Things we dive into in this episode:
Is FULL recovery from disordered eating and body dysmorphia even possible?
How did we know when we were recovered?
What is a good definition of "health?"
📘Resources
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Lily Thorpe, LCSW, is the founder of Thrope Therapy LCSW PLLC, a psychotherapy practice located in Midtown Manhattan. Thrope Therapy specializes in supporting individuals who experience eating disorders, disordered eating, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and LGBTQIA-related issues. Lily is also a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and HAES aligned.
Lily helps her clients find the confidence to face these issues and find ways to live their happiest and most authentic lives. Lily is committed to fostering an environment where the client is the expert of their own story and therefore has integral skills for working towards their therapy goals.
Connect with Lily: Thrope Therapy I Instagram | Email - lily@thropetherapy.com | Work Phone - 917-747-2082
📌Episode Highlights
Reminder: Recovery is not black and white. There isn’t a correct way to recovery from an eating disorder, or anything for that matter. Take what resonates and works for you, and leave the rest.
Q&A:
Do you believe that full recovery is possible to fully heal your relationship with food?
Yes, and full recovery will look different for everyone.
The proof that you can be fully recovered isn’t always academic.
Caitie is proof of full recovery. Lily is proof of full recovery.
The fact that there are people like us who were once so tormented by food and body image and are now no longer tormented, is proof that full recovery is possible.
Full recovery is being able to live a life where the eating disorder or your disordered eating habits are not controlling your brain.
Your relationship with food or your body image or your relationship with exercise is no longer significantly impairing the quality of your life.
You can struggle in the relationship without struggling with the behavior.
In recovery, you can wake up and have a bad body image day and then quickly snap out of it.
When you’re still in the thick of an eating disorder, you are likely quick to try to figure out what to do with a bad body image day rather than letting it ride out.
What new coping tools did you find in recovery that kind of replaced eating disorder behaviors for you?
Eating disorders are a coping tool.
There's a really common misconception that eating disorders are born entirely out of the desire to be in a thin body. And that's not necessarily true for most people.
The thin ideal and the way society celebrates thinness and athletic bodies and all of these things makes it really difficult to recover from eating disorders. It makes it all the more difficult to break free from these maladaptive coping mechanisms.
But for a lot of people, controlling their food intake, trying to control their body shape and size, over-exercise, emotional eating, etc. These are coping tools.
So when you're recovering, it is really important that you find out what you're coping with and that you find new coping tools.
It’s so personal, but it comes down to doing things that make you feel safe.
Yoga, breathing, meditation, journaling, etc. - these were spaces that I found to develop my relationship with myself.
Having a supportive community around me. Whether that be a partner, family, colleagues, friends who have similar views on life really helps, especially when it comes to diet culture.
I had to become okay with never being in control.
I think a lot of people, when they think about recovery, they use this terminology of focus on what you can control instead of focusing on what you can't control. You can't control your body size, so turn your attention towards things that you can control.
The truth is we can find things that make us feel safe. But we can't actually find things that give us total control because we will never have total control. We'll never have total control over what happens next. We'll never have total control over how another person views us, whether another person accepts or rejects us. And so we need to find safety amidst the truth that we'll never be in control.
Traveling was really big because traveling for me is a metaphor of how awesome it is that we don't have control.
When I started traveling, I started having the most serendipitous experiences. I started meeting really amazing people.
Things that I could have never possibly controlled, events and people and relationships and things like that came into my life that I could have never possibly asked for.
I realized that the world was so wide and so vast and so amazing and if I was gonna continue to try to control my body shape and size and my food intake, I was never gonna be able to have these adventures. I wasn't gonna have the energy or the capacity to go explore.
I couldn't go right to dancing, I couldn't go right back to cardio, I couldn't go right back to a lot of the things that I was doing in the worst stages of my ED.
But when I did re-enter those things I was fortunate enough to find the mentors and the instructors that helped me find a whole new relationship with dance and with dance cardio and that's been amazing.
I try to actively be kinder to myself when I make a mistake because if I am advocating for my clients to not beat themselves up when they make a mistake and other people in my life, then I'm not gonna treat myself that way.
That's part of recovery too, is just learning how to treat yourself kindly during times where you have made a mistake. We are human, we will make mistakes. That is part of the human experience.
What does health mean to you now that you're fully recovered?
When we think about health and healthcare in terms of the Western medical world, it usually is defined as like the absence of disease, but I feel like it's so much more than that.
Health means something different to each person, so it’s a matter of deciding the definition for yourself.
My definition of health is doing the things that make me feel most alive while not limiting my life. It's making choices that make you feel most comfortable in this world that has so many challenges and complications.
It's being able to make choices that feel good for you day to day.
There's resilience in your body when your body is healthy.
What behaviors can I engage in that will help my body become resilient? And that's going to be contextual. That's going to depend on where I am in my life and what my body needs on that day.
Flexibility is important in my recovery.
How flexible are you in your life?
Recovery also looks like presence for me.
I believe that I'm truly healthy when I want to stay in whatever moment that I'm in.
Thanks for listening! 💖 Stay tuned to Caitie’s website for more episode updates and other exciting programs and resources.
Transcript
Caitie: A recovered life is a creative life. A life that we just get to create all our own. It's never been done before. You've never been done before. I think that that's maybe the essence of what it's like to just, yeah, be yourself and be fully recovered and kind of the point of this episode too. I think there's so much content on Instagram that's like, your recovered life has to look like traveling. Your recovered life has to look like this. Your recovered life has to look like that. And Lily and I are just two healthy, objectively, in whatever definition, recovered people in our lives look really, really different.
Welcome to Whole, Full, & Alive, a podcast helping you feed yourself, feel yourself and be yourself. I'm Caitie Corradino. I'm a registered Dietitian-Nutritionist, a body image coach and the founder of Full Soul Nutrition, a method that combines nutrition counseling with a powerful toolkit of somatic healing modalities. I have guided hundreds of clients to freedom with food, their bodies and every aspect of their lives. I've also been through this healing myself, and on this podcast, I want to help you eat with confidence, embrace your body, form aligned relationships and create a life that you're in love with. I'll share actionable tools, no bullshit stories and interviews that will remind you why you have everything you need within you to feel whole, full and alive. Are you ready? Let's get into it.
