Skip to main content

Trans and Gender Diverse People With Eating Disorders with Kai Schweizer

Home » Inspiration and Insights » Trans and Gender Diverse People With Eating Disorders with Kai Schweizer

Podcast Episode Description

JenUp Podcast Transcript

Share this podcast to help others

Trans and Gender Diverse People With Eating Disorders

Speaker A [00:00:02]:
Okay. Hello and welcome back again to the JenUp podcast. If you’re struggling with an eating disorder and feeling lost, you’ve come to the right place. So, both Becky and I are former sufferers of eating disorders, and we understand the challenges you’re facing. So join us for inspiring, educational, and relatable content. Whether you’re seeking support, guidance, or just someone who understands, we are here for you. So today we have Kai Schweizer on the show. He is a PhD student based in Australia and is focused on trans experiences of eating disorders.

Speaker A [00:00:44]:
He is a small business owner providing LGBTIQA inclusive training and diversity for youth and community clinics, mental health services, and workplaces. And he also provides this training internationally. So thank you, Kai, for coming on. Would you like to introduce yourself to everyone?

Speaker B [00:01:09]:
Hello. Thank you for having me. Yeah, my name is Kai. I, like you said, I’m a PhD student, which is most of my life these days, doing that with the University of Western Australia. So I’m on the west coast here, based inside of the children’s hospital here. I’m also a research affiliate at the Inside Out Institute for Eating Disorders in Sydney, which is the other side of the country, and a sessional academic at the Curtin university’s sexology department. So, doing some interesting research around eating disorders and relationships and sex lives as well. But that’s very early days.

Speaker B [00:01:49]:
I’m a trans person. I’m an autistic person with ADHD. My background is youth work. So prior to research, I was doing case management with young people, particularly young people from the LGBTIQ community. And I have lived living experience of an eating disorder as well.

Speaker A [00:02:15]:
Okay, cool. So is that how you got into this line of work? Did you want to tell a little bit about your own experience with an eating disorder? That would be really good to hear, if you don’t mind.

Speaker B [00:02:28]:
My early experience with eating disorder was a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa in my teens, and I was one of those classic cases, as we’ll probably talk about more later, of trans people who suppress their impurity through starvation. And as a result of that, I’m shorter than average. But I also haven’t had the same level of development that other people around me would have had, and that essentially was very resistant to treatment. I did not really get better until I was an adult and I went on to hormone replacement therapy, felt much more comfortable with my body, and almost instantly went away and has only recurred once, one time. One period of time, which was when I temporarily went off of hormones. It just sort of immediately returned. So I went back on them and it’s gone away again. And my current ongoing diagnosis is arfidgesthe.

Speaker B [00:03:32]:
So not really related to body image concerns or anything of that nature. It’s more related to the autism, the ADHD, the neurodivergence component, and having a more restricted range of food types that I eat as a result of sort of sensory differences around food. So that’s very manageable and very different from most eating disorders, I would say, in that, yeah, it’s not necessarily trying to recover from it so much as to accommodate it.

Speaker C [00:04:07]:
That’s a really good way of looking at it, actually trying to accommodate it, because I think our food is. I think it’s been around for a long, long time. It’s now got a name, and people are focusing on it more, and there’s more research going into it. So more training can go in place to support eating disorders now or disordered eating.

Speaker B [00:04:26]:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s an area that is very complicated and interesting in that most eating disorders, we say we can’t lean into the behaviour at all, or we are sort of enabling it or listening to the eating disorder voice. Whereas something like ARfId, where we’re saying this particular texture is completely intolerable, pushing someone to eat that texture is not going to improve their overall well being. The thing there is to collaborate with the person to find a workaround. So if you can’t get all your protein from meat, because meat’s gross, then how can we get the person protein from some kind of other nutrient dense food? Yeah.

Speaker C [00:05:10]:
Working with the client, isn’t it?

