00:00:00

Intro

00:04:23

What Abbie’s relationship with food was like growing up

00:08:05

How she developed an eating disorder

00:18:58

What her recovery looked like

00:28:57

The benefit of values work in recovery

00:37:52

The importance of self-compassion

00:47:28

Answering the question “Is recovery worth it?”

01:01:37

“But I don’t love what my body looks like”

00:00:00

Intro

Chris Sandel: Hey! If you want access to the show notes and the transcripts and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can head to www.seven-health.com/328.

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.

Before we get on with today’s show, I just have an announcement to say that I’m currently taking on new clients. If you are living with an eating disorder and you would like to reach a place of full recovery, then I would love to help. It doesn’t matter whether this has been going on for a year or multiple decades; I truly believe that everyone can reach a place of full recovery. So even if that feels very out of reach for you at this point, I believe that you can get there.

If that is what you would like help with, I would love to support you. If you send an email to info@seven-health.com, and just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, then I can send over the details.

So, let’s get on with today’s show. Today’s episode is a guest episode, and my guest today is Abbie Attwood. Abbie is an anti-diet, weight-inclusive provider with a master’s in clinical nutrition. She is the founder of Abbie Attwood Wellness, where she offers virtual nutrition therapy and body image coaching for individuals and groups. She also hosts the Full Plate Podcast and writes the accompanying newsletter exploring the complexities of healing from diet culture with nuance, warmth, and science.

Abbie’s passion for this work is deeply personal; her own experience with an eating disorder, shaped by the intersection of competitive running, OCD, and chronic illness, fuels her commitment to supporting those who don’t always see themselves in the traditional narrative of disordered eating. She works with clients worldwide, helping them to break free from chronic dieting, body shame, compulsive exercise, and disordered eating. Her approach is grounded in self-compassion, social justice, and body liberation, guiding people towards a more peaceful and respectful relationship with their bodies.

Abbie splits her time between Maine and the Bay Area with her husband and their two quirky rescue pups. She’s a devoted lover of breakfast, books, the ocean, and all the ice-cream.

I’ve been following Abbie for maybe the last year or so. I found her through Instagram, and I always love what she puts out there, so I wanted to have her come on the show. As part of this episode, we talk about her eating disorder and what led up to it, but more importantly, what helped her to recover. I loved getting to talk to her about this and her reflecting on the things that really mattered in her recovery. We go through the very common question that people ask themselves, which is whether recovery is worth it, and what to do when these thoughts come up. We chat about body image and what to do if you experience the feeling of “But I don’t like what my body looks like.” Abbie has some really great advice in this area. We also cover self-compassion and using values to make decisions and many other topics.

I loved chatting with Abbie. She is very easy to talk to, and I loved everything she had to share. We had less time than the usual two hours, but I think we packed in a ton in the limited time that we did have.

So that’s it for this intro. Here is my conversation with Abbie Attwood.

Hey, Abbie. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for joining me today.

Abbie Attwood: Hi, Chris. It’s really nice to be here.

Chris Sandel: As part of today’s call, I want to talk about you and your backstory and how you got into doing what you’re doing, and then focusing on a lot of the different areas that you work on with people. I’ve gone through your podcasts; there’s so many different great topics that you cover, and I want to be able to talk about some of those with you.

There was a really interesting thing on your site. You said, “The road that led me to this place was a culmination of factors: multiple autoimmune diseases, an identity that was overly wrapped up in my running career, and the nature of my highly sensitive and anxious personality.” I want to see if we can hit all of those pieces.

00:04:23

What Abbie’s relationship with food was like growing up

But just as a starting point, tell me about your relationship with food growing up.

Abbie Attwood: Growing up, I was someone who was very fortunate, and I think that’s actually an interesting part of my story because it definitely was not driven by family dynamics or home culture that I developed an eating disorder. I didn’t develop an eating disorder until I was about 20 years old, so I was really fortunate. There weren’t dieting rules in my house. There were all foods. My mom cooked anything. There was no food shaming. I was very lucky when it came to food. And it’s interesting because both my parents were physicians, but I’ve never seen either of them diet, never seen either of them say things about food in that way.

However, I do think – and as I’ve done this work over the last few years – not few years, many years – I’ve realised I think a lot of that was because of thin privilege in my family. No-one in my family struggled, so to speak, with that in that way. So I do wonder, if I had been in a different body, would food have been policed differently in my home.

Chris Sandel: For sure. Have you had conversations now, the work that you do in terms of being anti-diet and all of this approach, when you have conversations with your parents now about that, how on board are they?

Abbie Attwood: Oh my God, Chris, should we make that a whole podcast? [laughs] Oh my gosh, have I had those conversations. Hi, Mom, if you’re listening. [laughs] Very honestly and openly, it’s hard. I think not so much the food stuff, but the weight bias in medicine is difficult. It’s difficult to get around. I think we’ve come a really long way in the conversations, and my parents are my biggest supporters. We have actually really, really great conversations about this stuff.

But there is that push and pull, because – you know this, most likely – but I think doctors and physicians really get steeped in anti-fat bias more than even someone outside of medicine because of the training. For so long, it’s been very, very rooted in that. So that’s where the tension has arisen here and there, but they’re such open people and growth-oriented people, and they’re interested. I also think witnessing me struggle so much for so long opened their eyes to that people have different experiences with this. Just because food was never complicated for them, does not mean that that’s the norm.

And helping them realise just how many people struggle with this – they are most certainly the exception, I believe. What do you think? I don’t know. In terms of the population out there, how many of us struggle with our relationship with food and our body. It’s massive.

Chris Sandel: For sure. I’m also the exception. I’ve never dieted, I’ve never had issues in terms of my relationship with food. I’ve definitely had stuff around my body and worry and shame and stuff connected to that, so that piece I can really understand. But in terms of my lived experience around food, food has been a very easy thing for me for the entirety of my life. And I know how much privilege there is in being able to say that. But yes, I am definitely the exception, not the rule with that stuff.

Abbie Attwood: Yeah, it’s amazing, isn’t it?

00:08:05

How she developed an eating disorder

And I think that’s what got me interested in why I did develop an eating disorder later. We know that there’s obviously environmental factors and biological factors, social factors, all these things, and I didn’t have that seed planted when I was younger, but I did have this athlete identity that you mentioned, based on what was on my website. So that was a big part of who I was.

