Bridging Disciplines

A yoga teacher and an eating disorder therapist meet on substack and discuss what they have in common

Substack can be a really tricky place to build relationships. At least, that’s what I discovered in my first year or so, publishing here. I’d try to connect with other writers by commenting on their pieces and sharing their work. Sometimes I’d get a response, but if their audience was bigger than mine, I was (and still am) usually met with radio silence. A few times I’ve reached out directly to say, “hey, I love your work! I’d love to chat about this thing we both write about. Maybe we can collaborate.”

One person I ending up chatting with gave me the name of her business coach and I haven’t heard from her since.

A few months ago

Vanessa Scaringi, PhD

reached out to me and it was a completely different vibe. I’d read a post of Vanessa’s that really landed with me and admired her work. After connecting through chat in substack, we did a quick zoom call to have a conversation to see the places where our work intersects and how we might be able to support one another. The conversation was so good, we decided to have a second one and share it with everyone.

If you don’t know Vanessa, she’s a licensed psychologist and a certified eating disorder specialist. She works primarily with young women who are in recovery from some sort of disordered eating or body image issue. She says that now that she’s a mom, some of the work she’s done with clients over the years is really hitting home in her own life. She has a book coming out in 2026, so stay tuned for that. She writes the

A Side of Freud

substack. Please go subscribe.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. I really did.

photo courtesy of istock

NAOMI: I have a history of disordered eating, never diagnosed, but absolutely in my behavior starting from when I was a child.

I got therapy for it when I was a kid, but not with good therapists. And those behaviors persisted through the birth of my second child, if I'm really honest about it.

Through my first 2 pregnancies, I bounced back and forth between having a healthy approach to my body and shifting into familiar unhealthy behaviors and patterns.

By the time I was pregnant with my third, things had radically changed in me and I’m now healthier than I’ve ever been, mentally and physically. Still, some of the remnants live within me. As you know, these things tend to continue over the course of our lives and show up again and then battle them. They recede and then they show up again.

It is something that I think I will be dealing with for the rest of my life.

VANESSA: We turn the volume down and sometimes it gets cranked up, but there's so many external factors involved in all of that.

NAOMI: This is a really good place to start, which is the idea of eyes on your own plate. Or eyes on your own practice, for me as a movement professional.

As a woman in the world who is very physically active, who recently ran a half marathon, who is still a dancer in her forties. All of those things continue to be things that I have to remind myself constantly.

Eyes on your own practice.

VANESSA: I remember the first time I heard “Eyes on your own practice” in a yoga class. I think I was in my late twenties and doing yoga in a studio that I was unfamiliar with, and the instructor caught me looking at someone else and said to me very gently, “we try to keep our eyes on our own mat” and remember thinking, wow, that is so true.

I don't do that enough or I'm not reminded of that enough. And it stuck with me in a way that I have taken to so many different parts of my life.

NAOMI: I love that because yoga can be such a competitive space.

Maybe competitive is not quite the right word, but it's very visually oriented, despite all efforts to keep it a more internal practice, and particularly when you're in classes with other people. When I first started taking yoga classes, I was in New York City for college. The studio where I took classes was in Soho. And one of the teachers that I took classes from was a former fashion designer.

VANESSA: You're painting quite the picture!

NAOMI: Oh I know! Many of the women who were showing up to those classes were exactly what you'd expect. This was the early aughts. So pre-Lululemon, when most people were still wearing bike shorts or sweatpants to yoga classes — but not at this studio. Lots tall, thin, white women wearing fancy sports bras, leggings, and uggs. Their aesthetic of yoga was just so prominent.

When I first started going to yoga classes there, I was very young and still very much in the throes of eating disorder land. It was actually yoga that finally gave me a different perspective of my body, But it took a long time for me to get there.

Part of what initiated this shift was a deepening awareness that I was not taking good care of my body – that I was doing actual harm. And it's because of the mind-body connection in yoga, in which you are very intentionally linking the actions of your body to what's going on in your mind and also vice versa.

Depending on the style of yoga that you practice, sometimes it's to bypass your body to get to a more spiritual place.

But the style of yoga that I learned and practiced in that Soho studio taught us that the objective was not to bypass your body – It was to be in your body and to celebrate being in your body while you are alive.

So if I was supposed to celebrate being alive and being in my body, why was I treating my body like garbage? And despite this wake up call, I still didn't really listen to it for many, many years. But it was that it was the first place that I had that recognition.

I tell that story while also saying I still went to a studio where women showed up looking like models and where, the aesthetics of the studio were really about beauty, thinness, and whiteness, while celebrating a very particular type of person and a very particular type of spirituality.