Speaker B [00:05:13]:
Yeah. And that’s something generally, any disorder treatment is not famously known for is being collaborative and having the person with the lived experience actively sort of involved in the decision making about their own care. But with things like Arfid, that becomes particularly important.

Speaker A [00:05:32]:
Yeah, definitely. I’m hearing a lot about Arfid now. Like, sort of. It’s more. It’s becoming more. Do you train people in Arfid, or are you trained in that, to deliver that training or. Yeah.

Speaker B [00:05:47]:
I think Arfid is much more, I would say, of a dietitian role than my work. I do a lot of research into understanding arfid and sort of neurodivergence’s relationship and intersection with disordered eating and eating disorders. But generally, it’s the role of the dietitian to sort of help that person identify what sensory textures and things they find distressing, and to work with them around the actual, like, individual nutrients that need to be met for that person as well as maybe an occupational therapist sometimes, if it’s also things like, is there a device that can be used, for example, like, eggs are a common one that people don’t like the texture of because squishy and slimy. But you can get through the occupational therapy sort of genius, like egg cracking little machines that mean you don’t have to touch it. So, yeah, it’s something that comes up in my training when we’re talking about eating disorders more broadly, but it’s something that is not necessarily my expertise because I’m not an accredited practicing dietitian.

Speaker A [00:07:01]:
Okay. Okay. Well, it’s good to know for anyone listening to this who has got off at, like, go work with someone who’s actually qualified in it to obviously, you know, if you’re going to, if you have it, work with someone who’s qualified. So that’s really important.

Speaker B [00:07:13]:
Yeah. Generally a neuro affirming dietitian, neuro affirming occupational therapist, psychologist. Those sort of tend to be the bit of the multidisciplinary team you’re looking for.

Speaker A [00:07:26]:
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker C [00:07:27]:
What sort of.

Speaker A [00:07:28]:
When you said about neurodiversity, like eating disorders, disordered eating, have you done research into that? Are you doing research into that at the minute?

Speaker B [00:07:37]:
Yeah, at the moment, the focus of my research is mostly transgender diverse people and eating disorders, exercise, body image. And by nature of that, it ends up being that there’s a lot of research on broader LGBTI QA people, neurodivergence in eating disorders, because there is so much intersection, the rates of, I guess, self described neurodivergence in trans people, for example, tend to be somewhere about 80% of every study sample that we find, depending on how we ask the question.

Speaker A [00:08:13]:
Right. Okay. So what have you found out, like, so far? If you could tell us a little bit about, like, because I think that’d be really interesting. Like, in terms of research, like, what are you finding out at the minute? Obviously saying transgender, like, high sort of neurodiversity. Anything else?

Speaker B [00:08:31]:
Yeah, I guess there is some unique stuff there in terms of the overlap between being trans and neurodivergence, particularly the sort of rates of ADHD and autism are really, really high. But the big difference in studies as to whether the rate is, like 80 plus percent or 20 something percent is how they ask the question and whether that’s, have you been diagnosed with or do you consider yourself to be or have neurodivergence because the rates of formal diagnosis are so low in this group of people. So far, it seems like from what we can find in the research, it’s a cost issue. Over here in Australia, if you want to get a diagnosis for ADHD from a psychiatrist, that’s out of pocket thousands of dollars. And if you want to get an autism diagnosis, there is a public system through which to do it with years long wait list. But most trans people won’t be eligible for that system because it requires what’s called an early childhood informant. That’s someone from your youth, usually a parent or a guardian, who can speak to the fact that those symptoms or differences were present in childhood. And if you can’t provide that, then you can’t go to the public system and have to go private, which is, again, thousands of dollars.

Speaker B [00:09:59]:
And so we have this group of people who need access to those supports that you can sort of get open to by having the formal paperwork, but who can’t actually access those services. And then it’s also sort of complicated by immigration rules here and in many countries that say, you know, if you’re not a citizen yet and you want to be, getting a diagnosis could potentially preclude you from being allowed citizenship. So we have, you know, refugee and asylum seekers who are here because of their friends or other LGBTI status who can’t get diagnosed because doing so would be considered. Yeah. An exclusion criteria to being able to stay, for sure.

