00:00:00

Intro

00:04:43

A bit about Harriet’s background

00:08:14

Food growing up + how she developed an eating disorder

00:15:37

How a trip to Australia helped her begin recovery

00:19:48

Top 5 things that helped her during recovery

00:22:42

The importance of regular eating even while binges are occurring

00:25:56

Dealing with the bulimia / purging piece in recovery

00:32:29

What is bulimia?

00:37:49

Reconnecting with emotions as part of recovery

00:48:07

Fluctuating motivation during recovery

00:56:33

The importance of being assertive

01:03:31

Dealing with negative thoughts

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/321.

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 have an announcement. I’m currently taking on new clients. If you are someone who has been living with an eating disorder and you want to reach a place of full recovery, then I would love to help, and it doesn’t matter how long this has been going on; it doesn’t matter whether you are at the start of your recovery journey or you are quasi-recovered. Really, wherever you are on that journey, I can help you get to that place of full recovery. So if this is what you want, then please send an email to info@seven-health.com. If you just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, then I can send over the details of how I work with people and we can arrange a strategy call to figure out if we’re a good fit for one another and if my approach is the thing that you want to help you reach that place of full recovery.

Without further ado, let’s get on with today’s show. On today’s show, it is a guest interview, and my guest today is Harriet Frew. Harriet is a BACP accredited counsellor and eating disorder practitioner and has worked in adult eating disorder NHS services and privately since 2003. She’s also an expert through experience, having made a full recovery from bulimia nervosa herself. She is an integrative counsellor drawing on motivational enhancement therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, and compassion-focused therapy, and is passionate about the therapy relationship and instilling hope that recovery is possible.

Harriet specialises in working with bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and OSFED. She’s also the host of The Eating Disorder Therapist podcast. Harriet uses an anti-diet approach and promotes a healthy relationship with food and your body. She works with the psychology of disordered eating, helping you understand your story and then supporting you in learning the skills, habits, and behaviours to find peace with food and then live your life.

It was actually a past guest who put me onto Harriet. It was Victoria Kleinsman, who I’ve had on the show before. She sent an email where both of us were CC’d and just said, “Hey you guys, I think you should get in contact, I think you should have each other on your show or talk to one another, because I think there’s a really good fit between you.” So I checked out Harriet’s stuff, I listened to her podcast, and I liked what she had to say, and that is why I’ve invited her on the show today.

As part of the episode, we chat about Harriet’s background. We talk about the fact that she has had an eating disorder and what her journey with that looked like. We talk about how she got into the profession that she’s now in in terms of working with people with eating disorders and her background in terms of the studies that she did. We looked at the importance of regular eating, dealing with negative thoughts and emotions, self-esteem, motivation for change, learning to be assertive, and much, much more.

We had less time than my usual two hours. I like doing longform conversations, and we didn’t have as much time, but I feel like we really packed it in. With the time that we did have, we covered a lot. This is definitely a practical episode, so there’s a lot that you can take from this, and I really enjoyed this conversation.

So without further ado, here is my conversation with Harriet Frew.

Hey, Harriet. Welcome to Real Health Radio. I’m really glad that we’re getting to chat today.

Harriet Frew: Thanks for having me, Chris. Really pleased to be here.

Chris Sandel: What I want to do today is I want to talk a little about your story. I know you’re someone who has suffered with an eating disorder and you’ve fully recovered, and you’re now helping people to do the same through the therapy work that you do. So I want to talk about that. And I know you have a programme as well, and just being able to use some of the topics and the modules that you cover in that programme for us to have a bit of a discussion about all the different aspects around recovery and things that are important that we talk about with clients or come up in the course of our interactions. So that’s what I thought we could cover today.

Harriet Frew: Yeah, sounds great. Thanks.

00:04:43

A bit about Harriet’s background

Chris Sandel: As a starting place, do you want to give listeners a bit of background on yourself? Who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that kind of thing.

Harriet Frew: Sure. My name’s Harriet Frew. I’m a therapist. I’ve worked in this field, eating disorders, for 20 years. Can’t believe that. [laughs] I came to this as a wounded healer. I suffered from bulimia in my late teens and early twenties, and back then there was very little help available. I really came to this whole field in quite an idealised, ‘I want to save the world’ place. But I was quite fortunate, really; although it was pretty hellish having an eating disorder, I went travelling when I was in my early twenties and I decided when I was in Australia that I was going to come back, train as a therapist, give people support in the way that I hadn’t had support. So in a way, some good came from that pain.

I started my training when I was 24 and trained very young and then was quite fortunate, really, to have found my passion and purpose at a young age. It’s given my career a lot of meaning. I was very fortunate to get a job working for the NHS Adult Eating Disorder Service in Cambridge here in my twenties. It’s one of those things I should never have got the job because you’re meant to be a clinical psychologist. [laughs] But I was very, very passionate. I’d just finished my counselling training, and they took me on. That was the beginning of a journey of a lot of learning and working with colleagues and getting a lot of experience.

My original training was actually psychodynamic, but I am not really a psychodynamic, blank screen kind of person, as you can probably tell. In the NHS, I was working a lot with eating psychological formulation, motivational enhancement therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, compassion-focused therapy, a bit of cognitive analytic therapy. But fundamentally, I’m an integrative counsellor. I believe the relationship is the main thing for healing. I think that’s where my strength is as a therapist; I think I can form very warm, trusting relationships with people. I’m probably not the best researcher or the best technical therapist, but I think I can really form relationships with people. I get so much joy and satisfaction from supporting people.

It’s been my career, but I’ve now left the NHS; I work for myself now. Covid changed all that for me. I work completely from home, all on Zoom. Works very well. I’ve got three teenagers, so I feel I can juggle my life, which works pretty well. And then the last few years, I started my podcast in 2020, The Eating Disorder Therapist. That’s got over a million downloads. Thank you, Covid. [laughs] That just started at the right time to reach a lot of people all over the world.

More recently, I’ve developed online courses for professionals and also for clients as well, and recently got into Substack, started to do some writing. I’m someone who loves a new challenge and being creative, and I like everything, really, about working in this field with clients and professionals, supervising people now as well. So that’s me, I guess, in a nutshell.

Chris Sandel: Nice. There’s a lot more from that that I want to dive into.