And in that is, even subconsciously when you’re young, this idea of what an athlete ‘should’ look like. This idea that an athlete – I mean, sport to sport, it varies, but –

Chris Sandel: What sports were you doing?

Abbie Attwood: When I was young, I was playing lacrosse, soccer, and I was skiing. But what’s interesting is in college I started running, and that gradually got more and more competitive, and interestingly enough, that’s when the disordered eating started. I think there is a lot of disordered eating culture in running, and then there’s also very much a thin body archetype in runners, too.

But I think a lot of what led me into an eating disorder was actually more about my mental health conditions that had gone unaddressed my whole life. I didn’t get diagnosed with OCD until I was an adult, after having recovered from an eating disorder. That put so many pieces together for me, in my childhood and all of it, because I was the most anxious kid you’ve ever met. Socially I was great, I was happy, but I had really, really deep-seated anxieties about certain things.

Disordered eating and running, essentially to make a long story as short as possible, were like tools that became the most accessible to me to manage that. I had panic disorder for a long time and so much anxiety, and that control of running and eating in a certain way was like a life raft when I felt like I was drowning in all of these other ways. And that took hold of me in a deeper and deeper way over the years, and finally I was like, “Oh my God, how did I get here? This started as a way to feel okay, and now here I am.”

Chris Sandel: I talk about eating disorders as being anxiety disorders. When you look at people who go on to develop eating disorders, a very high percentage of them have high anxiety before this ever started and have high anxiety after this is all over, just because that’s the baseline of that person.

You talked about eating disorders being biopsychosocial, which they totally are, and the biology piece being you get into a lower energy state, whether that’s intentionally dieting or just “I’ve started to run more and I haven’t been putting as much focus on the fact that I needed to eat more frequently” or whatever, and you suddenly find yourself in a biological state that starts to have more of these eating disorder thoughts come up, or “I’m now getting this euphoria” or “I now feel calmer” or this state that is there in the beginning, that honeymoon phase where it feels like “I found this way of being and this winning ticket”, and it works until it doesn’t.

And then you find you’re in this place where “I’m knocking up against all the malnutrition and the symptoms that are occurring because of being in that low-energy state, and yet I feel unable to do anything differently, and this feels so compulsive and it feels so hard to then move away from doing this.” Does that sound accurate?

Abbie Attwood: Yeah, I think you just wrote my book for me on my experience. [laughs] Yeah, no, everything, literally everything you just said.

I want to highlight one thing you said, which was it wasn’t intentional. I did not set out to lose weight necessarily or anything like that. It was very much to manage existential dread and anxiety and fear and panic all the time, and just not feeling okay in my body. More like psychologically not feeling okay.

But to your point, and what’s been demonstrated in a lot of the research, is once we get into that malnutrition, deprived state, it drives more obsessive behaviours around that. And you can imagine for someone with undiagnosed OCD, that was this huge spiral for me. Running became more obsessive and eating in a certain way became more obsessive, because it was more about the routine itself, more about the rigidity of doing everything a certain way every single day, and it became “Oh, this isn’t just a way to get out of this hard time.” Over time, it became “This is the only way I know how to live.” Then at that point, you’re like, “I actually don’t know how to get out of this. I actually have no idea where to go from here.”

The other thing that happened once I started trying to recover is that I was diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses over the course of like five years. That complicated things a lot. It also contributed to some self-blame and shame because I felt like perhaps I’d done it to myself through being undernourished. I was like, “Did I put this stress on my body, and did that become a catalyst for these things? Did it cause them in the first place?” I know that’s not true now, but I do believe being malnourished contributes to the manifestation of, or perhaps increases the intensity of some of those symptoms. Because the body fundamentally doesn’t have what it needs, so if you’re struggling with an immune condition at the foundation, of course not eating enough and not giving your body the energy it needs to even address that thing is going to have some detrimental effects.

So that was another really complicated piece of my recovery because – you probably know this, Chris, as well as I do – diet culture has all sorts of things to say about how you should eat if you have a chronic illness or an autoimmune disease. It gets you wrapped up in that rabbit hole, too. So it was a tough one.

Chris Sandel: For sure. I think the thing with an eating disorder is it will find any bit of evidence, any bit of logic of why we should keep doing this thing, so you start having these ideas about what’s ‘healthy’, and it can be then very easy to, as you say, go down that rabbit hole. And it’s coming from the place, or it feels like it’s coming from the place, of “This is me taking care of myself. This is me being healthy.” And yet actually it’s the thing that’s preventing you from getting to a better place of health.

One of the things I will regularly say is, the healthiest thing you can do is not have an eating disorder. This is true, doesn’t matter if you have multiple autoimmune conditions. Not having an eating disorder is going to be the healthiest thing that you can do for yourself.

Abbie Attwood: Totally. I think at the core – it takes time because we’re not able to really see what’s going on unless we get some support or we work through it, but at the core, if you’re living in that state of reactivity to what’s going on around you, you’re coming from a place of fear. Like you said, it feels like you’re taking care of yourself. “Oh sure, I’ll eat this way to manage this condition.” But you don’t look at the evidence around that. You don’t look at the research. You’re like, “Oh yeah, this sounds great because I can control food again.”

But all that is, is fear. I think if we’re being driven by fear, we are truly never able to make self-compassionate, body autonomous choices for ourselves, because fear is in the driver’s seat. Urgency is in the driver’s seat. It’s like a constant shame spiral because it’s perfectionism. It’s just more perfectionism manifesting as self-care.

Chris Sandel: It also prevents you from being objective. If I have all these foods that I really fear and I say, “I just don’t like those foods”, we don’t know if that’s actually true, or it’s just the fact that it feels safer to choose these other foods that I’ve labelled as being healthy or okay. So we need to get to a stage where everything is on the menu, and now I can start to be objective about what does truly work for me and what doesn’t work for me. But it takes a while to get to that place. And I think too often, people are trying to make those decisions while still being very much in the grips of an eating disorder or while they have all these off-limit foods, and you’re just not able to truly be making objective choices. You’re being heavily influenced by the fear.

Abbie Attwood: Yeah, that’s the body autonomy piece that I mentioned. We don’t have autonomy with an eating disorder. We don’t have autonomy when we’re listening to diet culture’s random rules or when we’re being driven by fear or feeling like we’re failing in some way. It’s always going to be like we’re grasping at anything to help us feel okay and feel safe.

I totally agree with what you said; that objectivity is lost. I convinced myself for years that I shouldn’t eat gluten or dairy. Those are two common categories that get demonized.