Speaker C [00:10:43]:
Loopholes isn’t there. It’s very. It’s. Your waiting list is very, very similar to the UK. There’s a lot of loopholes, though, and also, I think, get residency and citizenship, so important, but then it’s also your identity, and knowing who you are is so important, but you’ve got to sacrifice one for the other to start off with.

Speaker B [00:11:04]:
And that’s why, I guess, the idea is self diagnosis is very controversial still, but we would generally argue that if a person looks at the criteria and feels like, oh, that’s the missing piece for understanding myself, then there is. What is the harm in that? If a person can finally explain and understand their experience of something like autism by self diagnosis and through that, understand what kind of supports they might be able to create for themselves, um, like noise cancellation and things like that, then that’s awesome. Um, gradually, we would reduce the barriers as much as possible to accessing that formal diagnosis. And, um, from what we can tell so far in the research, uh, there is so many overlaps between neurodivergence and its effects on eating. And then you add in, um, things like gender diversity into that that adds extra sort of compounding and intersecting issues, it all just sort of compiles.

Speaker C [00:12:09]:
I wish just one thing, because I didn’t get diagnosed with dyslexia until I was about 36, and I’m in the process of doing the ADHD referral. And it’s the one thing I wish that I knew grew in growing up. Because if I understand how my brain was working at 100 miles an hour, I don’t think I would have hyper fixed so badly onto the eating disorder and then the hyper fixing goals shifting constantly, because the brain is just amazing. Like where I shared with you before we started recording, it’s my absolute superpower, but it’s also the bane of my life, so it’s trying to find that balance. And I think finding out who you are is really important, whether you’ve got a diagnosis or not. It’s understanding which helps eating disorder into recovery.

Speaker B [00:12:54]:
Yeah. And I think there are some aspects of things like ADHD that are, I guess one would say, perhaps risk factors for disordered eating and eating disorder. Things like the executive function difficulties and differences. But, you know, cooking can be harder. Following the directions to cook a meal can be harder. At the end of your day, when you’re exhausted, you don’t always have the level of brain power or executive function that other folks who are neurotypical might have be able to cook and do the kind of nutritional work. And so some people sort of fall into disordered eating by just not having the energy or capacity left to feed themselves, essentially, or will be eating not very nutrient dense food as a result of that. And then, ironically, eating disorders also really impact executive function, which then worsens executive dysfunction and sort of creates a cycle that it’s very hard to break out of in terms of being able to eat and feed oneself.

Speaker B [00:14:03]:
And then you throw in the sensory differences and sort of potential restricted quantities and types of food and interceptive differences as well. Things like not being able to discern our hunger cues, fullness cues, thirst cues, mean that someone isn’t necessarily going to intuitively eat when they’re hungry in terms of when their body needs food. It can end up being only when you reach a really acute, oh, wow, now I’m starving hungry or I’m going to faint soon. That you become aware of the fact that you need to eat, and that’s sometimes worsened by the kinds of stimulant medications used to treat many of the cognitive effects of ADHD.

Speaker A [00:14:45]:
Yeah, that’s like poor interceptive awareness, isn’t it? Like, with sense? Yeah. I worked with someone who had that, and I actually suffered with that as well. And that explains a lot. I just didn’t really struggled with, like, hunger and fullness. Like, he’s like, mad because I was always on the go.

