Episode 294: Today on the show I'm chatting with Victoria Kleinsman. We cover her 20 year battle with an eating disorder, escaping an abusive relationship, reaching a place of full recovery, how she went from body hate to body love and so much more.
Victoria Kleinsman is I’m an eating disorder and abuse survivor, food freedom and body love coach, speaker, podcast host, and writer. Her purpose is to guide you on a journey to discover food freedom, cultivate a loving relationship with your body, and, most importantly, fall in love with yourself.
She has overcome complex childhood trauma, anorexia, binge eating, bulimia, and a six-year-long abusive relationship. Today, she is a testament to complete recovery, revelling in food freedom and body positivity and is I’m on a mission to guide millions of women back home to self-love and intuitive eating.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 294 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/294.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help clients to fully recover.
On today’s show, it is a guest interview, and it’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these. It’s a great one to come back with, and my guest today is Victoria Kleinsman. Victoria is an eating disorder and abuse survivor, a food freedom and body love coach, a speaker, a podcast host, and a writer, and her purpose is to guide you on a journey to discover food freedom, cultivate a loving relationship with your body, and most importantly, fall in love with yourself.
She has overcome complex childhood trauma, anorexia, binge eating, bulimia, and a six-year abusive relationship. Today, she is a testament to complete recovery, revelling in food freedom and body positivity, and is on a mission to guide millions of women back home to self-love and intuitive eating.
Victoria is someone who I’ve recently become aware of, thanks to Julie on my team putting her on my radar. I went through her podcast and her Instagram. I really like what she’s been putting out, so I wanted to invite her onto the show.
I need to give a trigger warning in front of this one. Victoria swears, so there is some of that throughout the episode. But more importantly, Victoria is very open about her story and her background, and this includes talking about physical abuse, sexual abuse, rape, and being in an abusive relationship. Victoria is such a strength and has such a strength when talking about these things, and it’s really powerful to hear her talk about this stuff, but I want to warn you upfront that these topics are covered in this episode.
In addition to this, we talk about Victoria’s history with dieting and how it all started. She talks about how this then turned into an eating disorder and how this disorder morphed over the span of 20 years, and we talk about the different aspects of this and how it shifted. We look at her recovery process and what this looked like and how she’s reached a place now of full recovery. We talk about how she went from hating her body to loving it, and the steps she took to get there. This is actually a very practical part of the episode, and we talk a lot about this. We look at how to deal with binge eating and whether to keep specific foods in the house or to not keep specific foods in the house. Again, a very practical part of the podcast. And so much more as part of this episode.
Victoria is very easy to chat with, and it felt like this was a very flowing conversation. So without any further intro, let’s get on with this. Here is my conversation with Victoria Kleinsman.
Hey, Victoria. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for coming on the show today.
Victoria Kleinsman: Hi, Chris. Thank you for having me.
Chris Sandel: I’m really excited about this. When preparing for today, I’ve gone through your podcast, and there’s really just so many things that we could chat about. But what I’ve decided to do is create a list of ideas and we’ll just see where the conversation goes and probably get to some of them and probably not get to some of them, but that’s just how it is.
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I think as a good starting place, let’s start with you and your story, because this is so integral to the work that you now do. If we go back to the beginning, if you think back to your childhood, what was your relationship like with food as a young kid, and what was food like in your household growing up?
Victoria Kleinsman: It always starts from childhood, right? I’ve not met a single person or worked with a single client that this hasn’t started from a young age. For me, I started, I notice – and this is all from reflection and from the inner work that I’ve done and continue to do, which is why I can articulate it in such a clear way. Trust me, it took years to fully understand how, why, what, when.
Looking back, I was naturally, I guess, with my personality, a perfectionist. Anyway, a high achiever. So from a very young age, I did feel the need to be perfect. I also was the youngest. I only have an older sister, but we were quite close. 18 months between us. So as you can imagine, my mom was working full-time with two young children. As the youngest, I feel like I was given less attention, so I would do anything that I could to get the validation and attention from my mom.
I also learned, through my mom mirroring back to me, through my behaviour through her reactions, if I was a really good girl and did everything I was told, then I got the praise and the validation and the love that little me was seeking. I also knew that being fully myself, my true, authentic self, I was always told through my parents and grandparents that I was too much. I was too loud or I was too silly or I was too angry. When I would cry, I would get locked outside as a toddler until I stopped crying, and then I’d be allowed back in.
I was left alone a lot in my big emotions, and what I was being taught then – and again, my parents and grandparents were only doing what they knew. They weren’t doing this on purpose. I was taught having big emotions, being my true, authentic self wasn’t acceptable, and I would be rejected and basically literally physically locked outside. So I quickly learnt how to people-please and to act how my parents and other adults wanted me to act.
I was also noticed that when we went to a friend’s house with our parents, I would always want to stay with my mom. I never wanted to do child stuff. I always wanted to be with the adults because my mom was always like, “You’re a mini me! We’re the same.” She saw me as a best friend. Whereas that might seem nice when we’re older, as a child, your mother should be your mother, not your best friend. So what happened there was she would confide in me things that in all honesty a child should never know, such as family affairs and having to keep secrets and not tell this person and not tell that person.
I soon became held responsible for my mom’s emotions, because when I cried she would say things like, “Oh, don’t cry. You make me sad if you cry.” All these things that I internalised as like, I am not okay. I’m not okay to be in my emotions. I’m not okay to be my authentic self. So I actually spent quite a lot of time alone as a child. The only memories I have, actually, under the age of nine, were of me just playing by myself, and that was because I felt safer and it was easier to be by myself because I didn’t have to pretend to be somebody else.
That’s the backstory to the lead-up to my relationship with food. My mom, throughout my entire life, as long as I can remember – and even still to this day – she’s always been a yo-yo dieter. So she would diet, lose weight, binge, put weight on, gain it, start the diet again. Thankfully she never was diagnosed with an eating disorder. It never went that severe. She definitely had and has disordered eating.
When I was nine, she took me to Weightwatchers with her. Not because I needed to lose weight as a child; just because we did everything together, and I was a mini her.
Chris Sandel: You were her best friend.
Victoria Kleinsman: Right, exactly, so why not bring your youngest to the Weightwatchers meetings? And I very soon learnt, obviously, everyone claps when people lose weight and they’re all celebrated. You have to get weighed in front of everybody. I don’t know if it’s the same now. And then when someone puts weight on, everyone’s like, “Oh no, what can you do better? What have you done wrong?”
Because I wanted to be like my mom with everything, because I was a ‘mini her’, I wanted to do Weightwatchers. Now, my mom said, “You don’t need to lose weight but you can count points as long as you count the ones that I give you.” So she gave me enough points to just, I don’t know, maintain my weight. I have no idea. But because I was a perfectionist and I wanted to be praised and validated by her and everybody else – not that I was getting weighed or even allowed to do this – I would secretly have less points each day. So it quickly spiralled.
Then when my weight got quite low, my mom would – this sounds so bad – but almost teach me how to binge eat, because after her weigh-in, she would binge eat and then be good again for the entire week for the weigh-in and then binge eat. So I learned that cycle.
But when I was about 11, the anorexia started. That was down to puberty happening. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, Chris; I’ll be interested. A lot of my clients, including myself, who have anorexia, they start puberty really early, like at 10-11 years old. Have you noticed that?
Chris Sandel: I have not noticed that, actually, and that’ll be an interesting thing for me to look out for when asking questions connected to this. One of the things that I’ve noticed and I’ve talked about before is I think the people who have the capacity to develop anorexia and eating disorders more generally – because I think there is a genetic component connected to them – is that their need for energy or their need for food is higher than the average person at baseline.
And that is definitely something that I’ve noticed through having conversations with clients and looking back before the eating disorder started and people commenting “I used to out-eat my brother” or “My brother’s friends would come round and I’d eat more than them.” This had been this thing before the eating disorder started. So that’s definitely something I’ve noticed. I haven’t seen anything in the research connected to it, but it would be interesting to now look out for the thing that you mentioned in terms of early starting of puberty.
Victoria Kleinsman: Yeah, I just noticed that as a correlation. Also, speaking to what you said, actually, Chris, that’s so true because in terms of having a hearty appetite, I was always told, “You’re greedy. You’re greedy, you’re greedy, you’re greedy. Why do you want more? Why can’t you have what everyone else wants?” And I was a very active kid. I rode horses since I was five. I started gymnastics at a young age. I had a lot of energy. I was always told I was too much. I obviously burnt a lot. Sot hats interesting that you brought that up.
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So the anorexia started as I was starting puberty. I think it was a combination of me being so scared that my body was changing and I was growing into a woman when I was freaking 11 – like, I wasn’t ready to step into that. Also, because I’d been always like a mother to my mom my entire life, I just wanted to be taken care of. Like, can someone please just take care of me? This is obviously all through reflection; I didn’t know this at the time. If I’m sick, I’ll get taken care of. And also the perfectionism as well; if I can lose weight perfectly and do it to the extreme and be the best at it. It was a combination of all of those things.
I remember watching a movie – I actually watched this a few years ago because I wanted to reminisce and just be with my younger self – it’s an old movie called The Perfect Body. It’s about a gymnast who develops bulimia, and it doesn’t end well. The movie doesn’t end well. The movie’s intention, I’m sure, is to stop people from developing eating disorders. For some reason I watched that movie and wanted to be like her. So I remember it like it was yesterday. I know where I was, I know what day it was, what the weather was like. I just decided in my head, “I’m just going to stop eating.” And I did.
Chris Sandel: I actually don’t think that’s as bizarre as you’re saying because I think there’s been research looking at memoirs and recovery memoirs and actually that they can be quite triggering for people because of the fact that people often read them as almost a ‘how-to’ manual. And so much of what’s focused on in those memoirs, and I imagine it’s the same within the film that you watched, is actually the disorder, descending and getting worse and worse, but nothing of the actual recovery process.