00:08:14

Food growing up + how she developed an eating disorder

You said you developed an eating disorder in your teenage years. If we go prior to that occurring, what was your relationship with food like? What was food like in your household?

Harriet Frew: I think for me, growing up, my relationship with food was pretty healthy. I grew up on a farm, oldest of four girls. I was very active. My dad was a real slavedriver, literally had us out feeding the cows before school kind of thing. But I never really thought about food. Didn’t have a difficult relationship with it. My mum was a homemaker, always cooked us nice meals, had a lot of stability, regularity around meals. My mum never dieted. Also, I think living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, I was quite protected from diet culture.

Chris Sandel: Where were you?

Harriet Frew: This was Cambridge. It wasn’t until I was 16-17 that I suddenly developed more body image dissatisfaction, I guess. Up until that point, I’d never really had to think about eating, food, body image. I was literally someone that ate everything in quite large quantities and was very active, so I never really thought about it. And then sixth form, classic thing in a way – first boyfriend, fell very deeply and then got really hurt. Difficult time. And then also had a big falling out with my dad. He didn’t want me to leave home. He wanted me to stay home and work on the farm. I was not going to do that.

But I had a lot of inner conflict about really wanting to please him and be the good daughter. As the eldest child, he literally raised me to take over the farm, and by going off to university and doing my own thing, I was really rejecting everything that he stood for. So it was a really difficult decision because I really knew in my heart that I needed to get away and do my own thing, but I really struggled with letting my dad down. And then the fallout from that – because I did go off to uni, and our relationship was very difficult for quite a while.

The eating disorder, for me, I mean it was about food and body image, but it was a lot more about all those deeper issues, about the heartbreak and rejection, just something I had to reconcile in myself. I couldn’t find peace, really. I felt if I went to uni – which I did – but then I was going to let everyone down and be a disappointment. I had to deal with that. But if I stayed at home on the farm with my dad, that would’ve been not the right thing for me at that age. I couldn’t win.

The eating disorder became a way to deal with some of those feelings. I think particularly with bulimia, there’s a lot of splitting in bulimia in terms of what you show the outside world and being very coping and seemingly everything is fine, almost, and then behind closed doors you deal with all the negative emotions that you feel you can’t bring into the outside world. Bulimia is a real mirror of how I was doing emotionally at that time, that splitting off. Yeah, that’s a bit about it.

Chris Sandel: During this time, did anyone know? I know you said there’s a lot of stuff behind closed doors, but was there anyone you were able to confide in about what was going on?

Harriet Frew: I guess before bulimia, I had a short period of anorexia nervosa, but for me that was quite short-lived. When I was very underweight, then people around me realised I was struggling. But once I had weight restored – which I did fairly quickly – basically I had anorexia for about three months; I had bulimia going on for 10 years. Once I was weight restored, people around me assumed that all was well, I guess. I couldn’t really talk to my family at the time. I have compassion for that generation of not having much understanding about mental health, dealing with all their own trauma and difficult stuff. It wasn’t an environment where I could open up.

My first boyfriend was a source of support at the time, but I think he found it deeply frustrating, really. I had so much shame around what I was doing. He was trying to help me, but I wasn’t really accessible to help. I was quite isolated, really. But when I look back, I realise as well, that was a bit self-perpetuated as well because I wasn’t actively pursuing help or talking to people openly. There was so much shame around it. I guess I always thought I would be able to muscle my way through it and recover myself – which I kind of did in the end, but it’s not the best way. [laughs]

Chris Sandel: No. The weight restored piece is such a tricky one because I think for so many people, the story is “I had all these people who were really worried about me for a period of time”, whether that’s a very brief period of time or a long period of time, and then at some point, “because I put on some amount of weight, everyone stops worrying.” Everyone moves on with their life and they make assumptions about “Everything’s better now, you’re doing better now, I saw you eat that meal, everything must be fine.”

I think for a lot of people that can be a really tricky situation because there’s this feeling of “Everyone thinks I’m fine, so maybe I am fine, or I’m now not sick enough to be seeking out further treatment.” I think that’s a really difficult thing for people to navigate through if they’ve had this period of being acutely ill where everyone thought something was wrong and now no-one thinks anything’s wrong.

Harriet Frew: Yeah, it’s true. It’s very isolating. I think with an eating disorder, you never feel that you’re sick enough, so if other people are mirroring back to you that you’re fine or not showing concern, you tend to think there’s not a problem.

I think for me, I did realise there was a problem to some extent. I went to the doctor’s when I was about 21 and completely broke down and said, “Please, can you help me? Give me something” because I felt so – just such an awful perpetuating difficult cycle. But there just wasn’t any help available then. I think the service had closed in Cambridge at the time. But that was the way it was back in the day.

Chris Sandel: For sure. I think for someone where there is binging or there’s binging and purging, it can be easier for them to recognise there’s a problem, but if there’s just the restriction piece, even if there’s restriction and their form of compensating is going and doing lots of exercise, it’s very easy to rationalise that away. Like, “Well, everyone restricts, and I’m just being healthy” and all of these things. It’s often when the binges start to occur that a person goes, “Now I’ve got a problem.” But prior to that happening, it’s a lot easier to logic it away of “This isn’t really so much of a concern.”

Harriet Frew: That’s so true. I think there’s a wellness culture as well; it’s almost like being strict around food and doing tons of exercise is just seen as super healthy, never mind it it’s obsessive.

00:15:37

How a trip to Australia helped her begin recovery

Chris Sandel: Yes. So with your trip out to Australia, what was the intention with that? Was it very recovery-focused, like “I’m going to go out there and get over this”? Or “Hey, I just need to get away”? What was your intention?

Harriet Frew: I think it was just getting away, really. It wasn’t a massively thought-out experience, to be honest. [laughs] I guess I can be quite a spontaneous person, really, and rely heavily on my intuition. What was happening was I was coming to the end of my degree in Sheffield and Sheffield University, and I was lined up to do a master’s in London, and I remember getting to the end of studying and thinking, “I just need a break from all of this.” And then I had a couple of friends who were going to be travelling in Australia, so I just thought “I’m going to do it” and ended up meeting some of those friends over there. It was all quite spontaneous, really.

But I think I just knew in my heart I needed to have some geographical distance from home, just have some space. It wasn’t really recovery-focused per se, but I guess it kind of was, beneath the layers.

