Katy: Carolyn, thank you so much for being here. I feel a little bit starstruck, because I’ve looked up to you for so long and the work that you’ve done. I’ll let you tell people more about your story and how you got into the field of treating eating disorders.

Carolyn: Oh my gosh. Well, that’s a very nice thing to say. It’s interesting to think of someone looking up to me. As a clinician in the field, it was probably nice to have people paving the way who aligned with your philosophy.

I know I didn’t really have that. People say, “You were so brave,” and I wasn’t really brave. I just did what I thought was the right thing to do. Early in my career, I talked about my own eating disorder.

It started when I was about 15 and a half, 16. It came with me to college, and I didn’t know what it was called at the time. Somewhere in those years, my mom took me to a doctor, and the doctor diagnosed me with anorexia. I was pretty trapped, brain hijacked, for several years. This was before there were books out, before there were treatment programs available. It just wasn’t widely known.

I went to the school counselor at my college, and she had never heard of anorexia, much less met anyone who had it. I told her I felt guilty when people saw me eating, and she said, “Well, maybe you should eat by yourself,” which made it way worse. But she didn’t know.

I went through college without getting help. Interestingly, I wasn’t studying nutrition, but I was studying psychology, so I started trying to study my own mind and behaviors. I would put myself on a behavior modification program, like CBT, because I knew it was bad. I didn’t really know the word “recovered” or what becoming recovered meant. I just knew I couldn’t, or shouldn’t, keep doing what I was doing. I was getting thinner even though I didn’t really want to. I just didn’t want to be fat, and I kept losing weight trying to keep myself from gaining weight, which is a pretty common thing. I’ve seen it now with so many clients.

I continued to slowly gain weight, slowly add foods. I was also studying philosophy and Buddhism, so I was learning about the soul, and how I was taking care of my soul, and my body being a house for my soul. And I slowly recovered. That’s how I want to say it.

I became a high school teacher, then a high school counselor, and I really liked the counseling part. I was going to counsel youth, never in a million years thinking I would counsel people with eating disorders, because back then I had never even met anybody else with one. There were no books, no TV shows, no internet to look things up, no Instagram. We didn’t really have the language around it. It’s so weird when I think back.

I tell this story a lot. A principal I was working for said, “I think you should see this girl across town who has that thing you had.” I saw her, and it was one of those mind-meld, instant rapport moments. I was asking her questions nobody had asked. I freely shared with her, “I recovered from all that. You can, too.” And I never looked back.

I sort of made a name for myself in the early days of the field because nobody else was doing it. I always say I grew up with my eating disorder practice as the field was growing up. I got hired to run hospitals. I opened the first in-home residential program in the US. I have several books now, and now I’m training coaches. So, there’s my last 46 years.

Katy: I’ve always known you as the person who talks about her own recovery. That’s how I got to know you, and it was the thing that made you unique in a positive way. I also know you don’t subscribe to the idea of food addiction, and you think people can be recovered versus recovering. Can you speak to that and explain why you think that way?

Carolyn: Well, it makes sense that people know me for that, because no one else was doing it. I stood up at an IAEDP conference in 1992 and announced that I’m recovered. I did a talk called “Recovered Versus Recovering,” and I brought five former patients with me who had all been recovered for at least five or six years. They talked about being recovered. I didn’t realize what a huge impact that was going to have. People came up to me before the talk and said things like, “You’re going to talk about how you disclose your own eating disorder? You brought other patients?” I was breaking rules, but I think those are rules that needed to be broken. I’ve done so many things in my eating disorder career, but you’re probably right that I’m most known for announcing that I’m recovered and you can be recovered. You don’t have to deal with this like an addiction, like alcoholism. I’m not saying it goes for everybody, but I know it goes for many.

In my early years as a therapist, I was fully recovered from anorexia. I had gained weight, stopped weighing myself, stopped the comparisons, looking up calories, all the behaviors. I had to buy new clothes, all the stuff that was so hard to do. At some point I just realized, it’s gone. It’s not hanging around. I didn’t think of the word “recovered” then. Eventually, when I started treating people, I started using it more.