Often in memoirs, there’s like an epilogue where there’s like two pages of “And then I recovered.” But giving absolutely no detail of what happened, and there’s all this focus on the actual eating disorder. Even when someone’s not intending to do it, whether this is in a book or in a film, there can be a lot of glorifying of that, and especially glorifying to someone who is a young, impressionable teenager whose mind thinks very differently to someone who may be an adult. So yeah, that doesn’t surprise me at all that you said this had this impact, even if that wasn’t the filmmaker’s intention.
Victoria Kleinsman: Yeah, and thank you for reflecting that, Chris, because that is actually so true. You’re right, the whole entire movie, it was right at the very end she started to get better for like 10 minutes. She like ate a meal or something. It was almost like you said, a ‘how to have an eating disorder’. And especially because I related to the gymnastics and I was really good at the gymnastics, obviously, because I had to be the best at everything. In order to prove myself, to get validation and love, I wanted to copy her. So I just decided without telling anybody that I was going to stop eating.
I managed to hide it for probably about six to eight weeks. I used to wear like three jumpers to go to school and try and pad myself out, and then my mom noticed and I remember her dragging me to the doctor’s. I was in complete denial. I was handed a leaflet of anorexia nervosa, and I remember my heart stopping and just being like, “No.” I was in denial. I thought everyone was crazy, “They don’t know what they’re talking about. I know what I’m doing, I’m in control of this.”
I wasn’t in control of that because I have the genetic component to anorexia. The migration response was switched on when I got to a certain low weight for me. Not eating became so easy. Didn’t even want to eat. I just wanted to move, not eat. I even restricted water. I had a severe reaction to anything inside my stomach. So I don’t know how I’m alive to this day, honestly. I used to allow myself 250 millilitres of water a day. That’s it. Until my mom discovered and then forced me.
I actually ‘recovered’ because I ‘weight restored’ over four years, but I didn’t because I was still underweight for my natural body size, which is now overweight on the BMI scale. We’ll go into that later, I’m sure.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I would love to get some more details on some of the stuff that you already said.
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I want to pick up on the anorexia piece, but the thing that keeps coming up in my mind is I want to hear more about your sister’s relationship with your mom, just because of how you described what happened with you and how this was with you. What happened in terms of her? And I also guess that this is personal, and if you don’t want to share stuff about your sister, I understand that as well. But yeah, I just wonder, did she get out of this unscathed? Did she have issues in terms of her relationship with food?
Victoria Kleinsman: That is a great question, Chris, and I’m happy to talk about anything. Interestingly enough, or not so interestingly, my sister was a daddy’s girl. That is obviously quite interesting. Quite close together, 18 months older than me she is, and she was a daddy’s girl. My dad, great man, did the best he could. He was quite emotionally unavailable a lot. He was there. I mean, he worked a lot. They both worked full-time in the police. That’s how they met. But he wasn’t really emotionally there. It was always “Ask your mom.” My mom wore the trousers. Kind of overruled my dad a lot.
My sister was daddy’s girl and I was a mommy’s girl. My sister actually had one episode where she tried the Atkins diet because my mom was doing it. She got really sick. Not sick with an eating disorder; just her body was like, “What the fuck are you doing? Where are the carbohydrates?” She got really sick and after that she just never dieted again.
She did get married really young. She got married at like 19 for the first time. It might have been early twenties. It was really young, I remember that. She’s with someone else now. And since speaking to her, she left the house as early as she could because of my disorder and everyone paying attention to me. It was a really difficult household to grow up in because it was always arguments around food and forcing me to eat and everyone paying attention to me. My mom was on depression tablets because of me. So my sister was affected, and she has shared that she did want to leave the house as quick as possible.
But she didn’t really have any issues with food. Body image, yes, because my mom used to pick herself apart in front of the mirror, fat shame people walking down the street – because she had had that conditioning, too. So my sister was also really ashamed and kind of obsessed with her appearance, but thankfully she never really did the whole food control thing.
Chris Sandel: And I guess it’s interesting, and we will never know for sure, but this again can speak to the genetic component of it. She went on Atkins and had a very terrible experience very quickly with that and was like “Never again.” I think that’s really true of many people. Many people try dieting once and it’s like, “I’m never doing this ever again.” There are many people who just don’t have the capacity to develop an eating disorder.
And when I say the capacity, I’m not talking about they don’t have the willpower or they don’t have the determination. It’s more just like, it is really uncomfortable to be in that situation. Like, you talked about, “When I turned on that eating disorder switch, actually there was calmness or it became easy to do this.” If I reflect on me, I don’t have the capacity to develop an eating disorder. If I get hungry, I’m not fun to be around. I don’t enjoy being in that place. So I’m not going to go down that route. I could have lots of different self-destructive behaviours, but having an eating disorder is not one that would happen to me just because of how uncomfortable and unenjoyable it is for me to be in that state.
So you can speak to the fact that your sister had some biological things were different to you in terms of your capacity to develop this.
Victoria Kleinsman: Definitely. And my mom didn’t have that capacity, either or it was guaranteed she would have, with all the diets she went on and the weight that she lost. So it’s very true, and I’m glad you brought that up, Chris, because a lot of people I know – and this was before I got into the work that I was doing – used to make half-assed comments like “Oh, I wish I was anorexic” when they were struggling to lose weight. I’m like, you fucking do not. You do not wish that you have the genetics for anorexia, trust me.
Yes, when the anorexia response gets switched on, like I was saying, there’s no willpower at all. There’s no willpower involved because your biology drives you not to eat. It’s nothing to do with how strong you are or how much willpower you have or how successful you are. It’s literally genetic. So I want to make that so clear because if someone is struggling with let’s say dieting and restricting and unfortunately wishing that it was easy – you don’t want it to be easy, trust me. Because you will probably die.
And then recovery is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life but worth every fucking second of it.
Chris Sandel: For sure. And I will say as well – where you say it’s easy, that is true, and there is also a honeymoon period. At some point, all of the malnutrition and the depletion and the energy debt that you’ve got into does then start to catch up with you. So what initially felt easy now does not feel easy in any way.
Victoria Kleinsman: Yeah, because part of you – anorexia, as we know – Tabitha Farrar explains this beautifully – it was adapted for the famine prognosis, like back in the day when we were cavemen and women or whatever. It was only supposed to happen for a short period of time. We’re talking weeks, maybe months at the most. So then when we did reach the land with an abundant amount of food and everyone feasted together – not binge ate; feasted together – the genetic response would’ve got switched off and everyone would’ve gone on their merry way.
However, because in today’s world we have supermarkets all around us, obviously there’s food everywhere, but we’re choosing not to eat because of an eating disorder – the longer we’re in the eating disorder for, your body is starving and it’s malnourished. And yes, the genetic response is on, so it’s easier not to eat than someone who hasn’t got that, but you’re right, there’s a huge biological aspect as well that is driving you to eat because you are starving. But then you’ve got the brain wired with an eating disorder. There’s lots going on. But the recovery process is the same for anybody.
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Chris Sandel: Definitely. So let’s come back to your recovery. We’ll start with the first attempt at recovery with the anorexia piece. What did that look like? Did you go inpatient, were you outpatient? What was going on in terms of that recovery process?
Victoria Kleinsman: I was outpatient. Thankfully, I was very blessed and I had a horse that we’d bought with our own money with what my grandma gave us when we were younger. We had a horse. My sister had lost interest. I loved the horse more than I loved the eating disorder. Thank God, because my mom would literally say, “If you do not eat that, we’re selling the horse.” And she meant it.
So I would sit there and scratch my face, I would scream, I’d run into the road. But I had to eat a lot of freaking food. Every hour of the day. I had to have these 1,000-calorie weight gain milkshakes like three times a day on top of all the food. Oh my God, it was horrible. I hated every single body. I hated my mom. I thought I did. I hated everyone who would force me to eat, as you can imagine. But thankfully I loved my horse more, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here, to be honest, or I would’ve gone inpatient.
So I did gain weight over the course of a few years and then I was discharged, like, “You’re recovered. You’re at a healthy BMI. Off you go.” And then off I went, but then from that point up until the age of 30 – now I’m 37, almost, as we record this – for however many years that was, what, another 15 years? I was bulimia through having catastrophic binges, because I was still underweight without realising it and just thought I had lack of willpower and “Why can’t I restrict like I used to?” and “What’s wrong with me?” So I spent 15 years binging my face off, purging through excessive dangerous laxative abuse – because I thankfully couldn’t make myself physically vomit. God, I tried. And exercise addiction. And that was until I was 30.
In between that, I had a six-year-long very abusive relationship where I was hit, raped, abused daily. Didn’t go to my sister’s wedding. That was a lot. And I think that was all contributing to, of course, the bulimia. And then started my healing when I was 30. I’m sure you’ve got many questions before I continue how I healed. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I do. And I just want to say that’s a lot for you to go through, for anyone to go through. It’s kind of heartbreaking hearing that that’s what your life was like for that amount of time and that you had to go through all of those things.
Victoria Kleinsman: Thank you, Chris. It’s made me who I am today, though. And honestly, it sounds weird, but I’m so grateful for what I have gone through because I can only take my clients to what I’ve been to and what I understand. If I see all of this pain and that was my superpower, I can help other people. It’s so worth it. So I am grateful even though it was really hard.
Chris Sandel: Totally. I’ve had many clients say the same thing, like, “Okay, I now feel like I have this superpower. I’ve recovered from an eating disorder; life is a lot easier now. When there’s a struggle with a relationship, with work, or with whatever, it helps to put some real perspective on things.” So yeah, there must be definitely struggles that come up in your life now, whether that’s relationships, whether that’s work. It happens. We’re humans. And you also have that point of reference of like, “Well, it’s not at all like it was when I was in that abusive relationship.” There must be some real strength that comes from that.
Victoria Kleinsman: Honestly, it’s almost like I have this energy of like, bring it the fuck on. Because nobody can abuse me like I was abused anymore. My worthiness – I know how worthy I am now. So nobody can hurt me like he hurt me. Nobody can hurt me like the eating disorder hurt me. So yeah, I feel very powerful and empowered because I’ve overcome those things.
