It's Not About Food Podcast with Laurelee Roark

Recovery from body hatred and disordered eating provides many layers of learning that unfold uniquely and spontaneously. “Trusting the process” means we all work through these experiences at our own pace and in our own way. We can trust our process is exactly right for us and we don’t have to waste precious time comparing ourselves to others.

About Christina Lowe
As a Registered Dietitian, Certified Eating Disorder Specialist and IAEDP (International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals) Approved Consultant. Christina has 8 years of experience working with eating disorders with a variety of populations and at differ...

Truth is our own internal wisdom that defines who we are. Finding our own truth means figuring out the difference between what we’ve been told we should be, verses who we really are. Often time in the past our true feelings, passions, opinions, and experiences were ignored, rejected, or just not encouraged. When we can relearn to identify what our own truth is, we are able to put into action what our heart and soul desires. 

Dr. Daganzo is an Internal Medicine physician with over 15 years of experience. She holds an MA in Physics from UC Ber...

Expressing ourselves is a way to live our truth in our bodies, minds and souls. Many times we’ve been taught that to express our feelings, to put up boundaries, to be honest, and to just allow ourselves to be ourselves it might be upsetting to others. The real truth is, if we let ourselves show our “whole self”, it is beneficial for everyone.

"Expressing Yourself” read by Carol Normandi, page 158.
“It's Not About Food” by Carol Normandi and Laurelee Roark.

Carol Normandi is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice since 1992. She is a co...

If you know the word divine means holy or sacred, then you have a clue to the meaning of divinity, which can be a god or other religious being. Anything very holy is full of divinity. Divinity is also the subject of religion itself: divinity students are studying theology. But if you're not into religion, don't worry — you can still enjoy divinity, a type of white, creamy fudge made with egg whites that probably goes well with angel food cake.

The definition above was something I could totally get behind. I  found it by googling divinity on the...

Author and Founder/CEO, Certified Business Archetype Coach™, Certified Money Coach (CMC)®

Deborah Price is the Founder and CEO of the Money Coaching Institute, which provides money coaching services and training to individuals, couples and families.

Deborah Price is the Founder and CEO of the Money Coaching Institute and the pioneer of the field of Behavioral Money Coaching. The Money Coaching Institute provides money coaching services and training to individuals, couples, families and business owners.  A former financial advisor for over twenty years with firms such as Merrill Lynch, Mass Mutual, AIG and London Pacific Advi...

The audio podcast on this newsletter today is read by Carol Normandi from our first book, “It’s Not About Food”. It’s about getting in touch with your spiritual path and you can find it written out on page 137.

Carol Normandi

Inhabit means to live in our bodies, not in our heads. When we learn to be present in our bodies, to move out of the obsessive thinking and into our feelings, we can learn to identify and meet our physical, emotional and spiritual needs. First, we must be aware that we are in the obsession, in the thinking, in the head. Then we cause our breath to being our awareness into our body and explore what we are experiencing in our bodies. 

The podcast today is me interviewing me about living in the bodies we have, taking c...

This show is about using the example of a spiral as a recovery mechanism from disordered eating, body disturbances, addictions, depressions, anxieties and so many other coping mechanisms people suffer from. The progress towards health when followed by the non linear idea of a spiral allows for the development of new and more effective coping strategies used to achieve complete wellness. 

Taylor Houston 

Taylor of The Golden Yarrow is a Holistic and Functional Nutritionist, Clinical Herbalist and Flower Essence Practitioner, Health-Supportive Chef, Personal Trainer, and Reiki Healer. As a third-generation wellness practitioner and entrepreneur, Taylor co...

This show is about finding and following our purpose. We are all here to share our gifts and our experiences as we walk our many paths of discovery. We find our calling by listening to our inner voice and doing what feels right and true to ourselves.

Erin Byous, MFT has been working with individuals and families since 2010. She’s worked in private practice and for a large healthcare organization as a therapist and also a mental health educator. Erin currently works at Willa Wellness Center in Petaluma where she facilitates groups and teaches cl...

Spiritual Being Visualization by Carol Normandi from our book, “It’s Not About Food”.

Laurelee and Carol talk about what is true recovery and how to get there. 

Carol has been working with eating disorder recovery since 1988 when she co-founded Beyond Hunger with Laurelee Roark, a non-profit that provides support groups and eating disorder prevention education. In 1998 they published their first book It's Not About Food, based on their own recovery and their work with eating disorder clients. They later published Over It: A Teens Guide to Ending the Obsession with Food and Weight, and Body Love Cards. For more information about Carol or Amrita Treatment Center please contact her below.

Trust is knowing that our bodies are living intelligences, giving us immediate feedback about what does and doesn’t work for us. When we stop viewing our bodies as something we need to manipulate, we can begin seeing them as very wise teachers. When we start to trust our bodies, we can listen and understand what they need. 

Jenny Sederholm, LCSW 

While I have been a Licensed Clinical Social Worker for 14 years, life quieted and expanded for me eleven years ago when I was intensively trained in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. I co facilitated a DBT Year...