I was sort of known as the eating problem therapist, because eating disorders weren’t that well known. People came to see me about what they called back then compulsive overeating. Some of them were going to OA, and I didn’t know much about 12-step because I didn’t have an issue with alcohol. I studied up and learned that OA was based on AA, and the philosophy was that you will have this for the rest of your life. But I had already treated people who came to me for binge eating and were now recovered from it and not doing it anymore. So I said, “It’s not really what I believe. If you want to go to the meetings, that’s fine. It’s a community. I don’t want you to stop doing what you think is important, but I’m going to share with you my philosophy that you can be recovered from this.”

I looked at what people were bingeing on and realized that it was what they were telling themselves about the food. They were restricting these foods: “I don’t eat cookies.” In my intake, I would ask about foods they avoid, or what a normal or good day of eating is, and it became so obvious that, for most, there was a huge restriction on, let’s just pick one, cookies or desserts. When they did eat it, it was like they opened a portal: “Oh my God, I’ve already broken my rule. I might as well eat the whole bag.” And then there were the people in between anorexia and binge eating, with bulimia, who would restrict and binge and purge and go back and forth.

For all these people, it didn’t make sense to me to sit in an AA or OA meeting and say, “I admit I’m powerless.” That’s the first line. I don’t want to get into whether or not that works for alcoholism. I’m not an expert in that. But with eating, when people say the first step is “we admit we’re powerless over food,” I really try to empower people. You’re not powerless over food. It’s what you’re telling yourself about food. It’s all the restriction you’re having about food.

I used my “eating disorder self, healthy self” approach. What would you tell somebody else in your position? Sometimes I’d say, “Come and have cookies with me. We’ll have a double session, and we’ll have the cookies first.” They would say, “I can’t control myself. I’m so addicted that if I eat a cookie, I just can’t control it.” And I would say, “What do you mean, can’t control? Stay with me for the hour, then call me.”

This was before texting or emailing. They would have to call my exchange and leave a message, and I’d call them back. I wanted them to have access to me in the moment, because if I just waited for them to come back the next week and said, “How’d you do?” it would be too late. I had a full practice, so I’d pick maybe two or three clients each week who had that access. I had many conversations with people who said, “I feel compelled. My brain is telling me I have to eat it.” I would talk them through it and get to the other side, that curve that happens.

A lot of times you have to get them out of themselves. I even used myself: “What would you say to me if I told you I couldn’t resist it, I had to eat those?” They would say, “Oh, no, it’s different because you’re different.” And I’d say, “How do you know I’m different?” “I just think differently than you do. I think I can be in control of it.” I would even say, and you’re going to think this is weird, “What if I put a gun to your head right now? Would you not be able to eat those cookies?” Invariably people would say, “Of course not. Not if you had a gun to my head.” I’d say, “Well, that just means the deterrent right now isn’t strong enough. In the moment, you’re taken over by the feeling or the need to do the behavior, and the part of you that wants to stop bingeing goes away. You tell yourself you’re not going to binge anymore, and then right now you really want to. What happened to the other part of you? We need to get those two parts talking to each other. I’m not going to take this away from you. You and I both know I can’t do that. This is not between you and me. It’s between you and you. The part that wants to stop bingeing and the part that keeps bingeing. There’s a conflict going on, and we have to resolve it. I want to help you make your healthy self stronger.”

Then I would have them write things down, even while they’re on the phone with me: “Write down five of the reasons why you said you want to stop doing this, because they’ve gone out of your mind right now. The next time you’re in this situation, maybe before calling me, see if you can come up with those five things yourself.” That’s strengthening your healthy self. Writing is a huge part of it, because if they don’t write it down, they’ll start to give themselves arguments against it. If I say, “What would you tell your kid if she said, ‘I have to binge on this food, I can’t stop’?” they’ll say, “But I believe it when I tell her.” So I say, “Just write it. Stop arguing with yourself. Get it out on paper.”

Sometimes it just takes focusing on something else, or surfing the urge until it’s gone, and then they can see that if they wait long enough, it passes. So I’d say, “Get a timer, like an egg timer.” Now you can set one on your cell phone, which is so easy, but back then I had to find other devices. In my office at home, I actually have a whole set of sand timers of all different amounts of time. I’d let clients take one home. “This one’s 30 minutes, this one’s 15, this one’s an hour.” They’d turn over the sand timer and wait till the sand ran out, and if they still wanted to do it afterwards, I’d say, “I don’t care if you binge. It’s okay with me if you binge. You’re the one saying it’s not okay with you.”

