Is An Eating Disorder A Cry For Attention?

When I was in the darker depths of my eating disorder, people would ask me whether I was using food to gain attention.

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I wasn’t trying to get attention; I was trying to get my needs met. An eating Disorder is the body’s attempt at Communicating its needs in the only ways it knows how.

The ways in which I used food and manipulated my body symbolized how afraid I was for asking for what I wanted, how I uncertain I felt for expressing needs, and how ashamed I felt for having desires. I was trying to get my needs met that I felt scared to ask for and didn’t know how to ask for directly.

As dramatic as it sounds, in my body, it felt like by expressing myself authentically = death.

 For people who are navigating an eating disorder and who relate to this, you may struggle with:

• Bingeing on foods that do not satisfy hunger or thirst because you can’t ask for what you truly want,

• Restriction because you cannot act on hunger cues,

• Asking for help,

• Expressing emotion, or

• Asking directly for what you want or need

How do you reach out?

For people who relate to this embodied perspective at understanding eating disorders, you may notice that it’s hard to physically reach out or extend out with your arms and hands, which may make it challenging to give, receive, or reach out for help or connection or intimacy.

Linked to this somatic architecture are correlating beliefs. As such, you may have this belief that it’s not ok to have fun or a feeling of not being able to give in or give up.

On the other hand, you may notice that your arms and hands flail or are very loose or disconnected from the rest of your body. Maybe you have joints that click, or your shoulder can dislocate easily. Linked to this somatic organization, are beliefs such as believing that you cannot be direct with your feelings or intentions, or that others will not support you desires.

So, is an eating disorder a cry for attention? I think in many cases, people with an eating disorder or disordered eating who resonate with these words, will say it’s not.

On the outside, on the surface, at first glance, it may look like attention-seeking but underneath, the person is trying to find a creative, secretive, indirect way of getting what they want and who also feel deeply afraid to ask for those things in a direct or honest way (because possibly when they tried to ask in the past, they were shamed or wronged, or made to feel bad).

And usually, what people with eating disorders are seeking and are trying to reach for is connection, co-regulation, safety, and support.

We have to utilize both top-down and bottom-up processing to support eating disorder recovery. Our beliefs are represented and manifest through our physical body. This means that our working with the body and the nervous system can influence our thoughts and perceptions of reality. By supporting the loosening up of beliefs, the ways in which the body moves through life and how the nervous system can handle challenge and pleasure transforms.

Rather than vilifying and demonizing eating disorders as simply a cry for attention, let’s get real. We all want attention.

We all want to belong, to be seen, to be considered and recognized. We want to be understood.

We want to feel safe. We don’t want to feel alone. We want to engage with others in ways that feel resonate and genuine. We want to be held.

When we give the body what it has been asking for (ie. attunement and safety), the coping strategies that involve food lessen, the body becomes more flexible and resilient, and beliefs around worth, belonging, and purpose evolve.

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The Link Between Binge Eating and People Pleasing

What is the link between binge eating and people pleasing? How do they cycle and feed one another?

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When we have learnt to shapeshift, to attend to other’s needs before meeting our own, to keep giving even when our cup is empty, or to comply to other people’s standards or expectations, we exhaust ourselves. Binge eating is a strategy that attempts to bring some kind of relief from all of that intense, built-up energy.

It takes so much energy to be someone that we’re not. The body can only hold so much intensity. And that intense energy is stress survival energy (aka flight, fight, freeze energies).

Every time, we people please and ignore ourselves, it takes enormous effort. Instead of listening to our own needs, we become hypervigilant to the outside world, constantly scanning around us, moulding, shaping, changing ourselves for approval and validation (aka, all we are trying to do is to feel a sense of belonging). Hypervigilance comes with anxiety, defensive orienting, and urgent fixation on the external environment. This is taxing on the system.

With all of that energy in the body with nowhere to go, the action of binge eating comes in to suppress and numb that energy. The food squashes it down, out of sight, out of feeling.

Binge eating can also create an energetic wall between us and the outside world. Exhausted from trying to please others, binge eating can bring relief whereby we collapse and no longer have to engage with the world.

Binge eating can offer a moment where we no longer have to play by society’s expectations. We can flip the switch and relieve ourselves from the tight constrictions and conditionings.

Binge eating symbolizes just how much we have learnt as a society to hold it in, and how underneath all of those stiff upper lips, we are humans (aka mammals) with biological impulses, desires, and needs - and that if they cannot be met, allowed, followed, or expressed they come out in other ways which can feel out of control or unstoppable.

For those who are navigating binge eating, or an eating disorder, disordered eating, or diet culture mentality for that matter, pay attention to the times where you turn away from your authentic self and people-please instead.

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Notice the times you ignore your impulses, such as suppressing a feeling, a need to rest, or a hunger pang, and see what happens when you aim to care and attend to yourself.

This practice requires a slowing down, a tuning into your body, a commitment to be with the uncomfortable sensations and feelings (even if it’s a few moments before bingeing), and to follow an authentic impulse that your body is asking. This process rewires the nervous system and takes practice practice practice.

So, observe within yourself:

What comes up for you when you fill up your cup first?

What emerges when you give space to an emotion to express itself?

Can you offer yourself compassion and gentleness throughout this process, with its ups and downs?

What happens to your overall energy with this awareness?

Can you manage food in a different way?

What does it feel like inhabit your authentic expression?

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The Frequency of Eating Disorder Recovery

The process of recovery is allowing the eating disorder to let go of you. It is about getting to a place within you where there is no place for the eating disorder to hold onto anymore.

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With nothing to grip onto, the eating disorder eventually releases itself.

This work of recovery is not about needing to let go of the eating disorder or trying to push it away.

Rather, it is an expansive and additive process where you add to your toolbelt, increasing resources, support, capacity, perspective, and awareness.

Recovery is not a restrictive process.

Recovery asks us to expand what we believe, think, and feel. It's the path of moving past our edge. It is the path of embodied awakening.

Eating disorder recovery is about reaching a place in yourself that is more aligned with a deeper truth.

By living that authentic truth, free from the conditioned layers and the heavy illusions, the eating disorder has nothing to grip onto and naturally dissolves.

This takes leaning into the unknown, facing change, practicing the unfamiliar, and sitting in that that limbo space.

Through observing, unlearning, discerning, and clarifying what is the voice of the eating disorder and what is your voice, you land in knowing you are, what you care about and value, and trust in you core self.

This place within you vibrates at a frequency that is higher and beyond that of the eating disorder. There is an inevitable natural maturation of out the eating disorder whereby it lets go of you.

You don't force it away, push it aside, or shout at it to leave.

There is an inevitable natural maturation of out the eating disorder whereby it lets go of you.

When we clearly remember the truth of our being and make the courageous choices and actions that align with that, what no longer serves can release itself from us with grace.

What is alive in your heart is worthy to be embodied and to be integrated.

Remember, recovery is a very deep unlearning and unraveling of what we have held onto (for some of us, for many, many generations) for a sense of protection, stability, control, and emotional management.

If you are reading this, I bet you have navigated your fair share of messy, challenging, and uncomfortable moments ~

~ and that you know in your heart that this wild process is bringing you closer to your aligned expression.

Recovery asks us to face our fears and hesitations, and to choose what our soul needs in order to thrive, so that we land home within ourselves.

This is about fine tuning our inner compass.

In truth.

In what matters.

In aliveness and attunement.

Integrated, proud, free, and whole.

Trusting in the undeniable core of ourselves.

Thank you for choosing to walk this path.

Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash

An Eating Disorder Is Not A Disorder

Through my personal explorations and through the support of plant medicine and nervous system healing work, I have come to understand that an eating disorder is not a disorder, but rather the body in a particular pattern attempting to communicate a need and solve a problem.

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Breaking out of the “disorder” diagnosis means that I am not defined by my “illness”, nor is there a predetermined, cookie cutter treatment plan that can “cure” me.

No longer being defined by it, the eating “disorder” is no longer part of my identity or something that I attach to as a way to feel see or validated.

Seeing it as a pattern means that I can shift and redesign the pattern. It means that the recovery process is unique to me, to my dreams and aspirations, and that it is truly a creative process. Additionally, the eating disorder is not me - it is not my identity - and rather, it is a coping strategy or survival pattern that I learnt at a young age to help me feel a sense of safety.

An eating disorder is a disorder because what it is actually responding to is a Society that is dys/dis-regulated.

We have to look at eating patterns/disorders from this higher and wider vantage point because they point us towards what we are missing as a society, and what is out of balance within institutions, communities, and families.

What we are missing within these networks are collective teachings that help us ground, self-regulate, and express emotions, healthy anger and boundaries.

