291: Recovery Even During The Most Difficult Of Circumstances With Kate Ely

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 291 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/291.

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 people to fully recover.

Now, before I get started with today’s episode, I have an announcement to make. I’m currently hosting a free 3-part live training series. It’s called How to Fully Recover From an Eating Disorder. At the time that this episode is going to air, the first two trainings will have already happened, but there is still one more training to go on Thursday the 15th. If you missed the first two trainings, that’s completely fine. If you sign up, you can catch a replay of these, and then you can join for the final live call, or you can catch the replay of that as well.

I’ve already received some lovely messages from people attending the training – things like “Can’t thank you enough for this webinar. It was informing, enlightening, encouraging, and inspiring”; “Thank you. You brought everything together accurately and succinctly. Thank goodness, at last.”

I did a similar training back in September last year, and one of the standout messages I got back then was: “I want to thank you for taking the time to create these three trainings. They’re probably the most helpful 5-½ hours I’ve ever had in recovery, and I’ve been at this nearly three decades. After many inpatient, residential, PHP, and IOP stays, this is invaluable information that is tangible, doable, and understandable. I’ve never met someone to have such an insight into eating disorders that hasn’t had one themselves. Thank you again. I really appreciate you.”

I’ve been working with clients for over 15 years now, and I’ve put a ton of time and effort into this free training because I know the difference that it can make in people’s lives. And as you can hear from the comments, people are really loving it. So if you would like to be part of it, you can go to the show notes, www.seven-health.com/291, and if you go to that page, you can then find the link to register.

Now, on to today’s show. It’s actually another interview with a past client. This time, it is Kate Ely, who is a past client of mine – and boy, is this an episode. I worked with Kate back in 2018, and we worked together for about a year or so. At the time that we finished up working together, Kate was in a much better place but still had work to do. We continued to be in correspondence over the years and had some further support calls as Kate continued to persevere in her recovery, and today she is fully recovered and is now helping others to do the same.

Now, when I worked with Kate, I knew some of her history with her family and some of the struggles that she had gone through, but I did not know the full extent of the story that Kate shares during this episode, and I don’t think that it’s hyperbole to say that she had a hellish decade and went through things that I would never wish on anybody.

I talk a lot about resilience when it comes to recovery, and I think that Kate just exudes this. Now, it’s not like there weren’t times that she ran towards her eating disorder. As she describes, it was clearly a coping mechanism. But with her, she kept coming back to the realisation that this is not how she wants to spend her life – that she wants more than this.

As part of this episode, we talk about how Kate’s eating disorder began, and while there were many factors that led up to it, it was really a mean comment by Kate’s mum that got her going downhill. We talk about Kate’s family and the many issues she had to endure – for example, having to take her dad to court while she was still a teenager, having to defend herself while her dad hired a fancy lawyer. And this isn’t the half of it.

We go through Kate’s different attempts at recovery and how things were at their absolute worst when she got in touch with me; how Kate was able to make changes to her food and her exercise and what this looked like in her recovery; Kate’s fear of ‘unhealthy’ and being unhealthy and how her eating disorder shapeshifted between anorexia and orthorexia; and then Kate’s work as a recovery coach and how she ended up in this place over many years, not wanting to jeopardize her own recovery and wanting to only work with people when she was in a place where she’s ready.

I was a really big fan of Kate before we recorded this, but I now have a whole new level of respect for her and what she’s gone through. She is such a great example of what’s possible in recovery and how much life can be better when you’re out the other side. We don’t talk about it during the interview, but Kate has been helping out as part of my The Fundamentals of Full Recovery programme. Kate ran many of the meal support calls last time, and for this next round will be doing the same, as well as being a coach to those who want 1:1 support and running some of the live calls.

As you hear from this episode, if anyone knows what it is like to recover, even during the most difficult of circumstances, it is Kate. So if you are part of the programme, you’ll be seeing and hearing a lot more from Kate, and if you want to be part of the programme, you can go to the show notes at www.seven-health.com/291, and there you can sign up to go on the waitlist. While you’re there, you can also sign up for the free live training that I’m currently doing.

Anyway, let’s get on with the interview. Here is my conversation with Kate Ely.

Hey, Kate. Thanks for joining me on the show today.

Kate Ely: Hey, Chris. I am so excited to be here today. I mean, I’m kind of in awe to be sitting here as a guest on the podcast that was such a catalyst for me and my own recovery. It’s just crazy how things work out and come full circle that we’re sitting here today.

Chris Sandel: Definitely. Thank you for saying that, and it’s incredible – I was looking back before this call of when you first reached out; it was back in 2018, so it’s been a long time that we’ve been in correspondence over all of these years.

00:06:25

How Kate’s eating disorder developed

I guess for listeners, do you want to start by telling them a little about how your eating disorder started?

Kate Ely: My eating disorder started when I had just turned 15. What really prompted it was me going on a diet, which I think is how it is for a lot of people. It was the first real diet I had gone on, and what prompted me going on that diet was my mom said a really cruel comment to me in front of the family. We were just sitting around, talking about getting clothes and shopping for the summer, and she said, laughing at me, “Are you really going to wear a bikini this summer?” And it was designed to be cruel. She was designing it to be cruel.

That was pretty typical behaviour from my mom. At that point growing up, my mom was kind of a cold person, struggled with a lot of her own mental health issues. A very dysfunctional person. Would have these moments where she would say cruel things about your body, about food, but also about other things – like anything, you name it. And because of a lot of her dysfunction, growing up and up until that point, she had weeks on end where she would lock herself in her bedroom and remove herself from the family or just stop talking to you for weeks, even if she was out in the house. She would just pretend you didn’t exist. And all of that got really bad the couple of years leading up to this comment when I was 15.

So at that point I was pretty used to surviving in that environment. I think as a kid, you get good at blocking those things out, finding ways to cope – maybe not the best ways, but you just do what you need to do to cope in those types of environments. So when my mom said that comment to me, I don’t remember feeling hurt, I don’t remember feeling connected to any emotion or thinking “Oh, she shouldn’t have said that, how mean” – which now as an adult looking back, I think, how cruel. How could you say that to your kid and try to mock them? But it didn’t really register at the time. I think I’d been so disconnected from my feelings because of all the dysfunction and trauma that was going on growing up. I just thought to myself, “Something’s wrong with me. I should go on a diet. I should lose some weight. That will fix this right up.”

So I went on a diet, and I had the genetics and temperament, obviously, for an eating disorder. So it turned into a full-blown eating disorder pretty quickly. But I also think the environment in my house, the culture we live in, the stage was being set long before. And with the environment in my house, when the eating disorder came in, it also started serving, I think, a bigger purpose of numbing, maybe dealing with emotions from everything going on in my family. It was very helpful at the time when it started and quickly turned into a way to cope for me as well, I think, and escape and distract from what was going on.

Chris Sandel: I’m so sorry your mum made that comment. As a parent hearing that – I mean, I don’t even need to be a parent to hear that and just be like, oh, that’s horrible. And I can imagine what it’s like, being such a vulnerable age, being a teenager – you’re already so insecure, you’re trying to find your way in the world. And to have a parent, someone who you think should be loving you unconditionally, make a comment like that, that’s really hard.

What I’m hearing in your story is so common, unfortunately, with many people that I see developing an eating disorder, of this really dysfunctional upbringing, parents with mental health issues. Yeah, very much, as you say, it being a coping mechanism.

00:10:05

Her relationship with food + body before the eating disorder

What was your relationship with food like with food before you started the eating disorder and before you started that first diet? And even what was your relationship like with your body? Had you internalised a lot of that stuff back then? Or it was more this was this real pivotal point?