Chris Sandel: How long were you out there for?

Harriet Frew: I was in Australia for about eight months, and at each end of the trip I did Camp America, working as a camp counsellor in Connecticut. So I had probably almost 18 months of just completely stepping out of my normal life and being away from my family. And it was great, actually. I’m not saying everyone needs to go to Australia or America to heal. My family were very intense in many ways, and I just needed some space to be able to become a bit more independent and think for myself a bit more, I think, for the first time.

Chris Sandel: I think it depends on what the trip is for and what it’s about. I’ve had many clients where they’ve tried to do this thing and they moved somewhere else and their problems were still there and nothing changed, or actually they were now more isolated. And then I’ve heard lots of stories of “That was the thing that really helped to shift things, and I changed my perspective because I had this new environment that I was in.” So I definitely am not of the opinion of “No, you’re not allowed to go away; you’re running away from your problems.” It just depends on the individual and the intention with it.

Harriet Frew: Yeah, that’s so true. Just to say as well, when I came back from Australia, I wasn’t in the land of unicorns and rainbows. [laughs] There was still work to do. But it was a massive stepping stone in my recovery.

Chris Sandel: Was it while you were away that you decided you wanted to be a psychologist? Is that when it happened?

Harriet Frew: Yeah, I made that decision that that’s what I really wanted to do. I was a bit vague in terms of how I was going to reach my goal, but I’d got a place to do nutrition – which I don’t really need nutrition for what I’m doing, because I work in psychology, but I had a place in nutrition at King’s in London when I came back from Australia. So I went to London and did that course for a year, and then I began my counselling training after that. I just did night school while I was working in the day, working for a charity doing helpline calls and things like that.

Chris Sandel: Did you at that stage know “What I’m going to do once I’m qualified is work with eating disorders”? Or it wasn’t quite that specific?

Harriet Frew: I was very specific. [laughs] I knew exactly. I made that decision I think when I was 23. I had no idea actually how I was going to achieve it, but my counselling course I did was much more general. It took me a bit of time; once I finished my counselling course, I needed to do more specialist eating disorder qualifications. It wasn’t a really smooth, planned out trajectory, but I guess my heart and my intuition knew I would be doing that at the end somehow.

00:19:48

Top 5 things that helped her during recovery

Chris Sandel: Talk more about your actual recovery. If there are two, three, five things, whatever, that you feel like made a real big difference for you in your recovery, what would those things be?

Harriet Frew: Number one – I say to clients, the boring, unsexy work of regular eating. When I was undereating, restricting, I felt addicted to food. I was constantly preoccupied with food. When I would binge, it felt like an addiction where I’d literally lost control completely. I’m not saying regular eating solved all of that, but it put me in a much better place. My body was in a much more stable place, and then I guess my emotional regulation was a lot better when I wasn’t starving all the time. So eating regularly was I’d say one of the number one things.

Another thing for me – connection with other people has always been really, really important. Being able to talk to people. I wasn’t able to talk to my family, but I have been very fortunate over the years to have some really good friends, people I can be very open with. I think talking to people, sharing, that was really, really important. And not necessarily about specific eating disorder behaviours, but more about the deeper stuff that was underneath, being able to talk about stuff that was going on. That was really important.

What else? I think I really immersed myself – back in the day, there wasn’t podcasts and social media. I’m quite old. But I used to do a lot of recovery reading. Not necessarily eating disorders, again, because there wasn’t that much around then, but I used to read lots of self-help books, things like Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, You Can Heal Your Life, all of that. I say as well, recovery is a full-time job. You can’t just go to therapy once a week or something. I mean, you can; you can do whatever you want to do. But the message is that you need to really invest in an overhaul of your life.

Slowing down, number four, was really good. I used to always lead my life in a very striving, always doing, spinning on the hamster wheel so fast, and that meant I was very detached from myself. So slowing things down.

What would I say is number five? For me, having a positive mindset has always really helped me. And I don’t mean being toxically positive; I mean about starting where you’re at. But I think I am definitely a glass half-full person, and I think just being able to see in life the things that are going well, to be able to support and encourage myself, has been massively helpful as well, particularly in difficult times.

Chris Sandel: Let me go back through some of those. I’ll see if I can remember all five of them.

00:22:42

The importance of regular eating even while binges are occurring

In terms of the regular eating, we’re definitely on the same page with this. I think of eating disorders as being biopsychosocial and there’s many different components, but there is a real biological driver with this. If you get into a low-energy state, that has an impact on your thoughts, feelings, behaviours, all of these different things. So I think regular eating and people bringing in adequate amounts of food is super important.

What often happens, someone’s thought process is, “I can’t be doing that. You’re telling me to eat regularly, but I keep binging and I’m having these big binges at night. I’ll do the regular eating during the daytime, but I’ll only do that once all the binges have stopped. I need that part to figure itself out first and then I’ll start doing the regular eating.” That’s a very common conversation that comes up. What would you be saying in a scenario like that?

Harriet Frew: The restrictive eating does trigger the binge eating, doesn’t it? We are designed as humans for survival. We know from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, where the men did not have eating disorders but they were starved of food, that many of them started binge eating. If you take a human and restrict their food, you’re highly vulnerable to binge eating.

I think a lot of people can understand that rationally, maybe on one level, but I guess I’d just say to people, you just have to experiment a bit with it, really. You might find to begin with that you do more regular eating and you still want to binge in the evening, but usually what you will find – I know for me, when I used to restrict, I literally felt addicted to food. When I would start binging because I’d restricted for so long, my blood sugar was so low, the endorphin rush and the blood sugar rush I would get from binging would almost feel like a real addiction. Whereas when my blood sugar was much more stable, that was very different. I’m not saying I didn’t still have the urge to binge sometimes, but it massively helped regulate my physiology and my emotions and everything through regular eating.

I think it’s just experimenting and getting the feedback, and you will learn to self-trust more as you get that positive feedback from that process.

Chris Sandel: Cool. I definitely agree with all that. I think a big part of my role, the way that I see it, is managing expectations and just saying, “Look, it’s unlikely that you’re going to stop binging if you’re still restricting.” As you said, this is a biological drive to do this because you’re not eating enough during the daytime. So managing expectations to say, the chain of events will be you’ll start eating regularly and the binges will still occur, and then the binges will get less and then the binges will stop. That’s what will happen as part of you getting to a better place, but it’s just unrealistic to expect that you’re going to be able to have the binges disappear without changing the restriction piece first.

