Healing Through Food: Nicole Kerr’s Journey from Bulimia to Self-Love and Empowerment in Midlife Health

What if a near-death experience could lead to a profound transformation in your relationship with food? Join host Heather Carey in this compelling episode of Real Food Stories as she welcomes Nicole Kerr, a former dietitian who bravely shares her remarkable journey of healing through food after battling bulimia for 20 years. Triggered by a traumatic car accident at just 19 years old, Nicole’s story is a testament to resilience, self-discovery, and the power of nourishing oneself beyond societal beauty standards.

Nicole’s life-changing accident left her with severe injuries and forced her to confront the deep-seated issues surrounding her body image and food beliefs. Growing up in a strict household and facing immense pressure at the Air Force Academy, she candidly discusses how these experiences shaped her self-worth and contributed to the development of her eating disorder. The conversation dives into the emotional turmoil that followed, revealing how food became a coping mechanism for her trauma.

Throughout this heartfelt discussion, Nicole emphasizes the importance of addressing underlying issues and embracing self-acceptance as vital steps on the path to healing through food. She reflects on her spiritual awakening, catalyzed by her near-death experience, which reshaped her understanding of life, death, and ultimately led her to a journey of self-love. This episode not only highlights the complexity of eating disorders but also serves as an empowering narrative for women navigating their own personal food journeys.

As a culinary nutritionist, Heather provides valuable insights and nutrition advice that resonate with women in midlife, particularly in the context of menopause health and body positivity. Listeners will gain healthy eating tips, mindful eating practices, and a deeper understanding of how to cultivate a healthy lifestyle through real food choices. Nicole’s story is more than just a weight loss journey; it’s an exploration of family food traditions, emotional eating, and the importance of nourishing your body in a sustainable way.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from Nicole’s experiences and discover how healing through food can empower your own journey. Tune in for a captivating conversation that is sure to inspire and uplift, reminding us all that it’s never too late to make peace with food and embrace a joyful, nourishing life.

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Hey everybody and welcome back. The mission of my podcast, Real Food Stories, is to give voice to the many issues, concerns, and things that keep us up at night when it comes to health, eating well, our weight, and our body image, as well as simply just making peace with food. So it’s no secret that eating disorders are rampant in our society. Running the gamut from anorexia to bulimia, there’s so much we could be talking about, and I plan on doing this more in the future. Eating disorders are complicated, and they’re complex, and oftentimes covered up in so much shame, which is why I want to give voice to this subject today. The other day, I had a conversation with Nicole Kerr. Nicole is a former dietician, yes, even dieticians and people who know a lot about food can struggle with eating disorders. But Nicole experienced some life-changing events in her teens that sparked a 20-year tangle with bulimia. Through a lot of soul-searching and inner work, Nicole has learned to make peace with food. So take a listen to my interview with Nicole Kerr. Hey, everybody. So today I am talking with… Nicole Kerr. Nicole is a registered dietitian and the author of two books, one nutrition related and one on her intriguing life story and near death experience. So hi, Nicole. How are you?

Speaker #1
Hi, Heather. I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me on your show today. I’m absolutely delighted and extremely grateful.

Speaker #0
Sure. Not a problem at all. I’m really excited to talk to you because when I think when we first. met. I was really intrigued by your near-death experience story because I thought it would be so interesting to talk to you more about almost dying, not fearing death, making peace with aging and getting older. Because I know you say that when you were 19, when you were a 19-year-old cadet at the United States Air Force Academy, you were forced to learn how to live and love. differently following what you described as a terrifying and transformative near-death experience. And I know you even wrote a book called You Are Deathless. A near-death experience taught me how to fully live and not fear death. But I think as we were talking that day and we got more into your story, I learned that you were a practicing dietitian in your former career. And it. you have a very profound story about what happened to you following your very traumatic experience around food and eating and an eating disorder that developed as a result. And, you know, as a result of the trauma that you had experienced, which I know was incredibly profound. So we agreed that this might be a two-part interview, because you really have two very significant stories to speak of. Now, I’ve talked quite a bit on this podcast about childhood experiences, forming the relationship we have with our bodies and food, but you had a very significant trauma as a young adult. So I’d love to just jump in and talk more about what happened to you specifically, the accident and how it shaped the rest of your life. I know that’s a big ask. That’s why I’m asking. hotbed But particularly, I think, around the eating disorder that we were talking about, your body image. And I imagine just making peace with the body you live in now. So why don’t we just jump in and just talk about that?