Kate Ely: I think there was a lot of issues with food growing up in my house just because my parents were very authoritarian. We were a very ‘clear your plate’ family. I was forced to sit at the table and finish vegetables if I didn’t eat them, and they would save them till the morning and make me eat them cold if I didn’t eat them the night before. So I started developing strategies, even very young, of playing games with myself while eating dinner. Like, “Okay, if you have the things you hate first, then save the best thing for last.” I used to do that and be in my head, coming up with ways to make it easier. Or I would ask my sisters, “Who can eat their ice cream the slowest?” and would do that. Really weird – I feel like I had odd behaviours with food even as a young kid.

In my family, there was a lot of food and body comments. It was very clear that not eating a lot of food / being small was good, and eating more food and being in a larger body was considered bad. And a lot of that came from my mom, but my dad took part in it too. Throughout their marriage, my dad had gained weight, and my mom would openly express disgust for him and his body. She would say that to me and my sisters, which we really internalised. Of course, I’m like, “I don’t want to be someone who my mom sees like that.”

I was always seen as the small, petite kid, and my mom really put that on a pedestal, and my two sisters, always comparing us, and they were in slightly larger bodies. It was really detrimental to them, and it was also detrimental to me because I got a lot of my self-worth from that. Like, “Oh, Mom sees me as good because I’m small, I’m petite.” So that was obviously even more heart-wrenching when she made this comment. It was like, “Now I’m no longer good. I’m not small anymore.” And the crazy thing is, looking back, I was still in a very small, thin body. I just was going through puberty, so your body’s changing. For her to even make that comment was so uncalled for.

But I didn’t think about my body a lot growing up. It was always something I was conscious of, but because I fit that standard of small, petite, or I thought my body was good in a way growing up, I didn’t feel this pressure to change it until that comment was made. And once that comment was made, I was very self-conscious. That was the pivotal point of uncomfortable in my skin and feeling very self-conscious, wanting to change my body.

But I think the relationship with food and the complications with food started long before because of the way my parents were about it. Also, my mom was a role model wasn’t a very normal eater. She was very disordered. I wouldn’t say she had an eating disorder, but she was skipping meals or saving all her calories to have ice cream at the end of the day. These things were normalised. Or she’d make food for us but she wouldn’t be eating. So that stage was being set throughout my whole childhood, role modelling disordered relationships with food and bodies.

00:13:26

How her eating disorder progressed

Chris Sandel: Then what happened when your eating disorder started? I’m imagining with everything you’ve told me that there was praise that was then given to start with, where you’re now losing weight or your body’s changing, you’re now eating less food – which, as you said, your parents were very much in favour of. So what happened when it originally started?

Kate Ely: The crazy thing is, my parents didn’t really notice what was going on. We’d had gym memberships for a couple of years. Which, again, crazy. My mom got us gym memberships when I was in middle school. Nothing really changed from their perspective. They weren’t seeing that things were drastically different.

But what ended up happening was right after my eating disorder started, my parents separated and started going through a divorce. My dad moved out of the house and into his office next door. He owned a business and operated out of an office next door to our house, so he moved over there, and like I was saying, my mom was basically locking herself in her room for weeks at this point, months, barely interacting with us kids, me and my sisters. I was in high school at the time. They were just so consumed with themselves during that time, they really had no idea what was going on with any of us kids. So my eating disorder wasn’t paid attention to at that point.

My little sister did find my journal and see that I was putting things in there about calories, so she did go to my dad and was like, “I’m really worried that Kate has an eating disorder.” She went through that. But my dad sat me down and was like, “If you want to lose weight, you need to do it the healthy way.” That was about the most we talked about it at the time.

Chris Sandel: Wow. And were you seeing it as a problem? Because I can imagine, given everything you’re talking about in terms of your parents divorcing, your dad moving out, your mum not talking to you, all of these things going on, this is your way of coping. So when did you start to think maybe this is an issue?

Kate Ely: That’s really complicated because the disorder started when I was 15, and I didn’t work with you and fully recover until I was 25. A lot happened over those 10 years, and there were a lot of moments during those 10 years where I did think it was a problem. But a lot of things got in the way of me getting help and made it hard for me to get help, especially with the family things going on.

Pretty quickly I knew it was an eating disorder, I think, but because of all the turmoil going on in my life, it was just shoved to the side by everybody else, and I think that made me shove it to the side as well for a long time. What ended up happening was my parents got divorced and my mom ended up leaving the house and didn’t really tell anybody that she was moving out. Since then, I’ve had little to no contact with her, since she left when I was 17. My dad did not move back in the house. He stayed in his office next door and started dating someone and having this new life.

So me and my two sisters were just in the family house, cooking our food. I was in high school and working a part-time job, and I would come home and it’s not like I had a parent with dinner on the table for me. My older sister was there and grocery shopping, and thank goodness for her. She was in college at the time. But my little sister would be cooking the family meals.

And then when I was 18, my boyfriend at the time, when I was a senior in high school, was going through a lot of family turmoil. He’s now my husband, so we’ve been together for a long time. But he was going through similar family turmoil, and he ended up moving into the house with me and my two sisters. So I’m struggling with an eating disorder, I’m in high school, I’m working a part-time job, and I knew it was a problem, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I’m a kid.

Things really took a turn for the worse once I graduated high school. My older sister and dad had a falling out, so she left the house, and I became the mom of the house. I was starting community college, again, still working part-time, driving my little sister to and from school. I was also navigating living with my boyfriend, which was a lot when I was 18 and 19, and still struggling with an eating disorder. And the eating disorder started to get a lot worse. I think before that – I was always high-functioning during my eating disorder, but there were stages when it was a lot worse, and that was one of those moments where it really took a turn. I remember feeling really depressed, really anxious, struggling with a lot of digestive symptoms at the time and wondering what was going on. I started having a lot of OCD-like behaviours that were coming up.

My boyfriend was like, “Why don’t you go to therapy?”, because I was a wreck and struggling. He had been in therapy. In my family, therapy was not a thing we ever talked about; it wasn’t normalised. But for him, he’d been doing it for a couple years, so when he suggested it, I was like, “Okay, I’ll try.” I didn’t feel ready to recover. I knew I had an eating disorder. I didn’t feel ready to recover, but I knew I wanted support.

I started seeing a therapist, and it was fantastic. I loved her. It was the first time I’d had a support system throughout my entire life, like an adult, somebody to rely on. She really encouraged me that I needed more care. She was advocating that I do an intensive outpatient programme, that I take a step back from college and a lot of my work and responsibilities that were on my plate – because she could see that I was under so much stress at 19 and 20.

Chris Sandel: And had you been honest with her about the eating disorder and where you thought you were at with it?

Kate Ely: Yeah, I was really honest. And she was fantastic. She didn’t pressure me to change. She was really just there for me, and she helped me see how bad it was. Because I didn’t have people in my life – it’s not like my dad was like, “Kate, this is really bad. You need help.” No-one was saying this. I mean, my boyfriend was saying this because he was seeing this day in and day out, but I didn’t have an adult who was showing me that something was really wrong.

And I think when you’re in the eating disorder, you get really lost, like the anosognosia. I don’t know if I’m saying that right, but that gets stronger with time, and that was definitely my experience. The more I struggled, the more malnourished I was getting, the harder it was for me to see how severe of a problem it was.

Chris Sandel: Yeah, and that for me is just one of the saddest things with this illness. I think there’s this feeling or this belief of “When things get bad enough, then I will change. I’m going to hit some kind of rock bottom, and then I will start to make a change.” The sad thing is, with an eating disorder, it doesn’t often work like that. Yeah, there are probably some people where there is this incident that happens that is this moment where it becomes a line in the sand and someone’s like, “Never again, I need to get help here.”