Harriet Frew: Very true.

00:25:56

Dealing with the bulimia / purging piece in recovery

Chris Sandel: What about for you in terms of the bulimia piece – we can talk about you first and then we can talk about clients – but how did you tackle that part of it?

Harriet Frew: For me, the bulimia piece was purging through self-induced vomiting. I used to really dislike the purging. And I know that’s not true for everyone because I know for some of my clients sometimes you get a big sense of relief and it’s almost a way to regulate emotions, etc. For me, I really, really didn’t like it. I recognised how much it fed into a lot of self-loathing and self-sabotage.

So I guess I had quite a high motivation to want to change it, even though I felt that I couldn’t. Again, it was a messy, imperfect process. I remember when I was trying to go for – I could go 10 days without purging and it felt like, “Oh my God, that’s a really big win.” But I was committed to that imperfect process of trying to reduce it. That’s what I was doing initially, just trying to reduce it.

Then I think you finally get more momentum with that as well. The longer I went between purges, the more I felt like, “Okay, I really want to continue with this.” And I would still think about purging a lot, but I knew that if I did it once, it would just open a whole dark place again and I didn’t want to do that.

An interesting thing as well is I remember being at a party in my early twenties and hearing someone else being sick in the bathroom who was suffering from bulimia. That, for me, for some reason, in that moment, was a bit of a wake-up call. Like, “Harriet, that’s what you’re doing to yourself.” For whatever reason, in that moment I was able to zoom out. I’m not saying that would’ve happened at another time. For some reason, that really, really helped me.

So a combination of things, really. I think again, the regular eating in the background helped. The trouble is, the reason I was purging often is because I had such huge binges. When I was more regular eating, my binges weren’t so big, so then I was able to tolerate the overfullness better, whereas when I was restricting, the binges were just astronomical in size. I guess that’s an important part of recovery as well: once you stop purging, you won’t just stop binging overnight. But I used to think, “What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? Maybe I gain three pounds.” Not that I’m weighing myself, but nothing that bad is going to happen.

I think I began to trust my body a bit more, almost, that even if I had a binge, it’s not great, but it’s still better than purging, and my body will deal with it. That was a bit of a process of self-trust, I guess. But yeah, it was imperfect. It was messy. It wasn’t that I just woke up one day and thought, “Right, never again.” I wish it was. It was much more of an incremental reduction of purges.

Chris Sandel: That’s also what I’ve noticed with clients as well. Typically, as well, as there’s more of the regular eating that is occurring and as those binges get smaller because you’re doing more of your eating during the daytime, what clients have said – and you can tell me your experience personally and with clients – is that actually, the upside of doing the purge, whether there is that euphoria feeling, is a lot less. It doesn’t help in terms of the emotions in the way that it used to.

I think part of that is you’re not getting into such a state by being so deprived, and then this thing happening and there’s this huge rollercoaster of emotions. It’s just, “Okay, I did this thing and it just didn’t feel very good. And within two minutes afterwards, all of that relief or whatever has disappeared and I’m just left with this thing.” So there’s more of this realisation of “This isn’t doing for me what it used to be able to do for me.”

I think you get there only when you’ve done those other steps, where there is more of the regularity, you have started to have more of your state be on this even keel. You used the word ‘experiment’ before, and this is something I come back to again and again with clients. I can tell you all of these things, but you are not going to believe me until you go through this yourself. You’re going to have to run this experiment and then we can talk about what actually happened as opposed to your theories and my theories about what may occur.

Harriet Frew: Yeah, that’s so true. You can’t just think your way out of it, can you? You have to practically take some steps.

Chris Sandel: Yeah. I regularly say, you can’t think your way into acting differently, you have to act your way into thinking differently. It is really through the action-taking – which, one, shows you “I can do this thing”, but two, more fundamentally, it starts to change your state. My level of thinking and the things I become preoccupied with and the things I’m fearful of change drastically depending on the state that I’m in. You don’t feed me for a while, my perception changes. You don’t let me sleep for a while, that changes as well.

One of the things I’m constantly trying to get across to people is, you are perpetually in a state. You don’t know that you’re in a state, but you are always in a state that is having impact on the kinds of things that are naturally occurring to you. Even when things feel like they’re going wonderfully well, you are in a state. Just becoming really aware of that.

Harriet Frew: So true. I think one thing I’d add as well is one thing that helped me interrupt that cycle was not drinking as much alcohol. When I was a student, alcohol was very much part of the package. I wouldn’t say I had a problem with alcohol, but I probably did drink excessively during different periods, in quite a student-appropriate way. That was massively disruptive for my state and for my eating.

Chris Sandel: For sure. I think there can be so many different things that impact on state, and alcohol is definitely one of those, both while drinking but often the day after or the couple of days after.

00:32:29

What is bulimia?

One of the other things that I wanted to go through – and I’m now looking at a list of different things from your programme in terms of the stuff that you touch as part of that – maybe we should define bulimia, like what is bulimia, so that people are aware of this. Because I think often there is this stereotypical view of what it is and then there’s the actual definition or what is going on in reality.

Harriet Frew: Bulimia is an eating disorder. It involves concerns around weight and shape, often underneath the eating disorder. Someone with bulimia will normally go through periods of restriction followed by binging and purging.

What we mean by binge is eating a very large amount of food in one time, often very rapidly, in secret. Loss of control. I guess the important thing with a binge is it’s a lot more than someone would normally eat in a normal setting. It’s a very large volume of food.

That’s usually followed by purging if someone’s bulimic. That means self-induced vomiting, taking laxatives. And then you can have non-purging bulimia where people might still binge but then do excessive amounts of exercise as well. But I think – it’s a bit controversial, slightly different definitions, but might go into OSFED these days.

I think ‘bulimia’ means ‘hungry like an ox’ or something, and it wasn’t really known about until the 1980s, when Princess Diana was open about her experience with bulimia. And I think you’re meant to be binging and purging at least twice a week for three months to meet the textbook definition.

Chris Sandel: For me, there are so many things with eating disorders where you’ve got to tick this box, and I think for so many people, they just don’t naturally match up to how it is defined. Even with a lot of clients I work with who have anorexia, a lot of what they’re saying is “It’s not really even the weight and shape that I’m concerned about.” So I think we have a lot more to learn about eating disorders.