Hey, welcome back to another episode of Whole, Full, & Alive, the podcast helping you feed yourself, feel yourself, and be yourself. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. It is a really special one. I have a very special guest who has been on the show before, repeat guest, so you know it's going to be a really good episode because I had to have this person on the show again. And we are going to be talking about disordered eating recovery, eating disorder recovery, and how it looks different for everyone. My guest is also a recovered professional like me. I help people recover from disordered eating and eating disorders, and I've recovered from an eating disorder myself. My guest has also recovered from an eating disorder herself and so what we're going to be doing is sharing our personal experiences with this mental health recovery and showing you how my experience is totally different from her experience. And I'm sure you're on the edge of your seat. I really have just been kind of vaguely talking about my guest without introducing her.
But before I do introduce my guest, I want to invite you to take the deepest breath that you have taken all day today. So wherever you're tuning in from, whether you're in multitasking or just tuning into the show, I wanna invite you to pull over and remember that you have a body. Really drop in by taking a nice deep breath in through your nose, feeling your back expand as you inhale and take a nice deep breath out your mouth. And just in case you didn't actually do that, let's do it again. Take a nice deep breath in through your nose. And exhale, release, let it go. Nice, full, long exhale. Amazing.
One more order of business before we dive into this exciting episode is that I have some space, very limited space, but some space for a few new one-on-one clients right now if you are interested in working on your relationship with food, your relationship with your body, your relationship with exercise through a combination of nutrition counseling, somatic work, and self-confidence coaching, please check out my website, fullsoulnutritionm.com or at the link in the show notes. And that's all, that's all. I also have a monthly breath work group that's actually a very accessible community offer that I don't talk about enough on here. So that too, check that out. April's group is coming up soon by the time this episode is published and I'd love to have you there. It's a really great community and a really good time to come back to you through some breath work, some journaling. All right.
Lily Thrope, today's guest. I am so excited to have her back on the show. Lily is a New York City based therapist. She is a licensed clinical social worker. She is the founder, the practice owner of Thrope Therapy, where she sees private clients one-on-one as therapists and has a few other associate therapists working under her. They specialize in eating disorder recovery, disordered eating recovery, LGBTQ, self-esteem, body image and more. Lily is also a certified intuitive eating counselor like me. We actually went through a training together and Lily, is there anything else you want me to say about you in this intro? Take it away.
Lily: I think you did a pretty good job of introing. I'm just really excited to be here. And Caitie’s actually taught me a lot of what I know about eating disorders and how to work with them. And I just owe a lot of my expertise that I say I have to Caitie and all of the work that she does. So I'm so grateful to be on this podcast and be a colleague of Caitie’s.
Caitie: Thank you for saying that. I owe a lot of my persistence and perseverance in this field to Lily because I don't know if I would be able to continue seeing clients one-on-one in the capacity that I am able to now if it weren't for having colleagues like Lily to collaborate with. It is such an amazing thing to have a work wife. It is such an amazing thing to have someone that I can collaborate with in such a seamless, creative, successful way. As a private practice owner, we don't get that much collaboration with colleagues. We are mostly spending most of our days working with people one-on-one. And if there's anyone that I'm able to talk to during the day and call on the phone and just talk to you about work issues, it is Lily. And I'm so grateful for that. I'm so grateful that we met at a very toxic fitness class many years ago that we're still friends today.
Lily: We can hold gratitude for even challenging experiences like, you know, meeting at this toxic class and also recovery. I think recovery can feel like a challenging experience. And I think a lot of people have gratitude for it. So maybe we can make a little parallel there. And also, I think just for any clinicians listening, it's so important to have other clinicians that you connect with, because that prevents burnout. Like when I am feeling burnt out, and I get on the phone with Caitie and she presents a new perspective on a case or even on a business challenge. I'm like, oh, I didn't think of it that way. And it just really prevents this feeling of isolation, burnout, feeling not certain of what to do. I think having that support from other clinicians and for us specifically, like women supporting other women, I think is so important.
Caitie: Yeah, that's so true. That's kind of what I meant when I say I owe my perseverance in the field to Lily. I mean, like every time I was about to burn out I've talked to Lily and we've created a new solution together. Just talking to someone who understands how much energy and compassion and perseverance it takes to work in this field is so important. So yeah, thank you so much for saying that. So Lily and I, as I said, are both recovered clinicians. A big reason why we do this work is because we have been through this healing ourselves. We've been through our own series of challenges with mental health, and we've both been through eating disorders and disordered eating and recovering from toxic diet and fitness culture. And I really feel now more than ever, people want to know that their providers have struggled, that their providers have been through some of the experiences that they are trying to be carried through right now.
And so before we dive into the listener questions that we got today, which are really beautiful, and I'm excited for Lily and I to each answer them and show you how both our experiences are so different. I want to ask you, Lily, why is it important that we hold space for this paradox of, it's important that to me that my clients know that I recovered and it's important to me that my clients know that their recovery doesn't have to look like mine.
Lily: If I can start with what the eating disorder makes you feel and how the eating disorder operates, it operates in a very black and white way. And I think what's so beautiful about recovery is that it does not have to be black and white. And I think this idea that recovery is gonna look the same for two people makes it this black and white thing. You're either recovered or you're not. And I think it's so much more complicated and nuanced than that. And I think there's so much beauty in recovery because of how individualized it is for each person. So I think sharing our stories is so important in understanding that you can take a small piece of my recovery, you can take a small piece of Caitie’s recovery that you connect with, and then you have another piece of recovery that we never even thought of, right? And we get to learn those unique and special things about our clients all the time. And it, for me, adds to my recovery, instead of feeling like, oh, that's so different. I feel like wow, that's another layer that I didn't even discover myself. Now I can apply that to my recovered life. So I love this idea of picking up more things as we go, rather than like there's one way to do something and once you've done it, it's done. I think especially with mental health, you're kind of picking up stuff throughout your life that works and letting go of things that don't. And I think recovery can be really similar and just figuring out what works best for you. So I hope that answered the question. I got a little rambly there.