We are missing moments to co-regulate and attune with others in integrity and connection, because we are overriding something within ourselves in order to keep go-go-going with a society that is extractive, dominating, and patriarchal.

We are missing trust between others and towards our own bodies as a result.

 Consider some of these statements:

“My eating disorder has been my only constant thing in my life; it’s like my best friend”.

“It helps me feel in control and it blocks out the chaos.”

“My world goes quiet and no one can reach me; I feel at peace.”

“With an eating disorder, I feel like I am achieving something – I’m not good at much else.”

“I don’t feel my body or my feelings; I am scared if I feel anything, I’ll drown.”

“I feel protected, no one can touch me.”

I have heard similar statements like the ones above from my clients, and I have lived them too. Maybe you relate to one or more of them. These are statements that are clearly telling us that as a society it’s time to do things differently. It is time to fill in the pieces of what we are missing, and to restore the fragmented, discombobulated patterns back to flow, coherence and wholeness.

As we do the healing work, we slowly shift the pattern from the rigid, defensive, scared, survival-based pattern into a pattern that is more flexible, resilient, coherent, and anchored in the present.

This is the work of neuroplasticity, which is the gradual rewiring of our system, reorganizing, changing, and growing into connections that are more supportive for our current-day reality.

 Let us remember that an eating “disorder” is not something that is wrong, and as such should be shamed. An eating disorder is a sign that someone is in a place of fear and protection, and at the core is yearning for safety and attunement.

 An eating disorder with all of its physiological hurt and emotional pain that it brings, underneath it all is a small child asking to be loved.

Rewiring the pattern to hold love, to express, offer and receive love, and authentic connection is a life-long path.

This path asks not just you to do the individual work, but is a collective undertaking, because when society agrees to offer genuine safety and attunement, this greatly impacts the wiring of our nervous system which in turn affects our ability to digest food as well as the unprocessed sensations, emotions, and memories.

Each step towards regulating, reclaiming, releasing, and remembering shifts the eating "disorder” into a more trusting, intuitive, compassionate, and grounded pattern.

This not only changes the way we eat, but how we relate to others, how to care for, listen to, and attune to those around us.

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Why Working with the Gut is Key for Eating Disorder Recovery

Trauma is not in the event itself, but about what happens within the nervous system, which impacts our digestion system, and our ability to have health, regeneration and flow in this system.

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Our digestion gets impacted due to trauma. Eating disorders are a trauma response that exacerbate the digestive system, and as such working with the digestive organs are important for recovery.

Now of course, if there’s a history of restrictive eating, bingeing and restricting, weight cycling, or dieting, the gut is going to be affected by these coping behaviours that use food. But this connection to the gut goes back to an earlier time in our lives and connecting to the gut is an important piece of healing from trauma and eating disorders.

The gut is considered our first brain and through the vagus nerve connects to the brain. There's a direct communication gut to brain, brain to gut. The chemicals that we find in the gut are also the chemicals within the brain. When we heal on a gut level, we support our brain healing too.

There is this superhighway between the gut and the brain that connects the two through the vagus nerve In fact, 80% of nerve information goes from the gut to the brain (where the brain interprets the information coming from the gut and then sends a message back down to the body) and only 20% of nerve information goes from the brain to the gut. The 80% is called "efferent nerve pathways" and the 20% is called "afferent".

This means that the gut is involved in almost everything we experience. And because it is linked via the vagus nerve, our gut is part of our social engagement system - which needs to be activated if we want to heal from trauma and eating disorders.

When it is in good health, we find more flow and ease in our ability to connect with others, to create and take in information, to instill healthy boundaries, and to utilize supportive resources.

Think about your history: was there high stress around the dinner table or when eating was going on? Do you remember feeling a lot of fear or anxiety in your belly as a child? Did your survival instincts increase when it was mealtime?

Over time, our system connects eating with stress. When there’s heightened levels of stress chemistry in our body, the gut won’t be in a good flow. This leads to gut challenges, like IBS, constipation, chronic diarrhea, food not being digested properly, as well as mental issues including brain fog, distractibility, depression, social anxiety, and all of this discomfort can exacerbate eating disorders.

When there’s been chronic stress (which can also be perpetuated from diet culture) or early childhood trauma, the stress survival energies get trapped inside of us which makes it incredibly hard to be in the body.

With the trauma energies and memories still swirling around with nowhere to go to be processed, we find ways to not feel all of that. We may start to exist in the mind, cutting ourselves from the body, and ignoring its subtle cues.

This means that it can be challenging to connect to the gut – which is also the place that governs instinctual, internal, intuitive knowings (there’s a reason why we say “I feel it in my gut” or “I have this gut instinct”). This is the concept of interoception – sensing and perceiving what is going on inside of us.

Gor many people who have experienced trauma, that 6th sense has become dimmed, and as a result, may make choices that aren’t good for them. They may only realise that they are tired when they are about to faint, or that they are full once they have reached a point of discomfort. In this case, the cues from the gut are harder to detect and can only be heard at the extreme edges.

For people with eating disorders reestablishing interoception and connection to the gut is key.

For people with an eating disorder, there is often a feeling of not having goodness and that there's always something missing (which can be further internalised as “I am not enough” or “something is wrong with me”).

These feelings can be shifted when we start to make connection to that first brain, to acknowledge it, and to work with it with gentleness, intention, and presence (not a “fix it” mode).

Through somatic awareness practices and developing tools that support nervous system regulation, within the context of eating disorder recovery is what I support my clients with, and together we bring in the support from the bottom-up, from the gut-up to heal at a body-first level.

Over time, as we let the gut know we are here for it, and listening, it begins to reorganise to flow and works in the way it’s can work. There is an integration of the whole system.

We have more capacity to feel and digest our emotions in the present moment, make aligned decisions, create spontaneously, instill healthy boundaries, trust in ourselves and what is good for us.

An intuitive wisdom starts to emerge from within: we start to know what is safe or not safe for us, what resonates or doesn’t, and what brings clarity, coherence and connection to our lives.

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How a Psychedelic Journey Can Support Eating Disorder Recovery

During a psychedelic experience, intense emotional content may arise. For people navigating eating disorders, big feels can feel unfamiliar, especially since the attempts at trying to keep physically small is a way to not feel big emotions. 

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To help the process of being with big feelings, having solid preparation and support in which you gain tools and context for navigating the experience is key.

And to prepare for this in a psychedelic journey, it is helpful to remember that despite what may arise in your perception or physical experience during the journey, the risk of physical harm is low. You won’t die from feeling the big feeling nor be completely swallowed by it!

Developing body awareness, learning about your nervous system and stress responses, as well as ways to regulate (breath, sound, movement, touch), recalling your intention, and developing a keen eye to spot reactive and unconscious avoidance patterns, are supportive tools to practice during the preparation phase, and to bring these skills into the journey space too.

 These exact skills can be applied throughout one’s eating disorder recovery journey, and so the process of preparing to navigate a psychedelic journey is akin to eating disorder recovery.

It is important to note that preparing for a psychedelic journey is not just a single 90-minute session with a therapist or a coach.

A psychedelic journey is part of an ongoing healing process, that goes at the pace of each individual’s nervous system, taking into account their (trauma) history, their current mindset, and how comfortable they feel with the person who is supporting and holding the journey space alongside.

For people in eating disorder recovery, feel safe with the facilitator is super key otherwise the eating disorder defenses will still be on guard, and this may make it more challenging during the journey itself.

 During the preparation phase, it is vital that there is space for the facilitator to truly take good time to develop rapport with the person who is seeking to journey, to gather information about their background, trauma history, and current medications, clarify expectations, explain logistics, delineate acceptable boundaries.

When there is relational safety, trust and rapport, and clarity one is able to surrender to and deeply engage in the experience. Without this safety, one may try to control the experience, hold back, or resist which can lead to feelings of overwhelm and fear.

With this deep level of understanding between the facilitator and the journeyer, there is flexibility and adaptability.

For people in recovery, developing a safe, co-regulated relationship that honours the inner rhythms of their psyche rather than following external protocols, can be powerful medicine. And when experience within the context of the psychedelic experience, can touch on supporting the healing of early developmental trauma, for example.

When there is enough safety, trust and rapport in the preparation and journey space, one feels empowered within themselves to face and be with whatever they encounter in their Psychedelic experience, and to trust that it will lead to whatever it is they are calling in to be healed.

Through this relational safety, you ultimately seek the answers on your own, access deep inner healing. It takes courage to face this. And having the right support and preparation will bolster self-confidence to face whatever arises.

