BeyondWell KC

Are you a person who does everything for others and puts yourself lowest on the totem pole? 🙋‍♀️

So many of us struggle with this, and ESPECIALLY those in helping professions who sometimes have a hard time taking our own advice. Despite knowing how important self-care is, for many of us, our needs always seem to be last in line to be tended to. Sometimes conversations we have with our clients (and ourselves!) center around processing their WORTHINESS of the effort self-care requires, sometimes conversations center around navigating discussions with significant others to help carve out this important time without all Hell breaking loose at home or leading to guilt (this is a BIG one!), and often conversations center around our clients identifying their needs, defining what meeting these needs and what self-care actually looks like for them, and in many cases SIMPLIFYING how they meet their needs and give themselves TLC.

Today, I had a gap between clients and decided to step out of my office and work at a table in our building's beautiful courtyard. For 30 minutes I answered emails while listening to birds chirp, leaves rustle, and cars whiz by and enjoying the breeze and the warmth of the sun. I was still working, but this simple location change felt energizing in a way that I would not have experienced were I still sitting at my desk. I didn't even mean for it to be, but I noticed for me this felt like self-care.

Despite what we know, the word 'self-care' still tends to evoke images of getting a 90-minute massage on the beach at an all-inclusive resort. In reality, self-care doesn't need to be this complicated or elaborate. Self-care can be simple. It can be quick. It can be a moment here and there.

Comment below: What is a form of self-care for you that might not SEEM like self-care?

News flash! 📰

Just as the temperature drops, the leaves change, and the days get shorter each year, we can expect that our bodies are going to go through seasonal changes and continuous transformation throughout our lifespan. The obsession with keeping our bodies from changing -- from gaining weight to aging -- leads so many down the never-ending rabbit hole of unsustainable diets, online fitness programs that guarantee quick results, unnecessary supplements, and costly anti-aging treatments.

These are not only fruitless pursuits, but also they instill fear in younger generations who see their trusted grown-ups spending their precious time, energy, and hard-earned money on trying to remain exactly the same rather than embracing how our bodies naturally grow and change overtime.

Try something radical. Try embracing rather than fearing your body's beautiful metamorphosis. Try offering your body compassion rather than criticism at any size, any weight, and any age.

If this speaks to you, reach out. Let our specialized clinicians help you navigate all the changes our bodies go through while existing in a culture that propagates and profits from insecurities.

Asking yourself these questions will help you better navigate and eventually avoid the bingeing trap.

AM I HUNGRY?
Recalibrating our eating patterns (eating more often and ensuring that our eating is balanced and satiating) is usually step #1 to interrupt bingeing because allowing ourselves to become ravenously hungry sets us up to eat quickly and to usually overeat. When combined with unmet emotional needs, this can be a perfect storm that leads to a binge.

HOW AM I FEELING?
Most of us walk around so disconnected that we don't stop to notice what we're feeling. Our bodies communicate with us by sending us signals that are like little clues that point us toward what we need. Being in tune with what we're feeling can help lead us to what we need physically (food, sleep, calm, a trip to the ER, etc.) and emotionally (connection, security, to de-stress, etc.).

WHAT DO I NEED?
When we can pause long enough to tune into and identify our emotional needs, when we know how to meet those emotional needs, and when we're in a position to meet those emotional needs, we can begin to drift away from coping through food behaviors. This takes time and practice!

Remember that you may not know the answers to any of these questions, and you may not have any stinkin' clue what you need. That's okay! In these cases, the most important thing you can do is offer your self lots and LOTS of compassion.

Struggling with emotional eating or bingeing? There's hope! Our BeyondWell KC clinicians have 70+ years of combined experience helping those who struggle with these issues. Reach out to us via our website, phone, or email.

Parenting a child with an eating disorder and supporting them through recovery is a steep learning curve and can feel like learning a new language. It's hard! Check out our latest blog to learn one of our specialized dietitian's go-to advice for parents of a child with an eating disorder.

👉Click here: https://tinyurl.com/5xehpp4z

We're excited to introduce the newest member of the BeyondWell KC team!

Emily Fravel is an anti-diet dietitian with experience at higher levels of care and a passion for utilizing exposure methods and CBT techniques to adjust clients' judgments and assumptions about nutrition, movement, and health as she guides them toward a more trusting relationship with their bodies and with food.

She enjoys working with adolescents and young women as they face the challenges of entering adulthood. She has a playful, lighthearted yet direct approach to treating clients. She makes her clients laugh AND nudges them along the path toward recovery if they need a swift kick in the pants.

Read more about her here!
https://www.beyondwellkc.com/about/emily-fravel

At BeyondWell KC, we are often talking about body neutrality rather than body positivity with our clients, but both have their place in eating disorder recovery, and sometimes one is more helpful than the other at certain points in the treatment process.

Body neutrality is a form of radical acceptance. It creates space to feel all sorts of ways about our bodies, to allow how we feel about our bodies to shift from day to day and throughout our lives, and to encourage us to care for our bodies regardless of how we feel about them or what the world around us has to say about them.

This approach to body image is inclusive. When used appropriately, body neutrality meets trans, non-binary, those with gender dysphoria, non-abled bodies, and those whose bodies do not feel safe or welcomed in our world for any reason where they are as well.

We recommend you try saying these body neutral statements to yourself. Remain curious about how doing this and how seeing your body through this lens impacts your self-perception and your view of they ways in which you show up for and care for your body each day.

Meet Dr. Carrie Sheets! Carrie is a Licensed Health Psychologist, co-founder & co-owner of BeyondWell KC, an eating disorders expert, and mama to 2 rambunctious young boys.

She believes connection, including the therapeutic relationship, is a core component of the recovery process. Carrie cares deeply for her clients, and the relationships she forms with her clients are truly transformative.

As an eating disorder takes hold, an individual becomes more and more isolated & disconnected, not only from their true self but also from those around them. Research shows that a major factor which has been identified as being protective against the persistence of eating disorders is social support & connectedness. For many individuals, a therapist is first human being that they open up to about their illness. Hand-in-hand with our clients, we crack the door open wider, shedding more and more light on the disorder, and a powerful therapeutic connection forms. This partnership is a threat to the eating disorder and also a powerful ingredient in the recovery process. It's also often one of the first steps toward enhancing wider social support and connection that is so healing.

To learn more about Carrie, visit our website and reach out to us to find out if our team of expert clinicians is the right fit for you!

Our co-owner and dietitian, Jessica Thompson, is attending this year's iaedp Foundation Symposium in Florida. She's joined by many other providers from a multitude of specialties eager to continue to gain knowledge and expertise in treating . We are learning more and more all the time as more research is carried out, as more individuals seek treatment, as we learn more from our clients and accumulated clinical experience, and as more treaters join the fight.

One of today's keynote presentations by Margo Maine, Kathryn Fraser, and Karen Samuels -- Eating Disorders in Marginalized Populations and Aging -- contained this gem of a quote by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and author.

Just as the fear stemming from how society perceives and treats those in larger bodies fuels the often futile efforts to control our weight and to cling to the "promises" of dieting, we are seeing more and more cultural fixation on avoiding the effects of aging. As a result, we have also seen a surge in businesses preying on these insecurities, not unlike what we've seen in diet culture. At the same time, we are seeing more eating disorders occur in mid-life, especially among women over the age of 50. Many of these women have very likely engaged in disordered behaviors, and in some had cases clinical eating disorders, for decades but never sought treatment for a litany of reasons. Based on recent statistics, eating disorders among middle-aged women have now surpassed the prevalence of those affected by . This is only based on those who actually seek treatment, so the number of those affected is likely far more staggering.

At BeyondWell KC, many of our providers are middle-aged themselves and specialize in treating individuals in mid-life. If this is you, we see you, we understand your unique struggles, and we invite you to reach out for a Discovery Call.

It's not always easy or financially feasible to access eating disorder treatment. For many, treatment is a logistical & financial hardship. It takes time & resources many do not have, and this is a major barrier to proper diagnosis and treatment for all the individuals who really, truly need it.

At BeyondWell KC we recognize this and do our best to work with the financial limitations of individuals seeking treatment. If our providers are not the best fit for you or your loved one for any reason, we pride ourselves on our commitment to helping connect you with other providers in the area.

Get in touch with us at www.beyondwellkc.com/contact.

Wednesdays are the BEST day becuase it's our Clinical Consultation Group day here at BeyondWell KC!

It's so important to all of us as clinicians to set aside time and to have this space to talk through cases and to learn from one another. It's a major gift to us as providers, and we see it as an even bigger gift to our clients who benefit from our accumulated expertise.

We'll be honest. Recovering from an is grueling. And treating eating disorders can feel that way too at times. We trudge alongside each of our clients, navigating the twists and turns of the anything-but-linear path toward recovery. We impart wisdom and provide tools to add to their toolboxes. We offer compassion when they cannot offer this to themselves. We hold onto hope when things feel hopeless. We help them shake off the losses and help them pick themselves back up when they falter. But it’s not all doom & gloom. Our clients have wins, big and small, all the time. And we get to celebrate their wins!

At BeyondWell KC, we do this work because we truly love it, because we care deeply for the individuals we have the pleasure of treating, and because we believe in full recovery and better lives for our clients beyond their eating disorders.

For all these reasons, our clients' kind words mean so very much to us! Their wins are our wins!

We do A LOT of reframing with our clients. It's a powerful cognitive behavioral therapy ( ) skill that can be really useful in challenging all sorts of distorted & intrusive thoughts. We can do a lot of things with our thoughts. We can let them overtake us, but we can also re-work them.

To begin, you can identify the harmful thoughts ➡️ evaluate the accuracy of those thoughts ➡️ and reframe them into more rational, helpful thoughts.

The example above is a great way to challenge rigid, negative thoughts about our bodies. Try saying it aloud. "My body is deserving of compassion and care at any size." That's a powerful shift in language and tone. It's not an I-love-everything-about-my-body shift. That's a lot to ask and far too big of a leap for most people, at least at first. It's a shift toward acknowledging that while we don't have to love or even accept our body size, we can recognize that our body does deserve to be treated with care. It needs teeth brushing, rest, nutrition, movement, and visits to the doctor when it's ill -- all the things we do to take care of ourselves each day.

What are reframes that have been helpful in your recovery? Drop some in the Comments section!

Have you met Christine Rupe? If you have a teen or know a family who has a teen struggling with disordered eating or an eating disorder in the area, she's hands down your gal.

Christine has an extensive background in working with adolescents with eating disorders and having two daughters herself, Christine's speciality is working with teens & young adults and their families navigating eating disorder recovery. She takes pride in her highly collaborative approach with other providers working with her patients, the importance of which cannot be overstated in treating this illness.

Christine is an incredible asset to our team here at BeyondWell and the clients and families she serves. To learn more about and to schedule with her, follow this link: www.beyondwellkc.com/christine-rupe.

A very insightful former client going through eating disorder recovery said this once, and it is SO TRUE. Recovery can be scary! Despite many having at least a semblance of a vision for their journey, many people don't know where to begin, and the destination can still seem riddled with unknowns. We would be honored to be able to travel alongside you on YOUR journey. ✈️

Click on over to the link in our bio to get to know our BeyondWell KC clinicians to see if any of us would be a good fit for you!

When you consider the long-term outcomes, dieting has a 95% failure rate. It's more likely to lead to eating disorders, weight cycling, and weight gain overtime than sustained health improvements, weight loss, or any of the industry's other empty promises that keep us coming back for more. Instead of setting diet-related resolutions this year, consider setting ant-diet resolutions that lead to a more peaceful relationship with food and your body.

👉 Instead of starting a diet, try tuning into your body. Your body houses the wisdom needed to guide you toward fueling your body appropriately. After years of dieting, this is a re-learning process. Begin by simply observing: What is your body communicating right now? Are you hungry? Full? Tired? Do you notice any pain?

👉 Instead of setting a weight goal, try accepting your body. If that seems like too big of an ask, aim for neutrality. Research shows that shame doesn't lead us to take better care of ourselves. Allow yourself space to feel positively or negatively about your body but to still extend kindness and compassion toward yourself.

👉 Instead of cutting out sugar, try allowing foods you love. Research shows that restricting foods we love and harboring a "forbidden food mentality" leads to difficulty eating these foods in moderation, bingeing behaviors, and loss of control, the very outcomes most people fear that leads them restrict foods in the first place. Allowing ourselves to eat foods we enjoy regularly enables us to eat these foods in moderation and to make intuitive decisions about what to eat.

👉 Instead of counting calories, try counting your blessings. Counting calories distracts us from focusing on what's really important at mealtimes - enjoying food & enjoying those around us. Try being present and practicing gratitude instead.

Follow the link in our bio to learn more about us and how we can help you achieve your 2024 anti-diet goals!

Believe it or not, you have EXACTLY what you need to guide you toward caring for your body. Your body houses the wisdom you need to point you in the right direction. The simple, subtle messages our bodies give us have been drowned out by the static of diet culture and suppressed by the pursuit of thinness above all else, often at the expense of, not in support of, our health. It's not just that we've stopped listening. It's that we're so disconnected from our bodies that we're flying through a dense fog without a compass. That would lead any reasonable person to reach out for something, anything, to grab hold of.

So. . . what next? How do you begin the journey back to your body? How do you find your North Star?

This can challenging! And taking those first steps toward clearing the fog can be challenging. Here are 4 steps to get you started:

Step 1: Be curious about ways in which diet culture has infiltrated your life.
Step 2: Assess whether dieting & external rules has really worked for you.
Step 3: Create a list of these external rules.
Step 4: One by one, begin examining the scientific accuracy of these rules and experimenting with letting them go.

At BeyondWell KC, we can help! We'd be honored to partner with you in learning how to reconnect with your body, your North Star.

Does this look familiar? At BeyondWell KC, our clinicians work with so many individuals who are stuck in this cycle.

In addition to emotions underlying our tendencies to cope with food that can lead to bingeing, there are other physiological reasons why an individual might binge-eat.

Our bodies perceive any sort of restriction (dieting, reducing calorie intake, cutting out sweets) as a threat, resulting in biological processes that create a surge in hunger & cravings (reminding us to eat), especially foods we've deemed forbidden & especially sweeter foods (glucose), a vital nutrient our bodies need & can use quickly, which is key when we're under-nourished. This usually leads to "giving in," which can lead to bingeing, especially as the day goes on, our fuel tank becomes more & more depleted, & our brains feel more & more deprived. This leads to guilt, shame, & an "I'm a failure" internal dialogue that's very un-fun to sit with. So what do we do? We try to fix it. We say to ourselves, "I'll skip dinner." "I'll do better tomorrow." Where does that lead? Right to the the start of this never-ending loop.

How do you exit this roundabout for good? Here are 3 ways to stop this cycle:
1. Avoid restriction.
2. Allow all foods in moderation & without guilt.
3. If you do binge, avoid the urge to "fix it" by compensating. Offer yourself compassion. Consume your next meal/snack as planned.

Are taking these steps easy? Heck no! It's really challenging to stop this cycle, especially in our toxic diet-obsessed culture that feeds our shame when we "lose control." And there's a lot to learn & unpack with each step. If you find yourself stuck in this loop, call or email or visit our website to learn more about how our clinicians can help.