Episode 298: In this episode I speak with Sheri Segal Glick, author of The Skinny: My messy, hopeful fight for full recovery from anorexia. We cover calorie counting, compulsive exercise, shame and secrecy, quasi recovery versus full recovery, commitment in recovery and sitting with discomfort.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 298 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/298.
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 an eating disorder expert, and I help people to fully recover.
I am currently taking on new clients at the moment. I actually need to do a whole episode on this in terms of what I offer and how I structure it and all of those kinds of things, because there’s a lot that I offer as part of the coaching. It isn’t just one-on-one calls. There is obviously the one-on-one calls, and there’s support between those calls, people are doing homework, which can include writing exercises, reading, listening, watching different material, setting goals for certain behaviour changes and mind shifts. There’s also a group component to it. We do group calls, and there’s a group support area that you can participate in, and it can help you to feel less alone and to receive the support of others who are going through recovery just like you.
It’s this combination of elements that are really designed to provide you with the most comprehensive and effective experience, leading to the fastest transformation and making it to that place of full recovery.
I fundamentally believe that people can change, and that you can fully recover despite what your eating disorder may be telling you. After working with clients for over 15 years, I’m very good at helping people to achieve this. People will have their symptoms improve. They learn that they can develop resilience and learn other coping skills, without needing to use the eating disorder. And they can live in a way that is value-aligned and be spending their time on the things that truly matter in life, not the things that the eating disorder is making them spend their time on.
So if you’re tired of living with an eating disorder and are ready to do what it takes to reach a place of full recovery and complete freedom, then I’d love to help. Email info@seven-health.com with the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and then I can then send over further details. So info@seven-health.com, the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I can send over further details for how we can then schedule an initial chat and a discovery call and figure out if we’re a good fit for working together.
On with today’s show. Today, it is a guest interview. I’m chatting with Sheri Segal Glick. Sheri holds a degree in journalism, a J.D., and a half-eaten muffin that one of her kids handed her and made her promise not to throw away. Lawyerly stuff she has done includes working at the Canadian Department of Justice and the Canadian House of Commons. Mommish stuff she’s done includes wrangling her three kids, finding new and exciting ways to monitor screen time, and chairing the parent council at her kids’ school. Writerly stuff she’s done includes writing her first memoir or first book, called The Skinny: My Messy, Hopeful Fight for Full Recovery From Anorexia: A Decently Comical Memoir, writing for newspapers and magazines, and drafting a great deal of Canadian federal legislation (but maybe nothing you’ve read).
I became aware of Sheri through Julie, who helps out in the community support area at Seven Health. Julie suggested checking out her book, which I did, and I really enjoyed. I actually listened to the audio version of it, which Sheri reads, and she does excellently so.
What I enjoyed about the book was how honest it was. So often, I find with recovery books, there can be about 95% of it being in the disorder, and then there’s this 5% about recovery. This is often like a footnote or just a short epilogue afterwards, so you don’t really get to see what the recovery process was like. Or you get this very sanitized version where someone chooses to recover and then it gets very easy and there’s this abridged history that removes all the indecision and the struggles or the step backwards. So recovery ends up being this very linear improvement, or at least that’s how it appears on paper.
What I liked about this book is that that is not what is contained within it. You get to see and feel how hard recovery is. I’d find myself getting frustrated at the care that Sheri would be receiving, or even frustrated at Sheri and the eating disorder and how it was leading her astray and leading her away from recovery, and just wishing she would make different choices as part of this. I think it did a great job at painting the struggle, but also Sheri realising everything she’s missing out on because of the eating disorder and all the emotions connected to this. I really enjoyed the memoir and its honesty, its fairly accurate portrayal of what recovery can look like, so I wanted to have Sheri on to talk about it.
As part of this conversation, we talk about: her relationship with food growing up and the impact of comments made by parents and other adults in her life; how the eating disorder started and the various treatments she received in her teenage years; Sheri thinking she was recovered for decades, only later to discover that she wasn’t and never had been and dealing with that discovery, and then starting to do recovery at that point; the shame and secrecy of eating disorders and the response that Sheri’s received from sharing her story; calorie counting and exercise compulsion, which were two of Sheri’s biggest struggles; commitment in recovery and sitting in discomfort; and how humour is interwoven throughout the book, and why this was so important to Sheri.
So let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Sheri Segal Glick.
Hey, Sheri. Welcome to the podcast. I’m really glad to have you here today.
Sheri Segal Glick: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here.
Chris Sandel: You wrote a book called The Skinny: My Messy, Hopeful Fight for Full Recovery From Anorexia, and that’s why you’re here today. I want to talk to you about that book and many things that you covered in it.
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Like all these interviews that I do, I always like to start at the beginning. If we go back to your childhood, what was it like growing up in your household as far as food was concerned? And what was your relationship with food like as a young kid?
Sheri Segal Glick: As a young kid, my relationship with food was pretty typical, pretty benign. I wasn’t a picky eater. I had a pretty solid sweet tooth. I just never thought about food as it related to my body. It wasn’t until I was a little bit – probably somewhere around the fourth grade.
For the purposes of this interview, I’m going to refer to this as my ‘chubby phase’ because I can’t think of a better way to describe it, because that’s the way it was described by my parents at the time. My doctor said I was about 10 pounds overweight, whatever that means. Take it for what it’s worth.
So then my mom started making some comments. She thought I should start eating only one sweet thing a day as a means of controlling my weight, and she suggested that if I was hungry, maybe I should have a glass of water first to make sure I wasn’t actually thirsty. Little by little, I had a bit of an inkling that what I put into my mouth might affect my body, but it didn’t affect my behaviour for a couple more years. It was this little spark of a seed of a thought, but it didn’t really affect my actions initially.
Chris Sandel: Were you noticing you being treated differently to other siblings? You have other siblings, so how was your mum’s reaction to their eating?
Sheri Segal Glick: My siblings are 3-1/2 years and 5-1/2 years younger than me, respectively. They were very tiny people, so there was definitely some – and they were, again, on this ridiculous weight chart that they used in the ’80s, considered underweight. So they were encouraged to eat more. I definitely knew that my parents preferred the way they looked to the way that I looked, and they definitely made comments about that. But again, initially those were things that I heard, but I didn’t internalise them.
Chris Sandel: Do you remember when that suddenly started to switch? Is there a significant event that you really did then internalise?
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah, for sure. My mom was making comments – there was no malice. I really do believe that she thought she was being helpful, but she would say things like, “You only look fat from the front and not the back. Your legs are still slim, but your tummy is too round.” I remember for the first time, the first day of Grade 6, I was going to a new school – I wore a sweatshirt to cover up my not-thin tummy and a miniskirt to show off my not-fat legs. That was the first time I had this thought, like, “Maybe people at school won’t know.”
That was the first time I remember actually really thinking about the way that I looked to the outside world based on what my mom had said. Again, I understood. I wasn’t walking into rooms backwards because I thought I looked thinner that way. It didn’t really affect my actions.
Until that winter, my family was on a trip. We went to Grenada. A client of my dad’s had an estate in Grenada, and we were staying at his guesthouse. We had dinner with him. It was after dinner, and I was listening to the conversation – the way you do when you’re a kid, when you’re listening but you’re not in the conversation – and he’s describing his granddaughter and said, “She is hefty, like Sheri.”
For whatever reason, that was the comment that just sliced me to the core. I ran out of the room crying. My parents were like, “What? Can she hear us when we say mean things about her body? What just happened?” To me, there’s a very distinct before and after, and that was the beginning of the after. Maybe it was like a ‘death by one thousand cuts’ situation. What I think it was, was this moment where it was the first time someone who wasn’t my parents made a comment about my body. It was this moment of like, “Oh, other people see this too” when everything changed.
Chris Sandel: Wow. Do you remember your parents at all comforting you about that, or anything along those lines? It might sound like a stretch given how they reacted in the moment, but what happened after that?
Sheri Segal Glick: I think they were just like, “What? What just happened?” The thing in life is you think about these moments that were so pivotal and meaningful to you, whereas to other people they’re probably these non-events. So I don’t even know if they remember these moments.
But I do know that the next morning, we were flying from Grenada to Barbados and we were at the airport, and I skipped breakfast probably for the first time in my life. I was feeling a little hungry. We were in the gift shop, and I saw a Snickers bar, which I liked. Still do. I asked my mom, “What’s more fattening, breakfast or a Snickers bar?” She was like, “I don’t know, Sheri. Both.” Again, to me, this was this big meaningful moment, and she was just this mother of three young children, trying to make sure everybody got on this airplane. So we both had very different experiences, but for me this was the beginning of my eating disorder.
