what actually causes an eating disorder? | recovered-ish with chloe cox

One of the most common questions I get — from clients, from my own lived experience, from people who have spent years wondering — is this: why me? Why did I get an eating disorder when the people around me didn't?

In this episode I'm getting into the real answer. Not the oversimplified version. The actual, nuanced, deeply personal answer — using my own story, my clinical experience, and the framework I use with clients in my group program The Quasi-Recovery Exit to help people understand themselves in a way that actually moves the needle in recovery.

This one is a thinker. I hope it gives you some real clarity.

This Episode Is Brought to You By Cozy Earth

Cozy Earth makes the softest, most comfortable pajamas and bedding I’ve foung — and comfort in my body is something I don't compromise on anymore. Visit CozyEarth.com and use code RECOVERY for up to 20% off.

In This Episode:

• Why I grew up with two sisters, in the same family, doing the same activities — and I'm the only one who got an eating disorder
• The genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger framework — and what it actually means for understanding your own story
• The specific temperament traits I was born with that made me vulnerable to an eating disorder
• How my performing arts high school became the environmental trigger that intensified those traits
• Why understanding what caused your eating disorder is actually one of the most powerful things you can do in recovery
• The identity conversation — how the traits your eating disorder co-opted are actually your greatest strengths
• Why you won't lose yourself when you recover — you'll finally find yourself
• How narrative therapy helps you make meaning of your story without shame
• What to do with the traits you don't want to give up in recovery
• A reframe for the question "what's wrong with me?" — and what to ask instead

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro + new desk setup 2:00 Life update — pregnancy announcement followup, son's hospital stay, Disneyland plans 4:00 A note on binge urges and what they're actually telling you 6:00 Today's topic: what actually causes an eating disorder? 7:00 Growing up with two sisters — same family, same upbringing, only I got an eating disorder 10:00 Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger 12:00 The temperament traits I was born with — drive, perfectionism, sensory sensitivity 16:00 Early signs of genetic predisposition — body awareness from a very young age 18:00 How performing arts high school became the environmental trigger 22:00 Competition, comparison, and the perfect storm that created my eating disorder 24:00 How to understand your own story through this lens 26:00 The identity conversation — temperament vs conditioning 28:00 Your eating disorder traits are actually your superpowers 30:00 Narrative therapy and making meaning of your story 32:00 What to ask yourself instead of "what's wrong with me?" 35:00 How to channel your traits toward recovery and growth 37:00 Closing thoughts

Practical Reflection Questions From This Episode:

• What traits do I have that might have made me vulnerable to an eating disorder?
• What life circumstances intensified those traits or made the eating disorder necessary?
• What do I actually like about those traits — and do I want to keep them in recovery?
• Where do those traits show up in my life in ways that aren't harmful?
• Can I look back through my story with curiosity instead of criticism?

Quotes from This Episode:

"You don't have to become a different person to recover from your eating disorder. You just have to become who you've always been without the eating disorder casting a shadow over it."

"Every trait that made you good at your eating disorder can make you amaz

Resources + Connect with Me:

