recovered-ish with chloe cox

does intuitive eating work in eating disorder recovery? | the recovered-ish podcast ep. 21

• Chloe Cox • Season 1 • Episode 21

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 48:11

Episode Description

Short answer: yes. Long answer: it's complicated, it takes time, and it definitely doesn't happen the way most people think it does.

In this episode I'm getting into my own journey from restriction, to meal plan, to eventually finding something that actually feels like food freedom — and what every stage of that actually looked like. Including the messy middle, the slips, and the moments I started to actually trust my body again.

Inspired by a comment questioning why I still eat six times a day at 11 years into recovery. Spoiler: it's not because I'm still on a meal plan.

In This Episode:

  • Why I don't recommend jumping straight into intuitive eating at the start of recovery
  • My first experience with a dietician — and why my eating disorder hated her immediately
  • The role of exposure therapy in rebuilding a relationship with food
  • How fear foods actually lose their power over time
  • The messy middle between meal plan and intuitive eating
  • Why I still eat six times a day — and what that actually means
  • How pregnancy deepened my ability to trust my body's cues
  • What food freedom actually looks and feels like

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro — back from New York City 2:00 What returning to NYC recovered felt like 5:00 Today's topic: does intuitive eating work in ED recovery? 6:00 Why I don't recommend starting with intuitive eating in early recovery 9:00 My first experience with a dietician 12:00 What finally made me surrender control to someone else 17:00 The role of exposure therapy in rebuilding a relationship with food 23:00 How to expand your zone of safety if treatment isn't accessible 26:00 The messy middle — when the meal plan starts to loosen 33:00 Why I still eat six times a day 36:00 How slips and relapses fit into this process 38:00 When life becomes bigger than food 41:00 How pregnancy deepened my body trust 46:00 Closing thoughts and resources

Resources:

📚 Books:

📲 ED-Informed Dieticians to Follow:

Keywords/Tags: intuitive eating eating disorder recovery, does intuitive eating work, meal plan to intuitive eating, food freedom eating disorder, rebuilding trust with food, eating disorder recovery food, recovered-ish podcast, chloe cox, ED recovery podcast, eating disorder therapist, fear foods, exposure therapy eating disorder, quasi-recovery, intuitive eating after restriction, body trust recovery



Resources + Connect with Me:

SPEAKER_00

Like you were telling me that it is 9 a.m. and you want to have a feast of pickles and peanut butter. Like what? That's so weird. Okay. I'd have dinners that would have freaked me out like crazy in my eating disorder, but now it just felt like I'm not really thinking about that. I'm thinking about going on this date with this guy, and it's either going really well or it's so weird. Those were the things I was thinking about. She turned to me and said, Are you body checking right now? And I was like, What? I'd never even really heard the term body checking before. And I was like, What is she even talking about? I was body checking, but I didn't know that that was a thing. And it really caught me off guard and really made me feel vulnerable and offended. 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, we are back for another week of the Recovered Ish Podcast. I'm Chloe, I'm your host, and I am coming to you fresh off a family trip. I just got back actually last night from New York City. I live in Southern California, if you don't know that. So it's a bit of a flight from one side of the country to the other, and definitely was a challenge with a two-year-old, or at least we were really anticipating that it would be a challenge, but it was really delightful. I am happy to report. The entire trip was really amazing. Before we get into today's episode, I know so many of you have messaged me, and we even talked about it in last week's episode, that traveling is something, especially when you have an eating disorder and when you're in recovery that brings up a lot of anxiety. And I so vividly remember how that used to feel. But especially for me personally, New York City as a place is something that holds a lot of mixed emotions in my life. I lived there for a little bit when I was really, really deep in my eating disorder. I was working as an actress and lived in the city. I was so young, all on my own, very lonely, but also very, very, very much in an eating disorder. And I had dreamed basically my entire life about living in New York City. It was always my goal. And so then when I finally arrived, and it was so different than I thought it would be, probably because of the headspace I was in, but it was just hard. And one of the things I remember so much is looking up different food places that I really wanted to go, like quintessential New York City places, bagel shops, pizza, hot dogs, all that stuff that just isn't the same in California. I really wanted to enjoy those foods. And back then I was too afraid. And so I never did in the entire time I lived in New York when I was that age. Never had a New York bagel, never had a slice of pizza, never had Italian. It just never happened because I was so stuck in my disorder. And so now every time I return to the city in a space of being recovered, I make a point to have those foods and really enjoy them. And I can think back to a couple different times I've been to New York since I recovered that, you know, I was in the process of recovery. And so sometimes those things still felt hard. But this trip was different. I had so many bagels that were delicious. And if you follow me on Instagram, I was posting about them. Had an amazing slice of pizza. Well, more than one slice, obviously, from my sister's local pizza shop. And it was so good. And if you know me, bagels and pizza are like kind of my top foods that I absolutely adore. New York City food is made for me and what I love. And we got Italian one night from this amazing Italian place. I'm really grateful now when I return to the city that I can have those foods and it just is okay. Like I eat them, I enjoy them. I'm like, wow, what a treat because I'm here. Maybe in the far back corners of my brain, there's a part of me that's still sort of shaking in her boots. But that's a part of me I don't feel connected to anymore. So I am able to look back at her and say, girl, we're fine now. It's okay. You can have this. And I can feel more at ease. So it was really cool to be there. I mean, on so many levels, like enjoying brunch with my family many times after my sister's graduation and going to her favorite food spots. That was so cool. Things that really reminded me of the ways that food holds meaning outside of just nourishment. And I think when you're in an eating disorder, you start to just see food as numbers and the fear of what it's going to do to your body. And it's about so much more than that. If I had approached this trip when I was still in my eating disorder, I think it would have been so stressful and so hard. And I wouldn't have been thinking about what was really important, which was being there with my sister, who graduated with her master's degree. I'm so incredibly proud of her. Seeing the way that she lives, experiencing the life that she lives there, being there with my son and seeing him with his cousins, and having my parents there with us, and my grandfather was there too. Four generations of my family all came together on this trip. And that's what was important. The food was a piece of it where we convened and connected. But if I was focused on the food the whole time, I wouldn't have felt any of that. So I'm just really grateful to find myself here. And I thought I would share a little bit of that with you today, as our episode topic really focuses a lot on my own relationship with food, which kind of duh, like that's sort of the entirety of this podcast. But I want to talk more about how I got to this place of being able to be a lot more intuitive, less stressed about it, more connected to what really matters, and how I got to a place of, I guess, understanding more about what my body needs and how to give it that. Because it certainly didn't happen overnight. It happened over the course of several years that I found myself here with several dips and slips and relapses along the way. But what really prompted this thought for today's episode was a reel that I posted on Instagram last week now that