What happens a lot with people who binge is that the people who try to help them stop become the enemy to the eating disorder self that wants to do it. I don’t want to be an enemy to it. I don’t want to get into a push-pull fight. I think it’s so important to put the locus of control back where it belongs: it’s you that wants to stop, and another part of you that keeps it going. That’s my whole philosophy.

Katy: As a dietitian, I feel like there’s a dynamic where clients are worried I’m going to take something away, or scold them for what they’ve eaten. It so easily gets into that territory. People who binge have already been told a thousand times all the reasons why: you’re going to be so unhealthy, you need to go on this diet and lose weight and control your eating.

Carolyn: Right. And there’s so much hiding and so much shame involved. That’s why, in our roles in this field, we have to get people to trust that we’re not going to judge or shame them. One of the things I say a lot is, “Tell me all the reasons why you want to do this, because I want to make sure you want to stop and it’s not just that you’re supposed to.” They’ll say, “It’s relieving. It’s the way I get my stress out. It’s the way I deal with my anger. If my dad gets mad at me or I have a fight with a sibling, it’s the way I deal with the pain of it.” They have a lot of reasons.

Then I ask, “Why do you want to stop?” I think when we provide all the reasons why it’s not good for them to binge, we fall into that trap of being someone taking the bingeing away. It doesn’t work anyway.

Let me say something about addiction, because this is something I can say about how I’ve changed over the years. I’ve become more open to the idea that certain people are more prone to becoming addicted to highly processed foods. You would never have heard me say that years ago. I always go to the science, and there’s a lot of science now showing that food companies, just like tobacco companies, made highly processed products that turn on dopamine at higher rates and get us seeking more food. I’m willing to believe there are some people who don’t have the same response to those foods as other people. So I’m not so strict anymore about everybody having to eat everything. I’m way more individualized than that. If someone wants to avoid those foods, and they’re eating enough, eating well-balanced, having joy in their food, and being conscious eaters, then who cares?

Camps happen in the eating disorder field: either all foods fit, or you have to get rid of all these foods because they’re addictive. I think we’re too nuanced as human beings for that. We have to look at the individual and their dynamics, get a history, try something, and if it’s not working, steer over and try something else. I’ve treated people who stayed in their 12-step programs and loved them, and they know I still use the term “recovered,” not “recovering.” I don’t say I’m powerless over food. They took a little bit from my philosophy and a little bit from that philosophy, and that’s okay.

Katy: From all the work you’ve done with people with eating disorders, are there lessons about recovery that would apply to people who don’t have an eating disorder, but still struggle in their relationship with food and with their body image? How does that translate to people who don’t have that diagnosis?

Carolyn: I’ve treated my fair share of people who just come looking for help. It’s like if you spend a lot of time as a mechanic on race cars, where everything has to be absolutely precise, you learn how to treat somebody’s broken-down truck. Where the breakdown is, and where the healing is, is the person being able to take agency for their body, not making their body a project, something to whip into shape, and being more in tune with their body. These are the things you work on with people with eating disorders, but they’re all over the map in the culture.

I call people with eating disorders our cultural canaries in the coal mine. Miners took canaries down into the mines, and if the canaries died, it meant the environment was toxic. People with eating disorders are shouting and screaming, in a way, through their eating disorders, that we have a toxic environment. Everybody is susceptible to it. It’s just a matter of whether you also have the genetic traits, psychological predispositions, or trauma that make all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle come together for an eating disorder.

But there are comparisons that help people. How much time are you paying attention to your soul versus your image? To the size of your heart versus the size of your thighs? There’s also knowledge. I know you’re big on teaching clients science and facts. How much are you being influenced by influencers, and how much are you taking in what you actually need to know about nutrition to provide healthy meals?

A really good concept comes back to my philosophy: how would you feed a friend who came over? How would you feed your kids? Every client I’ve seen has all these rules and guidelines for themselves, and the part of themselves that says, “You’re going to get fat if you eat pizza,” is saying something they would never say to a kid or a friend. So even when someone doesn’t have an eating disorder, it’s about helping that healthy part of them. Marsha Linehan, from DBT, called it “wise mind.” Bring it out for yourself, the way you can bring it out for others. It’s not coming out for you right now. Where is it? Find it. Strengthen it. Grow it back up.