• Instagram: @recoverwithchloe
• Recovery Skills Training: use code PODCAST for $57 off!
• Leave a 5-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe on YouTube! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My eating disorder was not all bad. It actually gave me a lot. And the traits that led to my eating disorder, I don't know if any of them were bad. It's this sense of I have to be the best. If I'm not the best, then why am I even trying? This sense of no matter how good I am at something, I could always do it better. So I should do it better. And that's a little bit toxic, I think. You're listening to the Recovered-Isch podcast. I'm your host, Chloe Cox. And yeah, I know a thing or two about eating disorder recovery. Between my own very complicated history with disordered eating and the work I do now, I've seen this thing from pretty much every angle. This podcast is where we talk about the messier parts of recovery that don't really make it online. No platitudes, no inspirational quotes, just the real, raw, sometimes frustrating, sometimes surprisingly liberating process of building a life beyond your eating disorder. Let's get into it. Hello and welcome back to the Recovered Ish Podcast. I'm Chloe. Thank you for being here. If you are watching on YouTube, you might notice we are in a different space. Not really, it's still my office, but we're just at a different angle. I got some feedback recently that me holding the microphone causes like certain bumpy noises that are like kind of annoying. And then when I was editing last week, I was noticing them and I was like, oh no, no, no, this has to change. So here I am sitting at a desk now. I feel a little bit like a newscaster, which is odd, but we're just gonna go with it. And I'm hoping that it improves the audio quality. I'm all about constructive feedback. Even though I'm a little bit sensitive, I also have learned in my life to take constructive feedback, and more often than not, it helps to make me better. So I just try to look at it that way. Anyways, here we are. If you tuned in last week, you know that I am pregnant. That was the big news. And yeah, I'm announcing to the world essentially this week, tomorrow. You haven't heard the podcast yet when I'm recording this, but I'm gonna post on Instagram. I'm telling all of my clients. Kind of feels like a big deal, like cats out of the bag. But good news is I'm feeling a whole lot better. I'm in my second trimester and physically, mentally even, I'm feeling a lot clearer. I tend to give you all a life update at the top of most episodes. And if you've seen on Instagram, you will know that I also had another crazy weekend where my child got sick again. And with his condition, we ended up in the hospital again. So, other than feeling like totally exhausted from a crazy weekend, I'm doing mostly good. He is doing much better. We are going to Disneyland on Thursday to have a little fun day after he had a pretty rough couple of months with his health. So I'm hoping that that lifts everyone's spirits, family included. But one thing I did notice when I was in the hospital this weekend, and I think I might have shared this on my stories before: binge urges are not something that I have experienced in quite some time. And I really only experience them when I am at the hospital with my son. Before I really processed it, it kind of struck me as odd that those would resurface in that setting. But when I really thought about it, I was like, okay, what part of me is needing attention right now that my body is calling out to binge, really. And I don't know if I've ever talked about binging on this podcast before, because it really wasn't a behavior for me that was terribly present, other than kind of early on in my disorder. But it comes up every now and again when I am experiencing high levels of distress and low levels of stimulation. And that's what it's like in the hospital, where it is very stressful. Where, like with my two-year-old who is not able to get out of a hospital bed hooked up to an IV, it's just not ideal for a toddler, that kind of a situation. And that feels really stressful to me. That feels really hard as a mom to watch. And then on top of that, we're all kind of stuck in a room. And by we all, I mean me, my child, and my husband for days on end with very little stimulation, other than just like kind of surviving and other than our meals. So I find that my brain goes to food as something to look forward to in those moments, which is just something to note, something to be aware of, not something to like criticize or judge myself for, but it's just something I'm noticing. Just another one of the ways that eating disorders and food kind of present to fill a certain role or purpose. I notice for me, in that specific environment, that comes up, which is interesting. And I have ways to manage it and ways to deal with it. And the way that I eat when I'm there is different than the way that I eat when I'm anywhere else because of what's available to me. And that's all fine. It's just more than anything, what it tells me is in those moments, I need ways to manage my stress. I need ways to keep my mind stimulated, and I need comfort. So just a little tidbit and a lesson from my own personal life for you to start the episode today. But we're back in office. It's been a, I don't even want to say it out loud, but I'm gonna knock on wood. It's been a normal week so far, and I'm just hoping that it stays that way, please. That said, it feels really nice to just be sitting down and talking to all, though I will admit I don't know what to do with my hands now that I'm sitting at this desk and not holding a microphone. I'm like, do I cross my fingers? Do I cross my hands like a newscaster? Or do I express with my arms? It's very weird. I'm adjusting. I'm adjusting. Anyways, the