was basically like not everyone's going to understand why I still eat six times a day, but if you know, you know. Sort of in reference to the standard recommendation, usually, when you're in recovery, of having three meals and three snacks. I still do that. I still have three meals and three snacks most days. And it's not because I'm still on a meal plan. And it's not because I'm rigidly following a recommendation from a dietitian, or it's not because I need to be following those recommendations to work towards any sort of health-related, eating disorder-related goal purely at this point in my life. Eating six times a day is what my body tells me that it needs. And so I just do it. And I got a really weird comment that was like, I'm 12 years into recovery, and hearing you say that you are 11 years in your recovery and still eat six times a day is really weird. And I didn't really know how to take that. I was like, what do you mean? It's weird. Like, what are you talking about? First of all, to judge me for what I'm eating when you know I'm a person in recovery is like kind of whack. So it kind of put me off. But I was also like, what is so weird about getting to a point in recovery where you're listening to your body and eating when your body tells you to eat? I don't think there's anything too weird about that. Perhaps what this person was wondering was after 11 years in recovery, why am I still following a meal plan? Which is not what's happening. But I could understand if there was some confusion there. So that comment sort of made me scratch my head a bit, but also made me want to explore this topic more because we don't all start in the same place with what needs to change about our food and recovery. And we don't all end up in the same place with how we continue to nourish our bodies and move through the world. And we shouldn't, because we all need different things dependent on your body's needs, your lifestyle, your energy, your age. There's so many factors. And I also know that maybe in 20 years from now, I won't be eating the way that I'm eating now, which is fine because my body is in charge of that. But I did not just wake up one day and say, I'm gonna eat intuitively. I'm gonna listen to my body and give my body what it's asking for, and simple as that, done. It's way more complicated, and the path there is so much more complicated. So I'll take you back to the beginning. All of this, too, I want to preface is this is my personal story. This is my personal journey. I'm not recommending this path for everyone. Everyone's recovery is gonna look differently. I do recommend that you work with an eating disorder-informed dietitian if that's possible for you. And if not, I would say read the book Intuitive Eating, look up the rule of threes, and follow some amazing dietitians on Instagram that I will be happy to recommend to you in the show notes as a starting place. I'm not a dietitian myself. So none of these things I'm gonna share are recommendations for nutrition. This is just the evolution of how I went from being deep in an eating disorder, specifically restriction, how I adapted to the recommendation of a dietitian, and how I moved from having to follow a meal plan to somehow being able to follow intuitive eating and listening to my body over the course of the last 11 years. Wow, kind of a big topic. This is kind of ambitious for the day. But here we are. So, anyways, back to the beginning. First time I ever saw a dietitian was when I had come home for the summer between my freshman year of college and when I went off to New York City to work. I was seeing an eating disorder therapist at the time. And we were making some progress, but not a whole lot on the food front. I was still really fearful of a lot of different foods. I was still in a pretty restrictive place. I was trying to make change, but I didn't really know. I didn't know that I didn't know how to do that. I thought, I know everything there is to know about food. I know all the calories and anything that you could possibly imagine. I know about macros. I know that I'm not eating enough. And it's simple, right? Just eat more. It wasn't that simple because my brain was not allowing me to eat more because it didn't know what my body actually needed. But I thought that I did. So when my therapist first recommended I see a dietitian, I was like, that seems like a really bad idea because that seems like I'm gonna become more obsessed with food. Somebody telling me what I should and shouldn't eat. My brain already tells me that every day. Why do I need another voice to do that? However, I trusted my therapist because she was amazing, and I said, okay, I'll give it a shot. And I think I may have mentioned this before, but the first time I went to see a dietitian, I absolutely hated it. Surprising. I was sitting in her office for our first session and just talking, and I was doing something that I won't name exactly what it was, but it was an observable behavior. And she turned to me and said, Are you body checking right now? And I was like, What? I'd never even really heard the term body checking before. And I was like, What is she even talking about? I was body checking, but I didn't know that that was a thing. And it really caught me off guard and really made me feel vulnerable and offended. And so I left that session and I was like, I don't like her. The thing I realize now is my eating disorder didn't like her because my eating disorder was very threatened by her. She saw through me like no other. And she's one of the reasons to this day that I even got into treatment in the first place. She's actually somebody that I still refer clients to myself. But I left that session feeling like she doesn't understand me, doesn't know what I need. I tried to see her a few more times, and then I booked the job that took me to New York and I didn't see her again for a little while. But I really felt in those days that recovery should be simple, right? I know I'm not eating