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Parent coach Oona Hanson joins us to discuss how going to a physical therapist for back pain led her down a wellness-culture rabbit hole, why dietary restrictions to “fight inflammation” just ended up harming her relationship with food and her body, how she got the dubious diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue,” and more. Behind the paywall, we get into how she helped her child heal from an eating disorder (and how that process changed the course of her career), how parents can help their kids navigate pressures from diet and wellness culture, why smart and science-minded people can still fall for wellness misinformation, her experience with perimenopause and wellness culture, and more.
Oona Hanson is a nationally recognized parent coach who supports families navigating diet culture and eating disorders. She is passionate about helping parents raise kids who have a healthy relationship with food and their body. A regular contributor to CNN, Oona has been featured widely, including on Good Morning America, The Washington Post, USA Today, US News & World Report, People, and Parents Magazine. Oona holds a Master's Degree in Educational Psychology and a Master's Degree in English. She writes the Parenting Without Diet Culture newsletter and will publish her first book in 2026 with Cambridge University Press. She is a mother of two and lives in Los Angeles. Find her at oonahanson.substack.com.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Oona’s piece about “adrenal fatigue”
Oona’s website
Oona’s Substack, Parenting Without Diet Culture
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Here's my conversation with Oona Hanson. I'm excited to talk with you about your experience with wellness culture and particularly being mislabeled with a dubious diagnosis of adrenal fatigue and what that did to your relationship with food and your body. But first, I'd love to hear a bit about your history with diet and wellness culture up to that point. How much did they influence you growing up in childhood or early adulthood?
Oona Hanson: I was thinking about how in many ways I was protected from a lot of diet and wellness culture as a pretty young kid being in a smaller body, and there just wasn't a lot of diet talk in my home. But in the teen years, I definitely, like a lot of my peers, struggled with body image and disordered eating. And I really vowed when I became a parent, which is something I always wanted to do, that I was going to do things differently. And at the same time, I was really vulnerable to a lot of the wellness messages out there. So even thinking about becoming a parent for the first time only a few years after the retracted Lancet article about vaccines, I started to have these questions about what kind of parenting I would do, even in terms of how I wanted to have childbirth. I had this vision that. It was really important to me to have a natural childbirth. My husband and I went to weekly intensive classes.
I held so tightly to this idea that if I did everything right, if I followed someone's rules about how to do things the right way and especially the natural way, that I would be guaranteed a particular outcome. And when that didn't end up panning out, my birth plan did not go as planned.
Christy Harrison: Same.
Oona Hanson: I feel like that should have been my wake up call, that, hey, maybe you can't control everything about your state of health or medical outcomes, things like that. In some ways, I almost doubled down on myself, "I'm going to make my own baby food." It all made sense to me. It felt right to me. And yet again and again, the reality of life, the reality of parenting kept butting up against these idealized ideas of what kind of wellbeing or wellness for our family would look like.
Christy Harrison: Do you feel like that desire to parent "naturally" and do things by the book that wellness culture dictates, do you think that's a product of your value system in some way or was at the time or the cultural milieu that you were in? For me, it was part of this ethos and value system that I was a part of and this cultural milieu and group that I was around and in. So I'm curious if any of that was at play for you in your decision to do natural childbirth and make your own baby food and all that stuff.
Oona Hanson: Yeah, I think there must have been people in my environment that reinforced some of these ideas. I definitely can think of one friend in particular who I probably looked up to. She didn't just have natural childbirth, she had home birth. And it worked out great for her and her family. What's interesting is that I was pre-med in undergrad and I have lots of friends who are doctors. And I've never thought of myself as anti-western medicine or anything like that, but somehow I thought I was bringing in the best of both worlds, right? I didn't want to have a birth at home. I knew I was going to have a birth in a hospital. But I wanted to do itthis one specific way that I had in mind that would be the best way or the better way.