topic today is something that I have pondered a lot in my life, both with myself and with my clients in a therapy capacity, in a coaching capacity, whether I was working in treatment or here in my private practice. It's the idea of why do some people get eating disorders and other people don't? What makes one person susceptible to an eating disorder and other people somehow get through their lives without developing one, despite growing up in the same, the same world with the same global context? And I was really thinking about that as I was editing my podcast that, you know, you will have heard at this point from last week about why it's so hard, particularly in 2026, to recover from an eating disorder. A lot of what we spoke to was the availability of a quote-unquote solution for a common insecurity or preoccupation that our world has kind of fed to us, which is that idea that our bodies should be a specific way, that beauty is inherent to our value. That's not something that's just absorbed by people with eating disorders. That's absorbed across gender, race, socioeconomic status. It essentially that doesn't discriminate, is what I'm trying to say. So why do some people absorb it and it manifests and turns into a disorder when it doesn't for others? And there's so many ways to ponder that and answer that question. The one thing that I've always wondered myself I mean, I guess I can start with a personal pondering. I am the middle child of three sisters. And we grew up in the same family with the same values, with the same messaging around us. We also had extremely similar interests. We all three were involved in theater and dance from a very, very young age. I really didn't actually even care about musical theater at all until I saw my older sister performing and was like, I want to do that because she does that. I wanted to do everything my older sister did. So we had the same influences both within our household and in the environments that we were placed in, in extracurricular activities, the dance world or the theater world, where there is an emphasis on appearance and excellence. And that all seems odd, right? That my sisters and I had nearly identical upbringings. But of the three, I am the only one that ended up with an eating disorder. And I've always been kind of confused by that, because a lot of what you learn is it is the environment that you're in and what you learn to believe that plants these ideas in your head that eventually become an eating disorder. So why is it that of the three of us, I would be the only one, even though we were essentially raised exactly the same and we were in the same environments at school, we all three went to the same schools, we all three did the exact same activities, mostly together, really. And so what was it? And at the risk of sounding self-deprecating, I often wondered what's wrong with me, that I'm the one that picked this up. And you know, that's a probably not the most constructive way to ask that question. But I wonder if any of you have felt similarly. Like, what is it about me that made me fall victim to something like an eating disorder? And so I I guess I can use that template of my family's story and my personal story as something to demonstrate what I have discovered or seen to be true for so many of us. There are things in life we choose, and there are other things in life we don't choose. Duh. I growing up chose to go into theater and dance. I pursued that, I really loved that, or I thought that I did. I was taught in my family to value hard work. And granted, my parents were not strict by any means. They, and I know my mom listens to this podcast and she's wonderful. I love her so much. She would always tell me, and I think I've mentioned this before, that like just, you know, just do your best. And it didn't matter to her what I pursued as far as a career, as long as I was happy. And so the value of hard work that I think we all picked up on was more what was demonstrated to us by our parents. I always saw both of my parents really both being creative and really putting their all into whatever they were working on. It wasn't even an explicit lesson. I think it's just something that I picked up on, and my sisters did too. They're both very, very hardworking individuals. My youngest sister is about to graduate from grad school from Columbia, and I'm gonna go visit her at the end of May. So excited. So we learn within our environment to value certain things. And again, those are the same things with me and my sisters. So I wonder to myself, what is it about me that was different? I've often heard in my own studies and experience as an eating disorder clinician that, and this is the way that it's phrased, I don't love it because it's kind of, I don't know, violent, that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger when in terms of eating disorders. So to speak, the way that you're wired genetically sets you up, predisposes you. But if certain stressors aren't placed upon you in your life, you might never have those temperamental traits lead you down the path of an eating disorder. You have to have both the genetic predisposition and the life stressors to have essentially a perfect storm of what creates an eating disorder. For me, that is a good way to understand why I might be different than my sisters. Yes, we all technically have the same genes, but we all know there's genetic variation. I can look at it between the way that I look from my sisters. We all look similar, but we all are clearly distinct. We're different. We're all slightly different heights. Like the physical traits you can see, there's genetic variation. And that's the same thing with our temperaments. So while we were all very hardworking, I would say there's something wired in me that I've never quite been able to fully