Chris Sandel: It’s really interesting. I’ve got a six-year-old son. I’ve had moments of things in my life where, as you described, it’s this pivotal, big moment for me, and the other people involved probably have no recollection of that going on. I have these feelings of like, I wonder what are those pivotal moments for him. What are the things that possibly I’ve already forgotten that are the things that in 20 years, he’s sitting at therapy, recounting to his therapist about “this time Dad did this thing to me”?
And it’s a tough one because you don’t know what are those things that are going to have that kind of an impact. There could be, as you say, all of these different incidents, and there’s just this one thing that really lands. But it’s definitely something I think about a lot.
Sheri Segal Glick: I do too, with my three kids. I think that’s parenting, always wondering how we’re screwing up our children and hoping that it’s not too much. But that is very relatable. I think about that all the time too.
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Chris Sandel: What was your mum or your parents’ relationship with food in terms of their own stuff? Because you can have people who are concerned, but they’re naturally in thin bodies, so they just do whatever they want, or they’re on their own dieting journey. What was going on with them?
Sheri Segal Glick: Both of my parents are slim people naturally. They definitely are people – it was very obvious to me that they were people who cared about thinness. As a child, I knew my mom’s height and weight, because this was something she talked about. I knew what she weighed at her wedding. I knew that she had left the hospital a week after I was born wearing the same jeans that she wore before she was pregnant. These are weird things for a kid to know.
My dad used to weigh himself once a week, and when he saw his weight creeping up a little bit, he would go on whatever diet was trendy, get his weight back to where he considered the right place, and then carry on as normal. And my mom would often do these diets with him. It was just part of my life. I remember going to a restaurant with them and they were on some kind of low GI diet and saying to the waiter like, “Does this have carrots?”
I remember being in summer camp and getting this letter from my dad – I was in Grade 5 – and three-quarters of the letter was explaining this new diet he was on that he’d found in Reader’s Digest, which is obviously where everybody goes for the best health advice. Obviously. In retrospect, that was so weird.
But then there was also all of this normal stuff, like we ate dessert, we went out for ice cream, we had takeout, we ate dinner as a family. So if I had to describe it, I would say mostly normal with a heavy dash of not quite right. It was not completely disordered, but just not quite normal, if that makes sense.
Chris Sandel: It does. I think you pick up so much of that stuff through osmosis in terms of what people believe is valued in this household, what people think is important in this household. And some of it is outright saying it, and other things are saying it but not really saying it, or not saying it directly – I’m just noticing it by your behaviour or noticing it by the story you’re telling me about that person at work or whatever it may be. You understand what people’s values are because of the way that they are speaking about certain situations.
Sheri Segal Glick: For sure. Even my mom would say stuff – and I’m making her sound like a witch, and I really don’t want her to, because I really do believe that she was doing the best she could. Things were very different. The way we talked about food and bodies was very different.
But I do remember her saying about a neighbour, “She let herself go.” That was this idea that I grew up, like “Don’t let yourself go. That is the most important thing. Don’t let yourself go.” It just seemed like this woman, who was so many other things, had gained weight and all of a sudden she’d let go – like, let go of what?
Chris Sandel: It’s very one-dimensional, very reductionistic of this hugely complex human being has gained weight and then that defines everything about them and they’ve let themselves go.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah. Which is ridiculous, because there are so many other ways one could let themselves go that have nothing to do with their bodies. You could gain weight and actually be the best you’ve ever been.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, 100%.
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Going back, you talked about this trip to Grenada and this being the starting point of all this. What then happened from there?
Sheri Segal Glick: I got home and I decided on that trip, on that day, that I would stop eating all things that were sweet. That was followed very closely by pastries and then fried things. And I got a lot of very positive reinforcement. I remember I took this acting class with a couple of friends, and one of the moms had taken us all out for croissants after class. I didn’t get one; I just asked for water. This mom was like, “I am so impressed by your wonderful self-control!”
And then she called my mom to tell her how impressed she was that I’d had water while the other girls had croissants. And then my mom came to me and she was like, “Lynn is so impressed with your amazing self-control. We are all so proud of you!” So I got this message that I was doing the best.
And then very, very quickly, because I didn’t have a lot of weight to lose, it was about my appearance. All of a sudden I was getting all of these compliments around my appearance. This was this message to me that not only was I doing the right thing, I had to keep doing it. But because I had the genetics for an eating disorder, it escalated. It didn’t just stay there.
Chris Sandel: And how quickly did it start before it really escalated, going from people complimenting you to getting to the stage where “Now we’re actually concerned and now we’re seeing this thing that we were praising you for is starting to be a problem”?
Sheri Segal Glick: Interestingly, when you’re a middle school kid, you can be skinny and gangly and people don’t really think much of it because a lot of kids, that’s just the way they look. So I was still getting a lot of positive reinforcement for my appearance. Somewhere in middle school – I honestly can’t remember; I think it was Grade 7 where my parents knew there was a problem – they asked me to go see a psychologist. I said no.
Then they said I could have a phone in my room if I agreed to see this psychologist five times, so then I said yes because that felt like a really worthwhile transaction. Because in those days, for any young people listening to this, you needed to have it wired in your room and hooked up. It’s not like today. So I went to see her the five times, and I was very forthcoming. I didn’t lie about anything. I didn’t hide anything.
But at the end of the five sessions, she said to my parents, “Yeah, it was kind of weird. There’s some issues. But she’ll grow out of it. It’s going to be fine.” So then my parents were like, “Oh, okay, yeah. She’ll grow out of it, it’s going to be fine.”
In the eighth grade, the summer of Grade 8 going into Grade 9, I went to sleepaway camp, and the camp called my parents because they were concerned about my eating habits. They started weighing me once a week as a condition of staying there, because they were so concerned. Then I got home from camp – then it was a thing. Then it was like, “Oh, now we have to go to the hospital and get an appointment” and all the things.
But prior to that, I think my parents understood that there was something going on. My friends absolutely understood that there was something going on. From Grade 7 on, my big friend group, everyone knew. But it was just like this thing we didn’t talk about. It came up a couple times, but then it was just not something that I was willing to discuss with anyone, so I just carried on in my life. It wasn’t something until it was something, if that makes sense.
Chris Sandel: If you could go back in time and change something with those friends, is there anything you think they could have said or done at that point that would’ve made you receptive?
Sheri Segal Glick: No, I don’t think so. I think especially at the beginning, when you’re in the honeymoon phase of an eating disorder and you have this very strong genetic pull towards an eating disorder, I think it’s really hard for a 12-year-old to talk you out of it. I think it would’ve been pretty impossible. Because my friends did try. There was an incident in Grade 8 that I talk about in the book where there definitely was a little mini intervention. I was super embarrassed, and I just wanted it to be over. It made absolutely no difference.
I do wonder if the psychologist had recognised – and I think that’s hard for anyone, so I don’t think it’s her fault, but I think if she had recognised where I was heading, and if there’d been an intervention at that early stage, maybe things could’ve been different. But also, could’ve, should’ve would’ve. Who knows.
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Chris Sandel: When did then the next bit of treatment come? There was a psychologist that didn’t amount to much; what happened then?
Sheri Segal Glick: After I got back from camp, my parents had an appointment for me at the Children’s Hospital, which is a really wonderful teaching hospital that we have here where I live. We went to see the head of the eating disorders programme. He weighed me and measured me and took my blood pressure and said, “Okay, well, yeah, you have anorexia and you need to gain this much weight. You can do it at this rate per week.” I think it was like two pounds per week or something. “And if you don’t gain this much, you’re going to be admitted.” And that was it. It was like, “Okay, bye. See you next week.” There was no therapy. There was no dietitian. It was just like, “Good luck! See you soon.”
I was terrified. I didn’t know what I was going to do. The idea of being forced to gain weight was just the worst possible thing I could’ve thought of in my young life at that moment.
Chris Sandel: What did you know of anorexia at that stage? When that label has been given and you’re in the room and you hear that – had you watched some after-school special about anorexia, or had there been some Phys. Ed class that covered it? What was your knowledge?
Sheri Segal Glick: I think at that point I knew that I had anorexia. Definitely there was no internet because I’m a thousand years old. I’d definitely seen a movie. I do talk about this in the book. There was this movie that I’d taped on our VHS. It was this woman who had bulimia and she was treated, and she had this anorexic roommate in treatment. I definitely watched this movie a lot, because I recognised myself in that. Also, I knew that Karen Carpenter had died from anorexia. So I knew about her, and I would go to the library and read articles. But I also didn’t want anyone to see me reading these articles.
So I definitely had some sort of understanding of what I had, but I’d never heard the word ‘recovery’. I didn’t know about that part. I just knew what I had.
Chris Sandel: What did the treatment look like? You got sent on your way, come back in, and then what happened?