And looking back, I think a lot of it really comes back to perfectionistic tendencies. I don't do gymnastics, but if I did gymnastics, I would have gone for the Simone Biles vault, right? Like, let me go for the highest level of difficulty and see if I can get there. And I think all of the wellness culture messages really were appealing to that. Like, let's raise the bar on what a person, especially a woman, especially a mother, might have to do. I don't know what gold stars I thought were coming at the end, but when I think about it, it tapped into maybe my temperament more than my milieu. Although of course, living in Los Angeles, it is always around me, even if I'm not picking it up directly.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious, you wrote that you started really down this particular wellness culture rabbit hole of thinking you had adrenal fatigue and going hard on wellness diets and stuff by going to a physical therapist for back pain. Can you talk about that experience a little bit?
Oona Hanson: I was having that thing where you're throwing out your back. I don't even know if that's a technical term, but I think anyone who's had the experience knows what I'm talking about. Well, I kept throwing out my back, even doing things like brushing my teeth or I wasn't doing anything super strenuous and it would happen. And it was very painful and very scary and made it hard to take care of my family and take care of myself. And I can't remember how I found this person, but someone I trusted recommended this particular physical therapist. And I actually found her really helpful.
She gave me so many great exercises and stretches, even helped me realize things about my gait and posture that were carryovers from pregnancy where I hadn't gotten back into my normal rhythm of how I sat and walked and stood up. And those were really, really helpful. So I had developed this level of trust. And for anyone who's had a physical therapist work on your piriformis muscle you're pretty vulnerable. To keep doing that, you have to really trust this person. And I really valued her input.
And she said I wonder if part of this is coming from inflammation. And I had never really even thought about that concept. I knew that certain medications were anti-inflammatory, like Advil or things like that. I hadn't really heard the idea of systemic inflammation before. But I trusted her. I was open to her suggestions. And she said, I know this woman. This is what she does. She'd be great for you. And so, the good A student I've always been, I went and contacted her, booked the package of sessions. And I was really, really hopeful that this was gonna be a game changer for me.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, the PT recommended this health coach for inflammation. What did that coach tell you to do?
Oona Hanson: So the first step was submitting saliva samples to a lab. And then there was this elaborate report that came back to her and to me, and it confirmed what she already said she thought she was thinking was going on with me. And she "diagnosed" me with adrenal fatigue. And I understood some of the science of how our hormone system works, but I didn't know enough to catch some red flags about how some of this didn't quite add up. So at the time, I was buying it. It felt like it made sense.
From that, she went right into recommending pretty extreme dietary restrictions. And it didn't sound easy, it didn't sound fun, but I was like, okay, this is like that Simone Biles vault, I can do this high degree of difficulty. I'm very disciplined. I'm very organized. I can do this. And then when I couldn't, it just was this letdown, that I was failing at this protocol that she was giving me. And week after week, I just started feeling worse and worse. Not only physically, but just feeling worse about myself and my ability to take care of myself. And the irony that here I am paying so much money for this private personalized health coach. I was really going in the wrong direction.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's so, so painful. And I think so many of us can relate. You have these symptoms and whatever is going on that's not really being addressed by other methods and then someone comes along claiming to know what's up and having a scientific sounding explanation for it. And it is hard when you're not a specialist in something to pick up on those red flags of this person doesn't quite get it or have the whole story or whatever. And if they're using words that you are familiar with from like pre-med, for example, you might be like, okay, this person seems to know what she's talking about. I'm curious how it made you feel to have that diagnosis of "adrenal fatigue." And also, do you know anything about the lab that she sent the samples to and what it actually was?
Oona Hanson: I probably still have it in a file somewhere. That would be an interesting thing to go dig up. I think at first it felt really validating. It's like, yeah, I am really tired. Yeah, I have been under a lot of stress. Having someone just acknowledge that, that's probably what felt the best was hearing someone say to me, you have too much on your plate. You are overwhelmed.
The idea of burning out your adrenal glands... but the idea of burnout, that resonated, right? It's like, okay, but there's a biological thing going on that I can fix, rather than thinking about what are the stressors in my life and could I find ways to address those, instead going right to trying to, so-called, solve this problem through food without ever realizing that this is going to add a lot more stress. Looking back, how did I get so bamboozled by this? But at the time it made sense.