Caitie: No, that was awesome. First of all, I want to underscore what you said about the eating disorder and disordered eating is black and white thinking. It's all or nothing thinking. And recovery is literally pulling yourself out of that. And so it is so important that we hear that other people are on the other side of recovery and that we hear how they got there and that we let ourselves be inspired by their stories. And it's so important that we take bits and pieces of it and kind of make it our own and apply it to our own unique life. No two people will ever be the same. And that's what's so beautiful about recovering is that you get to discover the unique person that you are. And so I think it's great that we've opened the episode in this way, because I really do want to point out that what Lily and I are doing here is not a, we did it and so you can too. And here's our playbook. That is not what's happening at all on this episode. Actually, I hope that what you're going to take away from this episode is that there isn't a playbook. There isn't a playbook. Recovery is possible. It's probable for you if you're listening to this episode. And you get to take what works for you and what inspires you from other people's journeys and from clinicians' toolboxes and apply it to your own unique life in your own unique way.
So, let's dive in. Let's see which one of these questions makes the most sense to do first. You know, I actually answered this question on a recent episode, so it won't take me that long to answer it. Lily, do you believe that full recovery is possible to fully heal your relationship with food?
Lily: I think it is. I think, again, not getting black and white about it is really important. So, what does full recovery look like for each person may be slightly different. And I think full recovery is possible. The reason I believe it's possible is not academic or empirical. It's because I have fully recovered and I look at Caitie and I see someone who's fully recovered and I see clients who have fully recovered and I know that it's possible because there are people who were so tormented, honestly, tormented is the right word by their eating disorders, by this experience. And now they are living free of that mental torment. They're just not experiencing that. And I think that to me is full recovery is being able to live a life where the eating disorder or your disordered eating habits are not controlling your brain. And I think that is fully possible. I think for me, it's been a kind of windy road and I imagine a lot of people feel that way recovery can feel like this windy road you're going down these paths that you've never seen before you don't know when they're so scary. But every time I found more joy more freedom more experience of life more ability to connect with my body so I think I hope as you're on that winding road you can see like it's leading towards something better and the better thing is full recovery and.
In full recovery, that doesn't mean you don't struggle. And this is something I really want to emphasize is like, I can wake up and have a bad body image day. That does not mean that I'm not fully recovered. It means that I'm human. And I have emotional experiences and I have a relationship with my body because a relationship isn't perfect. So full recovery does not mean that I never have a challenging moment. It means that I know that I will be able to handle those challenging moments and move through them in a way that's really recovered. And I think that's, that's what full recovery means to me.
Caitie: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. Full recovery for me means something pretty similar. And this is what I said on the show actually two weeks ago for my NEDA Awareness Week episode is that, yeah, you can fully recover and you're going to continue to have a relationship with food and a relationship with your body and a relationship with exercise. And just like relationships with other human beings go through ups and downs, your relationship with food and your body and exercise are going to go through ups and downs. Just like you could be married to your soulmate partner and you guys are going to fight sometimes. You can be married to your soulmate partner and you guys are going to have ruptures sometimes. Doesn't mean you won't repair from those ruptures. Doesn't mean that your relationship isn't still good and healthy overall. I have ruptures in my relationship with food every once in a while ruptures in my relationship with my body every once in a while ruptures in my relationship with exercise. And I repair very quickly, pretty quickly, almost instantly. And every time I go through the repair, I actually deepen the relationship. And that's something that's also really special about continuing to go through ups and downs, even when you're in full eating disorder recovery, is that your relationship with your body and food and exercise does evolve and it gets deeper over time with those different ruptures.
And so it's never the expectation that it's gonna look perfect and that food is gonna be easy all of the time. It will be a lot of the time and it should be a lot of the time. And it should never be that you use restriction of food as a coping tool, right? If you're still leaning on that as a coping tool, then I would consider that not full recovery. But if you are feeling triggered by comments about food sometimes, if you're feeling like you're lapsing in an emotional eating tool sometimes, even if you're feeling disconnected from your hunger and fullness cues sometimes. That's still full recovery, even if your relationship with food is feeling a little funky.
Lily: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that answer. And I think it goes really well with the answer that I gave. I really like the idea that you can struggle in the relationship without struggling with the behavior. And I think that's what I heard you separating. It's like, I can wake up and have a bad body image day and then quickly like snap out of it versus if I was still in my disorder, then thinking what am I going to do about it? And I think if your brain doesn't go to the, what am I going to do about it? You're in a better spot towards full recovery than if you're like, what am I going to do about it? So I think it's that, again, that distress piece in the relationship versus knowing that we're still going to have challenging moments.
Caitie: Yeah, yeah. And maybe it's also important to say that your relationship with food or your body image or your relationship with exercise is no longer significantly impairing the quality of your life. That is really important. If you wake up and you have a bad body image day, which is something that we could spend a whole episode defining, right? What does it mean to have a bad body image day? But let's just say you wake up and you have a bad body image day. I think you know what that means for you personally, if you're listening to this. It's not gonna create this cascade of doom and gloom into the rest of your day. You can have a bad, a tough, a challenging body image day and still live your life and still have positive experiences and still want to go to that social event later. And that is really important, the repair and the resilience and the way it doesn't create doom and gloom in your life.
So, okay, so let's just, I'm just going to go random here. I just want to do this question next. What new coping tools did you find in recovery that kind of replaced eating disorder behaviors for you? And I want to provide just like a little asterisk on this question. Eating disorders are a coping tool. There's a really common misconception that eating disorders are born entirely out of the desire to be in a thin body. And that's not necessarily true for most people. The thin ideal and the way society celebrates thinness and athletic bodies and all of these things makes it really difficult to recover from eating disorders. It makes it all the more difficult to break free from these maladaptive coping mechanisms. But for a lot of people, controlling their food intake, trying to control their body shape and size, over-exercise, emotional eating, etc. These are coping tools. And so when you're recovering, it is really important that you find out what you're coping with and that you find new coping tools. So Lily, what does that bring up for you? What was your experience with that?
Lily: Yeah. So I think as you were talking, I was reflecting on what was I coping with in my eating disorder, because I also view it that way. I think I wanted to feel safe. And in a lot of ways, the eating disorder made me feel safe. There was a set of rules. I followed them. At the end of the day, I could say, you were good. I wanted to be good. There was this maybe perfectionism, this morality to it. And I just wanted to feel safe. So when I think about my coping tools, I think about what makes me feel safe now. And I think the things that make me feel safe are so many, there's so many of them. So I think like, what comes to mind first, I think yoga was really healing for me in the beginning of my recovery. I think that was something that helped me reconnect to my body from a place of breath, from a place of movement that wasn't HIIT or I don't know what to call it like excessive, a place of more gentle, connecting to my body. I think breath work was also really important for me. I did a lot of meditation, I visited Kripalu, I don't know if people are familiar with that, a meditation center in the Berkshires, just blanked on that. And I think doing things like journaling, I would say is another one that made me feel safe. Like these were spaces that I found to develop my relationship with myself.
And I think what the eating disorder did, it actually took me away from myself. And I think the lack of safety was that I didn't have a good relationship with myself. I didn't really know who I was. I had kind of lost that and by recovering, I started to reconnect with myself. So those were the things that in the beginning made me feel safe. I think if I reflect on what makes me feel safe now, it's having a supportive community around me. Whether that be a partner, family, colleagues, friends who have similar views on life really helps, especially when it comes to diet culture. I think just being surrounded by positive community in that way makes me feel really safe at this moment in my life.
Caitie: It's very difficult for me to say exactly, you know, a summary of what I was coping with when I developed an eating disorder, because there were so many different things that I was coping with. So many different things that I experienced as a young person that just made me feel really, I guess, overall out of control. I felt really, really out of control and I wanted some certainty in my life. And I also, similar to what Lily was saying, wanted to feel like I was doing good and like I was doing enough and like I was being good. And I wanted some control over how people viewed me and how people saw me because I constantly felt like maybe people didn't think I was good enough. That is one thing is like, I felt like my parents didn't think I was good enough. And so I wanted to be viewed as better.
And I had to become okay with never being in control. I think a lot of people, when they think about recovery, they kind of use this terminology of focus on what you can control instead of focusing on what you can't control. You can't control your body size, so turn your attention towards things that you can control. And honestly, the truth is we can find things that make us feel safe, like Lily was saying. But we can't actually find things that give us total control because we will never have total control. We'll never have total control over what happens next. We'll never have total control over how another person views us, whether another person accepts or rejects us. And so we need to find safety amidst the truth that we'll never be in control. And the things that made me feel more comfortable with surrendering control, the things that made me feel more comfortable, I guess, with the free fall that is life, are breathwork and yoga similarly, things that help me really drop into my body and make me feel grounded in my body and made me wanna stay there and feel okay there versus escaping into my head.
Traveling was really big because traveling for me is like this metaphor of how awesome it is that we don't have control. When I started traveling, I started having the most serendipitous experiences. I started meeting really amazing people, things that I could have never possibly controlled, events and people and relationships and things like that came into my life that I could have never possibly asked for. I could have never possibly orchestrated. And I realized that the world was so wide and so vast and so amazing. And if I was gonna continue to try to control my body shape and size and my food intake, I was never gonna be able to have these adventures. I wasn't gonna have the energy or the capacity to go explore. And so traveling for me was actually an amazing way to replace the attachment that I had to my eating disorder. And having a much better and more healthy relationship with movement eventually became a coping tool for me. I couldn't go right to dancing, I couldn't go right back to cardio, I couldn't go right back to a lot of the things that I was doing in the worst stages of my ED. But when I did re-enter those things I was fortunate enough to find the mentors and the instructors that helped me find a whole new relationship with dance and with dance cardio and that's been amazing.
And relationships, above all else. Safe relationships and learning actually how to develop safe relationships was really big for me too. I developed a fascination with relationship psychology at some point in my recovery. And I was like, why the fuck am I so fascinated by this? Why am I always reading about love and relationships? Why do I love Esther Perel at age 21? And it was because I realized that I never had safe relationships in my life. My parents didn't model a safe relationship for me. And I felt so out of control because of that. And a coping tool I developed was learning how to have good relationships and how to pursue a good romantic partnership. So that's been really special to me too.
Lily: I love that. And I think also the relationship with yourself is the other one. How can we have a safe relationship with ourself when that has not been modeled? So beyond thinking about romantic relationships, I think it's so important to think about our experience with ourself as a relationship. And I think that's something people don't really think about too often.
Caitie: Yeah. How do you talk to yourself on a regular basis? What does it feel like to be inside your head? One thing especially that's important to notice is how do you talk to yourself when you've made a mistake? Not how do you talk to yourself when you had the best day ever and you got a new job and whatever. How do you talk to yourself when you really just epically fucked up? What does it feel like to be inside your head? Because if it's not a safe place to be inside your head after you've made a mistake, then that is an indication that you really do need to work on your relationship with yourself because then of course you're going to need something like a needing disorder to feel more organized and feel more safe if when you make a mistake, you're berating yourself.
Lily: Totally. And I think sitting here and acknowledging that we make mistakes, just to put it out there, we make mistakes, me and Caitie, people in recovery. We're okay not being good. We're okay not being perfect. That is not something that I live my life by anymore. I try not to, let me say that because I'm sure there are ways I do. I try to notice them and I try to actively be kinder to myself when I make a mistake because if I am advocating for my clients to not beat themselves up when they make a mistake and other people in my life, then I'm not gonna treat myself that way. And I think that's part of recovery too, is just learning how to treat yourself kindly during times where you have made a mistake. We are human, we will make mistakes. That is part of the human experience.
Caitie: Yeah, yeah. If there's one commonality in everyone's recovery, I think it's that you feel a sense of freedom. And if you feel a sense of freedom, you feel permission to make mistakes. I love this quote from Glennon Doyle that's kind of a riff on John Steinbeck's quote, “and now that we don't have to be perfect, we can be good.” She says, “and now that we don't have to be good, we can be free.” And it's like, yeah, when you stop holding yourself to these impossible standards, when you stop treating yourself like a piece of technology that runs off of an algorithm and gets everything right all the time, when you treat yourself just like a human, like a part of nature that goes through seasons, that has bad days, that gets a bad night's sleep sometimes, that PMS’s sometimes, that just isn't paying attention sometimes, then you finally feel free.
Lily: And then you have to learn how to tolerate those moments. So they're really beautiful and special. I love being free, but I think it's worth just noting where we didn't just magically get here. I've spent a lot of time learning the skills to tolerate those emotions that come up when you do make a mistake or you're not proud of something you did. So I think not to sugarcoat it at all and just note that it does take time and work to get to that place where you have the emotional regulation skills to tolerate challenges like that. And I think that's another part of recovery that is not talked about and maybe glossed over a little bit.
Caitie: Yeah, yeah, it isn't that you go from beating yourself up for being imperfect to feeling complete peace and freedom with your imperfections. Not at all. Actually, feeling free is, part of feeling free is feeling like shit sometimes and having the capacity to sit with that a little bit. Increasing your window of tolerance for bad days, for hard moments and actually being able to recognize that if you just let yourself kind of feel bad for a little bit, it is temporary and there is wisdom even in negative emotions and in being able to feel them sometimes. Real freedom is feeling a full spectrum of emotions, guilt, pain, shame, blame, and being able to sit with it without getting hooked in it and letting it drive the car for days and days. Does that resonate with you?
Lily: Yeah, totally.
Caitie: Moving forward to the next question, what does health mean to you now that you're fully recovered? And I am excited because I think that Lily and I will probably have three different answers to this question. I am curious, what does health mean to you?
Lily: I do not like the word health. So I'm going to do my best to answer this keeping in mind that I think the word health brings up a lot of mixed feelings for me. The word health feels moral in some way and I don't like that. I think that's the part of health that makes me not feel empowered by it is this feeling of black and white, there's some morally healthy way to live and there's an unhealthy way to live. And I think that's how health was always presented to me growing up in society with, you know, everyone I've spoken to it's like you're either making a healthy choice or you're not. And I think that's how people talk about food. It's how they talk about exercise. It's how they talk about stress, anything. You're either being healthier or not. So keeping that in mind, I do have to have a working definition of health. So I think my definition of health is doing the things that make you feel most alive while not limiting your life or something like that. It's like making choices that make you feel most comfortable in this world that has so many challenges and complications. It's being able to make choices that feel good for you day to day. And that is gonna look so vastly different for each person.
So for me right now, I would say health is getting to spend time doing my job, not excessively, but have, you know, an schedule that works for me where i'm able to take time to rest throughout the week, it means getting to knit every single day because I love knitting and I love creating projects. Maybe a little obsessive perfectionism coming in there, but I do love knitting and I think it's a great thing, but just being honest. And I think it means being able to move my body in a way that feels good for me. So right now that feels like walks. I love walking. I love being outside when it's nice out. It's been kind of gray. But I think walking is one of the things I love. I think doing yoga is one of the things I love. I just ran a half marathon. So somehow that was something I was doing, but I'm also okay saying that wasn't for me and I'm not going to do that again. So I think exploring movement in a way that, doesn't have black and white features to it. Like I'm not now a runner. I'm just like, I did a thing and now I can go back to the things I also love like walking and yoga. I'm getting rambly because I don't have a definition of health. And I think like I'm trying to find it maybe I'm still in that place. I really just don't like the word health. So I think for me, it brings up this feeling of, I don't actually know what healthy looks like. I feel like my life is healthy right now with the choices I've been able to make and I feel very privileged to be able to make choices that feel healthy for me. But it's so tough to define that word. So if you're struggling with that, or if you're feeling like, I don't know what that is, that's okay. You don't have to have a definition, I guess, is what I would say. And if you do, I hope it's a good one that doesn't create any disordered behaviors or habits. So that's what I have to say.
Caitie: Yeah. My answer would probably be rambly too. Well, my answer will probably be rambly too because I haven't really thought about this really either for a while. I don't actually have this working definition of health. I'm a healthcare provider and people do put that label on me. And I would say that I work in healthcare. I am a dietitian-nutritionist and I don't personally actually have this working definition of health. I can say some things that come up for me.
One thing that comes up for me is that there's resilience in your body when your body is healthy. I think that when I've been unhealthy, my body has not been resilient. I haven't been resilient to unexpected changes in my day. I haven't been resilient to if there's a cold going around, I'll get it immediately. I'm tired. I'm fatigued. I can tell you when my body's been unhealthy, it has not been resilient. So the word resilience kind of comes up for me. Like what behaviors can I engage in that will help my body become resilient? And that's going to be contextual. That's going to depend on where I am in my life and what my body needs on that day. An apple is not inherently gonna make my body become more resilient every single day. Maybe sometimes an apple is a good choice for me in enhancing my body's sense of resilience, but actually maybe on other days, eating a cheeseburger and fries is much better for my body's sense of resilience. That's what my body needs. Also, sleep is gonna make my body more resilient. Stretching is gonna make my body more resilient. Deep breaths, watching funny videos on YouTube so that I can get a little bit of comic relief and laughter. All of these things are involved in, I think, enhancing or increasing the resilience of my body. So health is very, very contextual. It's going to change day to day depending on what I need. It changes from body to body. I don't believe that there's things that are inherently healthy for everyone or inherently unhealthy for everyone except for hard drugs, obviously, We don't need to talk about the other like extremes of things, but I think that it is important to say that a perfectly healthy balanced plate of food might not be a perfectly healthy balanced plate of food for all people. It really does depend on what your body needs. So contextual resilience comes up for me.
Flexibility comes up for me. How flexible are you in your life? And I do love what Lily mentioned about feeling alive and aliveness. I believe that I'm truly healthy when I wanna stay in whatever moment that I'm in. Something that I've really struggled with and I can share this frankly is that I used to struggle with kind of dissociating a little bit and really wanting to like check out. That was one of the functions of my eating disorder is that it kind of took me out of the very difficult reality that I needed to cope with. And now that I am mentally, physically, emotionally healthy, I want to stay in the present moment more. I don't want to check out. I'm not bouncing out. We're not like earth to Caitie. That's a big part of health for me is doing the things that make me feel like I can lean into reality that make me feel happy, that make me feel alive, that make me feel safe, that make me feel joyful.
And maybe just as I'm noticing my answer is rambly and Lily's answer was nuanced, right? Is that like, I like the way that this question was posed as like, what does health mean to you? Because health is gonna mean something different to everyone. I think a final thing I wanna say is that, when we think about health and healthcare in terms of the Western medical world, it usually is defined as like the absence of disease, but I feel like it's so much more than that. And I really do like going back to Eastern traditions because they look at health as the body's ability to kind of heal. There's something like that. I don't wanna fuck it up. I don't want to say exactly what it is. But it's something along those lines of it's about healing more so than it's about the absence of disease.
Lily: Yeah, I love this idea of resilience. I hadn't thought of that as part of the definition of health. But this ability if you are in a quote, healthy place, you are able to cope and be resilient to challenges that come up, to be flexible, to experience joy, but also sadness and find balance. I think that's a really good definition of health. So I like that addition and I really love the way you talked about it.
Caitie: So the last question that we got was, what little moments, maybe like specific moments, if you have specific memories, made you realize that you were recovered? Now, this was a really beautiful question and I haven't had time to really reflect on my answer, so I'll be curious what comes up for me, but does anything come up for you immediately, Lily?
Lily: It's a tough question. It's a great question, but it's also a tough question. I don't know why, but this moment where I was out to brunch with friends and I always ordered whatever I thought was the, quote, healthiest option, and I ordered french toast for the first time, and love french toast. In a long time, right? I had had it when I was a kid, but I just felt so free. I was like, this is the best day ever. It was so simple. I remember texting a picture to my dietician being like, I got french toast. It was a big moment. Like, I don't know if anyone has certain foods that they're like, oh, these were tough ones for me. And now they hold like no power. I think french toast would be one of them for me. So that that was a really special moment where I felt like I was really on the path towards recovery.
For me, I had to do a lot of healing around exercise. So I think a lot of the moments were choosing not to exercise and realizing, I'm okay, I didn't exercise today and the world didn't fall off balance, everything's okay, giving myself a lot of permission to choose when to move my body and not and not putting a rigid calendar on it of like I exercise and these days in this way I think that was a really big moment for me when I went you know, maybe months without exercising and I felt so okay. And I think that was really a sign for me that I had really recovered my relationship with exercise. There's many other food examples, but I think the french toast one sticks out to me the most for whatever reason.
I think right now moments that remind me that I'm recovered are sort of what I said in the beginning. Waking up, having maybe not the best thoughts about my body and quickly shifting away from that and being able to completely live my life and never revisit that that even happened an hour later, later in the day. I'm not thinking about that at all. And then I guess the last one I would say is being able to support other people through their recovery really makes me feel recovered like that. When I am talking to clients, when I am talking on a podcast, and I'm reflecting on these feelings, I remember what I used to feel like, and I feel so different. So just knowing how different I feel, every time I maybe have a momentary lapse or something, and then I'm like, who, what's that? What's going on? That's not how you think anymore. It reminds me how recovered I am that I only have those so infrequently. So that's just something I feel really grateful to be able to do is work with clients and have those experiences for myself too of, I've come a really long way and I'm really proud of where I am and I'm so grateful to be here because it's so much better. So much better.
Caitie: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. I think my, the moments where I realize I'm recovered definitely fall in a couple of categories too, right? There is the food category and then there's body image moments and then there's exercise moments which obviously are like rest moments now. And I think the food moments that make me realize I'm the most recovered are when people make comments about food and it just has no impact on me. I mean, there are things that people say to me still about food now that used to, like that would just melt me. That would just absolutely melt me, you know, 5, 10 years ago. Someone said to me recently, I was eating a beef stick prior to getting on a plane. Really needed some protein. There's absolutely no like forms of like gluten free protein at airports. It's really hard for me to get food at airports as someone with celiac disease. So I usually ended up getting a beef stick and some like chips or something. So I got my proteins, fats, carbs, right? And someone said to me, I'm so surprised that you would eat that as someone who's a dietician. And I was like, you're a fool. Like it just, I just literally, it just bounced right off of me. And I give the specificity of the comment because, people say black and white stuff like that and judgmental stuff like that about food all of the time to me and around me. And it just doesn't, I can almost laugh at it a little bit and I try not to because I never wanna be judgmental ever. It's just, it just bounces right off of me and that makes me realize, yeah, I actually really do feel so comfortable and confident in my definition of health and my relationship with food that these sorts of comments actually don't touch me anymore.
And with body image, I noticed that my relationship with social media is really different than it used to be. I actually don't scour my photos for perfection. I actually don't look at every feature of my body before I post an image of myself on social media. And sometimes it's to my detriment. I noticed that I've got toothpaste on my mouth or something like that. And I post a photo and I'm like, okay, maybe I should have checked that, but it's just like the way that I used to look at every inch of my body in a photo before posting it was, it was just so different. It really was debilitating and it would take me hours to decide to post something on my Instagram grid. And my relationship with photos of myself has changed a lot.
And I would say in terms of exercise, I used to get out of bed and as soon as I put my feet on the floor, start planning for my workout. Like how am I gonna move my body today? What's gonna happen? And my morning routine nowadays is that I get back into bed with a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and I journal and I linger in bed, I lay in bed and I don't know that my teenage or early 20s self would have ever been able to fathom that my morning routine is not moving. My morning routine is being in bed, breathing and relaxing. I wake up earlier just so that I can be in bed a little bit longer. And knowing that that rest is part of health is such a wildly different way of thinking. My brain is rewired completely in terms of how I relate to rest. And I think if people are having a hard time contemplating their relationship with exercise, I really want you to contemplate your relationship with rest. Because that's more what it's about is like, how do you feel when you just rest? Yeah, does that bring up anything for you?
Lily: Yeah, I think I've had to work really hard on resting and finding a way to rest because rest feels also black and white. You're either doing nothing or you're doing everything. And I think it's so different. Like you said, when you're resting, you're having a cup of coffee and you're journaling, it doesn't have to actually look like doing nothing. So I think I've reframed rest and I love listening to audiobooks. So I think that's something that's helped me find rest, but also be engaged. Like my brain doesn't actually just do nothing. I also love swimming. I think swimming is restful, in the ocean or something where you're actually weightless, that just feels so good. Things like that where you're doing something but resting, I think can feel really nice. Yeah, I like everything you said too.
Caitie: The black and white definition of rest is so real. I used to get so paranoid when I was trying to rest. I'd be like, oh my God, I didn't actually rest today. Did I actually rest today? I don't know. And it was because I would look at rest in such a black and white way. I get rest on some work days. I could literally be doing work and resting at the same time. It's so important to add nuance to the way you look at rest in the same way we want to add nuance to the way we look at exercise, right? Going on a walk to the grocery store counts as exercise. Walking down the stairs in your home is movement. And it is important to count those forms of movement. I don't wanna count anything, but it's important to consider those forms of movement. It's also important to consider other forms of rest, things that feel relaxed and restful as rest. It's not just staring at the wall doing nothing, although I am a big advocate for moments of silence and taking time to breathe and take inventory of what's going on. It doesn't have to be that you do nothing. Yeah, for sure.
Lily: I was going to say, I also really resonate with the idea of not letting comments affect you. I mean, as anyone who's in this field or listening to this podcast, aware of this type of community, the comments are endless. They're endless. They're everywhere. They're literally everywhere. And I also just laugh them off. And I feel so confident in my way of living. I don't have to explain it to anyone. I don't have to prove it to anyone. I just know in my heart, I know. And I think that's what you were saying too. You don't have to dismantle this person's beliefs about jerky. You can just know that the common is ridiculous and move on. And it reminds me of that recovery feeling of like, Oh, I didn't love how I look today. Move on. Like, it's fine. Right. And just like if someone says something about the food I eat, okay, move on. Like it doesn't cause me to spiral. It doesn't cause you to spiral. I think that's the really big difference.
Caitie: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. Yeah. You don't have to dismantle this person's views about jerky. Not being so defensive is such a sign of full recovery. When you just realize you don't have to defend, you don't have to prove, you don't have to do anything. It's just like, you just feel comfortable in who you are, which reminds me of the very last thing that I want to talk about today which is that Lily and I are such different people and our fully recovered life looks really different. And I think that one of the greatest gifts of recovery is that you get to figure out who you really are when your life is not being steered by your fear of weight gain, when your daily decisions aren't driven by fear of weight gain, when your daily decisions aren't driven by having this perfect arbitrary definition of health be achieved, then you get to decide things based on your personal values, based on your desires, based on what makes you happy in life. And so, Lily, I guess the last question, this is my question that I've made up for us, is as you've gotten further along in recovery, what have you discovered about who you really are and what you enjoy? Maybe things that surprise you about yourself that you didn't realize were things about you when you were so deep in your eating disorder. And yeah, what is your recovered life look like that's driven by your values and your desires?
Lily: What comes to mind is I love just spending time at home. I'm actually a homebody and I live in New York City, which is very ironic. I'm someone who used to run around and do everything. I think in our last podcast episode, I think Caitie mentioned that I would walk 10 miles a day. I would just do do do. I would always do stuff and I love just being I love just like chilling. I love I watched three movies on Saturday. I just hang out and I love it. I knit and I listen to audiobooks and I just soak up what's out there in the world and I don't have to go outside and rush around and do all these things. So I don't know, that's part of what my life looks like. I love spending time with my family. I have a niece and nephew, they're adorable. I love spending time with them. I think kids have just such a different approach to life and I love experiencing it with them because they have the freedom that we so badly want. So I love experiencing life through their eyes. Yeah, I just love hanging out doing my thing.
I love the work I do. I think the work I do adds so much value to my life and being able to do something I feel passionate about and not sit in front of, you know, a computer screen all day crunching numbers. I get to be with real humans learning about their experiences, their stories and helping them heal. That really fills me up. I love Disney. I know I always say this on my podcast that I'm on, but I have to just have to give the shout out to this. I know a lot of people have negativity towards it, but I just got back from my honeymoon actually there. And it's so immersive. That's what I like about it. It's really hard for me to detach from work, right? I'm in another city and I'm just like, oh, look at these people. They're depressed too. It's the same stuff versus Disney's truly immersive. People are literally dressed up as characters. You're on a ride, then you're in a experience. I like experiences. And I think Disney is a place where I can be whoever and experience whatever and it doesn't have to travel home with me and I kind of like that versus being in another city can be great and exploring a new place but you kind of bring that back with you in a different way. So that's how I kind of relate to it but also it just brings me joy and I think that was part of your definition of health too is just like pure joy. I am happy when I'm there and I noticed that and then I need to just keep going back because I feel happy there. So, if you find your happy place, don't be afraid to just keep going back there. If it's the beach, if it's Lisbon, wherever it is, just kind of keep going back to your happy place, I would say.
Caitie: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that you framed it in that way. My dad recently said to me something along the lines of, he's like, I'm in the camp of if you have a good day, it's good for everybody. If you do what makes you happy, it's ultimately good for the world if you're doing what makes you happy and you need to remember that. And I like that sentiment because people will poo poo on Disney adults, right? People will be like, oh, that's stupid. It's whatever. It's like, honestly, thank god Lily's doing what makes her happy because then she's gonna be able to be recharged and refueled and go help a bunch of people with their mental health challenges. This is what gives her the capacity to serve. And it ultimately is what allows her to radiate more positive energy. Let her be. People do the things that make them happy. Yeah, I think that's really important. I love that you mentioned that.
And it's so crazy when I think about this question, how much I used to identify with being the person that eats healthy. That really was like a big part of my identity, like being the gym person and you know, I started my career in fitness too. I was a fitness instructor full time from the time I was 20 years old. And that was just something that took me a really long time to figure out, do I actually even like this? I really did have to break free from teaching fitness completely for a while to figure out if I even actually fucking liked that because I just got so wrapped up in it. And it was such a big part of my eating disorder for so long. And what I realized is that I do like it, but not for the reasons that I used to like it. I don't like it because it allows me to have this rigid identity of being like the fitness person. I don't like it because it gives me control and forces me to get my workout in. Oh my god, the amount of people that used to say to me, oh, you're so lucky you're a fitness instructor because you get your workout in at work. Oh my god, just like cringe. No, it's a terrible thing. It actually is awful. I used to teach 25 classes a week. Sometimes I was moving way too much.
Yeah, I like it because I have a dance background. I love dancing. I love music. I love bringing people together for fun experiences that allow them to move in a community and be silly. I never want to teach on a spin bike. I hate spin. I hate when my feet are attached to a bike. I think that's an awful place to be. I don't really like lifting weights that much. I don't really like those kinds of classes. I like dance classes. I like beat based movement. And that is a big part of who I am. That's my passion. And that's something I've discovered is that I am a dancer at heart. And I love that. And I love, I love shaking my ass and I love making up choreography. And this is just, this is just part of me. That's authentically me in recovery. And in recovery, I also love to travel. I'm not a homebody. I'm really grateful to have a home now. I finally stopped being nomadic. That was the extreme version of my passion, right? It's nice now to have a place where all my stuff is and it feels cozy and it feels amazing. But I am a big adventure person. I love rolling the dice, I love taking chances. I love meeting new people, I love being in new environments and learning new languages and trying new foods when I can. And that's a big part of who I am in recovery. And I think a big part of who I am in recovery too is not making myself live in a box.
For a really long time, I was having a little bit of a career crisis wherein I was a clinical dietician by day and a fitness instructor by night. And now I realize that I can actually blend all of the modalities that I am educated in and all of the things that I do into a service that is authentically me and really help people recover in a holistic way. And it took me a long time to be okay with that, to be okay with like, okay, I'm not just a dietician. I don't wanna just be a dietician. I don't wanna just give people meal plans. I don't wanna just focus on nutrition. I wanna have a creative service that feels really true to what has helped me recover and incorporate some of the things that I told you I've learned about relationship psychology and self-confidence and body image and movement and breath work. Yeah, that's a big part of who I am in recovery too.
Lily: I love how creative you are. I think whenever I talk about you to a client or to someone I'm trying to refer to you, the number one thing I always say is just how creative you are. I'm always impressed and inspired by how creative you are. That's something that's so special about you. And I think your traveling must add to that, right? You are always experiencing new things and being in new places. And I wonder if that pushes you in a way to be creative or just causes you to connect more to your creativity. That's such a beautiful thing.
Caitie: Yeah. Thank you so much for saying that creativity is such a high value for me that I'm almost like, I kind of want to write a book about how we can be more creative in our nutrition practices and how I actually do think that a recovered life is a creative life. Like a life that we just get to create all our own. It's never been done before. You've never been done before. And I think that that's maybe the essence of what it's like to just, yeah, be yourself and be fully recovered and kind of the point of this episode too. I think there's so much content on Instagram that's like your recovered life has to look like traveling. Your recovered life has to look like this. Your recovered life has to look like that. And Lily and I are just too healthy objectively, in whatever definition. Recovered people in our lives look really, really different. And my favorite thing about Lily, since she mentioned one of her favorite things about me, is how okay she is with who she is. And how evident that is, that you're so confident and comfortable with yourself and who you are, and you're so unapologetic, like so unapologetic. And I think people really need to see that in their therapist because there are a lot of people who are intangibly uncomfortable with who they are. And that's really unsettling. And that doesn't feel like a safe space to unravel in. And I think you create a really safe space for people to unravel in by being so confident in who you are.
Lily: Yeah. Thank you.
Caitie: Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're going to wrap it up here. This was an awesome conversation. Lily, thank you so much for coming back on the pod.
Lily: Thank you for having me.
Caitie: Can you just tell everyone where they can find you and how they can stay connected with you, or if they want to maybe work with you in five years when you have an opening?
Lily: Yeah, definitely. So I am available on Instagram, you can follow me @thropetherapylcsw. Or you can email me at lily@thropetherapy.com. I think Caitie will include those in the show notes. I answer all my own emails. So feel free to email me. I'm pretty responsive. You can also give me a call. My work cell phone number is 917-747-2082. I know. No one answers their phones. I really do try to answer mine. Um, and if you leave me a voicemail, I will actually get back to you. And I know right now a big problem is therapists not even answering. One of the things I feel most passionate about is helping people find a therapist, even if it's not me. So a lot of what I do is talking to people who are looking for a therapist that for example, takes insurance and providing them with referrals of people who I really trust. So please reach out. I'm happy to talk to you. And I carve out space specifically for that. I know it can feel just so isolating to look for a therapist. So happy to help with that. We do have an office in person in New York City. It's on 40th and Lex just south of Grand Central. So we do offer in-person sessions as well as virtual. And I have two amazing associates, Emily and Julia, who work with me and have a very similar vibe. So happy to connect you with them as well if that feels like a fit and yeah, just reach out if you need anything from a therapist, I guess.
Caitie: Amazing, amazing. And Lily really is so generous with her time. Frankly, if you are looking for an amazing therapist who will actually help you find the support that you're looking for, please don't hesitate to reach out to Lily. She's passionate about her work and cares legitimately about helping people. Can't recommend her enough, my faith therapist.
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And I hope that you have a peaceful rest of your day, rest of your week, wherever this finds you right now. Take another deep breath before you move forward into the rest of your day and I'll see you soon.