Sheri Segal Glick: I didn’t know what to do. I go home, I’m thinking this through, and I’m trying to think of a plan and I think, “Should I put weights in my pockets? How am I going to get out of this?” I get this idea to water load, even though I had never heard the term before. So before my weigh-in the next week, I went across the street to a corner store, right across from my high school, and bought several bottles of diet pop. I had brought this giant plastic cup from home. I went to an area of the school that had these lockers that were not assigned, and I just sat there and drank and drank and drank and drank and drank.
My friends knew, and they came to visit me between classes, which is also so weird in retrospect. And before I continue, I do want to say that water loading is so dangerous. Knowing what I do now about water intoxication, I’m so grateful that I didn’t end up dead or brain damaged. I would not recommend this. Zero stars.
I also think it just made me so ill. I still have very strong sense memory of what it felt like. My vision would blur, I would start shivering, I was nauseous. It was just a horrible feeling. And on top of that, I think if you’re somebody listening to this podcast who thinks this is a great idea, I’m sure that they do urine samples now. I’m sure that they have wisened up to this. So this is not a good plan for anyone. I just don’t want to give anyone ideas, because this is a terrible, dangerous, horribly stupid thing to do.
Chris Sandel: And for listeners, we’re going to focus a little bit on this part so people understand where you’re coming from, but I want this podcast to really be focusing on the recovery aspect. All of the things that you’ve been through as part of recovery so people can understand that point.
I also want to say this is actually what I enjoyed about your book, because I think so often, there’s 400 pages; 350 of them are about living with the eating disorder, and then there’s this tiny little bit at the end of like “Oh, and then I recovered and everything was fine.” There is no detail about what recovery looked like. What I loved about your book was just how honest you were about all the points in recovery. It hasn’t been quick, and there’s been different stages, but it was a very eye-opening, not trying to make it all seem lovely and pretty and put a bow on top of it. It’s like, as the book describes, “this is my messy recovery.” So I want people to understand that as well.
Sheri Segal Glick: Thank you. I really appreciate that very much. So anyway, I went into the hospital. I had gained all the weight they wanted me to gain in that one afternoon of water loading. My parents were shocked. I think they had a bag packed for me because my eating habits hadn’t changed. My mom asked the doctor if I could be manipulating my weight and he said only by a couple of pounds, so he was clearly wrong.
I went on doing this for quite some time, until some friends actually did tell my parents what I was up to. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. But of course, at the time I didn’t know because I would’ve been so mad at them – but now I’m so grateful, knowing what I do now.
So then my dad showed up one day after school on a day that I didn’t have a scheduled appointment. He was just waiting outside the school for me. I had been actually thinking about that possibility for a while. I thought, “What will I do?” I never got past like, “Run” because I had nowhere to go. I was a kid. So I got into the car with him and I knew that when they weighed me, my weight wasn’t going to be high enough. In happy news, it was the first time in my life I’d gone to the hospital without having to pee really badly, but it was really agonising, and I was really, really scared. They weighed me and admitted me right away.
They took me upstairs to the ward, and then my dad went home to get stuff for me. I was given a contract to sign. They used a behaviour modification protocol, which set out that we had to gain 100 grams a day, which is like a quarter of a pound, about, for anybody who thinks in pounds. On any day that I didn’t, I had to be on bedrest. Bedrest wasn’t just like “You’re not gaining weight, so you’re saving calories.” It was actually very punishing. All of my possessions were taken away, everything, except schoolbooks – including clothing. I had to wear a hospital gown and hospital pyjamas.
It was really, really demoralizing and scary, because they didn’t take hyperdrive into account. And I didn’t understand – when you’re undereating and all of a sudden you start eating again, sometimes your metabolism becomes hypermetabolic. That’s exactly what happened to me. So then I was ending up on bedrest despite the fact that I was eating. It just became this almost war against the doctors and the nurses because I was like, “I can’t be on bedrest again today.” So then I started water loading in the hospital. It was awful. It was really not a good experience.
Chris Sandel: When I was reading this part of the book, it’s so sad that this is how eating disorders were treated. Maybe some of this is still going on, unfortunately. But as you talked about, it’d be one thing – I don’t think the punishment really works at any stage. I think it’s going to just create more ‘us and them’ and more resistance and all of that stuff. It would be one thing if you were like, “Hey, I’m refusing to eat my food and now I’m losing weight” and they would be saying, “This is the consequence of you refusing to eat the food.”
But if you’re doing everything they’re providing for you and asking of you and that’s not happening, I think that’s really unfair. When reading, it was like, I would be pissed. I can understand how annoyed you would feel. Like, “I’m already doing this thing that is my biggest fear, I’m eating all this food, and yet I do this, I don’t match up to some number that you want me to match up to, and now I’m being punished.” It’s a surefire way of getting someone to be like, “I will comply just to get the hell out of here.”
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah. It was also this idea that you can’t even trust your body. There was this huge culture of mistrust. It really did feel so adversarial all the time.
And the other thing is – there was me and some other teenage anorexics, and we were on this medical ward, so we were being treated next to kids who had cancer, next to kids who had cystic fibrosis. The nurses hated us because they saw us as just these giant pains in the butt who chose to get sick, whereas the kid next to me who had cancer definitely didn’t choose to get sick. I understand why they thought that, but it still felt really – it was a difficult situation to be in.
We didn’t see dietitians. We didn’t have psychological support. There was no group therapy. It was not the best. I definitely think there is one incidence when I was in the 11th grade and I was quite ill and I was admitted against my will – I think they did save my life. But I don’t think anyone ever recovered under that protocol.
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Chris Sandel: To then speed things up in terms of your story, the cliff notes are you got to a stage where you were somewhat passable, where people were no longer on your back. You’d done enough to get into a stage where people were fine, like “That’s just Sheri, she’s got some stuff, but she’s fine. She no longer has her eating disorder anymore.” And you felt the same thing.
And then at some point, that changed, or at some point your understanding of that changed. Talk about that – and how long did that go on for, where you were in that state?
Sheri Segal Glick: A long time, because I felt like I was basically recovered, certainly by the end of undergrad. Things were so much better than they had been when I was acutely ill. I also had a heavy dose of anosognosia. I never really thought about it anymore.
Then after the birth of my third child, when she was about nine months old, I lost all of my hunger cues. I think I got into an energy deficit, because my husband was working out of town, he was commuting back and forth, and I was solo parenting three children and breastfeeding. I think that’s what that was.
When I’d been ill as a teenager, loss of appetite had actually made me the most ill, because I just had such a strong resistance to eating when I wasn’t hungry. And then I had these same feelings all of a sudden as an adult. I went to the doctor and I was like, “I’ve lost my appetite.” She did blood tests and we couldn’t figure out what it was. I was eating, but just not enough because, again, I was nursing and I didn’t have hunger cues.
One day I got on the scale and it was a number that I’d never seen as an adult. And I had this moment of fear, elation. It was this like, “What have I done? Oh, good job me.” So that scared me, because I recognised that the elation part was not a healthy feeling to have. I googled psychologists, eating disorders, and got myself on a waiting list, because I figured I should probably go talk to somebody about why I was finding it so hard to eat.
But the waiting list was very, very long, and in that time, while I was waiting to go see her, my hunger cues came back. So I started eating again. By the time I went to see her, many months later, I was back to ‘me normal’. But I kept the appointment because I thought, “Well, I’ve been on the waiting list so long and I have all these lingering behaviours from when I used to have anorexia. I might as well go talk to her.” Then I was also worried that I might lose my hunger cues again if I cancelled the appointment, kind of like if you cancel your hair appointment and then your hair is really bad the next day and you can’t get back to see your hairdresser – same thing.
So I went to see her. I was like, “I was having trouble eating, but now I’m okay, but I used to have anorexia, so I thought we could fix a few of my lingering behaviours, because I have kids and I want to make sure that I’m not passing any of this on to them.” She’s like, “Sure, what are these lingering behaviours that you have left over from when you used to have anorexia?”
I was like, “Well, you know, I measure and weigh everything before I eat it. I count calories. I have to exercise X amount a day. I’m afraid of X food and Y food and Z food.” She was like, “Oh, well, this is because you still have anorexia.” I was like, “No.” She was like, “It’s functional anorexia, but you have anorexia.” I was like, “No, I’ve had anorexia, and I know what that looks like, and this is not that.” She said, “Okay then, go home and stop weighing and measuring your food, and stop exercising, and eat the things you’re afraid of, and come back and tell me how it goes.”
I went home and that was when I realised that I’d actually never been well. I googled ‘functional anorexia’ – the biggest oxymoron ever – and the term ‘quasi-recovery’ came up. I thought, huh, how did I not notice this? It was this crazy moment of epiphany. And that’s how that happened.
Chris Sandel: When you’d left that office and she said, “Go home, stop weighing things” – did you feel like, “I’ll be able to do that” and then there was this shocker of like “Oh wow, I can’t”? Or you already left knowing, “Oh boy, there’s no way I can do that”?
