Empathetic, well-educated healing expert
Brave explorer of the human soul
Marriage and Family Therapist
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Eating Coach
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Marriage and Family Therapist • Eating Coach •
About Sheira Kahn
Currently in private practice, I teach seminars on eating disorders to clinicians, clients and students at schools, treatment centers, and doctors’ offices. While practicing a spiritual discipline, I learned an effective method for disengaging from the inner critic, which I adapted for people with eating issues - and for couples. Having studied attachment with Sue Johnson, David Mars and David Wallin, I focus treatment of both eating and relationship issues on the healing of attachment wounds.
I had a rough childhood so I took a lot of workshops and classes. Scholarly and lively, I am equally comfortable teaching from a podium as dancing to the radio in the kitchen. I am a member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and published Why OA Doesn’t Work in the organization’s magazine. Eat in Peace is my signature program for recovering from disordered eating.
The story you are about to read became the foundation for my signature recovery program, Eat in Peace.
The Beginning
The year my dad moved out, I went on my first diet, The 9-Day Miracle Diet.
It called for four days of drinking dilute orangeade (no food of any kind) followed by five days of plain chicken breast, plus the orangeade. The diet was in one of the women’s magazines and several moms from the neighborhood had encouraged me to go on it after they got great results. I was not thin, but I could hardly be called overweight. I was 12 years old.
It was grueling, but I followed the diet. At the end, food never tasted so good and I could not. stop. eating. I gained back the weight and more. I was afraid and really sad about what was happening to me and my body. I found out everything I could about diets and nutrition. But nothing I read could help me stop bingeing.
Bingeing & Purging
When I was 15, I got the basic Weight Watchers book. I was able to follow it and stop overeating. I also started running. I lost weight and was extremely relieved. One night, after following Weight Watchers perfectly for eight months, I caved, eating three powdered donuts filled with chocolate creme (not cream. creme). I panicked. I had read in a book that you could make yourself throw up by putting your finger down your throat. I did that and instantly felt better.
Every day after that, I resolved to stick to my food plan. I could make it through breakfast and lunch, but I succumbed to a binge by afternoon or evening most days. I was able to keep this a secret by making myself vomit, running 3–5 miles, or both. People thought I was fine because my weight was normal.
I looked everywhere for answers about my strange behavior – even while bingeing. One time during my fourth bowl of Fortified Oat Flakes covered in brown sugar, I saw an ad in the Princeton Packet that showed a lady’s head with a thought balloon next to it saying, “A Diet Starts Here” (meaning, in your head). I knew my problems with eating had something to do with my thoughts, so I was thrilled, thinking the place in the ad could help me. I called the number and a recorded voice said, “A diet starts in your mind. You have to decide you are going to do it, then stick to your plan. We will help you get motivated for SUCCESS!” Well, I had tried that already. No one was more motivated or tried harder than I. All that motivation had gotten me was low self-esteem and my head in the toilet. I hung up, confused and disappointed as ever.
The adults around me had no answers. Partly this was because I had everyone convinced I was well-adjusted. In reality, my pulse was 45, blood pressure was 90 over 60, and I did not get my period - signs of advanced bulimia. Your heart can stop at any time, and I hospitalize someone who comes to my office with those vitals. But the school nurse who took my pulse and BP didn’t talk to the social studies teacher to whom I had confided that I didn’t get my period. When it came to eating disorders, they did not know what to look for in those days, and I would have lied about my eating anyway. The bulimia continued through my last year of high school and into my first year of college.
The Inner Critic
By sophomore year, the purging stopped. I wasn’t killing my body anymore, but the huge critic that had fueled my eating behaviors continued to kill my soul for years. Shame, obsession and anxiety filled my mind and heart so it was hard to do the tasks of daily life, like clothe myself and start a career. I had one pair of pants and two shirts, and I waited tables. I still focused on changing my body and obsessed over every bite of food. In an effort to gain some control and peace of mind, I tried to restrict what I ate, but the only time I experienced actual relief was while eating.