Christy Harrison: Food seems so benign, right? At first when you think about it and you're not thinking about the side effects or the possibilities. Okay, well, I don't have to do any medication or expensive scans or whatever. It's just like what I buy at the grocery store and I can change it and I have this power to fix things through food. It feels empowering. It definitely felt empowering to me to think I have the tools at my disposal to make these changes and I don't need anyone else, other than the people to tell me what the diet is. But I can actually carry this out myself.
Oona Hanson: Yeah. And living in Los Angeles, the upside is I could walk to a Trader Joe's and I had a Whole Foods and I could access these foods that were being, so-called, prescribed to me. So, yeah, it felt like it should have been really doable.
Christy Harrison: And what was the reality of that? What was she actually having you eat? Cause some of the stuff you wrote about, I was just like, oh, my God, I cannot imagine.
Oona Hanson: Well, gluten free was the first thing. And that was the peak of gluten free mania. Where restaurants, everyone was convinced that they had this gluten sensitivity. So that was the first thing to cut out. And then things like added sugars, caffeine. Oh, that was a really brutal one for me. So the caffeine, alcohol, kind of made sense. And I now I can't remember if dairy free also came on the scene. She said I'll send you recipes to make it easier. And there was this bean and cabbage stew. She was like, you make a big batch and have it for breakfast and that was the beginning of like, this seems a little weird.
Some of these recipes, I still have a few of them that I hold onto just to remind myself of those days. But it was not easy. But I still wanted to follow the rules. I had two little kids working part time from home, husband working a lot outside the home. And to follow the rules, I just did the easiest things that I could do, what was accessible. Oh, Trader Joe's sells gluten free JoJo's, like the knockoff Oreos. There are a lot of prepackaged items at Trader Joe's that fit the criteria technically, but probably weren't as nourishing as I really needed to take care of my family and myself.
So it really sent me down a rabbit hole of binging on some of these snack foods or things, which, I'm all for snacks. I'm not anti-processed foods or anything. But at the time, it just really felt like that was all I could do to follow the rules. And it wasn't really helping me feel nourished. I was grumpy all the time. I was feeling like there were things I couldn't eat that I wanted to eat. Meanwhile, I'm making food for my two kids. It was just a recipe for stress and undereating, followed by probably some overeating or binge eating that just made me feel like I was a mess around food but I had created this problem. At least that's the way I started to see it by the end.
Christy Harrison: It's good that you were able to see that. I feel like for so many of us, I know for myself, when I was in it, I didn't see the iatrogenic effects of restrictive eating until very late in the game, until, really I was mostly recovered. And at the time, it was just like, well, I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to be doing. Why am I so out of control with food? Sort of forgetting about the 20 years or whatever I had spent up until that point, feeling totally fine with food, thankfully, because no one interfered in my relationship with food and I was able to be intuitive about it and never had an issue with it. And that is sheer luck, really, that that happened. But I forgot all of that great history that I had and was just like, oh, I'm destined to be a mess around food. I can't get it together. What is wrong with me? And not seeing the role that the restriction was playing at all.
Oona Hanson: And for me, the fact that my answer to feeling so chaotic around food was going on Weight Watchers. I have so much empathy for my past self because at the time, that somehow made sense, partly because I was gaining weight by trying to follow this restrictive diet. So at the time, I thought that was a real problem to be solved. I think differently about those things now. But at the time, I was like, oh, I've got to get a handle on this. I better have someone else tell me how to eat. It's like, this lady didn't give me the tools that worked for me, but maybe this very well established, trusted brand. And that was right when Oprah became a shareholder and a spokesperson. And it was like, oh, this is going to be great. I thought this was going to solve all my problems.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I mean, it does seem such a trusted brand. And I remember, even when I was in school to become a dietitian, people talking about Weight Watchers in glowing terms like, oh, it's a really solid diet. It's been around for a long time. It's got science behind it and it's framed as this thing that was unassailable and the reality is so different. Before we go there, though, to Weight Watchers, I'm curious to dig into one other aspect of the work with this health coach, which was that she had you track your blood sugar. I think that is so problematic. And of course, we're seeing that so much more now in people without diabetes that they're being encouraged to track their blood sugar, wear continuous glucose monitors.