And then by the time that I was starting to realise that I could eat those things, I had convinced myself that I didn’t like them in the first place. So it was a whole process to come back to a place where I was like, “Okay, I’m going to try these things and objectively try to figure out what I like, what I don’t like” – and to take that a step further, what feels good and what doesn’t feel good. Like, “Is this actually, genuinely making me feel a negative symptom?” And what I found is it absolutely wasn’t. But our belief that it will can certainly create a symptom.

00:18:58

What her recovery looked like

Chris Sandel: For sure. Tell us more about your recovery – what that looked like, what are some of the things where you’re like “Hey, I want people to know this.” And I know it’s n = 1, but what was your experience and what were the things that helped with that?

Abbie Attwood: The really big piece of recovery for me was disentangling food and movement. I very much lived in this exchange system, this prison between what I ate and how much I exercised, for a really, really long time.

What was at first more of a restrictive eating disorder very much became a binge/purge disorder through food and exercise, so exercise was effectively what I would consider the purging. Like feeling really bad about what I ate the night before because my body was finally pushing me towards eating, but it would happen at night – which happens to a lot of folks and a lot of my clients, and there’s a ton of shame in that because you sit there after and you’re like, “What the hell just happened? What’s going on? I have no control, what’s wrong with me?” So you wake up the next day and you try to ‘be good’ again. It drove that really painful cycle for me for a long time.

So I had to disentangle food and movement. A couple things that that meant for me was I stepped back from exercise. There were times in there where I was forced to because I started getting a lot of injuries. One of the chronic illnesses that I have – well, two of them are pituitary-driven, so while undereating obviously negatively impacts our bones, mine was way worse than that because of what was going on with my endocrine system. I was breaking bones left and right from exercising.

So there was a lot of forced rest, but then eventually it was like, “Okay, I need to deliberately rest and step away from this and rethink what it means to live in my body without this constant battle between the food and the movement thing.” That was so crucial to me. And I don’t say that as like everybody should just stop exercising, but I do find that there is a lot of value in that for a lot of people if that’s the thing they’re struggling with – to really step back from that, because it is so hard to heal when you’re still using the thing that you were abusing your body with for so long.

At the very least I think it helps to embrace a different type of movement than the one that was originally used in that way. When I started moving my body again, it was not running; it was very gentle, like stretching and that kind of stuff. So that was one piece, and that took a really long time and it was really hard. Like I said before, it went way deeper than the food thing. It was an identity. It tied me to my family, it tied me to my sense of self, my self-worth. So it wasn’t just disentangling the two; it was like, “Who am I? If you take this thing away, then who am I? What makes me, me?”

It’s such a precarious place to be when you define yourself by one thing, and I realised that, because that thing could be taken away in a flash. It’s not guaranteed. I think that was essential.

Chris Sandel: I want to hear more how you transitioned through that period, because that comes up so much for people, where they’re like “This is my identity”, whether it’s “I’m the runner” or “I’m the fit one” or “I’m the healthy one” or whatever it may be, and “I’m now having to essentially lose this thing and take on this new identity.” I know that can be so destabilizing for people, or it feels like “I’m having this really messy in-between period where I just don’t know who I am.” How did you navigate getting through that piece?

Abbie Attwood: Just hearing you say that makes me ache for my younger self. I still feel that. It’s grief. I think it’s grief work, so I still feel that when I think about it. I still think about the loss of that, and not in a way that I’m longing for it again, but in a way of having a lot of compassion for my younger self and just how tethered I was to that thing for so long, and how much it prevented me from living my life.

I think that’s one thing. I think what I had to do was actively let myself grieve that thing, grieve the loss of running from who I was. And I can speak to practically what that looked like, but I think mentally and emotionally what that involved was really letting myself feel what I was feeling and then, once I felt safe, getting curious about what that was giving me. Like, why? Why did that identity feel so important? For me, it came back to a sense of belonging, a sense of safety, a sense of value. It was tied up in my family a lot, I realised, like getting approval and feeling loved. So I had to dismantle that. I had to realise that was bullshit. Excuse me, can I swear?

Chris Sandel: [laughs] Yeah, you can swear.

Abbie Attwood: Like, my family does not love me because of that. My friends do not love me because of that. I really had to break that down.

But the other piece of the grief was losing a thing that was giving me some joy. I genuinely loved running. That was hard because that’s different than just leaving something behind that you’re like “This is not a good thing for me.” It was like, oh my God, no, I genuinely love this thing. It has turned into something that’s also destructive, but at its core it began because I loved it so much.

So eventually I had to find other things that brought me joy. I think that goes back to if you’re identifying with one thing, it’s never going to serve you long term. We are so many things. So I had to find other things that I loved, like other ways that I found I could experience joy in the world and use my body to experience joy. Not physically, but literally going to a museum or reading a book or listening to music that I loved or playing with my dogs. That helped a lot.

And I will say, practically, I had to make sure that I invested in community outside of athletic circles. Being up against that all the time with those people that talked about that stuff all the time – no shade at all to that, but it’s hard if you’re trying to disentangle from that but that’s the only type of group of people that you’re hanging out with. I really had to diversify that.

Those are some of the things that come to mind, but there was a lot. There was a lot of resting.

Chris Sandel: That’s really useful. In terms of the identify diversification, I think that’s a really important thing. As part of the programme I run, one of the modules is looking at this, or one of the videos is about this. There’s a Tim Ferriss quote connected to this. And I have mixed feelings about Tim Ferriss; I think he does some wonderful stuff and some stuff that is highly questionable. But there’s a quote about the importance of identity diversification, because if you put your identity all in this one thing, that thing could very easily go tits up, and then you’re left with nothing. You’re then left in a situation where “Who am I now?” So I think it’s important to have all these different things.

And as you said, if all of my friends are doing this thing, I’m going to need to find a new group of friends. If you’re discovering you’ve got issues around alcohol and you’re now starting to go into sobriety, if every one of your friends is in the pub or in a bar every single weekend, we’re going to need to find some new friends, at least for a while, so you can find other ways of being, so that you’re not just constantly feeling pulled back to that thing or feeling resentful about this thing or all the emotions that would then come up when you’re knocking against the fact that “I’m no longer choosing to do this thing and there are other people who are choosing to do this thing.”

Abbie Attwood: Yeah. I think relationships are actually a really core part of this work. My husband has been central in keeping me stable all these years. And me for him. He was an addict, so it’s interesting you brought that up. We sometimes talk about the similarities and differences between those recoveries a lot, and it’s really interesting.