I later came to see this unbearable internal atmosphere as the core of my eating disorder, and it persisted long after the bulimia. [It was a permanent state of being mortified]. This is also the central experience of my clients, who have tried diets and gotten frustrated, asking the same questions I did: Why can’t I control myself? Why is it so hard for me to lose weight and keep it off? Why am I such a failure? I was soon to find tools that addressed my internal angst and tension.
Finding the Answers
When I turned 25, I found three practices that finally brought answers.
Ridhwan School
The first was work on the inner critic in the Ridhwan School. This work helped me manage that voice that always had me running and dissatisfied with myself, that I had tried to manage by improving my eating and losing weight. In the Ridhwan school, there was a zero-tolerance policy of self-critical activity; we were taught to separate from the critic whenever it showed up. This meant I was confronting the critic at least once an hour (and usually more). My friends in Ridhwan were doing the same. At a party, I might say, “Where is Debbie?” “Oh, she’s in the bathroom disengaging from her critic.” Since my critic spoke mostly about my body and what I was eating, the practice of disengagement reduced those eating-disorder thoughts.
Somewhere into year four of repeatedly disengaging from the inner critic, I noticed that a month went by in which I had no obsession about food, no out-of-control eating, and no recrimination about my body. Each micro-moment of facing the critic had been like so many pinholes in a balloon. Now the air had started to go out of my eating disorder.
The second practice I found was also in Ridhwan. We were directed to feel what was happening inside ourselves. One night at home, I had an unpleasant emotion. I opened the refrigerator to find something to eat. Something stopped me. It was a feeling in my heart, a preference - almost an affection - for being with what was happening inside instead of eating. I went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and let the feeling come. I wasn’t scared because I knew I could talk about it with my teachers the next time we met. It also turned out not to be unpleasant, once I felt it directly. After that, I chose to be with was happening instead of eating because I liked that better.
Thin Within
The third practice was a meditative eating method that showed me, step by step, how to eat normally. It came from Judy Wardell’s book, Thin Within. (It later emerged that Judy Wardell based her teachings on the work of Joy Overstreet.) I found it on an end cap at Cody’s books in Berkeley. Turning the book over, I saw a picture of a very thin woman next to the words, “If you want to hang on to your potato skins, this book is for you.” Thin woman? Potato skins? It was the best of both worlds. I decided then and there to do everything the author said.
The directive was to eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full, and eat what you enjoy in between those two markers. (This is one of the things I now teach in my Eat in Peace curriculum). I couldn’t believe that what I wanted to eat, the day after buying the book and reading the first chapter, was a grilled cheese sandwich. How could this possibly be OK? A grilled cheese had everything forbidden in one sandwich: bread, fat, cheese. Flavor. Following the instructions, I let myself eat and enjoy it. When my stomach felt full, I put the sandwich down. I had eaten about one third of it. I didn’t have mixed feelings about stopping, though, because I knew I could finish the sandwich as soon as I got truly hungry.
I began to do that at every meal. I gained confidence in my ability to remain in control. I started to trust my body, and this subtle feeling of aliveness I felt during meals. (Judy Wardell had articulated the importance of paying attention to and integrating in this feeling that is spiritual in nature, but comes through the body. This would become a keystone in the non-diet mentality and the single change that brought freedom from eating problems). Eating this way calmed me. There was a learning curve of three years, but after that, my eating got easy and stayed easy. To this day, I eat whatever I want, enjoy every bite, remain at or around the same weight, and don’t think about it very much.
Integrating my Body and my Emotional Self
Recent research on the brain shows that new thoughts, actions and experiences actually change the shape of the brain, like a muscle getting sculpted by working out. They call this “brain mapping.” I did not realize it at the time, but the three practices combined to give me a new brain map for eating and relating to my body. They helped me form a whole new identity, one based on self-love instead of self-hatred. Most importantly, they showed me how to integrate a whole sector of my humanity that I was either trying to repress, or had an adversarial relationship with: my body, and my emotional self. That integration was the key to ending my eating, weight, and body-image problems. I want this for you so I have adapted the three practices and blended them with my knowledge of the nervous system and psychology into the Eat In Peace program. This program is the culmination of my story.