by Alexia Vernon, Woodhull Alumna & Faculty

Originally posted to the Catalyst for Action Newsletter on April 20th. Sign up for the newsletter here!

While I speak a lot to values-driven, socially-conscious emerging leaders and professionals, I was particularly blown away a couple of months back by a group I addressed of StartingBloc fellows–young people between the ages of 18 and 30 committed to social innovation. While it’s easy for us to think of sustainability as a value outside of ourselves, (i.e. I value work or policy that is sustainable for our planet), a lot of us don’t see the connectedness between sustainability in the way we show up to the work we are called to do and the work itself. But these StartingBloc fellows “got it.”

Until more of us “get” that in order to “sustain” doing work that is good financially, socially, and environmentally (and I promise, I’ll scale back on the quotations except when they are truly necessary), we need to honor our values, strengths, and enthusiasm, we run the risk of burnout. And when we let ourselves burn the candle at both ends for too long–irrespective of whether we are on the frontlines as community organizers and teachers or in the C-suite inspiring our leaders and managers or funding the kinds of innovative social ventures StartingBloc fellows are proposing–our passion dries up, our creativity diminishes, and we under deliver on our potential to create “sustainable” solutions to the many problems, (I mean possibilities), for us building a more heart-centered, just society.
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by Sunny Sea Gold, Woodhull Alumna

Originally posted to healthygirl.org on April 13th.

Part 3 of the excerpt from my book Food: The Good Girl’s Drug. Enjoy!

Are all binge eaters or emotional overeaters overweight? Not at all. This is a huge misperception that people have about emotional overeaters. I know people who have been reluctant to get help because they figure that if their body size is about right, their problem isn’t “bad” enough to need fixing. “Believing your size is an indication of your mental or physical health is incorrect,” said Dr. Nardozzi. “The extreme ends of eating disorders can lead to sizes that are way too small and too big. But what you really need to look at are your behaviors and your mind-set. Are you obsessing about food and your body? Is your mood affected by what you eat? Are you feeling bad about yourself for eating large amounts of food or are you restrictive with your eating after indulging? That’s a better indicator of whether you have an eating problem than your weight alone.”

Some emotional overeaters are overweight or obese from the time they’re children, but others yo-yo up and down, stay in a pretty normal range, or even become underweight because of things like overexercising or dieting. Kendra said she knows logically that her weight is normal, but she doesn’t feel like it. “I weigh 123 pounds and I’m five six, so technically I’m ‘healthy,’ but I don’t feel healthy,” she told me. “I don’t feel healthy unless I see definition in my abs and weigh 112.” (At 112 pounds, by the way, Kendra would be clinically underweight; just a few pounds from the official definition of anorexic.) Twenty-one-year-old Sarah, on the other hand, said she’s always been on the larger side. “You could say that I am morbidly obese, but I just say that I’m really overweight,” she explained. “I’m only five two and weigh about 260 pounds. I’m not comfortable in my body and always wear really baggy clothes.”

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by Sunny Sea Gold, Woodhull Alumna

Originally posted to healthygirl.org on April 12th.

Today, part 2 of the condensed Chapter 1 excerpt from my new book, Food: The Good Girl’s Drug. (Tomorrow’s installment: Are all bingers overweight?)

There are literally millions of us out there who have struggled with emotional overeating and bingeing. It’s estimated that three-and-a-half percent of women and two percent of men in the United States have full-blown binge eating disorder. (And that doesn’t even count the people who don’t meet those criteria and who binge eat more occasionally or use other disordered behaviors!) Recent research has shown that binge eating is more common than anorexia and bulimia combined, and that kids as young as six years old can have problems with it. But bingeing isn’t talked about as much as anorexia and bulimia, and that means there aren’t nearly enough resources for those who need help, said Jennifer Nardozzi, Psy.D., national training manager for the Renfrew Center Foundation.

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by Sunny Sea Gold, Woodhull AlumnaOriginally posted to healthygirl.org on April 11th.

Regular readers probably know that my book, Food: The Good Girl’s Drug, came out last Tuesday. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to have a look, I wanted to share an excerpt! So, for the next three days, I’ll be running condensed sections from the first part of the book, focused on understanding what’s going on between you and food.

I love to eat—always have, always will. But in my early teens, eating went from something fun, yummy, and nourishing to something that made me absolutely miserable. My parents had started fighting a lot, and ultimately talking divorce. I was freaking out. That’s when a really puzzling, frenzied pattern of eating started to emerge. I snuck food, stole food, hid food, obsessed about food, loved food, hated food, hated myself. I would shove more food into my belly than I would’ve thought was humanly possible.

What I call my first official binge happened in the ninth grade. Mom and Dad were yelling at each other one night, and I escaped outside and dragged a blanket with me, heading for the roof of our German shepherd’s doghouse so I wouldn’t have to listen to it. Before I scooted out the door, I grabbed a spoon and a can of frozen orange juice concentrate from the freezer. I perched on the roof of that doghouse and cried, scooping the syrupy stuff into my mouth until the can was almost empty. I was in so much pain—but the sweetness of the juice and the mechanical action of moving the spoon up to my mouth over and over again seemed to numb my feelings.

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