Speaker #1
Okay, well, the accident, it was a car crash. I was a passenger in a Corvette convertible. There was a senior cadet driving, and we were on our way back to the Air Force Academy. It was the beginning of my second year there, and I did not know him. But you’re not allowed to have cars out there to your juniors, seniors. So us freshmen and sophomores have to ask these juniors and seniors for rides or catch a bus. So anyway, I… was at an event and it was time to go. And I asked this guy for a ride back and he said, sure. What I didn’t realize is he had been drinking. There was beer provided at the event and he wanted to stop and have a couple of more drinks before he went back to the academy. And I was raised in the South in a very conservative household, very religious household. My grandfather was an alcoholic. So my dad forbade alcohol. So I was deciding for the first time in my life, I was going to just have some fun because my dad’s rules were no drinking, no smoking, and no dating cadets. Now you have to remember my dad was military. He went to the academy. He went, he wanted one of us four kids to go and follow in his footsteps. And I, the people pleaser wanting, you know, to be the star of my dad’s eye. I signed up for it because it was just opening up to women back in the late 70s. So I signed up and went through all the testing and got accepted. And I was like, oh, my God, now I got to go. I had no intention of doing anything military related growing up through high school. I was a model. I was 17 magazine. I mean, I from the rep from Mississippi, I had. I did nothing to prepare myself for something like boot camp. So I knew the first three weeks when I got up there and was like, they took all of my Estee Lauder away and they took all my new outfits that I thought I was going to college and they gave me these uniforms and they were yelling at me and all of this stuff. I knew I was in the wrong place. My soul knew I was in the wrong place. However, with my family, failure is not an option. Quitting is not an option. So you, if you choose something, you have to see it through whether you like it or not. And I wish to God that my mother, we got one phone call three weeks into bootcamp because we didn’t have cell phones back then. And I remember hearing my mother’s voice and I started crying. And then I started hyperventilating. I didn’t get one word out the entire conversation. Okay. And then my three minutes were up. The commander came and he hung up the phone and he said, sit over there and get yourself together, Kerr. And I realized years later that that was my first panic attack. And what I realized was I needed my mother to tell me it was okay to quit and to come home and that it’s okay to make a mistake. It’s okay that I don’t have to keep putting up with abuse and stuff that I knew was fundamentally wrong for me, but I never got that permission from her or my father. And she told me years later, she said, you know, I asked your father, what have we done to her? And he’s like, oh, she’ll be fine. And I wasn’t fine. I went from there to remedial, which was like one-on-one with the upper class. It was horrible. I was like private Benjamin. Okay. That’s the kind of person I was going in there. I was just not, I don’t know that anybody’s soul is cut out for that, but mine certainly was not. So I was having difficulty the whole year. was getting through, but it was by the, you know. tail just very basically getting through so that sophomore year I knew it was only going to get harder so I was not really looking forward to it because it was just going to be a grind and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it so when I got in the car with the guy and we stopped I said I’m going to have some fun finally in my life I’m going to smoke a cigarette I’m going to have two beers then he wanted to pull over and watch the sunset at. which to him, he had a whole agenda. He wanted to have sex before he went back. And I didn’t know what he wanted. And I got really scared. And I was like, no, we just got to get back to the Academy. So we got back on the road and he tried to make, and I remember this later, he tried to make a sexual pass at me. And I said, no. And he grabbed the steering wheel. And the next thing I knew is I went flying in the air and I wound up in the ICU the next day. And 19 years later, Heather, my memory came back. And that’s why I can say it was a sexual pass. And I knew I had had relationship issues with men my whole life. I was scared of their anger. My people pleasing elevated. And I will tell you, I’m a recovering people pleaser. That is an identity that is based out of fear. Okay. And when your body is running a fear program, your nervous system, you’re in sympathetic. Okay. That’s that amygdala. flight or fear freeze, you know, and you’re not going to make the healthiest or the best choices for yourself when you’re making them out of fear, you need to be making them out of that prefrontal cortex, your forehead, where you have that executive reasoning function. Well, back to the scene of the accident, I was pronounced dead, I was a passenger. And there was some people that heard it. They came out. This is in Monument, Colorado. They called 911. They checked for vitals, couldn’t get any on me and covered me up with a blanket. And by the time the first responders got there, between 10 to 13 minutes later, I was out. I was dead that entire time is what the EMT said. He couldn’t get any vitals on me when he was checking. And then all of a sudden he did this sternal knuckle press, which is designed to elicit pain in the body. And sure enough, my right eye flickered and the pupil dilated. That was the only sign of life he could get out of me. Now there’s this saying, you might’ve heard it. Our eyes are the window to the soul. At that moment, my soul, which had flown out of my body when I went through the windshield of the car, it came back through that eye and into my body. And all of a sudden, they were able to get a blood pressure reading of 60 over zero. Now, mind you, that’s pretty deadly still, but at least they could get something. And they started CPR and they got me to the nearest community hospital, which was not equipped to handle major trauma. And I had major injuries. I amputated my left foot. I severed my right wrist. I broke my pelvis. I had a huge fourth degree laceration in between my two legs where my vagina area is. It was because I went butt up through the windshield. So it cut up all of that, but it saved for the most part, my, my brain and my spinal cord. So I began a four month journey in the hospital, seven weeks in ICU, up and down, up and down, I would be close to death. And then something would happen and I would get a little better. And then something terrible would happen. And in one of the operations, I just remembered exactly the second near death about a month, two months ago when I write about it in a blog on my website about what happened when I coded at the hospital in the OR and I sent it to my surgeon who’s still alive. She’s 84 and somebody wanted cooperation. Did this really happen? And she wrote back, it’s accurate. And what happened was I actually died on the operating room table. They went and told my parents in the chapel, Nicole’s dead. We were sorry. We couldn’t, you know, resuscitate her. And then two minutes later, another surgical nurse comes in and said, her heart just started again, you know, and what had happened was I was getting a colostomy. I had three bacteria that had set in from all the ground up, the road, the dirt, the grass, the rock. the feces, all of that. I got sepsis. I got gangrene and I was just, my body was just like wanting to shut down. And so I just left my body again. But my angel James, who I, in the book called Casper the ghost, cause I didn’t know it was really my grandfather who was there helping me out until this past August. He said, no, Nicole, you got to get back in your body. You’re going to get through this. There’s a mission for you. And I got back in my body and I kept on the journey. But the part toward December, I finally got stable enough to where they could send me home. And I had reverted back to infancy, Heather. OK, so as a 19 year old, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself. I was completely dependent on my mother again. And for any of you that have teenagers to have your child who had been independent now come back. and have to basically start over. it is traumatic. You know, I lost so much weight. I could have been the poster child for the anorexia nervosa campaign. You know, it was, it was awful. I was very fit, you know, because of all of the activity that I was doing and everything. And I think that helped. But I dropped from 154 pounds at five foot 11 to 119. So you can see that’s a, and that’s all muscle wasting, you know, I I was on TPN for part of it. I was, you know, it was just, I was on every diet you can imagine. I had gallstones, so they put me on a low fat diet. So, you know, as a result of all of that, toward the end of it, the doctor said to my mother, Nicole’s going to need psychiatric help and psychological help because of the trauma that she’s been through. And my mother looked at the doctor and said, Jesus is our psychiatrist and she’s going to be just fine. Well, Heather, guess what? Jesus never showed up on my sofa and said, Nicole, let’s talk about what happened and let’s deal with the trauma.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I guess on that, too, that that suddenly Jesus didn’t show up to help you out.