A psychedelic journey is like an eating disorder recovery, just condensed into a few hours.

During the journey, accepting whatever comes up is exactly what is needed for this moment, rather than resisting, keeps one grounded in the present moment.

Since an eating disorder is a variety of coping strategies that attempt to bring someone out of the present moment (and shoots one into the past or future), reconnecting back to the here-and-now one of the key steps in healing from disordered eating patterns.

Facing the difficult stuff and surrendering is exactly what the eating disorder doesn’t want us to do. When shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, anger, grief, sexual energy, ecstatic joy, and love are experienced, people in eating disorder recovery can use the opportunity offered in plant medicine journeys to stay with these feelings and experience them fully.

Learning to trust oneself to hold and be with the unfamiliar, activating feelings in an embodied way, rather than trying to intellectualize or avoid, we can observe the ever-fluctuating feelings, and meet the eating disorder in a new way.

For people in eating disorder recovery, where there is often a deep fear in things changing and a tight grip on control, realising how quickly things do shift and that the ground under us is always moving, means that finding ground and home within the body is where we find the medicine we have been seeking.

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Working With Plant Medicine Requires a Trauma-Informed Approach [Eating Disorders]

Psychedelics can often bring up traumatic memories for people with eating disorders.

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Even with all preparation work prior to the journey, the unexpected can arise.

Sometimes after a psychedelic journey, one’s symptoms can get worse. For example, some people experience increased suicide ideation after a journey, or during the journey one may recall childhood sexual abuse, re-experience a traumatic event, or become aware of their trauma history whilst experiencing the effects of a psychedelic.

This is why working with a plant medicine facilitator who is trauma-informed and who has a clear understanding of what you’ve been through (your trauma history, your current challenges etc); and for you to learn about your own nervous system, stress survival responses and physiology, can be super supportive when trauma memories surface during a journey.

For people in eating disorder or disordered eating recovery, there is often a history of trauma or chronic stress that the eating disorder is trying to manage.

Working with the body that is holding the unmetabolized stress survival energy and indigested defense imprints, as part of the focus for the psychedelic journey, can support the gradual rewiring and the natural maturation out of the eating disorder patterns.

Even though what comes up may be challenging and evocative in journey spaces, improved mental health outcomes, a nervous system rewiring, and aligned and empowered somatic organisations over the long-term can be sustained, especially when there are trusted others who can support the anchoring in of the new insights, breakthroughs, and increased capacity in integration.

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Psychedelics and Eating Disorder Recovery: What To Expect

If you are looking to sacred plant medicine or psychedelics to support your eating disorder recovery, it is possible that you may experience being challenged on your worldviews, the way you relate to your body, the beliefs around how you perceive yourself, and your place here on this Earth.

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The process of disentangling from an eating disorder can be shocking, painful, and uncomfortable. Many years, decades, and generations of undoing often needs to be faced, and it is to these places inside of ourselves where plant medicine can take us.

These shifts in beliefs may also bring up grief and sadness in seeing from a new perspective, the years (and possibly generations) of how our bodies have been spoken to, punished, hurt, rejected, betrayal, perpetrated, and abandoned.

These shifts in how you view your body may be healing and liberating and positively change the ways in which you treat your body and accept other people and their bodies (aka #droppingoutofdietculture).

It can also bring up anger in seeing the oppressive reality of diet and fitness culture with fresh eyes.

Plant medicine or psychedelics support this undoing by reopening a window of brain development – one in which the brain is more plastic. When there is greater plasticity, there’s more potential to generate new patterns of thought and behaviour. This is called “neuroplasticity” and refers to the ways in which the body’s ability to change, heal, grow, and relearn.

For people navigating eating disorder recovery and the tight rules of diet culture, supporting the process of generating more flexibility and plasticity, allows for:

• A softening of rigid food rituals,

• A reduction in ruminating food and body thoughts and negative self-talk,

• A release of punishing guilt-driven restriction (and subsequent pendulum swing to bingeing which leads to more guilt, shame, and restriction), and

• An increased capacity to with one’s feelings, to be more in one’s own body, tracking sensations, emotions, and impulses in the present moment.

Plant medicine experiences often allow people to access emotions that are usually too intense to process – and for people with eating disorders, feeling the feels is one of the toughest aspects of recovery.

Many people don’t want to get physically big because they don’t want to face big emotions.

Psychedelics and eating disorder recovery: anything is possible

When in a psychedelic experience however, one may experience a rainbow of emotion, insight, wonder, awe, fear, disgust, shame, grief, connection, loneliness, love, and compassion, as it relates to the eating disorder, but it often extends much deeper and wider than that.

It can be empowering to come out the other side of the journey having felt so much and to have not been totally swallowed by the emotion.

This can offer evidence to an individual that they can feel and are not numb or robots, and they have the strength and the softness to feel the real and raw sensation of the present moment.

Good preparation with the help of a coach or guide prior to the psychedelic journey, can really support the process of being able to face and hold bigger feelings in a journey, ultimately increasing one’s capacity in everyday life. To access my free download on how to prepare of a macro or micro plant medicine ceremony for people in eating disorder recovery, head here. I go in-depth into what preparation can look like, and how it can deepen the journey experience as well as the integration thereafter.

What transpires in a journey can be further unpacked in integration sessions and can catalyze individuals into the next chapter of healing their relationship with food, their bodies, and everything else that the food symbolises.

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These medicines take us to these places so we can begin a new template of relating with your bodies; a relationship with greater kindness, forgiveness and acceptance.

In starting to make peace with living in the homes that house us in every moment, with each breath, our bodies become a safe haven. There is a felt sense of belonging: embodied belonging. The cells remember and know on a body level that all parts of you belong and are worthy to be here.

From this inner residing, we treat those around us with more groundedness, generosity and grace, including humans, nature and elemental beings.

We acknowledge.
We listen.
We attend.
We take care.

In the process of this clearly seeing, unlearning, metamorphizing, and transforming our relationship with our bodies, we are also healing our relationship with this greater body that nourishes us: the body of the Mother Earth.

And this is where plant medicine takes us: to ground back into this reality, on this Earth, where we all belong, and to take care of this great body that sustains all life.

Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash

Eating Disorders and Speaking Up

During the darker depths of my eating disorder, I used food to stuff words down when I wanted to speak up and restricted my food as a way to literally hold back on my truth.

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Tension and restriction in the jaw, throat, mouth, and skull are all signs of when we shut down our communication. The physical tension is like a brick wall around our head (and heart), and this puts strain on the body over the long run, exacerbating eating disorder behaviours too.

For many people with eating disorders, there is a knowing that an eating disorder is not something that someone chooses, but rather an eating disorder comes into someone’s life as a way to protect their delicate and complex system that has become scared.

And often, that protection whether it be restriction, compulsive exercise, body checking, chewing up, chewing/spitting, purging, or bingeing, is a response to some kind of danger that was felt in the body when the individual tried to express themselves authentically.

Many of us may have experienced this when we expressed or asserted ourselves, and it wasn’t received in supportive ways. Maybe we were ignored, challenged, undermined, invalidated, disregarded, or laughed at.

This can send out the unconscious message of, “If you speak your truth, you may be rejected and cast out of the tribe”.

And so, relying on food to swallow our authentic voice became a way to cope in a world that didn’t feel safe to express our truth.

We may have a big fear that if we rock the boat (even in the slightest way), speak up, or express our needs, wants or boundaries, that we will be kicked out of the group and have nowhere to go, or belong.

On an eating disorder level, this may manifest as:

• Pushing one’s voice down by over-eating.

• Restricting food so one doesn’t have any energy to express at all or even feel one’s desire.

• Using purging as a way to scream or express all the things one wants but cannot have.

• Over-exercising as a way to run away from what one wants..

• Feeling unsure what food to eat.

• Not knowing when one is hungry or full.

• Feeling hesitant to ask for a particular food that one really wants to eat.

Self-expression, truth-telling, and speaking up in eating disorder recovery

This leads to holding back on our words, our calling, and our heart’s yearnings. And ultimately, this energy of holding back gets stuck and locked in our systems, and is eventually expressed through the body, like acne, TMJ, teeth grinding, asthma, difficulty sleeping, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and so much more.

For those of you who are navigating eating disorder recovery right now, take some time to tune into your truth, needs, and desires, and “get right” with your own truth, and allow it to be free in you – this is the real work, and the first step: releasing the shame and fear from what you truly want and care about.

Eating disorder recovery is about reclaiming your heart’s authentic communication -its truth - without self-judgement or self-punishment.