But I think those relationships, my friendships, my family, those were really important things – and things that I had lost touch with in a lot of ways because disordered eating and disordered exercising are very time- and energy-consuming. They isolate us. They make us not maybe go to certain events, or they make us a little bit more rigid with our time and how we want to spend it. And even when we are with people, we’re not super present, because if you’re constantly worried about food and your body and all of that, it makes it really difficult to fully enjoy whatever you’re doing. So I do think that was a really, really important part – not just building new friendships outside of athletic circles, but really thinking critically about who I am and who that means I like to be with based on my values.

00:28:57

The benefit of values work in recovery

I know some people can cringe at the concept of values work, but that actually helps me a lot. If you can identify what you truly value in life and bring yourself back to that and stay grounded in that, you realise you will not look back on your life and wish you had been more obsessive with food or exercise. You will wish you had spent more time with the people that you love. You will wish that you lived a life authentic to yourself and true to who you are.

I’m a person that that really mattered for. Thinking about that all the time really mattered to me. And so did learning about the social justice issues that intersect with all of this work in terms of white supremacy culture and the roots of diet culture and all these other systems. Like hustle culture and – I don’t know, it’s a lot. You start to realise, “I don’t want this for other people. I wouldn’t want to treat somebody else the way I’m treating myself. This doesn’t line up with what kind of world I want.” So that helped me a lot, the big picture. Which is hard to grasp in those really hard moments, like if you’re having a really terrible body image day or whatever. But when you can reach for that, it helps a lot.

Chris Sandel: For sure. And I don’t cringe at values work. I think it’s so helpful, and I use it a lot with clients. For me, values don’t have to be set in stone. It’s not that the values you say are your values now have to be your values in 20 years. Often it’s like, let’s look at some different values and imagine, if we make these your values and you live in alignment with them, let’s see what starts to happen with your life. What are some of the choices that you start to make?

I think you can very much “I’m having this bad body image day, and I’m also going to come back into, I’ve said my value is integrity, and I’ve defined what integrity means, or I’ve said my value is openness and I’ve defined what openness means. So if I’m struggling with this, what would someone who has those values do in this moment?” It helps you to come back to making choices that feel like they’re much more about what is genuinely good for the quality of my life and the person that I want to be?” as opposed to “I’m getting pulled by the fear or the emotions or the current state that I’m in. This transitory state that I’m feeling in this moment that feels so permanent is not, but what could I do in this moment to come back to what is actually the thing that is important to me, and how do I want to genuinely live?”

Abbie Attwood: Yeah. That’s so well said, Chris. I realised, for instance, that my values are compassion and inclusivity, equity, humour for sure, joy. I mean, I’m a goofball at my core. And authenticity. Living with an eating disorder and organising my day around food and my body and exercise did not allow me to live into any of those things. It reinforced the idea that there was a ‘good’ body to have. It was the opposite of compassion. It was very punitive and judgmental and critical. It was not authentic. It was not who I was. It had nothing to do with inclusivity and equity, and it definitely stole humour and joy from my life.

I think stepping into the weight-inclusive, fat-positive space with nutrition and everything and body image and body liberation opened my eyes so much more to that, too. Like, I believe all bodies are worthy bodies, so why was I buying into this idea that mine was only worthy if it looked a certain way? Because by doing that, I was part of the problem. I was peddling the injustice of body shame and oppressive ideas about weight and worth.

That made me feel really icky and terrible, and I had to sit with that and go, “Wow, this does not square with what you believe. If you keep doing this, you are contributing to this.” And compassionately saying that to myself. Not like shaming myself, but compassionately having a conversation with myself, like, “No, no, this is not what you want. And if you do this, know what it’s doing.”

Chris Sandel: I think the compassion piece where you can realise, “This isn’t who I want to be or in alignment with my values – okay, what is this about? This is about fear.”

Abbie Attwood: Yeah, and “It’s not my fault.” That’s a powerful one. It’s not my fault. None of this is any of our faults.

Chris Sandel: Yeah. “It’s not my fault, and in this moment I still get to choose how I’m going to behave and what I’m going to do as the next thing here.”

Abbie Attwood: Autonomy.

Chris Sandel: I think it cuts through so much of the lies of the eating disorder thoughts and the eating disorder logic and all of that so that you come back to, “No, no, no, let me be honest about what’s actually going on here, because none of this matches up to my values. This is because I’m scared in this moment, or something’s happened, so there’s this state that has arisen within me, there’s certain thoughts that have come up, certain feelings that have come up, and I’m now being shunted back towards this old way of behaving.”

Abbie Attwood: Old thought patterns.

Chris Sandel: Yeah, all of that. So being able to catch that, have that objectivity of noticing, and then “Cool, now what do I want to do?” I know the way I talk about it sounds like it’s so easy, and I know in the moment it’s not like that. But just having that awareness piece of “This is actually what is occurring in these moments.”

Abbie Attwood: It doesn’t sound that way to me, because I really do believe that we can’t think our way out of this. I really believe we have to take actions that align with what we want for ourselves, and that can feel really inauthentic at first. But I do believe in that. I believe when we’re struggling with an eating disorder, we have become an expert at having an eating disorder. It’s because we’ve been practising it for so long. We’ve been doing it day in, day out, all the behaviours.

To believe that we can just start thinking differently is just wildly inaccurate. And it sucks, because most of us who develop eating disorders are very intelligent people. I say that to my clients all the time. Usually it’s very driven, highly intelligent people, and you want to be able to think your way out of it, and you wait until you can. And if you keep waiting, it’s never going to happen. You have to start taking actions that align with how you want to feel and how you want to treat your body so that you become an expert at self-compassion rather than restrictive eating. I don’t want to be an expert at restrictive eating. [laughs]

Chris Sandel: For sure. If I think about the identity piece, part of the reason why you had an identity as a runner is “I spend so much time doing this thing”, so it becomes your identity because you spend so much time doing this thing. It’s the same with an eating disorder. If I spend so much time doing this and behaving this way, that becomes my identity, and it also becomes the way that I behave. To take on a different identity and to behave differently, as you say, I need to take action.

So yeah, I regularly say you don’t think your way into acting differently, you act your way into thinking differently.

Abbie Attwood: I like that.