It’s really cool, actually. Recovering from an eating disorder, although it probably is the hardest thing you might ever do, like you said, it sets you up for a life of empowerment – and responsibility. When we recover, we need three things. We need courage, we need commitment, and we need tolerance, because of course – and you speak about this a lot, Chris – we need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. You cannot recover from an eating disorder without being uncomfortable and facing your fears for a long time.
Chris Sandel: Totally. I agree. And I would say those three things, you don’t work out first and then you do recovery. Those three things come about by going through recovery, and that is the symptom more the end result of going through recovery. You get more and more courageous by doing the challenging things when you don’t necessarily feel ready to do the challenging thing.
Victoria Kleinsman: We’ll never feel ready, right? That’s why support is really important. Someone like you or myself or all the other incredible recovery coaches out there, someone to hold your hand and actually say, “It’s okay. How you’re feeling is normal – and you can also do this, and here’s what you’re going to do.” It’s everything. I couldn’t have recovered without support. No way.
00:26:32
Chris Sandel: During that 15-year period – you’re now ‘recovered’ from anorexia – what did you think was going on in terms of your relationship with food and the pattern you were in? How were you, in your mind, categorising what was happening?
Victoria Kleinsman: I honestly thought it was normal because everyone around me – not to the extreme that I was doing it because I’m an extremist, but I just thought honestly that you were born, so therefore, when you’re born, you spend your entire life trying to be thin and stay thin. That’s the point to life. Then you die. Full stop. Honestly. So I thought it was normal, but I also thought because people weren’t binging like I was – so yeah, my mom would diet, she would binge eat a bit. But I’m talking 20,000 calories in a matter of hours. And I’d be so physically full, like I literally could hardly breathe and I couldn’t move because I was so full.
I was like, what the fuck is wrong with me? No-one else does this shit. And now I know that there are other people out there who experience this. You’ve probably heard this before; I would put stuff in the bin and put washing-up liquid over it because I know, because I’d done it many times – go to the bin again an hour later and try and get the stuff back out the bin and eat it again. I was like an animal.
So I kept a lot of it secret, especially the purging behaviours I kept secret. The binging especially. I’d only do that in secret. In the car, in the broom cupboard at work, when I was alone. I’d make excuses not to go out so I could sit and binge. Honestly, I just thought it was normal because people did that, but not to the extreme that I did. So I didn’t really know that I had an eating disorder, as crazy as that sounds.
00:28:19
Chris Sandel: So what was – if there was one – the pivotal moment or moments where there was a realisation of “This isn’t normal and this isn’t how I want to continue spending my days”? What happened to awaken you to this?
Victoria Kleinsman: It was really cool, actually, because when I was 30, I went to Egypt in the middle of the day, met my now husband, Wouter, who’s Dutch – which is why I live in the Netherlands – fell in love very quickly, moved in with him within like three months of knowing him. Still fully with an eating disorder. I don’t know how and why I did that. I was following my heart. I believe in a higher power. That was written in the stars that I was supposed to come to live with him.
So I did, and then I really started to realise, “I’m not normal.” Because he and his family, even to this day, have never mentioned anything to do with body image, with weight gain or weight loss, even through pregnancies in the family. They eat normally, they don’t restrict. So I was in a different environment where I was like, oh my God, this is like a whole new world. What is this? No-one’s obsessed with what they’re eating, what they had for dinner, for breakfast, what body size they are.
It really shone a light on what I was doing and my family was doing on a condensed-down level wasn’t normal. So living with him – and he cared about me. He’s like, “Why are you treating yourself that way? Why are you not nourishing yourself?” Because I would eat and binge, of course, but it would be on the processed food, and then I would skip meals to try and compensate. He’s like, “Don’t you want to take care of your body?” That’s the first time in my entire life where anything to do with food was actually reflected back to me of actually being able to take care of me.
That’s the first inclination I had towards what self-care and self-love might look like. And then I started listening to podcasts, because he was a personal development junkie, and I started reading books and stuff. As I was learning about personal development, I was still fully much in the eating disorder, and there was one time where I started my own brownie business over here, a brownie bakery business. I was binge eating all of my stock, which is funny now, but it wasn’t profitable because I was making all these brownies, trying to freeze them to stop myself from eating them, but then when Wouter would go upstairs and have a shower, I’d literally frantically, like a drug addict, go in the freezer, shove the brownies in the microwave, go in the toilet and eat them all and then be like, ugh.
I kept doing that, and then I literally remember just falling onto the floor one day and being like, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take laxatives anymore. My body is just completely broken. I’m swollen. I hate the way my body looks.” I just was like, “I cannot do this anymore.” I had my first and hopefully last true panic attack, where I couldn’t breathe for tears and gasping for breath. I was so afraid of my own thoughts. I seriously wanted to check myself into a psychiatric hospital because I couldn’t be with myself anymore. I was done. I didn’t want to commit suicide, but I just couldn’t be me anymore. It was too fearful and too anxiety-provoking.
And that’s when my recovery started. I was listening to some podcasts that were around intuitive eating, and that’s the first I’d heard of that. So I delved more into that, hired my first coach through this intuitive eating podcast, who probably wasn’t the ideal coach, looking back, but she got me started on the journey. Since then, I’ve always had a coach. I still have a coach now. Investing in programmes, mentorships. I of course have my own certifications now, psychology and coaching, nutrition.
It’s been a journey of getting to know myself and understanding why it started in the first place. A lot of inner child work, like going back to little me and actually understanding that, oh my gosh, she was just trying to get validation and ultimately love. It’s not her fault, and she is enough as she is. A lot of that type of work.
Obviously the behavioural work as well, like unrestricted eating for the rest of my life, which is the best thing ever, to live in complete food freedom. Of course I thought I would eat chocolate for the rest of my life, like every day for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and in between. I did for the first month or so, and then after that I remember being like, “I want a green shake. What is wrong with me? That’s interesting.” I kept allowing and allowing and doing all the body image work, and then you just kind of end up in a recovered place where your values change. I no longer valued appearance. I no longer valued values such as determination and control and discipline. My values started to change to love and acceptance and freedom.
So it’s a journey, and I am where I am now – still on a journey, always learning more about myself – but so grateful to be where I am.
Chris Sandel: Again, there is so many things that I want to say connected to what you have just shared.
00:33:26
I guess one of the things I would say is, yes, doing the recovery work in terms of eating more food and giving yourself permission to eat and doing that nutritional rehabilitation really does make a huge difference – and I don’t think it gets you to where you’ve got to. I think all of the extra work that you’ve done on top of that is so, so necessary to then really start to shift your values.
And it’s not that nutritional rehabilitation can’t start to shift your values, but again, I think there’s another layer of work that happens on top of that to really cement that and to really make a difference.
Victoria Kleinsman: There is, because nutritional – whatever phrase you just used, that sounded excellent –
Chris Sandel: Nutritional rehabilitation.
Victoria Kleinsman: Nutritional rehabilitation, exactly. Getting back up to your natural set point weight. Which is scary, because I didn’t know what mine was because I’d dieted since I was like nine. It’s absolutely crucial because your brain can actually work. Then you have the capacity to actually build neuropathways and rewire your brain from the eating disorder. You can do the body image and self-love work.
That’s the hardest thing, though, Chris, isn’t it? Because the first step is to eat more food when your whole entire body and self doesn’t want to eat more food. You have to do the hardest thing first, and then you can do all the other work. And that’s why a lot of people relapse, because they do the hardest bit first and then they immediately expect to be okay mentally and love their body. Like, “Okay, restriction’s better then, because I’ve gained weight and now I hate myself and I have an eating disorder mentally.”
But you have to be, again, committed and tolerate these uncomfortable, really painful feelings with the right support, and then, when you do the underlying work, that’s what true recovery is. Because you and I agree that every single person can fully recover from any eating disorder. I fully believe that.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, me too. Again, what you just said there in terms of having that challenging point where you’re going through it, you’ve gained some weight, it doesn’t feel like there’s been some upside connected to this, and you think “Why would I do this? Let me just retreat back to what I know” – that again speaks to the importance of coaching and support, to have someone there who is able to say, “What you’re going through at this stage is completely normal. It’s normal that there still hasn’t been a lot of those changes in terms of how you’re thinking.”
And also for someone to be able to point out the bright spots, because I think what often happens is there can be this very broad brushstroke, sweeping generalisations of like “nothing got better” – and then when I start to ask specific questions and get into it, it’s like, “Actually, yeah, my sleep has got better. I’m now waking up less in the night to urinate. I’m noticing that I’ve got a little bit better energy.” Or “I actually feel really tired, but I’m sleeping better.” There can be all of these different things that often get not even thought about or put to the side or whatever.
So really illuminating these things and saying, “Look, you are actually noticing some upside here. And yes, I get that this is really uncomfortable and it’s really challenging – and there are benefits that are here already. And you’ve run this other experiment for 15 years. You know what your life is like when you do those things. The data is in; that is what happens. If you want that for the rest of your life, that is what is going to be there. Let’s run a different experiment and give it some time and then see what happens when you do things differently.”
Victoria Kleinsman: Yes. We get restriction amnesia, don’t we? We only remember the really good things about restriction, like a thinner body, the praise from the external world, feeling in control. Because eating disorders are created for a reason. They’re not created just for shits and giggles, for you to suffer or whatever. They served you at one point. It’s understanding, why was the eating disorder serving you? And perhaps how is it still serving you to some degree?
Understanding that, and then, like you said, being able to look at it with clarity and say, “Okay, I can go back and I already know what that’s like. That’s why I’ve perhaps paid thousands for coaching. That’s perhaps why I’m listening to all these things and working on myself.” There’s a reason someone’s listening to this or watching this or working with you or working with me – because where they were was hell, and they wanted different.