Then the next step is communicating that truth to loved ones (which can be scary because now we are in the realm of intimacy and vulnerability which isn’t easy for eating disorders), and to be open to it being received as possibly a no (another scary reality)– and then do the work from a nervous system level that rewires those old beliefs that fear that all no’s lead to rejection (aka death) into a coherent system that has greater capacity and perspective to hold oneself from the inside out.

This work not only takes embodied awareness and great courage, but also it requires generational unwiring (and fundamental rewiring) because for many people with eating disorders, we are carrying wounds from previous generations, particularly around authentic expression. Recovery is a deep, multidimensional process.

Practicing speaking up and sharing one’s authentic expression can be done through actual speaking (in a safe and trusted spaces), writing letters or poems, singing, dancing, or creating art. Sharing in a group setting where other people are also navigating recovery can also be powerful - hearing other people’s shares can invite inspiration and courage to speak up and share one’s story.

This is where deep healing can occur: through witnessing, being witnessed, and sharing our stories in an energy field that is welcoming, accepting, validating, and encouraging.

We heal by sharing our authentic truth.

To join my monthly Eating Disorder Recovery Support Group, head here. In this space we invite authentic expression, compassionate listening, and embodied sharing as a way to bring healing and unity on this path.

Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash

Nervous System Rewiring for Eating Disorders

Eating disorder recovery is a self-exploratory learning process whereby we come to understand what the signs of stress are in our own bodies, how or bodies communicate what it takes to survive and thrive, and what happens when we miss these cues.

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Eating disorder Recovery is not just about eating more intuitively. It’s a process of understanding our own physiological responses to safety and stress - what makes us tick the right and not so right ways.

This requires learning about our own autonomic nervous system, how it’s wired, why it’s wired in ways that it is, how it is currently resiliently working for us right now.

This requires becoming more self-aware and embodied - being able to have a more accurate gauge of our internal responses to life - rather than how we may look on the outside, or how we may think we are doing.

For many people with eating disorders, disordered eating, or living in diet culture, we have become used to pushing through stress, pushing down feelings, and have become used to saying, “Everything is fine.”

I remember in the depths of my early eating disorder days, I strongly identified with being superhuman. I believed that by eating small amounts, exercising a lot, pushing through, and not feeling any sort of big emotion, I was some kind of superhuman. However, my physiology was struggling, my nervous system was stuck in a deep freeze, and I had no idea because this go-go-go had become my norm.

This norm had resulted from a history of:

• Suppressing my appetite and tiredness cues so when I finally wasn’t able to go anymore, at least I had an excuse to slow down.

• Learning early on to hold back my tears because of fear of being judged as too sensitive.

• Observing that it wasn’t nice to get angry, so I developed grudges and feelings of resentment instead.

• Remembering the golden rule “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill” so I doubted my reactions and feelings.

• Fearing to speak up or express myself because it was better to please others than to cause a show or conflict.

Nervous system rewiring for eating disorder recovery

Blocking my truth and my biological impulses, as well as pent up survival energy and stress chemistry in my system, resulted in the development of an eating disorder.

A large part of my own recovery has been about pausing and checking in with my body, and asking questions of what it may need, where may there be held tension, and how can I attend to myself moment to moment?

This process of acknowledging and pausing at intervals throughout the day gives the habitual go-go-go energy to reset, metabolize, and ‘come down’ so it isn’t on high all the time.

We may realize how starved our bodies are for self-care and nourishment (on different levels, not just food). When we pause, this creates more space and flow in the system, and we may start to realise that we can hear our hunger or fullness cues more easily, or that we can identify what foods we genuinely want to eat, or that we have more capacity to socialize and engage in more joyful activities because the system is no longer in a state of go-go-go or shutdown.

Shutdown is what happens to our nervous system when we’ve been going for so long, and often shows up in eating disorders as depression, low metabolism, or low energy).

The eating disorder recovery process will ask us to change, heal, grown, unlearn, and relearn.

The way we are wired, which is often towards unhealthy patterns, as is with the case with disordered eating, will be stretched, disentangled, and rewired towards healthier patterns and choices with nervous system education and support.

This is a somatic-based approach to eating disorder recovery that can sometimes feel painful and threatening to the person’s psyche, as well as their physiology and biochemistry.

When something has been done the same way for so long, when change is imminent, we may feel resistant, suspicious or doubtful. We may even want to hold on tighter to the eating disorder strategies because we know deep down, they are slipping from our grip.

This is when we need to remember why we are on the path and call in all the positive resources, because it is possible rewire the habitual firings of the nervous system.

And it takes patience, perseverance, courage, and commitment to face the undoing and shifting of old stress survival patterns into new patterns that supports our multidimensional somatic welling.

We all have the healing capacity to do this work. It requires a knowing that the body can heal, that you deserve the healing, and a willingness to embrace the process, however bumpy it may get.

Over time, areas in the body that were stressed from the eating disorder, like the digestive system, immune system, and tissues heal and recover.

Old programming and conditioning rests and rewires.

Intuition and self-trust emerge as we return to our natural capacity to heal.

As we learn the language of our biology, embody them, and become more attuned and self-aware to our internal and external environments in the present moment, the recovery process leads us to the medicine we have been looking for: ourselves.

Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash

Restriction in Eating Disorders: Is It Really About The Food?

Restricting food is more than just trying to eat less, ignoring hunger cues, or trying to make the body into a smaller size.

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Restricting food, eating disorders, and disordered eating are symbols for the needs that cannot be asked for but want to be expressed.

Restricting food is a symbol feeling more protected by coming across as not having any needs.

Restricting food is a symbol for fearing what happens if intimacy comes in too close.

Restricting food is a symbol for wanting to state healthy boundaries but not knowing how.

Restricting food is a symbol for putting a lid on big emotions, sensations, expressions, impulses because it feels scary to let them out.

Restricting food is a symbol of one’s inner power yearning to be expressed but terrified what will happen when one steps into it.

Restricting food is a symbol of one’s love deeply, quietly, strongly calling out to be shared.

Restricting food is a sign pointing you towards your deepest wisdom and truth.

Restriction in eating disorder is more than just restricting food or the body’s size.

Restriction is an attempt to keep things the same; there is a fear of the unknown, of letting go of well-outlined plans, and of releasing the grip.

For many people, an eating disorder began as a protective strategy during a time where there was a lot of unknown and chaos. The ritualistic food and body behaviours are ways to bring in order, control, and certainty. Over time, these attempts to restrict no longer work as well as they once did and start affecting our wellbeing in the long run.

We start to realize that this attempt at trying to control and keep things the same is an illusion because even behind the meticulous calorie counting, exercise tracking, and strict food planning, internally things still feel out of control - and above all else, we still don’t actually know what comes next.

Recovery from restriction asks us to accept the fundamental truth - that the only thing that is constant is change; and to be with that groundless change, we have to find safety, ground, and home within ourselves.

Recovery asks to rebuild safety in our bodies, regulation in our nervous system, and authentic expression within our somas, so that we can be with, open to, and free with the ebbs and flows of life.

Recovery is about shifting from restricting change to opening up to it.

Photo by Simone Pellegrini on Unsplash

What Does Eating Disorder Recovery Look Like On The Other Side?

I have been pondering over a question that I often receive in my 1:1 sessions and monthly support groups, which is: What does recovery look like on the other side? 

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This powerful question immediately asks us to dream a life without the protective food and body strategies, and to envision who we would be without them.

This is such a beautiful contemplation that I am sure many of you who are walking the eating disorder recovery path have come across in your hearts and minds. 

It may feel like a big step to try to imagine a life without these behaviours and thought loops, especially if you've been in it for a long time, or if it feels like the eating disorder or disordered eating patterns have become part of your identity.

If this is you, I would like to gently share with you that this is ok, and by acknowledging that this is where you are at, is the most important part of this whole process.

It is ok to not know. It is ok to not be able to imagine a life without the eating disorder/food/body rituals. Accepting that this is where you are in your journey brings compassion and patience - which are two keys to this journey.

We start where we are, not where we are not.

Remember, when we are wrapped up in the eating disorder, it is very hard to dream and envision. This is one of the results of trauma or prolonged stress: It is more challenging to access our creative capacity and imagination, because the system is more focused towards survival.

For many people, an eating disorder began as a protective strategy during a time where there was a lot of unknown and chaos. The ritualistic food and body behaviours are ways to bring in order, control, and certainty.

When life doesn’t feel safe, and when we haven’t yet learnt or developed tools to support and regulate, we will do whatever it takes to mimic a sense of control and protection. This is where meticulous calorie counting, exercise tracking, and strict food planning come into play because it brings a sense of order to an internal and external world that feels chaotic.