enough right now, so I should just eat more if I want to recover. But then your brain starts to ask the questions. Okay, but how much more? How much more of what? Okay, I'll eat more, but only more of these types of foods. What if I eat too much? What if it turns into binging, which totally can happen and is sometimes a really normal part of recovery, which we can talk about at another time. But it gets really scary really quick, and then you kind of backpedal and you're like, yeah, just kidding. Like, I'm gonna do what I know because I know how eating this way impacts my body. If I'm gonna change it, I feel like I've lost control completely and there's no boundaries. And so that's the thing that I found really hard about trying to do it on my own was there were too many intricacies and questions that I didn't know the answer to. And so I just stopped and kind of backpedaled. And this is why I've posted about this before. I don't tend to recommend that you start intuitive eating at the beginning of your recovery journey because very often your body cues are very much out of whack. Hunger, fullness, they're so confusing. Sometimes you don't really feel hunger unless it's in extreme ways. Sometimes you don't feel it at all. Sometimes you feel it perpetually. Fullness, you might start to confuse a feeling of getting a little bit full with extreme fullness, or you might only be able to sense fullness when it is extreme. It's just really, really hard to determine what it is your body needs when it needs it because you've been ignoring your needs for so long or responding to them in ways that isn't healthy and isn't helpful. So if you decide, okay, I'm just going to do my best to eat intuitively, I love that as an intention. It's an amazing intention. And also it's really hard to accomplish when your body isn't giving you signals that you can really interpret yet. That's why it's so important to have some kind of guide and boundaries as you're starting this journey. And that's of course why I always recommend seeing a dietitian alongside a therapist with the understanding that accessibility is really hard. And I wish that it were different. Fast forward years now, I'm back in California. I was at my lowest point in my eating disorder emotionally. I got to a point when I was working this job where I was like, I just need to come home because my eating disorder is so bad. I do know that I need to get help. But I really thought that if I just came home and I left that really toxic work environment that I was in, that I would be able to be better, that I would get home and I would just start eating more because I was safe again and my family would be supporting me and I would be out of that stressful place. I'd be happy and so I could be fine to eat. What do you know? That didn't happen. I got home and I was still very much stuck in my eating disorder. And I would try and it wouldn't work. I really thought that just changing my place where I was somewhere different would change the way that I felt enough so that I wouldn't be afraid anymore, so that I would just start to eat more. Again, I was really oversimplifying how complicated the relationship with food becomes and your ability to understand what you need really turns into when you've been stuck in an eating disorder for really any amount of time. At that point, I went back to seeing my amazing therapist in California, and she once again said, girl, go to see this dietitian. So I went back to her, even though I was not a fan when I first met her, and I kind of just got to the point where I realized I don't know what the heck I am doing with food. And if I do want to get better, I need somebody else to tell me what to do. My brain was too messed up at that point to determine this is what I should be eating, this is what I need to be eating. So I decided to try as much as I could to surrender that control to someone else. And I just had to trust her. Problem was, I did not trust her. So she gave me a meal plan and one that was is pretty standard when you're entering eating disorder treatment that focuses on getting consistent nutrition in. Obviously, depending on a person's needs, amounts of that are gonna vary, frequency is gonna vary, it's gonna look really different and individualized, and it should because we all need something different. So mine looked like three meals, three snacks. And in whatever amounts, I can't remember at this point. I pushed back like crazy at first because I really didn't trust that this was not going to be so incredibly overwhelming and change my body in extreme ways, which was what I was primarily afraid of going into eating disorder recovery. But what I did realize was once I started eating more consistently, those cues, those body cues, hunger, fullness, satiety, all of that started to show back up. It was complicated along the way. Obviously, you all know after that point, I wasn't making a whole lot of progress and outpatient. And I did end up going to residential treatment, PhD IOP. But that's the important key that I started to take away was okay, first of all, if you're telling me that this is a normal way of eating, I have no idea what normal eating is. And I have to just sit with that fact. And this person has a master's degree in dietetics. I have a master's degree in an eating disorder, essentially. And if I want to recover, I can't trust myself with that. I can't put myself in the driver's seat of what I should be eating because right now, the person in the driver's seat of my brain is a manipulative eating disorder that's trying to kill me. So get real, Chloe. You don't know what you're doing here. Please trust someone else that is supposed to be an expert. And the first thing that I noticed when I finally did that was my body started working again. My brain started working again, and that is good and hard because I felt hunger more. I felt fullness, very, very in an incredibly sensitive sort of way. And so much of my eating disorder was sensory. And