So to have someone to keep reflecting that back to the person, and like you said, to remind them, “You’ve come so far – give me a bullet point list now of how far you’ve come since we first met or since you’ve started recovery.” There’s so much growth that we don’t see because, again, with the anxiety, with the restriction amnesia, we want to be out of the discomfort. We want to retreat back to what it was giving us. But we’re not that person anymore. All of us, we grow and we evolve. We can’t ever go back anyway because we’ve outgrown that version of ourselves. The only way is to keep going forward, because why would you 50% or 80% recover when you can 100% recover?
Chris Sandel: Totally. And actually, the discomfort is the point of recovery in many ways. It’s then learning that, “Okay, this thing can be uncomfortable and I can still make a choice that is pro recovery. And I can notice that this discomfort lasts for an hour or two hours and then naturally goes down of its own accord.” Or “I can notice when I do these things to support my nervous system or to get co-regulation” or whatever it may be, “this helps me.”
This is you learning how to deal with all these different aspects of being an adult, in a very intense fashion, because of what you’re going through as part of recovery. But I think if you had a pill and you just took that, of course I would give that to everyone. That would be what I would want. I think with that not being available, there is a huge amount of upside – and we talked about this earlier – of going through that process. That is where you grow, that is where you get the strength, that’s where you get those superpowers, by noticing that “Hey, I can do this really hard thing of eating the food even though it feels really uncomfortable or taking the time off exercise even though it feels really uncomfortable.”
Victoria Kleinsman: Yeah, and feeling perhaps for the first time, really. When we’re a child who’s suffered trauma – and trauma doesn’t have to be what I used to think trauma was, like being locked in a room, beaten and starved every day as a child. It can be emotional stuff like I experienced, like enmeshment with my mom, feeling responsible for making her happy, my dad not being there emotionally and being unattached to that.
So whenever we experience those feelings and we don’t know how to feel them and we’re alone in our big feelings, our head says, “Hey, come and hang out with me because it’s safer up here.” So we start to live in our heads, because of course, when we feel, it’s a visceral feeling in our body. Myself included, until I started recovery, and many of my clients, they live in their head. Overthinking, not truly feeling, resisting feelings. So part of recovery, like you’ve mentioned – co-regulating your nervous system, breathing through it, being in your body – and maybe for the first time, they’re actually feeling shame. I mean, shame is usually at the root of most of it. That can be overwhelming when you’ve never felt that before.
But to have someone to, again, hold your hand metaphorically through “It’s okay to feel the shame and cry and feel what you’re feeling, be there for a younger version of you, and just let it go.” And then you’re alive. You’ve not combusted into flames. It’s okay. And then once you have one piece of evidence that you can feel a really painful feeling and be okay, it’s easier than to just keep doing it over and over again, which is all part of recovery as well.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. And this is the thing that I’m so encouraging of people when they’re trying to get started. It’s like, let’s make some change. You’ve got to get out of the realm of ‘what if’ thinking and all these theories and “Maybe this’ll happen or maybe that’ll happen” into “Let’s actually do this. Let’s have you eat more food and see what genuinely happens.” And yes, it can be uncomfortable, but we have then a real-life experience as opposed to all of the theories and the made-ups of what could potentially happen.
It’s impossible to convince someone when we’re just looking at the realm of theory. I can have long conversations with someone and it doesn’t change anything. What changes someone is taking the action and getting to experience that thing, and recognising that “That actually didn’t go very well, and I’m still standing and I’m still here and I was able to get through it.”
Victoria Kleinsman: Yeah, that’s the part when – I don’t want to say everyone takes this in order to change. I did. I’m curious what your views on this are, actually, Chris. I see, and I see in my clients too, until the pain of staying where you are is worse than the fear of the unknown, people will stay stuck where they are. They will read about recovery and they will listen to countless podcasts, but they won’t actually do any action steps, which is the most important. So I’m curious, have you had that experience where people come to you where they are at rock bottom and the fear of the unknown is actually less worse – if that’s even an English saying – than the pain of being where they are?
00:43:05
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I totally agree with you on that. I guess the sad thing that I see is that what I or someone else, as an objective witness, would think of like “this has got to be rock bottom” often is not rock bottom. This is the real sad part with eating disorders. Often, the worse things get, the worse your ability to have awareness around how bad things are. It’s really the clients where things are at their absolute worst where it can be the most difficult for them to see this really needs some attention.
It almost feels like they need to have some momentum going the other way for them to start to realise, “Holy shit, this is a really bad, dire place to be in.” I think that for me is one of the saddest things – the fact that it can be so hard to see how bad things have got as things have got worse. I often use the analogy because people talk about ‘not being sick enough’. I’m like, you don’t have to wait to some point of being sick. If your sink in your kitchen was busted and flooding the kitchen, you don’t wait until the whole house is flooded before you say, “Let me turn off the thing in the kitchen.” And unfortunately, for a lot of people, they are in a situation where the whole house is flooded and yet they think it is just the kitchen.
Victoria Kleinsman: That is a great analogy because people with eating disorders tend to be sufferers. Speaking for myself, I used to think that unless I was suffering or struggling at something, then I was doing something wrong. Even in the depths of it, and they know it’s not necessarily thriving behaviour, the struggle and the suffering that they’re in is so normal for them to be suffering in life, they don’t see how bad it is. You’re right, it’s helpful to show them – comparison can be helpful sometimes, not always – to say, “What you’re currently eating is not enough for a one-year-old child.” To really give factual information that could shock them to understand, “Okay, wow, I’m really just surviving” and therefore, do you want to thrive? Because if you do, let’s go.
What I noticed is when I started my recovery, I would move from the place of “Is this bad enough to change?” Yes, it was. Now I know my worth, when I’m changing something, I don’t go to the point or the question “Is it bad enough to change?” I go to, “Is this good enough to stay? Nope. So I’m going to change it.” Because your worthiness increases and you realise, “I deserve better than that.” But until you get to that place, we kind of think we deserve to suffer, for some reason.
Chris Sandel: Acclimatised to the status quo. I know the status quo. I know what that’s like. But this change, I don’t know what that’s like. So there’s the ‘better the devil you know’ because I don’t know what could happen. And also, it really impairs your ability to envisage something better. So to be able to say that full recovery is completely possible, you could have all of these different things in terms of your relationship with food, your relationship with body, exercise, etc. – if this has been going on for 10, 20, 30 years, that thing can sound like a pipedream. Like, “That’s not on the table. That’s not gonna happen.”
So the goal is to, as I said, it’s not about convincing someone, but to have someone start to see that that is truly possible for them.
Victoria Kleinsman: How many times have you had a potential client say to you, “I’m going to be the only one that recovery won’t work for”? And I say that with a smile because I said the same thing. I didn’t have a choice, though – well, everything’s a choice – but I was at rock bottom and I was like, “I am done. I have no idea how to get out of this. I just know I cannot continue the way I was.”
People come to me and say of course their biggest fear is what if this doesn’t work for them, and what if everyone else can do it but they can’t – and I lovingly reflect back and say, “Okay, you’re a human. Check? Check. You have a brain. Check? You have a nervous system. Okay, you 100% can recover, because we rewire your brain, we change your nervous system through bioregulation and show yourself it’s safe to be in your body. Yeah, it takes work. It’s impossible for you not to be able to change if you are human.” So that gives them a little bit of hope.
And I say, “All you have to do before you start recovery is believe that I believe that you can recover. I do not expect that you believe that you can recover yet. Of course you don’t, because you’ve not got any evidence that you can. Maybe you’ve tried and been in inpatient treatment centres seven times. All you need to do – I know it’s a big ask – is trust me. Trust the process. Believe that I believe. And I guarantee recovery is possible.”
It helps, whoever the person’s working with, it helps that the coach is fully invested. Obviously there’s boundaries and stuff to protect the professional relationship, but is fully invested in the person. Because belief is really powerful as well in coaching.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. That’s the thing. In the same way as you, I’m a full advocate for full recovery. I believe everyone can get there, and I’m only going to work with people where I’m going to bring that belief there and be like, “Cool, even when you are doubting this process, even when you think this isn’t going to work for you, I’m going to be the one who’s like, full recovery is possible. You need to do these things and that is going to get you there. It’s not a ‘if you do these things, maybe it will happen’; it’s a ‘if you do these things, it will happen’. And I feel very confident in that. This is a certainty. This is inevitable if you do these things.”
Victoria Kleinsman: Amen to that.
00:49:01
Chris Sandel: One thing that we didn’t cover as you went through your story – obviously, you said you were in this abusive relationship for six years, and then you said, “I went on a trip to Egypt and met the new person.” So how did you get out of that abusive relationship?
The reason I want to ask this is a lot of times, I think of an eating disorder as similar to being in an abusive relationship. I think there’s this grooming stage that happens in the beginning that makes you think “This is amazing, this is wonderful” and then you get into a situation that you feel very challenged in being able to extricate yourself from. You’ve got, in a sense, this thing in your mind telling you all the ways that you’re not a very good person and why you have to keep to these particular rules and standards and all of these things that are very similar to an abusive relationship. So tell me how you got out of what you were in.
Victoria Kleinsman: Interestingly enough, I left in the middle, very briefly, for a couple of weeks. I’ll briefly explain that and I’ll explain why I went back, which is also very common in eating disorders and in domestic abuse.
Chris Sandel: Yes.
Victoria Kleinsman: About two and a half years in – I’m going to go quite graphic. When he used to hit me, he didn’t use to hit my face because obviously in public, people would see. This particular time, he went crazy – I almost died because he strangled me, I passed out. He did hit my face. So it was very obvious I was being abused. We lived in a high apartment at the time, so he took my phone, locked me in the apartment for a couple of days so I couldn’t leave the apartment so no-one could see me. This is the first time I left.
Then on the third day, he was on the phone when he was leaving. He forgot to lock the door, and I just sat there. I heard him drive off and I was like, oh my God, this is the only chance I have to leave. So I got my dog, who was my little saviour – I had a little toy poodle at the time. It was also horrible because she was so scared of him and swear words and all of that. The only way he would get me to react was if he held her out the window. Yeah, he was that type of guy. I learned to disassociate, so during the abuse, I would just leave my body and go limp and not be there – emotionally, of course, because it was traumatic.