Speaker B [00:15:05]:
Fullness can be. Fullness cues are interesting one, because some people, they have. It’s hard to tell when one’s hungry, but fullness can feel like, almost like a sensory overload or overwhelm for people. And that’s quite different to the distress that a neurotypical person with, say, anorexia might feel about feeling full and, like, the sort of more cognitive thoughts of, you know, weight gain, fatness and things like that, that people are traditionally thought to have. But more of a. This is an uncomfortable physical experience in my body that makes me feel bad. And so, you know, that disconnect can be from fullness altogether, can be protective in some ways. And that’s something we see in the research around trans folks, is if you’re neurodivergent and trans, you have potentially a lack of awareness of your body in terms of hunger and fullness and thirst, which is obviously not ideal from an eating perspective, but from a distress about the body in terms of gender.

Speaker B [00:16:10]:
Dysphoria can actually potentially be useful if you’re not as aware of your body’s movement and cues. Though we see sometimes trans folks with eating disorders who are very resistant to the kinds of therapies that could help them to build or improve upon those cues and become more aware of hunger and fullness and whatnot. Because there is a fear that it will elevate dysphoria. Yeah, we don’t really know if it’s true or not. It’s super early days research wise, but that is the perception that we’re hearing from people in the research.

Speaker A [00:16:46]:
It’s also like, I mean, obviously I struggled with it. I found it, like, when my hunger, when I worked on my hunger keys and all that kind of stuff came back, I found it, like, really triggering. So I was like, oh, like, it was very, like, you know, it was just like, right, I know I need to work on this. But then again, like what you said, we are not registering it. It’s like, it keeps you stuck in the cycle as well, which is not good. And that’s why it becomes harder. So I can really empathize people going through that. It’s really hard.

Speaker B [00:17:15]:
Yeah. And I think our current sort of mainstreaming disorder treatment is not very good at accommodating neurodivergence. In many ways, the meal plan is the meal plan with no flexibility or exceptions. And that means that we might be forcing someone who cannot follower a particular texture to eat that texture daily, which is not going to help them, and it’s going to potentially worsen the distress that they’re feeling. And if we’re not making those accommodations for that person and just forcing them to sort of. Yeah, brute force through their distress all the time, then we’re not getting to the underlying reasons for their behavior in the first place or how we can work around that. So, yeah, there’s been a few studies that have found that if you do, in a group of women with anorexia in inpatient treatment, the sort of autism traits questionnaires, that a substantial portion will come back with high traits compared to the general population, which suggests there is a lot of undiagnosed autism amongst the general sort of hospital inpatient population for eating disorders.

Speaker C [00:18:24]:
I really agree with you. I would say undiagnosed clients that I work with, I’d say I’m not trained to diagnose in any shape or form. And I just, through my own experience, my own learning about what ADHD and autism is and dyslexia, you can spot the traits and then to then be able to say, have you thought about this? Go and have a look. It opens people’s eyes up to how they’re thinking, how they’re behaving, and that the overwhelm that links in and stimulation with food, there is a massive connection and how they see their bodies.

Speaker B [00:19:02]:
Yeah. And I think it’s also we have a tendency to pathologize eating difference, even when it’s not eating disorder, particularly around neurodivergence, that, you know, a person might eat the exact same thing for every meal, every day, but that’s not inherently bad. It is if that person is getting their nutritional needs met. And, you know, sometimes we would recommend, say, a dietitian so that they can have additional vitamins that are going in through pill form to make sure that the health markers are good, that’s not inherently a negative thing for that person to be doing. And so we have to be cautious of, like, trying to apply a lens of what the neurotypical norm is of eating and exercise and those sorts of behaviours to people for whom that is not going to be right. Eating differences are not harmful. Eating disorders and disordered eating can be very harmful. And so point where maybe eating the same thing every day with no supervision or support could become harmful.

Speaker B [00:20:09]:
But it’s about sort of teasing apart what is different from what is dangerous.

Speaker C [00:20:15]:
Yeah, that’s really working, and it’s how I tend to work. It’s really listening to from a very person centred point of view, really listening to what the client is saying and hearing what they’re saying and then putting strategies in place that are going to work for them so they’re not set up to fail.

