Food Psych #274: Getting Your Period Back, Healing from the Wellness Diet, and the First-Diet Trap with Lu Uhrich

Photographer: Khali MacIntyre

Introduction & Guest Bio:

Eating psychology coach and body image mentor Lu Uhrich joins us to discuss how a cancer scare and chronic illness in the family made her fall prey to the Wellness Diet, how to get your period back if you’ve lost it, why it’s so easy to tumble into disordered eating with just one diet or exercise program, the process of leaving a religion and reimagining your faith, and so much more.

Lu Uhrich is a Certified Eating Psychology Coach and Body Image Mentor. Using a Health at Every Size®, Anti-Diet approach, Lu supports clients in finding food freedom, befriending their bodies and moving on with their lives. Through self-awareness and compassion, she’ll guide you to deconstruct diet mentality and give you plenty of resources and insight to call bullshit on fatphobia and diet culture, too—all for the sake of redefining your relationship with food, body, and self. 

Lu provides the tools, teaching, and support necessary to make a loving and lasting change—in your own time and on your own terms. She leads clients in practicing Intuitive Eating and Movement, Body Acceptance and Self-Compassion. She’s also adept at coaching around period recovery, self-care, ditching diets, and overcoming binge eating. Through her intimate 1:1 Mentorship and the MEND Sessions course, she's helped hundreds of women worldwide to recover from disordered eating. And she can help you, too.

When Lu's not working with clients, she enjoys life as [anything but] usual with her husband and three kids. She’s an infant foster parent who loves memoirs and YA fiction reading, American Sign Language studying, Netflix watching, true crime podcast listening, tattoo collecting, nature hiking, cookie baking, craft beer drinking, moon charting, hip hop dancing and fact googling.Learn more about Lu and her work at LuUhrich.com.

We Discuss:

  • Lu’s memories of her grandmother and how she helped to instill a positive relationship with food in her and her family

  • When Lu started to feel pulled away from her peaceful relationship with food

  • Why it’s so common and easy to tumble into disordered eating with just one diet or exercise program

  • Why there’s no specific “type of person” who is particularly susceptible to disordered eating and eating disorders

  • Being dismissed about disordered eating concerns by healthcare providers because you don’t look a certain way

  • The privilege that is often required to access care

  • “Personality privilege” and how it can affect your access to healthcare

  • The lasting effects of the program Lu participated in, including losing her period through hypothalamic amenorrhea (HA)

  • How she started on the path to recovery, and why she decided to hire a coach in addition to working with a doctor

  • What Lu learned about herself during recovery

  • How learning about physiology helped Lu and Christy in their respective recoveries

  • Diet culture as a Life Thief

  • Harmful narratives around “self-discipline,” and how that is often connected to faith

  • The parallels between recovering from disordered eating/diet culture, and leaving a religion or relationship

  • How Lu and her husband supported each other in their recoveries/deconstruction of diet culture and religion

  • Why she decided to pursue a career in eating-disorder recovery

  • Her work helping people get their periods back, and how disordered eating and overexercise can lead to lost periods 

  • Lu’s recommendations for HA and period recovery

  • How the body adapts to energy deprivation

  • Treating your body as a friend

Resources Mentioned

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

 
Christy HarrisonDisordered eating, eating disorders, eating-disorder recovery, privilege, coach, physiology, diet culture, Life Thief, religion, faith, periods, menstruation, menstrual cycle, HA, hypothalamic amenorrhea, hormones, period recovery, energy, deprivation, restriction, anti-diet, S821