So I learnt to deal with that quite well, but then when he needed a reaction, he would do something like that, which definitely got a reaction because she was my little saviour. So I took her, ran down the street. The first thing I came to was a hairdresser’s. God knows what I must’ve looked like. The sight of me. I walked into the hairdresser’s and I was like, “C-can I u-use your phone?” I can’t speak, I’m crying, trying to say “Can I use your phone to call the police?”
They got me the phone and I called the police. Hadn’t spoken to my parents in years, since I’d been with him. My mom was on holiday, my dad was on holiday. They weren’t together; they’d divorced. I forgot that in my childhood, by the way. That was a big thing. Separating loads of times and they eventually divorced. That was a big deal.
My mom came back straightaway, and I went to live with my mom for a couple of weeks. Got a restraining order on him. Went to court. He pleaded guilty for battering me, got a suspended sentence. Anyway, couple of weeks later he would start following me in bushes. I knew it was him, and he came out of the bush one time when I was at the horse stables and he was like, “Please don’t call, please, please, please. I have a certificate. Look, I’ve been to an anger management course. Look at my certificate. I’ve got better. I promise I’m going to get better.”
Believed everything he said. I have no idea how I was still so brainwashed. Believed that he’d gone on this anger management course. Long story short, got back with him. It all started again. It was literally in a matter of weeks, so I didn’t leave for very long. Went back to him. Two and a half years later – it wasn’t anything that he particularly did. I was 25 at that time. His son had come to live with us. He had a young son who was six and he came to live with us, and his son kept getting out of bed every five minutes. It was nothing against his son; it was just something really annoyed me, because he said, “If you come downstairs one more time, I’ll turn the TV off.” It was like 50 times and the same thing was said, nothing was done.
So I just walked upstairs, unplugged the TV, and walked back down and sat there. He looked at me – and I wasn’t scared. For some reason, I wasn’t scared what the consequences were. For the first time ever, he didn’t abuse me. It was as if something shifted in my energy. I was just done with hit, and I just took an action. Then in my head, I was asking myself, “What are you doing with your life? Vic, look around you. This is your life. You’re 25 years old. What are you doing?” At that point I decided to leave.
I would text my mom in the bathroom – and he used to have a screwdriver to open the lock to try and check what I was doing in the bathroom. So I was secretly trying to text my mom, “I know you don’t believe me, I promise I’m going to leave. Please can you come round on this day? I’m going to have all my stuff together.” Because he used to take his kid to school.
This day came around a week later. He took his kid to school. My mom came round. We started putting all my stuff in her car. This is like a soap. He came back because he forgot something.
Chris Sandel: Gosh.
Victoria Kleinsman: Came back mid me and my mom basically leaving. I’ve never seen him cry so much in my entire life. He was really upset, and “I’m so sorry.” My mom, I swear to God she was going to kill him or something. She didn’t. She was a police officer. She was very angry, as you can imagine.
We left. Never saw him again. Changed my number, got the restraining order back on. Never saw him again. Started to rebuild my life. A month later, the bailiffs come knocking on my mom’s door, which is debt collecting people – “Miss Macdonald” – that was my name at the time – “you’ve got 10,000 worth of debt in your name. We’ve come to pick up your car and your house stuff.” I was like, “What?”
He had put all the bills and stuff in my name, got has daughter to sign it. My word against his. There was nothing we could do. We went to the Citizens Advice Bureau, all these legal things. My mom paid it, and I’ve paid her all back. So then I had all this money in debt. I had no job. I hated my body. I had gained a lot of weight at that point. Started from scratch, and I got myself a job working with horses, paid my mom back. Started the gym – that’s when the obsession with the exercise and everything came in, because it was my thing. I felt empowerment being strong because I could physically defend myself then. Not that I needed to at that point.
But that’s how I left. That’s the story. In the middle I left and went back. I think I went back because honestly, suffering was my comfort zone, like you were saying. It’s what I knew. So I just ran back to what I already knew, and I believed that he had changed – and he hadn’t, of course.
Chris Sandel: Oh man, that’s so, so sad to hear, that after two and a half years, you had this opportunity to get out and then you endured another two and a half years after that. I think it’s so common. Not I think – it is. It is so common. This happens with abusive relationships. It’s got nothing to do with you and “you should’ve known better” and all of that. It’s just like this is unfortunately the brainwashing that happens, and how you think of yourself and your self-worth and what you deserve and all of those things. So people stay in horrible situations that objectively, for everyone looking in, it’s like, “What are you doing?” And yet for that person, it makes sense. And it’s the same with an eating disorder.
Victoria Kleinsman: It is. I also wanted – you know how I mentioned in the anorexia, I wanted to be taken care of. This person, albeit shit caretaking, I had no responsibility because he paid for everything – well, clearly he didn’t.
Chris Sandel: In theory. [laughs]
Victoria Kleinsman: In theory he paid for everything. I wasn’t allowed to work, so technically I had no responsibility, and as a child I felt very responsible for my mom a lot. I was ‘taken care of’. Also, my worth was at an all-time low. So I understand now why I chose that relationship. I was also unconsciously looking for a strong male figure because my dad wasn’t. He was weak and passive, more in his feminine, and this guy was the opposite. He was in the wounded masculine, so he was very angry, very ‘masculine’ and over empowering.
So I understand now why. Back then it was just I guess I thought that’s what I deserved, and I was trying to find some need to be met somewhere, although, of course, it wasn’t serving me at all.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Hearing your explanation, it makes total sense.
00:57:43
For you, when did the idea of becoming a coach come to mind? You then went through your own recovery, you’ve done a lot of work, whether that be with different coaches or therapists or whatever it may be; when did you start thinking, “Actually, this is where I want to take my life and what I want to do”?
Victoria Kleinsman: When I started off with my coach, like I shared, started off my recovery with intuitive eating – which did benefit me a lot, but there were a lot of aspects missing, such as mental restriction, which I was doing a lot of.
At the same time, I’d stopped the brownie business because I was eating all the stock; I started cleaning student toilets and showers, because I can’t speak Dutch. I can a bit now, but I couldn’t then. So I was just cleaning. The benefit to that was I could listen to stuff all day in my earphones because it was just a manual job. So I started to listen to health type podcasts – because I was still in recovery, so I was still a bit obsessed with “If I could just get my health right and my nutrition right and still get my eating perfect” – which is disordered – “I’ll be better.”
I came across a podcast who had a guest on who was sharing that she has this – it’s called the Institute of Transformational Nutrition. Don’t know if you’ve heard of it.
Chris Sandel: I don’t know that one.
Victoria Kleinsman: When I was listening, I was like, oh my God, that’s what I can do. I want to help people. I want to help myself. Because honestly, about 85% of recovery coaches that I’ve spoken to started off as a nutritionist.
Chris Sandel: As a nutritionist – I’ve said this on the podcast before – if I had known about psychology when I was younger, I would’ve definitely gone in that direction. I just didn’t, so I started as a nutritionist. And I’m actually really grateful that that’s the case because it gave me a very good understand of physiology, and for the work that we now do, really understanding physiology is hugely important. If it was just the psychology piece, I think there’d be a bit missing.
Victoria Kleinsman: I agree. So I started that certification. Didn’t have the money, borrowed the money, and started that. I learnt a lot through that because it had a massive psychology piece to it. A spirituality piece too, which was the first time I was introduced to that type of healing journey, like more spiritual and more energy and stuff. It was very holistic. It’s a great programme, a very holistic way to learn and also emphasizing the science of nutrition.
Then I started my health coaching business before I was fully recovered. I just started. I started, I want to say, ‘diety’. It was definitely – not weight loss, but it was still very much engrossed in diet culture because I was still. I can’t do something unless I’ve grown into it first. So I started my business about two years in, when I was about 32. Started my podcast. So if anyone goes to the very, very first – oh my God, I was considering deleting them, but it’s all part of my journey. The very first podcast that I ever did – my podcast was called something different then.
And then I just progressed from there, and I started to feel disaligned with generic health coaching. Started to really understand Tabitha’s work. There was an incredible lady who unfortunately doesn’t do this anymore – have you heard of Isabel Foxen Duke?
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I know Isabel.
Victoria Kleinsman: She doesn’t do the eating stuff anymore.
Chris Sandel: No. I think she’s gone into Bitcoin, is what I know. But yeah, I did her programme back in the day. I think I was actually one of the guest lecturers on for one of the things in her programme when it came out.
Victoria Kleinsman: Yes, you were on the programme. Yes, I remember now. She was my mentor. She was my coach as well. I learnt a ton through her. I hired body image coaches.
From my certification, from me starting my generic health coaching business and not really knowing what I was doing, I then, as you can see, started to invest in coaches that were more aligned with true recovery and just brought everything I’d learned from them, including all the spiritual stuff that I’d learnt – not necessarily brought in a spiritual context, because not everyone aligns with that and that’s okay, but the bigger lessons. For example, like the Buddha says, the greatest form of suffering is attachment. So I would use that context and share that in my work, to do with body image and what your food looks like and how that causes suffering.
I just brought all of this stuff that I continue to learn together, and that’s how I serve my clients now. I’ve had my podcast for I think three years now and my business for – goodness, maybe four or five years now. But it seems like a lifetime ago. I just have such a knack to – like books. I just remember the author, the name of the book, this person needs to read that immediately. It’s what I’m here to do. I’m here to coach, I’m here to serve. And as you can probably tell, I’m so passionate about what I do.
Chris Sandel: That shines through in this podcast. It shines through on your Instagram, on your own podcast. There is definitely an energy connected to this, which makes sense. You’ve gone through all of this. You have personal experience and like “I don’t want someone else to go through this, or if someone else is currently stuck in that place, I want to be the one that helps to assist and guide them out of that place.” So yeah, I think that’s a great thing.