Speaker B [00:20:33]:
Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s what good treatment looks like as we start the process of this PhD and trying to identify what kind of treatments are really harmful to trans folks and neurodivergent folks by sort of proxy. And what treatments will work. It’s the ones that are very didactic and very structured and say, we’re going to do 20 sessions that follow this exact plan with no flexibility whatsoever. Your individual circumstances are irrelevant. Your unique contributors to your eating disorder are irrelevant. We’re just going to follow the plan. That doesn’t tend to be particularly effective.

Speaker B [00:21:11]:
It’s that if you’re dragging someone along, kicking and streaming through that process, that’s just. It’s just not going to work. You have to be bringing someone along in a way where you feel like you’re collaborating as a clinician and a person with lived experience, because then, yeah, you can actually build a plan together that the person will be able to maintain and tweak and work on in their own time. They get, you know, so many hours of being in treatment, but then the rest is sort of on their own.

Speaker C [00:21:46]:
Just giving them the skills and the tools to be able to manage.

Speaker B [00:21:50]:
Yeah. And a lot of it is creative solutions to things, rather than trying to say, just stop doing that thing or just eat more or just think this way. It’s often really specific and clever workarounds.

Speaker A [00:22:08]:
No, definitely. Thank you for that. It’s so interesting, especially everything you saw can relate to some of it. Very much so when I was going through it as well. So I think going back to, obviously, transgender and eating disorders. So why are transgender people more at risk of developing an eating disorder? Because I’ve been reading a lot around that, actually. If you could explain that, that would be great.

Speaker B [00:22:34]:
Sure. There is a bunch of reasons so far that we’ve identified and many more to come, that the high levels of neurodivergence is one of those, you know, if you’ve got sort of the things like we talked about, like the executive function differences and sensory differences and whatnot that can contribute. But there’s also the role of trans folks using disorder, needing behaviours to alleviate gender dysphoria and sort of increase the level of congruence between body and, like, self and identity, suppress puberty, things like that, and to cope with the. We call it minority stressors that are faced by being visible and different in the world. Those are sort of the main ones. There’s, yeah, an entire PhD’s worth of paper to write about each individual one of those things. But that’s sort of the broad overview is that it’s not always in. Not every trans person’s eating disorder is related to being trans, but from the literature we have, a lot of the time, it’s either a huge factor or one of the contributing factors.

Speaker B [00:23:53]:
So it has to kind of be a part of the treatment in order for the treatment to be effective.

Speaker A [00:24:02]:
Yeah, definitely. And no, thanks for that. And, I mean, do you have any advice for a transgender person who is suffering with an eating disorder and looking for support? Like, you know, what advice would you give to them right now?

Speaker B [00:24:18]:
I think it’s a multifold thing, really. Partially it’s about identifying what function that eating disorder is serving. So is it coping with the distress of discrimination? Is it really a lot of self hatred and internalized transphobia? Is the person trying to change their body through the disordered eating in a way that feels gender affirming? So some of the common ways we see that are suppressing puberty, but also trying to reduce body weight to make breast tissue look less prominent, or to change the fat distribution on the body to a different place, or just minimize it altogether, is the person experiencing the. Are they passing as the word we would use better as a result of their disorder, needing basically, are they being perceived as their authentic gender as a result of the changes they’re making in their behaviour? Is their weight so low that they’re suppressing menstrual periods? Because that’s a super common thing that pops up trying to waste muscle mass or any of those kinds of things that are common reasons. And if someone listening to this was thinking, oh, that’s what I’m doing. For every single one of those different sort of functions of an eating disorder, there is a far less damaging and much more sustainable alternative medical gender affirmation option that can meet those needs. You know, puberty suppression. We have puberty blocking medications that are considered reversible and safe, though the NHS doesn’t totally agree on that.

