that, have to eat this/that, can’t think this way, have to see my body that way….) I, and many others who have gone through an “interesting” challenge or all-out fight with food, fell out the other side of the dieting intensity with a life and mind-body-food relationship somewhat strapped together with fragments of nutritional understanding, rules of accountability, and remnants of a confusing past I wasn’t supposed to hold on to anymore. 

Following that was a conversation about how I’d had to leave behind all I knew about myself, life, and eating, but how I was still looking backwards at the old me in the rear view, too afraid to look ahead, and inevitably crashing over and over, feeling directionless and without a road to drive on. 

By that day on the couch in tears (another day on the couch in tears) I had been mostly “recovered” from 24 years of anorexia and bulimia (and all the variations of disordered eating I hope you don’t even know about). But if I tried to carve my own way a bit and graduate from the same (albeit nutritionally balanced- because I’m a bit of a perfectionist) meals into the rhelm of intuitive eating, I quickly drowned in a sea of dogmatic nutritional protocols (each claiming superiority over the others in the name of health, of course) combined with protocols of, seemingly-to-me, little substance or rationale at all (these taking the “no food is bad” approach  and relying on obscure internal cues of satiety with little nutritional backbone at their core). 

Don’t get me wrong- the later generalist styles of eating anything you want can be really great for the recovery stage of disordered eating or a past of restriction based on toxic nutritional or body image beliefs. They can open the cage door that has kept your food world small for so long, and allow you mental space to get to the heart of what’s really eating you. Plus, If you are undernourished (regardless of your size), they can help rehabilitate your body and mind and (if chocolate is included) your soul. I used this anything-goes style (somewhat) to allow me the privilege of learning how disgusting the fake soft serve ice cream is, to grant me permission when I wanted to have a spoonful of fresh churned sea salted butter, and to revel at the flavor profile from a bite of my husband’s panini (made with my homemade sourdough of course). But these little allowances, as freeing as they were, didn’t give me the fundamental nutritional skeleton I was craving to know:

• how to eat freely, but with deliberate, conscientious choices

• without restriction, but with satisfaction before I felt like I’d explode like a potato I’d nuked without punching fork holes in.

• Without obsessing, but with appreciation

• With permission, but also with reason

And it also didn’t help me find “me”. As author and eating psychologist Marc David says, your relationship with food mirrors your relationship with life. 

And how true it had been for me.  

Rewind 20+ years:

Diets had failed me. I tried them all, to the extreme, and they all let me down. At that time “diets” really amounted to “dieting” which was universally accepted as low/no fat, graduating towards low/no calories if fat reduction alone didn’t give you the thigh gap the girls in the magazine had. (I didn't know about photoshopping.) I wanted to lose weight to feel “okay” and safe, even if the fat-free muffin tasted truly disgusting and the low fat ice cream legally had to be called ice milk. (Yes, it was that bad.) Contrary to many’s beliefs, control over food, extreme exercise, and body image obsession isn’t usually about harming oneself or self-punishment, even if those are certainly outcomes. It’s often about trying to achieve a controlled form of feeling okay. It is a symptom of deep distress. After suffering some emotionally traumatic events in my life, struggling with attachment issues, and not having a good sense of who I was and my value, I tried to create order and satisfaction from the internal chaos by holding on tightly to the reins of caloric restriction and weight manipulation. 

Eventually, I caved into full blown disordered eating, and realized that most of those diets were only societally-condoned covers for the disordered eating I already had (though I’d never let on about my exploitation of them in this way to anyone). Extreme exercise broke my body down and left me with all kinds of injuries. 

Yet none of that worked to help me feel safe and okay about myself. Despite the (hungry) pit in my stomach of this recognition, disordered eating had actually become who I saw myself as, and dictated ever part of my life. It’s all I knew. 

Fast forward 20+ years:

My marriage in distress, my muscles tearing when I rolled over, and my central nervous system so on the edge I had chronic nerve tingling in my feet, I wish I could say fear broke me. But I think it was more desperation. I wanted to know what others had that I didn’t. I had lived a life feeling like a bird trapped in a cage, the white grids on our Virginia windows were the bars between me and the outside world on a spring afternoon that progressed into a moonlit night, both filled with bingeing and purging.

I determined myself to recover. 

It was slow and painful. Letting go of bulimia was surprisingly easy for me. (Not easy by any means, but not as hard as I thought.) I’m gifted (and cursed) with a fiery determination. Once I make up my mind… get out of my way.

Some of it was naively easy and felt liberating. But those short chapters would inevitably pass and I’d wind up searching for myself again. Rigidity would often occupy my mind, but determination and perseverance (combined with a “feel shit, do it anyways” attitude borrowed from DBT) would keep me nutritionally on course, leaving me confused. My feelings and life whirled in circles of nothingness and emptiness, and desire burning for my life to mirror my recovery with food. 

My tightly-controlled, regimented food life and critical, perfectionist body image of the past had been interrupted by sheer determination. Allowances, enjoyment, and daily multiple large containers of cottage cheese had successfully put spacers between the rules and regs of anorexia and bulimia. 

I filled my days of recovery with literature, research, podcasts, study of psychology, neuroplasticity, metabolism, and listening to a variety of dogmatic (and some toned-down) YouTube health influencers, desperate to know “the right way to eat”. But by this I don’t at all mean “which diet to follow”. I mean “how to eat for future me, for my body, for my life, to heal past me, and for growing my soul”. 

And starting 4 years into full recovery, I started to dig deep with a therapist I finally found to help me, up in Alberta Canada. The food thing was going “okay” and I was starting to loosen my grip on my desire to lose the safety pudge just below my belly button that appeared out of nowhere at my 2 year recovery anniversary, but I wanted help unscrambling the confusion of feelings surfacing daily and help to assemble the broken pieces of a shattered past into a new, thoughtfully created me. We didn’t talk about food. We talked about life. (Ironically I never “succeeded” at therapy during my disordered eating chapter. Despite trying countless times, I never found someone who could truly sift through my complexities and tap into my guarded heart and mind.) 

That day on the couch was after all of that.

I’d pretty much created a dietary paradigm for myself that had healed my body, I had recovered from 23 years of hypothalamic amenorrhea, my labs consistently looked great, and by the look of me (except for the tell-tale extra wrinkles on my face telling the story of a sad past), you’d never know I had only a few years ago been afraid to fall asleep in case I died. But my journey was only beginning. Well, a new journey. 

And I was right. There’s nothing out there about the afterwards. And the afterwards can be harder than the fight to get out. 

In an essay I wrote when I applied to the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, I said that no one should ever have to do what I did. I never had the helping hand I yearned for. No supportive older sister showing me the way through and beyond the confusion of life and tangles of a chaotic relationship with food and my body. I fought for years, alone, to learn my part to help God put pieces of me back together. I’m cracked still. There are a lot A LOT of cracks. Most days, if I don’t fall back apart, I feel like I could at any moment. But through the cracks you can see a bit of light shining through, which you couldn’t ever see before I was broken.

My dream is to use that little bit of light to help illuminate the path of freedom to others struggling with eating, recovery, body insecurity, health, and the afterwards. I want to be the “her” I needed but never had, for you.