Katy: I pulled this quote from a speech you gave many years ago, when you won an award from the Eating Disorder Foundation. You said, “To some people, talking about the cultural contribution to eating disorders is old, boring news, but I say that this is still a current important issue until we fix it.” It’s been many years since you said that. How do you see the current cultural contribution to eating disorders, and do you have thoughts on how we fix where we’re at right now?

Carolyn: I do remember saying that. It was in Denver, at an award. I said it because there was a big buzz about the genetics of eating disorders, and everybody got focused on brain research. We were acting like the culture part was old news. Even when the genetic findings came out and people thought, “Good, now we’re going to be able to cure eating disorders,” it’s just not true. It’s vulnerability. It’s risk factors. It’s not a cure-all.

In that same talk, I went back to the Fiji study, which is talked about all over the place but also forgotten. If you’re new in the field, you might not even hear about it, because nobody thinks of it as new. In Fiji, before television, there were no eating disorders. Three years after Fiji got television, they had the same rate of eating disorders as the US. That’s dramatic, and that’s culture, and that’s media.

What I think about it now is that it’s not going away. The coal mines and the fumes aren’t going away, so we have to make more resilient canaries. We have to help people with resilience. We have to teach the antidote and show the alternative. That’s what I’ve always done in treatment. It’s why I never had a body image group when I ran hospitals and residential programs, which I did for 22 years. I did have a group called Body and Soul. It was about what you’re spending time thinking about: improving your body or your soul? Are you spending any time taking care of your soul, and what does that even mean? I don’t think we have soul mentoring. And that’s for people even without eating disorders, because it’s a slippery slope from disordered eating. Where’s the line? Yesterday you were disordered eating. Today you’re eating disordered.

Katy: Right. It’s not like there’s one line in the sand that you step across. Let’s talk about this concept of healing your soul and tending to your soul. What does that actually mean to you, and what does it look like practically for people?

Carolyn: It’s so many things. First of all, I think it’s pointing out to people that they have a soul. Unless it’s church or religion, there isn’t a lot of understanding of what that even means. It’s your life essence. It’s who you are. There’s ego and there’s soul. Teaching people the difference is important, and both matter. It’s not that the ego is bad. The ego is all the things that help you navigate this planet, get breakfast together, do this podcast. It’s the things that make me a certain personality, a separate identity from yours.

Soul is none of those things. If I wasn’t a wife, a therapist, an author, if I wasn’t five foot four, take those things away, would I still be Carolyn? Who are you without all those identifying markers? That breathing, observing, wise self that’s in there. We’re not our thoughts, we’re not our feelings. We are the underlying observer of our thoughts and feelings. When you really teach people that, they learn they don’t have to react to all their various thoughts and feelings. They can respond more carefully. They learn to challenge their thoughts. They learn that their feelings aren’t bad and aren’t going to destroy them. This underlying essence isn’t woo-woo. It’s actually really true.

The other part is all the things that make you live a soul-led life, because becoming recovered is one thing, staying recovered is another, and why do you even want to do it? So I talk about traveling, about nature, about going out and looking at the full moon, watching a sunset, getting back to the awe we used to have in more primitive cultures, before science explained things. Even though science can explain a rainbow, it’s still awesome. Don’t bypass things just because you have an explanation for them. Learn to get into the essence and be in the moment with them.

I would take clients on nature walks where they weren’t allowed to talk. They just had to be in their senses, forest bathing. I would play music, which is a quick way into the soul and into feeling. I would have them collect soul moments during the week. It might be looking into your partner’s eyes, witnessing your sister give birth, a new puppy. Just helping people notice what they’re paying attention to, because the world bombards us with diet culture and all the ways to improve ourselves, the diet ads, the biohackers. Who is helping us remember the other things? Poetry is another way I do it. It’s a subtle shift in how you want to live on this planet, seeing life as an incredible gift and treating your body as your earth suit.

You introduce people to these concepts and see what they take in and what they don’t. Even if people don’t leave saying, “I did all this soul work,” if they leave with a richer life and deeper meaning, that’s a reason to get better and stay better. I have found.

Katy: You said a moment ago that the work to recover is different from staying recovered. What do you think it takes to stay recovered that’s different from what it takes to get recovered in the first place?

