Find peace with bodies and food

The Intuitive Psychology academy delivers online training and therapy, helping clients repair their relationship with their bodies and food, focusing particularly on disordered eating behaviours such as dieting and the pressures around restrictive and harmful concepts of beauty. 'We place eating and beauty in the context of issues such as sexism, capitalism, racism, and classism. The language of individual blame doesn't apply; understanding wider systems of oppression does. It's a social justice issue.'

I asked Sara how she got interested in the area. 'I was frequently on and off diets to "manage" my weight. I experienced the impact this had on my mental and physical health, often feeling fatigued, irritable, anxious, and hungry when dieting. I had been going to see a therapist for some years and began to explore the impact of dieting on my overall sense of self. I asked my therapist why I felt I should be trying to lose weight or continuously following beauty and exercise regimes. I was keen to know if this was "normal." My therapist answered, "I don't know if it's normal, but I do know it's become normalised in a society that ties worth to appearance and weight." 

My therapist suggested that I read Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach and that was like a door opening. I was finally able to put words to those nagging feelings. Dieting wasn't about my "health"… I knew this because I always felt physically and mentally worse when dieting… but instead about obedience, fatphobia and issues such as sexism.'

Sara says Naomi Wolf's book The Beauty Myth also influenced her thinking. 'One of her quotes sums up the subliminal intent that kept me stuck in the dieting cycle for years: "A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one."

Eager to learn more about the topic, Sara trained to become a certified intuitive eating practitioner in 2020. 'Simply put, intuitive eating is a framework that promotes attunement to your internal hunger and fullness cues. This might seem blindingly obvious but years of following external food rules, set by dieting companies, means we often learn to detach from what our bodies actually want and need. Dieting has become a common method used by society to control our eating and how we look. Using ten guiding principles, the intuitive eating framework aims to support individuals to find peace with their bodies and food.'

'People are literally dying to be thin'

Sara's therapeutic approach integrates psychological principles with the intuitive eating framework. 'I always start with identifying a client's existing unique beliefs and conditioning rather than immediately applying new learning to these old wounds. Using a relational psychodynamic lens, I seek to understand an individual's relationships with their primary caregivers and how these have contributed to their relationship with food and their body. 

If I am working with an individual who identifies as female, then I will be curious to know, for example, what her mother's relationship with her own body and food is like and was like growing up. This is not intended to attribute blame towards parents. These deeper and more personal explorations promote clarity in identifying key contributors to an individual's own body image dissatisfaction and relationship with food. 

If trauma is identified as a key contributor to their situation, alongside processing the trauma I explore their choice to use food and their body to bear and express their pain. This method of coping gives eating disorders the highest mortality rate out of all psychiatric disorders. People are literally dying to be thin.'

Sara's therapeutic method moves on to an educational stage; providing the individual with psychoeducation in order to place their personal systems within wider oppressive societal systems of power. 'Understanding Body Mass Index (BMI) is an example. It's very widely used as a scientific term in health systems, government policies, media, and dieting programmes. 

How can a simple calculation of height and weight tell us anything about an individual's internal bio-markers of health? The measuring system, originally called the Quetelet Index, was created over 200 years ago by a Belgian astronomer aiming to find the "average man", using only White men as the research group. It was renamed the BMI in 1985 and continues to be used by health systems and insurance companies, arbitrarily applying labels such as obese and morbidly obese to permit or deny healthcare. 

It informs important decisions such as access to fertility treatment. Such decisions are discriminatory.' Society's health message – that losing weight is better for health – is often what keeps people stuck in the dieting trap, Sara says. 'That's ironic as weight cycling, the scientific term for dieting, is the number one predictor of weight gain. The body tries to keep a balance – homeostasis – in many areas, not least energy and hunger. We're also genetically predisposed to have a unique set weight point enabling us to function optimally. 

If you go under this set point the hypothalamus releases hormones to ensure you crave lots of high-density food. At the same time, your metabolic rate slows to reserve the energy and fat you have access to, and this is why you feel fatigued when dieting. As you lose weight the body burns less calories to conserve what you've got, hence weight loss always slows down after the first week or two. Once this survival mechanism wins and you finally stop the restriction (diet), your clever body increases your set weight point in case the restriction happens again in the future. Your body can't distinguish between a genuine famine and dieting.

Overwhelming research shows dieting is not good for your health. It actively increases metabolic and cardiovascular risk factors and affects areas as diverse as blood pressure, cholesterol, and insulin resistance. Low weight is much more of a health concern than higher weight, yet diet culture prioritises losing weight.' 

Sara points out the dieting companies know these facts and use them to inform their business models. The weight loss industry turns over $255 billion a year. 'Government policies have always painted what is seen as "fat" in a negative light. They have spent billions waging wars on "obesity" and are now even weighing children at school. The public shaming of fat keeps the focus of "health" on the individual, without taking into consideration wider social determinants of health.'

'I haven't dieted for five to six years; I feel less pressure and I am much sharper mentally. I don't spend all my time thinking about my weight. But it's important to make clear that I hold a lot of thin privilege recovering from diet culture into a body that, although it falls within the obese category, is still socially acceptable.' 

This was a life-changing event

Sara had moved back to talking about her individual experiences which have hugely influenced her work. 'I didn't do that well at GCSEs and didn't have a career in mind. I got a job in an insurance company and became their youngest manager at the age of 21. In 2005, at the age of 18, I had a life-changing event when I lost a friend in a car accident. I didn't really understand death, didn't know how to process the loss, and particularly the anger that I felt that he had died so young. I was too proud and scared to receive therapy myself. So my idea for coping was to train to become a therapist (I was the epitome of the wounded healer in action)! However, on my first day of my Diploma in Counselling, I was told, "You all have to get personal therapy in order to pass the course," so my clever ploy failed!'

After her diploma, Sara worked in a variety of roles. 'When I was working for the drug and alcohol service one of my clients took his own life. Like the death of my friend, it has impacted everything I do. A lot of my work since then has been on behalf of them, keeping in mind life's fragility and the importance of mental health. This event was the catalyst for my pursuit of further education… I felt I could have done and known more. At the age of 25, I entered higher education and took a degree in psychology at Southampton Solent. 

Contextualising the academic experience really helped me, even in areas I was nervous about, such as statistics; I had found my home. I won a scholarship for my Clinical MSc at the University of Southampton; I couldn't have afforded to self-fund. Throughout my education, alongside years of therapy, I had lots of paid jobs ranging from child protection, neuro-rehabilitation and work on student well-being and staff therapy. After my MSc, I got a loan for my doctorate in counselling psychology which I studied at The University of the West of England – an amazing training programme where self-awareness and personal development are considered key factors in learning how to sit and work with client's distress.'
 
The lockdown gave birth to the idea of the Intuitive Psychology Academy. 'Obviously, Covid had hugely negative consequences on many people, but it did give us space to think and feel about how we are spending our one wild and precious life. My experience in the NHS of dealing with as many as seven clients a day impacted my mental health, and the need, to pathologise clients in order to secure treatment for them convinced me that the NHS wasn't where my skills were most suited. Hence the birth of the academy.'

And outside work? 'Wholeheartedly connecting with my family and close friends is essential for me and my mental health. We are fortunate to live a few minutes from the beach and have a family beach hut where we spend a lot of time drinking tea, eating good food and collecting sea glass.'

To find out more about the academy visit The Intuitive Psychology Academy or email Sara on [email protected]