my brain started waking up enough that I was able to do more work in therapy, but that was also hard. In treatment, the difference for me between being an outpatient and being in treatment when it came to food was the level of rigor and intensity to which I challenged myself. I did not have the capacity in the outpatient level to challenge myself in the way that I needed to. I would sort of eat the meal plan, sort of not. I would really rely on foods that felt safe to me, which is sometimes what you need to do when you're getting started, just to like make a little bit of momentum. But I found that really stunted my progress in recovery. I stalled out. In treatment, they're like, you're eating this. This is what is for dinner. And you don't really choose it a lot of the time. You do get some different options. But it's like, yeah, here's what's for dinner, go. And then you kind of have to deal with it. And it's really emotional and it's really, really hard. But I In that environment, I had to face a lot more fear foods than I would have ever put in front of myself if I was not in treatment, if I was still living at home. So that's kind of the next piece of where my relationship with food went was so much of it was exposure therapy. And if any of you are familiar with exposure response prevention, that's a type of therapy that's used really often in OCD treatment, where the whole idea is you are exposed to the thing that you are the most afraid of, and you learn techniques to reduce your level of distress. So you manage through the response. And eventually your body and your nervous system and your brain learns okay, this thing that I feared so much, actually, I've been exposed to it so many times and I've been safe all those times that I'm okay. I can survive it. And so much of the food part of eating disorder treatment is really exposure therapy. And that is what happened every single day, six times a day in treatment was here's your food. This is something that is feared. We have to eat it, learn how to manage the response. And eventually, over the course of several months and years, you learn this thing that I've once felt so afraid of is actually not going to kill me. Because that's what is being sent as a signal to your brain when you're deep in an eating disorder. It's not just like this food freaks me out a little bit. Really, what's happening in your nervous system is a danger threat response. Like we are being threatened and might be killed. That's not typically what we're thinking, but that's what the body is feeling. And the only way for the body to understand that this is not something that's actually going to cause us fatal harm is encountering it again and again and having an outcome that is safe. Where that gets sticky is when we're also really afraid of body changes. Because a reality for many of us in recovery is that our bodies will change. And that, as a feared response, can also signal danger, can also signal threat. So to feel, okay, I've been this food itself no longer produces that response. But the idea that I am going to gain weight produces that response. And so this is another conversation for another day about the ways that we also kind of need to expose ourselves to our bodies changing in order to manage through that whole response system of my body's changing, danger, danger, I'm gonna die. Those are different tracks, but they're related. So again, this is a complicated thing. And I wish that I could go back and tell myself in those early days, like, Chloe, you don't need to figure this out all on your own. It's kind of it feels like an insurmountable thing to figure this all out on your own. You don't need to figure it out on your own. It's really, really complicated. I remember a really specific instance in PHP where we went to a lunch outing, and that's essentially where you go to a restaurant, which is a massive challenge for many of us in recovery, and you order off the menu, you're with a dietitian, and they kind of help you navigate all right, this is what you're ordering, this is how much would meet your meal plan. So, you know, do your best. It was really hard for I just remember those restaurant outings in treatment were really tense at the beginning, and then eventually they started to become more lighthearted as I went along in my process. But I just remember the hardest part for me about some of those lunch outings was the fact that we would have lunch and then it would basically be snack time, and then they would take us out for snack right after. And there are so many moments where I went back home and just called my sister crying because it was so scary to do that. And what she would reflect back to me is that's the most normal thing in the world, and quote unquote normal being like that's the most non-disordered person thing to do in the world. You go to a restaurant, you have a dinner, and then you continue the night on, and you maybe get dessert somewhere else. Totally a person living their life in a joyful way, sort of process thing to do. And it was helpful to have that perspective from the outside because it's something that I actually do really regularly in my life now that once felt so, so, so scary. But it was experiences like that where I had to get uncomfortable and I had to eat the things that my brain was screwing to not eat again and again and again and again until I was like, okay, I've had whatever food this is so many times at this point. I'm whatever about it. Maybe I still don't really want to eat it. Maybe there's still part of me that's like, ah, this is gonna make me gain weight. But also, I've had it so many times, my body is the way that it is right now, and it doesn't produce on a nervous system level that same response. I think that's really the important part of this phase and why challenging fear foods, even if they're not foods that you're likely gonna have every single day of your life, is so important. We have to teach our bodies that it's okay to eat all