Your spiritual, mental, and relational health is far more important than what you eat, how you exercise or what a number on the scale tells you. You can be doing all those things “right”, be completely perfectionistic about all things health, and still be completely unhealthy – our guest today, Haley Hannah Erickson, knows this because she was exactly there.
Today with Haley we’re talking about how so many of us fall prey to the trap of using exercise and food solely for control, to try and “fix” our bodies, which so many times stems from a fear of not being loved. *spiritual side of healing
“I started to see how much this disordered eating had impacted all these different areas of my life: relationships with my family members and friends, I had isolated myself for at least 5 years because I was so consumed by making enough time to exercise, I wouldn’t go out into social situations because I was afraid of what the food would be like. I was devastated by how many times I had chosen working out over spending quality time with my family.” – Haley Hannah Erickson
We discuss:
- Why we are fearful of gaining weight
- How this cycle manifests especially in college
- Orthorexia as a form of disordered eating: being perfectionistic about controlling your food and taking clean eating to the extreme, to the point where you become consumed by food and exercise.
- The warning signs of orthorexia
- The emotional, physical, and social consequences of disordered eating – how it seeps into every are of your life
- The spiritual side of healing from disordered eating
- How Haley understood that the root of all this perfectionism, her disordered eating and disordered exercise patterns were stemming from a fear of not being loved.
- Shame triggers & how to get out of the cycle of negative self-talk
Haley’s Book Recommendations:
The Gifts of Imperfection, by Brené Brown
The Road Back to You, by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile
“The more we sit in our shame, the more it continues to grow. As soon as you bring it to the light, it diminishes the power of the shame.” – Haley Hannah Erickson, Real Talk with Dana Podcast #52
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