Sheri Segal Glick: I left knowing, “Oh boy, there’s no way I can do that.” Then I got to googling and was like, “Oh, okay, most people don’t do these things. Huh. Interesting.” In retrospect, it’s such a weird thing for me that I went for all of these years without noticing. I certainly have trouble describing it to other people, let alone myself, that my denial was just so deep that I didn’t see it, because it just seems ridiculous now that I didn’t see it.
Chris Sandel: I think, one, that’s actually pretty common that there is the denial component and that you can explain away so many things. And two, I kind of think that speaks to the culture that we live in – that it’s easy to be like, “Oh, I don’t eat those kind of foods” or “This is what I have to do when we go on holiday.” What would seem to you and I now as very obvious problematic behaviours for so many people is like, “Oh wow, good for you. That’s really great dedication. Wow, I wish I could have that willpower.” Like you experienced when you first did this, there’s a load of praise that is there when there should be some head-scratching and some further questions and maybe some heavy thought about this.
Sheri Segal Glick: That’s a really good point, and I certainly noticed that once – because there was this period where I knew there was a problem but I wasn’t sure I wanted to fix it. I had a few months of going back and forth. I did notice that. I noticed how many accolades I got for these habits that, at that point, I started to understand were actually disordered. I think that sometimes can make it harder at the beginning of recovery to separate yourself from people’s compliments for these behaviours that you’re really trying to stop.
Chris Sandel: For sure. And it can be then hard to pair those behaviours up with the damage that is being done, whether that be the physical damage, whether that be the psychological inflexibility. It’s like, “No, no, no, these are the good things about me. These are the things that are really healthy about me. This is the way that I’m able to cope.” There can be all these reasons why “This is not the problem; this is actually the solution. Maybe it’s a slightly quirky solution, but it’s a solution that really works for me.” It can be hard to see that this thing that you think of as a really helpful thing is actually the problem.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Chris Sandel: So how was it when you read the quasi-recovery piece? At that point, was there still a lot of denial? Or that quickly gave way and you’re like “This actually really does sum up what is going on”?
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah, all of a sudden it all became very clear to me. It was like this fog had lifted, and I recognised myself. But then there was also just so much fear in making any of these changes. And I certainly wasn’t ready to talk to anybody about it, because I was also so ashamed. I’d always been very ashamed of my eating disorder. I’d always tried to hide it. And I only mentioned it to my husband before we were married when we first moved in together, because I was worried he would hear about it from somebody else, that I used to have an eating disorder. I was like, “By the way… and also, this is why I don’t get a period, so we might have to use some kind of drugs to get pregnant.” It was just like, “By the way…”
But it was not something I ever wanted to talk about, even with the psychologist. It took me weeks of seeing her before I was ready to even discuss it because I was just so scared, and I was also just so embarrassed that this was still a problem for me.
00:38:04
Chris Sandel: Maybe we’re fast-forwarding a bit – we can go back – but as you talked about, a lot of shame, so much secrecy, and then now you’ve written a book, you’ve opened up about this. What’s that transition been like?
Sheri Segal Glick: It’s actually kind of crazy because even when I wrote the book, my close friends knew about my recovery, and obviously my husband knew about my recovery. My children didn’t.
Funny side story is when the book – because I knew I had to tell them, because I knew they would hear it from a friend, probably, maybe, and I knew I had to tell them about it. I wanted to make sure I framed it in a way that was not scary for them and that they would understand.
So this box of books arrives at my house that my publisher has sent, and they’re on my dining room table. My son was waiting for me to drive him somewhere, and he looks at the book and he looks at the cover. He was I think 14. He says, “Mummy, why would you make up an illness just to sell books?” [laughs] He had no idea, which I thought was really a good news story, because I felt like I’d worked so hard to act in very non-disordered ways around my children.
All this to say that nobody knew. I wrote this book; it still hadn’t really clicked that it was going to be released, and then it was on Amazon for pre-sale. I remember calling my closest friend and being like, “Oh my gosh.” She said, “Yeah, I’ve been waiting for this to hit you” because it hadn’t up until then. It just didn’t feel real. I was still really quite worried about what people were going to say and what people were going to think – that I was tagged by my publisher on my personal Facebook page, and that I had all of these people messaging me about their secret eating disorders that they’d never wanted to talk about.
It became so apparent to me that there is so much shame and secrecy around eating disorders, and why it’s so important to talk and be open about it, because these things thrive in secrecy. And if we don’t talk about it, how are people going to know that things can be different and better, if nobody talks about it?
Chris Sandel: I think your experience with people reaching out to you says a lot, because without you being the first one to put up your hand and be like, “Hey, this is me. This is something I’ve gone through”, everyone else just keeps their head down and no-one says anything. But then there’s this feeling of like, “There’s this one person who’s now talking about this, and I feel like I’ve got this other person who I can talk to about this big thing that I’ve never talked to other people about.” I think there can be a lot of freedom as part of that. Even if they’re not then willing to share it with everyone, there’s this secret code of “I can talk to someone else who’s been through this same thing.”
Sheri Segal Glick: I was really shocked by the number of people who I know, either well or peripherally, who told me about their super-secret eating disorder that they either used to have or are still struggling with. I was shocked. I just had no idea, really. Which sounds naïve, but I had no idea.
Chris Sandel: Again, I think part of that is because you can be hiding so much in plain sight. The reality is, your story is what I see on a very regular basis. Someone who develops an eating disorder in their teenage years then gets better to some better stage where ‘it’s not as ill as I was’ and then it just goes on for the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, until there is a similar thing that you had. There is some kind of epiphany that “Wow, maybe this thing hasn’t gone.”
And that could be because some crisis happens in their life and they find themselves back in the real depths of an eating disorder, where it is like it was when they were much younger, or there can just be this realisation of “I don’t have the freedom that I imagined that I had. Yeah, it’s not as bad as it was, but actually, now that I start to look around, I’m still very much trapped in my behaviours, in my compulsions, and wow, I can’t believe that I haven’t noticed this, but I now notice it.” And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Sheri Segal Glick: That’s exactly right, yeah. That’s why I think being honest with people around you and yourself is so life-changing. Again, seeing that things can be so different and so much better I think is really meaningful.
00:42:43
Chris Sandel: What did your recovery then at this stage start to look like, and what were some of the things you did as part of this?
Sheri Segal Glick: Initially I was seeing this psychologist for a little bit, and then I started doing recovery coaching. I worked on a fear foods list and was working my way through these foods, changing my exercise, stopping things and changing things up and eventually stopping. Just challenging all of the things that my eating disorder had led me to believe were so terrifying.
I did it gradually. I think there are some people who jump all-in right away. For me, it was much easier to take gradual steps and be like, “Oh, that was okay. I can also do this now. Oh, that was okay, and I can also do this now.” That’s how that worked for me.
Chris Sandel: I know some of the stuff that you went through as part of the book, so I can ask things specifically in terms of different things that were a big part of your eating disorder.
00:43:38
In terms of the exercise component and the movement compulsion piece, that was a big part of your disorder. So I’m wondering – you can talk about what you did, but you can also look at, “If I was to do this again, I would do this differently.” If there’s any of that, I would love to hear your thoughts of like, “Now that I’ve been through this and I tried out all these different things, if I was to do it again, this is how I would actually approach it.”
Sheri Segal Glick: I think the thing that a lot of us waste a lot of time doing is thinking about doing it and planning it and thinking about how hard maybe it’ll be or how hard maybe it won’t be. But actually just doing it is the way to go. I think that I wasted a lot of time thinking about maybe doing it or how hard it might be or how my body might change or might not change, but I think actually just doing it and realising, “Oh, actually, not only is it okay, it’s better than I expected it to be, because now I’m not sore all the time, now I can go on trips, now I have more free time” – all of these things that changed my life in such an incredibly meaningful way.
I wish I’d done all of it sooner, obviously. I think that’s the most common answer you get by anybody who’s done any recovery things, probably. Like, “Oh, I wish I’d done it sooner” is the regret. Especially with my cardio addiction, I had that for at least half of my life. It really affected every single decision I made. Every single decision I made about absolutely everything, like what jobs I took, what hobbies I had, where I went, all of the things – had I known how easy it would be to just stop, I would’ve done it.
I’m not being hyperbolic when I say it would’ve actually been life-changing, because it was. Even things like travel. When you are addicted to exercise, you can’t do it in the same way. Last summer, I went to France and England with my family. We live in Canada. That is something I wouldn’t have been able to do previously because it’s a very long flight, there were very long travel days. We were staying in places that didn’t have a gym. And there was travelling in between. We were in Provence and we were spending hours driving to go to these cute little towns and have lunch. These are things I would not have been able to do but for recovery.
