So what specifically or like what drew you into this work from like on a personal level though?

Yeah.

So, I mean, first, I would say what woke me up, but obviously the journey started before this moment.

But what woke me up first was at around 21 years old, I got an endoscopy and colonoscopy done because I was having severe digestive pain.

And Digestive diseases run in my family.

And so I think they wanted to rule that out, that that wasn't also going on for me.

And when they got inside, nothing was that they could visibly see was wrong.

But from a somatic perspective, what actually happens when someone tries to control their body instead of listen to it?

Maybe you could just go into a little bit of of what like what what you call yourself for my listeners.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I have my master's degree in somatic psychotherapy.

I'm actually currently also getting my PhD in somatic psychology.

So I'm doing research on our food behaviors, specifically kind of focusing more on binge eating disorder because there is a lack of research there.

It was only added into the DSM in 2013.

So it's only really been fairly recently that we started to recognize binge eating disorder as something that many, many, many people are struggling with.

like, where do you begin? That's

My breathing tends to sort of slow down a little bit and I smile more as well.

Yeah.

You're in the same environment.

Like you are sitting in the same exact seat, but your experience in your body so quickly changed just by shifting your attention to a cue of safety instead of a cue of threat.

And so what I find when we're having that urge to go reach for more food and more food, we've maybe already gotten to the point where we've picked up too many cues of threat that day.

And sometimes it's not like the big things.

There's something called allostatic load, which is the amount of stress that our body can handle.

for so long and I was like no no no we don't we can't add a dog in we both ran our own businesses we've got really busy life we can't add something else in because my mind was like this will be more work to add in I'm probably the one that loves the dog the most I hug the dog I walk the dog and I was so happy we got a dog but I was probably the most resistant at the start

But in these moments, what do you actually wish parents understood about what's happening underneath those behaviors? So this is similar to like not taking things literally and trying to see what might be underneath.

Yeah, love this question.

Because yes, when you see... your kiddo may be struggling with food and you don't really know how to talk about it or you're like starting to get worried for their health or something like that, like wanting to make sure that they're eating in a balanced way or, oh, do they really need that extra snack? And was it okay for you to like say, yeah, sure, or no, or, you know, it can feel hard for parents because no one wants to like create some struggles with food for their kid.

So I first want to view this through the lens of nervous system work.

And this is something that I do with almost every single person that I work with one-to-one and in my programs is do kind of like a nervous system mapping exercise where we start to get to know, well, how does your body communicate with you about what your nervous system is trying to tell you through where it's at? So if we first think of when we're talking about the nervous system, it's the autonomic nervous system.

So it automatically turns on when it perceives threat and we have the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.

And I always like to see it as like two pedals in a car.

And what would be some common signs for a parent that their teen's relationship with food may actually be rooted in that emotional stress, anxiety, those unmet attachment needs, rather than simply having bad habits?