But typically what happens is the worse someone gets, the more difficult it is for them to see the problems that it is creating – and/or the more it becomes so seemingly impossible to change. So even if I can recognise, “Now I’ve lost my job” or “Now I’ve lost this relationship” or “Now I’m struggling to be able to be present with my kid” or whatever it is, I can recognise this, but the fear and the worry and the anxiety just grow because you’re getting further and further into an energy-depleted state. It then becomes more challenging to change. So yeah, everything you’re saying makes complete sense.

Kate Ely: Exactly. When we continue to go through this timeline, you’ll see that. I feel like at first it was very clear to me I had an eating disorder, I needed help, but it was hard for me to get help. And then as the years went on, towards the end, I was so unrooted in reality and I was so confused at that point, and I didn’t even know, was I sick, was I not? Was this an eating disorder? It also turned more into a health, orthorexia – it evolved. It shapeshifted. So it became much harder for me to recognise what was going on the longer it went on.

00:21:54

Her initial attempt to recover

Chris Sandel: With the therapist you were seeing, what suggestions were they making? I know you said they were very gentle about this, they weren’t bossing you to do anything, but what suggestions were they making to help you in your recovery?

Kate Ely: She suggested that I take a step back from school and work and maybe reduce schoolwork and work less and then go to some type of intensive outpatient. I ended up deciding to do that, and I really had to go ask my dad for permission to do that. Like I was saying, my parents were very authoritarian and very high expectations on us kids. I was basically a mini parent at that point, running a house, taking care of the family pets, taking care of my little sister while going to school and working. I needed to ask my dad, “Can I work less hours and go to school less?”, because that could’ve easily been interpreted as me being lazy in my family or not doing enough things. I told him I was struggling and I needed to do this. And he was supportive at that point. He was like, “Yeah, do it.”

So I did start IOP, and I did feel like “I really want to recover. I don’t want this anymore.” But during that time, I didn’t make much progress because I was still dealing with so much family stress and things were getting really tense with my dad because he basically started saying that I wasn’t really sick and that I didn’t have an eating disorder and all he saw was me not doing enough and me sleeping too much, and I wasn’t going to school enough and working enough. So we had a big falling out. I got discharged from IOP and he accused me of not really having an eating disorder and faking it.

Chris Sandel: Oof.

Kate Ely: Yeah, it was really rough. It took a lot of courage for me to ask for that support, and then to be blindsided like that, from somebody who – my mom wasn’t in my life at that point, so my dad was the only parent in my life at that point, and for him to say those things about me, it was really hard. He basically told me I needed to start paying rent, and because I had cut back on work hours, I couldn’t afford to. I was trying to prioritise my recovery.

I ended up having to move out to my boyfriend’s mom’s house. And as I mentioned, my boyfriend comes from a family with a lot of dysfunction, so we were basically leaving one dysfunctional environment for another really dysfunctional environment. As much as I had wanted to recover then, because of everything that happened with my dad, it became really hard to work on my recovery because the eating disorder, again, was serving such a big function at that point. I was just at such a low point.

So I was living at my boyfriend’s mom’s; it was really tough. All this had just happened with my dad. I still was going to therapy and contemplating recovery, but then my dad took me off the family health insurance. And I was 21 at the time, so I was still pretty young and couldn’t afford insurance on my own. Basically I couldn’t access any care or treatment at that time. So even if I wanted to recover – I remember doing a lot of research online. I was reading Gwyneth Olwyn’s website and starting to look at recovery stuff online, but this was 2014, and coaches didn’t exist the way they do now. Online resources weren’t the same. There were some, but it was really hard to do on your own compared to now, when there’s a lot more resources and YouTube and coaches out there.

So I was trying to take steps, but honestly, life was just a wreck at that point. My dad also was refusing to give me his tax information so I couldn’t file for loans to go to college. So my life was just at a standstill. I was living in my boyfriend’s family’s house, my dad took my health insurance, I was working as a nanny, trying to save money, get back to college. I couldn’t even access loans because in the US you’re required to submit your parents’ information. I’m sure people listening will understand that it’s very complicated. But he withheld that and I couldn’t even go back to school.

During all of this time, I just felt really stuck, and my eating disorder was obviously getting worse and worse because not only was I not getting support, but I was also going through a lot at the time.

Chris Sandel: Yeah. I worked with you and I knew a bit about your backstory and having a challenging time in terms of with your parents, but I had no idea to this level of detail that this was what you were going through. This is a lot.

Kate Ely: Yeah, and there’s more, sadly. I think this speaks to how badly I did want to recover: I did end up taking my dad to family court to get health insurance because when he and my mom divorced, divorce agreements were drawn up and he was required to provide me health insurance while I was in college, at least till age 22. So I went to court, pro se, representing myself. My dad hired a big fancy lawyer. It was extremely stressful.

But I won the case, and the judge said, “Give her her health insurance back.” At that point, as soon as I got the health insurance, I went right into another IOP programme. So I did want help. I did. And the judge also said he had to give me the tax information so I could get loans out and go back to school. It was like a whole year of fighting in court for that to happen, but when it happened it was such a relief.

I went to IOP. I was so excited. It’s not like I fully recovered there. I would say I got to a place of somewhat quasi-recovery at that point. Not fully. I was eating more, I had gained some weight, but there was a lot of things said there that really fuelled this idea that emotional eating was bad, or they would talk to us a lot about binges, and that honestly fuelled this fear in me of like “If I actually let myself eat, I’m going to be eating too much or binging or emotional eating.” So I didn’t let myself fully recover. It was really hard during that time.

At that point, me and my boyfriend ended up moving a couple hours away because I got back into college. I went to school for social work my last two years. We moved a couple hours away. It was nice because we were finally independent, living on our own, had an apartment away from our dysfunctional families. I was in that quasi-recovery state, and honestly I was really vulnerable still to eating disorder behaviours.

00:28:28

How her eating disorder morphed into orthorexia

At that point, the eating disorder morphed. I was in college. I started working a really high-stress job in international group travel, and doing that in the job with the international group travel, my coworkers were former high-level athletes, so there was a lot of talk about wellness, exercise, ‘no pain, no gain’, a lot of this mindset. And that can really fuel an eating disorder. You know, Chris.

Also, in college I had to take a health class, and this was the catalyst to me leaving quasi-recovery and going down the worst two years of my eating disorder where they had us track our calories in the health class. There was a lot of talk about like “college students eat unhealthily”. So all these fears started coming up for me. My eating disorder at that point really morphed into extreme orthorexia, extreme exercise. For two years, I was really struggling with that.

And those were the years that I just couldn’t understand that I even had an eating disorder because it had shapeshifted so much. My husband would sit down and have these long conversations with me and I’d be like, “Okay, yeah, I really need to change something” or “Oh my gosh, this is so bad”, but then as soon as we’d leave the conversation, I’d lose touch with the reality. I’d get ungrounded, and I wouldn’t think I was sick.

I spent two years – that was the final phase of my eating disorder before I reached out to you. It’s like we were talking about with the anosognosia. It got so bad at that point. Also, it gets confusing when you add in the wellness piece, the health piece. You’re like, is this actually restriction, or am I just trying to be healthy?

Chris Sandel: Totally. I remember this as being a big part when we did start working together, and we can get into that piece more, but I remember this being a part of it and us having conversations or email exchanges about this and your health concerns, and “Is this really healthy?”, and “What about this thing?” One of those things that as an outsider, it seems so obvious, but when you’re in the thick of it, it’s not so obvious.