Carolyn: I think they’re the same, but we sometimes mistake absence of symptoms for being recovered. When someone is white-knuckling it, counting the days of not purging or whatever, and they aren’t connected to a why, that’s not recovery. We can put anybody in a treatment program with 24/7 monitoring, and they have to gain weight. They’ve gone through the treatment and gained the weight back, and there’s this illusion that they don’t meet the criteria anymore. But what keeps them wanting to keep that? Getting compliance isn’t that hard. You can monitor people. You can have incentives, like they can’t leave treatment unless they gain a certain weight. You can get compliance a lot more easily than commitment. Commitment is where I’m not making you do this. You’ve decided it’s worth it, even if it’s hard, even if it sucks, even if you’re fearful.

It’s hard to give up something you developed for a reason, especially the longer you’ve done it. It’s hard to give up even the identity of it, if you’ve identified yourself as a person who doesn’t eat those things, or “I’m the thinnest person in my peer group.” So how much do you attach your value to those things? Start helping people value themselves and their relationship with the world in a whole different way, because then nobody can take that from you. It doesn’t fall apart. The moon is not going anywhere, so I can always go out and go, “Wow.” My understanding that I have a soul, and that I want to take care of it, can’t be taken away. Whereas the latest diet comes and goes. Now it’s GLP-1s. We’re constantly dealing with the new way people have discovered to lose weight, but the thing is always the same. I always say, “Don’t do anything to lose weight that you’re not prepared to do for the rest of your life.” That’s really important. And then look at all your reasons for doing it, what you think you’re going to get from it, and whether you have any evidence that’s true. I’m sure you ask your clients those things all the time.

Katy: What would you say are lessons you learned because you had an eating disorder? What did you learn about yourself or about life from going through it yourself?

Carolyn: It is a good teacher, isn’t it? Definitely that being vulnerable is not a weakness. Sharing, being vulnerable, is actually a strength. That was a big one, because I didn’t want to tell people things. I didn’t want to seem vulnerable, and I learned that’s not being weak. It’s a good asset to have. People actually get closer to you when you tell them things about you. You don’t have to show only your good self forward. Telling people about your struggles, and the parts of you that maybe aren’t so good, brings people closer to you, at least the people you want around.

I also learned that things I would argue about and absolutely say I couldn’t do, I could do. So I’m careful now about being too sure of myself about anything I say I can’t do. I never thought I could gain the weight. There are foods I eat freely now that I couldn’t imagine eating. “You can’t make me do that.” I thought I wouldn’t ever do it, and I do now. So be careful when you take strong positions.

And that small steps really add up to big changes. That’s so huge, because you may not see the growth you’re making, and then all of a sudden there you are and you’ve grown, like a kid. If you have marks on the wall, you don’t necessarily see them grow, but when you come back and put them in, the marks are way down there. It adds up. We often get better in small steps.

That’s why on my own podcast I’m asking people, “Tell some steps that you took. Tell things you had to stop doing.” It’s a vague world, going from so sick to so well. I used to have a problem with the first television shows that came out, because they would show a person really sick with an eating disorder, and then say they had therapy, maybe a couple of sessions, and then they were better. I think we owe it to people to tell them, “Here are some hard work things. Here’s something I learned for sure.”

It’s how I opened this podcast today: you can get better. Don’t get stuck on the why. I didn’t know why I had that illness. I didn’t know what anorexia was, or that it was a combination of factors. I have some good ones: my dad left my mom for a stepmodel, and my doctor told my mom I was overweight. I have some good reasons. But I didn’t know any of that was connected to what I was doing. I just thought I wanted to have better control, look better, and be fit. Why is important. Underlying stuff is a bridge to helping you get better, but people get stuck on the bridge, looking for all the reasons. You can know all the reasons and still not get over your eating disorder until you change your relationship with food and your body. Both of those are true.

From all I can gather, I feel like that’s what you do. You remind me of a dietitian who acts like a therapist, and I’m a therapist who acts like a dietitian. They’re intertwined. We can’t totally separate the emotions from what someone’s doing with food and their body, and you have to be careful not to get weird about turf wars.

Katy: I team really closely with the therapists I work with. It’s kind of like we got the baton and we pass it back and forth to each other as we help connect things for the client. I’ve been blessed with therapists who are very collaborative, though I can imagine scenarios where it gets awkward.

