182: She became naturally thin and got off her GLP1: Allison’s Heart Led Eating transformation

Ashlyn Burnett (0:00)

You can become naturally thin without taking Glp-1s, and even if you have a history of taking them in the past, you can come off of them and learn how to do it the naturally thin way instead of the forcefully thin way, which, newsflash, is even better, because not only will you land in a body that feels good to you and not have food noise and not feel out of control with food, but you also will end up growing your nervous system capacity and expanding your life in so many other ways as well. And my client, Allison, experienced this very thing, and she is sharing her full story with you here today. I know so many of you are going to resonate and grow from the wisdom that she has to share and little tidbits of advice she even has for current Heart Led Eating students. So if you're in HLE right now, Allison's story is going to impact you as well. I'm Ashlyn. I'm the host of Heart Led Wellness, the creator of Heart Led Eating. I'm so grateful to be here with you once again. The link to Heart Led Eating is in the show notes as always. And without further ado, let's dive into this conversation.

Beautiful Allison, I am so excited to be sitting here with you and chatting with you. I know you're an HLE alumni now, so we have lots to talk about. But I just want to say thank you for being willing to come on the show and share your story.

Allison (1:28)

Of course. Thank you so much for having me, I'm very excited.

Ashlyn Burnett (1:32)

Absolutely. So take us back. Where did your issues with food, your body, like, tell me how this all started for you. Go into as much detail as you need to.

Allison (1:42)

Literally, when I was born, I didn't have a blood glucose that would register on a monitor. And it was a life-threatening situation, I was told. And they immediately fed me glucose by bottle. And I think that was like the beginning of my mom policing my nutrition, because that was such a scary experience. So it's like a lifelong thing.

My mom was always obese and was always on the newest diet or pill or whatever. And she, the rhetoric that we were fed, like me and my sister was that everybody in our family, women wise, is just is overweight. And so like if you want to be different, you have to keep it in check. Like you have to keep it in check. You have to be vigilant. And you have to weigh every day, every morning, you know, on an empty bladder.

It was the only way to keep it in check. Like you have to weigh no matter what, even if you don't want to. And she would have me weigh for her, like anytime it looked like I gained maybe a pound or two. And I was 12 when she, in a very public way, in a dressing room told me that I should be in a smaller gene size. And that was the first time I started feeling like, oh, maybe I need to change something about myself. Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe skinnier.

Yeah, and I was sophomore when I got invited to prom and I immediately was like, oh my God, I need to lose 20 pounds. And so she put me on an 800 calorie diet of frozen fruit and yogurt. And it was like still frozen when I was eating it. So I had to eat really slow and it worked, obviously, but I was starving.

But, you know, I learned how to count calories and read labels and I got lots of attention mostly from other girls in school who were like, teach me your secret and people were like looking up to me and I was like giving advice that was not good and but that just fueled the obsession and like the disordered eating, you know? And college was kind of rough because I didn't know how to cook. I had also only ate prepackaged diet foods that I knew the calories to, and I was obsessed with working out sometimes multiple times a day. So just in this like vicious cycle of severely restricting in every way imaginable and drinking too much at parties and binge eating all the time, and purging and over-exercising to compensate for all my mistakes.

And I knew it was disordered, but I like felt so trapped within it that I didn't, and I didn't know of another way to manage my weight. And so I just kept doing it even though I was thin. And so I went and saw a counselor who told me I had EDNOS, which is symptoms of both anorexia and bulimia. And the counselor was not very helpful. I saw her twice.