Speaker B [00:26:10]:
Now, that’s a whole thing in itself. There is gender affirming hormone therapies that can substantially change a person’s body to feel more aligned with their sense of self. And we have all kinds of medications that can work and support someone with menstrual suppression as well. We can’t change the discrimination of the world in terms of minority stress and coping with that, but we can support someone to build healthier coping strategies and also just like, connect to some of those factors that help to build that resilience so that the discrimination doesn’t feel as unbearable. So sense of community, sort of internal sense of pride in self and so on can all really help. So I would say if you are a person struggling with eating disorder, a trans person struggling with any sort, recovery is possible. There is treatment out there that will be affirming and understanding. There is community groups out there that are able to help you with understanding yourself and feeling a sense of not being alone, because that can be a horrible part of it, is feeling like you are the only person in the world feeling this way.

Speaker B [00:27:32]:
And there are entire support groups specifically for trans folks with eating disorders out there in many of the different countries. So, yeah, don’t be afraid to reach out for help and support. And that support does not inherently mean that you’re going to be left with higher distress. You know, I think a lot of the time people think I’m going to go get help, they’re going to weight restore me, and then all these things that are going to change about my body are going to be super distressing and I’m going to have this horrible dysphoria. But we are getting more and more into a point now where, like, gender affirming medical care for those who want and need it is a component of treatment, because you can’t really help someone who’s experiencing distress about their body related to their gender without incorporating that. Um, yeah, recovery is possible. And in many people, it is amazingly fast. In trans folks, sometimes they are the easiest people to treat and to help, and sometimes it’s really complex.

Speaker B [00:28:39]:
But those instances where someone starts hormones and they never have another instance of purging again, like one of my research participants, that’s amazing. You know, it’s possible.

Speaker C [00:28:52]:
It happens really interesting. I’ve worked with quite a few trans people, and it’s that complexity of not being able to access the services that they need to support them. So then they get quite stuck and finding people to be able to talk to who get it as well.

Speaker B [00:29:14]:
Yeah, I think it’s interesting that you’re both in the UK, because over here, sort of one of our peak eating disorder organizations is called the Butterfly foundation. And one of my colleagues and I wrote a piece for their website about how the ban on puberty blockers in the UK was going to severely worsen the level of eating disorders in trans young people, sort of speculatively, based on the existing research, when we already have so many young people who are suppressing their puberty all around the world through disordered eating because they can access puberty blockers, when you suddenly reduce the access further, you would anticipate that there will be further elevation of all those folks who would typically have had access to them no longer will, even with parent consent.

Speaker C [00:30:06]:
So damaging to the mental health as well. The distress some of the young people that I’ve worked with, stress of just the confusion of, I’m not being heard, no one gets me, and there’s nowhere. It’s really limited, nowhere to go.

Speaker B [00:30:21]:
Yeah. And I think, again, there is a really important role, at least when I was doing more of that under 18 work in case management for dietitians, in that, because they can be really. A really good dietitian can be very clever in, okay, we can’t increase this person’s weight too much because then they will, you know, a period will return, their body will feel distressing. But is there a way we can, without doing any kind of significant weight gain, increase the health of that person by changing the nutrition or density of the food that they’re eating? You know, can we make sure that their heart is going to be safe and that we minimize the long term damage of their behaviours while we try and find a workaround for them to be able to access things like the gender affirming care they need. And often it is a waiting game where I’ve had clients, 16 and 17 who are just waiting till they turn 18 to be able to access what they need, which is, yeah, heartbreaking. But it’s just about holding that space with them and trying to do harm minimization around the, you know, significant impacts, long term health implications of eating disorders.

Speaker C [00:31:41]:
That’s just safeguarding, isn’t it?

Speaker A [00:31:46]:
Thank you so much for all of that, Kai. That was great. Well, honestly, you’re going to help so many people with this. So thank you so much.

Speaker B [00:31:54]:
No worries. It’s like an entire three hour workshop in itself, this topic.

Speaker A [00:32:00]:
Yeah, I feel like it could be.

