"This is a great program to facilitate healing"
My name is Erica and I was working as a sustainable building energy modeler and was struggling with binge eating and bulimia for many years. I quit my job 2 years ago and traveled the world for a year. During this time I left a program I was in for 7 years and which wasn’t working for me - Overeater’s Anonymous (OA), threw it all away, and I started looking into intuitive eating, My goal was to actually heal my relationship with food.. I still was obsessing about my weight, my body, how I was feeling. There was still a lot of judgment. This is when I realized I needed help. This is when I came across Rory.
I was struggling with many things before I met Rory, mostly compulsion, perfectionism, and body-image issues, but I was also struggling with sleep and gut health issues. I was having yeast infections at least twice a month for almost a year and couldn’t go to the bathroom regularly, and was only getting a few hours of sleep most nights.
On an emotional side, I was experiencing a continuous mindset story about feeling victimized by life, that I can’t change, can’t do things I want to do, can’t speak up for myself, can’t be honest with others about how I feel. Although I was so much happier than I’ve been in years prior, I was still holding onto a lot of old stories on a cellular level which were maintaining and dragging around a very sorrowful identity, a feeling of heaviness or fogginess.
Rory helped me understand the importance of nutrition without feeling deprived and restricted, just part of the balance and having a flexible mindset around food. I was afraid of the cost of the program and that it wouldn’t “work” for me. But mostly this was just a mindset issue, thinking all problems will be resolved in 3 months, and that healing can be limited to the duration of a program. Going through the program I realized this will be a never-ending process of change and it’s best if it’s gradual. So my doubts about it “not working” just weren’t true, the program resulted in many changes in my life and my mindset that I’ll carry with me and will keep changing.
Biggest wins:
1.) seeing this victim mentality and belief that I can’t do things, and can’t change, that change is too hard and is impossible, this was keeping me seeking for solutions outside of myself all the time because I never believed that I could do it
2.) understanding that when I turn to food, really I’m just trying to take care of myself...and often I’m looking to be intimate, to connect with something...and that maybe I can learn how to connect with myself and with others in these times, learn how to be intimate with people and myself rather than putting all of my intimacy in food
3.) I thought I would be happy when I lost a few pounds and was perfect with caffeine, sugar, food. Instead what Rory helped me understand is that it’s not about perfectionism, it’s about being flexible, meeting our needs in a multitude of ways using a variety of tools, and there will be times we aren’t perfect with food or caffeine and that’s okay
I learned how to relax more and more into my body and just be at ease with my experience and whatever emotions were arising. Rory reinforced the idea that it’s okay to simply be with our emotions and not try to fix them, resolve them, understand them. To tap into the feminine side of ourselves. In terms of gut health, I now go to the bathroom pretty regularly, have more energy than I did.
I would definitely recommend signing up for the program. if you really lean in, ask for help, seek guidance and just be as honest as possible, a lot of shifts can happen and they’ll happen really gradually which is to me often the most effective change. Healing is a never-ending process, but this is a great program to facilitate that healing and set it further into motion. Rory is extremely real, that’s the thing I love most about her. She tells you what you need to hear and will often talk about her personal life experience and relate with you. She has a lot of firsthand experience with healing and recovery from disordered eating and can therefore really understand where her clients are at and what they need to hear. I definitely recommend working with her!