Speaker #1
No. And in fact, Jesus never said anything to me. OK, I never heard from Jesus at all. And so I was raised Southern Baptist and Lutheran. Okay, so I was raised with a God that. was very fear-based in one realm and then very loving in another. So the fear-based outweighs the loving, because when you disappoint your dad, you really disappoint God, the father, the big father. And it’s a very terrifying way to grow up as a kid. If you don’t obey certain rules, then you’re going to be eternally separated from God and your family, okay? So needless to say, you’re growing up. programmed with fear in you your whole life. And then it just exacerbated when I went to the academy and the expectations just went off the chart of what you’re expected to do. So that’s when the eating disorder set in.

Speaker #0
But I’m curious, I just want to I just want to interrupt you. Was the accident a disappointment for your parents? You know, because now this is the ultimate. I mean, now you really can’t go back to the. Yes.

Speaker #1
Yes. It was absolutely.

Speaker #0
And you did something very rebellious. I mean, you were rebelling, right? You went out and and drank and smoked and you were with a boy.

Speaker #1
And and I and, you know, my dad would have never known that had I not been honest with the district attorney, because like he told me, you weren’t driving. You’re not responsible at all. The state charged him. with vehicular assault and driving under the influence. And he pled guilty. He was the one that was responsible. But my father blamed me because I broke his rules and said his thought process, and still is to this day at 85 years old, is you deserve what you get. And he actually told my three siblings, this is what happens when you don’t listen to me. So more fear, okay? And what are you supposed to do at 19? I mean, most people were doing this at 14 and 15. They were having alcoholic beverages or smoking a cigarette, you know. And so it was like the first time I really let myself go and have fun. Boom. I just got slammed. And so that part, my parents blaming me, that has been the hardest part of this because they are Christians. They’re religious addicts, in my opinion. And yet they will not forgive. And they won’t say, Nicole, we had it wrong. We got it wrong. You know, because this did. This made me a disabled veteran. I’m now fully 100% disability. And it’s because of all the various injuries I’ve had. But it absolutely devastated my dad because he wanted, I was like the trophy that he could put up. and say, here’s my daughter, look what she’s done. She’s special. Okay. And being special was what I needed to be to, to, to separate myself from my other siblings and to be the apple of his eye.