When our system is still locked in a state of survival - where getting away from danger an avoiding threat at all costs are the only priorities - the focus becomes narrow, leaving little room to dream big or widen and open the focus. 

It is key then, for anyone in recovery, to access spaces and moments where things are safe so that there the system is able to genuinely downregulate and soften. It is in moments like these, that are safe, grounding, and recalibrating, that envisioning and imagining new possibilities can occur.

So, I invite you to ponder over these questions as you imagine a life, a day, or a moment without an eating disorder:

How would you show up in the world?  
How would you value your body-temple? 
In what ways would your connection to food change? 
What larger, collective systems would shift or fall away? 
How would society organize itself, and what would it prioritize? 
Would your relationships - including with the Earth - be any different?

Two final thoughts on this contemplation - 

Everyone's recovery looks different and so what recovery looks like to you will be totally different to another person.

We will all be led on our own paths, experiencing the unique experiences that we need to support each of us in own healing and transformation. Do not compare the pace, speed, direction of your path to anyone else. Remember, your individual path, however it looks, contributes to the greater collective and generational healing.

Your unique path matters. Deeply.

And there is no end goal to reach on this path.

The road of recovery has not finite end. There is no "other side". Whilst this path does result in a lessening of punishing thought patterns and a decrease in reliance on restrictive food and body rules, it is a gradual, never-ending process, with many layers that extend beyond food. 

Stay for the process.

Be here for your process. 

I honour you on your path. Thank you for showing up.

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How Psychedelics Can Increase Emotional Capacity in Eating Disorder Recovery

I’ve started to notice a pattern: when things start to feel good, I shut it down.

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Over this year, I have been paying attention to how much joy, love, pleasure, and laughter I allow into my life, and have observed the ways in which I restrict how much goodness I let in.

One of the functions of my eating disorder was to suppress good feelings. For many years, I got stuck in a pattern where I didn’t want to feel good, nor did I want anyone to see me in a good mood.

I felt protected in a numb, dark and moody state because it felt like no one could get near me.

Good feelings also somehow equated with me losing control; I believed that if I started to feel good about myself and life, I would relax and let go, and subsequently everything would spin out control.

And at the deepest core of it all, I believed that I didn’t deserve goodness in my life.

If I didn't deserve it, what was the point of feeling? So why feel at all?

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During the years of puberty, at a critical stage of my life where my body was changing and making space for adulthood, I directed my life towards restricting not only my food, but how much I could allow myself to feel. By directing my life in this way during a developmental stage of rapid learning, change and transformation, the eating disorder imprinted itself in a very foundational way in my psyche, carving out deep grooves of habit.

The food became a symbol for all that I wanted but couldn't allow myself to have. The body became a site where I would punish myself for having desires and feelings.

My recovery has taken me on a path back to feeling, and it continues to be a path of improving my emotional bandwidth and increasing the upper limit of my emotional experience.

This has greatly been supported by sacred plant medicines - more on this below, so keep reading :)

I have been gently nudged to give myself permission to let joy and goodness in - and to feel more - which has meant developing my emotional resilience and increasing my tolerance to be with moments of discomfort rather than numbing away through reactive food or body strategies.

Indeed, recovery for me has been about moving out the numb and grey, and into a more colourful way of being and expressing, slowly developing capacity to hold myself more and more through challenging moments and in the uncertainty of change, as well as amidst the awe-inspiring beauty of life.

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Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant opening up to relationships rather than shutting away from them.

Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant allowing myself to laugh and be happy in front of others.

Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant becoming more adaptable in the face of change

Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant trusting more in myself, what I can hold, what I can feel, and what I can transform within myself.

Increasing my emotional bandwidth has meant believing in my worth.

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Many people navigating eating disorders experience a stuckness in how much and what they feel; there is a rigidity that is characteristic of an eating disorder that makes the daily ritualized food and body behaviours challenging to shift.

This is because eating disorders lack of plasticity, meaning the habitual thoughts and habitual emotions become deeply ingrained and are hard to change. Over time, it can feel like the eating disorder is who we are, or it seems almost impossible to imagine a life without the eating disorder, because the patterns become deeply entrenched and wedged into the psyche.

This is why it is so important to find ways to repattern the neuropathways that are associated with automatic, habitual disordered eating patterns.

And altered states, such as psychedelic experiences (but also including flow states, embodied movement, art-making, and nature immersions) can support that process of promoting plasticity, reopening windows of new learning, change and adaption.

When we enter a psychedelic experience (microdosing included), these unconscious patterns come to the surface, and we are able to see them in a new way.

The default mode network – the part of our brain that navigates life when are not consciously directing it – become quieter, and as such, so do the unconscious eating disorder patterns.

This means we diverge away from our standard way of operating patterns. Altered states that get us out of our heads and immersed in the present moment, move us out of our default reality and help recode our baseline of what we feel - and how we feel.

Because there is such a high level of daily rumination and need for control, especially around emotions, supporting people with eating disorders to be more adaptive in the face of change and shift from narrow focus to open focus will help the recovery process.

Starting to connect with more emotions, developing resilience to be with uncomfortable emotions, and giving ourselves permission to feel more in our bodies supports the process of deepening into embodiment – which is what recovery is all about.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

The Wisdom of Sacred Plant Medicine for Eating Disorder Recovery

Sacred earth medicines and other psychedelics show you what is happening to you, allow you to see and to experience consciously what is normally unconscious.

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This is the wisdom of plant medicine: they illuminate the unseen, and once we see the unseen, we can no longer unsee it.

An eating disorder keeps pain, stress, and trauma suppressed, numbed, and hidden and out sight through various food and body strategies, such as restriction, over-exercising, purging, or eating past fullness.

As such, when we enter into a psychedelic experience, we must remember that we will very likely encounter aspects of ourselves that we have repressed, forgotten, or ignored.

It is therefore important that foundational preparation work has been laid so that the protectors, managers, and other defending parts have been acknowledged and feel heard, so that they can feel safe to soften and put down their walls and amour.

That means that when the unseen, hidden, or ignored aspects of the psyche are revealed and illuminated in a psychedelic journey (or even when microdosing), there is enough robust grounding, nervous system capacity, and psychological flexibility to hold whatever comes up - because sound preparation work has already been done.

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Approaching Eating Disorder Recovery with the Wisdom of Sacred Plant Medicine Offers Us the Potential To: 

• Hold ourselves in a way that supports our healing, whereby we embody the felt sense of dignity, self-acceptance, and wholeness.

• Illuminate our purpose and re-contextualize our place in the world.

• Open our hearts and remember that our healing ripples out, positively impacting the collective.

• Acknowledge how the disordered eating strategies were needed at a challenging time that supported our survival.

• Widen our capacity to be with the full spectrum of sensations, emotions, and internal thought processes through empowering self-regulation tools.

• Dispel doubts and fears, and question the validity of self-limiting beliefs, including those related to food, weight, and body.

• Activate gratitude and self-compassion towards ourselves and to the greater world around us.

• Widen our perspective from a narrow, rigid focus, to an open mind and heart, restoring our connection in the web of life.

• Move from external rules to internal cues, and attuning to our intuition.

• Embrace and nurture the inner child and other fragmented parts of ourselves.

• Shift our focus into the present moment and to trust its unfolding, releasing the grip of control.

• Reconnect with our inherent worth and true belonging, and believe in our capacity to give and receive love.

Remember who you truly are.

Just as important as the preparation work is to support and deepen the psychedelic journey, integration after the experience is vital. Integration is all about taking the downloads and insights from the plant medicine experience and weaving into the fabric of everyday life.

The euphoria from such an inner journey is not eternal.

Maintaining an open heart,

Weaving the insights into the fabric of daily life,

Navigating moments of trigger and challenge with humility and curiosity,

Practicing developing a coherent nervous system that allows for natural impulses to release, sound, movement and expression to come through,

Reclaiming our space that we deserve and are worthy to take up,

And embodying the energetic frequencies of our authentically aligned expression, is the work we are required to do.

The integration work is to regulate our nervous system and state of mind, and recall and practice feelings of love - and whatever else we aspire to embody and experience more in our lives - in our hearts again, as experienced during the psychedelic journey.

A plant medicine experience brings us closer to the places we have avoided so that we can integrate the fragmented parts within us back into wholeness.

This leads to greater peace and trust in our bodies as we start to learn that we can hold both the darkness and light within our vessels and come out the other side, transformed and whole. As such, we embody the medicine we have been seeking all along.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

How Psychedelics and Nervous System Regulation Supports Digestion in Eating Disorder Recovery

Our digestion is intertwined with our nervous system. When we feel safe, we can digest.