foods in order to find a sense of safety with food in general and to find a relationship with food that's just neutral. There's so much freedom there. And as I talked about at the top of the episode, that's something I really experienced on this trip was, you know, these are foods that I don't encounter all the time, every day in my life. But when we're going out to brunch and this is what's on the menu, I want to be able to look at that menu and know I could order anything off that menu and be okay and be able to eat it and focus on what's really important, which was my family. And that started in treatment doing these restaurant outings and eating fear foods so consistently that it stopped producing a response or an intense sort of response, really. Even if you don't find yourself in a treatment environment or that sort of support isn't accessible to you, as I know that is a massive problem. Many people need this level of support and it's just not available. This doesn't mean that you cannot implement this in other ways. Get real with yourself. What are the foods that are safe for you? What are the foods that are maybe a little bit scary for you? And what are the foods that are like red flag, off limits? I'm not even gonna go there, shut down kind of foods. How can you start to slowly expand the realm of safety? And maybe you don't do it in a massive flooding way because you don't have support for it. I'm not saying go to the 10 out of 10 for your food right away, but how can you take something from the, I'm a little bit scared of this list and sprinkle it onto whatever you've got going on in your food today? How can you just little by little start to expand your zone of safety so that eventually what was once a 10 out of 10 is maybe a seven out of 10. And then maybe it's a five out of 10. Journal about it, bring it to therapy, tell your best friend that you're doing it, do it with somebody that you really, really feel safe with. But I think the important message is getting to a place where you can feel free and intuitive with food requires you to get uncomfortable with food. We can get a long way, at least in changing some behaviors by eating safe foods. But if what you want is that full, recovered, free life, you've got to do the things that scare you with food. And that is maybe a way to start that's a bit more accessible if treatment or higher level of care is not possible for you right now. Now, where things I think really get interesting with the way that we move from meal plan to intuitive eating is in that middle phase of recovery. Maybe you're seeing your dietitian less and less. Maybe you're still trying to hit the pillars of three meals, three snacks to keep yourself accountable. But perhaps you're working again, or you're back in school, or you're back in your life, and things are really, really busy, or your focus is just starting to shift so much away from recovery being everything to recovery being a part of your life. That this, I think, is a really essential place to keep recovery a part of your world in focus, but also know and trust that maybe you can trust yourself a bit more at this point. This is where I would notice sometimes I would be hungry when it wasn't snack time or it wasn't lunchtime yet. And I'd be like, wait, but I already had my snack. What do I do? It's those questions that start popping up. Or, okay, I have a class right at noon. When the heck am I gonna have lunch? And I would have to think about, okay, maybe I'll have morning snack and lunch together at like 11:15. I found myself getting a little bit more creative and flexible here while also keeping myself accountable. So I started to realize, okay, if I am hungry between mealtimes, that probably means whatever I had before wasn't enough. There's no reason why I need to be waiting until 12 p.m. on the dot to be having lunch if I'm hungry at 11:30. Also noticing that, hey, it's fine to have a handful of something if you're feeling a little peckish and you can't have lunch for another hour or so. Those things were not easy for me to do at first because I went from a place of rigidly following my eating disorder to rigidly following a meal plan because it felt like what I was supposed to do. And what really helped me, honestly, in my recovery was following that meal plan. But I think uh, and any dietitians listening to this right now feel free to comment. But I think any dietician would tell you that this is a place where your meal plan is not as an exact science. I hear a lot of dietitians say that nutrition is an art and a science. And this is one of those places where no one really is gonna know what your needs are 100%. You can do all the calculations and do your best, but your body is going to be the expert, and our activity levels are different every day, our energy needs are different, depending on your cycle, your needs are different. And so there's gonna be times where your meal plan doesn't exactly fit perfectly. And at a point in your recovery where you're in that integration stage, I would say, that's a good place to start to notice what your body's telling you when you've been consistent for some time. And at this time, I'm talking, it was maybe three years into my recovery that I was feeling like I could kind of experiment a little bit more with this. I could trust my body's hunger fullness cues. I knew what they felt like. I started to even understand, hmm, what sounds good to me to eat today, which is not a question I used to ask myself at all. It was just what should I eat? At that point, when I felt hunger, I would try to challenge myself to just be like, all right, well, let's have a handful of whatever. Let's have lunch a little bit earlier today. It was giving myself a little bit more flexibility and space. And I'll also add that I was still seeing a dietitian at this time. So I was talking about these things with her, getting her feedback, doing this trial and error sort of thing, because it does take time to trust yourself. It's scary to trust yourself. It's not something we can just jump right into. But there's a middle phase where it's important to maybe dip your toe a little bit into what it would be like to release the reins a little bit, trust my recovery, and trust my body. But the interesting thing is, and I'll go back to what I said in that reel, even along this process, I was still finding that I did need to eat six times a day. Three meals, three snacks. Breakfast time, I would eat. Like clockwork 9:30, 10 o'clock, my body was hungry for a snack. 