And I just think it's so harmful to people's relationships with food. First of all, there's no actual evidence based guidelines for what random glucose tests should be for people without diabetes. And diagnosing diabetes is not even done with random glucose test. It's not postprandial glucose. It's fasting glucose. And it's also A1C, which is a measure of glucose control over several months. These random readings of glucose after a meal or just a random time of day don't really tell you anything when you don't have diabetes. And so, I'm just curious what that information kind of did to your relationship with food and your sense of your body's functioning, I guess.
Oona Hanson: Yeah. Oh, I probably skipped over that because it was such a nightmarish part of the experience. Yeah. And this was before the fancy continuous glucose monitors that people can buy now. I was using the little lancet, like pricking my finger and using the test strips that way, which again, this is where it all started. "It's so scientific, sending in your saliva sample. Now I'm testing my blood." It's almost a little bit like biohacking or something, right? It's like, let me really understand what's going on in my body. But it only made eating more stressful and it was very confusing. And I wasn't given a lot of guidance. I was just supposed to keep a journal. The impression was higher numbers were bad and that lower numbers were better.
Christy Harrison: So it was all just relative. It was like, if this one meal seems to raise your glucose more than this other meal, then that first meal is bad because it's raising it more, not having any sort of benchmark or whatever of like, this is all within the normal range.
Oona Hanson: Right. I don't think I was given a range. This was the next level since following the diet that I was being prescribed wasn't, so-called, working. Now we're gonna drill down and see where in what's currently allowed are there some foods that are a little bit more problematic for me. That was the message I got was like, okay, now we're really gonna fine tune. We're gonna figure out what else we need to cut out or what else we need to change. And I was like, okay, I'm going for it.
I really have a vivid memory and I wrote about this in the piece of going to one of our favorite restaurants as a family and really enjoying this meal. And it almost had a cheat day mentality because I was like, I just want to enjoy this. This is not following all the rules, but I'm gonna enjoy this meal. But I was still in the back of my mind worried maybe this is gonna show that I shouldn't have this anymore. I was having that almost last supper kind of thinking around that meal. And sure enough, when I did the finger prick, it was the highest reading I had had.
So it really made me afraid. Am I never going to be able to eat at this restaurant? That's like, at the time was, the one place that everyone enjoyed. It's so hard with young kids. It was like, oh my gosh, the perfect place. And everyone has things they like and there's things we share and it's always this fun outing. And now it felt ruined. It was really heartbreaking and also kind of scary. Like, oh my gosh, have I been hurting myself with this food all this time?
Christy Harrison: Which again, I can totally empathize with feeling that way. And it feels outrageous to me that there was no sense from the health coach of like, this is still within the normal range and you don't need to worry and maybe we should test your A1C if anything. If she was really concerned about anything with blood sugar rather than just this random reading after a meal.
Oona Hanson: Right. If only I knew then what I know now.
Christy Harrison: And if only she knew then what she ought to have known too. Yeah. And then you wrote about this interesting fallout from that. That you checked after going to that restaurant again and having a really restrictive meal and then the ways that your blood sugar seemed to fluctuate in response to different things was not what you would have expected.
Oona Hanson: Yeah, it was really all over the place because again, at the time I was being told it was all about food, that was the number one thing or how you're combining foods. I think the real eye opener for me was New Year's Eve when we had our traditional hors d'oeuvre dinner as a family. We had such a good time. We were wearing our silly hats. We had Ina Garten's onion dip. We had all our favorite things and I even had a couple of cocktails. We were celebrating New Year's Eve.
And I was like, oh, it'd be kind of funny to test my blood sugar now. And I was almost kind of laughing, like, what is it going to be? And it was lower than all these other meals that were really restrictive. By next session with the health coach, I said, what's up with this? Let me tell you what I ate and then what my blood sugar reading was. She was like, oh, well, you were relaxed and having a good time. And I mean, I can laugh now, but at the time, that was the beginning of thinking maybe there's something about this attempt to over control or restrict food or be afraid of food that is actually doing way more harm than good.