I think understanding that also is really meaningful. Looking at what you’re gaining as opposed to what you’re giving up I think is a really important piece.
Chris Sandel: When I was reading – this part of the book is quite a long part as it goes through different stages, but as an outsider who does this for a living, the thing that was so frustrating would be, “I did it for a day and then I stopped” or “I did it for two days and then I stopped.” I was like, I just want you to be able to do this for a longer amount of time to actually notice the benefit where, “Cool, I actually committed to this and I did it for two weeks or a month or whatever, to really give this a chance.”
And especially with the exercise piece, this is the one that I think improves the quickest and is the easiest to adjust to, even though every person that I tell that to looks at me like I’ve got two heads. It’s like, “I cannot believe that. This is the thing that is the most difficult, the most scary for me” – and yet, of all the things, it changes the quickest.
In your book, you’d be like, “I did it for two days” and I was like, oh, please, just longer, just so that you can get to experience this change. There can be so much debate about, do we do things gradually? Do we go all-in? I think shades of grey with this stuff, and context matters and all of those things. And I want someone to make a change that is going to be meaningful. If you’re making changes that are so small for the amount of anxiety you’re going to create as part of that, you want there to be an upside. Taking one day off exercise, there just isn’t enough of an upside for that to occur.
So yeah, there were definitely times when reading it that there was that frustration of like, “I just wish…” But also, it’s so clear what an addiction this is. If you substituted the word ‘heroin’ for the word ‘walking’, everything you were describing would still make complete sense. So it was so obvious how compulsive this is. As frustrated as I was, I also could tell how hard this really was for you to make that change.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah. The idea of all the terrible things that might happen is so much worse than actually just trying it, because it’s fine. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: I think what I often hear is “But if I do that, I will gain weight, and that is the thing I’m most frightened of.” It’s like, that’s actually not the thing you’re most frightened of. The thing you’re most frightened of is “I’m going to gain weight and then XYZ is going to happen.” Or “I’m not going to be able to cope with that.” It’s not the weight gain in a vacuum; it’s that “I won’t be able to tolerate the discomfort and I won’t be able to cope or my life’s going to fall apart” and all of that. That’s just actually not true.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah, and I finally did come to that conclusion in the book – I mean, in life and in the book. That actually was exactly that. It wasn’t weight gain; it was this idea of this terrible thing happening in conjunction with weight gain. Obviously doesn’t happen, because when you gain weight, actually your brain starts working a little bit better. And then all the other things are easy.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. And I don’t want to sugarcoat it where everything gets amazing and it’s great. There can be definite downsides. People can be assholes. People can make comments. There can definitely be things that happen that we would put in the ‘this is a negative associated with this thing’. There are all of these other benefits that then do occur at the same time.
So it’s being able to hold two things to be true at the same time. Yeah, there can be some uncomfortableness, or there can be things that happen that are not great connected to this thing, and there can also be this huge benefit that I get for doing this thing.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah, like your life. Like all of the things.
00:49:50
Chris Sandel: So then calorie counting was another one that was a really big thing for you. What did you do in terms of changing that, and what would you do differently if you had your time over again?
Sheri Segal Glick: I started calorie counting when I was really young. I started in the seventh grade. I talk about this in the book. My teacher gave us this handout, and we had to figure out the number of calories we’d eaten the day before. This was the first time that I understood that what I was eating could somehow be measured. He’d given us this limit of maximum of what was too much and what was too little and what was the exact right amount.
Even though I can’t remember why I opened Google 5 minutes ago, I can remember the number of calories I ate that day. That became my first caloric maximum, and that was the day I started counting calories. It had been so long that I’d been counting calories that I actually thought I’d never be able to stop. I’ve never experienced OCD, but to my mind, that’s probably what OCD feels like. It was numbers being thrust at me all day long. I was adding them and re-adding them and re-adding them. Even my high school notebooks that my parents gave me back had all these columns of calories written in the margins.
So the idea of stopping was unfathomable to me, and yet I knew how badly I wanted to stop. I couldn’t reconcile these things. So the first thing that my coach and I started doing – because I was counting calories, I was doing it for a reason, and that was because I had caloric maximums for each meal. We made my maximums into minimums and made my maximums much higher. Then all of a sudden I had so much more room that it was less important that I counted because my threshold was so much bigger. I don’t know if I’m explaining this in a way that makes sense.
I also started eating more uncountable things. I went to the salad bar at Whole Foods and got things like marinated mushroom caps. Like, who knows how many calories? Things I just couldn’t count or would have to work really hard to count. Meals with little components in them. Just not letting myself tally things up. I remember reciting the alphabet backwards. One day I was like, “I’m just going to count the colours of the things I ate!” It was a little bit mind-numbing. It was really difficult. And I was working on it for quite some time, and some days were harder than others.
I talk about this in the book – there was a weekend that I went away and I was hanging out with a friend of mine and we were having dinner. At the end of the evening, I realised that I hadn’t tallied up my calories that day. I thought, “What?” And then of course, I had this urge to tally them up right away, and I wouldn’t let myself do it. I was like, “I’m not going to write this down for the weekend. No matter how hard it feels, I’m not going to add them up this weekend, and then when I get home, if I still need to add them up on Monday, I’ll just remember everything I ate over the weekend and I’ll delay it.”
I got home and I was like, “I’m going to keep this streak going.” And it worked. That’s what I did. I just kept delaying it and delaying it and delaying it until I was able to just not do it. I think part of it was also that my weight was a little bit higher. It was probably easier to ignore the noise. But I also think that all of that practice of eating the uncountable things and having these higher thresholds where I wasn’t trying to fit a certain amount of food into a certain meal really, really paid off.
I know that this is the most trite thing I can say, but if I can do it, anyone can do it. I remember I used to see these posts once in a while on Instagram like, “How I stopped counting calories.” I’d be like, ugh, eye roll. Because I thought, “I will never be able to stop.” And I stopped. I’m so pleased that I was able to stop. It’s been a really, really meaningful change.
Chris Sandel: Nice. You said something there that really stood out. You said, “Because I’d gained weight, the noise had decreased, and that allowed me to stop calories, or at least in part.” I think for most people hearing that, they would think it would be the other way around. When I say most people hearing that, people who are stuck in the eating disorder would think it’d be the other way around. “When the weight comes down, then I’ll have more freedom, then I’ll have more space, then the calorie counting can stop because I’ve got this buffer” or whatever it may be.
But actually, that just makes it worse and worse and worse. And as you experienced, actually by gaining weight, that was the thing that did allow the noise to start to dampen down and did give you more of the space to be able to do this. I wanted to point that out because I think this is not how most people think it’s going to work.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah, I agree. I’m not sure at the beginning of recovery, if somebody had said that to me, I would’ve – but also, I highly recommend stopping counting calories. It just makes everything so much easier. Five stars, would recommend.
Chris Sandel: Totally. There are definitely those kinds of things. I think the same about calorie counting, I think the same thing about weighing. With everything, there is nuance. Do I think every single time, it has to happen? No. There are definitely clients I’ve worked with where we used their calorie counting to be the thing that helped to bring the amount of food up that they were eating, and we used it in that way until we got to a point where they were better able to stop doing it. So I’m always trying to not get into the ‘never’ and ‘always’ type categories.
Sheri Segal Glick: Sure.
Chris Sandel: There are definitely some shades of grey. But the vast, vast majority of the time, it’s actually not helping someone. If you can steer that ship to be like “This is now in service of my recovery”, great. Most people aren’t able to do that.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah, and I think ultimately you know if you’re restricting, you don’t need to count calories to know that.
The other things I forgot to mention that I did were change – I obviously stopped weighing and measuring things, but I also changed the bowls I was using. I think if you’re someone who counts calories, you can also eyeball things really, really, really well. So if you change bowls and plates and cups, that makes it a little bit harder.
And I stopped looking things up. I’d agreed with my coach that every time I looked something up, I would donate money to SeaWorld. I think SeaWorld is terrible, so I had a real disincentive, because I really didn’t want to donate money to them. [laughs] I don’t think the way they treat the animals is very nice. So that also worked for me, because I was like, “I do not want to give these people any money.”
Chris Sandel: I like that as an approach. I had a call with a client last week, and so often the problem with being in an eating disorder is you have acclimatized to the status quo, so you doing another day that is the same as yesterday – there’s not a lot of downside. Yeah, there’s a lot of downside when we’re thinking about “Where do you want your life to be in five years?” or “What do you really want to be doing with your life?”, but in the day to day, at the point of making that choice of “What am I going to eat at this meal?” or “Am I actually going to go out for this walk?”, it can be really hard to recognise “There’s a downside to me continuing to do this” because you’re just so accustomed to it.
So trying to figure out ways of like, “How do I create some pain point that is connected to this?” I did the same thing in terms of writing a check. I was like, “Think of the organisation or the person that you most despise, and let’s write a big-ass check. You’re writing it out now, and you’re writing it down and you’re putting your goals on there. So now the fact that you didn’t have your morning snack or whatever isn’t just a ‘doesn’t matter’. You’re going to be mailing a really big check to someone.”
And look, someone has to get on board with that and be like, “Cool, I want this layer of accountability. I’m going to do it.” But I do think it’s a nice psychological way of starting to shift something so that there is this new pain with doing something that wasn’t there only a day ago.
Sheri Segal Glick: Right.
00:57:42
Chris Sandel: In terms of your different treatments – you’d gone to different treatments, you’d worked with different coaches, you’d worked with different therapists – I’d love to find out from you what you think are some of the things that (a) people get wrong and we should do away with doing that thing, we should never be doing it again, or (b) the things that are really helpful and you think are really crucial and every coach or every therapist or every treatment centre should be doing. Again, I shouldn’t be using the word ‘every’, but we would like to suggest in stronger terms.
Sheri Segal Glick: I think the things that I found the worst are when a programme feels – and I’m saying this with a programme because I haven’t had this experience with a coach, but when I did a day hospital programme, and also when I was obviously hospitalised as a teenager, I think this very punishing behaviour modification protocol, or where it feels very adversarial, or you feel like you can’t be honest with the treatment team – I think that is the absolute worst approach possible. I think that nobody gets better when there is not some kind of feeling of mutual respect and when you can’t be honest with the people around you. I don’t understand the point.
And then I think also in these programmes, a lot of the time there’ll be some kind of goal weight. I also think that a lot of the time these goal weights are set too low, because they look at the BMI and they choose the bottom of the curve. Obviously, the problem with having that is that you get to your goal weight – you’re not recovered. You’re on your way to recovery, but you think, “Okay, I weigh X amount of pounds now, so obviously I’m recovered, and I’ve got to do everything I can to stay at this weight.”
That can also be very, very damaging, especially if at that point you’re thrown out of the programme. They’re like, “Okay, good luck and goodbye!” I use the analogy in the book of taking off the cast before your bone is healed. Let’s say you have a broken leg and they take off the cast. Either you’re going to end up limping for the rest of your life or re-breaking the bone if you don’t get to a place where you really are fully recovered.
They can’t just randomly choose a weight and tell you that’s the weight you’re going to be recovered at. So I think a lot of these goal weights can actually be very, very damaging.
Chris Sandel: I 100% agree with you on that. I think the added one that I would also add connected to that is you get to your goal weight, you recognise “I’m still having all of these same thoughts, I still have all of these same struggles, and now I’m just in a bigger body. What is the point of all this? If this is what full recovery is, or this is as good as it’s going to get, why would I do this?”
People then completely regress – and it makes sense. They then go back to what they were doing, because there’s this false idea of “That’s what I’ve got to live with for the rest of my life.” I think that’s, for me, as well the most damaging point, because people don’t get to experience the magic that is waiting on the other side of that.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah. I also think that for some people, this idea of harm reduction is all they’re looking for. For me personally, that’s not enough. I think if you’re somebody who wants to fully recover, you need to have a provider who believes in full recovery. Who isn’t going to be like, “Okay, good enough. It’s okay, you’re good enough.” I don’t think that’s enough. I think you need somebody who believes in better for you, who can remind you that you can have more.
And similarly, there was a time that I was seeing a psychologist, very briefly, and any time that I failed at something, she would say, “Oh, it’s not your fault. It’s okay. It’s not your fault.” Of course it was my fault. [laughs] She’d be like, “Oh, it’s your illness. It’s okay.” But no, I had to take some responsibility.
For me personally, I need to feel empowered to know that – because I think if there’s too much of this “It’s not your fault, you had no choice”, that can really become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have to have some agency and know that you can make these things different and better, but you actually have to do the things. For me personally, those were the things that I found both the most helpful and also, conversely, the least helpful.
Chris Sandel: Just touching on that last one, you can have huge amounts of compassion with someone and also figure out, how do you hold yourself accountable, what are the things we need to do to prepare so you can fulfil that goal? We can do all the planning piece around it and analyse it; we don’t have to make you feel terrible because you weren’t able to do it – and we can also say, “Yeah, any person who’s been able to recover has done this thing. Let’s figure out, what are they doing differently than you did? Or if you were to do this again, what would you do differently?”
There’s all these questions we can ask, and ask in a curious way, like “If we were to run an experiment, what would be some of the things?” You can do it in that way where it’s not about shaming someone, but by being able to say “You definitely can do this.” And I’m a full advocate of full recovery. I’m on board with the fact that everyone can get there. It’s not necessarily easy, but everyone can get there. It’s just a matter of doing the things and you will get there.
So I want to be the one that is able to say, “Even when you don’t believe it, I 100% believe it, and it’s not just me making this up to make you feel better. I genuinely believe that you have the capacity to do this. I believe that you can tolerate this discomfort. I believe that you’re able to pass through this.” All of the things. So yeah, I totally agree with you on that.
Sheri Segal Glick: That’s so meaningful, yeah, just having somebody who believes in you.
Chris Sandel: And even the first one you mentioned in terms of the honesty piece. This is one of the things – again, heartbreaking when I read your book, with times where you could see that you’re not going to be honest with this person, you’re not going to be honest with this programme. We’re creating an environment where it disincentivizes you to be honest. And that’s not a great situation to be in.
I want someone to be able to come to me like, “Hey, I know we agreed on this goal, and I didn’t do it.” “Thank you for telling me. Let’s explore this” as opposed to them feeling like they need to tell me that they’ve done this thing that they haven’t. Because no-one wins in that situation. So I want to have it be that we’re going to look at accountability, but also, let’s be able to be fully transparent and honest about what’s going on so that we can look into what would actually help you here.
Sheri Segal Glick: That’s so meaningful. In the book I talk about the stay hospital programme that I did, and they had a no exercise policy. At the time, I was still exercising. I told them, and they kicked me out of the programme. I remember having this thought like, “Should I have not told them? Was I a dumb-dumb for telling them?” But when I actually thought about it, no, because to what end? If you’re lying about one thing, what stops you from lying about something else? Then you’re just wasting everybody’s time. So ultimately, that was a really good sign for me that it wasn’t the right place.
Chris Sandel: Are there any other things that come to mind in terms of things that have been really helpful with different coaches or therapists that you’ve worked with?
Sheri Segal Glick: I think probably all of the things we’ve touched on. Being able to be honest is really, really important. Somebody who believes in you and believes in your full recovery is really, really important. I think somebody who – for me personally, again, I needed somebody who was willing to remind me that there was more. For me, I didn’t want somebody who was going to allow me to settle. So all of these things feel like the most important things. If I think of anything else, I’ll interrupt whatever you’re saying. I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, this one! I forgot!” [laughs] Because I’m sure there’s something else.
01:05:22
Chris Sandel: Sure. In the book, you say the two most important things in recovery are commitment and sitting with discomfort. Talk about this. I’m in agreement with you, but expand on this for us.
Sheri Segal Glick: Commitment in my mind is entering into a binding contract with yourself that sets out that no matter how yell-y your eating disorder gets, you’re not going to quit. It’s knowing that you’re entering this thing consciously and purposefully because you believe that you can recover and that things are going to be different and better, so you are not going to let your eating disorder hijack your plan.
But this goes hand in hand with this idea of being able to sit through discomfort, because obviously the reason your eating disorder is so yell-y is because you have to do these very uncomfortable things over and over and over, until they feel normal and natural and eventually easy and pleasant. I think it’s human nature, or as sentient beings, to want to stop doing the thing that makes us feel uncomfortable. So it’s changing your relationship with this idea of discomfort and understanding that these uncomfortable feelings are actually a sign of healing, and that with repetition, neural pathways will rewire and these things will feel easy and natural.
I also think it’s worth keeping in mind that objectively speaking, the things we do in eating disorders – like ignoring pain signals and ignoring hunger cues and being cold and being isolated – all of these things are objectively so much more uncomfortable than recovery. It’s also worth remembering that being in an eating disorder for the rest of your life is so much more uncomfortable and so much more permanent than recovery.
So that’s why I think those are such important pieces. I hadn’t really grasped them at the beginning of my recovery, but when it clicked I was like, “Oh, right.”
Chris Sandel: These are two big things that I work on a lot. In terms of the way that I typically work with clients, we’ll have the session and as part of the session we’ll figure out what is the goal or goals for the next week or two weeks or however long it is between us having calls, and the thing I always say with the goals is, have these be non-negotiables. This isn’t a suggestion or “Maybe it’d be nice if this happened” or “We’ll see what happens on the day and then we’ll possibly figure it out.”
It’s saying, “These are non-negotiables, and if this is a non-negotiable, what has to happen for you to go ahead with that goal? Do I need to prepare things in advance? Do I need to go to the shops? Do I need to pin something on the fridge? What do I have to do to make this a non-negotiable?” Because I think when you are having that type of relationship to the goals, things really change. Because you’re not then in appeasement mode, you’re not in negotiation mode. You’re just like, “No, this is the thing that I’m doing.”
So even when the eating disorder thoughts come up, it’s like, one, I don’t even have to entertain this because this thing is a non-negotiable and I said I’m going to do it, and two, I’m not then trying to decide in the moment. This has already been decided. I’m here and now; all I have to do is do the thing that I said I was going to do. I’m not minimising how hard that is, but I’m not adding on this layer of decision in this moment.
It changes the way that someone relates to that goal. The difference between that and the indecision and “Maybe I’ll see, I’m not sure about it” – it has a very different outcome.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yes, absolutely.
Chris Sandel: And the sitting with discomfort piece, I think that is so much of what recovery is about. And for so many people, that’s also what the eating disorder was about. In the beginning there can be this discomfort of feelings, and “This is the way I cope.” And I very much think of eating disorders as being anxiety disorders, and anxiety disorders are about avoidance. So it’s the avoidance of these things. It could be avoidance of specific events, it could be avoidance of uncomfortable feelings or thoughts or whatever it may be.
The remedy for that is then exposure. It’s doing the thing again and again and again until I get more comfortable and used to doing this thing, until it gets to a point where this thing’s now no longer uncomfortable for me.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah.
01:09:40
Chris Sandel: One of the things that I think has made your recovery more difficult – and you talk about this in the book – is that some of your family members run a weight loss company. Talk about this. Obviously, there was some of this that already came up with your mum and your parents and some of the comments that they’d made. So talk a little about this and how that had an impact on your recovery.
Sheri Segal Glick: I don’t want to make this sound like a weird ’90s talk show, but my brother and my brother-in-law and my ex-boyfriend that I’d been dating for four years, right after we broke up, opened this weight loss company. Initially, I was so mad and I was so hurt for a myriad of reasons – because it’s also not fun to have your family go into business with your ex. I was also just so frustrated and disappointed every time diet talk came up at the dinner table when we were at my parents’ house. It was a really hard time for me.
I had to make a decision that I was not – the same kind of decision I make when somebody is talking to me about their juice fast or their intermittent fasting or their carb-free diet. It is not what I want for myself. Like, no thank you, juice diet. And it’s the same as their businesses.
I think this is something that actually applies to all of us – hopefully most people’s families aren’t going to go into the diet business, but I think in the broader sense, we’re surrounded by diet chatter all the time. So recovery can feel very, very counterculture. I think it’s worth remembering that anyone who’s in recovery has tried restriction. They’ve tried tracking their food. These things did not lead to happiness; in fact, they probably led to a whole bunch of very unhappy things, or devastating things. And we consciously chose that this is not what we wanted.
I think it’s certainly worth remembering when my brother talked about his calorie counting app or his business or whatever, that I tried that. I did not like that for myself, and I don’t want that for any of my loved ones. I think it’s kind of the same thing.
Now it’s like if they owned, I don’t know, a store that sold like pythons or motorcycles. These are not things that I find safe or enjoyable. I wouldn’t shop there. It doesn’t really affect my life at this point because these are things I know I don’t want for myself.
Chris Sandel: I think that’s a transition period, because I think what often happens in the beginning – what can be so triggering connected to that is like, “This is unfair. Why do those other people get to do these things that I don’t get to do? Why do I have to be the one that misses out? It’s unfair that I can’t calorie count, or it’s unfair that I can’t go to that spin class” or whatever it may be. It’s like, “This feels like something that is being taken away from me, and every time it gets mentioned, I’m pissed. I am pissed that other people get to do this.”
I think at some point in your recovery, that transitions to what you’re describing there of like, “I’m actually no longer annoyed about the fact that I don’t get to do it. This is a pretty inane conversation and I don’t want to be part of it, but it’s not that I feel like I’m missing out.” And often you then get to even a further stage of like, “I have a huge amount of empathy or compassion for that person, because wow, I do not want to be back there. I am so grateful that I’m now not the one who’s buying the low-carb bread, or I’m not the one who’s doing this thing and that thing.”
So it goes from this place of real envy and annoyance that “other people get to do this and I can’t” to “thank God that is not me anymore, and I’m so happy that that isn’t how I’m spending my life.”
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah, 100%. And there are certain things about these businesses that I think – they remind me too much of my eating disorder voice, and I was really worried about that happening to other people, because I feel like once you turn that noise on, you can’t really turn it off. But also, I just had to be like, “This is none of my business. I have to stay out of this and just do what I think is right for me.”
Similarly, I have a friend who’s doing a half-marathon next week. There’s a big race weekend here, and I remember the first time the race weekend happened after I stopped doing cardio, I felt really sorry for myself that I couldn’t watch it and I couldn’t think about it. Then the other day she was telling me that she’s doing this half-marathon and I was like, “Oh, I’ll come cheer you on.” I was thinking to myself, “Thank God I don’t have to do it. I’ll hold a freaking sign, but I’m so happy not to be running in that stupid thing.” [laughs]
It was a real change, and a relief that I had absolutely no feeling of like “I’d like to join in.” No, sounds terrible. It sounds horrible. I’m just going to be sore the next day and it’s going to be really hot and muggy out because it always is. But I’m happy to go cheer her on. [laughs] And I hope it goes great for her.
Chris Sandel: I think that’s a really good shift that you can then notice between, “When this event happens or when this comment is made or when I read this article or when someone sends me this email, what happens to me?” This can then be a really good indicator of, “Where am I in my recovery?” If someone was like, “I’m doing really well, I’m great” and then this happens – okay, this is probably an indication that there’s still some work to be done because this thing has set you off again.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah.
01:15:06
Chris Sandel: One of the things that is very apparent in the book, and apparent now talking to you, is humour, and that humour is an important thing in your life. Obviously it’s an important thing woven through the book. So when you wrote the book, was there this real conscious “I’m going to make this funny”? Or how did that come about?
Sheri Segal Glick: First of all, I don’t think the world needed another sad, maudlin, depressing recovery memoir, and I didn’t want to be the person to put that in the world. I think really important things can be said with humour. I didn’t only want it to be the kind of book that I would want to read, but it had to be the kind of book that I would want to write, and I think I would’ve found it really difficult to write a book that didn’t have any humour in it, because humour is just the way I move in the world. It’s what I use when I’m in tense moments, or when I don’t have anything smart to say, or in stressful times. It’s just the way I communicate.
So it was very natural for me to write a book with humour, and it would’ve felt very unnatural – I would’ve had to sit there every night and pull out all the jokes because it would’ve been really hard for me.
And then the other piece is just I wanted it to be a book that not just people in recovery or people who were contemplating recovery or people who worked with people in recovery would pick up. I wanted it to maybe appeal to people who were in diet culture, who yo-yo dieted or who had a mother who yo-yo dieted. So I thought that would make it more, I don’t know, palatable – no pun intended – to people, or digestible, if there were some lighter moments in the book as well.
Chris Sandel: I definitely thought that as I read through it, like, this isn’t dry, this is something that someone who only has a passing interest – interest might not be the right word, but I don’t have to be someone who spends my life in the eating disorder community that makes me want to read this book. It does open up to a wider group of people who could get into the book.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah.
Chris Sandel: In terms of the humour piece, what did you notice happen in terms of your sense of humour or your ability to laugh and all of that as you went through recovery? Because one of the things I’ve noticed is that this is a real common thing that people will say to me, like “As I’ve got better, I started telling more jokes again or I’m laughing more.” This can often be an indicator of progression in recovery. Was this something that ever went away for you, or it was always there? Did it get stronger? What happened?
Sheri Segal Glick: I think it was always there. I don’t think that that ever changed for me. I think humour has always been a coping mechanism that I’ve used. Not an unhealthy one. So yeah, I think that’s an inherent part of my personality. Take it or leave it. [laughs] That’s all I know how to do.
Chris Sandel: I wonder if therapists have ever used it as “Is this the way you deflect? Can we have some honest conversations?” Getting into that stuff, I can imagine, could come up.
Sheri Segal Glick: Absolutely. Or like “Stop being funny.” “Oh, okay, for sure.” Because I think it is very, very easy to use humour instead of talking about feelings, and that’s something that I’ve definitely had to work on. Yeah, for sure.
01:18:19
Chris Sandel: What about in terms of your own parenting? Having the eating disorder, what you’ve been through, how has this impacted upon your parenting? This can be connected to the way you talk about bodies or food, but it could just be more generally, “This had this impact in terms of how I talk about emotions” or whatever it may be.