I have a belief that really, all eating disorders are the same. They’re anxiety disorders and they’re just manifesting in slightly different ways depending on someone’s constitution or temperament or different things. I think the way we deal with someone who has binge eating disorder is the same way that we deal with someone who has anorexia, which is the same way as we deal with someone who has bulimia because it’s really the same stuff that is going on. I don’t know if this is your take on it.

Harriet Frew: I agree. It’s just different symptom presentation, isn’t it? At the end of the day, it’s not really about food, it’s about feelings anyway. The underlying, core stuff is all going to be quite similar. It’s just how that manifests itself in life in terms of the symptoms will be slightly different.

Chris Sandel: The one thing I’d also add with the bulimia – and this is true of binge eating disorder – and you can have both of these. There can be the very intentional binges where, “I’m thinking about this thing, I go out and get the food, and I know exactly what is going to happen”, and then you have the unintentional where “I started eating a meal, I had no intention for this thing to happen, and then it just spiralled from there.” One of the things I’ve noticed is often, if we talk about that sequence of events in terms of the road to recovery, it’s often that the intentional binges disappear first, and it’s then the unintentional binges that take a little longer to repair. Is that true for you or for the clients you work with?

Harriet Frew: I would say so. Interestingly enough, I haven’t looked at it quite in that way before, but I think it’s true. There are different ways the binges show up. If you’re more intentional, you’re much more conscious, hopefully, or connected with what’s going on, and you’re able to access your wisdom and maybe make a different decision, whereas, as is often in life, we are not so connected with ourselves and we’re a bit disassociated, disconnected, and it’s very easy then for what seemed like a straight forward meal to end up in a full-blown binge, and you wonder “How on earth did I get from A to B?” And that is harder to interrupt.

Chris Sandel: Yeah. When I’m working on that in terms of – once it’s over, we can then start to analyse it, but typically when we start to look back, either there was some restriction that had happened that day or the days leading up to it. So just being able to look at, even though this thing was unintentional, there were things contributing to this ending in the day that it did.

Harriet Frew: Absolutely. I always say a binge is the endpoint of a whole snowball of things, isn’t it, really? It’s been building for some time before you get to the edge of the cliff where you have the binge.

Chris Sandel: Yes, definitely.

00:37:49

Reconnecting with emotions as part of recovery

In terms of the emotions piece – when I think about a therapist, emotions is a very big part of why people come to therapy, to talk about emotions or learn to talk about emotions or learn to be able to feel their emotions. When you’re thinking about recovery – and I know this is a very broad question – recovery and emotions, what are the kinds of things you are helping clients with or working on? Are there particular techniques you want to share?

Harriet Frew: Just generally, I think most people with eating disorders are very disconnected from their emotions. They’re often living their life as well at 100 miles an hour and just busy, busy, busy all the time or always connected to something else apart from themselves, I guess.

You’re trying to help the client slow down, to connect with their emotions but also to connect with their body a bit more, and their hunger and fullness, and also noticing where they’re feeling their emotions in their body.

I guess a piece of work I would do first is really explore their childhood and maybe understand why there is a disconnect with emotions. I think for so many people brought up in Western culture, it’s quite a new thing where mental health has had such a focus and we’ve been much more understanding about the value of our emotional world and the psychological side of things. It’s not uncommon that many people come into therapy and say, “I’ve never had a big trauma that’s happened in my life, nothing terrible has happened. I come from a loving family, everything was pretty good” – and I guess that’s quite a common presentation. Obviously, some people have been through horrendous things, which definitely are going to have impacted them, those more big ‘T’ traumas.

But a lot of people coming in haven’t really had those more obvious traumas, but there’s been a lot of perhaps emotional overlooking in the home. There hasn’t been someone to really listen to them as a child and to understand their perspective. And not because people are bad and don’t care, because often people can come from quite loving families, but maybe parents have been away working or there’s been too much going on or a sibling’s had something they’re struggling with. There’s multiple reasons why people don’t get their needs met.

I guess a helpful starting point is to understand in a way why you’re not very connected to your emotions and to think about that. And also, when did you start to use food as a coping strategy? I think many people, before they have an eating disorder, they may have emotionally eaten or turned to food as a coping strategy in some way or another before they developed a full-blown eating disorder.

And then in terms of getting in touch with emotions, it varies a lot from client to client. I do use food and feelings diaries with some clients. Some clients just don’t like diaries at all. But I think when clients do engage with diaries, it can be a really helpful way to slow down, be more present, to really try and tune in in the moment, notice what’s going on. Use things like the Emotions Wheel from Google to expand emotional vocabulary, start to get more in touch with the body and thinking about how you’re feeling your emotions.

I guess it’s a very slow process of becoming more connected. For a lot of people, I think they have a lot of ‘shoulds’ around how they should feel. It’s very common that people think “I haven’t got it as bad as that person” or “I shouldn’t be feeling like that.” So a lot of the time as well, you’re helping people strip those things back and just realise how you feel is how you feel and creating a safe space in therapy where people can start to bring all those hidden parts of themselves, start to become more accepting of those parts, and eventually integrate that shadow side in.

It’s an ongoing journey. Once people become more aware of their emotions, again, you’re helping them to develop coping strategies to deal with their emotions in more healthy ways rather than binging or restricting or overexercising or whatever they’re doing.

Chris Sandel: A couple of things I’ve noticed is that for many clients who develop an eating disorder, they’re Highly Sensitive. I think there’s a high correlation between those two things. It makes it even more challenging if you’re Highly Sensitive and then you’ve been brought up in a household where “Hey, my brother or sister was able to deal with the way Mum and Dad were, but the way it was for me, it just felt much more challenging for me to be able to deal with it.” And maybe we don’t know if the brother or sister really did deal with it okay, but at least as an outward presentation, that’s the assumption with it.

So I think whenever I’ve looked into high sensitivity with clients – and this is something I’ll do a lot – they’re like, “Okay, wow, this is telling me a lot about myself. I really match up with the HSP score, and this tells me a lot about why I struggled so much in my primary school or my high school” or with whatever was going on.