Speaker B [00:32:02]:
Try to squeeze it in. There’s so much to talk about, really.

Speaker A [00:32:06]:
I feel like the UK has this.

Speaker B [00:32:08]:
Very unique brand of thoughts about this whole area. So I think I’ve done like an entire hour workshop just on the anti trans rhetoric in the UK and how they love to talk about eating disorders as a way to justify that. But, yeah, so much.

Speaker C [00:32:25]:
Your research, it’s just giving me goosebumps. Your research and your time and your energy and you just being you is most probably going to save so many lives and helping so many people understand themselves. So, yeah, just. It’s amazing. Well done.

Speaker B [00:32:44]:
Yeah, thank you. I am. I remember still what it was like to go through that period of self discovery. And, you know, I’m. I’m a bit older than the average young person now. I’m almost 30. Being trans was something that even, you know, ten plus years ago was really not well known. And so I remember that feeling of thinking you’re crazy and that you’re the only one in the entire world who’s felt this way and trying to make sense of that.

Speaker B [00:33:14]:
And fortunately, the world has changed, at least in terms of visibility and knowledge about the existence of trans people. And the levels of support and community groups has grown substantially. And so, yeah, things are not necessarily going to be, are not perfect, but they’re better than they were. And there is a lot more support available than there used to be. So that is heartwarming. And, yeah, my PhD is a series of studies with the final output being a very large document, a set of guidelines that will be designed by me and a bunch of experts from different kinds of professional disciplines that treat eating disorders. And it’ll essentially be a set of best practice guidelines on how we treat eating disorders in trans folks so that we are not doing the harms that current treatment does and hopefully can ensure that people are able to recover and not become those folks who have severe and enduring cases or who lose their lives as a result, which we unfortunately see far too often. Hopeful is the word of in mind.

Speaker C [00:34:36]:
I was just gonna say, hopefully it comes over to the UK as well, because it would just make so much difference, like, huge difference to so many different people and open people. Yeah, open people’s minds up with be working in a different way. That’s not like a blinkered way. It’s working for the need of the client.

Speaker B [00:35:00]:
Absolutely. I think my, my opinion when I see any of this information, unlike research or discourse about the idea of severe and enduring or treatment resistant eating disorders, is that people are not resistant to the treatment. The treatment is just not working for them. So the problem is not the person, it’s the treatment needs to be more flexible. And I am very intrigued to find out someday, if we can get some good research on it, how much of those folks who are severe, enduring cases are neurodivergent people, autistic people, ADHD ers, trans folks and queer folks who are not out or who have not disclosed in treatment their clearness and get a sense of, yeah, I think there’s some subpopulations that make up that of supposedly treatment resistant people for whom we need to be designing better treatment.

Speaker C [00:36:00]:
I agree with you, definitely.

Speaker A [00:36:04]:
Thank you so much, Kai, for coming on. You’ve been absolutely amazing. I think we’re going to have to do a part two because we will have to end it there, I’m afraid. I feel like I could listen to your day.

Speaker B [00:36:18]:
Thank you for having me.

Speaker C [00:36:19]:
No, I was just thinking that I’m just absorbing. I keep getting goosebumps as well. It’s fair. This is just powerful.

Speaker A [00:36:28]:
Thank you so much for coming on. I’m going to pass you up to Becky. She’s going to end the podcast.

Speaker C [00:36:34]:
Thank you so much for listening to JenUp’s podcast. Please subscribe and share this podcast so others can benefit. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and ask JenUp and on the JenUp website, jenup.com. if you visit the website, you find lots of different resources and available available here. Please like subscribe and share.

Speaker A [00:36:59]:
Thanks guys. Oh, sorry, I’ve lost you. Wait a minute. Stopping.

How to get help?

Jenny Tomei is a Nutritional Therapist and Eating Disorder coach. See all her credentials on her About Jen page and then should you need help then make contact with her today. Your road to recovery can start now!

Contact Jenny