Kayla is the author of “Damn the Diets,” founder of damnthediets.com and course instructor of two online e-courses "Find YOUR Balance" and "Get Your Period Back!" She is a non-diet Holistic Nutritionist who’s sick of women and men struggling and suffering from restrictive eating disorders caused by unrealistic and unsustainable diet culture and beauty standard demands. I want to show people there’s more to life than food and looking a certain way. More about Kayla[...]
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intuitive eating
I used to identify as a "sugar addict" and was convinced that I had to avoid sugar at all costs, in order to get over my "addiction". However, I wasn't aware of the whole truth behind the "sugar addiction" research. Once I educated myself on the big picture of this study, I was able to heal my relationship to sugar once and for all. In this episode, I am sharing the other side of the "sugar addiction" story with you, as well as the reasons you might feel out of control or addicted to sugar a[...]
This is a question I get almost every single day: How did you learn to accept your body after gaining all this weight in your recovery? It was not easy seeing my body change so drastically. During the first 2 months of my recovery, I put on about a third of my body weight. I talk all about the physical side effects of this weight gain in this article, especially when it came to my digestion. However, when it comes to the mental side effects of that weight gain, it is a whole other sto[...]
Once I tasted ice cream for the first time in years, all flood gates opened and I couldn’t stop eating. After quitting my extreme fitness lifestyle, I went through about a year of eating upwards of tens of thousands of calories every single day.
Leslie McDonald is the face behind the social media account @balanced_life_leslie. She is a sound healer, reiki practitioner, and certified holistic health coach with a passion for creating community, sharing recipes, and meal prep tips as well as making wellness accessible to everyone. Her work has been featured in Mind Body Green, Thrive Global, Greatist, and Whole30recipes. Trigger warning: Leslie has suffered from some autoimmune conditions and has found eating Paleo to be very benefi[...]
“Deprivation (noun): the lack or denial of something considered to be a necessity.” Deprivation gets glorified, especially for us women.Whether that is depriving ourselves of food, depriving ourselves of other basic self-care needs or even depriving ourselves of our wildest dreams in life, so that we can take care of everybody else’s needs first. Have you ever thought about that? In this article, I want to dive a little bit deeper and explain: - How food deprivation harms our bo[...]
The episode everyone keeps asking me about is finally out!I am interviewing my husband Shaun and we are having a very juicy and honest conversation about body image, diet culture for men, supporting a loved one through an eating disorder, mental health, sex and much more! Some of my favorite topics we covered - The “movie-version” story of how we met and why we didn’t start dating until 18 months later - My rock-bottom moment and eating disorder from his point of view - Men and diet[...]
Here is a big myth about being recovered from an eating disorder that I always thought was true: ”Your life is full of rainbows and unicorns and you will be forever free!" (and here are some more myths in case you are curious) I always thought that once I am recovered and free of my food- and body obsession I will be happy. Why? Well, because for so many years the only thing weighing me down was my issue with food and my body. Once that was gone, everything was going[...]
I used to be team all-or-nothing. Either I would eat “clean” and train 6 days a week - sometimes twice a day - for months on end OR I would “fall off the wagon” and use this as an opportunity to eat unbelievable amounts of foods I wouldn’t normally allow myself. The binge-restrict cycle was my life for many years. To the outside world, I was the “healthy girl” that was so “dedicated”. Behind closed doors, I was isolating myself, hating my body and eating myself s[...]
Raise your hand if you’ve been on some kind of diet or “lifestyle” before and it didn’t work for you. Now raise your hand if you blamed your “lack of willpower” and “lack of self control” for this. Okay. Now, raise your hand if you loved this “lifestyle” or diet at the beginning until the first “cheat” happened and you either binge ate or overate on something that was "off limits". I am over here raising my hand at all of this. We think that the diet[...]