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Sacred plant medicine can support this process of entering into the parasympathetic part of our nervous system which is the state that the body needs to digest our food effectively.

When we feel stressed, anxious, or in danger, our nervous system prepares us to be on high alert to fight or flee, activating our sympathetic nervous system. When this part of our nervous system is activated, our adrenal glands are stimulated causing an increase in heart rate, muscle contractions, and a dry mouth. Additionally, blood gets directed away from the digestive tract, slowing down digestion.

The reason for this is that all non-essential bodily functions slow or shut down (such as the immune and digestive system) so that the body can reserve energy needed by vital organs like the heart and lungs. In this way, the body can concentrate on taking necessary action to alleviate the danger.

For many of us, due to early traumatic experiences and living in the larger environment in which we live in today (characterized by stress, hustling, and diet culture), we remain in this state of heightened alertness, feeling vigilant, on edge, and frazzled. This in turn leads to digestive problems such as IBS, constipation, bloating, or diarrhea.

These digestive issues which cause their own kind of discomfort and stress, can trigger eating disorder or disordered eating behaviours. And eating disorders themselves continue to exacerbate these symptoms, straining the digestive system further.

It is important to support the body and the eating disorder recovery process by entering into the parasympathetic nervous system. We need to be in the rest-and-digest portion of our nervous system to properly digest our food (and our emotions).

The parasympathetic nervous system has two branches: the Ventral Vagus and the Dorsal Vagus. The Ventral Vagus is the part we really want to help us calm down and downregulate. It is the part that governs our ability to socially engage with safe people, make sound, or hear soothing sounds.

The Dorsal Vagus, on the other hand, is more like the emergency brake. When a lot of energy goes into it (aka “High Tone Dorsal”), it activates the freeze, or shutdown response. This will also bring us out of our sympathetic nervous system, but it is a survival response - so not that great when it becomes the go-to option.

On the other hand, “Low Tone Dorsal”, which is also part of the Dorsal Vagus, lets us rest, digest, and repair our cells. It supports immune function and barrier-keeping in the gut. It uses a lesser amount of energy is in this system and is needed for healthy immune function and barrier-keeping in the gut. When we have more access to the Ventral Vagal part of this system, we will also have more access to this healthy ‘Low Tone’ state. This is what we want for coherent, smooth digestion of food, of memories, feelings, and sensations.

With unresolved trauma in the picture though, it is much more common to flip between high sympathetic activation (fight/flight), and High Tone Dorsal (freeze). This leads to our gut being impacted because we don’t have enough access to healthy digestion and barrier keeping in the gut.

One way we can start to access more healthy ventral function is by using a pillow or a weighted blanked on the abdomen, which sends a signal of containment and safety to the organs there, which in turns helps the Vagus.

Additionally, engaging with safe people also stimulates the Ventral Vagus. If there is past trauma, it may result in resistance to engaging with people in general, because our system interprets people as potential threats. So, if we notice an improvement in our ability to interact with others in a grounded, calm way, this is a sign that our Ventral Vagal function is improving and healing, and less energy is going into the survival responses.

Relaxing, resting, pausing, connecting with loved ones, and feeling genuine safety is important to avoid sympathetic overdrive. Our bodies need to register that they can put down the defensive armour and can stop running. Our bodies need to register that it is safe to rest.

When the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, it produces the feelings of connection and calm that allows your body to repair and heal itself. In this state, food is broken down into an absorbable form which is carried to our cells for energy and nourishment – nourishment of body, heart and mind.

Sacred plant medicine and psychedelics can support this process of entering into the parasympathetic part of our nervous system. They interrupt the deeply entrenched habitual patterns of the eating disorder which are often existing in sympathetic energy.

An eating disorder is an accumulation of rigid thought patterns and ritualised behaviours that has slowly imprinted itself more and more deeply into the psyche, taking root and affecting the many aspects of one’s life, including energy levels, digestion, mood stability, and cognitive focus.

Over time, this way of being can start to feel normal. The food thoughts, habits, and digestive issues - that eventually arise after prolonged sympathetic arousal - can become so automatic and unconscious that one doesn’t even realise they occur.

When we enter a psychedelic experience, these unconscious patterns come to the surface, and we are able to see them in a new way. The default mode network – the part of our brain that navigates life when we are not consciously directing it – become quieter, and as such, so do the unconscious disordered eating patterns.

This means that in altered states, we diverge away from the standard way of operating, which can support the recoding of the default mode network activity into more beneficial pathways.

In these critical windows that expanded states offer, especially in the integration period post-journey, we have more space and capacity to shift the eating disorder beliefs into more empowered patterns that support the recovery process.

As such, we also have the opportunity to see the interconnected relationship between our digestion, nervous system, emotions and thoughts. When there is the felt sese of safety, the fight or flight part of the nervous system can soften, allowing for a gentler way of being to take root.

No longer needing to protect and defend, one’s emotional and mental bodies are positively affected, which also supports the energy and vitality of the body, the regulation of the nervous system, and the overall functioning of the digestive system. We need to feel safe in order to digest well. And we need to digest so that we feel safe.

As we shift the nervous system pattern of sympathetic arousal as well as the racing thoughts that come along with this highly charged and into parasympathetic, our digestion, nervous system and overall recovery land in more and more safety and rooted presence, and as such innate heal and transformation emerges.

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Fear Tactics For Eating Disorder Recovery Do Not Work

Eating disorders are born out of trauma.

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They are strategies of defensive action, meaning that they try to bring a sense of protection, control and holding due to unmetabolized emotions, memories and actions associated with the trauma. As such, the body is already in a state of fear - so rather than adding more fear in treatment, let us bring compassion and gentleness to the recovery process.

What this means is that when we are in recovery, it is not helpful to say “this eating disorder is going to kill you” or “you need to try harder.” The nervous system is already in so much fear and in a place of shame, and by trying to force an individual out of an eating disorder through fear tactics simply doesn’t work.

We don’t need to add more fear to the system that is already in a state of fear, and that was in fear before the eating disorder even developed.

We need a compassionate approach. And we need a compassionate approach to bring in safety and containment because a scared nervous system cannot support nourishment when it’s in fear.

In order to eat intuitively, we need a regulated nervous system and a felt sense of safety. If we don’t feel safe, it is hard to eat and hard for the body to digest.

If we aren’t feeling safe, the body is biologically not prepared to eat - it is prepared for danger. And when the body is geared to keep danger and threat away, the body places less focus on digestion, increasing the chances of constipation or IBS - and if we experience digestive issues, it not only feels physically uncomfortable, but we also don’t feel great emotionally either.

So we need safety to digest our food, and we digest properly when we feel safe. That’s why when we feel safe, our digestion works pretty well. The nervous system is in balance, alignment, and inner harmony.

When we feel safe, this also opens the capacity to tune into our desires around food that stem from a grounded place rather than from a place of fear.

We can eat more intuitively, accurately assess our hunger and fullness cues, and determine what we are hungry for.

I understand how natural it is to feel the fear in this context - especially when there are very real risks that come from eating disorders, like malnourishment, organ failure and death. If possible, see where there are moments where you can bring in the energy compassion, a human to human meeting.

Indeed, an eating disorder often represents a young inner child who has been wounded and who is scared. As such, how we approach eating disorders require a lot of gentleness, kindness and holding.

A compassionate approach to recovery

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Eating Disorder Recovery and Microdosing - What To Expect

As more people are becoming curious about psychedelics and their ability to support people move through depression, anxiety, addiction, and eating disorders, the practice of microdosing is also receiving increased interest.

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Microdosing is the practice of consuming a small amount of plant medicine, like psilocybin (magic mushrooms), on a regular or weekly basis.

The hallucinogenic effects are small, meaning that the soup on the stove won’t change to a purple colour, but it may seem more nourishing, alive, and vibrant (and possibly easier to eat).

When you microdose, the world feels more intimate.

Your place in the world feels more connected as you experience a dropping away of the false illusions, and a deepening into the interconnectedness of things (including how each ingredient in your soup is part of a complex and beautiful web that you are also part of).

Microdosing can sensitize you towards your own body and your inner emotions. The veil starts to feel thinner allowing whatever has been suppressed or numbed out to come to the surface to be acknowledged.

With this increased intimacy and sensitivity, things can feel confronting for the psyche. One of an eating disorder’s main strategies is to put up walls and defensive armour to keep the tender, fragile, painful emotions at bay.

Through restriction, excessive exercise, or obsessive planning, one stays focused on the external, in the future, or on outside expectations, in order to stay away from what is brewing inside. Avoiding emotions is one of the eating disorder’s main tasks.

Microdosing may take you to an edge whereby you start to feel and connect to those previously hidden emotions.