Chris Sandel: I need to keep doing these actions, and now I start to think about food differently, or I think about rest differently because I’ve done the thing to demonstrate and to have my nervous system and my body start to react differently to this thing. In a sense, you’re now retraining it how to be in these situations.

Abbie Attwood: Yes, I agree fully.

Chris Sandel: I know there’s a million things you could probably comment on, but anything else from your recovery that you want to mention in terms of “This was a really important part of my recovery”?

00:37:52

The importance of self-compassion

Abbie Attwood: We did start to touch on self-compassion, and I think that was really essential for me, just realising how unkind I was being to myself. So leaning into that. I think self-compassion was essential. And I like to break it down for folks who are not really sure what that means – I think it’s about meeting yourself with as much kindness as you can muster when you’re suffering.

It is not easy, but I always think when we’re struggling, in those moments we’re struggling, whether it’s with our body or food or something else, we always go into this ‘fix it’ mode of like “What can I do? How can I control this?” And self-compassion is acknowledging the pain you’re in. I don’t think we do that enough, if ever. Like, when we do actually sit back, put a hand to our heart, and say, “Oh my gosh, what a hard moment I’m having right now.” Never.

And yet we do that to a friend. That’s how I meet a friend; if they come to me and are having a horrible day, that’s the first thing I say. I say, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. That sounds so hard.” I don’t say, “Well, you should probably go restrict and shame yourself in a mirror and go do an exercise.” No. But I think getting curious about – you and I touched on this a little bit, but why are we having the thoughts we’re having? Can we get a little bit more present and objective with that? Where did those messages come from? Why are we buying into them? What are they giving us? What would it be like to choose something else in this moment?

Connection and community. Remembering that we’re not alone and we’re not isolated in the experience is another part of self-compassion. And then the kindness piece. Just really not being so mean to ourselves all the time. It sounds radical to be nice to yourself, and it shouldn’t. [laughs] It shouldn’t.

That helped me so much. And it still does, Chris. Honestly, it still does, because life is inevitably going to be hard in all sorts of ways. You don’t recover from an eating disorder or get a much better handle on your anxiety or OCD and suddenly life is rainbows and butterflies. It’s hard. Especially lately, it’s been very hard. I think recovery from something like an eating disorder teaches us how to meet ourselves in other moments of suffering without abandoning ourselves.

I really think that’s what it comes down to for me now. If I’m having a hard day, how do I take care of myself without abandoning myself? Because that’s how I see eating disorders now – mine for sure. I thought I was coping in some way, but I really was abandoning and dismissing my body and my fundamental needs. So kindness towards myself has helped a lot.

Chris Sandel: When you reflect on this, was it the eating disorder that really led you astray from self-compassion? Or “I wasn’t particularly compassionate before I developed an eating disorder, and if I reflect on myself as a young kid or in my teens, that was definitely missing”?

Abbie Attwood: That’s a great question. I think it was missing. I actually think it wasn’t a skill that I grew up with. I think I was self-critical, which drove a lot of perfectionism and fear. I think a lot of that was because of undiagnosed OCD and anxiety. I would go into these spirals of depression because of all the intrusive thoughts. It felt so othering to me, and I was like, “But this isn’t who I am.” I was really outgoing. I’ve always been an outgoing, positive, optimistic person. So I would really fight against it. I would fight against those intrusive thoughts, I would fight against the anxiety, I would get frustrated with myself for being like that, and I would feel like I was broken. I was like, “What is wrong with me? Nobody else feels this way.”

I don’t think I grew up with any of that, and it was painful. I do think that’s probably why I started using disordered eating and exercising to cope with those feelings, eventually, of just feeling like I had nothing and no-one to tether myself to. I just felt like I was failing all the time. When I look back, I’m like, oh my God, not at all. Not even close. But I didn’t have the skills to say, “Oh, what would it be like to find some acceptance in this moment and be nice to myself and not fight these feelings?”

Yeah, it’s a great question, Chris. I didn’t have it before, so it was definitely like I didn’t have the touchstone to go back to. I had to build from scratch in recovery.

Chris Sandel: For sure. And if you’re talking about what are some predisposing factors to developing an eating disorder, low ability to be self-compassionate is one of those things. I like the way that you talked about self-compassion. I use it a lot with clients because it’s so important as part of recovery, but also just being a human in this world.

Abbie Attwood: Life, yeah.

Chris Sandel: And living at this moment in time, or really any moment in time. It doesn’t matter how utopian things get in the future, if it ever gets there; there’s still going to be much need for self-compassion.

I think the one thing I would add when going through recovery – again, the eating disorder can very much latch onto this idea, and there can be faux self-compassion, which is things that are very much in service of the eating disorder, like “I know you said you were going to have this thing as a snack or you were going to add this thing to your lunch, but it’s just going to be so anxiety-provoking for you. You don’t need to do that. Just give that thing a pass.”

I think really understanding that self-compassion in those moments is treating yourself kindly, but also there being the accountability of like “Hey, I know this is really hard for you to do this, I know it sucks, I know you wish that we didn’t have to do this. And we said that we’re going to do this, and we need to do this to get better.” I just want to say that because I think it can be very easy to hear about self-compassion and then the eating disorder uses it or it’s in service of its doing.

Abbie Attwood: I love that you said that. I love that you brought that in, because absolutely. I think there’s nuance. If life is a total shitstorm, everything is hard, somebody in your family’s sick, I don’t know, literally all these things are hard – yeah, it might not be the day that you do the really hard exposure food. [laughs] But you do show up for yourself and say, “In light of that, though, what am I going to do? I’m going to eat more of this thing” or whatever. There’s some toughness to self-kindness. Being kind to yourself doesn’t mean letting yourself off the hook or not holding yourself accountable, like you said.

But I love that you brought that up, Chris, because I think that’s really important. Yeah, all these old coping behaviours are going to try to latch onto the new thing and be like, “Well, how can we twist this in service of what we want?” [laughs] It is so tricky.

Chris Sandel: As you said, so many people who develop eating disorders are really smart, and the way that the eating disorder gets in, especially as time goes on and someone’s truly wanting to recover and they feel like “I’m just not making any inroads with this”, it is because of the logic piece and the eating disorder using logic against you. I think the self-compassion piece is one that I’ve found with people when they start to hear about it that yes, the eating disorder then takes self-compassion under its wing and says, “Okay, cool, I’ve got a new tool that I can use here.”