But it was painfully obvious from my perspective, the healthiest thing you could do is not have an eating disorder. There were all of these fears and worries, “But what about this bit of health information?” A lot of that getting lost and not seeing the forest for the trees, not seeing how bad things were and then getting hooked by this thing about this little bit of minutiae that you’d either read or heard in a class or whatever it may be.

I do remember constantly, when we were working together, trying to get to that bigger picture, like let’s take a step back from this small thing that is hooking you and let’s look at bigger picture in terms of where your health is at, where your mental health is at, where your physical health is at – really being able to ground it in reality as opposed to hearsay or “this thing that I heard about” or the fears that come up.

Kate Ely: Yeah, and that was one of the things that was so helpful about our work together, grounding me. You were constantly having to ground me and re-ground me and re-ground me. And you were fantastic at it. I trusted you, so it really helped when I would come to you. And you wouldn’t be frustrated with me or anything about it. It was just someone I could talk these fears through and you would ground me in what was the truth.

00:32:12

How Kate found me + why she reached out

Chris Sandel: Let’s take a step back and get to that piece. How did you find me? How did we start working together?

Kate Ely: I found you because of your podcast. I picked you and reached out to you because of how you came across on your podcast. I felt like you really cared about wellbeing and true health and not just the appearance of health, which is what had been dominating my life for the last couple years. I think the things I heard you say on the podcast – it was the first time someone truly poked holes in my eating disorder beliefs at the time, like you talking about exercise isn’t always beneficial or healthy, or talking about why restriction is typically at the heart of binges and you can’t just talk about binges without also talking about restriction.

You seemed really compassionate and gentle and kind and also smart, which you are, and that really won me over. I just felt like it would be a good fit because of those things, and that’s how I found out about you.

Chris Sandel: When you reached out, did it feel like a big deal? Were you worried? Did it feel like “I’m really looking forward to this” or a mix of emotions? How was it, if you can remember back then?

Kate Ely: It did feel like a big deal. I felt hopeful for the first time in a long time that you could actually help, and I also felt terrified and scared because you could actually help, which meant I could actually recover.

00:33:39

Kate’s symptoms when we began working together

Chris Sandel: What was going on symptoms-wise when you did reach out? I know you’ve talked about different points in your journey and you said the two years leading up to us working together was when things were at their absolute worst. What was going on symptoms-wise?

Kate Ely: A lot. One of the first symptoms that came up for me early in my eating disorder was digestive issues, which I think is so common. Bloating, not being able to digest food, feeling like it was sitting in my stomach. But when I reached out to you, I had a whole list of things I was struggling with.

First, I was terrified of eating. I was terrified of gaining weight. Terrified of eating any foods that I thought were unhealthy, especially carbs / sugar. I was always worried about getting diabetes. These were my main fears. And then the digestive issues. I’d had no period for years when I reached out to you. I was struggling to fall and stay asleep at that point. I had been taking huge doses of melatonin for years every night and I still wasn’t able to sleep.

Along with that, I was peeing five times a night, which also made it very hard to sleep because I had to constantly get up and go to the bathroom. I think the symptom that got really bad before I reached out to you those last two years, when the restriction got so bad with the orthorexia and what I could eat was so limited, I started having these episodes where I would wake up in the middle of the night and basically sleep-eat during those last two years. It was really scary because I felt like I couldn’t control it at all, and I went to extreme measures to try to keep myself in the bedroom and not able to eat.

So that was one of the newer symptoms that popped up during those last two years when the eating disorder got really bad and had morphed.

I think some of the other mental symptoms were intense shame and thoughts of self-harm if I deviated at all from my food rules and my exercise schedule. That was one of the things that alarmed me the most, and also made me realise how serious it was. If I went to my nephew’s birthday party and I had a cupcake and now I’m having this intense hour-long crying episode or thinking “I want to hurt myself”, it just made me realise how reliant I was on the eating disorder behaviours. So that’s where I was when I reached out to you.

00:36:02

What our work together looked like

Chris Sandel: What did our work together look like? Obviously, we worked together for a while, and there were lots of different aspects to it, but what stands out for you or what do you want to mention?

Kate Ely: Our work together was really collaborative. I felt like you respected me and listened to me even when I was having these fears and consumed by eating disorder thoughts. I recently saw this wonderful post on Instagram, I think from the Recovery Unicorn – shout out to her. She’s awesome. She said even when your eating disorder is talking, you still deserve respect and dignity.

I feel like our work together really captured that statement. You still treated me as a person. What stood out the most was you gave me full permission to eat. That’s one of the things I wanted throughout my recovery and why IOP didn’t fully help me get where I needed to go. I feel like they didn’t give me full permission to eat, and when I looked at these meal plans or things they wanted me to eat, I’d be like, “All I could have is half a cup of ice cream?” I felt still so restricted, and you were always encouraging me to eat. The focus was on making sure I was eating enough; it didn’t matter what I was eating. There was never any judgment or analysing of that. It was just, “Are you getting enough?” That was our main focus for a while.

We set specific goals together that were achievable and realistic for where I was at, which was really helpful. You constantly challenged me and grounded me in the reality. I was convinced I was eating a lot at the time. I think I’ve told you this, but I went back and looked at my food logs and had a good laugh about how I was definitely not eating a lot, but at the time I was convinced I was. [laughs] You really helped me stay grounded and brought perspective and helped me not get swept away in diet and wellness culture when those fears would come up.

We also did a lot of journalling and writing prompts and self-exploration together. It really helped me identify my values and what truly mattered to me and start to take an honest look at, does the eating disorder fit into my values and who I am?

The other thing, too, I remember from our work together was doing food logs three days a week. That was kind of hard at first because it was hard for me to see what I was eating. But it’s not like we were tracking calories or anything like that at the time. It was more just it gave us data that we could look at together, and you honestly pointed out a lot of things I couldn’t see. Having that data and us meeting and you pointing out things that I couldn’t see – again, bringing that perspective to it.

Chris Sandel: And with the logs, my recollection with it, and one of the things that we were working on, was yes, you need to have more food coming in, but just how much it was shifted towards the latter part of the day – which is so common. There’s this real fear of eating in the earlier part of the day or “I need to save up” or “What happens if I have a big meal for breakfast and I’m still hungry, whereas if I have a big meal for dinner and I’m still hungry, at least I can go to bed.” There’s all these reasons why it’s easier to eat more in the latter part of the day, and eating disorder morphs your eating into that way.

So for a lot of it, it was, how do we start to bring more into the earlier part so that you can benefit from that energy throughout the day and you’re not spending the first six hours white-knuckling it?

Kate Ely: Exactly, and that was a big fear for me. A big part of my eating disorder was delaying food until the end of the day. I would only let myself eat things at the end of the day, kind of as a reward for restricting all day. A lot of that ties into some of the things from my childhood, like “Okay, if I get through these things, then I can have the good thing” or “If I do this, then I could have the good thing”, those games I would play with myself. Or seeing my mom skip lunch and not eat most of the day and then she’d let herself have ice cream at night. A lot of it was rooted in that, I believe, looking back.

But yeah, the delaying was a big issue, and also contributing to, like we talked about, the night eating and my body not knowing and trusting that food was coming in.

00:40:05

Her recovery process with eating + strategies she used

Chris Sandel: Let’s go through some of the aspects of this one by one. In terms of the eating piece, what was the process like with changing this? I know we’ve obviously touched on some of it just now, but is there anything else you want to add in terms of what it looked like in terms of your recovery with eating?