As such, microdosing can be challenging!

This is because sacred plant medicine or psychedelics shine light on repressed sensations, feelings and memories - the things we don’t want to look at - so that we can acknowledge them, and move through them, and ultimately heal.

If you are microdosing or are thinking about starting to microdose for your eating disorder recovery, and to free up your relationship with food and your body, there many be moments of discomfort as you start to venture into the places you have been working so hard to turn away from.

Whilst each person will have their own microdosing journey, you may notice four shifts come up: feeling hungry, feeling tired, feeling feels, and feeling lost. These are beautiful to work with, especially if you are in recovery. Here’s why…

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Feeling Hungry

If you are microdosing for your eating disorder recovery, one of the things that you may encounter is a feeling of being hungry.

This is because plant medicines illuminate the places that we have ignored, hid from, or suppressed. When there has been a history of eating disorders, there has been history of restriction in some way or another (for more on restriction, read this).

Ignoring hunger and the subtle cues of hunger are a large part of an eating disorder - and if we have practiced not responding to our hunger (and only responding when there’s obvious tummy growling or when we feel faint), the more subtle cues of hunger are missed, and we simply get used to feeling hungry. all. the. time. without realizing it.

As such, if you start microdosing there may be feelings of increased appetite. This is the medicine illuminating the restriction, the malnourishment, the undereating, and the lack of fuel in the body (as well as heart and mind).

It's important to listen to these cues, to trust these feelings of hunger, and to respond to your body's needs. This is an opportunity. The feeling of hunger is being amplified for you to listen and is a chance for you to do things differently, and to see how it feels and what happens.

It is a chance to choose differently for your recovery; for you to take care of your body and transform your relationship with food.

With the cognitive flexibility that plant medicine offers, you can use these windows of opportunity when microdosing to respond from an aligned and courageous place in relationship to food and your body. This is how you create new pathways that support your recovery.

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Feeling Tired

Another thing you may notice when you start microdosing is just how tired you feel. A large part of what recovery is about is learning how to slow down, to yield, and to pause.

So much of the eating disorder wants to just keep pushing, going, doing, and excessively exercising - with often not enough nutritional support. The energy of the eating disorder is to steamroll through and to not stop.

The body is running fast, running on empty, and running from the painful past. When things slow down, all the emotions and memories that have avoided come up. The eating disorder is like protective strategy is to ensure you just keeps going.

When you start working with plant medicine, they may ask you to slow down so that you can feel what has been hidden away allowing for healing to occur. We have to feel to heal, and feeling comes by slowing down.

When you're microdosing and there's a sense of feeling really tired, it's another opportunity for you to do things differently: to slow down and to allow the body to rest, as a way to support whatever wants to come up to be felt.

It doesn’t mean coming to a complete halt but to make small shifts towards taking a few conscious breaths, pausing between tasks, taking a moment to look around your environment, or feel the energy in your body. Pausing.

When you slow down in a sustained and supported way (ie. not collapsing but rather resting), there is a chance for the nervous system to recalibrate so that you start to come back into balance, build up capacity to feel, acknowledge, accept, and ultimately move through the pain that has been suppressed through the eating disorder.

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Feeling Feels

For people choosing to navigate eating disorder recovery, there is also a deep refamiliarization and re-navigation of one’s emotional landscape. In the beginning of recovery, it can be challenging to feel the feels or name the emotion that is bubbling to the surface. Sometimes it can just feel like numbness - like a vast plain of nothingness.

Not being able to sense or articulate an emotion could be a protective strategy. In the past, you may have learnt that if you expressed your emotions, they wouldn’t be received in the ways you needed. And so, you learnt to hold them in and block them off - because it’s easier to do that than to feel the rejection of not being received.

Sacred plant medicine, including microdosing, amplify our emotional state, intensifying our current inner world. The emotions that were repressed or avoided come up to the surface through the support of psychedelics and give us a chance to feel, acknowledge, and accept the emotions.

For people with eating disorders, this can be a challenging but deeply transformative experience. When we turn to the emotions rather than hiding from them, we rely less on the disordered food and body strategies. This is because these strategies played the role of managing the emotions through restriction, excessive exercising, purging or eating past discomfort.

When we build capacity to be with our feelings, we don’t need the eating disorder. This why psychedelics can support people in eating disorder recovery, specifically through consciously connecting with and moving in and through the emotional landscape.

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Feeling Lost

It is possible that when you start microdosing, you may notice at times a feeling of being a little lost, or a bit aimless. This is a really interesting insight to work with.

The eating disorder likes to control things, has a rigid way of navigating through life, and feels protected when it knows each step. When the microdosing comes in, you can be opened up to a more flexible way of being - and that can feel scary. It can bring up anxiety when there isn’t a roadmap or a plan.

This is an opportunity to experiment with the spontaneity, the ever-changing moments of life, to trust the unknown, and to ground into anchors that feel resonate and valuable for you and you only - not based on what someone or some program told you is important.

Sometimes we have to lose ourselves to find ourselves.

The medicine is shining light on the illusion of control that the eating disorder attempts to give us, and instead asks us to open up to reality of impermanence, to trust the unknown next step, to develop capacity in the face of change, and move from rigidity to flexibility not only with food but in our lives.

“When we truly surrender and truly trust the unknown, we run into something big… We come to understand it’s coming from within.” - Joe Dispenza

Psychedelics and microdosing increase cognitive flexibility, meaning they support people in eating disorder recovery to more easily change their thoughts around food, allow for emotions to come through, and for the body itself to release tension.

With the support of psychedelics, there is an ability to go to the root of why the eating disorder developed, process painful memories and challenging feelings, reduce pervasive food and body thoughts, and improve self-love and self-acceptance.

There is an increased sense of self-trust that develops through this process. This self-trust leads to an inner grounding or anchoring - a feeling of, “I deserve to be here, I belong, and I am worthy to live my life.”

This self-trust leads to a greater ability to face and move through challenging feelings from a more grounded, centered place without needing to numb, relieve or suppress through food or body manipulation.

There is more flexible, grounded, and compassionate approach to life and towards oneself, even in life’s ups and downs.

Through this process, the nervous system is able to move beyond the old imprints of the stress survival responses, and into a blueprint that is aligned with the present moment. This is the process of embodiment - and recovery is all about deepening into one’s own embodiment.

Learning to hear and respond to hunger, listening to when rest is needed, allowing emotions to be acknowledged, and anchoring into deep trust are the gifts that the medicine can give us as support in realizing our full self, beyond the eating disorder.

For more articles on microdosing:

Can Microdosing Support Eating Disorder Recovery? — Francesca Eats Roses

Microdosing for Eating Disorders

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash

Dance and Embodiment Healing for Eating Disorder Recovery

I had a complex relationship to movement during the darker depths of my eating disorder days.

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I would use exercise to numb, suppress, discipline, or run away from whatever I didn’t want to feel or face. Exercise and movement had become weapons that would punish my body and put me back in line. Do you relate to this?

As I started to acknowledge the layers of the eating disorder, I realised that this way of judging, comparing, demonizing, and competing with my body was just. not. working.

I noticed that I didn’t know what it meant to move my body without it being a duty, obligation, or punishment. I remembered how as a child I loved to move just for the sake of it, not for anyone else but simply to feel the fire of my own heart dancing.

At this juncture, I stood before a sea of questions:
What kinds of movements did I actually enjoy doing?
If I am only existing in my head where is my body?
Why do I need to exercise to "deserve" my food?
What scares me about going down and into my body?
In what ways are the old ways of exercising helping me feel sane?
What are other ways that I can support my well-being other than punishing exercise?
What am I truly afraid of?

My recovery reminded me that while I had not tended to my inner fire, it was still alive. My inner dance was yearning to be reignited, for its embers to be fanned, and for its warmth to glow through me. My body wanted to be felt, tended to, seen, and allowed to express.

My heart wanted to be on fire again.

And so, I reached down and held out a hand.

At first it felt awkward, sometimes scary, and sometimes confusing, but over time, bridges of communication built, and trust, safety, and connection were established between me and my body.

A large part of my eating disorder recovery has been learning how to move my body in ways that bring joy, flow, grounding, emotional release, and authenticity. It has been a long process of unlearning that I don't need to move in a perfect way, and that any and all expressions are welcome.

What a relief.

This unlearning journey has brought me to conscious dance and intuitive movement. These practices have helped me connect with my body, trust my impulses, acknowledge my feelings, and to surrender to the unknown and unfolding dance (of life).

Intentional movement spaces are like portals that support us in shedding the old ways of separation and disconnection and to step into new ways of self-trust and inner wholeness.