What would you say to women who are listening and like what they’re hearing, and want peace with food? Maybe they don’t have an eating disorder. They’ve done a lot of dieting, and they get logically that dieting isn’t the answer. It’s not sustainable. But they still don’t like their bodies. They want to be thinner, or maybe a doctor told them they need to be thinner. What advice do you give somebody stuck in that conflict of “I feel like I should diet, but I also feel like I shouldn’t, and I don’t know what else to do instead”?

Carolyn: I start by helping them decide whether they really want to give it a go, because when people have one foot in the door and one foot out the door, it’s super hard. I want to get all the reasons out. What are all the reasons you’d like to change this, and all the reasons you want to keep it? Let’s compare that list. I don’t want to make the list for you. I want you to come to this decision, and I will help you if you decide you want help. But it’s not me doing the doing, it’s you.

First, how is this getting in your way? There’s sometimes a lot of grieving clients have to do about giving up the idea that they can reach an ideal weight, giving up the ideal of ever being what the culture holds up as an ideal body size. It’s crying, it’s letting go. That was an interesting realization when I started working with more people with binge eating. I thought, “This is definitely the deep psychotherapy part of it,” the grief that comes from letting go of what you wanted.

Then there’s the cost-benefit analysis. You could force yourself to do these diets, intermittent fasting, the grapefruit hot dog diet, the wine and egg diet, whatever it is. One, how many years have you tried and it hasn’t worked? Would you tell anyone else to do that? And two, how happy are you doing that? Let’s look at the quality of your life, rather than just one factor, which is losing weight and being thinner. What are all the other factors?

I always go back to “What would you tell…” and I try to pick a really close person. If I’m working with somebody who has a teenage daughter, or a daughter in her 20s, I say, “What if she said to you, ‘I just gotta lose this weight, no one’s going to love me,’ or ‘I don’t love myself, I have to do this’? What would you tell her?” Generally, people know what they would say to other people. They cannot say it to themselves. This goes back to the writing. I have to get them to write it out, because otherwise they’ll start to answer me with, “Oh yeah, but I just can’t.” So I say, “No, pretend you’re writing to her. Write out what you would say, then tell me what she would say back, then write it out again.” That’s a big part of my work, and a big part of my success in the eating disorder field: strengthening people’s healthy self. With every client I see, I really do believe it’s you that’s going to heal you at the end of the day. We can do things to people, but unless there’s an internal shift, it doesn’t last, so I work at getting that internal shift.

Another thing I do is have people list all their food rules. Sometimes they’ll say, “What do you mean?” and I have to give examples: “You don’t allow yourself to eat after 10 PM,” or “You don’t eat breakfast,” or “You don’t eat anything over a certain amount of carbs in a day.” Then I have a whole list of questions. Where did you learn this rule? What does this rule give you? Does anyone else have to follow it? Do you have to follow it forever? What would happen if you stopped following it? There’s a whole page of it, in Key Five of my “Eight Keys” book. Even if we start with one rule, let’s just see if what you thought would happen if you stopped following it really happens. Sometimes you have to break down people’s behaviors, even their philosophy, into steps, because they’ve developed it over time and they’re not even clear about what it is. They haven’t broken it into pieces they can easily play around with and make changes in.

Katy: To just ask people to give up all their rules and eat whatever, of course that’s going to feel terrifying, like a free-for-all. And the language of “rules” evokes punishment and guilt: you broke the rule.

Carolyn: Right. I say, “You don’t have to go from all these rules to no rules, but let’s call them guidelines.” Guidelines are a little bit pliable. Maybe you want to get a certain kind of nutrition, or not eat too many desserts because you used to binge on them. Have some guidelines, but rules will get you in trouble, because the other part of you is going to backlash and say, “I broke my rule, I might as well eat the whole box.” That’s such a common refrain. I’m sure you’ve heard it so many times.

I always say to people, “If you fell down one stair on a flight of stairs, would you say, ‘Oh well, I fell down one, I might as well fall down the whole way’? You wouldn’t even grab the railing and try to stop yourself.” I really try to make people laugh. I think it’s an important part of breaking through strongly held beliefs, when you can laugh at yourself and look at it from a different perspective.

Katy: I love things like that, that make people laugh at themselves. Is there anything else you’d love to say that we haven’t touched on, an important message for people to take away from this discussion?