I think for a lot of people, when we’re starting to do this work, especially – I work with a lot of clients who are very restrictive, and it doesn’t numb everything, but it does something in terms of turning down the volume on that. And once we’re starting to do more of the eating, while there can be some wonderful benefits from doing that – we talked about how helpful it is do that regular eating – there can also be some real downsides in terms of “I’m now having all of these emotions come up, and I really don’t know how to deal with this.” That can be a very tricky thing for people to navigate through.

Harriet Frew: It definitely is. It’s like a volcano sometimes. When you suppress things for a long time and then everything comes to the surface, it can feel really overwhelming and very normal to have quite a few meltdowns in recovery, I think. We should normalise that, really.

But again, that speaks to the real importance of having a good support network. Even one or two people who’ve really got your back, and who you can trust and lean on. Yes, coming to therapy is really, really helpful, but you do need people in the world as well that you can start to show up and be yourself and gain that acceptance.

Chris Sandel: For sure. I think it’s then learning how to deal with when those emotions come up – which isn’t always just “Let’s sit and do some breathing exercises or let’s pull out the Emotions Wheel.” As you say, it could be the support network and reaching out to a friend. It could be “I’m going to do a puzzle right now.” There can be lots of different things that are useful for helping that person to manage and deal with that, as well as learning tools for “How can I create room for this thing to be here?”

I think so often, the challenge with the emotions isn’t the actual emotion per se; as you talked about, it’s all the ‘shoulds’ connected to it. It’s all the “I don’t know how I can handle this. What happens if it’s still here in 10 minutes?” It’s the resistance piece that is laid on top as opposed to just the emotion, and that very much extends the half-life of that emotion. Something that could’ve resolved within a 5-, 10-, 20-minute period has now gone on for many, many hours, especially if we then start to do things from a restriction standpoint or a food standpoint that make that worse.

So often, what happens when people have been in an eating disorder, everything gets filtered through that as a way of thinking about things. Whether I got an email from someone at work about something I did incorrect or I got a text from my mum and she wasn’t happy about this thing or “I’ve got to organise this” or “I stepped on the scale and I didn’t like what I saw”, all of them, it’s the same endpoint in terms of what needs to be the solution and “why I’m failing at this thing.”

So just starting to be able to recognise that I can have an emotion and I can stay with that emotion and figure out what that’s actually connected to as opposed to everything getting funnelled through the eating disorder prism or perspective.

Harriet Frew: So true. I think clients, and myself in the past, are so disconnected in a way from what we really need. Also that real feeling of lack of permission, in a way, of having needs. It’s a bit of a process of peeling back the layers. That takes a bit of time. If you’ve felt undeserving of needs and so disconnected from being able to have needs for so long, it’s quite a big shift to be able to start to look after yourself and listen to yourself and feel you’re deserving of listening to yourself as well.

Chris Sandel: For sure. As we talked about earlier, with the food piece, people want to feel deserving of all these things in advance, like “I need to change my mindset”, and again, it’s not going to happen if you’re staying in that state. We need to have the regular food come in. We need to shift that, and then the thinking will start to shift. It doesn’t do everything automatically, but if we’re still in that other state and we’re trying to do all of that work, you don’t get very far. It’s a lot of Groundhog Day.

Harriet Frew: So true, isn’t it? A lot of people have come into therapy and said to me, “Can you just change my head? But I want my body to stay the same.” [laughs] Sadly not. But that wouldn’t really be a healthy place, would it? Not mentally or physically.

Chris Sandel: No, definitely not.

00:48:07

Fluctuating motivation during recovery

What about in terms of motivation? Motivation for change or how you deal with this both in the programme and with clients. People are on a spectrum with this, and also motivation is a pretty terrible thing to try and rely on, because it shows up one day, it disappears the next. Talk a little about the motivation piece.

Harriet Frew: I say it’s very normal to be very ambivalent, in two minds about change because of the eating disorder as a coping strategy. It’s serving you in many ways, or at least it was serving you in the beginning. Understandably, in a way, because if it is a coping strategy, you will be a bit in two minds about letting go of it.

I would very much talk about that with a client, help them understand how it is a coping strategy and get them to do exercises like list the pros and cons of the eating disorder. I think it’s very good to name some of these things out loud. Often before people come into therapy, they’ve defended their position a lot of times. Actually being able to talk openly about how they value the eating disorder can be quite helpful because it can move towards a place of greater acceptance and then open the door to think more about change.

I use Prochaska and DeClemente’s Cycle of Change as well, looking at how we move through cycles of change from where we’re contemplating, preparing, taking action, maintaining, and how relapse is a normal part of the process. I think people are often in quite all-or-nothing mindsets around change instead of realising that change is this movable thing, in a way, and you will relapse and that’s normal and that’s okay. That can be a really helpful reframe.

I think what else helps with motivation is anything that helps zooming out. Most people on their deathbed are not going to be massively worried about how much they weighed, not wanting to have spent loads of time binging and purging and being disconnected from people.

This definitely helped me in my recovery; I always had quite a big vision, in a way, even though I had no idea I was going to get there, of something quite appealing at the other end. That always, for me, really pulled me forward, and I think that really helps with clients as well. I think of clients that have had particular successes – they really wanted to have a baby or they really wanted to go travelling, or there’s been something that’s been really, really important that’s become more important than the eating disorder that really helps people to change.

I think that can be hard as well. If you’ve lived with the eating disorder for a long time, it’s become chronic, you’ve missed a lot of milestones, there’s a lot of grief about the time lost, you feel helpless and hopeless. But it’s never too late, is it, to be able to start building a life and to get much more in touch with yourself and live out your dreams and purpose, etc.

That’s a few things about motivation. Yeah, motivation will fluctuate. Willpower is a finite resource, so a lot of the time it’s trying to put these things into practise, developing them as habits, underwhelming steps. I say to people we want underwhelming sustainable steps rather than trying to go too all-in too quickly and then just feel hopeless and disempowered. So there’s a few thoughts.

Chris Sandel: Cool. A couple of things I would add to that. In terms of the understanding the eating disorder and the needs that it meets, I think this is a really important thing. Sometimes I think the tendency for the practitioner or the provider is to be telling them all of the reasons why this is a bad idea and all the things you’re losing by this, and “Think about your kids and think about your future” and all of that, and it’s missing the point that this thing’s serving someone’s needs. It’s probably the best way of getting their needs met for this thing that they know of up until this point. So let’s actually understand what it is genuinely doing for someone so that we can either, one, find other ways to meet that need that don’t have as much collateral damage associated with it, or two, what else would have to change so that need is now no longer so important for someone?