12, 12:30, my body's hungry for lunch. It was less of me looking at the clock and thinking, oh shoot, okay, now it's time for lunch. And more my body telling me, oh, I'm hungry, looking at the clock and realizing, oh wow, that's because it's snack time. My body got really comfortable and accustomed to the rhythm of consistent nutrition. And the way that my body works, it needs that to feel its best. And that's something I really started to understand at this space was I'm eating the six times a day, but it's not from a place of I have to do this because it's what my dietician is telling me. It was more coming from I'm doing this because my body is telling me to do it. And also, it helps me to know that my dietitian is still co-signing it. So it was me trusting my body a little bit, also pulling from the reassurance from a professional, but knowing that was once my meal plan and now just felt really like what my body was asking for was really interesting to realize because I think in the beginning of recovery, I thought, okay, I'm eating this much because I'm trying to recover. This is a recovery meal plan or whatever. What I didn't realize was, no, my dietitian was just teaching me to eat in a way that honored my body's needs, not just for recovery, but for life. And that felt really nice to know. Also a little scary to know because I had it in my mind that I was not gonna have to do this forever. But I will also say when you get to a recovered place, that doesn't really matter. I have my snacks, I move on. I focus on what I need to focus on, I eat my meals, I move on. And it's what helps me live my life. Food is not the focus, but food is a tool for me to be present, get my work done, have energy to be with my son, support this pregnancy, which by the way has also changed the way that I eat. But that middle phase of recovery was a space of realizing, like, oh wow, this wasn't just a meal plan. This was me learning my body, learning what my body needs. And now my body's responding and telling me, like, yes, thank you. I would like a snack now. Yes, thank you. I would like to have my dinner. Now, all of this is also not to gloss over the fact that in these moments, I did have slip-ups and I did have ups and downs where I would dip back into a phase of restriction, or I would have a relapse, even as recently as just several years ago. There was a what I would say was a really close relapse. But having done this work on the back end, what I really found helpful was knowing coming out of those phases, I know genuinely what makes my body feel good. It's three meals and three snacks. And the amounts differ depending on the day and whatever. But coming out of the slips and out of the relapses, I knew that was a pattern that I could return to that was supportive to me in my body. And so I returned. The other thing I'll say about the slips and the relapses is having this awareness of this is what works for my body made it really hard to ignore and rationalize when I was restricting, because my body would say, yo, Chloe, it's time for a snack. And my eating disorder would say, Ha ha, no. And then it was really clear, like, because I had this blueprint of what works for my body when I was ignoring it and when my eating disorder was stepping in. And I actually think that helps me to get back on track when things do veer off, because it is not just, oh, I don't really need that. It's like, no, clearly I know that I need that, and I'm ignoring that knowledge. Over the course of the next several years in my life, with the ups and downs, with the dips, the slips, the recovery oopsies, I found that the more I lived, the more flexible I could become with food and the less important it became to me to focus on is this a good snack? Is this the right kind of lunch I'm supposed to be having? Is this perfectly on my meal plan? Because I didn't really have a meal plan anymore, but I kind of just started to understand what my body needed to feel satiated, and I gravitated towards those things. I'm also really a creature of habit in my life where, and I don't think at this point it's an eating disorder thing, but where my brain will just be like, I love this breakfast. I will have it every day for three months, and then one day I'll be sick of it and I'll move on to the next. But I honestly think that has more to do with just how hectic my life is, and if I like something, I'm just gonna default to that so that I can think about other things. I posted about this a while ago, and everyone was asking me if I had ADHD, and I don't diagnosed, but it got me thinking about it. But the point here is the food choices became less of a big part of my life and more I'm hungry. I know that having carbs, protein, and fat in a meal makes me feel good. And so I would make sure that I had all those components in a meal, and then you move on. And I was dating at the time, and I'd go out to dinner and we'd order appetizers, and sometimes I'd have dinners that would have freaked me out like crazy in my eating disorder, but now it just felt like I'm not really thinking about that. I'm thinking about going on this date with this guy, and it's either going really well or it's so weird. Those were the things I was thinking about, not necessarily as much what was on my plate, or you know, going out and getting drinks or a cup of coffee, things that would have also freaked me out when I was in my eating disorder. I wasn't finding myself calculating