Meet Erika

A Broken Relationship…

For years, I felt like my body had let me down. After battling a decade-long eating disorder, insomnia, anxiety, depression, the inability to experience pleasure, chronic fatigue, GI dysfunction, and finally, a parasite, my relationship with my body was in need of a revival. I tried to beat my body into submission through diets and exercise. I desperately wished I could “take my body back” and get a new one—trade it in for something less “broken!”

Eventually, I realized that my body was hurting because my relationship with it was. As registered dietitian Ali Miller said, “You cannot hate your body to heal it!”

Getting to the Root…

When I first began to pursue healing from my eating disorder, I found the available resources sorely lacking. No one on my treatment team was talking about the power of real food as medicine, or offering ancient healing modalities-meditation, breathwork, yoga, sound therapy etc.- for emotional regulation and trauma healing. Instead, I was told, “You’re just afraid of fat! You need to eat more ‘junk food’—donuts, cookies, muffins, and ice cream—to have ‘food freedom.’”

Everyone was busy asking, “Why the eating disorder?” What I needed was for someone to ask me, “Why the pain?”

I knew in my gut, the approach to healing I was given missed something crucial, so I began my own studies of nutrition, brain health, and trauma recovery.

Instead of looking at health as a separate part of my life, I saw for the first time that true healing flows from integration of mind, body, and spirit. I discovered that the root of my eating disorder wasn’t food. Rather, it was a broken relationship with my body and a lack of emotional resources to navigate adversity in childhood.

When I didn’t know what to do with my big emotions as a teen, I turned to food and exercise to calm my inner turmoil. However, food and exercise alone are inadequate to reach a wound stored deep within the body. Real food can be a powerful tool for healing, but not when it is used as a means to numb undealt with psychological pain.

Food: An Agent of Healing…

This new connection between food and emotions led me to a fascinating question.

“If a disordered relationship with food leads to whole-body dis-ease, could a balanced relationship with food facilitate the opposite—healing?”

The idea that food could be an agent of healing drove me to devour books, documentaries, articles, and more in pursuit of a new approach to health. I studied the role food plays in physical healing, the connection between nutrition and mental health, using movement and exercise as therapy instead of self-punishment, and how mindset affects transformation. The discoveries I made were pretty exciting!

Body Partnership…

My research led me to three key aspects that make up what I call the “Body Partnership” approach to healing:

• Embrace My Body As Friend - Caring for my body and listening to it, so that I can identify its unique needs and make whatever lifestyle changes are necessary for improved health. Through learning the language of my body, and “holding space” for my own emotions, I make space for others to experience their own emotional peaks and valleys too. The work of healing my response to my own emotional climate, plays a crucial role in my ability to carry out my purpose in the world, at large. Body/emotional intelligence is inspiring, and births freedom in the hearts of those who come into contact with it.

• Ancestral and Medicinal Eating - Nourishing my body with minimally-processed food. Honoring my body’s feedback in order to give it the specific nutrients that will promote healing through keeping food as close to its original state as possible and recognizing that my body will have unique needs because of my bio-individuality.

• Mitigating Stress Strategies - Providing a sense of inner-safety so that my body has the freedom to flourish. Recognizing and removing lifestyle patterns that send danger signals to my body and cause disease. Incorporating strategies such as meditation, breath work, and time in nature that restore balance and safety.

These three pillars support a balanced mind-body-spirit connection.

Through using my Body-Partnership method and proven resources, my passion is to help others discover their bodies on a deeper level and experience life in a more vibrant and abundant way than ever before.

No matter where you’re at today, hope and healing await you. You and your body can do more than “make peace;” you can become best friends!