I think really starting to understand this is a really crucial piece, because otherwise the person just feels really confused and shitty and like “I said I don’t want this thing and I kind of don’t want this thing and I can see how much damage it’s causing, but yet I keep doing this. Why do I keep doing this?” It actually helps them to feel more like “Okay, this now makes sense, and I can understand why this thing is happening.”

I think that’s a really important thing to be able to explore with someone and not just constantly jumping into “This is a really bad idea.” Being able to say, “Cool, tell me all the reasons why it would be a really bad idea to recover. Tell me why this would be really good, and if we go five years from now, why you would want to still be in this place. And I’m not asking this as a rhetorical question; I genuinely want to understand your perspective.” I think that can be helpful.

In terms of the creating the vision piece of where someone wants to get to, that’s something I will regularly do with clients and is often somewhere I start with people. And it’s interesting because there are many people who are able to do that and they’re able to think, “In a year’s time or two years’ time, this is where I want to be and this thing’s changed and I’m able to do this thing” – and for other people, they’re not able to make contact with that. it just feels so hard to think about a future.

So if that’s you, what I’ll typically do is, “Okay, let’s not go so far out. Let’s go three months’ time. What would you like to be different then? Or six months’ time.” I think if we can do it in that gradual way – because some people really get behind full recovery, and I talk about full recovery all the time because that’s where I want people to get to, but I also know for some people that just feels so big. It feels so unattainable.

So if that is where someone’s at, let’s find the thing that is attainable. “I want to make it through the end of the university semester.” Cool, that sounds good. “I want to be able to prepare my own meals so that my mum and dad aren’t having to do that for me anymore.” Okay, cool. So being able to break it down into something that feels motivating but is tangible as opposed to it just feeling like “This is a complete pipedream.”

Harriet Frew: Yeah, it’s important, because you don’t want it to feel so idealistic and on a pedestal, almost, that it’s unreachable. I always think about getting your first hand on the bottom rung of the ladder, or your first foot. What’s that first step, really?

Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think also – and I keep coming back to this point in terms of the regularity in the food piece – what I typically find is people get more motivated as time goes on. Most people feel like “I’m going to have this moment where I’m going to hit such a rock bottom that I’m just going to be awash with motivation, and it’s going to be so crystal clear that everything needs to change”, and that just rarely happens. I can probably count on one hand the amount of times that has truly happened to someone.

Typically, the worse things get, the more you lack the awareness to see how bad they are, or the more it seems like “This is so important now to hold on to my eating disorder.” People are like, “But how do I feel motivated?” Again, coming back to that, you don’t think your way into acting differently, you act your way into thinking differently. It is about then taking more and more of those steps. As someone then gets further along, then there is more motivation because you’re able to have much more contact with “Oh, that was really nice to be able to go out with my friends and be present in the way that I haven’t been able to do before” and being able to notice the difference that this thing is making in your life, and there’s the realisation of “Oh, I actually want more and more of this.”

But when everything’s fallen apart and “All I have is my eating disorder”, it’s hard to get the motivation to then change.

Harriet Frew: Very true.

00:56:33

The importance of being assertive

Chris Sandel: One of the things in the programme is about learning to be assertive. I would love to hear about this piece and why you think this is so important and maybe why it was important for you, but also why you think it’s important as part of the programme.

Harriet Frew: Going back to the whole unexpressed emotions and not recognising our needs, I think a lot of people with eating disorders – and I’m generalising here – tend to be people-pleasers. Very good at being the compliant person, going with the flow, adjusting to be whatever they need to be in the world, really. They’re putting other people first. So a really important part of recovery is beginning to find your voice, beginning to acknowledge your needs, beginning to feel that you’re deserving of those needs and wants, and being able to communicate them.

I think, again, that’s all a bit of a process, because if you’re becoming from a place where you feel really undeserving and you have a lot of ‘shoulds’ and you are really worried about losing people in your environment, you’re used to being very people-pleasing, it can be a bit of a journey. But it’s really important, because often people are showing up in very passive ways, not really asserting their needs or perhaps even being a bit manipulative, like guilt-inducing, or if someone asks you if you’re okay, you wouldn’t say it in a straight forward way with words, but you might act out with a lot of stonewalling someone, maybe.

And I think as well, the people-pleaser – myself having been a bit of a people-pleaser, I would suppress everything, but then one day, the pendulum would swing the other way and suddenly all the anger that I’d been holding in would erupt, and the other person would be like, “Oh my God, where did this all come from?” [laughs] And sometimes it’d destroy relationships because the relationship wasn’t based on true honesty and authenticity, when you’re trying to always accommodate someone else. And when we try and bury our needs, they tend to build up and then come out.

I don’t know if I articulated that well, but part of the module is helping people to identify their different modes of communication – do they tend to be more aggressive or manipulative or passive, or are they assertive. But helping them to develop more skills, identifying their feelings, having a voice, expressing those needs, being able to communicate with other people. Having permission to do so.

Chris Sandel: I think connected to this, there’s often a lot of mind-reading going on or hoping someone is able to read their mind, like “Why aren’t people understanding me?” But you haven’t actually said any of this, or there’s this grand game of charades, of “If I can do all this with my food stuff and if I can get my weight to a place, then people are going to want to take care of me more, or then they’re going to know what my needs are.”

No-one is going to be able to guess any of this stuff by any of the things that you’re doing, so having the ability to use our words, be able to sit down and have a true, honest, vulnerable conversation, to be able to express what is going on as opposed to hoping that someone’s going to be able to figure it out.

Harriet Frew: Very true. And it’s hard, because I think sometimes as well, we might grow up in families where if you are more assertive with your communication, they don’t always receive it well. So I think a really important part of this journey is developing more and more healthy connections. And that might be with your family members as well, but just having safe people you can share and be yourself and be accepted, and people that can listen. Such an important part of the process of healing.

Chris Sandel: For sure. If I reflect on me, when having difficult conversations – and this is something I’ve had to get better at – I would just go into shutdown. And it wasn’t as if I was avoiding the conversation; the description I always use is it was like someone had taken the top of my head off and filled it with bees, and I could not think clearly. I couldn’t articulate. I would just go into this shutdown freeze response, “I’m now completely gone. I’m here in body, but in mind I’m gone, and I’m not even able to tell you this.”