Speaker #0
And to people please. Right. And when you were the people pleaser. And so this was going to be probably the ultimate in people. Oh,

Speaker #1
absolutely. So, you know, forget that my, I wasn’t listening to myself. So the first thing I said when I woke up in the hospital was don’t tell my dad he’ll kill me. And the officer, my officer was like, Nicole, we’ve already called your parents. They’ll be here in a couple of days, you know, and I was just like, that’s what I feared even most. So to me. not meeting the expectations of my father, the academy, I would have preferred death. That’s how severe it was in my mind, you know? And so the death that the crash got me out of that in a, what I want to say in a way that wouldn’t, reflect negatively. But what a horrific way to get out of a situation, you know, instead of being able to own this isn’t the right place for me and I’m going to choose to quit. I’ve given it a year. It’s not what I want. I couldn’t even think like that, you know. And so I think that’s that was the biggest lesson is I just didn’t have any sense of self and what no voice to articulate what I needed and wanted in my life. So,

Speaker #0
I mean, you were you were not a child, right? I mean, you weren’t right. You were old enough to go to the Air Force Academy, but you were yet still not really an adult. You were under their.

Speaker #1
Yeah. And, you know,

Speaker #0
their wings, you know, so to speak.

Speaker #1
And and I and they always said they knew what was best for me, which most parents say they know what’s best for their child. So, you know, I I believed them and I didn’t. I didn’t question it. Just like with religion, I didn’t question the God that we were being taught was going to, you know, the wrath of God was going to come on us if we didn’t do X, Y or Z, if we were bad in some realm. So I will tell you that then I went home for rehab. And then about a year later, in August, my dad said, OK, you’ve gotten codependent with your mother now. I’m going to move you over. to Dallas and you’re going to live with your sister. And so my sister was 15 months older. And so she just graduated from college and she didn’t get a roommate or sister. She got a traumatized, untreated person living with her.

Speaker #0
And that’s that almost like we don’t know what else to do with you anymore. So we’re just going to unload you over to your sister. Yes.

Speaker #1
Yeah. And she didn’t have a choice because she was living in a condo that they had bought and she was starting up her own business. So it was like, OK, you deal with your sister now. And so try to get her to go back to school and see if she can community college. And so they wanted me to start rebuilding my life. That was the mandate. And instead, I began to hide out in our townhome. Food and television became my new best friends. This was back when Dallas and Dynasty were on Friday nights. And I had a standing date with them and I always watched them. And I would order Domino’s pizza, Canadian bacon and mushroom. And what was it? Bluebell caramel turtle fudge ice cream. And that was my version of dinner and a movie. So while my sister was hanging out with her friends. I cocooned and was compulsively eating and it just got worse and worse and worse. And I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what, because back in 83, 84, compulsive eating was something that wasn’t talked about a lot. And now the term is binge eating disorder, you know, but back then I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stop. I had, it should be a willpower issue. And so I lived with binge eating disorder for 20 years. And I finally sought help. My senior year in college, I went to a counselor and she was like, well, tell me, describe yourself. I said, I feel like my body’s been put through a meat grinder. I’m at Southern Methodist University where my sister went to school. Very focused, Dallas is on looks, okay? They’re not the only city, but looks matter. You go to school to get your MRS degree kind of thing back then. And they’re all in sororities. They wore the cute little shorts with all the little Xs and Us and whatever their symbols were on them. And it was really important to look good. That’s how you got accepted into a lot of the sororities and things like that. And here I was. formal model having, I mean, every, my stomach was cut open from here to here in emergency surgery. I had, my foot was grafted back together. Thank God I have my foot, but I had severe road burns from sliding on the pavement. They had to work on that with plastic surgery, but I just felt my my self-esteem nosedive. I couldn’t quit binging and I hated myself. Every time I did it, I would tell myself, okay, tomorrow we’re not gonna do it again. And then I would do it. And at the root of it was self-hate, that I had caused this myself. And that is so sad to me when I look back on how much of my life I… I spent obsessed with my body, my body image. I had plastic surgery to have breast implants because I was very flat. And I thought, okay, if I have some boobs, maybe that’ll help me. And, you know, it didn’t. And then two years later, a doctor tells me, oh, one of them’s leaking. And so you got to get them removed. So I go into have them removed. And the doctor goes, they’re not leaking. They were fine. But I had them taken. I took them out anyway. So you I’m glad that they’re out now, but I’m like, how could you misread that x-ray and see that they were leaking when they weren’t? But, you know, I tried all these different ways to, to, to hide the scars and to not talk about it, you know, cause I was so, embarrassed and shamed by him. I know a lot of men, you know, like, look at my scars. They’re my battle scars, you know, but for women, it’s a whole different. expectation.