understand. It's this sense of I have to be the best. If I'm not the best, then why am I even trying? This sense of no matter how good I am at something, I could always do it better. So I should do it better. And that's a little bit toxic, I think. I don't really know why I feel that way or why I have, but I've felt that way as long as I can remember. Even going back to when I was learning how to read when I was five, or however old you are when you learn how to read. My sister was seven, and she was a very early reader, and she was already reading chapter books at seven. I was just learning to read two-letter words. Normal developmentally for how old I was. But seeing my sister being able to read chapter books, I thought to myself that I should be able to do that too. So I would open the chapter books and try to start reading them, even though I didn't know how to read yet. I always wanted to run before I could walk. And then inevitably I'd set myself up for failure because I didn't work my way up to that. I would struggle then because I didn't allow myself to start from where I was. There was this idea that no matter where I was, I should be somewhere different. I should be better. And my gosh, I saw that replicate in so many ways and so many other areas in my life as I was growing up with school and grades. I had to get 100% on the pretest for spelling, spelling words that I had not been introduced to. But the standard was you have to get 100% on the pretest because then you don't have to take the real test at the end of the week. And if I got a word wrong on the pretest, I felt like a failure, even though those were words I hadn't learned yet. And of course, my parents would say that it's okay. They would do whatever they could to get me to stop being so hard on myself, but that's kind of just the way I was wired. Not down to my environment because my parents were incredibly supportive. They did value hard work and they reinforced it when I did well. But I never heard from them that I had to do well to be worthy. That was something that was just in me. And I saw this follow me further when I started dancing and I started doing theater. I needed to be the best in the class, or I would want to quit the class. I needed to get the lead role, or I would feel so unworthy and frustrated and mad at myself. When for at first, theater was just something I did for fun. I also felt that I needed to be really well liked by everyone, or feel like I was perceived positively by most people. And all of this predated my need to look the best. That didn't really start until much later on in my life. I do remember a heightened body awareness that perhaps my sisters didn't have. Again, a sign of genetic predisposition. But all of this drive, this like crippling need to do better all the time, I don't ever remember a time before that. That's really wired into who I am. The other piece that I'm remembering now is the body awareness thing. I also believe that that was a genetic predisposition, something that I couldn't have picked up on in my environment so early. I mean, my first memory was of me becoming aware of my body and feeling a bit disgusted by it and surprised by it. That sort of sensory awareness that followed me too. I remember being in dance costumes and looking down at my legs and comparing them to my friends' legs and feeling like mine weren't good enough or they were too big. And I was really, really young making those observations. That's not something anybody taught me. That's something that I was just physically aware of. It wasn't so much of a conscious criticism. It was more of a physical discomfort. My parents will even tell me sometimes that when I was a little girl, they would have to take my shoes on and off and on and off and retie my shoes again and again so that the shoelaces would be exactly the same amount of tight around my foot, and they would have to rearrange my socks so that the seam laid just so. I was just really sensitive when it came to sensory input. And I think that's something wired into me as well that maybe led to this awareness of my body and eventually to the eating disorder. Again, not something I learned from my environment. But something I also realize is I could have had all of these traits and still not had an eating disorder. I could have been so driven, so disciplined, so hard on myself, and not had it translate to food and body. I could have had this heightened sensory awareness and it maybe would have never gotten past the point of a frustration or a preoccupation, but somehow it did. And that's where I think environment comes into play. And perhaps not so much the environment of my family home, because I really do believe and I'm so grateful that I grew up in such a supportive family, but I almost feel that the environment I'm thinking of is my high school and the performance industry. Okay, before we continue, I want to talk about our sponsor, Cozy Earth. And I actually really mean it when I say this one feels aligned with everything we talk about on this show. You guys know how much I believe that recovery shows up in the small stuff, the tiny daily choices that are really just acts of kindness towards yourself. And one of mine lately has been what I'm putting my body in at the end of the day. I've been wearing Cozy Earth's bamboo stretch knit pajama set, and they feel like I'm wearing nothing. Genuinely so light, so cooling, and the waistband doesn't dig in or squeeze at all. They just exist on your body. I put them on and I'm like, oh yeah, this is what comfortable is supposed to feel like. I also have their bamboo sheets made from viscos from bamboo, and they actually regulate your temperature while you sleep. So no more waking up hot and sweaty at 2 a.m., just real rest. If you're someone who's learning to be a little bit gentler with yourself and like, hello, that's exactly what we do on this show. This is such an easy place to start. Seriously. There's a 100-night sleep trial, completely risk-free, and a 10-year warranty. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code Recovery for up to 20% off. If you get a post-purchase survey, let them know you heard about it here. Because home isn't just where you live, it's how you feel. Comfort lives here. Cozy Earth. When I went to high school, I went to a performing arts high school in Orange County. You might know of it. And I was really excited to go. I was like, my entire life was about theater and performing. I just wanted to be doing that all the time. And so going to this school felt really important to me. When I got there, I think I felt for the very first time a sense of inferiority. I was introduced for the very first time to people that were like very wealthy. And I never even thought about money or wealth until I got to that school and saw people that had so much more and placed such an emphasis on things and appearance. I remember looking at the other girls in my class and thinking, like, wow, they have such beautiful clothes. They know how to dress so cute, their hair looks so nice, and feeling like for the first time I was really less than in those ways. I'd never thought about that before, really. I focused mostly on academics and friendships and performance, not really on appearance until I went into this environment. This school was a it was a charter school. So people could attend the school from all over the county. So we would have people coming from the very, very richest areas and also the areas that were not as rich. You were really exposed to the full spectrum of what a lifestyle could look like through these children. For context, what I'm talking about is like my first year I met a friend who invited me to go to Mexico for the weekend on her friend's private jet. I was like, what? I didn't even know that that was a thing. It was crazy. So that's where I first really felt a sense of I Don't have the same thing that other people have. And also, other people know things that I don't know, like how to dress a certain way, how to do their hair a certain way, how to do makeup a certain way, which is something that just never was important to me until I arrived at that school. Then we add in the aspect of competition that was involved in this high school. I was, all of my friends did theater and were singers and actors and dancers just like me, which was really fun. We all like had a common bond. But we also were always in competition with each other, always for the lead roles, for who was even going to get into the productions. Every week in our voice class, we would have to sing a song. And like you just compare the heck out of yourself to everybody else in the room. Always, of course. And you get live critiques from the teacher. And so hearing what other people were being praised for or criticized for, you just start to see your friends as yes, they're my friends, but also, am I better than them? Also, can I sing better than them? Can I dance better than them? Am I prettier than them? All of those questions start coming into your mind because that's the nature of the industry that we were being trained for. It is highly competitive, it is cutthroat, and there was no um sugarcoating that at this school. So it really, I think, fed into my genetic predisposition, the need to be the best, the need to do the best all the time, and a disconnection from true support and friendship because I never felt fully safe with any of my girlfriends, anyways. My sisters did go to this same high school, but I think they might have had a slightly different experience of it. I know my younger sister, she went into the acting conservatory, which had a different sort of vibe than the theater conservatory did. My older sister had a really close-knit group of friends that were all really supportive. And she also knew from the time that she started that school that she didn't want to do theater professionally. She wanted to be a teacher, which is wonderful, and she's amazing at it. But I knew from the second I started there that I was doing this for my career and I had to be the best. So I think I saw it through a different lens, and therefore it shaped my experience differently. All of this led up to when my eating disorder finally sort of emerged. And I think it happened at the perfect time where I was lacking support. And you'll probably remember this if you listen to my episode where I shared my full story, where I was lacking support. I was on my own for the first time. I was thrust into the theater industry, like for real for real, as a young adult, but also still kind of a teenager. And I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was I needed to succeed. And I think even looking back at that, it becomes really clear that it is this link between the traits that were natural to me, being disciplined, being driven, being hardworking, having an eye for creativity and aesthetic, passion, hypersensitivity, all these things that were just a part of who I was, add onto that the conditioning of competition and comparison, add onto that a lack of support and immense pressure on someone whose frontal lobe wasn't fully developed, and boom, like there's the recipe for an eating disorder. And that's kind of where I make sense of why do some people have eating disorders and other people don't? It really comes down to every person's individual story. I have met plenty of people in my life who have similar temperaments to me that did not develop eating disorders because whatever environment they were in didn't nurture those traits in the same way. For example, you might have a child who's so driven and might be really, really hard on herself. But if you give