Mental Health: Hope and Recovery · Mind Body Spirit.fm

Overcoming My Eating Disorder: One Woman's Story

·52 min·1 clip

I literally started having suicidal thoughts over a cookie.

This episode features Kaylin, a woman in long-term recovery, sharing her personal journey with eating disorders, alcoholism, and complex PTSD with hosts Helen Sneed and Valerie Milburn. The hosts are peers who have overcome their own severe mental illnesses, offering a perspective grounded in lived experience rather than clinical expertise. Kaylin details how her struggles began in childhood, influenced by early sexual trauma, her mother's eating disorder, and being called fat by peers at age seven. She explains her symptoms started with OCD rituals around food at age eight or nine, evolving into restrictive dieting and compulsive exercise in college. Kaylin was unofficially diagnosed with disordered eating at 25 but received an inaccurate diagnosis of binge eating disorder before getting proper help around age 30. Her turning point came after leaving an abusive marriage, which allowed her to enter a residential partial hospitalization program out of state. Key treatments included Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), trauma therapies like EMDR, and working with a licensed dietitian specializing in eating disorders. Surprising tools that helped her were sensory regulation items like weighted blankets and holding ice cubes during moments of crisis. Kaylin learned from the Minnesota starvation study how malnutrition itself causes food obsession and body dysmorphia, which was a revelation. She emphasizes that her accurate diagnosis was atypical anorexia, delayed because she was never thin, highlighting a common diagnostic bias against fat individuals. Her recovery involved building a full clinical support network where all providers could communicate, and she credits her 12-step program for alcoholism as a foundational element. Kaylin now maintains a relationship with her body based on acceptance and neutrality, though she acknowledges the daily difficulties of living in a fat-phobic culture. She manages setbacks by being rigorously honest with her support system and planning for triggers, like choosing a Health at Every Size OB/GYN during pregnancy. After eight years in recovery, the constant "food noise" has largely subsided, which she attributes to consistent, adequate nutrition. The episode has a conversational, supportive, and deeply personal tone, blending educational segments with intimate storytelling. Listeners interested in detailed, first-person accounts of eating disorder recovery, especially from a non-thin perspective, will find this episode invaluable. Those seeking purely clinical information or quick fixes may find the personal narrative focus less applicable.

As heard by us

A steady recovery story that keeps body image, treatment, and hope in view.

This episode follows one woman's recovery from an eating disorder with a calm, practical eye. Helen Sneed and Valerie Milburn keep the focus on lived experience, and Kaylin speaks plainly about body image, outside judgment, treatment, sobriety, and the work of hearing her own…

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Why you'd press play

A lived-in recovery story that keeps treatment, support, and body acceptance in view.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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