And I would also add, at least from what you’re saying, it sounds as though you’re not very dogmatic in the way that you work. This is the thing I always say. I’ve never had an eating disorder, and there are some real downsides to that. I have not walked a mile in your shoes because I haven’t had to deal with this. The upside is that I don’t have biases connected to what my recovery looked like and that that’s what everyone else has to do. I think that can often be a really big trap, like “I didn’t need to go and see a therapist, so you don’t need to see a therapist. Therapy’s not worth it” or “I had a bad experience with a therapist, so no-one should do therapy and this is why you shouldn’t do therapy too.” I don’t have any of that baggage. So I will read and explore and do different things and be like, “Cool, let me bring this in. This sounds really helpful and really fascinating, so I’m going to incorporate that as part of it.”
And through listening to you, it sounds like that is also the case. You’re not trying to push everyone through the same recovery experience that you had. It’s like, “Cool, I did these things and some of them may work for you, some of them won’t. There are these other things that I didn’t even know about when I started my recovery and I think they could be helpful for you.” I think that’s a really positive thing.
Victoria Kleinsman: Absolutely, Chris. For example, the genetic component to anorexia – I didn’t know that when I was working with Isabel Foxen Duke, for example. It wasn’t until Tabitha Farrar and – I forgot the lady’s name who originated with –
Chris Sandel: Is it Shan Guisinger?
Victoria Kleinsman: Yes, that’s it. I didn’t know that until I knew that. So right, my recovery journey is beneficial because I’ve been through it, but honestly, not everyone – everyone has a different path, and it’s very clear that you’re very passionate about what you do. And honestly the most important thing is that the person helping is passionate and actually cares. One of my clients said to me – I might put this on my website – she said, “The difference between you and most coaches, not all, is that you actually give a shit.” And you do too, because you can feel it and sense it in your work, how you’re speaking now. And that’s so important, isn’t it? To actually care. A lot.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and for someone to feel that. Because especially if someone has felt so shut down, so isolated, so, as you said earlier, stuck in their head, and it feels like “The world is against me. This is so hard.” To have someone show up and be like, “I really want something better for you. I really want this not to be your life, and I truly believe that this can be the case” – there is a huge amount of power to that. And you then need to be able to back it up, like, “This is the things we do to actually get you to that place.” But I think that therapeutic relationship where someone genuinely is supporting you and you can feel that they’re genuinely supporting you is integral.
Victoria Kleinsman: Yeah, it’s everything.
01:06:12
Chris Sandel: I know your podcast is called the Body Love Binge, and a lot of your branding is around body love. I want to talk about this. We can start with you and what your process was with this, and then we can talk about it in terms of clients. So what was your process, the steps, what happened for you to get to this place of body love?
Victoria Kleinsman: Great question, because I thought when I first started recovery that all of the eating disorders were originated from not liking the way my body looked. That is partially true, but of course the stuff underneath that in terms of “Why are you not accepting your true, authentic self in all ways?” – and that’s the childhood stuff that I went into a little bit. Body image was a huge aspect for me. Like I shared, I thought that you were born, so then you try and get skinny and stay skinny and that’s the point of life. You also probably marry a rich man so then you’re a well-kept woman. That type of – that’s how I was brought up.
So me hating my body unless I was thin, or I did a stunt of fitness modelling in between the bulimia, so I did some fitness modelling at some point and getting so much praise and so much validation – when I started true recovery at 30, my body changed a lot, and I am now at my set point weight. I didn’t even know what that was because I’d restricted and binged my entire life.
Body image, and especially getting to body love – and body love to me means unconditional love for your body. Not necessarily looking in the mirror and loving the way it looks aesthetically. It’s way deeper than that. Absolutely it can include body positivity, and that’s where I’m at right now, because I’ve changed my values. I’ve let go of my worthiness and happiness, I’ve detached them from the way my body looks. I’ve let go of perfectionism. All the things. I’m completely free. But it’s been a journey.
So body image specifically was a big deal, and I had to start with first of all surrender and acceptance to what was. When I gained all the weight, I couldn’t look in the mirror without feeling absolute disgust. I need a word that’s stronger than ‘disgust’, because every single thing that I’d been suppressing from childhood came up, and I looked in the mirror and saw a body that I just hated the look of. And I had to be with that. Honestly, I think that was harder than eating when the anorexia response was turned on. That was really, really, really, really hard.
I think the hardest thing was looking in the mirror and really hating the weight gain and hating my body. And a lot of people talked about intuitive eating and recovery; they didn’t really do a lot about body stuff. I was like, that’s a massive thing for me. Okay, I’m in food freedom, but then what if I just hate my body, though? I want something better also than that. And I was in that place for a while. I was in food freedom. I had no anxiety and guilt around food, but I really still disliked the feeling of my body, being my body.
That’s why I emphasize that as I share my experience, it’s going to be helping others as well because it’s the same process. I had to start with acceptance and surrender. When I did my mirror work – which is really important – I would go to the mirror and I would take a breath, because I knew emotions were going to come up. I would feel the emotions: shame, disgust. I would let myself cry and just be with the emotions to start with. That’s a big one.
And then, instead of having the goal of “I’m going to practice accepting my body” – that felt too impossible at the start. So I actually practiced just letting go of fighting reality, which ended me in a state of a sad surrender. It was kind of like, “This is the way my body looks. I hate it. I feel all these feelings about it, and I’m going to feel them, and I’m going to soothe myself through them and put my hand on my heart or rub my arms and say, ‘It’s all right, sweetheart, that you feel this way.’” That’s really important, to self-soothe.
Then I’d be like, “Right, I’m going to practice stop fighting, because what other choice do I have?” Like, okay, I can go back to restriction – no thank you – or I can be with where I am at and look at the real body I have in this moment right now and just surrender to that and not like it. Because approval is not the same as acceptance.
So I started in the sad surrender for a couple of weeks. Everyone’s different. I had support through this. Then I would quite naturally move from sad surrender to “This is the way my body looks today. Don’t particularly like it. I’m just done. I’m actually done giving a shit. It’s exhausting to be constantly obsessed. I’m just done with that shit.” So it went from sad surrender to just like “Whatever, still don’t like it. It is what it is.” That’s more of a neutrality feeling.
From that stage, went to gratitude. When I allowed myself to truly think about what my body does for me – like, if I didn’t have hands, I couldn’t eat. And I love food. My tastebuds. I would really practice – because I felt safer through the trauma work I’d done to be in my body, I could feel being in my body. I could feel the wind on my skin and not just notice it, really be present with that feeling. I could be present with food, and hug my pet or hug my loved one, and just be really grateful for having a body without loving the way it looked. Still didn’t like the way it looked, still hated it. Still hate the cellulite, blah, blah, blah. But I was able to be in gratitude for the healthy body I had.
And then from gratitude comes deep love, unconditional love for who I am. I would go from looking at photos of myself – and photo work is a big part of our work together as clients, too, because it’s very common. They’re okay in their body, they’re feeling good, someone takes a photo, they post it on social media, and they’re like, “Oh my God, I look so big” – and back at square one. So I would go from judging the shit out of myself looking at photos to seeing a photo of me and just being like, “Aww, I love me.” Just kind of – you know when you see a photo of your mom? This is how I described it. I see a photo of my mom and I just have this wave of love. “That’s my mom.” Just like a wave of love. Shit was complicated, but she loved me with all she had and how she knew how to love.
That’s what happened with myself. I’d see a photo of myself and not like it, but just love who I am. Love the journey I’m on. Think back to everything I’ve been through – the abuse, the eating disorder, little me who didn’t get her needs met – and I would just feel love, and just want to be happy for me.
And then body positivity can come, because then you can experiment with colours. Like, we’re on video right now – I love to wear red. It looks good on my skin tone. I like to experiment with make-up. You then start to be able to adorn your physical vessel without it having to be a certain size, and that’s when body positivity can step in.
But you cannot go from body hate and disgust to body positivity and body love in a matter of a week. It’s a process.
01:13:39
Chris Sandel: Totally. And I like the way that you talked about that process and the different steps along the way. One of the things that I will often do in terms of mirror work is, as a good starting point, being able to speak neutrally. How can you describe each of these different parts of your body in a neutral way? The goal isn’t that we then talk about them in these positive ways. It’s like, how can we just use neutral language to describe different parts of our body?
Because I think so often, someone doesn’t even have the vocabulary to be able to do that. And if you don’t have the vocabulary, it means that when you do see that part of you, you’re going to have to use that negative word because you don’t have anything else. So at least if we can come up with all of these neutral terms – even if in the beginning it doesn’t feel accurate – at least there is now a descriptor that someone actually has access to, because language really does make a really big difference. So that’s one of the things that I work on with clients and would add in.
And in terms of the photo work, I think it’s also true that we’re not used to – I mean, a lot of people now are used to looking at themselves in photos, but a lot of the time people aren’t really used to looking at themselves in photos, and it looks different when you see yourself in photos. The things I always can reference it to is I feel very comfortable listening to my voice on a podcast now; that is not how I felt when I first started. Because it sounded so odd. I’m not used to listening to replays of my voice, and I wasn’t used to listening to recordings. And now I’ve done this and listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours, it feels very natural.
I think the same is true in terms of photos, especially if someone’s body has changed. They’re not used to seeing their body in a photo. They’ve maybe done some of that mirror work and that now feels normal, but seeing it in a photo is different.
Part of it can be around repetition, like, “Okay, I need to see more and more of this.” But again, I’m seeing more and more of this while I’m doing this in a very neutral way. And I can feel disappointed and I can feel upset, and I’m still going to use neutral language or words when I’m thinking about this as a way of giving myself the opportunity to feel neutral about this. Because if I’m using negative words, I’m not giving myself that opportunity to feel neutral about this.
