The Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross Show: Binge Eating Disorder, Stress Eating, Emotional Eating, Food Addiction

Stephanie Dodier of “Going Beyond the Food” has been a guest on my podcast many times and our conversations have always been honest and cover a variety of topics. Today, we talked about the toxicity that exists in the world of eating disorders, black and white thinking, backlash from the medical profession, what it means to really do your own trauma work and how social justice is an important part of healing our relationship with food and our bodies.

In this episode you will learn:

1. Why I call trauma work, the new “healthism”
2. How black and white thinking has caused an us vs. them mentality in the work with people with food addiction, emotional eating and binge eating.
3. Why the desperation for a thinner body continues to be paired with being happy and being healthy.

You may have dieting whiplash and just frankly have so much misinformation that you really don’t know what is good for your body and what is not. So you end up eating lots of raw carrots and celery or stick mainly to salads. While there may be kernels of truth in expert nutritional advice, nutritional confusion also contributes to unhealthy eating styles. Joyful eating is about determining what works for you and your body, and learning to eat those foods with joy and without guilt or fear.

In this podcast, you will learn:

1. What is joyful eating?
2. How can joyful eating help me with binge eating, food addiction and emotional eating?
3. What you can do to learn to eat with JOY?

Food shaming is when someone criticizes or judges what another person is eating. Food shaming can be intentional but even with unintentional, can lead to guilt, shame and embarrassment. Constant examination of what you are eating or what someone else is eating are all part of the diet mentality and diet culture. Diet culture endorses the importance of staying thin which then leads to the compulsion to feel you have to watch every calorie that goes into your mouth and eat foods that fit into diet culture where it’s all about the calories

In this podcast you will learn:

1. How food shaming can make your food addiction, binge eating and emotional eating worse.
2. Why food shaming is part of the “arousal cycle” of those with food addiction.
3. What you can do to reduce food shaming from others and from yourself.

Grief following the death of a loved one is well studied and understood. Researchers have documented an initial period of numbness, followed by sadness or depression and then reorganization and recovery. Grief in this case is used to describe how we react to loss - physically, emotionally, behaviorally and cognitively. It is not uncommon when we experience a loss that we default to old behaviors such as binge eating, obsessing about food and emotional eating. The emotions associated with grief can feel overwhelming and we may reach for the comfort of our old friend – food.

In this podcast you will learn:

1. Why is there no time limit on grief?
2. What are “normal” responses to grief?
3. What role does food play in the grieving process?

In the podcast, I interview friend and colleague, Julie Duffy Dillon who is a specialist in Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). We discuss the importance of addressing TRUE determinants of health – what makes us healthy and how weight loss does not have to be part of that equation. We also discuss treatment of PCOS including use of supplements and talk about weight stigma.

In this podcast, you will learn:

1. What is PCOS?
2. How does having binge eating, food addiction or emotional eating affect PCOS?
3. What is weight inclusive medical care and how can I get it?