Speaker #0
And when you’re a young woman, and you are going to a college that is very dependent on looks and what you’re wearing and outfits, and you’re very self conscious, I can imagine that was just incredibly painful mentally, physically.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
I want to talk about just the so the binge eating that you say sort of developed, was there a… Did you have a history of that? Do you feel like? No. Okay. No,

Speaker #1
not at all. I never thought about my body image. I never thought about, you know, we had, I ate whatever my mom served, you know. I remember growing up on Wonder Bread with a piece of bologna and cheese. You put it in the broiler and you, off to school you went, or cream of wheat, you know. No, we didn’t, I didn’t think about food in that way. You know, it just never had any issues. And at the Air Force Academy, we were fed the same amount of calories the men were. So they had something called Colorado hip disease, which a lot of women started getting wider hips and putting on weight if they were short. But I’m 5’11”, and I was able to eat. And, you know, I gained muscle weight is what I gained. So it didn’t bother me. But. when I lost all that weight, and then my mother was trying to put it on me, I was just eating so much. I think that’s really when it precipitated is trying to put on another 30 pounds, and then pretty fast too. And it just was really hard to do. And especially with trying to eat ice cream and all this stuff that really is not the best for you, you know, but it’s got a lot of calories in And then. when my mother left me, she was my best friend at that point. She was my only friend. All the rest of my friends were off in college. It was like, Nicole’s going to live. She’s going to be fine. So people stop checking in with you and you’re over in a way,

Speaker #0
right? I mean, you’re alive and you’re okay. So we’ll go back to what we’re.

Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly what happened. No more cards, no more flowers. You know, it really is hard. And for anybody out there that’s going through a long rehab, please, please send them a card or call them and check in with them because it’s very lonely to have to do that. You know, go in for rehab every day to physical therapy. And that takes a long, it took me eight months to rebuild. And I still, you know, had more to go. But at least I could walk then and I could function. But it was difficult. And then, you know, no sooner is my best friend gone and my sister, you know, didn’t want me there in that condition, I could feel that energy from her. And it was tough because my parents just were like, they didn’t call. They didn’t check on me anymore. I was like out there on my own. And I didn’t know anybody except her friends. So it was. lonely. And I think that’s part of the soul loss that occurs when a trauma happens. You not only have You have a lot of different types of wounds. You have the physical wounds, you have the mental wounds, but you also have spiritual wounds. And that is called soul loss or soul fragmentation. When you go through a trauma, part of your soul fragments, and it does that in order to protect you. And so if you don’t heal that spiritual wound and get that piece back, there’s certain conditions that now that I look back. were exactly what contributed to soul loss for me. And the first one was I didn’t want to come back. When I…

Speaker #0
went over to the other side and I experienced the bliss, the unconditional love, the beauty of all the colors. I mean, it was just unbelievable. I didn’t want to come back into that body that I could see in the ditch, you know, mangled. I was like, oh no, I don’t want to go back in that because I knew what was going to be in store for me, Heather. I mean,

Speaker #1
a lot of guilt and shame and, and

Speaker #0
Pain and suffering. Yeah. Just not only from your father. Yeah.

Speaker #1
Yeah. Your mother. I mean, yeah, that’s.

Speaker #0
Yeah. And feeling like I would, I would never get the love and the, the, I would never get that relationship back. And I never did that. That time I had with my mother that year, I kept trying and hoping to get that part of her back. And I never have. And she got extremely religious because she made a deal with God that if I survived, she would be a missionary for him. And so she thought I should be the same. And now that my book has come out, they’ve never read it, but they don’t agree with the God that I experienced on the other side, which was pure love. OK, there is nowhere that God is not. And God is not some white man in the sky that’s old judging you and waiting for you to come to the gates of heaven. That is that that’s that that is an image that was created to keep us in fear that we were going to be judged. OK. And so one of the lessons that is positive from near death experiencers is that we are not judged when we go to the other side. And if we could quit judging ourself here on this planet, that would be the biggest, one of the biggest steps we could take. And that goes along with eating disorders is how much we judge ourselves. You know, we’re not good enough. We’re not worthy enough. We don’t look pretty enough. We’re not thin enough. We’re not whatever it is. It’s we’re not enough.

