My interest in Mindful Eating is personal and goes back to 1960's's - before anyone knew much about disordered eating.  From the time I was a little girl, I thought I was fat.  Growing up in the era of Twiggy didn't help, nor living in a family where calories were counted, worshiped, then demonized.  By the mid 1970's, In a perfect storm of perfectionism and poor body image, I developed significantly disordered eating.  It seemed like all I thought about was food. 

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My disordered eating took the form of bulimia.  Every day, multiple times a day, I binged and purged.  My life became very small, though it looked like I was ok, from the outside.  I was weak, confused and overwhelmed with the certainty that being thin was a goal worth punishing myself for.

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Mercifully, I woke up one day, twelve years into this nightmare, and knew that I needed serious help.  The first step was being able to admit I needed help. Reaching out to one of the first physicians who treated disordered eating, I got so much better.  It took time and good professional help.  I recently googled my physician, and found that he is now practicing in Boston at Tufts Medical Center.  

  

Flash forward 10 years into my recovery and I had stumbled upon mindfulness.  Moving forward another 10 years, after 20 years of peaceful co-existence with food, it was thrilling to discover research combining mindfulness and eating behavior.  I began immersing myself in all the mindful eating training programs I could find including:  Mindfulness-based eating awareness training (MB-EAT) with Jean Kristeller, PhD, Eat for Life with Lynn Rossy, PhD, and Intuitive Eating with Tribole and Resch, Registered Dietitians.

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The memory of my own struggles with food and the relief I experience each day, from NOT obsessing about food and harming myself with it, propelled me to begin offering the wonderfully kind, comprehensive, effective program, Eat for Life.  The course has been an invitation to freedom for hundreds of participants.

 

While I am not longer teaching the course, I utilize all the trainings in my private practice.  In individual sessions, I meet with folks to support them in rejecting diet culture, making peace with their bodies and finding true satisfaction in eating.   

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A word of caution. This learning and exploration is not meant for those who are just beginning to recover from serious disordered eating, like bulimia or anorexia.  If you are experiencing active binge/purge eating or severe food restriction, you must be under the care of a mental health professional as well as a physician in order to work with me.