Research is now showing that something called “attachment styles” may also explain why people with a history of toxic stress related to childhood trauma or to other specific childhood issues (abandonment, neglect, abrupt separation from a parent, frequent changes in caregivers, or lack of caregiver responsiveness) may have food and body image issues. Individuals who were raised in a family where their parents invalidated their views or feelings are more likely to binge and purge

Stephanie Dodier of “Going Beyond the Food” has been a guest on my podcast many times and our conversations have always been honest and cover a variety of topics. Today, we talked about the toxicity that exists in the world of eating disorders, black and white thinking, backlash from the medical profession, what it means to really do your own trauma work and how social justice is an important part of healing our relationship with

You may have dieting whiplash and just frankly have so much misinformation that you really don’t know what is good for your body and what is not. So you end up eating lots of raw carrots and celery or stick mainly to salads. While there may be kernels of truth in expert nutritional advice, nutritional confusion also contributes to unhealthy eating styles. Joyful eating is about determining what works for you and your body, and

Food shaming is when someone criticizes or judges what another person is eating. Food shaming can be intentional but even with unintentional, can lead to guilt, shame and embarrassment. Constant examination of what you are eating or what someone else is eating are all part of the diet mentality and diet culture. Diet culture endorses the importance of staying thin which then leads to the compulsion to feel you have to watch every calorie that

Grief following the death of a loved one is well studied and understood.  Researchers have documented an initial period of numbness, followed by sadness or depression and then reorganization and recovery. Grief in this case is used to describe how we react to loss – physically, emotionally, behaviorally and cognitively.  It is not uncommon when we experience a loss that we default to old behaviors such as binge eating, obsessing about food and emotional eating.  The emotions