her the tools to be self-compassionate and place her in environments that value things outside of excellence and competition that give her space to explore her inherent worth. I mean, all of these sound like lofty ideals to place a child in, and it's abstract, it could look a number of different ways, but in the right environment, a child with the same temperament that I had could have grown up totally differently and uh gone on to not have an eating disorder. Similarly, those same traits could set you up for a different sort of issue in a different environment. That's the really tricky part, is when you are going through your life, it's impossible to foresee how certain situations are going to impact you all the time. That's one thing I'm really grateful about with my recovery, is that it's given me the opportunity to really learn that for myself. I now know, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, certain situations produce certain emotional responses. And those emotional responses necessitate my eating disorder coming up and trying to save me. And I can now predict when that's going to happen and sometimes intervene. But there was no way for me to know that the first time around. There was no way for anyone to know that that was going to happen. So when you ask yourself the question, why do I have an eating disorder when other people don't? What's different about me? What's wrong with me that I had an eating disorder? I want you to ask that in a less of a less of a critical way and more of a curious way. What is it about me? What traits do I have? What qualities was I born with that might have set me up to be vulnerable to this? What life circumstances did I go through that intensified the need for the disorder, reinforced the values of the disorder, made it important for my disorder to step in and save me. Really ask yourself that. Because if you can understand what it is about you and your traits that made you susceptible to the eating disorder, you can also understand that those traits don't have to always be linked to the eating disorder. And that's where we get into the really fun identity conversation. And this is top of mind for me because I just wrapped up a call with my group program, the Quasi-Recovery Exit. Our topic for today was about identity and the eating disorder and temperament versus conditioning. And essentially, the idea is that we all have traits and temperaments that we've linked to behaviors in the disorder. They don't have to correlate to one another. You can be a driven person and also not restrict your food. You can be a disciplined person and also not exercise in a destructive way. You can be a sensitive person and not take on the responsibility for every other person's emotions. You can be a caring person and not sacrifice your own needs to prioritize others. All of these things can still be true about you with or without the disorder. And that's something that I've really found to be true in my life. When I recovered, I was worried that my discipline was going to disappear, that I would become lazy or the world would start to see me as lazy, that I'd like to let myself go or whatever, which is a really sad thing to think when I was actually taking care of myself for the first time. But I'm happy to report that 11 years later, I'm still as driven as ever. I'm still as disciplined as ever, just not in the ways that it destroys me. I use my discipline and my drive now to put work into my business and my programs and helping my clients. I'm still a very sensitive person and I have a high degree of sensory awareness. But now that's a superpower that I can use when I'm in therapy with a client. I can so often feel the way that they are feeling in my body because I have that sensitivity. And I really think it makes me a better therapist. It's a superpower in that way. It doesn't have to crush me the way that it used to. Every trait that made you good at your eating disorder can make you amazing at something else. You're not going to lose that when you recover. You're actually going to be the fullest version of you without that. The fullest version of you without the eating disorder co-opting those traits for a destructive purpose. I've mentioned before that I am a narrative therapist in a lot of ways, which just means that I conceptualize in stories, where as human beings, our brains are hardwired to make meaning of stories. And that's kind of how we make meaning of life is linking events together in a sequence to form a meaning. That's essentially the definition of a story. And so in telling my own story in my own therapy, I've been able to link those events together to understand the meaning of why I had an eating disorder. And even in the aftermath, why it was important for me to have an eating disorder to learn what I needed to know about myself to be the person that I am today. Hindsight is 2020. I would have never been able to acknowledge that or validate that back when I was in it. And there's no way that you can even see it at that point. But I guess the point here is: as you're listening to this episode today, or when you're done with this episode, I would really encourage you to comb back through your own story and your life. Understand who you are, who you've been, who you were born as, the traits that you had from your earliest memories, the ones that your eating disorder might have stolen and used for purposes that might harm you. Can you look back through your story and identify what were those key moments of influence? What were those spaces where you learned a lesson that amplified a trait, or you went through an experience that rocked your world? So for so many of my clients, it comes up in grief or trauma, loss, overwhelming life chain. Moments like that are an opening for an eating disorder to kind of moments like that