Abbie Attwood: Yeah. It reminds me of what we were talking about before with acting differently rather than just trying to think your way out of it. If you’re just using self-compassion in service of trying to think differently, it’s not true self-compassion. You have to do those hard things. You have to do the hard behaviours. That’s self-compassion. But doing those things with kindness and not bringing perfectionism into it. I think that’s where we end up beating ourselves up in recovery, thinking we’re now failing at recovery.

So if you do fall short of what you wanted to do that day in terms of taking those behaviours, you are never going to be better off by beating yourself up. Ever. You’re going to be better off by being like, “All right, that happened. I’m not a bad person for that. I’m not failing at recovery. I’m just learning, and none of this is going to be perfect or linear, so now I decide, what do I do next? What’s the next kind thing I can do in this moment?” It’s this constant, constant work.

00:47:28

Answering the question “Is recovery worth it?”

Chris Sandel: For sure. I want to hit some of the topics you’ve covered on your podcasts, because I think there’s so much good stuff here. One that feels somewhat connected to what we’ve just been talking about is this idea that someone can start questioning whether recovery is worth it. I think this comes up at lots of stages through the recovery journey, whether we’re right at the beginning or we’ve made some changes or we’re quite a long way along. So talk about this. If someone was coming to you and feeling like, “Hey, I’m really struggling, I’m in a funk, this thing’s happened and I’m questioning whether recovery is worth it”, what are some of the things you would be either asking them or sharing with them? Where would you go with that?

Abbie Attwood: That’s a good question. I think I’d first want to understand why they feel like recovery’s not worth it. I’d want to know more about that, and within that, I’d want to know more about what does recovery mean to them. I think ‘recovery’ is actually a word – I use it just because I think people understand what you’re saying when you say it, but it’s not a word I really identify with. My personal experience, I never really identified with it.

I really felt like I was just healing from a lot of disconnection with myself. What does it mean to heal? Where are we trying to get to? Because if you start thinking it’s not worth it, I’m really curious about how you’re defining it. I think our autonomy and liberation and respecting ourselves and living a life that feels true to ourselves and not being stuck in this prison of eating and exercising or whatever it might be with your body image, I think it’s always going to be worth it. Always. I think the question is how you’re defining it.

I think there’s a lot of neurotypical and neuronormative definitions of recovery – that eating is going to look a certain way, that you’re going to feel a certain way all the time, that you might recover into a certain body. I think what we have to do is start picking that apart and redefining it for each individual person. Like really writing down, what does this mean? What do I want out of this? Why the hell am I doing this?

I wouldn’t be here talking to you – I’m thinking about a client talking to me. The person wouldn’t be sitting with me if what they had been doing was working for them and making them feel good. I think we can really trick ourselves into thinking that maybe it’s just easier to live with the eating disorder. I don’t believe that. I’ll never believe that because it is no way for anyone to live. No-one deserves to live that way. In my mind and in my heart, I really believe that.

So I would really want to redefine with that person what they want out of this at the end of the day and why, and just root ourselves in that a little bit more and think about, what does it look like day to day, then, to start practising into that, with and while embracing all the imperfection and messiness that comes up? I think there’s a lot of perfectionism that shows up in a person who says “I don’t think this is worth it.”

Chris Sandel: For sure. I agree with everything you said. I think being able to play the slightly longer game of “What are you doing this for?” – because I think often when this is coming up, it’s because of an experience I’m having today or in this moment or when I’m trying to make this change, and we’re then knocking up against all of the discomfort that is coming up in those moments. What often happens with that is I then forget about all the discomfort that is permanently going on because of living with an eating disorder.

I think one of the things I come back to again and again with this is so often, what is getting chalked up to recovery is the eating disorder. People are like, “Recovery is so much harder.” It’s like, no, no, that’s the eating disorder that’s so much harder. And really connecting into it is the eating disorder that is making this thing really difficult; it is not recovery that is making this thing really difficult.

I think it feels like “If recovery’s the thing making it difficult, if I stop recovering, then I’m getting a holiday from all of this discomfort and pain and suffering.” It’s like, no, you’re not going to get a holiday from any of this. Maybe you’ll get this momentary relief, but you’re still, as you say, living in this same prison. So if at least I can see all of this as being connected to the eating disorder, I’m not going to fool myself into thinking, “When I pull back from this, then it will get easier for me”, because it just doesn’t.

And I have a huge amount of compassion for someone in that moment. I get that it’s really hard in this moment, and you’re wanting to find any way of relief or making it easier – and the thing that your mind is convincing you is going to make it easier is actually not going to make it easier.

Abbie Attwood: Totally. You’re reminding me of something that I say a lot. I think when we’re in that space of “This is too hard” – I mean, behind that feeling is “This is too hard, I can’t do this. I’m going to stick to what I know. I’m going to stick to what feels comfortable, what feels safe.” I think in those moments, we have to remind ourselves that it’s hard both ways. It’s not easy to live with an eating disorder for the rest of your life. Don’t let it trick you into that belief. Familiarity doesn’t equal ease. Just like newness and change doesn’t equal hard and impossible.

It is going to be hard both ways. It’s going to be hard to recover and heal, and it’s going to be very hard to stay in an eating disorder for the rest of your life. So we have to choose the hard that leads towards our freedom and our peace and our authenticity.

And also, if you were to graph both of these things – sorry, I think in graphs a lot, but I’m literally thinking of a line graph. If you were to choose the hard of the eating disorder, that line climbs over time. It gets harder and harder and harder to maintain an eating disorder. It destroys more and more and more and more of your life – your relationships, your work, your pleasure, everything, your connection to yourself.

But in contrast, choosing healing and recovering from the eating disorder definitely starts out feeling harder than sticking with the ED behaviours that you’ve been doing for a long time and know very well, but it’s a hard that eases up over time, and that graph goes the opposite direction. It gets easier and easier and easier as you go. It’s remembering that, that you have a choice, but one of these hards leads you closer to yourself and one of them leads you to a life of inauthenticity and disconnection.

Just because something’s hard, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Just because it’s uncomfortable, doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It’s just new. It’s just different.

Chris Sandel: I totally agree with you. I’ve said very similar things at various points. I also think the sad part with this is the worse things get with an eating disorder and the more things fall by the wayside, the more someone then tends to hold on to that thing, and the more this thing becomes important. Because if everything is going to hell, this is the one constant that I have.

I’m saying this because I think what can often happen for many people is “When I get sicker, then I’ll make a change. I’m going to hit this rock bottom, and at that point, man, it’s going to be so damn obvious to me that I need to make a change that I’m just going to start changing, and there’s going to be motivation forever, and I’ll walk out of this thing because it will be so clear-cut that I need to change.” It just doesn’t work in that way.