Speaker #1
Well, you had the near-death experience, right? You went and like learned something and then boom, you like almost get dragged back into your life. And then here you are. A year after your mom has sort of kicked you out and you’re living with your sister and it sounds very lonely. And I’m sure you felt very guilty. I’m sure you felt a range of all different emotions and looking for comfort, you know?

Speaker #0
Absolutely.

Speaker #1
And food became comfort.

Speaker #0
Oh, it did. And it worked for a while until it doesn’t, you know? And I think that’s the hard part is you get… how do I say this? It’s a very eating disorders, whatever the spectrum from anorexia to, um, binge eating, it is just, it’s all the same issues. It’s just on a different scale, you know, and it’s the pain that you are suffering in terms of you don’t love yourself. Okay. And that is the bottom line. You have put conditions on yourself and you wind up hating yourself and you can briefly stop this. In fact, it happens with a lot of people where they’ll get busy or they’ll lifeful, you know, with their kids, they’ll have kids and they get distracted. And then when that goes away, though, they’re left with themselves. And unless you do the work, and that’s why I say I had a spiritual transformative experience because I’ve had to work on myself. for the last 40 years. You know, it has been a process. Healing is not linear. It doesn’t just happen overnight. And for me to just end,

Speaker #1
right. It’s not like it’s a beginning and then there’s an end, right? We’re always growing and getting older and different things are happening in our lives and we need spiritual balance in all different ways.

Speaker #0
And I think that was really the hardest thing was when my memory came back. it was like my whole life started to come into focus. Like now I know why I’ve been scared of men, why I haven’t gotten married. You know, I’m scared of their anger because I might piss them off and I might die. You know, now I understand, you know, the God on the other side was love. Well, now how does that concept, how do I let go of this vending machine God concept that I was raised with? and How does my concept of God evolve now, knowing that I died in fear? Okay. And I mean, because that was my belief. So I’m coming back now to tell people. not to be afraid of death, because when you get over there, none of that happened. I wasn’t at the pearly gates. I didn’t get judged. I was never alone. We are always, we all have at least one guardian angel with us. And there are unbelievable amounts of guides and angels and spirit beings on the other side that are here to help us on a daily basis. But we forget that. It’s called spiritual amnesia. We forget who we are spiritually, that we are perfect. Our souls are perfect and we are loved more than we can imagine. And we get caught up in the societal and the human part of us that expects perfectionism. And that takes us totally in the opposite direction and gets us totally off track with awakening. to who we really are, which are these spiritual beings that are perfect, that our soul is what lives on and what never dies. Hence the title of my book, You Are Deathless.

Speaker #1
So you were in the throes of this eating disorder, right? And if I’m correct, right, you had no memory of the accident and the near-death experience, right? So that took about 20 years. to have that come forth. Having that knowledge and remembering the near-death experience, did that help you make peace with the eating disorder? Tell me more about just how the rest of those next 20 years panned out for you as far as eating disorders and just soothing yourself with food. Because I can imagine just even getting through. college must have been very difficult.

Speaker #0
Yeah. And, and then the expectation of I’m supposed to be the successful entrepreneur for my dad, you know, and I’m supposed to go out there and, and, and achieve, you know, keep achieving and more about the accolades and the awards. I will tell you, and I talk about it in my book, even in my mid thirties, when I was working at the CDC, I was having night sweats. I was having… panic attacks. I was going down to my freezer a lot and getting my pint of Ben and Jerry’s out to soothe me, to cool me and stuffing it. And what I realized now was a lot of that was my anger. I was not letting my anger about so many different things, my parents, about God, the God I was raised with, about. Christians, the hypocrisy with Christianity and a lot of religions. You know, there were so many things angry at the guy that was driving that didn’t take responsibility, that his dad was a three star general that got him off, you know, and and just, you know, that rank has its privileges. All of these things that I was angry about. But as a Southern girl, you just are not supposed to get angry and you’re supposed to not. hurt your mother, you know, and I couldn’t tell her what she did by leaving me how much that hurt me. And, you know, you just couldn’t express that. I couldn’t express that emotion. So I was also working at the CDC, which is the top of public health, had a lot of expectations on me. And I Thank you. wasn’t sure that I could manage them because I also had health issues. So I was taking a lot of days off from work and, you know, but at the same time, they’re expecting me back to do this, that and the other. And I was on my own. I lived alone for 20 years. My dad was like, you know, you go off and you do whatever. And, and so I didn’t have the support that I needed to deal with the trauma. And I think. that is one of the reasons my body suppressed the memories so long is because unless you have support and safety, those two keys, your body is not going to let it come up. It’s called repressed memories. Okay. And that happens a lot with sexual abuse. You know, the same thing. I was abused at eight years old by an uncle. It came up in my mid thirties and I was like, oh my gosh, this can’t. be, you know, it was like, why did I not remember this earlier? So, you know, and we have a society that causes you to doubt your memories or to doubt memories that come up, like, well, why didn’t you, you know, come to us sooner? Or why didn’t you mention this sooner? Or any of these kind of things, you know,

Speaker #1
it’s mentioned that. It doesn’t sound like your parents would have supported this.