This week’s offering is about creativity. It’s a recording Carol Normandi and I made. It’s on our CD of several visualizations found in our book, It’s Not About Food. We talk about using Creativity as a way to recover from disorder eating and body disturbances. I hope you have as much fun listening to it as we did making it. 

Today’s podcast is about the many miracles of recovery and remembering we are at choice to either accept the miracles or to step around them. Recovery is about opening our hearts to life, to health and to love for ourselves. 
Melanie Larson MA, RDN
Nutrition Director
Willa Wellness Center 
Email: melanie@willawellness.com (mailto:marie@willawellness.com) 
Website: www.willawellness.com (http://www.willawellness.com/)
Pronouns: she/her/hers

This show is about learning how to set boundaries and being at choice about our own needs. By setting limits or saying no we protect our integrity based on our own truth. 

Kari Floberg is a Marriage and Family Therapist in Northern California. She holds degrees from New York University and the California Institute of Integral Studies.  In her private practice, she works with individuals and groups, offering paths to come home to their true selves and find freedom from food and weight obsession. Bringing 12 years of clinical experience in a variety of settings, plus her lived ex...

Carol Normandi and I recorded this visualization about healing the spiritual wound within us. It is found on Pg 128 of our book, It’s Not About Food, 2010, Penquin Putnam, NY, NY.

Carol Normandi and I recorded this visualization about healing the spiritual wound within us. It is found on Pg 128 of our book, It’s Not About Food, 2010, Penquin Putnam, NY, NY.

Holistic means looking at ourselves in a way that includes our entire being, taking each part of ourselves into consideration. When we stop measuring ourselves by how we look, how thin we are, or how much weight we’ve lost, we can begin to embrace all the physical, emotional and spiritual parts of ourselves. We move beyond the goals of having a certain body type and into the integrity and magic of the recovery process itself. 

Sheira Kahn is a Marriage and Family Therapist and fully recovered bulimic. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and the California Ins...

This weeks audio has the visualization on reparenting from the CD Carol Normandi and I recorded after our book, It’s Not About Food” came out. I hope you’ll listen to it and find peace for your own precious child who lives in you still.

Creativity is the outward manifestation of who we are as spiritual beings.

It is the magical ability to crest something out of nothing that is uniquely ours. It is the gift of being able to imagine, to dream, and then to make the dreams come true. Creative expression is essential to feeding our souls. It forces us to go beneath the obsession with food and weight. To access the part of ourselves that passionately hungers for self expression. 
Maneva is an intern working on her certification in eating disorder coaching at the Carolyn Costin Institute. Drawing o...

Feelings
So when the peer educators go in the classrooms to present our 3 prong prevention and recovery program from disordered eating (body acceptance, intuitive eating and emotional intelligence) the students are interested and engaged. But as we move into talking about feelings, everyone goes into a coma. No one wants to hear about their own or anyone else’s feelings. They’re often too yucky, too messy, too uncomfortable and hard. But we have to. It’s what makes us human. Cause, if it’s not about food, and it’s not about weight…what is it about?
Everythin...

Today’s podcast presents the Beyond Hunger Peer Educators talking about who they are and what they do in our program. These 3 young women are leaving to go away to school. Below is why they have donated so much of their time and themselves to the program. 

Grace 4 years peer educator. Going to Chicago 
being part of the peer education program has taught me not only practical skills such as public speaking, leadership, and teamwork but also to approach every situation with compassion. knowing I’ve made a difference in my community and potentially helped those who ar...

Feelings come from the deepest part of ourselves and are a guide to what we are learning, who we are as beings plus where we want and long to go. They are here to show us when our boundaries are crossed, how to love and allow ourselves to be loved, how get in touch with our own truth; body, mind and soul and then know how to feel all of it. 
The audio mediation below will help you go through feelings as well as how to stay with them and come out the other side

First, there will be a few moments of a guided meditative exercise.
Next, you will be guided towards talking to your body and then listening to your body.
Afterwards, you will have tools to better understand your body and its needs and wants. 
Which will bring you closer to the goal of loving and taking care of yourself-
 body, mind, and soul. 

Today we are discussing the idea the eating disorder is a cry from our deepest soul. Something is trying desperately to get our attention. And it is our own self. We are spiritual beings trying to live in a body. So at the heart of every eating disorder is the desire to awaken, embrace our whole selves and experience our spiritual truth. Creativity, passion and our soul's desire will lead us to our true selves. Carol Normandi, MFT, www.amritaedt.com, FB- Amrita Eating Disorder Treatment

Trust is the knowing that our bodies are living intelligences, giving us immediate feedback about what does and doesn’t work for us. When we stop viewing our bodies as something we need to control and manipulate, we can begin seeing them as very wise teachers. When we start to trust our bodies, we can listen and understand what they need.

About Wendy Welsher

Wendy is a fat-positive personal trainer who specializes in functional strength and conditioning. She teaches the foundations of functional movement, weightlifting, and power training, including safe practices and recovery methods, wh...

