Unspoken Food, Body, and Parenting Shame of Eating Disorders Professionals

A dietitian/nutritionist that I provide clinical supervision for asked me today if it was okay to feed processed food to a one-year-old. She was feeling guilty because a friend was following “no processed food” for her own baby. My supervisee is a nutrition professional, so she started wondering if it was shameful to give a frozen waffle to her child. Her little girl loves waffles, so it seemed like a fun-filled breakfast, but she began to doubt her choice. This mom is someone who has worked in the field of eating disorders and been in recovery from her own, so she embraces intuitive eating and a non-diet lifestyle. Regardless, she felt conflicted. 

This example illustrates how even those of us who work in the field and truly believe that there are no “good” or “bad” foods sometimes get sucked into diet culture’s clutches. We want so much to do the “right” thing by our children that we second-guess our amazing intuition. Those gut feelings about how we should feed and parent our children are important and worth listening to. Parenting is not something that can be learned from a book (and, believe me, I read a lot of them in the early days). Parenting is as much a feeling as a thinking process. We need both our guts and our brains to be in gear -- which is damn hard when we’re sleep-deprived.

I encouraged my supervisee to continue to feed her daughter the waffles that she loves and to not feel bad that she doesn’t make them from scratch with organic ingredients. As parents, we need to pick our battles and decide where we put our time and energy. In my mind, it’s better to get down on the floor with your toddler than design the “perfect” meal. And if it feels deeply nourishing for you to make something from scratch, by all means, do it. But do have awareness that even the "cleanest" ingredients have been processed some way -- unless you are milking the cow and grinding the grain that you grew in your own backyard. The idea that we have to save our kids from processed food is not only orthorexic (a condition in which the sufferer systematically avoids specific foods in the belief that they are harmful), it’s also impossible.

I share this story of a well-meaning mom because I want to highlight the fact that even the most educated professionals who are doing their own work to block diet culture sometimes fall prey to it after the comments of a friend, or the stray ad, or the surprising negative body thought. As someone who has recovered from an eating disorder and developed a healthy relationship with food and my body over a number of decades, even I have to pause sometimes and remind myself that the latest superfood is not all that. I’ve had to remind myself that repeatedly encouraging my teens to eat protein at breakfast is disrupting their intuitive eating and likely going to backfire. (Trust me. It did.) Even those of us who have literally written books on this subject have to karate chop the health messages (some are diet messages in disguise) that come into our spheres, allowing our children to trust their own bodies’ wisdom as they develop their very own relationships with food. 

This is why I’m a HUGE advocate for those of us in the eating disorders field to receive ongoing therapy and/or supervision from a mental health clinician and/or certified eating disorders dietitian who has significant experience with eating disorders work. If we are going to encourage our clients to do the hard work of navigating the world of diet culture, fat-phobia, and trauma recovery, then we have to examine our own biases and attitudes and work through them constantly. This is particularly important if we have our own eating disorder history and may be more emotionally vulnerable to the messages of our culture or to other people's views of us in general. 

I’m so glad that my supervisee reached out to me and shared her doubts about her daughter’s joy over frozen waffles. She’ll be less likely to judge a client who talks about guilt over eating them. She might even say that she “gets it,” being a busy mom herself who wants her family to enjoy the food they eat and serves waffles, too. Shame lifted, they can now talk about what it would feel like to experiment with different foods and find the ones that “work” best for the client’s lifestyle and taste. I promise that you will encourage balanced, joy-filled experiences with food in yourself, the children in your world, and your clients if you examine regularly your own attitudes about food and body in regular supervision. 

We are all perfectly imperfect. We are all human. (This water-loving writer likes to think she’s part mermaid, so at least part of me is human. :-) This means that we have the ability to fall into the same thoughts, feelings, ruminations, and sometimes behaviors as our clients. If we don’t examine what goes against our ultimate values as a recovery advocate, then we are at risk of doing harm in our clinical work. I am forever grateful for all the supervision that I’ve received and continue to receive as I practice as a dietitian with a specialty in disordered eating. If my colleagues and I pretend that we’re perfect and impervious to the culture and its messages, we do a disservice to our clients and create a culture of shame in our profession that I personally see as toxic. 

Brooke Huminski, LICSW and I lead a biweekly, multidisciplinary group for professionals who work with eating disorders and have a recovery history. Please reach out if you are a clinician interested in this kind of group or individual professional support. Whether your history includes an eating disorder or dabbling in “clean” eating (and even if that’s not the case but you happen to have a body), I urge you to find professionals and communities that allow you to share and work through the challenges that come up when doing the hard work of helping clients improve their relationships with food, body, and self. By reaching out for regular reflection and help yourself, you will become a stronger clinician and create sustainability in your ability to help others.