Send us Fan Mail

What a joy to have Jenny Langley on the podcast.

Since her son recovered from anorexia 20 years ago, Jenny Langley has campaigned to raise awareness of eating disorders and the impact on the whole family, and to provide practical help and support to families affected by eating disorders.

Jenny co-authored the New Maudsley Skills-Based Training Manual and wrote of her family’s experiences in the book Boys Get Anorexia Too.

In this episode, we talked about recovery, empowering parents and carers as well as those struggling and here are some of our key takeaways.

What we learn in this episode:

• The gap between clinical care and real-life recovery is real
• Recovery isn’t linear—and that includes movement
• “Starting again” isn’t failure—it’s part of the process
• Exercise can easily become another way to reassert control if not approached carefully.
• A healthy reintroduction to movement might focus on:
  • Curiosity over performance
  • Flexibility over rigidity
  • Internal cues over external metrics
• Carers carry more than just practical responsibility
• For carers listening:
  • You’re often “on” all the time, even when things look stable
  • Your wellbeing matters too.
• “All or nothing” thinking can sneak into exercise in recovery and how to navigate a safe return to movement.

Resources for Parents, Friends, Carers:

Caroline Toshack Counselling - Caroline has particular expertise in supporting people with a difficult or disordered relationship with food or their body. This includes eating disorders, exercise dependency and body image concerns.

The New Maudsley Approach - A resource for professionals and carers of those with eating disorders

Beat - UK Eating Disorder Charity - Beat provide carer groups, free resources, signposting and support

Attempt to Flee Famine: Adding an Evolutionary Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa

Support the show

Please reach out if you would like some support with your relationship to food OR movement. Ela currently has limited spaces for Intuitive Eating coaching and if you'd like to reconnect with movement, contact Christine. If you'd like exclusive access to our supporter-only channel click here.

We appreciate you

Send us Fan Mail

Are you tracking your weight/progress/calories/sleep/exercise/whatever-else-there-is-to-track?

We had a feisty conversation about it (always feisty!!), and feel that tracking can be helpful in some situations (e.g. when you are training for a certain goal, when you are recovering from an eating disorder, or when the person tracking is in a good place with food, exercise and their body).

BUT: tracking can distract us from trusting our body, listening to our intuition and reduce our ability to feel what we need/want. Having a device or a spreadsheet tell us how long we slept, or how fast we ran, or how many calories are in a chocolate croissant is information. BUT, the information may be:

- inaccurate

- irrelevant

- out of context

or make us feel

- obsessive

- anxious and

- like we've failed.

As intuitive eating and movement coaches we are here to support people in finding their way back to trusting themselves and their bodies, to start listening again to how and what we feel. If a sleep tracker tells you that you had a 'bad night', you may well start the day feeling bad (EVEN if the tracker is wrong, EVEN if you are actually feeling fine). If a calorie tracker app tells you how many calories are in a food, you may not eat it (EVEN if you really fancy it, EVEN if calories are an arbitrary and inaccurate number). If your fitness app tells you that your run was slower today than the last time you ran, you may feel like you are regressing (EVEN if there were very good reasons for running more slowly, EVEN though you did manage to go for a run rather than skip it).

On balance, tracking everything from food to weight to exercise is probably less beneficial than we think. It may give us a snapshot of information, but it can't provide a full picture of the context and nuance of the tracked item.

We'd love to hear about your experience with tracking things: do you do it? How does it make you feel? Have you found it helpful or triggering?

Support the show

Please reach out if you would like some support with your relationship to food OR movement. Ela currently has limited spaces for Intuitive Eating coaching and if you'd like to reconnect with movement, contact Christine. If you'd like exclusive access to our supporter-only channel click here.

We appreciate you

Send us Fan Mail

Part 2.

We could chat to these folks all day. Tasha* and Brandon are heart-centred coaches who work with recovering perfectionists (Hello!) people struggling with burnout as well as high achieving humans who are navigating complex life circumstances and have lost themselves along the way.

In this episode we touch on the following topics:

• The real definition of burnout and why it is always unique to the individual.
• What is the first step out of burnout and how do we prevent relapses
• Why Nervous System Regulation is key and how to anchor it onto daily activities
• What's the story with vision boards and do they actually work when it comes to realising our goals?
• How compassionate curiosity is a gamechanger when it comes to our capacity. What do we actually want and need.

Listen to the episode and please let us know what you think.

*Tasha has just announced here Boldly Becoming You Workshop which is for driven, ambitious business owners and other heart-centred humans with big financial and impact goals, who are done sacrificing their health, their family and their sanity to get there.

Details of the Boldly Becoming You Workshop

Check out their website for more information and how you can work with them.

Support the show

Please reach out if you would like some support with your relationship to food OR movement. Ela currently has limited spaces for Intuitive Eating coaching and if you'd like to reconnect with movement, contact Christine. If you'd like exclusive access to our supporter-only channel click here.

We appreciate you