So I try to hold onto that feeling of enjoying food and the company of people you love, it's so nourishing and the idea that, obviously, unless you have diabetes and you have to check your blood sugar, that your body can handle it and it actually could be really good for your body.
Christy Harrison: That's so important to know. And I'm glad that you were able to glean that from that experience. How did you finally stop working with that health coach?
Oona Hanson: I had prepaid for a package of sessions and after that New Year's Eve light bulb moment, and I was asking a lot of questions, her whole vibe shifted, right? And she was like, well, you're really having a hard time following these rules and because you're having such a hard time, I almost wonder if you have disordered eating or an eating disorder. And I remember thinking, if you were worried about clients having disordered eating or eating disorders, you should have evaluated. That's something it seems like you should evaluate someone for before you prescribe restrictive diets. And I was like, I don't think I do. If anything, it's this that we're doing that's creating this disordered relationship with food and how I feel so chaotic and I feel worried about eating. These are the things you taught me to do.
And so that was like, okay, I'm not renewing. I'm not going to go to package number two and upgrade or whatever it was called. I knew I was doing the right thing by stopping this program, but it wasn't easy to then to just go right back to my normal way of eating. This disruption I couldn't unhear or unlearn some of the things. I still had some of that nagging suspicion that certain things maybe were problematic. So that was the tough piece, that it wasn't like I could say, okay, I'm done with you and wash my hands of it. Some of that really stuck with me.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I feel like that's my experience and the experience of so many clients and people I've spoken to as well is there's just this residue of each diet or each orthorexic protocol or whatever that sticks around in your mind and those rules and those voices judging you for eating particular things are still there. And then even if you go onto a new diet, there's that residue that still sticks around. And so maybe you're restricting certain things within the new diet, even if it doesn't have the same protocol or restrictions or whatever and so you're piling on the restrictions. I'm curious if that was your experience when you went to Weight Watchers and how that all played out.
Oona Hanson: Yeah. Those layers, like sediment, of these different diets. Some of it did overlap because some of her messages about carbohydrates kind of match some of the same Weight Watchers values, like the way the point system worked, there was some overlap. So even though I thought I was kind of getting this refresh to retrain myself to get into a healthier pattern, in many ways, it really just doubled down on a lot of the same fears or rules and obviously reinforcing a lot of fear of weight gain. This was pre-Noom, right? This was not like OG Weight Watchers. This was the app.
Again, it felt very scientific in terms of how you were putting things in your app. I thought it was going to be my little buddy to get back on track to my normal. And of course, in the back of my mind, I'm also thinking, I want to lose the weight that I gained on this health coaching protocol. So it was a really unpleasant time.
Christy Harrison: And what did that do to your relationship with food and your body to be on Weight Watchers? Do you feel like it compounded things or took them in a new direction?
Oona Hanson: How could it not, right? The fact that you're seeing a little graph of your weight. I think we even bought the Weight Watchers branded scale. My husband also did it for a little bit with me, I think to be supportive, and yeah, that graph of your weight and the way that you would feel like the graph was going in the wrong direction. And again, the amount of food it was saying that I should eat to reach my supposed goal, looking back, knowing what I know now, it was so low. I mean, it's like toddler level nutrition for a grown woman with two kids. And so it really was just reinforcing restriction, reinforcing my own internalized weight stigma.
And it also, I think, really encouraged some of that cheat day or binge mentality. Because the idea of saving up your points, right? It was just like people restricting all day before going to a party or something. It was that same restrict binge cycle that I had experienced a little bit on this health protocol as well. Or even in disordered eating, like before prom type stuff that I might have experienced as an adolescent. It just reinforced all those things.
Christy Harrison: And did you notice that at the time and think this is not actually taking me to the peaceful relationship with food that I want or did it take a while to break out of that?
Oona Hanson: It took a while. Again, I used to feel a lot of shame about having succumbed to all these things, but I have compassion for other people so easily, but for myself, it's like, oh, how could I have fallen for this? It took me a while. Also, as a Mom trying to have a healthy food culture for my kids, I remember cutting the labels off of the recipes I had printed out. I didn't want the kids to see the words Weight Watchers on these recipes. So I knew that I was straddling the fence of wanting my kids to feel relaxed around food and feel good about their bodies. But I'm over here doing this other thing, but I'm gonna try to keep it a secret. So that was that, I don't know, that cognitive dissonance or that internal tension where it wasn't feeling right to me.