Speaker #0
I know they didn’t. In fact, when I told him in my late 30s who it was, my dad says, well, he’s dead now, so he can’t defend himself. And my mother says, well, I always thought he was a pervert. It was all about them, you know? And I’m like, wow, you know, they don’t want to talk about it. You know, it’s like, well, if I knew that was going on, I would have killed him. Right. You know, that that kind of thing. So I didn’t get the support I needed, even just saying, you know, coming out and being vulnerable with that admission. And so I think it is hard for women, especially that the memories come back much later. And there’s a huge percentage of women that have been sexually abused that correlates with eating disorders. And the shame they feel. And even having an abortion, I worked with Anita Johnson for Dr. Anita Johnson for a long time. And we would see people that were overweight and held their weight in their stomach. And it was like they never we find out later they had an abortion. And we are like, did you ever process it? Did you deal with it? And they were like, no, we just had it. And we like nothing ever happened. You know, you did it one day and you were supposed to get up and go on with life the next. And once they processed it, they were able to start losing the weight. But otherwise, they were holding on like they still had that baby. You know, it’s the way the body was responding to it. And speaking of the body, there’s a great book out called The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Betzel. I think it’s Vanderkalf. And it talks about how your body remembers all of this, you know, and once it feels safe And once you have support. to deal with the trauma, it will come out. But it’s not as long as you’re not going to feel safe or supported.

Speaker #1
Yeah. And you clearly had no safety. I mean, no safe space to really talk about a near-death experience, I imagine, with your parents and just the feelings of anger and loss and abandonment from your mother or the feelings of total abandonment from the guy who was driving in the car. I mean, now he got off. I mean, that’s.

Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s it’s these difficult emotions also of shame and less than not good enough. And, you know, wounded pride and just humiliation and embarrassment, all of these things that come. And it’s just really difficult to process those kind of emotions. You don’t want to feel them. Nope. Nobody wants to feel them. And that’s why this work is so hard and transformative is because you really have to feel that. And usually under the anger is the grief, you know, and grief. Let me tell you, can knock the socks out from under you when you actually let yourself feel what you have lost, because grief is what you have lost in your life. 20 years of an eating disorder. I lost. the ability to go out and enjoy food with friends and socialize and all of that, because I was always worried about binging. I wouldn’t eat before then, you know, then I’d come home and binge because I was hungry. I mean, it was all these strategies of how to control, you know, this illusion of, of controlling your life so that you could stay safe. And that basically was how I tried to live my life. And, and so when these memories came back, That started the process. I only went. through one guy and then I met my now husband. I happened to meet a guy who had done his work, who knows psychology and counseling and could help me through this.

Speaker #1
Yeah. Well, you certainly have been through a great amount of just ordeals and emotions and really, really processing your family history and looking at that and turning. everything over. And it sounds like then when you finally got the memories of your near-death experience, that was the game changer for you. Yeah.

Speaker #0
Yeah. And then I met my now husband and then it was like starting down the road of starting to align myself emotionally because I had cut myself off from here. It was like, I could think the emotion, the appropriate emotion is anger for this, but it never got in. I didn’t. embody it. And that is what is so important is your body has to embody the emotion in order to release it. And so once you can get that. mind, body, physical, yeah, the body and the spiritual, once you get that in alignment, then you get that aha, that, oh my goodness, I now can remember who I am. And it doesn’t matter what anybody else says or thinks or does, you know your truth. And that’s why I put in my book on the cover, one of my credentials, which is the most important BTDT. I had been there and done that. And I’m still on the journey. I’m still on the journey. I was just talking to you, Heather, last couple of weeks ago, and I started binging again for the first time in 20 years. And it scared me because I was like, oh, my God, this has come back. And maybe we want to save that for another discussion. But it’s like it was my body again, knowing that binging would get my attention. And there was something else I still needed to deal with. There always, I guess it’s going to be at some layer, but this was a biggie. And boy, did it take that night binging again to wake me up to deal with it. And it was painful. It was really painful. But I can tell you two weeks later, the binging stopped. So it is a red flag for us to look at something. And if we don’t look at it, it’s not going to go away. It only gets worse.

