371: Full Recovery After Decades with an Eating Disorder with Pamela St Clair

In this episode, I explore how eating disorders use comparison around food, bodies, achievement and recovery progress to keep you feeling inadequate and questioning your needs. I also share a practical process for dealing with comparison in real time so you can continue choosing actions that support your recovery.

In this episode, I speak with my client Shannon about living for 20 years with an eating disorder shaped by under-eating, over-exercise and an identity built around movement, despite appearing highly functional from the outside. She shares what it took to stop exercising, eat enough and face the physical and emotional discomfort of recovery, and how doing so transformed her health, relationships and sense of self.

Pamela St Clair shares how she achieved full recovery after living with an eating disorder for decades. We explore what finally helped her recover, why it is never too late and how her experience led her to become an eating disorder recovery coach.

In this episode, I explain what refeeding syndrome is, who may be at risk, the warning signs and monitoring that matter, and how nutrition can be increased safely. I also explore how unnecessary fear can reinforce restriction and delay the nourishment needed for recovery.

This week on the show I speak with Dr. Brad Smith, the chief medical officer for Rogers Behavioural Health. We talk about the co-occurence of many conditions with eating disorders: OCD, anxiety, depression, and addiction. We also cover ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) - what it is, how it works and how it can be used for different aspects of recovery.

Virgie Tovar joins the podcast to examine how GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are reshaping diet culture, from the medicalisation of restriction to the marketing of weight stigma as compassion. We discuss the impact on eating disorder recovery, the psychological cost of weight cycling, and what it takes to choose body acceptance in a culture still determined to sell thinness.

One of the most common mistakes I see people making is to go slow in recovery. As part of this episode I look at the common reason why people take this approach and why it doesn't help.

Nutritional rehabilitation receives a huge amount of attention, and rightly so. But considerably less attention is given to what comes next: learning how to build a life in which you no longer need the eating disorder.

Do you know how to cope without using eating disorder behaviours? For many (or most) the eating disorder becomes their only means of coping. This means that part of recovery is about learning other ways of coping, and that's what this episode is about.

This episode explores everything you need to know about extreme hunger in eating disorder recovery, including why it happens, why it can feel so frightening, and how to respond when hunger feels relentless. It also covers mental hunger, hypermetabolism, weight restoration, common mistakes, and the myths that can keep people stuck.