Recovery from an Eating Disorder is not a Linear Process. This podcast is looking at true recovery. It requires many layers of learning that unfold uniquely, spontaneously and independently. As we go around the spiral of recovery we often hit a stressor, which takes us back to our behavior. But we learn how to work ourselves out of it and get back to recovery with more self-knowledge. Stress will always happen but we can have faith we will work through it. Margaret Burton

Sheira Kahn is a Marriage and Family Therapist and fully recovered bulimic. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and the California Institute of Integral Studies. Ms. Kahn taught in the UC Berkeley Extension certificate program in Eating and Weight Disorders for ten years. In the 1990s, she studied inner critic disengagement with Byron Brown and natural eating with Judy Wardell. These discourses became the pillars of her method on ending disordered eating. Later, she trained in couples counseling, where the research on attachment provided the final pieces to the puzzle of understanding disordered eating and how to heal it.

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Body Wisdom is the inherent wisdom we each hold within our own bodies that tells us what we need physically, emotionally and spiritually. When we listen to the wisdom of our bodies, we intuitively know how to feed ourselves, satisfy our needs and accept our natural bodies. 

With over 25 years of experience, Chevese Turner is an internationally recognized eating disorders, weight discrimination and social justice activist who founded the Binge Eating Disorder Association (BEDA) in 2008. Turner carries these messages to audiences around the US and abroad in schools, healthcare settings, trade organizations, associations, professional c...

Alexa Redner is currently a mentor teacher for Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness Meditation Program, training people from all over the world to become certified mindfulness teachers. She also works a Mindfulness teacher for Cloud Sangha, guiding people in small groups to deepen their meditation practice in community. Alexa holds a BA in Visual Arts and an MA in Creation Spirituality from Naropa University. Alexa has been a Waldorf Early Childhood teacher, a lead teacher for Mindful Schools, as well as an Eating Disorders and “Body Positive” educator with Beyond Hunger.  Alexa emphasizes using mindfulness as a tool to...

Recovery from body hatred and disordered eating provides many layers of learning that unfold uniquely and spontaneously. “Trusting the Process” means that we all work through these experiences and issues in our own way. We can trust that our process is exactly right for us and we don’t have to waste precious time comparing ourselves to others. 

Marcella Raimondo

For a decade in my teens and early twenties I battled with anorexia nervosa. As a queer, cisgender, able-bodied woman of color, I struggled in my recovery because my story did not mirror those in main...

Fat thoughts are the kind of thoughts we have when we are criticizing our bodies, calling them too fat, too ugly, too big, or too “whatever”. These thoughts are learned from our culture’s fat prejudice and body hatred. Sometimes when we are young and experience shame or uncomfortable feelings, we change them into body hatred. When we begin to understand that our fat thoughts and body hatred are learned, then we can take the blame off our body, and process the deeper feelings in far more constructive ways. 

Carol Normandi, LMFT, is a license...

Faith is trusting that there is a loving source of which you are a part. Having faith means that you can let go of fear and tight control and trust that there is great wisdom within you and around you, allowing yourself to breathe and listen for spiritual guidance. Having faith means that even though the recovery process may become difficult and dark, you can trust that you will also find the grace and the light. 

Rex Dubiel is an Army brat, photo-journalist, community activist, long-time blogger, “Rex the Surf Dog“ creator, 3rd grade teach...

Creativity is the outward manifestation of who we are as spiritual beings. It is the magical ability to create something out of nothing that is uniquely ours. It is the gift of being able to imagine, to dream, and then to make the dreams come true. Creative expression is essential to feeding our souls. It forced us to go beneath the obsession with food and weight and access the part of ourselves that passionately hungers for self expression.  

For more information about George Horner, you can check out his website at https://www.georgehorner.com

Honoring means we understand we are sacred beings and our bodies are sacred. They are not objects to be sculpted and forced to meet cultural ideals. They are not a commodity to manipulate in order to measure our self-worth. By de-objectifying and creating reverence for our bodies, we become free to experience the wisdom, magnificence and magic of our bodies. 

Emily Ireland Cox is an event planner, body liberation motivator, community builder, and uplifter based in Sacramento, CA. 

Co-founder of Fat Positive Sacramento and Sacramento Chunky Dunk swim parties. In recovery from binge eating disorder si...

Jen Powers is a local Non-Diet Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, and Certified Yoga Teacher specializing in eating disorders, healing chronic dieting, HAES, and intuitive eating.  She received her Bachelor's in Nutrition at UC Berkeley and Master's in Nutrition at CSU Long Beach where she worked closely with Evelyn Tribole, one of the co-authors of the book Intuitive Eating, on her Master's thesis project and received supervision from her as well.  Later she became a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor.  Jen has worked in the eating disorder field at various levels of care over the past 13 years and sta...

Robyn is a nationally renowned contributing author registered dietitian nutritionist. She has been quoted as an expert in various publications including The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Diabetes Forecast, Shape Magazine, Fitness, Oxygen, Life & Style, Natural Solutions, Beverly Hills Weekly and Today’s Dietitian. In addition, Robyn has also served as an eating disorder specialist on the nationally televised show “The Insider” and an expert on The Associated Press (AP).

Website: www.askaboutfood.com