Abbie Attwood: No, it’s such a lie, isn’t it?

Chris Sandel: The sicker someone gets, the more it feels “I now can’t make this change, this thing’s too important for me.” If that is the way you’re feeling, like “I’ve got to have my weight come down even more and then it will be serious enough for this to be dealt with”, that just doesn’t happen.

Abbie Attwood: You know what, Chris, I don’t know if you see this too, but something I see with that mindset – one of the ways to get beneath that lie is I think a lot of people that I work with, and I experienced this myself too, is if you buy into that belief, what then happens is – let’s say you do get to that sicker point, and then you take some actions to heal, whatever that might mean. Eating more, whatever. But then you get to a point inevitably where you feel scared to keep going, and then you convince yourself that you need to get back to that prior point in order to deserve to keep going again.

So if you were imagining a staircase, you wind up bouncing back and fort hon these two steps, because if you believe that you only deserve to get better when you’re at some level of sickness, you’re going to keep bringing yourself back to that point in order to keep going, so it’s one step forward, one step back. It drives this cycle.

And that is what can drive somebody to start feeling like “This isn’t worth it”, back to your original question. Because of course it doesn’t feel that way if you do really feel like you’re ping-ponging between two different stairs on the staircase and never getting any further.

So it’s looking honestly at, what would it take to get to that next step and sit in the discomfort of not bouncing back to that first one? What would it be like to just sit here for a little longer and see if this discomfort passes? Practise self-compassion, ask yourself what you need, and try to get to that next step before convincing yourself that you have to get sicker again in order to keep going.

Chris Sandel: I totally agree with you. I think the other piece as well is, however bad you are now, we want to get better than this. For example, if you’re at a 7 out of 10 in terms of how bad it is, if we get you to an 8 because things have got even worse, we’re still going to have to go past this original point that you’re at. You need to go to a 7, then a 6, then a 5, and all the way back up. So we’re just adding on extra time, extra pain, all of these things as this way of you conceptualising, “I’m now sick enough to start doing this work.” We don’t need to wait for things to get worse. Here is bad enough.

Abbie Attwood: Yeah. You know what this reminds me of? When I was really grappling with leaving running, which I finally did, and I was getting all those injuries, I found myself in the same cycle. It was very separate from the eating disorder, but very similar thinking, which was I would push through so much pain in running. But then I started learning how much worse that would make injuries versus if I just rested at the first sign of something hurting a little bit, it didn’t end up being this long-term thing that knocked me out for a year. But if I decided that it needed to get worse in order to justify me taking a step back and resting a little bit, it turned into a full-blown injury that took me out.

I learned that the hard way, like, no, actually, you don’t want this to get worse because that makes things harder in the long term. You want to rest when you need to rest. And we can take that back to the eating disorder thing, which is like, why do we want this to get worse? It’s going to make it harder and harder and harder and prolonged to heal. Just like a bone injury.

Chris Sandel: For sure. It’s like “There’s a flood in my house, and at the moment it’s only the kitchen that’s damaged, but I’m going to wait till everything downstairs is ruined and then I’m going to turn it off.” We probably don’t need to wait for that. And often the person who’s saying “It’s just the kitchen that’s flooded”, the whole bottom of the house is already flooded. You’re just not aware of how bad the flooding is. We don’t need this to get worse because you start doing something about it.

Abbie Attwood: Totally. And on the flipside, you’re making me think of something that comes up with this mindset of “This is getting too hard, I can’t do this, is this worth it.” Our mind plays tricks on us. These cognitive distortion type things happen where we perceive a bump in the road as a sign that it’s going to get worse and worse and worse.

I think I was reading a random book the other day and one of the characters said, “I have to stop seeing a pothole as a sign that the bridge is out around the corner.” I was like, oh my God, how good is that for recovery? Just because there’s a pothole, it doesn’t mean suddenly the bridge ahead is going to be totally destroyed. It’s just a pothole. So I think releasing that mentality of the catastrophic thinking of things are going to keep getting worse and getting harder and getting worse, and remembering that’s just the nature of growth. There’s some discomfort.

Chris Sandel: I love that as an analogy.

Abbie Attwood: Isn’t it good?

Chris Sandel: That’s really, really good.

Abbie Attwood: The pothole doesn’t mean the bridge is out. [laughs]

01:01:37

“But I don’t love what my body looks like”

Chris Sandel: You have a really good post on your Instagram that starts with “But I don’t love what my body looks like.” I would love you to share this because I think that’s got a lot of hearts, a lot of comments. So talk about this.

Abbie Attwood: It’s been one that I probably repost once or twice a year now because it blows people’s mind, this concept. I’m glad you mentioned it, because I was going to mention it – that’s one of the things I forgot to mention as part of my own recovery, what helped.

But the post essentially is saying that a lot of people struggle with body image, thinking that the whole point of body image is to love what their body looks like. What if we take a step back and say, what if that’s not the purpose of having a body? What if the purpose of having a body isn’t that you love its appearance? Sit with that for a moment.

I think most of us can let that sink in long enough to think, yeah, that might be true. The purpose of having a body is not that I look in the mirror every day and say “Oh my God, I love what I look like!” The purpose of having a body is so that we can be here. We don’t get to be on this Earth without a body. So starting to see it as a vessel, as something that holds our magic – I say a lot of times to my clients, your body holds your magic; it is not the magic that you offer the world. It is just the thing that contains who you are.

I think from there, we can start to think about, what does it mean to have a body? What is the purpose of having a body? If it’s not that we need to love what it looks like – if that’s the distraction that diet culture and patriarchy and ableism and all of these other systems have fed us, what does that open us up to doing with our body? Because putting loving what our body looks like as the goal is an impossible goal. Beauty standards, these impossible, unattainable body ideals, those goalposts are always moving, and our body is going to keep changing. We’re going to age, if we’re lucky. To make that the constant goal and the constant barometer and measure of our life is such a – I think it’s a violent distraction. It steals life from us.

So I like to challenge people to think about, maybe that’s not the goal of this work; maybe the goal of this work is to reclaim what the purpose of your body is, and that is to live, and to live life in a way that feels good, and not to love what your body looks like.