Kate Ely: Like I was saying, we set goals together and we made them really specific. We started building on them all the time. As soon as I was mastering something, we were adding more. And I think the big thing with changing the eating was also focusing on getting in more, but simultaneously challenging fear foods and food rules because my eating disorder had such an orthorexic component. It made it really hard to even get in the calories and nutrition that I needed because my rules were so strict.

So we were always doing both at the same time. It’d be like, I have a goal around eating more on a daily basis, but then there would also be a goal of challenging something. Like for me, a challenge at the time was pasta, because I had more of a fear of carbs. I know that manifests different for everybody. But we were working on that at the same time. We’re like, okay, I need to be having fast food or going out and having something that I’m afraid of every week.

Chris Sandel: The thing I’ll add with this is when I’m starting with someone, depending on the stage that someone’s at, with someone like yourself, calories trumps everything else. So the most important thing was getting in more energy. And often with clients like yourself, if that’s the case, I’m not always getting someone to do fear foods at that point. It’s like, let’s just get more energy in in whatever way we can. But as you say, because you were so restricted and there was such a limit on the things you would have, we weren’t really able to get there if you were continuing on with the way you were eating. So we did need to start to bring in more of these things.

And it’s a much easier way to get energy in by having this kind of food. For you to say, “Cool, I’m going to go and eat fast food” is obviously very scary from a psychological standpoint, but it’s a good way of bringing in more energy in one meal. This was why we did these two things together, even though I don’t necessarily do that with everyone. It just depends on what’s appropriate given the situation.

Kate Ely: Yeah, that makes sense. Plus, a part of me – and I think a lot of people relate to this – did really want to eat those foods. I think I told you that as well. The thought of recovering, feeling restricted, I hated that, and I hated that before. So having the freedom and working on those fears, because I wanted to be able to eat foods I enjoyed or that I was craving – because truly, when I was honest with myself, I was dreaming about food, I was craving food, certain things I hadn’t allowed myself. So it was really nice to be able to work on that as well. As hard as it was, it was also freeing to have those foods again.

Chris Sandel: Definitely. And as you said, me being able to give you that permission piece and say, “Hey, you have full permission to have this. You aren’t able to give yourself permission yourself fully at this stage, so let me express this for you so that you know that it is okay for you to eat these foods.”

Kate Ely: Yeah, it was so helpful.

Chris Sandel: Maybe you’ve already answered this a little bit, but I guess one of the biggest struggles that people have is “I understand this intellectually, I understand I need more energy, I understand I need to have this bigger snack or this bigger meal” or whatever it may be, but then when it comes to actually taking action and doing the thing, that’s where the block really comes in and they really struggle. Can you remember what was the thing that allowed you to take action?

Kate Ely: I feel like I had a couple strategies is used. I would print reminders out, and statements, and put them on my fridge and in my kitchen, which was really helpful because I would be set to do something, but then when I would go in the kitchen to make the food or do it, that’s when the fear kicks in. I think Tabitha Farrar talks about this, too. It’s why you get so stuck. So I would put reminders on my fridge. I would use one-line phrases a lot, like “The only way out is through” was a big one that resonated with me. I think it’s important to find ones that feel authentic to you and feel powerful to you.

I would also tell my husband my goals and voice them out loud for accountability, because if he didn’t see me doing it, it’s not like he was mean to me about it, but he was like, “Didn’t you agree with Chris to be doing this? What’s going on with that?” So that helped, having that extra layer of accountability.

I think the other thing that was super helpful for me was having compassion towards the part of me that didn’t want to do it and change. I kicked and screamed a lot along the way and I cried a lot along the way, and I held space for that. If I was going to be crying or feeling like this is really unfair before I went to do something, I let myself feel that way and held compassion, like, “Of course I don’t want to do this. Of course. It only makes sense. But this is what I have to do” – almost like you do for a child, lovingly. I really tried to do that for myself. Recognising and thanking my eating disorder for what it had done for me, but compassionately and firmly telling myself, “This is no longer serving me and these behaviours are hurting me.” Doing that consistently was really helpful, for me at least.

The last thing, too, I would say is I was committed to recovery. My motivation would waver for sure, and it was hard to take the action, but in the back of my mind I knew I eventually was going to have to face these fears because I was going to recover. So it’s a matter of “Is it going to happen now or is it going to happen in the future?” I think that level of commitment can be so helpful. It doesn’t mean I always wanted to do things or felt ready to, but I was committed, and I knew there was no point in putting it off if I was eventually going to recover.

Chris Sandel: With the compassion piece you mentioned a moment ago, it’s wonderful that you were able to have that for yourself, to create room for those emotions. Was the work or the study that you’d done with social work – do you think that helped as part of this? I don’t know what was covered as part of that course, but did that help you with this at all?

Kate Ely: Yeah, I think it did. One of the social work values is dignity and worth of a person. I had such low self-worth during my eating disorder and it’s something I really had to work on during recovery. I think it’s really common, right? You see this, Chris, too.

Chris Sandel: Yep.

Kate Ely: Learning about that value helped me see that I had worth just for being me, no matter what my weight was or what I was eating or how productive I was or how much I was exercising. That helped me have a foundation of compassion for myself going into recovery.

00:47:16

Changes she made to exercise during recovery

Chris Sandel: Nice. And what about in terms of exercise? What happened in terms of the changes that you made on that front as part of recovery?

Kate Ely: I took about a year off from any structured exercise during my recovery, and that include formal structured walks as well. I had already begun to taper down when I started seeing you. I don’t know if you remember, but I’d stopped all high-intensity stuff and I was just walking at that point. My therapist had helped me do that, which was awesome. That was a huge step from my history with it.

The reason I took a break like that was because my eating disorder was too strong and it would find a way to sneakily co-opt even gentle exercise. this is usually encouraged in treatment centres, like yoga, walking, you can do those things. For me, my eating disorder would immediately take over and would say, “You need to do these things so you can eat.” So I felt like all of that was off the table for me. I couldn’t trust my motivations for doing it. I couldn’t trust the intention behind it. So I just said, “I’m doing nothing until I can decipher what’s coming from truly I want to move my body versus my eating disorder sneakily taking this over.”

Chris Sandel: How was that when you made that decision to take time off exercise and to actually do it? I will preface this: I always think that this is the thing that people are most scared about doing. Taking time off exercise, more than any changes to any food, is the thing that feels the scariest, and typically what I notice is that when people do it, it’s the quickest thing to normalise and repair in a fairly short amount of time. Within a matter of weeks, it feels much more normal to take that time off exercise, and the stress and the worry and the anxiety connected to that has really come down significantly if not disappeared in a way that people don’t imagine would be the case.

I’m not asking you to say “Yes, that was definitely my experience”, but I just wanted to say that that’s what I’ve noticed with many people, and I want to hear, how was it for you?

Kate Ely: It was really hard for me. I think it was harder contemplating doing it than doing it, like you’re saying. During my eating disorder and in early recovery, I was convinced “There’s no way, I cannot do this, I’ll definitely eat less” – which is also something I hear from clients now. Like “I’m afraid to give up exercise because it means I’ll eat less.” I had all of those fears too, and it felt like this big scary thing that I could never do.

And then when I did it, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and it was kind of a relief. I was exhausted. It got to a point where I liked doing the exercise because my eating disorder liked doing the exercise, but me, Kate, I didn’t like doing it. I was exhausted and in agony. So yes, not doing it and making the decision not to do it was really scary, and yet I was also relieved. I had mixed feelings about it. And once I did it, that relief took over and it was like, “Great, I don’t have to do that thing anymore that I hated doing.”