Victoria Kleinsman: That’s true. You’re just feeding into the negativity. And of course, whatever you put out, you get back more.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Victoria Kleinsman: We also are where our attention is, so if our attention is on how much you hate your cellulite on your legs or how your hair looks shit or how you wish you were bigger or smaller or different, we just get more of that because we attract what we believe about ourselves. Neutrality is everything. I started off with neutrality by looking in the mirror and being like, “I have legs.” Literally full stop. That’s it for now. Rather than “I hate my legs, I’ve got big tree trunk legs.”
I’ve got all this story – because everything we tell ourselves is a story anyway because humans are meaning-making machines. Most of the time, all the time, it is what it is. It’s just facts. But we have a meaning behind it, obviously, because we have emotional experiences and conditioning. So “I have legs” is a great place to start. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but you’re right, Chris, if you change the narrative in your head, you change the way you speak to yourself. Your thoughts literally create your perception eventually, your beliefs, how you feel, and ultimately then your reality. The way you talk to yourself is a big deal.
We also train ourselves by our behaviours. So if we’re avoiding mirrors and if we’re avoiding looking at photos of ourselves because we don’t like them, we’re training ourselves, we’re showing our brains it’s not safe to look at ourselves or to look at photos because of this bad thing. So we do have to, again, be uncomfortable and feel feelings that we might not want to feel, and exposure therapy is really supportive in tis journey, like you were saying.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. People can do this at different points. It’s not that we’ve had this conversation; now everyone needs to, from Day 1, go and start staring at themselves in the mirror and doing this. I very much think about recovery in stages or phases, and depending on what phase someone is in, there are things that are going to be more important or less important.
So if someone is really starting from scratch and has been in this longstanding eating disorder, the most important thing is them getting in more food. And if them doing mirror work is going to interfere with that, let’s put the mirror work to the side and we’ll come back to that when it’s a more relevant time. But the most important thing is we need to do the nutritional rehabilitation. We need to have more energy coming in. So let’s keep the focus there.
And I know that you know this, but I just want to mention this for the listener because I don’t want someone to be walking away from this thinking, “Right, I now need to instantly start taking loads of photos of myself.”
Victoria Kleinsman: You’re exactly right. Everyone’s on a different point in their journey, and actually, depending on where they’re at – let’s say they’re in anorexia recovery – actually, I don’t advise mirror work at all. I advise just not avoiding the mirror, but definitely not going to the mirror to do work because there’s so much changing that’s going to be happening. Body dysmorphia is going to be a big deal as well. So we need to focus on the eating and the rehabilitation around nutrition first, and then the body image work comes later. You’re absolutely right.
Also, the body image work might not be suitable for you at any point. There might just be a different way – that might be too triggering. We might need to go and do some deeper childhood stuff first, before we go to the mirror. Everyone is different, and everyone’s journey and what they need is different as well.
01:19:22
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I saw an Instagram post that you put up where you put on a jumpsuit that didn’t quite fit and you were like, “You know what, my body’s a bit bigger and this doesn’t fit, and if in three months’ time it still doesn’t fit, then I’m going to get rid of it and that’s just the way it is.”
Victoria Kleinsman: It’s gone. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: I thought that was a very good example of the attitude you have towards your body and the relaxed attitude you have. Again, the reason I’m pointing this out is I think there could be a lot of people who would come to your Instagram and be like, “You do meet up to a lot of the standards of beauty that society has”, so there could be a lot of “Well, it’s very easy for her.” And yet you still go through experiences where you grow out of clothes. And that can be challenging for anyone.
I do think this message is so hard because someone like you says it and someone’s response is, “Well, that’s really easy. Look at the body she’s in.” And then someone in a larger body says the message and people are like, “Well, you’re just glorifying obesity.” There is never the right messenger for this, and I think that can be a really tricky thing, if someone wants to frame it in that way. But yeah, I just want to say that was really good evidence that yes, you feel good about your body, and you feel good about your body even when it is changing in a way that lots of people would struggle with.
Victoria Kleinsman: Yeah. That’s really worth noting, Chris, because a few people of course have said that to me before. And the opposite. I’ve had two people work with me and say, “I chose to work with you because the other recovery coaches I was considering are too thin.” That’s their opinion. So everyone, every coach, has their own flavour, their own energetic signature. Yes, I’m under the thin umbrella. I can go into a normal shop and buy normal-sized clothes.
And I’ll openly admit, I’ve not experienced being in a large body where I’m afraid I might not fit in a seat or I can’t buy clothes, and that sucks too. So I educate myself a lot about being in a large body. I haven’t experienced that, but I have education around it. But I haven’t experienced that, and people do say sometimes “I wish I looked like you” or “If I had your body then I could be happy” in recovery, and I don’t want to take away the relevance of what they’re saying. And my internal experience, even when I was doing the fitness modelling and everyone was praising me to high heaven, I didn’t like myself. My internal interpretation of me wasn’t what they were seeing.
So it’s hard, isn’t it? Because how you feel about yourself – if someone else says something the opposite, you don’t believe it. You just think they’re lying or being nice or whatever. So knowing that I’ve grown through my own challenges, regardless of what other people see – it was my own challenges – and now that I’m not afraid of weight gain, which I never thought I would ever say in my entire life, but it’s true – I am not afraid of weight gain. That’s true recovery.
My body might change as I’m older. Who knows? Not being afraid of weight gain and then actually gaining weight and being fine with that, regardless of whether it’s under the societal umbrella or not – I get that; I’m not discriminated against. It’s an internal battle, an internal journey that’s the most important. Everyone goes through their own journey. Some people are discriminated against and that’s not okay. And it’s how to navigate that, how to stand up for yourself, how to stand up for other people. There’s many layers to it, but mainly it’s an internal journey of how you see yourself.
Chris Sandel: Totally. And eating disorders don’t discriminate. It’s not that the eating disorders are disproportionately with people who are moving further and further away from the standards of beauty and people who are matching up to the standards of beauty don’t have eating disorders. None of those things protect someone. I’m not saying there isn’t thin privilege; there definitely is. There are definitely things that are easier when you’re in a smaller body versus a larger body. All of those things are true. And this work is internal work, and this work is then having you change how you think and feel about yourself. And that’s true irrespective of where someone falls on the weight spectrum or in terms of meeting up to or not meeting up to beauty ideals.
Victoria Kleinsman: Definitely. It’s a pressure, and even the thin people who are constantly on diets and perhaps have not been diagnosed with eating disorders, they’re on ‘diets’ or restricting because of fatphobia. So even if they never experience being ‘fat’, whatever that means, there’s always – it’s the oppression that fat people experience, which is why people restrict in the first place, apart from childhood stuff, bod image stuff. That’s the reason why.
Chris Sandel: Totally. And I’ve had lots of people where when they went to get support and see someone – and it could be because they’d lost their period, for example – they don’t get adequate support because people are like, “You’re doing really great. So good to see that you’re not keeping your weight too high. Definitely keep up with all the exercise that you’re doing.” The same biases are there and can be very harmful for them. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I don’t know why you’re 25 and you’ve got osteoporosis, but just keep doing what you’re doing.”
It’s really maddening, because there is a really obvious reason why this is occurring. And because someone fits into this body that we think is ideal, we’re unable to see that there are things going on here that are perpetuating this issue.
Victoria Kleinsman: And there needs to be way more education in the medical field, for sure. Like I was saying, I look in a thin ideal, but on the BMI scale, I’m almost on the obese category. But my body is really healthy and happy as it is in its natural size. And I’ve had a few clients who’ve been to get help and they’ve done their BMI and been like, “Actually, you’re in the overweight category, so keep restricting.” It’s like, if only they knew how damaging that was. Doctors are there to help people. They’re not doing it on purpose. We need a lot more education into the medical industry, definitely, around eating disorders.
01:25:44
Chris Sandel: Definitely. One of the other things I wanted to talk about is, because you obviously experienced so much with binging and binging and purging, ways to deal with this and how you’re advising ways to deal with this with your clients. I think I said this to you before we started recording; so often I’ll get feedback like, “The work you do is obviously just with people who have anorexia because of the way you talk about restriction or the way you talk about needing nutritional rehabilitation. Obviously this doesn’t apply to me because I have bulimia or it doesn’t apply to me because I have binge eating disorder.”
My take on this is, no, this applies to everyone. Restriction is at the heart of all eating disorders. So I would love to go through some of this with you. If someone is having episodes where they’re binging, what do you think in terms of keeping binge foods in the house? What is the advice you are recommending connected to this with your clients? I know there can be different stages people are at, so maybe it will depend. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Victoria Kleinsman: I have two different suggestions. I did one for myself, and then sometimes this doesn’t work for people, so I share both.
My first suggestion is to always have your ‘binge foods’ in the house – in excess, though, and there’s a reason for this. For example, I used to binge on jars of Nutella. You’ve probably heard me say it. I literally used to put it in the microwave and drink the whole 750 millilitre jar of Nutella. I’m not shitting you.
When I started true recovery with Isabel Foxen Duke, with her method – and this was a Victoria method, because Isabel doesn’t recommend this, actually – but when I didn’t have it in the house, I felt too panicky that it wasn’t there. I would then go out and buy it like I used to and binge on it anyway, so the behaviour didn’t change. I thought, “Right, I’m going to buy like seven jars of Nutella so even if someone paid me to drink them all, I couldn’t.” For me, that created such an abundant environment and an abundant mindset, and it helped me to tune in to my body.
Now, when I say that, I’m talking about intuitive eating here. I do not recommend intuitive eating for anorexia recovery because the migration response stops you from tuning in to your body and listening. So those that don’t have the migration response switched on for anorexia, who actually have hunger signals and are connected to mental and physical hunger, I recommend tuning in and listening and eating unrestrictedly.
So when I had an ample amount of jars of Nutella, I was then able to completely be like, “Well, I’m just going to have some, and if I want some more, there’s enough there.” And I naturally got in tune with my body and how much I wanted. Quite quickly, I went from drinking a whole 750 millilitre jar to just having a few spoonfuls because I allowed – that’s the key, the allowance – to have as much as I wanted. It was physically in my environment so I could see that there was enough. I practiced letting go of the mindset of “If I eat it all today, then I’ll start again tomorrow.” That’s why I had it in excess, because I physically couldn’t eat it all today. Really supported me.