Sheri Segal Glick: I think – actually, I know – that I am a lot more careful when I talk about food and bodies than anyone else I’ve ever come across because of my own experiences growing up. Eating disorders are genetic. I worry about my children a lot, as any parent does. I worry about all of the things about my children, not just related to that, about all of the things. So I’m so careful to only talk about bodies in terms of what they can do.
Even compliments. Because I think everyone understands not to tell their kids negative things. Nobody’s going to say to their kid, “Oh, you’re looking a little chubby.” People know not to say that. But what people don’t know, necessarily, is not to constantly compliment their kids for their appearance either, because if you do that, then your kids are going to think that is the most valuable thing about them.
So I’m also really careful and mindful about not constantly telling my children how pretty I think they are or attractive. I mean, not that I never compliment them, because of course I do, but I try to make the compliments just as many about how strong they are and how funny they are – because they are funny, thank goodness, because nobody wants to fake laugh in their own house for years – and how smart they are and how hardworking they are. I think these are all things that are so meaningful.
And then around food, not labelling things good and bad. My daughters have different body types from my son, and they’re also way more active than my son is – and treating them all the same. All of them the same, all the time. My youngest will come home from playing soccer, my middle one will come home from playing baseball, and my son will be lying in his bed all day, but all three of them get ice cream. These are things that are just non-negotiable for me.
Again, I’m sure I’m screwing them up in many, many, many ways, but hopefully not food and bodies. I think that I work really hard to be really careful about that stuff.
Chris Sandel: Having the experience that you did, both with the eating disorder but also the upbringing that you had, yeah, I can understand why you’re like, hey, I want to do something really differently. Especially where there would be – and I know other clients that I’ve worked with who have kids and their greatest fear is that they’re going to end up with this thing. And when they know about the genetic component, they’re just so worried that something could happen. So I really want to do things differently.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah. The other important piece I actually forgot and I’m going to mention now is that I also never, never, ever, ever do I ever criticise my own body. Ever. Like, not a word. And my youngest daughter, my nine-year-old, thinks telling someone they have a big booty is the biggest compliment she could possibly give you. So she’s constantly like, “Mummy, you have such a juicy booty” and I’m like, “Thank you, thank you.” [laughs] Or she’ll touch my tummy and be like, “Oh, so nice and soft” and I’ll be like, “Thank you.”
Or I never say things like, “I went for a walk so I deserve this muffin.” Nothing ever. And my husband also knows not to say these things, I think because not only what we say to our kids, but what we say about ourselves and to each other is also – kids hear everything, especially the things that you don’t want them to hear. So I think that’s also something that I’ve been really careful about.
Chris Sandel: There was a point in the book where you mentioned that your son noticed your changing body and really commented on this. Talk about what that was like and how you reacted in that moment.
Sheri Segal Glick: That was a difficult moment for me. I was upstairs; I was blow-drying my hair, and I was in my bra and underwear. I hadn’t gotten dressed yet, and he was yelling at me from downstairs. It was right before school. He was like, “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom!” So I came running downstairs. My husband was standing right there. Apparently whatever it was, was invisible to him. I hand my son the thing, and I’m walking back up the stairs, and he says, “Mummy?” I turn and I think, “This is the moment where he’s going to thank me, like I’ve read about and seen on TV shows.” Then he says, “Mummy, no offense, but you’re gaining weight.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. I rushed back up the stairs, because I knew that I’d gained weight, but I didn’t know that other people could see it. And this kid is oblivious. He notices nothing. Like, I could replace one of his sisters with a stunt double and he wouldn’t notice. I could replace our cat with a hamster and I’d be like, “Oh yeah, we’ve always had a hamster” and he’d be like, “Okay.” So the fact that he’d noticed that I’d gained weight was, in that moment, just so – I didn’t know what to do with it, because here is the least perceptive person in the world noticing that I’ve gained weight. Who else has noticed? And do I want to keep going? Is this worth it?
I really had to think about it. And ultimately, obviously, I decided that it was worth it and that I would keep going. But there was a moment that I really had to evaluate whether it was worth it. And it was, and I’m happy to say that I kept going – that if my son had noticed that I gained weight, it was probably a good lesson for him to show him that normal bodies change. We don’t stay the same for our whole lives.
But there really was this moment where I had to think, “If people notice my body changing, is that worth continuing this thing that I’m doing?” And I had a couple of days where I thought, “You know, I’m done. Forget it. I’m done.” Like you said earlier, you can’t unsee it, so I realised in those couple of days where I was on the cusp that I would not feel happy, and I would feel like I was missing something, if I didn’t finish what I’d started.
Chris Sandel: So much of life is, what is the meaning that we attach to a particular event or a particular situation? I’m glad that you were able to recognise, “Actually, this is something that I do want. I do want to be fully recovered, and I do want to keep moving forward with this thing.” Because the reality is, if you don’t do that, you go back to your eating disorder and you get all of the things that then happen because of that.
The thing I always think about is life is not a game of charades. You can go back to pretending and no-one recognising, but you’re then the one who’s having to put up with all of that stuff every single day. You’re the one who’s having to do all the compulsive walking or do the weighing or do all of these different things. No-one else is having to deal with that.
And when you’re balancing that ledger of ‘he noticed’ – yeah, he noticed, and he probably noticed the fact that Mum’s also joining us for dinner in a way that she hadn’t done before, or that Mum’s having ice cream in a way she hadn’t done before, or “Hey, we’re getting to go on a trip.” There are all these other things that he, despite his blissful unawareness to so much of life, would be able to notice. I think so often, when we’re evaluating things, it’s in this very one-dimensional way as opposed to, let’s bring in all of the components here and really tally up the balance sheet as opposed to missing the forest for the trees.
Sheri Segal Glick: Even when I had this moment of “Forget it, I quit, this is too hard” – it was very quick that I realised that it was actually much harder to go back. It was much, much, much harder than continuing to do the things that were actually really much pro recovery, but also pro my life, like actually living in the world.
01:26:10
Chris Sandel: The final thing I want to mention is one of the quotes from the book that stood out that I actually shared with a number of clients, and it really hit home. “With an eating disorder, the days are long but the years are short.” I’m maybe paraphrasing that a little bit, but I think this is something that is so true. Every day feels like this endless grind, and then you blink and it’s like, “Where did the last five years go?”
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah.
Chris Sandel: That is so true for so many people.
Sheri Segal Glick: Yeah, 100%, and I use it in the context of that’s what people say about parenting. Especially when you have children, you blink and you’re like, “Oh, my infant is a 12-year-old now. What? What happened? How did that happen?” When you have these living, growing things in your house, you notice the years passing. There’s evidence. But when you’re in an eating disorder, maybe you don’t notice, and then you look back and it’s been 20 years. The days and weeks and months all blur together unless you get out of it.
Chris Sandel: Totally. Thank you so much for coming on the show. People can get the book – Amazon. Wherever you get your books, you can get it. It’s called The Skinny: My Messy, Hopeful Fight for Full Recovery From Anorexia. Thank you for your time, Sheri.
Sheri Segal Glick: Thank you for having me.
Chris Sandel: So that was my conversation with Sheri Segal Glick. If you enjoyed it, then I recommend checking out her book, The Skinny: My Messy, Hopeful Fight for Full Recovery From Anorexia. As I said at the start, it’s a real warts-and-all memoir, and it gives a good insight into what recovery can look like. Now, I don’t think it necessarily has to take this long, and there are things that can be done to speed up the process, but if you are used to reading or hearing recovery accounts that are very linear, then this is very much an antidote to that.
As I mentioned at the top, I am taking on clients at the moment. If you are sick and tired of living with an eating disorder and really just want to get to a place of full recovery and want to be done with living the life that you are or living the half-life that you are, I would love to help. Simply send an email to info@seven-health.com and include the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I’ll send over details of how we can get started, how we can have a discovery call to figure out if we are a good fit for one another, and how you can get on the road to reaching that place of full recovery.
So that is it for this week’s show. I will catch you again next week with another episode. Take care of yourself, and I’ll see you then.
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I found episode 298 especially helpful (though in truth I find all the episodes helpful!). I was particularly drawn to this one because it reflects my situation exactly. I had anorexia in my late teens/early twenties, then believed myself to have recovered. I was at a “healthy” (ish) weight. However, it took significant restriction (calorie counting) and daily exercise to maintain this and I was always afraid of gaining. Five years ago I had a medical issue (fortunately, everything turned out fine) which caused me to lose weight unintentionally. And, surprise, surprise, as I became healthier again I did not want to gain weight, so restricted even more. As I began to recognize that I had relapsed, I began to listen to podcasts about eating disorders/recovery and was startled to realize that I had only been in “partial recovery” all those years (nearly 50). I embarked on recovery a year ago and have been doing quite well. I wonder how many of us there are out there!