Speaker #1
Exactly right. I mean, it sounds like you were aware of it and caught it quickly. That’s the important part. I mean, you caught it. Yes, yes. And you could get, and you had the tools to get yourself back on track. Well, I think, you know, what we’re saying is that your history with eating disorders and I think for so many people is that it’s a work in progress right it’s not linear it doesn’t like begin and then it just ends and then like you’re you’re done been there done that you’re past it right it’s a work in progress and it’s and it always might come up yeah and you have the tools to to work with it but I think you said something about like knowing your truth. and knowing who you are and getting, you know, and just as time has gone on and with your such a, you know, your significant life experience that you had near death experience, you know, that that really was just opened up, I mean, ripped off a bandaid of just personal transformation and spiritual transformation for you.

Speaker #0
Yeah. And I think, you know, I don’t fear death anymore. Now I know what awaits and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s brilliant. You know, we’re never alone. We’re going to be greeted by deceased loved ones and angels. It’s, it’s just beyond beautiful. So I’m not scared of that. What I realized, Heather, was I was scared of living, truly living, you know, putting myself back out there again and living life and taking chances and risk. And that scared me, I think, almost more than dying.

Speaker #1
So what do you think the takeaways, you know, just as far as you developing an eating disorder, overcoming the eating disorder, amongst all that you had to work with in your past, what would be like a significant takeaway? for listeners, you know, just with eating disorders and, you know, people who are working through their own eating issues and who have also grown up with challenges and trauma?

Speaker #0
Yeah, first of all, I will say every single woman who lives in at least the United States is going to face at some point issues with body image and eating. OK, because that’s just the way our culture is set up with the standards of the so-called ideal of beauty. So most people can get through that. They go through a time where they’re dieting or whatever, and then, you know, they come out of it and they’re like, OK, I’m I’m good with that. A lot of women don’t, but life kind of takes over. They get married. It stops for a while or children. But as soon as they get to a point, usually midlife, okay. and their children are away and their relationship with their husband may not be what they thought it was going to be. And they’re not traveling all the time. COVID put a real, you know. lockdown on that, people’s issues started to come up. And I always say the issues in your tissues, and you have to feel it to heal it. And most people don’t want to heal it. They want to go into some kind of trance, whether it’s food or wine or whatever it is, shopping, whatever they can do to avoid it. And what I guess I’m saying is start looking at that. Start awakening to who you really are, because that’s not who you really are. Your soul, understand and start developing that relationship with your soul. And you may just want to start with the journal question that I got from Lee Harris is, what does my soul want to tell me today? And just see what happens. And if you get nothing, try it again the next day. But it really is a relationship. And that is with your soul self. And that is the part of you that is eternal, that will go on. And that is perfect. And that doesn’t need you to judge yourself. And it’s trying to get your attention through these different ways, you know. So pay attention to your body because it is really trying to help you, not hurt you. And… I think that was the lesson that I’ve had to come to is learning to what it really, really means to love yourself and not just give yourself pedicures and manicures and massages, but to truly love yourself, even when you are binging or even when you are feeling bad about a decision you made or whatever, because once you’re on the other side, none of this matters.

Speaker #1
Right.

Speaker #0
It doesn’t. And so, you know, invest in the spiritual part as much as you invest in your physical part. People pleasing was like being a roach that got stomped on. You know, I didn’t get anything out of it.

Speaker #1
Right. It sounds like I think that the big giant, if I had to like sum it up in one sentence, I feel like be I mean, be true to yourself. I mean, it’s right. It’s all there’s all. So it’s the people who surround you and can influence you. But if you’re not true to yourself and to who you are, you’re going to really suffer.

Speaker #0
And the answers are within. We just don’t learn early enough to trust them. And you have to start being true to yourself and trust yourself and trust the signals that you’re given, even though someone else may say, well, no, nobody has the answers. all the time for you. People can help guide you on your path. But if anybody says I have the absolute cure or the fix, run away.

Speaker #1
Yeah, it starts with you first. Nicole, those are fantastic takeaways. And I so appreciate you sharing your story today. This has been a really deep and heartfelt life lesson. I think for all of us, for my listeners, and I think everyone’s going to love your story. And it’s just very inspiring and encouraging. And I will link all your things in the show notes so they can get your book and find out where that is. And thank you so much again for being on.

Speaker #0
Thanks, Heather.

Speaker #1
And as always, if you loved this podcast, please consider gifting me with a five-star review. It is so helpful for me to get the word out on real eating, our real bodies, and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.