My struggles with disordered eating
Hello everyone. Let me introduce myself. I’m Monica Schwingel, a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and a Level 2 Restorative Wellness Practitioner. I specialize in helping people balance their health or overcome issues with their health through a bio-individual approach by focusing on diet, supplements, and lifestyle. I decided to take on this new career role after working with an NTP myself and learning a lot about nutrition and health that I didn’t know about.
I wanted to talk about something that impacts me daily. I am recovering from disordered eating. I discovered this after going to school with the Nutritional Therapy Association and learning more about health and nutrition. What I thought were healthy habits were truly detrimental to my health and overall mental well being. This is not the same as an eating disorder, although disordered eating can very well turn into one.
My disordered eating came in the form of restriction, calorie or point counting, and becoming a vegan. *I am not bashing veganism in anyway so please keep reading further to see why this was disordered eating for me.
After leaving my extremely abusive relationship, I lost a lot of weight utilizing Weight Watchers. Once I lost the weight, I became obsessed with how many points a food might be. I also had to find another app to keep track of those points because I was so worried and obsessed with gaining the weight back. It was unhealthy. I couldn’t see food for what it should be, nurturing and enjoyable. I could only see it as a good food or a bad food, something that would keep me thin, or something that would cause me to gain weight. It became an unhealthy obsession.
I was introduced to veganism shortly after losing all the weight. And suddenly, I was losing more weight. “This was great!” I thought to myself. I stayed a vegan for over five years, but during that time, I never really looked at it in an ethical light OR a health-aspect. I saw it as solely a way to keep me thinner and thinner. I also wasn’t eating whole foods, mostly processed vegan items that truly were not keeping me healthy.
I tried all the fads. I tried all the diets. I restricted, then I would binge. My disordered eating was definitely on it’s way to becoming a full-blown eating disorder and I couldn’t even see that it was an issue.
In 2020, I had my second child at 36 years old. I remember craving all of the unhealthy things like sugar cookies and Chinese food. I was obsessed with losing all of the weight after I had her, and I could see myself spiraling back down the dark rabbit hole of disordered eating. That’s when I began to work with an NTP and learned a lot about my unhealthy eating habits and also that what I thought I was consuming was healthy, when in reality it was not.
Why I bring this up is because I believe MANY of us suffer from disordered eating in one way or another. It might not look exactly how my journey looks, but I think it is more prevalent than any of us really know. Couple that with what we think are “societal norms” for health and beauty, which are very skewed from what true beauty and health actually look like, our world is faced with an alarming rate of mental health issues, eating disorders, and just flat out unhealthy people. It’s so easy to get sucked into something like this in this world. When we scroll through social media, we see it. Waiting in line at the grocery store and glancing at magazine covers displaying thin, beautiful people, or new fad diets that are sure to help us lose weight. It surrounds us and consumes us.
If any of what I shared resonates with you, then I suggest you start to peel back those layers, dig deep into WHY you might be eating a certain way, and figure out is it truly for health OR is it more than that? Recovery from this isn’t easy. It’s something I work hard on daily and it can be a real struggle at times. But at the end of the day, I know that for ME I need to keep pushing forward for my overall health and mental well-being.