Chris Sandel: I love the post, I love what you said there, and I think the thing I would also add to this is just how relative those things are. It feels like, “Okay, that’s fine, but there’s going to be people who are out there who are changing their body and they absolutely adore the changes that are being made, and that’s what I want to strive after.” I work with those people.

And the reality is, you then make some changes, and it’s just never quite enough. Even if I’m now matching up into some ideal and everyone thinks “Oh man, she must be so confident in her body”, behind closed doors, that’s not how someone necessarily feels.

What I’ve heard from many clients is this realisation of “It didn’t matter where my body got to; I was never content. I was never happy with it. It didn’t fill that void I thought it was going to fill. The point where my body was the most aesthetically pleasing by society’s narrow standards of beauty, I was actually still really self-conscious. I wasn’t going to the parties. I wasn’t wearing the thing. It didn’t deliver in the way that I imagined it would.”

The hard thing for a lot of people is they often never get it far enough to be able to have that realisation. “I never quite got there, so it’s that thing that’s still out of reach.” There’s a podcast called Armchair Expert by a guy called Dax Shepard. He’s a celebrity who’s an actor, and he’s talked about different stuff he’s dealt with. But the realisation of “I thought when I’d made it – ‘made it’ being I’d got into a movie, I made a million – that I would feel differently.” And he realised that that just didn’t happen. He said so many people don’t get to have that realisation. Everyone thinks, “It’s just out of reach, and if I just had that thing, then I would feel whole.” He’s like, “No, I’ve had that, and it doesn’t do it for me.”

And that’s not just a unique experience to him, but that’s the unique experience that nearly everyone has in that scenario. “It didn’t do what I thought it was going to do.” So I just want to add that in there, because I think there can often be that feeling of “I get what you’re saying about the body, but I think if I can get it to this place, then I’ll get the best of both worlds.”

Abbie Attwood: That’s exceptionalism in play, believing we’re the exception. But I think what you’re describing is literally the human condition, the happiness fallacy of “It will be better when…” “When XYZ happens, then I’ll finally be happy and then I can stop all of this.”

But not only do we never get there, but even if we get as close – like the Dax Shepard example – it comes usually at the cost of complete destruction of everything else that matters to us. Like, I did get there. I did, me, from a body standpoint. And when I felt the best about my body aesthetically, it was the worst I had ever felt about my life in general. My mental health was at its worst, my life was empty. At what cost?

It’s like, yeah, it’s never enough, the aesthetic thing is never enough, and also, you are going to get there and you’re going to have a wake of destruction behind you. It’s not worth it. It’s never worth it, and it’s never going to be enough. No-one deserves to live like that. That’s not a life.

Chris Sandel: For sure. You come back to the values piece of “What is really important for me? How do I want to spend my time on this Earth?”

Abbie Attwood: And “Oh my God, I’m sacrificing everything that actually matters to me for this thing.”

Chris Sandel: Yeah, because the thing that you want isn’t the thing that you claim you want. No-one wants a ‘better body’ in a vacuum. It’s “I want this because I think it’s going to deliver on these other things. I’m going to feel more confident, I’m going to meet the partner of my dreams.” Like, okay, let’s talk about what those things are and figure out, are we going to go after those things? What are some fallacies baked into them? But we can then have a discussion about what this is really about. The better body is just this ruse. It’s not the real thing.

Abbie Attwood: Yes, totally. And we’re told that. We’re sold that day in, day out, that it is the thing. It is the thing that’s going to make us happy. The media does a really good job of that. I think a lot of healing is about building up other parts of your life in the process.

Recovering from an eating disorder requires, yeah, you have to focus on the food and the body piece, but also investing in other areas of your life to give yourself meaning and purpose from all these other things. So you’re starting to create other pillars that remind you and ground you in what’s actually important and what actually fuels your soul. It can’t be all about the food. [laughs]

Chris Sandel: When I think about recovery, I think it happens in stages. In that earlier stage, the food and the exercise and all those pieces are really important because you’re in that nutritional debt and we need to deal with that. But that’s not everything.

It’s then, you’ve had this thing for the last 10 years and you’ve missed out on learning these coping skills because every time something came up, this was the thing that you leant on. We need to look at developing this. Or you didn’t ever learn how to have self-compassion or to set boundaries or all of these other things that are very interconnected with having the eating disorder, and that’s then the next stage of the work.

Abbie Attwood: Yeah, I fully agree. It’s definitely stages, and no right way to do them.

Chris Sandel: For sure. Abbie, I feel like I could chat with you for many hours.

Abbie Attwood: I know, I feel the same.

Chris Sandel: I know you have to go. The last thing I want to ask is, for people who have enjoyed this, where do you want them to be going? Where can they find out more information about you or find content from you? Where do you want to point people to?

Abbie Attwood: First of all, thank you for having me, and I actually feel like we could talk forever. We have a lot in common, don’t we?

Chris Sandel: Yes.

Abbie Attwood: As far as me, I am on Instagram in terms of social media, and I’m @abbieattwoodwellness. My website is abbieattwoodwellness.com. I have a podcast. If you’re listening to this, I assume you like podcasts, so that is weekly on Mondays. It’s called the Full Plate Podcast, and I talk a lot about anti-diet culture and disordered eating and body image and bigger picture stuff with all of this. And I’m on Substack. I write a lot. I just moved everything over there.

And then if you want to look at what I do in terms of working with folks, that’s on my website, and my group offerings are what’s open right now. I don’t have any openings for one-on-one right now, but you can always get on the waitlist.

Chris Sandel: Awesome. I will put all of those things in the show notes. I suggest that everyone go and check that out. I love your social media. I’ve followed you on Instagram for quite a while, and I love everything you’re putting out.

Abbie Attwood: Chris, thanks. I really appreciate you, and I appreciate everything you’re doing. You have a deep understanding of this that is so rare, and even more rare for someone who hasn’t been through it themselves. It’s pretty incredible. So I really value your voice in this space a lot. Everything you said today just really resonated, so I’m really glad we’re connected.

Chris Sandel: Awesome. I will speak to you again soon.

Abbie Attwood: Thanks.

Chris Sandel: So that was my conversation with Abbie Attwood. If you enjoyed this and you liked what Abbie has to say, I would highly recommend that you go and check out her Instagram, that you follow her podcast, listen to her podcast, subscribe to her podcast, because there’s more of the same kind of stuff that we covered today.

As I mentioned at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients. If you are wanting to reach a place of full recovery, then I would love to help. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line.

That is it for this week’s show. I’ll be back next week with another new episode. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon!