Eating Disorders and Their Relationship with Shame, Perfectionism, Control, and Recovery

Welcome back to the Bite by Bite Podcast.

Perfectionism and control are often the primary drivers of eating disorder. In addition to that comes shame. 

In this episode, listen to the unedited and unscripted interview between Kait and Boston College researcher - Courtney Stoltzfus-Zvaro. The original purpose of this interview was for eating disorder research but Kait and Courtney decided it can serve a dual purpose, so it was brought to this platform. Courtney’s thoughtful, challenging questions invite Kait to reflect on how perfectionism, control, and shame didn’t just influence her eating disorder - they ran the show.

Episode Topics 

• Courtney describes her research on shame’s role in eating disorders (3:55)
• Kait shares how control and perfectionism fueled her eating disorder (7:50)
• Kait explores her early anxieties and people-pleasing tendencies (14:44)
• How Kait navigated isolation and intense emotions in eating disorder recovery (22:03)
• Kait describes shame’s cycle in her eating disorder (32:30)

Content Warning: This episode contains brief mentions of eating disorder behaviors that Kait has previously engaged in. Please listen in a way that feels safe for you and your recovery. 

Related Episodes

WHERE I'M REALLY AT: The Messy Reality of Eating Disorder Recovery

UNEXPECTED LESSONS: Lessons My Eating Disorder Taught Me About Healing & Self-Worth

Connect with Kait

@bitebybiterecovery

bitebybiterecovery@gmail.com 

Affiliate Links

COMFRT 

FIND THE GOOD 

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

Bye.

SPEAKER_00: 0:34

Hey everyone, and welcome to Bite by Bite. the podcast that takes you step-by-step through the messy, beautiful, and real journey of my struggle with an eating disorder and my recovery. I'm Kate, and I'm here to share my experiences, lessons, and the wisdom that I've gathered along the way. Here, I share it all, the raw, the real, and the uncensored, so those who can relate know they're not alone in the tough moments. And for those of you who haven't battled an eating disorder, your attention is just as important in helping to educate and break the societal stigma. Before we dive in, please remember that while I hope my story and reflections can be helpful, this podcast is not a substitute for professional treatment. If you are struggling or need extra support, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional. Today's episode is a little different. In today's episode, I will be sharing a formal interview that was conducted by Courtney, who is a researcher and professor at Boston College. In this interview, I answer questions that were difficult at times, but insightful even for myself. This interview really sheds light on how control, perfectionism, and shame were driving my eating disorder. Before I formally introduce today's guest, I want to give a quick content warning. This episode does include brief mentions of eating disorder behaviors I have engaged in. I don't go into specific details, but please listen only if and when it feels right for you. And please remember that the podcast is explicit because you already know that if I'm going to do something, I'm not leaving my personality out of it. Today I have with me Courtney. Courtney is a sociologist with a public health bent and a researcher and professor based at Boston College. And I will hand off to Courtney. Tell me about yourself, Courtney. Thank you so much, Kate, for having me on this platform. Your work and advocacy, your personal work and also work on behalf of others is really, really courageous and also very profoundly impactful, especially given that in our world, isolation and secrecy and shame are just so rampant. That's part of the reason why I'm in the realm of study I'm in as a sociologist. I focus on sociology of the body, which is where the public health bent comes into play. My focus is on how the social world impacts our embodied experiences, looking at ourselves as susceptible to whatever societal factors are at play. My focus is on eating disorders. There are many reasons why that is the focus, but primarily it's what I know. It's what I've experienced as somebody who has been in recovery for a number of years. I would say right now I'm pretty strong in my recovery and that's currently my history academically is in sociology and peace and conflict studies and philosophy. I've conducted research in conflict-ridden areas, primarily in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Croatia. And those were the contexts where I first became very aware and had to reckon And with the vulnerability of the body and the social world. So that's just a little nugget about me. I don't know how much you can share or if you can share anything, but for the interview, what is it being used for in terms of your research? Yeah, so currently myself and others are looking into why it is that 50% of patients with eating disorders relapse within 10 years of completing treatment. And this high rate of relapse suggests that even evidence-based interventions like behavioral therapy, like and inpatient, various also like inpatient and outpatient treatments regardless, but CBT is predominantly used with patients, that those miss deeper unresolved issues. The hypothesis is that there is a role that shame plays in that. And shame is defined, according to the study, as a state in which an individual has internalized an abstract perception of negative emotions or judgments about themselves to the devaluation of themselves. So there's this abstract idea that then is incurred on the individual and causes them to seek coping, affirmation, and normally self-destructive behaviors. And so there are various different addictions in which this could play out in. One of the key specialists on this, his name is Kurt Thompson. I interests you my interest again being eating disorders and the role that the social world plays on the body I'm curious about what is the social messaging that becomes shame inducing in individuals and why it is important to study shame as a determining factor in the experiences of eating disorders Again, that's the hypothesis. So at first we need to look at, is shame a determining factor at all? And people's stories are very different as well. And that's an additional complication, right? So one person would say, yeah, shame played a huge role in the development of my eating disorder. And it's evident in the ways that they conduct themselves and their behaviors and the ways they look to restriction or over-exercising, whatever disorder behavior they engage in for the sake of some sort of self-affirmation and encouragement. And I don't, resource for identity whatever it be um regardless of whether you know shame is at play in each in a particular case or not there is a There is a dearth of research on the role shame plays in mental illness or addictions, what have you, that is a real disservice. Shame is pervasive, it is caustic, and it is everywhere. So that is what the study is interested in. All right, Kate, so beginning with some basic identification questions, would you mind telling me your age? I'm 31. 31. What gender do you identify as? Female. And what is your eating disorder diagnosis, either self-diagnosed or medically diagnosed? Medically diagnosed, anorexia nebrosa.

UNKNOWN: 8:18

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 8:18

And how old would you say you were when you developed the eating disorder? Looking back, I mean, probably 16 or 17, but I wasn't medically diagnosed until I was 22. Okay. Thank you very much. Would you please tell me what eating disorder behavior you have experienced, such as some will say restricting food intake, binge eating, urging, exercise addiction, et cetera? So restricting and exercise addiction were the two primary, and then laxative use. Okay, absolutely. Would you mind describing for me what led up to the eating disorder behavior? in general. Just kind of shaped it over time. Okay, absolutely. Do you remember what the first behavior you engaged in that was disordered, first time you engaged in the eating disorder behavior, that is? In high school, I went to eat breakfast. Okay. Do you remember? know why you didn't eat breakfast um sometimes i mean it was a mixture of i was a high school kid rolling out of bed at the last second um but looking back there was definitely times i literally like chose just not to what emotions or feelings did you experience during that first engagement in the eating disorder and deciding not to eat breakfast it was like kind of just like a like a high like an achievement like something like to be proud of um It was at times, it was also like an adrenaline rush. Not so much during that time, but when I was really deep in it, 10 years ago, it was like automatic and it was just like a high kind of like adrenaline sort of thing. What did the sense of achievement and adrenaline rush mean for you? That I was stronger than most people because most people would eat breakfast or eat whatever I was skipping. That I was, it was like the only thing that I could control during times when things fell out of control. And those things could be big things or just everyday things that are pretty normal. And it was like an avoidance away from me to avoid like feeling emotions. And that would be like my coping mechanism. Like, okay, how am I going to deal with this? Well, I'll just restrict or I'll just exercise or use a laxative or do all three. Yeah. Do you think you could detail more of what the... Lack of control that you explained was what was going on in life that you feel like you didn't have control in? Um... I think it kind of shifted over time just as I aged and matured as a person. But when I think back to high school, again, I was, I would play, I played softball in New York and I was on a highly ranked team and everyone where I'm from knew that. So when I was playing softball for my high school team, it was like there was a higher expectation for me because I was of the external teams I was playing for. whether it was a game day or I had a rough practice the day before, that would be how I dealt with it. Or when I was really deep in it in college and when I graduated college, I think that that surfaced because up until college, I knew what was the next step. And then once I graduated college, I was like, okay, what do I do now kind of thing. And then more recently, I think it's now, like, and we look back the past two years and I was really back in it again. Again, I think it's just lack of unknowing what's going to happen, control, perfectionism, all of that. And these seasons of either needing to perform at a certain caliber on the softball team or Identifying what comes next, the need to feel you have the reins and you know what to predict, did the experience of the eating disorder shift at all? I feel like I think it just... I think it was never as bad. It wasn't bad in high school. It wasn't bad when I was in college because I was still charting that line of kind of with the eating disorder, but also kind of normal. So I think it fully shifted around when I graduated college because that's when I went to treatment and that's when it was at its worst.

SPEAKER_01: 14:36

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 14:37

Before the eating disorder, how would you say you saw yourself? Positively, negatively, neutrally? I never remember... Thinking of myself in any way, so I would say pretty neutrally, but I do remember I was just always anxious. I was an anxious kid. I just don't know. Sure, sure. As a child, were there particular things you were anxious about or was it just general anxiety? Some of it was general anxiety, or some of it, I should say, some of it was anxiety about normal things, but I feel like my anxiety was definitely abnormal in terms of the level it was at.

SPEAKER_01: 15:31

The

SPEAKER_00: 15:35

most recent anxiety that I can think of is... Again, the sports, like I would always be nervous to perform for a game or for practice. And then I would always, I literally lived my life like, okay, I can take a deep breath after this practice. But then I would have practice the next day and it was just a constant cycle. You said you experienced anxiety around normal things.

UNKNOWN: 16:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 16:03

I assume that that includes your sports performance, that being a normal thing, but again, abnormally intense. What other normal things were you anxious about? Making a mistake, messing up. I was always anxious that someone was mad at me. Like, for example... This one memory sticks out in my head where one day I was at my grandma's house and my parents were there and I had spilled my glass of milk. And I instantly started rapidly apologizing and asked everybody if they were mad at me. So that was a constant theme as well. Yeah. Did you ever have reason to believe that people were mad at you? No, I mean, no. No. Where this understanding you had of people being mad towards you while there wasn't reason for that to be, do you have a sense that it came out of an internalized state? anger that you had towards yourself that you were projecting outward um i don't think so i i think i just always wanted like people to be happy with me or people or people in my family to like not be mad at me and i think i was a very sensitive kid um so i would take everything just so literally and so sensitively okay understandable so how did you perceive people thought of you as you Are you engaged in the eating disorder or just generally? Just in general? I've never really... I mean, overall, I think people generally don't think bad of me or anything like that. I think half of my issue is the pressure that I put on myself. It gets projected outwards. Sure. And you've mentioned that it is in your nature to be competitive, right? It's a wonderful thing about you. Could also have, of course, its dark side, right, as we know. And so you wanted to be perfect and you wanted to make sure everybody was happy with you. Do you have an idea as to why that was such a focus for you, maintaining other people's happiness around you? I mean, through all the therapy I've done, I kind of know now that it probably comes from like early childhood where like my emotions and my like emotional needs weren't being met. So I try to give that to other people because it wasn't given to me. And then because I've just been so conditioned for my emotional needs not to be met, I just always focus on making sure everybody else's are. If you asked me that years before therapy, I probably wouldn't have been able to give you that answer. Yeah, a lot of these questions require a lot of self-awareness and you're Your ability to answer to them very thoughtfully demonstrates that you've been doing a lot of internal work. So, yeah, well done. In regards to your emotional needs not being met, have you come to realize sort of what that looked like growing up as a child, how your emotional needs weren't met and what your needs maybe were too? Yeah. So growing up, and just before I say it all, I don't blame my parents at all or have any anger or anything like that towards them. But I think when I was really young, my parents owned a restaurant. So they were... constantly working weekends, constantly working late. So there were a lot of times I spent with my grandfather or my grandmother. Um, so I was like bounced around between grandparents and it was great. I was, it was awesome. But I think just, I came to learn that, oh, I don't know where I'm going to be tonight or I don't know where I'm going to be this weekend or, um, If I was upset about something, it's like mom wasn't there or dad wasn't there just because they were working. Just like things like that, that really is no one's fault. But because it kind of went on for a couple of the initial years of my life, I feel like it just created like a shaky foundation. Yeah. There seems to be a recurring theme of unknowns, right? And in that season, couldn't predict, you couldn't control. And then later graduating from college, couldn't predict and couldn't control. Yeah. How significant are relationships to your eating disorder behavior, do you think? Including, you know, family, friends, significant others. So with my family, I think that's changed over time. I think initially It was kind of like nobody knew what was going on. So it was scary for everyone. I think it put a lot of stress mostly on my dad and everyone else in my family. I think my dad, I think my whole family kind of felt helpless because they didn't know what to do. They didn't know much about eating disorders, which I don't blame them at all. I mean, I live with it, and there are times that I'm like, I don't even know what's going on. But I just feel like it was a lot of stress and worry. And then I created a lack of trust. by lying about eating and not eating and things like that. Friendships, I mean, 95% of my friends didn't really know about any of this until the past couple of months. So The only way that it affected relationships in the past was just me choosing to isolate or cancel plans or avoid plans because that's what the eating disorder wanted me to do. So I just kind of lost a lot of friendships just through neglect on my own part. In relationships... kind of the same thing, just stress. I always prioritize my eating disorder before my romantic, before any relationship really, family, friends, or romantic. But I think now, presently, just with my eating disorder, I have an anxious attachment. So it's just a constant, like now that I'm in a much better place with my eating disorder, those behaviors have kind of transferred to relationships in the sense that the catastrophic thinking of weight gain after you eat has kind of transferred to, oh, they cancel plans, they hate me, they don't like me, they don't want to talk to me. So... Recovery has been great, but now it's like I see like the eating disorder trying to like cling on to other things. Sure. Sure. Are there other ways besides the anxious attachment you're noticing that change? My emotions are like... so intense. Like I feel them so intensely. And I think that's because my unusual was my coping mechanism for so many years. And that's not even necessarily just negative emotions. Like they can be excited, happy. And it's like, an intense level of happiness and excitement. And then the anxiety or whatever, the sadness, the tiredness, whatever emotion it is, it just seems very intense because I've never allowed myself to feel it before. So I would say that those two things put together are probably the two present biggest struggles right now.

UNKNOWN: 25:32

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 25:38

How have you been able to manage the emotional intensity? Has it felt more overwhelming, thrilling? Do you feel like you're living life more or is it more so, you know, triggered almost to isolate again because it's too much? No, I think it's a little bit good, a little bit bad. I think obviously with the good emotions, like those are fine. I can ride those out. That's fun. But the negative emotions sometimes... trigger like negative thoughts or like just rumination of just thinking the worst thing ever of like anything um but i know i try to just like remind myself like this is a good sign like it won't always be like this um but yeah it is i am kind of thankful for it too because like you said it is like living life again Yeah, powerful growth again that you're doing. You're wonderful. Backtracking a little bit, you brought up in regards to the significance that relationships played in your experience of anorexia and how anorexia in turn also played a role in your relationships. Would you mind explaining how it felt to lose trust with your parents and to lose friends during that time and even have to go through those breakups? With my family, it was in it, and I was in it when I was in treatment, when I was in my eating disorder, even when I relapsed. I didn't care because the eating disorder was still at the forefront. And I hate saying that, but it's the truth. Lying about eating or exercising was so, it wasn't even like a choice anymore. It was just automatic. So there were times that I wasn't even aware that I was not being truthful or whatever. Friendships. I have a hard time with that one because it's sad to look back and think that at one point it was the most important thing. But then I just try to move on from it because it happened. I can't go back in time, so... It just is what it is kind of thing. I have great friends now, and some of those friends are still with me by my side, so it wasn't like it's all bad, but there were some rough patches there where the eating disorder trumped my friends. Romantic relationships. I had one serious romantic relationship when I was in treatment, and that person was very supportive, and that was... It was a good relationship, but once I was discharged from treatment, I just kind of like wanted to move on from everything. So that relationship ended. And then since then, my most recent partner who was with me during the most intense part of my relapse two years ago, that person kind of like triggered it a lot. Didn't understand it, which I've never faulted anyone for not understanding it, but didn't care to understand it. Wouldn't make very awful comments. So I've never had a problem saying, like ending things or saying goodbye to the people that I don't need to be around anymore, but There are times I ask myself what things have played out that way if I didn't have any disorder. You've undergone, of course, a lot of loss and also been able to take on great addition to the benefit of your healing. your healing as you've gained more awareness and cognizance of the destructiveness of the eating disorder. How have you come to make sense of your desire to keep people happy, make sure people are pleased with the sort of conflict and turmoil that it also stirred up? So I think the easiest way to just say that is I was, I've always been a people pleaser. Um, and now that I've done all this work, as they say, um, I just stopped doing that. I just, There isn't like a day or a time or an event that I can look back and say, yeah, that's when I stopped doing that. It was just one day. it just like clicked and I was like, this is not working. So I don't, I'm not afraid to say no. Now, if I don't want to do something, I'm not afraid to advocate for what I want or need in a situation. Um, whereas before I would always put, I would always make sure the other person is comfortable all the time and sacrifice my comfort for that where I just don't do that anymore. And I like, stand by that, make sure that I stand by that because I know that if I don't, I know which road I'll go

SPEAKER_01: 31:30

down. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 31:34

To clarify, you said you don't remember when that shift happened. I mean, I can tell you that it happened about like a year and a half ago, but there wasn't like one specific thing or... event or like day it would just like looking back i can say yeah for about a year and a half i felt i've let it go do you accredit any circumstances or people to that shift no i just think i was just done just tired of it like i've been doing this for over 10 years and I think I just got to the point of like something's got to give, something's got to change.

SPEAKER_01: 32:25

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 32:28

Shifting gears a bit here, would you mind defining in your own words what shame means? Shame? Mm-hmm. Oh, it's a good question. I think it for me is just an internal feeling of letting yourself down, not being able to expose whatever it is you're shameful about. Just a feeling of like hiding and being afraid of People thinking differently of you, you thinking differently of yourself if you admit it to yourself. Circumstances in your life changing if whatever you're shameful about becomes exposed. It's just like an internal feeling of being afraid. of other people or even your own thoughts and opinions. Because to me, when I think about what I've been shameful of in regards to being a disorder, I think a lot of it comes from I know it's not what I'm supposed to be doing. I know it's not good for me. I know it's wrong. I objectively know all that. And I think the shame comes from I did it anyway. There were times I chose to do it anyway. I also think there's a factor in there that everyone Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Explaining the role shame played in your experience of the eating disorder briefly there. What about maybe in the development of your eating disorder? Do you sense that shame played a role in its development? No, I really think that for me personally, it was control and perfectionism. I don't think the shame came until I looked back and I was like, what the hell have I been doing for the past 10 years? So what was the motive for controlling and the perfectionism then? I think part of it is just my personality, the way that my brain works, and the way that my mind interprets things in the world, things that are said, things that I see, things that happened. And I think overall, just as a person, I like to know the outcome.

SPEAKER_01: 35:11

And

SPEAKER_00: 35:13

if I don't know the outcome, if I can control what I'm doing, then maybe I will know the outcome. When I say that out loud, it sounds very silly. But that's what it is. I think it's just control for me. Just control. Okay. And when you weren't able to control, how did it feel? That was when I was up to my neck and my eating disorder. I can't even tell you how it felt. The only thing I can tell you how it felt was what the eating disorder felt like and great and crappy at the same time. Do you remember how you felt before you had the eating disorder as a coping mechanism? If you didn't feel like you were under control or that you had control? I feel like I just was happy, just like a normal kid. Yeah, didn't have to worry about controlling anything. Understandable. Okay, so Kate, I have a few more questions here. They are... rating questions and instead of just audibly reading them off for you to rate um i'm going to provide them visually to you so i'll share my screen i don't know about you but i am not a very auditory person so beginning with the first one uh on a scale of one being not at all and five being a great deal how How much shame have you experienced in the following context, beginning with relationships with family, with peer interactions? Three. What about in academic or professional settings? One. In response to failure or perceived inadequacy? Five. Around expressing emotional needs? Five. due to feeling not enough or too much? Five. In connection to your identity? I mean, in relation to the gender, sexuality, culture, religion that's listed, one. One, okay. Is there another, excuse me, is there another demographic of identity that is not listed? No. Brilliant. So before we go down to the second prompt there, there are a few more questions to address before. Let me open this up. Excellent. So you would say that shame did not play a role in the development of your eating disorder. Not that I'm aware of, no. Okay. A five being strongly agree. To what extent do you agree with the following statements? Beginning with when I feel ashamed, I am more likely to change the way I eat. Five. And also this can be past tense. So when I feel ashamed, I was more likely to change the way I ate. Shame makes me want to control something in my life. Four. I've used food-related behaviors to numb or cope with emotional pain. I hide or isolate myself when I feel shame. I feel more in control when I engage in disordered eating behaviors. Shame has influenced the development of my eating habits. I'm going to have to say two. I think it's control. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 39:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 39:15

I'll go ahead and stop sharing that screen. There we go. Okay. Wonderful. Continuing onward here. We've touched on this briefly, but would you mind more... focus, Leigh, describing the connection, if there is any, between shame and your disordered eating behavior? So I've said that I don't think shame contributed to the development of the eating disorder. But for me, I think shame comes into play Like after the moment that I look back and I realize that I've been doing all these behaviors for X amount of time. And then I would feel the shame, feel that emotion. And then I would cope with that emotion through my eating disorder. So then it just created a vicious cycle. Absolutely. Yeah. How did you experience the feeling of shame? um just like I can't like just thoughts like just mental thoughts and like internal dialogue of essentially just beating myself up for what I did or didn't do in terms of eating or not or exercising or not and being shameful of what it is I did or didn't do and then going on and on with that dialogue for however long. Could be minutes, hours, a day. And then eventually resorting to my eating disorder to feel better and to get rid of that shame. And you're facilitating... like tense tenseness. Okay. In your healing, how have you come to sort of intervene and disrupt the cycle of disordered eating and shame? So literally what I have done this time around is I just do like if I'm having thoughts about engaging in something or thoughts about what I previously consumed or will consume in the future and I do want to do something because of that or don't want to do something because of that, I'll just do the opposite. I just literally do the opposite of whatever my eating disorder tells me to do and that in itself gets rid of the shame because then I don't have to be shameful about engaging in the behavior. Yeah. You refer to your eating disorder as something that is separate of you and that lords over you, right? So you're not identifying as anorexic per se, but anorexic. What was that? I used to. Not anymore, but I used to. Yeah.

UNKNOWN: 42:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 42:45

Yeah, I think one of the, so I said briefly before that I was struggling again really badly. So I relapsed probably about a year and a half after I came out of treatment. So that would have been like 2017, 2018-ish when I relapsed. But in 2021, started to get bad and then all the way until about, six months ago it was really bad and then one day my nutritionist either my nutritionist or my therapist had asked me who are you without your eating disorder what does life look like without your eating disorder and I I couldn't answer the question um Because in my mind, like, there was no difference. Like, the eating disorder was me and I was the eating disorder. It was my identity. Like, I was anorexic. I was an eating disorder. So a lot of my recent, like, therapy work or whatever um has been like separating the two

SPEAKER_01: 43:56

and

SPEAKER_00: 43:58

like realizing that because for a long time i uh i felt i described myself as feeling like the rope and tug of war with my eating disorder pulling me one way and my actual self pulling me the other um And so that was when I slowly started realizing that, okay, well, maybe we're not the same unit, we're not one. Because if we were, we would both be on the same side. And we were anymore. It's a powerful analogy. Yeah. What has been most fruitful in... the experiences of recovery you've had? Recently or just in general? In general, yeah. Respecting that recovery is a wave, right? So what's been bringing you to the peaks and that you've loved to take away? For a long time, I used to just... I mean, the whole time I've always focused on recovery, but for the longest time I was thinking of like the end goal of recovery. And that's daunting for someone with an eating disorder. That seems like it's very far away. It's impossible. It's whatever. So I finally was like, okay, well, this isn't working. So I don't, what's the most helpful for me is to I don't even think about recovery as an end goal. I think about it like day to day. Like when I wake up in the morning, what am I going to do this morning that's for recovery? I did that. What am I going to do next? And I literally just take it step by step. And if I'm ever at a crossroads of potentially engaging in a behavior, I don't sit there and fit in myself and tell myself not to because that hasn't been productive for me. What I do is I just tell myself, you have a choice. You can go, you can go back towards reading disorder and you already know what that's like and you hate it, or you can make another step towards recovery. And then It has been perfect. There have been times that I've chosen the wrong side. And for a while, it was always for me, all or nothing. Like if I had one slip up, I might as well just go right back to the eating disorder. So if I do have a slip up, I just... Not that I tell myself it doesn't matter, but I just really focus on it doesn't matter in the sense that you can still recover and make those wrong choices. Yeah. Step by step and day by day, I don't focus on it as an end goal because for me, that was daunting. Yeah. Grace is powerful. Wonderful that you have that towards yourself. Now that's the end of the questions I have for you, Kate. Are there any questions or final comments that this interview would be incomplete without that you might have to share? No, I just think, I don't think so. I just think eating disorders are very complex and there's, It takes a lot of work to understand them for your own, as your own eating disorder as a person. And it's hard and it's frustrating, but it's eye-opening. Yeah. You have a beautiful perspective that only you have, Kate. It took me a while to get that perspective. Yeah. Well, best of luck on the, what am I, what's the word I'm looking for? On the release, excuse me, of your podcast. Really great platform that you're developing and enjoy your travels. Yeah, I hope they're happy travels. Yeah, they have been for the most part recently, so I hope that continues. So the interview that listeners just heard was recorded about, I guess, three weeks ago, maybe a month ago. I mean, I knew you were going to ask me about shame, but I didn't know the context of what the interview was going to be. So it was very unscripted, which was great because some of the questions were difficult in the sense that I really had to think, which... was great because for me personally, I wouldn't have probably even thought about it. And I will share too that for the longest time, I had always thought that like my eating disorder kind of emerged in 2015. But some of your questions that you had asked me had like triggered like memories of like high school things that I have explained in my first episode where I remember just having bad body image and like some like skipping breakfast sometimes in high school and I had never thought about that before I don't know if like my brain like blocked it out but there was a question you asked me and that I was like oh no it was 2013 it was in high school mixture of feelings that I was left with after that. But I was happy I did it. And I am grateful for the research that you're doing, you and your colleagues. What's the timeline of like, I mean, I've never done formal research in your context. So like, what's the timeline of, obviously you have to get the information, analyze it. Yeah, so actually I'm working on a rather quick time of thing, relatively speaking. There's a conference we hope to have the paper ready by in September. So I'll be doing, I'll just be burrowing, yeah, burrowing myself in the research in August while still trying to conduct interviews, of course. And then during that just will be writing what I can. Nothing conclusive. Not that there will be a conclusion. We'll come to know that towards the end when we have enough data to conduct the analyses. We need to decide that. But nothing conclusive. Nothing final, I guess. And then the hope is that it'll be submitted to the journal. for publication by November. And then there's the wonderful dance in academia of receiving edits from the journal. And then you have to do revisions and send them new copies. And then it's back and forth for a few months. So publication, we could be looking at the spring of 2026. People wanted to, how do they... go about saying, hey, I want to participate? They're welcome to just shoot me an email. That's one way. You don't need to at all speak about your experience in the email or try to There's by no means an application to it. We're not looking for certain criteria. Just if you're willing to share your story, just shoot me an email and we'll find a time to chat. I'll put the email in the show notes. And I also want to say, just if anyone does want to participate, it is anonymous, but my interview is a little different just because we decided to use it on the podcast. So I do want to make it clear that there's no pressure and no one will know you participated. And just like I said to you, they would receive an information in form of consent and agreement. And just based off of that, I mean, emailing me is not to say that you definitely will be a part of the study. It could just be that you're curious and you'd like to receive that. And I'm happy to send it forward. Well, I'm curious to know what the findings are. So maybe I'll have to have you back on here next year once the study is published. That'd be wonderful. Yeah. Okay. Well, it was very nice. Thank you for reaching out to me a month or so ago. And I'm very Very glad that I did it and very, very glad that you came on here. So thank you for your time. I know you're on vacation, so I appreciate it. Thank you, Kate. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Bite by Bite. I'm so grateful to be able to share this space with you and I hope today's conversation brought you some insight, comfort, or maybe even a sense of community. Remember, no matter what you're healing from, healing isn't perfect and every step you take does matter. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with someone who might need it, leaving a review or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. And if you want to connect more, you can find me on Instagram at Bite by Bite Recovery. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Your stories are just to say hi. Until next time, let's keep taking life by bite. See you later.