I wanted to let everyone know that Donna Gates is doing another Certified Body Ecologist training in beautiful Whitesburg, Georgia – just outside of Atlanta – in August. I highly recommend this training for several reasons:

• You will learn how your body works – what can go wrong and how to fix it.
• You will better understand how eating disorders, digestive problems, cravings, fatigue and other illnesses are created – and how to heal them naturally.
• You will feel empowered to take charge of your health.
• You will meet other people striving for better health – including people who have overcome cancer, candida, eczema and other chronic illness through Body Ecology principles.
• You will learn how to develop an awareness about your body’s reactions to the foods you eat.
• You will learn how to guide others to health – and if this is something you’d like to do as a career, this can be a great start!
• You will get to try all of the delicious Body Ecology products each day during the training – see how great you feel afterwards – I admit that I liked this part a lot!
• You will get to eat balanced, Body Ecology meals to see how they work for you – without having to think about it or cook for yourself. It’s a great chance to be in a beautiful, structured environment where you can learn, while taking a step back into healing, traditional diets.
• You will get to meet Donna and ask her questions – she is such a wealth of knowledge. Like me, I can imagine you’ll be impressed by how well she gets the human body – and she shares so much of this with us.

Yes - You Can Eat Your Favorite Foods if You Choose Body Ecology!
Being on the Body Ecology Diet does not mean you can never eat your favorite foods again. It means you take some time out to heal your body – and once it’s back in balance again, you can add your favorite foods back! As you add them back, you’ll be even more aware of how they affect your body & moods, so you can make conscious choices about what you eat. As you know, I’ve chosen to be on the diet longer than the initial 3 months that are recommended for stage 1 – mostly because I am so sugar sensitive.

Also, because I developed a taste for this healthy, delicious food — which is not uncommon. After you start eating really healthy, grounding food, it’s entirely likely that you’ll start to feel more satisfied by it than by processed foods. One of my clients called me this week to tell me she couldn’t believe that she was craving vegetables and healthy foods — and no longer wanting sugar! But everyone is different and Donna always teaches about the principle of uniqueness. You will learn to use your own intuition and awareness to create a roadmap for yourself in this training.
(more…)

When I first started out in my recovery, there was very little information about what happens to the body in recovery. I even found that many people with experience in healthcare for eating disorders didn’t know how to guide me on what my body might go through.

Recently, I wrote to some researchers at bulimiaguide.org to find out if they had any plans to gather more research on the body in recovery, so that the process wasn’t so confusing. They wrote back and agreed that it was just as important to help people STAY in recovery as it was to help people get into recovery. Since many people recovering from eating disorders are extra sensitive about what their bodies are going through, it makes sense, they agreed, that research should be done in this area as well.

Helping Hands
In the meantime, we have each other to learn from. And each of us are out there looking for answers to our own personal situations. By the time we put it all together, we may have a good picture of possible scenarios that can help others. So for all of you out there blogging, chatting in forums, leaving comments and e-mailing – bravo to you for reaching out to the collective community!
(more…)

I grew up with parents who liked to antique, so many of my childhood vacations were spent in New England towns, rather than beaches. Because of this, I never really knew what real women’s bodies were supposed to look like – thinking what I saw in magazines was “real.”

It’s not surprising that I would judge myself harshly as I compared my own body to those in magazines. After all, the media excels at telling us we are “not good enough” in hundreds of different ways. Not to mention the industry’s favorite technique: airbrushing. Yes, airbrushing, that fabulous way of making all flaws – all things that aren’t perfect, aren’t someone else’s definition of beautiful – disappear.

The Role Of Media
I’m not sure I would say that the media causes eating disorders, but I do think it is a contributor. In fact, I think there are a lot of reasons why the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Madison Avenue have worked so hard to find ways to get us to buy, buy, buy. It’s not just the images, but also the messages: it’s not enough, we aren’t enough – and we need their product to make us feel whole again.
(more…)

What really got me to start thinking seriously about recovery is little things going wrong with my health. None of them alone were a big deal – more the kind of things you might take over the counter drugs for. But together, they made me feel like I was getting “old” too soon. And really, after living half my life with bulimia, I was terrified about what it would be like to take it into the next decade of my life.

Feeling Fear
That fear was what motivated me in my first foray into recovery, when I went to see Rhonda Lenair. That makes me wonder about fear. Mostly, we view it as negative and yet, recently, my husband was reading this really interesting book on fear that changed my mind. The book is called, The Gift of Fear, by Gavin De Becker. De Becker is a leading expert on how to predict violent behavior, and while this book is not one I would choose to read, I had great conversations with my husband about it.

The Gift of Fear
The first thing that struck me is that De Becker says fear is a gift. He came to this conclusion after years of studying how people become violent and how the victims felt before any violence happened. According to him, violent people don’t “just snap,” but instead, events occur which build toward a violent act. Preceding these events, the victim tends to recount having a “weird feeling” that something was not quite right – and discounted that feeling.
(more…)

Emily asked me to describe what a typical day’s meals look like for me, so I will share that in this post. First, I want to mention that since following the Body Ecology system of healing, I have felt more grounded in mind, body and spirit than ever before. This is not about deprivation at all – in fact, for the first time in my life, I feel more satisfied than ever with my food.

Never Enough
Before following the Body Ecology Diet, I would eat foods and only feel a sense of wanting more. There was no satisfaction at all – except in my taste buds. I’d feel like I really loved sugar and all kinds of other foods, but they’d constantly leave me wanting more. Not only would I want more for the taste – I’d want more from a deeper level, which at the time I did not understand. That deeper level was my body crying for nutrients.

Even when I thought I was eating “healthy” in between episodes of disordered eating, my impaired digestive tract was not allowing me to get the vitamins and minerals from my foods. No matter how much I had studied nutrition, it was not enough to make up for the fact that I wasn’t eating properly to improve my ability to get nutrients.
(more…)

Yesterday, I did a post on being happy all the time. In that post, I shared that a large part of my recovery was about starting to live my life according to my heart’s desire – what I truly wanted to do – and more importantly, how I wanted to BE. Any time we go against how we truly want to be or what we truly want to do, our lives start to go out of alignment. This can create imbalance, that at first might manifest as unhappiness and insecurity – and over time, if we truly stray from our heart’s desires, we can create addiction.

Heart’s Desire
The first thing I want to explore is our heart’s desires and what that means. If you think of yourself fully as a human being, you can imagine that your mind plays a huge role in your life. It shapes how you learn, how you see the world and how you relate to others. Your body is also important because it shapes your physical capabilities and your physical health. What we often don’t realize is that both mind and body play a critical role in how we FEEL. You can feel good or bad based on thoughts you think, beliefs you have or emotions you feel. You can feel good or bad based on the state of your health, things you put into your body (food, drink, drugs) or the amount of rest you get.

At the same time, because the brain in our head is linked to the brain in our gut, how we feel is also determined by the mind-body connection. If you put something into your mind that doesn’t align with what is truly right for YOU, it can affect body mind and body. Similarly, if you put something into your body that doesn’t align with what is right for you, it can affect your mind.
(more…)