or compensating in other meals. That's I think where life started becoming more important than both the meal plan and the eating disorder. And I was so much more trusting of myself that I didn't find myself focusing as much on those things. And so that's where a big part of a relationship with food also is what is your relationship with your life? If your life is revolving around your food, that is a very small life. But if food is a part of your life or something that is a tool in your life or a connective source in your life, beautiful. But your life needs to be about more than the food. And when my life became about more than the food, the food part became easier. And the trusting of my body became a lot easier as well. A more recent pivotal shift in my own relationship with food, I think has happened as I've become a mother and I've carried now two kids. I mean, I'm currently carrying my second, and that has forced me to really look at my relationship with my body, my relationship with food, my relationship with hunger fullness, and trusting myself, really. If you haven't listened to the episode on relapse, I think it was one of the earlier episodes where I talked about in my first pregnancy how I got just the strongest craving ever for eggs. And at the time I didn't really eat eggs. And I was like, all right, my body's screaming at me to eat eggs. I'm gonna eat eggs. And so I did. And it seems like such a small thing, but it was really massive in that moment to recognize a strong craving of something that I had said was off limits, and then honor that thing. Big shift in food freedom and acknowledging spaces I was still stuck in quasi-recovery. One thing about me in pregnancy is my body is loud. And I think normally my body's pretty clear about what it wants and needs, but in pregnancy, it screams at me and it's highly specific, like the egg thing. And a lot of the times it will ask me for things at really odd times that are super specific and things that I normally wouldn't eat at those times. And I know this is not a unique experience. I think many of us feel that in pregnancy, but when you have an eating disorder or even have recovered from an eating disorder and still just have the whisperings in your brain, it's like, what? Like you are telling me that it is 9 a.m. and you want to have a feast of pickles and peanut butter. Like, what? That's so weird. Okay. And I think if I had still been stuck in my disorder, I wouldn't be listening to those cues as much, but I do in this pregnancy, and I did my best in my last one too as well. But really, in this pregnancy, if there's a strong Craving, your girl's gonna get it. And the interesting thing that I've been reading up a lot about these cravings is very often your body will crave certain things in pregnancy that are essential to your developing baby. And that's wild, but also makes me really respect my body and the intelligence that it holds. And if I can really connect to that and know that my body actually holds that intelligence, not just while I'm pregnant, but at all times, and yours does too. If I can really learn to hear it and trust it and respond to it, that's the best blueprint that I could ever use for what's really healthy for me. Despite what society tells me, or even what any kind of healthcare professional could tell me, my body knows better what I actually need. I am a singular human that has unique needs, and my body can communicate them if I learn to listen. And that's really the lesson here is when you're in an eating disorder, you have so deeply disconnected from hearing, listening, learning those cues from your body that you cannot jump right back into it, but you can build towards that. And when you get there, it's so cool. And I really do trust that everyone can find their way there. It just takes time and patience and consistency. But again, I can happily say that I now eat six times a day, just like on my meal plan. It varies with what I eat, when I eat it. Sometimes I eat more than six times a day. That's okay too. It doesn't mean that I'm still in my eating disorder, that I eat at this frequency. It means that I've learned what my body needs and I honor that. Point blank. The end. That's the end of the story. This whole process for me was acknowledging that I couldn't trust myself at first. I had to surrender that trust to somebody that knew better. I had to consistently challenge, expose myself to fears, get uncomfortable, find nervous system safety, experiment with flexibility, understand, learn, respond to my body's cues to rebuild that trust. Now I know my body trusts me and I trust her too. And that's why it's a relationship with food. It's a relationship with body. It's bi-directional. You get feedback from your body and you respond to it. So I hope that helps to contextualize how intuitive eating becomes a part of the picture, how it looks different for everyone, why I still eat in this frequency, and actually how that happens, because it doesn't just happen. You work to get there. And it can take a really long time and it is really uncomfortable. But what it leads to is peace and trust. And that's honestly everything. Okay, friends. I hope that you can take some of these nuggets with you. I will link some resources in the show notes for people I love on Instagram to follow, like amazing dietitians. If you want to work with a dietitian, I would recommend just starting by looking up eating disorder dietitians, whatever area that you're in. So many of them take insurance now as well, so I wouldn't count that out. The intuitive eating book is a great one to pick up. All links should be below in the show notes. Thanks again for listening. As always, I would so appreciate a five-star review wherever you're listening. Apple Podcasts, Spotify. If you're here on YouTube with me today, give this video a thumbs up. And I would love to have you as a subscriber. Our count is slowly growing, it means so much to me. But today, I want you to eat your food. Bye.