are an opening or a perfect storm, so to speak, of all the things that necessitate an eating disorder to manifest in your life. Look back through your own story. Who am I on a temperament level? What happened that made those traits louder? What made other traits smaller? How did my eating disorder use those traits? And then I want you to ask, what do I like about me? What do I value about those traits? Are there traits that your eating disorder has stolen that you do not want to give up in recovery? If that's true, or if that's the case, that's okay. All of the traits, essentially, other than like horrific self-criticism that I had in my eating disorder, most of those traits I've kept and have just learned to channel towards the light, so to speak. You don't have to become a different person to recover from your eating disorder. You just have to become who you've always been without the eating disorder casting a shadow over it. And the last thing I'll say from the lens of narrative therapy is as you move through your day, I want you to look for moments where your true identity shines through and it's not being represented by eating disorder behaviors. When maybe that part of you that is so ambitious shows up in a different area, where the part of you that is very caring about what other people think shows up in an area that isn't actually harmful because it's not all good and it's not all bad. I will go to the grave saying that. And the traits that led to my eating disorder, I don't know if any of them were bad. At their core, with the behaviors stripped away, those are just neutral traits that are indicative of who I am. Nothing bad about that. In the same way that you might consider parenting a child and nurturing the goodness that's naturally in them, I want you to think about that with yourself. What are those traits and how can you nurture them in ways that support you rather than harm you? How can you provide yourself with the input that you need and the opportunities that you need and the tools that you need? So something like a crippling desire to be the best can actually become a strong ambition to do your best. That's where I've landed these days, as much as I try. It's a daily battle. The intention is can I do my best and be compassionate if I'm not the best? Because I'm never gonna be the best. There's always going to be someone that's doing it better than me. But that's okay. It should be okay. Because that's out of my control. My hope is that you can walk away from today's episode with curiosity. There's nothing wrong with you that you had an eating disorder. But instead, can you ask, what is it about me that set me up to have an eating disorder? How can I understand that so that I can protect myself? How can I understand that so I could use those traits for good? That's really how we change something that is so ugly and life-destroying, like an eating disorder, into something that can actually cause us growth and eventually lead to a life where we understand ourselves better than most people do. And I'll say most days I'm still trying to work through it, through that piece myself. I still have a part of me that just always wants to be better, that always wants to do better. It's not inherently wrong or bad. I just have to be kind to myself when I run out of steam. I burn out so quickly because I sprint until I can't anymore, metaphorically. So even though that trait is not being channeled into an eating disorder, I still have to find ways to protect myself from it becoming self-destructive. On the other hand, it's a superpower in so many ways. I've been able to grow a business that I'm really passionate about. When I get an idea about something, I execute quickly. And that reminds me of the little girl that was reading chapter books before she could even read two-letter words. Sometimes it works out, sometimes I face plant. But I think that's maybe something, and I'm just realizing it now as I'm talking to you all, that I'm trying to appreciate more about myself. That I'm a go-getter. And I don't always know what I'm doing. But I'm if I want something, I do what I can to get it. And I work hard. And it doesn't always work. But when it does, it feels really good. And when it doesn't, it's that's where the real work is because it isn't always going to go well. Oh, self-compassion. Maybe we should talk about that a little bit more. Let me know if you'd like an episode on how to be kinder to yourself, because that's a big part of recovery, and not just kinder to yourself, but less judgmental and more mindful and accepting of your emotions and allowing yourself to be a human being. You know what? We should probably talk about that. I'm gonna write that down. Thank you for listening today. And if you're here on YouTube watching, thanks for watching. And let me know what you think of this new angle. I feel like I got more comfortable with using my hands as the episode went on, but I still can't shake the feeling that I look like a newscaster. But whatever. Hopefully the audio quality was better. I'm crossing my fingers. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give it a thumbs up, rate, review, subscribe. I am so happy whenever I see a new subscriber on YouTube. I notice every single one of you. I'm so thrilled every time I see a review come through. It just really helps to get this message out and bring more and more people into the recovery fold. 2026, there's a lot of people out there that are being fed the worst kind of information for lighting up an eating disorder. So you liking, reviewing, subscribing helps this kind of a message reach those people that might be needing it the most. So thank you for doing that. As always, thanks for being here. You all mean the world to me. Please eat your food. I will be eating with you. We will talk next week. Bye.