Chris Sandel: When you started to bring exercise back in, talk about how you did that. How did you know it was time to start to bring exercise back in, and what did that look like?

Kate Ely: I knew it was time because my recovery was very physical, and nutritional rehabilitation took a long time. So I waited until all of those symptoms had improved, I was feeling a lot better. I even felt like moving my body. I was having – not eating disorder urges. Like, “Oh, doing this sounds nice.” So I waited for all those indicators. Even when those indicators came, I did not just jump into it. I did it gradually, I did it structured. I kept guardrails in place. I always like to think about bowling, too. What do they add, those bumpers? [laughs] I feel like I introduced exercise with bumpers. I set limits.

I did this with my therapist, where I’d have to ask myself a list of questions before I even did the exercise. “Why am I doing this? What is my intention? Is there anything else I need right now besides exercise?” to make sure that I was meeting my needs and not using exercise as a way to cope. And then I started it very gradually. I’m trying to think of the exact way we did it. I kept track and made sure I was only doing it – like if I said I’m only going to do yoga twice this week, I made sure I was keeping track of that and talking with my therapist about it. And that’s because at that point you and I weren’t working together anymore, so I was using my therapist to assist with that.

The interesting thing is, some eating disorder thoughts did come up when I reintroduced exercise. I noticed a pickup in thoughts. I did end up taking another three-week break when that was happening because I knew that I did not want exercise to be like it was for me before. So took it really slow, really gradually, and was really honest with myself when thoughts and urges were coming up about it.

Chris Sandel: I know we weren’t working together at that stage, but we were still having contact, because I remember conversations about this. I think when you brought exercise back in – or it may have been when you specifically brought walking back in – it was like, “I went for a walk, and then I didn’t do anything intentionally for 10 days or two weeks” – there was this good chunk of time – “and then I went for another walk, and again, I didn’t do anything for another week or 10 days.” Just very, very gradual with this.

And I think in a very good way. You wanted to be conservative with this because you wanted it to stick. By that stage you’d put in so much effort that there was no point rushing back into exercise and having all of that be undone. So yeah, I remember from our conversations it was a really gradual process, and there were points where work would get a little busier or there’d be more stress, and some of the symptoms would come back in terms of – I think there was some bloating or water retention that came back, and you were like, “Cool, I need to knock the exercise on the head again for a good amount of time.” There was this real intention with it of ”I don’t want this to be my undoing.”

Kate Ely: Yeah, and I definitely didn’t want it to be that. I think doing it in that way, what was so helpful about it is it’s so common with an eating disorder where it’s like, “I did this yesterday, so I need to do it today” or “I didn’t have this yesterday, so I can’t have it today.” Doing it that way, it wasn’t like “I went for a walk yesterday, so I need to walk today.” It was purposely breaking up that urge or that tendency to be a little obsessive or compulsive with something. Not allowing those patterns and habits to take over in that way.

Chris Sandel: Yeah. I talk about constantly proving that you are the one in the driver’s seat. “Cool, I’m going to do this exercise. Yeah, I can tell myself or I can experience it as being something that’s really fun and joyful and all of those things – and I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m having to do this compulsively every day, so let me keep proving to myself that I’m the one that is making this choice”, because it can be a very slippery slope, or it can be “It feels like I really want to be doing this, and then before I know it I’m not able to not do this.”

Kate Ely: Yeah, and that’s why I took that three-week break, too, because the thoughts were coming up and it was getting murky again. Like, do I actually want to do this, or does this feel like my eating disorder is making me do this? So because I couldn’t decipher, I was like, let me take a three-week break, prove that I’m fine without exercise again, and then we’ll start again.

00:55:13

Her relationship with her body during the recovery process

Chris Sandel: Nice. We’ve talked about the food piece, we’ve talked about the exercise piece. What about in terms of your relationship with your body and fears around weight gain and all of that? Talk about what that was like through the recovery process.

Kate Ely: It was terrifying. It was really, really difficult. I remember at first saying a lot to you I couldn’t even fathom being in a bigger body. “I don’t think I could handle it, I don’t think I’d ever be comfortable.” And that was when I was just starting recovery. That was my mindset about it. Having to gain the weight, thinking that’s how it would be, was really scary. Like, will I ever be able to handle this? It was really uncomfortable, of course. And I say this to clients now: even if you go through any physical change, no-one is going to be comfortable with their body changing quickly. Other people feel this way even when you’re pregnant. It’s uncomfortable to go through physical changes. I think that’s really normal to feel that way.

It was hard. But I think what surprised me most is as I nutritionally rehabilitated, as I gained the weight and got to my set point, I wasn’t uncomfortable like I thought I would be. Did I love my body every day? No, but I felt like my body was not a main focus like it had been during my eating disorder. I wasn’t uncomfortable in my skin like I was in my eating disorder.

Chris Sandel: I think that’s the thing the eating disorder makes you believe that is really incorrect – “If I’m at this weight and at this lower weight, I couldn’t possibly be happier at a higher weight because I have all this anxiety and all this worry already here.” Actually, the opposite is true.

As people gain weight – and not just gain weight in a vacuum; you’re gaining wight as part of your nutritional rehabilitation. All of your systems and organs are starting to repair, your brain is starting to repair, you’re rewiring your brain – as all of those things change, you actually start to feel better. You feel better psychologically, you feel better physically. So your perspectives change around this. This is the thing that’s so difficult to wrap your head around when you’re in that place of the disorder and when you’re really in the depths of it, like “There’s no way I could possibly feel better at a higher weight”, and there’s the opposite that ends up being true. It’s like, “Wow, I feel so much better here.”

And again, as you say, it’s not like every day is sunshine and rainbows and there’s never any issues or concerns or insecurities or anything along those lines. But in comparison to “I’m having a bit of a bad body image day because of the way this dress fits” compared to the abject fear that is going on when you’re in the depths of an eating disorder, those two things just aren’t comparable.

Kate Ely: Definitely. I think, too, you can’t say where somebody’s body will end up. I had a lot of anxiety about “What is my set point? Am I at my set point yet?” I’d be like, “This has to be my set point!” [laughs] I think everybody feels this way. But I truly surrendered to that. I talk a lot with clients about surrendering to the recovery process sometimes, because I think trying to fight the whole thing is terrible. What needs to happen needs to happen at a certain point. When you accept that you’re going to recover, eventually you have to surrender and let your body decide what it needs and what it’s going to do.

And the more I did that, the easier it got. Things since then, I would say my body image has continued to improve, and it’s even better than it was when I initially recovered. I feel very comfortable in my skin and have a really good relationship with my body now in a way that I could’ve never imagined during my eating disorder and when we started working together.

Chris Sandel: Nice. In terms of the surrender piece that you mentioned, when I hear you say that, I want people to understand that surrendering is a verb. Surrendering is the doing part of doing recovery. I think so often we can use words like ‘acceptance’ and ‘surrender’ and it feels like “it’s this state that I need to reach in my mind and then everything will be fine.” I just don’t think that is the case. It’s much more about “I’m surrendering, and that surrendering means I’m doing my recovery actions so that I start and continue to recover.”

Kate Ely: Yeah, definitely.

00:59:59

Other areas she worked on as part of recovery

Chris Sandel: You talked so much about stuff with your family to begin with and it being such a big part of why your eating disorder started, why it was a tool of you being able to cope. I’m wondering what other non-food, non-exercise, non-body stuff you went through or you worked on as part of your recovery.

Kate Ely: I think one of the biggest things was allowing myself to feel the pain of what had happened in my family and my relationship with my parents, because throughout my eating disorder, I wasn’t connected to that at all. I was very dismissive of the experience. I thought I was melodramatic. My therapist would say to me, “Kate, you were abandoned” and I’d be like, “No, I wasn’t! No, I wasn’t. That’s so dramatic.” I was very numb to the whole thing.

When I recovered, I really had to allow myself to feel the pain of the things that happened with my family, and the grief over not having relationships with my parents.

Another thing I worked on was recognising and voicing my needs. I think during my eating disorder, I struggled a lot with not wanting to feel like a burden. A lot of that goes back to my childhood, too. We weren’t allowed to have emotions. We weren’t allowed to have needs. Really working on that and voicing and asking in my relationships what I needed from others rather than being this suppressed version of myself who had no expectations from anybody and used my eating disorder to always be fine and not need anything. And with that, working on people-pleasing behaviours. That ties in to not having any needs.

I think the other big thing that I worked on, too, was an obsession with productivity. You probably see this a lot; typically this goes hand in hand with eating disorders – work ethic and getting your self-worth from being productive. So I really had to do a lot of that self-worth work. A lot of this was helped with good therapy, being in therapy, and working on finding other ways, like “Where do I get my self-worth from if it’s not my body, if it’s not how I look, if it’s not how much exercise I’m doing or how much I was productive today and work I got done?”

Chris Sandel: What about in terms of the connection or the community piece? I know at some point in your story you said, “Myself and my boyfriend then moved a couple of hours away.” I don’t know who you knew in that location that you moved to, but obviously you’re now disconnected from your dad, you’re disconnected from your mum. What happened in terms of your community, your social connections in your life, and how were these important or not important as part of your recovery?

Kate Ely: One of the things that was most helpful was repairing my relationships with my siblings. I have two sisters, and I have a brother. He wasn’t as involved with a lot of the things that were happening because he’s actually much older than me and my sisters. But we had a lot of our own stuff and things between us because of the things that happened with the family. But we really worked on repairing that these last couple years and are really close. They are a huge source of support. And my sisters were people I felt safe and comfortable with in my recovery, so spending time with them, and making friends and people that I feel get me and understand me.

And I think the other thing that was so helpful in my recovery was I joined a Facebook peer support group. I actually ended up inheriting it, and I admin and moderate it now. There were like 1,500 other people in there struggling, and we would all write to each other. It’s very similar to the Fundamentals of Full Recovery programme. We would just write things and people would respond. When I joined that, I think I was about eight months into recovery, and it was a game-changer for me. I felt so much less alone, and I was good friends with a lot of people from the group. We would talk outside the group and send each other Christmas cards.

One of the other people I was in the group with actually became a Carolyn Costin Institute coach about the same time as me, so we’re still connected. So I built a lot of connections through there, which was really wonderful, and people who really understood what you’re going through when you have an eating disorder and when you’re in recovery.

Chris Sandel: Nice. I think one of the things that I’ve discovered more and more over recent years is just how important that community aspect is and that connection aspect is. Obviously, eating disorders are so isolating. You had so many extenuating circumstances that made it even more isolating, but even people who do ostensibly have people around can still be very isolated and they can feel very lonely. So having people that you do feel comfortable with, that you can talk to, people who know the kinds of things you’re going through – I do think it’s so important as part of recovery.

Kate Ely: Yeah, and especially considering the culture we live in and how people who we love dearly or who we enjoy having in our lives sometimes are still steeped in diet culture and wellness culture, and have the best intentions but can be really triggering to be around. So recovery can be even more isolating in a way, because you’ve had this earth-shattering moment of you’re trying to break away from these disordered things that are normalised in our society, and then having to face that every day and be up against it and feeling alone. So having people who are also trying to break out of that and not partaking in it can be so helpful.

01:05:50

How she became a Carolyn Costin Institute coach

Chris Sandel: Definitely. You mentioned Carolyn Costin and her certificate, so talk about the fact that you have now gone into being a coach. I guess starting with how did that transition happen, when did you start thinking “Maybe this is what I want to do”?

Kate Ely: I always knew I wanted to be in a profession supporting others, which is why I went to college for social work, of course. Even as far back as first grade, I did a project on stereotypes and why they’re so harmful and always really loved supporting others and holding space for people’s unique stories. I hadn’t thought about coaching, but I started as a peer support mentor for ANAD. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them; they’re this great non-profit. You can get free peer support mentors, but also support groups as well that run every week.

Chris Sandel: What is ANAD? What’s the acronym stand for? Do you remember?

Kate Ely: I don’t know. I think it’s anorexia something. But they’re amazing. They do all free support.

Chris Sandel: I’ll add it in the show notes – just because I’m not aware of them, so I didn’t know if it was specifically for eating disorders or more just general mental health peer support.

Kate Ely: It’s specifically for eating disorders. I think anorexia is in the name, but it’s for all eating disorders. They even have a support group specifically for men. They have a bunch that you can choose from, and then they also can match you with a private mentor that you work with for six months to a year who’s recovered, during your recovery.

Chris Sandel: So you started working for them as a peer support?

Kate Ely: Yep, I started volunteering with them back in 2021. My mentee is amazing. I actually still see her all these years later, and we’re really close. I just loved it so much that it inspired me to pursue coaching. Also, that Facebook peer support group that I was in, taking that over as the admin and moderator – just seeing how much I loved talking to people and supporting people, it really inspired me to train as a coach.

Chris Sandel: So then you had this realisation, so what did it look like in terms of practical steps? Where did you go from there?

Kate Ely: I signed up for Carolyn Costin – she has the Carolyn Costin Institute, and it’s one of the best training programmes out there. It’s specifically for eating disorder recovery coaches. She has a year-long rigorous programme. I don’t know if anyone’s familiar with Carolyn; she’s been on this podcast. I’ve heard her on here with Chris.

Chris Sandel: Yep.

Kate Ely: She’s a renowned therapist in the eating disorder field, published The 8 Keys to Recovery, and she founded one of the first residential treatment programmes in the US back in the ’90s, Monte Nido. It’s still around. She doesn’t own it anymore, but she was the original founder.

So I trained under her for a year, and that ends with a supervised internship where I saw clients and recorded the sessions, and Carolyn actually listens to them and gives feedback and supervises you throughout that process before you graduate. It was really intense, but also a really, really good experience, and I learned a lot throughout the process.

Chris Sandel: Nice. So now as a coach, what do you think are the best parts of coaching, or what are the aspects that you like the most?

Kate Ely: I really like seeing how amazing, unique, and resilient people with eating disorders are, and hearing their individual stories. Like we were talking about, I think eating disorders and eating disorder recovery can be super lonely, like I know it was for me. I really enjoy helping make that process less lonely for people, walking alongside them during some of their most difficult moments, and also providing that safe space away from diet and wellness culture for people. I think it’s hard to find that, and so many disordered behaviours are normalised in our culture. I just love being able to provide that space and give people full permission to eat whatever they want, just like you were that person for me.

I think the other piece I really like about it is because I went to school for social work, so much of my social work education informs my practice with clients. There’s social work values, like service, social justice, dignity and worth of a person, which I mentioned, importance of human relationships, integrity, and confidence. Social workers really take a strengths-based approach, so looking at people from their strengths and how they can use these strengths for recovery. I love doing that versus focusing on somebody’s deficits.

And really understanding the change process and supporting people throughout their own change process, and supporting somebody’s self-determination. I think as a coach, it’s nice to let people decide and be a part of their treatment, that collaborative approach. This wonderful theory called self-determination theory talks about people’s innate tendency towards growth and motivation when they have autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I think that’s so relevant to recovery. I know it was for mine, and I really love providing people with that autonomy, competence, and relatedness, especially when I’ve been through recovery myself and can understand.