Some clients, that feels too overwhelming for, and it might not work in their household. So then I suggest, you don’t have to have your binge foods in the house; however, you need to make a promise to yourself and to me that if you want chocolate or ice crema, you will go out and get it for yourself, knowing that you can buy as much as you want. You can have it tomorrow if you want. It doesn’t matter how much you eat; it matters that you are coming from an abundant place of like, you can have it tomorrow also. You don’t have to eat it all today unless you want to.
So any way that you can create an allowance mindset and the freedom without restricting ever again, then things start to really shift from there.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I like that there’s different options available with this. When I think of the clients I’ve worked with, different things have worked for different people.
I think one of the things I’ll also focus on a lot is, what is the eating that is going on outside of the binges? I think there is so much of a focus on the binges and that being all-encompassing as opposed to, let’s get some structure in place. Because if your first meal is not till midday, it’s going to make it more likely this is going to happen. So let’s have there be structure in there. Let’s have the foods that you typically binge on be part of your day to day. When you’re having your lunch, have that be part of the lunch, or part of the dessert with the lunch, so you’re normalising these foods. These aren’t foods that are only consumed when a binge occurs and not put up on some pedestal, or they’re not thought about as these horrendous things that I never need to keep around. They’re very much more neutralized like “This can be part of my everyday regular lunch.”
And yeah, there’s going to be times where there are going to be binges that still occur even though this is happening to start with. And again, normalising that, like, yeah, this is also very natural because you’re giving yourself permission and your body hasn’t had that permission for a long time. So yeah, it’s going to be thinking, “Cool, we don’t know if this is going to go away, so let’s get in while we can.” But the more that that happens, there is a binge and then the next day you’re not restricting, you’re not going back to some way of compensating; you’re giving your body that feedback like, okay, that thing happened and there’s still the same availability. All these things are still here.
Victoria Kleinsman: That’s really important, to have what I suggest – never rules, because we all rebel against rules, right? Even the rules we make ourselves. To have a structure of three hearty meals a day where you get full – and that’s another story, because of course, we have to get over our fear of fullness and what that means. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, any snacks in between. And like you said, I started to add Nutella to my porridge in the morning. I started to have it on a slice of toast as a snack.
Peanut M&Ms were my thing. Over here, you can buy a kilogram bag just from the supermarket. I used to just eat a kilogram bag in one day, in one go, in an hour when I was binging. So I would have them on the table so I could see them, instead of being in the secret drawer that only came out when I was binge eating. I would have them on the table and I would start to practice having a handful randomly throughout the day. There would be the urge like “Oh my God, now I need to eat all of them and not start again tomorrow.” And I would just be like, “It’s okay. You can have some more now. You can have some more later.”
I kept, again, self-talk, reassuring myself through it, making it normal – and actually feeding myself and nourishing myself three times a day. That’s a really big one as well, because otherwise of course your body is going to be craving fats and sugars, if you’re not eating all day.
01:32:51
Chris Sandel: Yes. And this advice is true irrespective of where someone is on the weight spectrum. I think what often comes up is like, “Oh, that might be true, but hey, I’m not in the underweight category.” I say, no, this advice still applies. Or “Yeah, but I already eat more than my partner.” It’s like, that’s fine. And this advice still applies. As I talked about earlier, you may have a natural propensity that you eat more than the regular person and you have a higher baseline need for energy, and these same rules apply.
Because I think there’s always like “Oh, there must be some caveat here, the loophole where this thing doesn’t apply to me.”
Victoria Kleinsman: Yeah. No, it always applies. That is so crucial, because unfortunately – and you’ve probably seen this too – some therapists and some inpatient treatment centres, when their client is wanting more food or perhaps eating more processed food because hello, they’re feasting, they need it – they’ve mentioned things like, “Just be a bit careful with the amount of processed food. Don’t get binge eating disorder.”
Oh my God, it makes me so fucking angry because that is what causes relapses. There is no such thing as too much food. Unrestricted eating for life. I don’t care whether you’re fat, thin, medium size, obese. And I know that’s so hard, and I’m not in that – well, technically my BMI is, but in terms of to look at, I’m not there.
That doesn’t matter because there is not one single safe, proven way to lose weight and keep it off permanently that actually works. Not one single proven method. There’s just dangerous ways such as eating disorders, yo-yo dieting. So regardless, that’s when you need to be getting support. If you’re in a very large body, get support from someone also perhaps in a large body who’s in this work, who’s free, who’s accepting of their body, who understands what it’s like to be in the world with that size.
But just because you’re a certain size, it does not mean you need to be eating less than other people. Unrestricted eating for life. Your body knows what it wants to eat. It’s trusting that and getting out of the way and just surrendering to whatever that is.
Chris Sandel: Totally. I think what can often when people hear that is “Oh wow, so I’m just going to eat M&Ms and McDonalds and all of this every day.” Look, if that’s what you truly need at that point, that’s fine. But as you talked about, you start to change. The amount of energy that you need starts to change because you’re no longer in that depleted state, or the kinds of foods that you crave start to change.
I think there can be this very – almost creating a strawman of what you said, like “You’re just promoting obesity. You’re just wanting people to eat ‘junk food’ all day.” And that’s actually not what’s being said. We’re trying to get people to a place where there is true neutrality connected to food so that you can then make genuine decisions about “What do I want to eat?” And from the place of “What tastes good? What gives me good long-lasting energy? What sits well within my stomach? What would be a nice meal to be able to have with friends?” All of these other things that can come in as part of the decision-making as opposed to just what is the most highly palatable thing or what is the most healthy thing. It’s these very lopsided things as opposed to “Let me have some different ideas that I’m considering when I’m thinking about what to eat that are influenced by these different categories.”
Victoria Kleinsman: It happens naturally, because allowance creates space for choice. You cannot choose nourishment – because I want to be in a healthy, well-functioned, fit body. Not everyone wants to, and that’s completely fine. I want to feel good with my digestion, with my energy. So because I no longer restrict and I’m not afraid of restriction or impending restriction, I have the space and the allowance, because I allow anything I want, to be like, “Hm, what do I want to eat?” Nourishment and pleasure are the two things that I go for when I eat. I want to eat vegetables because I know they’re really supportive for my body, and I want to taste something delicious that might support my emotional health.
So it’s not really a thing you think about. You have some thought to it, but it happens very naturally. And like I said to you, that time where I’d eaten chocolate for months and I felt physically shit, as you can imagine because I’d got no protein, no fiber – but I kept allowing the chocolate, but I didn’t understand about emotional restriction then. That was a big deal, and I was emotionally restricting, which was causing me to eat more chocolate. But I kept allowing. When I just surrendered to it and thought, “Do you know what? Fuck it, this is just how I eat” – that’s when I was like, “I really fancy a green shake.” Then I was like, “Oh my God, is that diety?”
Chris Sandel: Yep, which is so common for that thought to come in.
Victoria Kleinsman: It shows there’s a part of you, of the person that is afraid of that, that loves themselves so much that they don’t want to go back to restriction. So that’s a really nice thing to notice. And diet culture doesn’t own vegetables or green shakes. As Isabel says, dieting isn’t an action; it’s a state of mind. When you’re in recovery or recovered or whatever where you are, if your intention behind having a green shake or, I don’t know, a jacket potato instead of a pizza – if you feel like you want that intuitively, that’s not restriction. If you think you ‘should’ have that, that’s restriction. Then do the opposite, therefore.
But all of this balanced, nourished eating happens naturally when we allow unrestricted eating, which doesn’t make sense, but I’ve experienced it myself. It’s kind of unbelievable, really.
Chris Sandel: I actually think it does make sense that when you’re able to do that, you’re able to be much more objective in terms of your decision-making and also truly subjective int terms of noticing, “This thing does really work for me” or “This thing does really taste enjoyable” or “It tasted enjoyable up to that point and then I’m done with it.” So yeah, it does make sense when people are truly able to allow themselves.
Victoria Kleinsman: Yeah, allowance is always the key.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Look, Victoria, this has been an awesome conversation. I’m looking through my list and we’ve barely scratched the surface of all the things that I’d written down, but I know people are going to get a ton out of this.
The final question I have for you is where can people go if they want to find out more about you or about your work?
Victoria Kleinsman: Easiest place is my website, https://victoriakleinsman.com. That has my Instagram, YouTube, podcast on there. That’s called the Body Love Binge. You can find me on social media, Instagram and Facebook I’m active on, and my podcast. I’d love to see you there. Any question, just ask me. I always reply to the DMs myself, so you should get a voice note with me answering your question.
Thank you for allowing me space to share, Chris. It’s been an honour to be able to share my story and give insights.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I’m glad that you’ve come on, and I will put all those links in the show notes. Keep doing what you’re doing.
Victoria Kleinsman: Thank you. Oh, one last thing, may I share?
Chris Sandel: Yeah, sure.
Victoria Kleinsman: I’m offering a free taste test. So they can try out my paid group coaching completely for free for 12 days. They can get that from my website, too. So they can get to know me a bit better, experience coaching with me, start going through the modules. That’s really beneficial for those to do as well.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put that in the show notes as well. Thank you for your time.
Victoria Kleinsman: Thank you. Bye.
Chris Sandel: Bye.
So that was my interview with Victoria Kleinsman. She is such an incredible example that full recovery is possible, and there is so much good stuff that was in this episode, so I hope you really enjoyed it.
One thing I want to mention just before I go is I have a free mini-course that you can sign up to. This is looking at the first 5 steps to take in your recovery. While this may sound like it is only for those at the very beginning of recovery, this is not true. Many people who’ve been working on their recovery for years have signed up and have said just how beneficial it is. I’ve added a link for the sign-up for this on the show notes page, so you can go to www.seven-health.com/294 and you can sign up there.
So that is it for this episode. I will catch you again next week.
Thanks so much for joining this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!
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