Fellow Health at Every Size dietitian Heidi Schauster shares how she overcame restriction and bingeing, why perfectionism fuels the fire of disordered eating, how intuitive eating leads to a peaceful relationship with food, what health professionals need to know about Health at Every Size, how to overcome self-judgment and speak more kindly to yourself, why the thin ideal is so damaging to people's health, and lots more!

Heidi Schauster, MS, RD, LDN is a nutrition therapist and registered dietitian with 20+ years of experience in the field of disordered eating. She is a nutrition counselor, writer, consultant, and clinical supervisor of other registered dietitians, based in the Greater Boston area. Heidi also publishes a seasonal blog called A Nourishing Word. Heidi feels called to assist clients and readers in improving their relationships with food and their bodies. Heidi also has a personal recovery history: she struggled with bulimia, food restriction, and binge-eating in her late teens and early twenties. Now that she is 45 and has been recovered for over two decades, she loves being in her body and in her life. Heidi is passionate about helping others get past obsessions with food, self-criticism, and negative body image. She uses Intuitive Eating principles, a Health at Every Size paradigm, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and mindfulness practices in her work. Heidi is also a life-long dancer, and dance has played a role in both her eating disorder history and her healing. Heidi encourages her clients, when they are ready, to discover conscious, mindful movement -- in order to fully embrace the joy of being connected to a well-nourished, well-cared for body and soul. Find her online at anourishingword.com.

Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, to start your intuitive eating journey. You can also text "FOODPSYCH" to the phone number 44222 to get it on the go! 

Join the Food Psych Facebook group to connect with fellow listeners around the world!

We Discuss:

• Heidi’s relationship with food growing up, and how it changed along with her relationship to ballet and dance

• Thin privilege

• Body changes that came along with puberty

• Binge eating disorder, restriction, and bulimia

• The value of therapy in eating disorder recovery

• Heidi’s studies in nutrition and psychology

• Intuitive movement

• Self-compassion vs self-judgment

• Intuitive eating

• Alternative coping mechanisms vs. emotional eating

• Reacting to self-criticism

• Raising daughters in diet culture

• Heidi’s introduction to Health at Every Size and the body-positive movement

• Body acceptance

• Anti-diet activism

• The HAES community in Boston, MA

• Treatment of disordered eating from a HAES perspective

• Fatphobia in the medical community

• Disclosing our personal food peace and recovery stories while maintaining our own boundaries

• Never-ending growth and lifelong learning

Resources Mentioned

Some of the links below are affiliate links. Affiliates or not, we only recommend products and services that align with our values.

• Intuitive Eating, 3rd ed. by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

• The Renfrew Conference

• Lisa Pearl, MS, RD