And it ultimately came to a head when one of my kids developed an eating disorder and so all my best laid plans of making this healthy food culture in my home. Cause I had a very simplistic idea of what that would involve. But I thought I had it all figured out. That was really my harsh wake up call that there cannot be any food restriction happening in a home where food restriction is threatening my kid's life. It was a no brainer that something big had to change.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I'm sad for you that in your family that it had to come to that. But also, sometimes I feel like that happens for people. It takes something major like that to shake them out of the way the diet culture and wellness culture condition us to relate to food and our bodies. It's just so easy to get sucked into that and to feel like you have to keep restricting in some way and that there's good and bad foods and that you need to always be trying to lose weight. And it's hard to see the flaws in that until you are confronted sometimes with an eating disorder or something where it's very clear the negative impacts of that kind of thinking.
Oona Hanson: Yeah. And I want to be really honest and share that it wasn't as if I had this lightning bolt moment where, okay, I'm done with all restrictive thoughts about food or negative thoughts about my body. It was still hard. Like the unlearning, even though this was literally life and death, it was still hard. And I think that's what helps me have empathy for people who are having a hard time breaking out of diet culture or wellness culture because even in an extreme situation like we were in, it was still hard.
And as I shared with you before, it was things like your Food Psych podcast that really were helping me retrain my thinking and relearn and unlearn some of the things from diet culture because I needed support. This is really hard to do on your own and you're also caring for a kid who needs a lot of support. So for anyone listening who's going through something like that, I just send so much compassion and empathy because it is really, really hard.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, absolutely. I'm just curious what you did to help your kid heal that worked for you. I know it's different probably for different families but I'm curious what approach maybe was the most helpful for you?
Oona Hanson: Yeah, we tried everything. We followed doctor's orders. We went up all the levels of care, really did the traditional or conventional approaches to treatment and it wasn't working. So someone had said maybe it's time to try family based treatment, FBT, or some folks in the UK might know it as Maudsley method. And we had been discouraged from doing this early on. We had heard people with a lot of letters after their name telling us that FBT was fringe, that there are horror stories that people shared and not to go that route but we had tried everything else. So we're like, well, we might as well give this a try.
And we took the whole family to San Diego for their one week intensive, almost like a boot camp, for learning about FBT. And that was a game changer and that saved my kid's life and I think it saved our family because it's what actually got my kid well. It helped us learn how we could be supportive. I think a lot of parents get the message of like, okay, back off, don't be the food police, let the professionals handle this. And maybe parents are part of the problem. So, there's this suspicion around parents when it comes to eating disorders. And you feel that as a parent, especially as a mom. We never looked back and really laid the groundwork for a really robust recovery. So I'm so grateful for that.
And that's what really quickly led me to shift my parent education work to body image and eating disorders. Because I had a little bit of the zealotry of the newly converted. But I will say, someone very early on had told me, oh, go to San Diego, do FBT, drop Everything, fire everybody. And that was actually a big turnoff. They came on so strong and it made me feel like I was doing everything wrong. It was almost like some of the stuff I'd been through before where I wasn't doing things, so-called, the right way.
I did learn not to come on too strong if people were asking me for help with their kid. I would try to understand their concerns or their questions about FBT. I would never say that one size fits all, that FBT is right for every family. I don't think there is one size fits all when it comes to recovery. But I think a lot more parents and families could get help if they really understood what FBT is or can be in the hands of a really thoughtful provider or at a treatment center that focuses on that approach and gives a more personalized approach, not just maybe a by the book, manualized delivery of the treatment.
Christy Harrison: What were some of the key differences that you found in the version of FBT that you practiced versus what you had imagined or thought that it would be?