So one, as a starting point, being able to say, “Hey, I’m in shutdown. We can’t carry on this conversation right now. This is important to me, but we’re going to need to come back to this”, and then actually being able to come back to it – but two, starting to do all of the other work where I was able to be more regulated in my nervous system, where that just doesn’t happen to the same degree. I’m able to have more of that social engagement system that allows me to stay in that conversation more.

All of my comments I made just before isn’t, “Just go out there and do it.” I understand there can be steps that are part of that, and so much of your state is just taking you into that place and meaning that you don’t have the capacity in those moments to be able to do those things. But it’s that process of how do we build it up so that you can actually have those conversations, and you can just say, “This is okay, this is not okay. I really need your help with this thing. Hey, can we not talk about that anymore? It’s not helpful for me to hear conversations around that” and those types of things.

Harriet Frew: So true. It does take time for us to feel safe in our bodies and to find a more regulated place and more peace so we can actually access some of that wisdom or recognise what we need to know what the boundaries need to be. Because like you said, I think your experience there is not uncommon for a lot of people listening, I’m sure, where people do go into shutdown and are so disconnected. Completely disconnected from their needs or wants or being able to communicate in any helpful way in that moment.

Chris Sandel: Yeah. I truly wanted to be able to keep connecting, but my body had just taken me out of that place, so learning how to do that – and therapy has been one of those tools, amongst many.

But the reason I’m bringing this up, I think sometimes people can hear “Be assertive” – “Oh, I just need to stand up for myself more.” And there can be many component parts connected to that process.

01:03:31

Dealing with negative thoughts

The final piece I want to ask about – we talked about emotions in terms of dealing with the emotions piece; what about in terms of the negative thoughts? I think this comes up a lot, and I tend to separate these out, even though emotions and negative thoughts often occur concurrently. But yeah, how are you helping people to deal with this? What are some of the suggestions you make here?

Harriet Frew: It’s just recognising that our thoughts aren’t facts; we have 60,000+ thoughts a day, many of these thoughts are very repetitive. If you could see a speech bubble above each person’s head, we all tend to think in slightly distorted ways about reality, don’t we? We all focus on different things depending on our own stories and history, etc. But if you have an eating disorder, you’ll be having a lot of thoughts around food and body image, etc., and there will be probably a lot of negative thoughts.

In cognitive behaviour therapy, we call those hot thoughts or automatic negative thoughts, where there’s an intense emotion often attached to the thinking. It might be anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, something that’s quite difficult to deal with. And then we’re seeing our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviour, our body are all interconnected.

For example, if you eat a donut and then you have the automatic negative thought, “I’ve blown it. I’ve totally ruined everything today”, you’re probably going to feel guilty, anxious, overwhelmed. In terms of your behaviour, you might well then go on and have a full-blown binge. Physically in your body, you’ll feel disgusted, really uncomfortable physically. And then you have more negative thoughts around failing, and it’s quite a perpetuating cycle.

The first step with people is to help them become more aware of their thoughts, because awareness has to come before change. And of course, even becoming aware, we’re not going to be able to suddenly shift our thoughts. And there’s different ways of dealing with thoughts. We can actively challenge our thoughts through Socratic questioning, using a more rational kind of logic to try and question some of our thoughts. We can also become a bit more mindful of our thoughts and less attached to them. Just recognising, “This is just a thought. This isn’t something I have to apply lots of meaning to.”

And under our thoughts are often beliefs as well. Sometimes we need to look at where things are rooted and do that deeper piece of work alongside, because we can rationally challenge our thoughts, but emotionally, if something feels very true due to something that’s happened, the story that we’re telling ourselves, sometimes we need a bit of help with unpicking that and making sense of it.

Chris Sandel: Definitely. For me, I much more lean toward the acceptance and commitment therapy style of things in terms of recognising thoughts are just thoughts; “This is an unhelpful thought. I don’t have to come up with a counterargument, and often if I do that, I get into this arms race and we don’t really get anywhere.” So just being able to recognise that “This is an unhelpful thought; becoming attached to this thought isn’t enhancing the quality of my relationships, it isn’t helping me to make the kinds of changes that I want to make.”

And if I am going to spend time where I am going through it, make it genuinely productive. “Okay, let me sit down and do some journalling for 20 minutes on this thing where I’m getting something out of it, as opposed to I’ve just spent all of this time ruminating on it.” So really understanding the context that this is coming up, and “What would be most helpful for me in this moment?”

There can be the recognition of “This is an unhelpful thought for me and I want to do some journalling on this, but it’s 10:00 in the morning and I’m at work, and now is not the right time to be able to do that. So I need to be able to use one technique in this moment and then later on I’m going to come back to this thing.”

Harriet Frew: Sure. There’s multiple ways of dealing with things. If I think about my own journey, I quite like doing a mixture of the mindfulness and sometimes the CBT. It’s experimenting a bit for each individual, really, to see in which different scenarios, which works better for you.

Chris Sandel: Yes, sure. Harriet, this has been such a wonderful conversation. I feel like I could chat to you for another hour. I didn’t even make that many notes for us today, but there is so much stuff that we didn’t hear. But where can people go if they want to find out more information about you?

Harriet Frew: First is my website, theeatingdisordertherapist.co.uk. Then on Instagram, I’m @theeatingdisordertherapist_. From there, you can find my podcast as well, The Eating Disorder Therapist. You can search for that on Spotify, on Apple. Those are the best places. But theeatingdisordertherapist.co.uk is the best place because everything is signposted from there.

Chris Sandel: Perfect. I’ll put all that in the show notes and people can go and check it out. Thank you for coming on the show. This has been wonderful.

Harriet Frew: Thanks so much for having me, Chris.

Chris Sandel: So that was my conversation with Harriet Frew. If you enjoyed what we covered, then please check out her podcast, The Eating Disorder Therapist, and the links that she talked about in the episode.

As I said at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients. If you would like help in reaching a place of full recovery, I would love to help and support and guide you in that process. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com, and if you just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, I can send over all the details.

So that is it for this week. I hope you have a good week. Until next time, take care, and I will see you soon!