Carolyn: I want to talk about a new concept that’s controversial, like being recovered was controversial: training eating disorder coaches. For a long time I thought, “Why are there life coaches, sober coaches, leadership coaches, and there isn’t eating disorder coaching?” I think there was a lot of stigma in the field. Some people even said to me, “You shouldn’t have somebody who’s not a licensed professional.” But I don’t mean for coaches to take the place of a dietitian or a therapist. I mean for them to help us do our work.

Not all therapists and dietitians have the time or inclination, and in some cases it’s not even ethical. It wouldn’t be appropriate for a therapist to go away for a weekend wedding with a client, like sober coaches do. If someone is newly sober and going to a wedding, a sober coach might attend with them and help them not drink, or go to their house and take out all the alcohol when they’re leaving a treatment program. The coaches I train do things like that. They’ll go to someone’s house when they’re leaving treatment and get rid of all the diet products and laxatives. They’ll go grocery shopping with them. You just don’t see therapists and most dietitians wanting to do that, or it’s not part of the role traditionally. Some dietitians do, I know. Also, the client can text the coach in the middle of the night when they feel like they’re going to raid the refrigerator and binge and purge. That’s just part of the deal. Coaches differ in temperament and who’s willing to do what, but you can find a coach who’s willing, like I was in my early private practice, to say, “You two are it this month, and I’ll respond if you call my exchange.” The thing is, getting them to call is the hardest part, not getting them to stop calling.

Most of the coaches have had an eating disorder, and they have to be recovered. They have to meet my definition, for two years, before I’ll even train them. Of course, I have to rely on them. There’s not a blood test I can give to see if they’re recovered. But it’s amazing how much integrity people have. I’ve had people read the definition and say, “I’m not there yet,” and I say, “When you get there, contact me.” Someone recently said, “I’ve only been one year,” and I said, “Thank you for being honest. Get back to me.” I learned over time that if someone has two years and meets my definition, there is very little chance they’re going to relapse. In all the treatment centers I ran, only one staff member relapsed, and I think it’s because I had that rule.

I want people to know about coaching, and that it’s an interesting adjunct to the field. A lot of dietitians and therapists are saying thank you, and families are saying thank you. But I know people are still a bit nervous about it.

Katy: You’ve always been somebody who wants to do the thing that everybody else thinks can’t be done or shouldn’t be done. It’s like, what’s she going to do next? Everybody wait and see. I would love for people to go check that out. What’s the website?

Carolyn: I didn’t mean to be that person. I’m actually very sensitive to criticism. There are some coaches who aren’t as good as others, and I’ve already had a coach relapse and tell me she had to drop out of coaching. It happens. But I think it’s an interesting new emerging part of the field, so I’m glad you asked. It’s carolyncostin.com, or the Carolyn Costin Institute. They can find it.

Katy: Beautiful. We’ll link to all of that in the show notes. Tell people about your podcast. What’s it called?

Carolyn: It’s pretty new. As we’re filming this, I’ve only had five episodes released. It’s called “Becoming Recovered: Body and Soul.” The whole focus is interviewing people from all walks of life, like you, who have recovered, in different roles. I’ve had an actress on. I had a woman who escaped a cult. An intuitive channeler. I’m finding out the various ways people get there, and what tips they have for others along the way. I’m hoping to show people all the different avenues for how becoming recovered is possible, on both the body and the soul level. As far as I know, you can find it on Spotify, you can watch it on YouTube, since there’s a video segment, and I think it’s on Apple Podcasts too.

Katy: We’ll link to that in the show notes as well. I highly recommend people check it out. It’s so interesting to hear the different perspectives from your guests, and I love the commentary you weave in. Even if you don’t have an eating disorder, you’ll take so many nuggets of wisdom from it. My motto has been, “You can’t lose if you don’t quit, so just keep doing it.” I don’t even pay attention to the numbers of downloads. I’m not going to get wrapped up in metrics. I’m just going to do it because it feels good for my soul.

Carolyn: Thank you. That’s a good thing for you to tell me, because I’ve been wanting to know what the numbers are, but I don’t know how to look them up. My director of operations said, “Just don’t even look. Don’t look at the comments. Don’t get lost in the weeds. You’re having a good time on the show, so just do it.” So thank you for adding to that. I’m new in the podcast world, and you’re much farther ahead of me.

Katy: Right back at you. I feel so blessed that we made this connection.

Carolyn: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really glad we met. I’m glad to know you’re out there in the world, and glad to know about your podcast.

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