For many people in eating disorder recovery, there is a deep yearning for authentic, genuine, and wholehearted connection. However, there is often fear and old wounds around connection and expression that need to first be met.

Over time, the eating disorder recovery path reveals opportunities to reconnect with what resonates with the heart and how to express the soul’s deep calling. Through intuitive movement, we nourish the conditions to remember why we are here at this time, and why we inherently deserve to be here.

This is the dance of recovery.

Dance is the song of the body.

Whatever your song is, as it changes from moment to moment, I invite you into this dance journey.

When we are able to move in a rhythm and dance the dynamic dance of our emotional landscape that is sustainable, life-supportive, regulating, and containing, we are able to ride the ebbs and flows of life without needing the eating disorder strategies.

When a movement practice is built to support all emotions and the fullness of our expressions, in all of their shapes, textures, and tones, we can embody a frequency and move in ways that call in a reality that is free from destructive food and body rules.

When we dance with our bodies and with our breath, we create physical and energetic flexibility that supports the psyche to hold the most precious parts within us that yearn to be held, and ultimately joyously danced with.

Then, our dance becomes a prayer for our recovery where the body is the invocation itself.

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Expanding into Receptivity for Eating Disorder Recovery

Eating disorder recovery is about developing capacity within our own nervous systems to be able to receive.

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When there are the tendrils of eating disorder behaviours, there are usually fears of receiving. Through the tactics of the eating disorder, which is to defend, armour, protect, or push away from anything that gets too close, one is unable to receive.

Why is receiving so hard?

Receiving requires us to take all of the food in, to chew and swallow all the way through, to slow down enough to digest. Receiving asks us to be intimate with food and to not push it away even when it feels like it is sitting deep and full within us. To be in recovery means to expand our capacity to receive.

Being able to receive is deeply intimate.

It requires being seen. It requires being close to another. It requires connection. It asks an individual to acknowledge their worthiness, deservingness, and their existence – because without that, who is it that receives?

Developing capacity to be with the present moment – aka connected in and to the body – is one way to receive whatever is here, without using food and body tactics as strategies to reject it.

And of course, being present is not easy. An eating disorder’s main goal is to exit and reject the present moment. So by developing nervous system capacity and regulation to receive more glimpses during the day, embodied, connected and mindful, are ways to start receiving more

This is what my recovery is focused on right now. I'm paying attention to the moments where I restrict, deny, or reject what is coming towards me to be received - be it a compliment, a hug, words of support, or eye contact.

It is often in the places of deeper connection and intimacy where I don't want to receive. These are the places where the old eating disorder voice raises its head and wants to build walls of defense so that nothing can come too close. And it’s in these exact places where I have the opportunity to choose differently: to say yes, to expand, to take up space, to allow my voice to be heard, to embrace, to allow for (safe and consensual) intimacy, to believe in myself.

Stepping out of self-rejection and restriction and into receptivity means stepping out of feeling wrong and into worthiness.

I invite you to practice looking for moments in your day where, instead of rejecting or restriction, you embrace and embody the art of receiving.

This means that as we open up to more receiving, we start to release patterns of restriction.

Whatever form your eating disorder or disordered eating patterns manifest in, they are usually all tied up in restriction. Either there is restriction of food, which can manifest as anorexia or orthorexia, but can also manifest as binge/rebound eating which is a response to earlier food restriction.

Restriction can also come in the form of restricting your feelings and emotional expressions (like sadness, anger, grief, or joy), restricting your needs and desires, restricting play and pleasure, restricting social interactions, or restricting yourself from spontaneity and new situations. As such, an eating disorder is often a symbol of some kind of restriction that is happening in another aspect of your life.

When did you feel you had to restrict or hold back a part of yourself in order to belong or feel accepted or recognized?

Can you identify what part of yourself that was that had to go into hiding?

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Eating disorders indicate parts within us that have had to hold themselves back in order to stay safe – because at one point freely expressing, expanding, spontaneously creating, and taking up space were not supported. These are the places from which eating disorders form.

Where in your life can shift from restriction to expansion?

What stands in your way?

What are you protecting yourself from?

Are there small moments in the day where you practice, embrace and embody expansion and deeper connection with your body?

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It is important to note that making connection with the body takes time. When there has been a history of eating disorder, connecting with the body is often the last place we want to go, and it’s the place we need to venture into.

From my own experience, I realised about at some point in my recovery that I was still very much in my head and still triggered and afraid of my body. Walking my own recovery path for the last 14 years eventually led me to embodiment practices. This was the work that was missing in the early days of my recovery. A big piece in this work of reconnecting with the body has been bringing to mindset of a blank canvas.

When I started this work, I had so many expectations. I thought I would finally feel all of my feelings, identify all the nuances of my physical body, release all the traumas held in my cells and tissues, and be free! That has not been the case. I’ve learnt that the best thing I can do is to not try force connection or try change, manipulate or create an experience – and to rather just arrive as fully as I can in each moment ready to engage or not.

Sometimes the conditions are right for me to venture in and other times it’s not the right moment, and to even allow the old reactions of shutting down and closing off to happen – and to not beat myself up about it.

This is the tool of compassion at work and is one of most important tools we can practice in our recovery. I’m sure many of you know that in the depths of an eating disorder, little compassion is present. So when we bring compassion into the picture, we are already shifting, healing, recovering, and transforming. Where in your life can you bring a touch more compassion?

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

Intuitive Eating From a Nervous System Perspective

We need to feel safe enough to eat intuitively.

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In order to eat intuitively (aka following our impulses, listening to hunger and fullness cues, honouring desires around food), we need a regulated nervous system and a felt sense of safety. And Feeling a felt sense of safety is key to eating disorder recovery.

Safety requires not only the absence of threat but also the resonate presence of a nurturing and attuned other. When there is a grounding and a holding, this then opens up the capacity to tune into our desires, wants, and needs around food that stem from a clear and safe place rather than a place of fear.

 Being able to feel that safety is complex in a world of diet culture where:

• People who do not fit into the “ideal” shape are discriminated against, punished or bullied.

• We have to dodge fat jokes, and weight loss and diet TV shows.

• Certain people do not receive the adequate healthcare due to their size.

• Before and after pictures are glamourized.

• Certain foods are moralized whilst others are demonized.

• Thinness is equated as a moral virtue.

• To feel some kind of acceptance and belonging, we need to fit into to a certain body type.

Remember this feeling?

 This is “normal” in our culture and it results in a chronic state of stress, leaving our entire physiology in a constant hum of danger and in a survival response.

When the body holds onto patterns of protection and defense, it does not have the spaciousness, flow and warmth to relax into intuitive or normative eating. It is geared for survival and will make whatever sacrifices needed.

For many people with eating disorders, it has not been safe to truly feel into their hunger cues or food desires. On a deeper level, it hasn’t been safe for them to feel or ask for what they want. Going a layer deeper, some people had to turn away from themselves and play a role that wasn’t them for another person. Boundaries may have been crossed. Needs may have not been met.

If we weren’t taught how to establish boundaries (or boundaries weren’t able to be instated), expand into safe relationships with others, or learn how to sense into the physical sensations or emotional waves within ourselves, we may have trouble identifying hunger and fullness cues, or choosing what food we want which could lead to restriction or binging.

This lack of a sense of self may result in difficulties in making decisions, identifying emotions, needs or wants, and as such may find it challenging to ask for help (because how do you know what to ask for).

When we haven’t learnt to come fully into our bodies, feeling the edges of where we begin and where we end, it can be hard to notice subtle hunger cues which include cues like general irritability, thoughts about food, distracted by a food image on social media, or a general lack of motivation. It may take a loud, grumbling stomach or feelings of dizziness or nausea before something registers hunger.

As we come into our own embodiment by feeling proprioceptively where we make contact with the outside world, or feeling how our bodies organise itself around a core or central line, there is a sense of pushing into things which give us the sense of our existence from a somatic, bottom-up perspective.

This shifts the inner beliefs from “I don’t belong”, or “Something is wrong with me” to “It is okay for me to exist” and “I am welcomed and wanted in the world”. When things in the body shift, so do our beliefs.

We are able to trust our bodies again and start to make food choices that come from our inner voice rather than something outside of us.

As such, eating intuitively is a revolutionary act in the face of “normal” society.

Eating from a place of felt safety changes the way we digest our food, our emotions and thoughts.

Choosing to eat intuitively has the power to change the collective narrative.

 Eating intuitively is the ability to move from external rules to internal cues, and is a state that embodies belonging and self-acceptance despite what the outside world says.

Photo by Ross Sokolovski on Unsplash