Oona Hanson: Boy, that's a really good question. The message we got was that if parents are the so-called food police, that if parents are paying attention to what the child is eating, that you're going to make the eating disorder worse. I think that feels right. The messages you hear about what I would tell a parent who wants to try to lower the risk for an eating disorder would be not to comment on what your kid is eating, but when there's actually an eating disorder already happening, to ignore what the child is eating is probably not going to end well. So there's some counterintuitive things about FBT.
Also, I was told with FBT, you're taking away your teenager's autonomy and that is going to be just horrible for their mental health. But not realizing that when someone is in the throes of an eating disorder, they don't have autonomy. They're being controlled by the eating disorder and they really need your help. The other piece was being told that it would ruin my relationship with my kid forever, that some kids never speak to their parents again after doing FBT. So there's a lot of scary messages you're getting about rather than helping that this could actually break your family apart. That's horrifying and I don't doubt people who've had those experiences. I trust people's lived experience in their assessment of what happened. But we were lucky enough to get really good support and training and work with a really wonderful provider.
I used to work at an eating disorder treatment program that focused on FBT for adolescents and just seeing how many incredible therapists and dietitians and medical providers who really gave this supportive approach to FBT, it's not gonna feel good, but that helped everyone feel really confident in the process and getting support during those bumps in the road.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's great. It's really helpful to hear. I've known clients and people I've worked with who've had success with FBT and others who've found it really hard and not helpful, and the ones that have not had a good experience with it, I feel like it's often from the client's perspective, not the parents perspective. When I was working with clients who were then adults and reflecting back on their own FBT experiences, saying that they felt they experienced some hypocrisy from their parents. Sort of, like, double standard. The client, the kid's meal was being policed, but the parent was able to do disordered things that weren't being called out or that wasn't being acknowledged.
I think that's the theme in the few people that I'm thinking of who had that experience. And so I wonder if part of what made FBT helpful and effective for your family was that you were starting to reflect on those things for yourself and make peace with food for yourself and ready to give up the dieting and the disordered eating as opposed to staying locked into that. And that's not to blame any parent who does that and has FBT not work, because everybody has their own journey, and parents struggle with eating disorders and disordered eating as well, and it's not an easy fix. So I'm sure, like you said, you don't just flip a switch and it's all fine. But I wonder if there's a certain level of readiness that may have helped for you.
Oona Hanson: Absolutely. I mean, I think learning about things like health at every size and the concept of all foods fit and just getting support to realize that if we're afraid of what the eating disorder is afraid of, that's cruel, right? If you're trying to help someone recover from, in this case it was anorexia, we need to be on the same team here, right? It's not parent versus kid, it's kid and parent versus this eating disorder and diet culture because obviously that does complicate recovery. So it did mean bringing back foods into our home that we hadn't had for a long time. No diet sodas. I've kind of reclaimed Diet Coke as a once in a while thing. At the time, anything that even had a whiff of diet food or diet anything, we no longer had that. And we really tried to focus on making food delicious and abundant and the fact that we weren't afraid of the necessary weight gain for recovery, I think that can really hold families back.
Because we live in such an anti-fat society, it makes sense that people are afraid of letting their kid's body recover in the way it needs to. So we were really lucky that we had the therapist that was supporting us was very well versed in all of this and was very supportive and helped us navigate moments where we had questions, even the pediatrician, was like, mmm, I don't know about this weight range. We had to come up against some weight stigma in the process, which I think a lot of families do. So yeah, I do feel like the treatment with the team we had and having my husband and I on the same, we were just so supportive of each other. We were all on the same page. It really made a difference.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's huge. Thank you for sharing that. And one question I have for you now that you are a parent educator on eating disorders and body image is I would love to hear some of your advice to other parents for navigating this world that we live in, this diet culture. Because I think as much as parents might try to create an environment of food and body acceptance at home, kids are going to go out in the world and they're going to encounter weight stigma and they're going to encounter diet messages and wellness culture messages from their doctors, their schools which teach nutrition lessons, wellness TikTok and all these different places. As a parent, how can you prevent eating disorders or disordered eating from taking root when kids are exposed to all these things?
Oona Hanson: It's really hard. So, again, I send so much compassion to families. At the same time, I do feel really strongly that having a safe haven at home is a powerful thing