Chris Sandel: I agree with everything you said there. Really, when working with clients, I am trying to show them the strengths that they already have, because I think so much of that can get lost when you’re in the eating disorder, as you talked about. Having that low self-esteem or low self-worth really chips away at what you think is possible, either bigger picture in this world, what you think is possible for you. It really has an impact on how you perceive things.

Really, so much of the work that I do in recovery – and it sounds like the same things you’re doing – is helping people to start to see the strengths they already have and the fact that there is something so much better out there that is available for them, and this isn’t some pipe dream; this is a reality, and it’s something they can very much reach. It is very much within their grasp. And yes, there are some challenging things that need to happen to get there – and they’re able to do that. They do have the strengths and the resilience to be able to go through those challenges.

Kate Ely: Yeah. I think I wrote this in my testimonial for you after we stopped working together, but for me, recovery was the process of getting myself back, uncovering who I am beneath the eating disorder and all that self-hatred and disgust and shame. I learned who I truly am, and that empowers me to use my strengths, to be authentically me and use my strengths and show up in the world in ways that matter to me and my values.

Chris Sandel: And as a coach, when you’re chatting with someone, so much of the conversation obviously can be the eating disorder talking or the eating disorder airing their concerns, but you then have these moments where you’re able to see the real person inside there. And depending on where someone is in terms of the depths of the eating disorder, you’ll see more or less of that.

But yeah, being able to see this true, authentic person behind all of that, and whenever I’m seeing it, mentioning it – and it could be that someone’s made a funny comment and laughed, and you can see that is their true nature in there, to make a joke about something like that. Or there could be something that they’re able to do, and there’s this real pride that comes up as part of the fact that “I was able to do this challenging thing.” Just really looking out for those moments that, with time, as recovery continues on, grows and grows and grows, and you see this more authentic self really leading the way as opposed to being hidden behind the eating disorder.

Kate Ely: Exactly. And I think going through recovery – you said this to me and it was so helpful at the time – this is probably one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. And you learn so much during the process, you gain so much resilience. After you recover, you feel confident that you can do – anything that scares you, you’re like, “I did the thing that was the most scariest to me, and I did it.” That also makes you so much stronger, in a way, when you go through that and see your resilience and what you’re capable of, even when you thought you weren’t.

01:14:40

What Kate wishes she had known during recovery

Chris Sandel: Definitely. The final thing I want to ask is, what do you know now that you wish you knew back when you were in recovery? And this could be stuff that you’ve learned through coaching, it could be stuff you’ve learned through going through your own recovery. What are some of the things you would like to be able to pass forward so that for anyone listening, they can hear these things?

Kate Ely: I wish I knew how good recovered life could be. I had hoped that things could be better, but I didn’t know how good it could be. And again, this was something we talked about; when you’re living at a 3 out of 10 but you don’t know what an 8 out of 10 feels like, you don’t know that you are at a 3 out of 10. I didn’t have the perspective of how much better things could be.

So I wish I had known that, that life does get better, things get better, I can have a life without worrying about weight gain and food and my body and that dominating my thoughts and every behaviour and every second of my day.

I think I also wish I knew that I could trust my body, that my body was capable of functioning normally and taking care of me, and all I had to do was just listen to it and give it food and rest and a chance. I always thought my body was out to get me, my hunger was a bad thing. And that’s what we’re taught: not to listen to our hunger. But I wish I had known that my body has my best interest at heart.

Also, like I mentioned, a lot of thoughts and urges lessen as you nutritionally rehabilitate. In my mind during recovery, I always thought “I’m always going to have to be fighting this hard. It’s always going to be this hard. The thoughts and the urges will always have this strong of a pull.” And the more nourished I got, the less intense the thoughts and urges were, and also the stronger I was, and the pull to do those things and let the thoughts have power wasn’t as strong.

I think the last thing that I wish I knew about – and I know we’ve talked about this a bit now, but in my recovery it wasn’t well known – was mast cell activation syndrome. Dr Gaudiani writes a lot about this on her blog the last couple years and how common it is in the eating disorder population and how much she sees it. Since my recovery, I have been seeing an allergist and being treated for that, and that also explains a bit about why my recovery symptoms were a little bit more severe than maybe other people experience. But I didn’t know about it at the time, and I would encourage people to talk to their doctor about that or get checked out for it, or read Dr G’s blog as a starting point, just to learn more about it.

Chris Sandel: Definitely. And on this final point, I totally agree. I think the problem, often, with asking a doctor about it is it’s one of those things that is so poorly understood, so I would definitely recommend reading Dr G’s blog. I think she did four blog posts about it, and I will link to those in the show notes so people can have a read of those.

I would also want to add, just for you as part of this, you were able to recover even though the mast cell stuff was going on. I really want to say that, because I think sometimes it can feel like “I have to get this other stuff under control first and then I can do my recovery.” You didn’t have to do that. And so much of the symptoms that were coming up as part of that – yes, it’s made worse by the mast cell activation syndrome, but equally, it gets better as you get more nutritionally rehabilitated.

Kate Ely: Exactly.

Chris Sandel: You do the things that truly support your health that reduce your stress load, and not getting in enough food and over-exercising is a huge stress on the body. So I just want to say that doing things that are going to be pro-recovery are going to help with the mast cell activation syndrome; it’s not that you have to figure out all of those things first and then you can get started.

Kate Ely: That’s such a good point. And Dr G mentions that on her blog. Undereating, living with an eating disorder, and experiencing the stress of an eating disorder all worsen – if you do have a tendency to have mast cell activation problems or syndrome, all those things worsen when you’re in an eating disorder and your body is not nourished. So a lot of my symptoms did alleviate and did naturally improve as I was eating more, and like you said, taking care of myself and getting in what I needed. That was a huge factor in worsening the symptoms.

Chris Sandel: Yeah. Is there anything that we haven’t gone through that you want to mention? Is there anything I should’ve asked you or that you want to add?

Kate Ely: I don’t think so. I think that’s it.

Chris Sandel: Cool. Thank you so much for coming on and for sharing everything about your eating disorder journey and obviously everything that led up to it. I know you’ve been very honest with everything that’s happened. I think it’s incredible what you’ve been able to achieve as part of your recovery – and not just from an eating disorder, but everything that you’ve gone through to get to the place that you’re in today.

I think recovery for so many people is very challenging, and as you described, there were a lot of moving pieces, there were a lot of things going on. It’s really a testament to the commitment and the effort you put in that you’re here today, that you’re now coaching people, that you’re in such a great place with this.

Kate Ely: Thanks so much, Chris. And I’m grateful for our work together every day and grateful – not a day goes by since I’ve recovered that I take for granted my relationship with food and my body and movement and my ability for food to take its proper place in my life versus where I was before. So thank you so much. And like I said, it’s crazy to be here and I’m just in awe that it’s come full circle like this. [laughs]

Chris Sandel: Nice. You fully deserve it.

Kate Ely: Thank you.

Chris Sandel: So that was my interview with Kate Ely. Like I said at the top, I only knew snippets of Kate’s story, so I’m glad that she was able to share so much here, and I know that we have probably only scratched the surface and she has a whole memoir worth of things that she could share – and maybe one day will.

For me, this was such an inspiring episode, and I’ve no doubt that it will help countless people, and that you can see and feel what’s possible..

So that’s it for this episode. As I mentioned at the top, right now I’m doing a free 3-part live training series. To sign up, you can go to the show notes at www.seven-health.com/291 and you’ll see a link to register. I will catch you again soon on the podcast, and I hope to see you on the live training.

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