I believe you are the expert on your experience. I believe we must seek to understand each person’s unique experience with an eating disorder—asking questions and listening rather than making assumptions. Coaching is a partnership, and you hold valuable expertise on yourself. You know yourself and your life much better than I do, so I believe your input is important in our work together.

I believe an eating disorder has been adaptive and served a purpose that makes sense in someone’s life. I validate the ways an eating disorder makes sense and has been a survival strategy—an attempt at a solution by a part of us to deal with our lived experience, painful learnings, dysregulation, trauma, and oppression. Healing asks us to honor our eating disorder’s attempts to help us survive while also acknowledging the harm it has caused in our life. I believe we must compassionately hold space for both of these truths without judgement.

I believe we must factor in the societal messages and inequities that contribute to eating disorders and add barriers to recovery. Each person faces a unique combination of factors contributing to their eating disorder and challenges in their life influenced by the environment we exist within. It’s vital to understand the interconnection between our cultural belief systems, anti-fatness, and eating disorders/disordered eating. I believe liberation for all will allow for more healing collectively and individually.

I believe full recovery from an eating disorder is a possibility while also understanding that we are complex humans living in a complex world. Not everyone is in a place where recovery is their priority, and not everyone wants to recover. I believe recovery should not be moralized; someone is always worthy of dignity and an increased quality of life regardless. I do always hold hope for the possibility of full recovery.

I believe in harm reduction to minimize the negative consequences of disordered eating behaviors. Harm reduction is ethical care. I see harm reduction as a compassionate approach aimed to reduce suffering and increase someone’s quality of life no matter where they are in their process.

I believe in Health at Every Size, weight-inclusivity, body diversity, and state not weight. I believe your body is wise and trustworthy. And only our bodies can decide what they need to weigh in order to be well. It’s harmful when we try to force our body to a lower weight than it’s meant to be at. Research shows that being in an energy deficit is a major contributing factor to developing and sustaining an eating disorder. It’s someone’s state, not weight that matters; their mental, emotional, and physical state. A number of the scale isn’t going to tell us if someone is healed.

I believe your internal experience is more important than any external measurement of well-being. Even if everything appears fine from the outside, what truly matters is your internal experience—how you are experiencing food, exercise, your body, and being with yourself. Your struggles are valid even if they are not visible. I believe it’s crucial to have supports who prompt us to explore our internal experience rather than simply define us by external markers and assumptions.

I believe diet, wellness, and hustle/grind culture and harmful cultural messaging can be insidious—even in recovery. We are socialized and living within cultural systems that pathologize and condemn bodies, hunger, food, aging, rest, pleasure, and our needs as humans. Proving our worth through self-denial, our appearance, how much we exercise, our health status, and our productivity levels is normalized in our society. Sadly these messages too often show up in recovery spaces as well. Full freedom from an ED will ask us to let go of all rules, compulsions, and conditions around eating, movement, and weight—even the ones that are normalized in our culture. If we wanted seconds but we didn’t have it because our meal plan didn’t require it—that is still restriction. If we are approved by our team to exercise, but are doing it from a place of fear and would feel anxious if we didn’t—that isn’t serving us. I believe we must root out any harmful mental and physical restriction and self-denial if we want to heal. To eat and enjoy food without guilt in a culture that tells us not to is an act of courageous reclamation.