I also had teachers who said, keep your eyes on your own practice, but it was almost impossible to keep my eyes on my own practice, because I so badly wanted to be able to do the things that these prettier, fancier, skinnier, taller, wealthier, bendier women were doing with their bodies.

Even when I was teaching my own classes early on and saying things similar to “keep your eyes on your own practice,” in my own practice, it was still so influenced by the aesthetics of diet culture that I hadn’t entirely let go of.

That for so many years, my practice, not my teaching, but my practice was built upon the idea of how deep can I go into this backbend? How badass can my practice be? How impressive can I look to this teacher who doesn't know me?

So I love that you had that moment with a yoga teacher who said that to you and I'm really curious what it then inspired in you because for me, it still took so long. I was so entrenched in the aesthetic culture of both yoga and also the aesthetic culture of diet culture.

VANESSA: I think you're speaking so clearly to the length of the journey and how long it takes for those messages to really sink in. It can take a long time to really believe that it's okay to “keep our eyes on our own practice” because we might hear it and think “yeah, that makes sense.” But to really be okay with that idea takes a long time.

When I was first told that in the yoga class, I was still pretty young. And I remember being in another class with that instructor and she asked me if I had been a dancer.

I had not been a dancer. I had been a swimmer. It felt like she saw something special in me just because of my body. Or I did something my body did that she liked. I really have no idea why she asked me that, but in my mind, that was the story I told myself. And so even though she's telling me, “keep my eyes on my own practice”, she's also giving me this mixed message of “ you're doing something that's aesthetically pleasing and keep that up.”

I feel like I'm finally at a place where I'm able to really stay centered and focus on myself in my movement activities. But there's always that deductive part of us, I think, as women in this culture where we're primed to compete with other women. I actually did my dissertation on competition with women and it's so prevalent.

So you might hear that message at a time in your life where you can understand what it means, but to really embody it and do any movement practice while staying centered in what you're doing in that moment and focus on how you feel in your body and not comparing it to the person next to you, takes so long.

NAOMI: It takes a lot of energy too. And I do think it’s a constant practice, like you said. It is a constant checking in with yourself and reevaluating what really matters.

This most recently showed up for me when I was training for a half marathon.

When I decided to train for this half marathon, I knew from the get go that I did not want to approach it from the same diet culture mentality that I had approached running for years and years and years. And that diet culture mentality for me was chasing a goal and chasing a time and pushing myself unnecessarily hard to do it.

I also needed to learn how to fuel my body better during my runs, as well as before and after running. In my old way of running, I’d eat more on the days when I was running harder, but I would eat a lot less on the days that I wasn't because I thought I didn’t need more calories on non-run days, which turns out, isn’t true.

Anyway, I knew that when I went into training for this half marathon that I did not want to approach it with any of that. But I still found myself in a “keep your eyes on your own plate” moment once during my training.

I was doing a training run one morning and someone passed me. She was running faster than I was, with a dog on a leash wrapped around her waist. And even though I felt pretty good about my run that day so far, as soon as she passed me, that old ego turned on and I thought to myself, “I could catch up to her.”

And then just as quickly, I heard another voice in my head, saying “you don't need to catch up with her. Pay attention to your own pace.”

I spent the next 3 minutes watching this woman run further ahead of me while I talked myself out of pushing myself too hard, too early in my run because I knew it would make me feel like garbage later.

VANESSA: I was thinking of other, similar idioms like “eyes on your practice” or “eyes on your own plate” – which is one I use a lot in my work. Running your own race is another good one.

We're taught these phrases but we're so rarely actually following through or expected to follow through. Instead, every message we get is pointing to that actually you should've tried to push your body and catch up to that woman. No excuses and all the different things that we hear. It's directly in conflict with the ideas of “running your own race.”

Or other messages like, “Listen. Go inward. Did you eat enough? What's your body telling you?”

All the messaging is actually to look outward but then there's this conflicting rhetoric telling you to also look inward. It’s confusing. And it’s really difficult to figure out what you’re supposed to do.

NAOMI: Yes! This is such a big issue within the fitness community. For example, lots of fitness pros will give you a detailed look at their workouts – how much they’re lifting, how many reps, how many sets they do.

But when I’m working with my students or clients, I typically don’t tell them how heavy the weights are that I’m using. And when I share my workouts on social media, I don’t give those details, either. It’s just not relevant to them.

Instead I give them tips to choose the right weights to progressively load and challenge their bodies.

What I often remind my clients is that it's not about how heavy you can lift or about max performing every workout. It's really about what is it that you want to be able to do with your life?

A lot of the women that I'm working with are postmenopause. So for them, the goal might be to remain active and feel strong in their bodies for as long as possible. They want to be able to travel places without feeling like they need help from people. One of my students frequently says to me, “it's all about the overhead compartment.”

She says, “I just want to be able to lift my suitcase overhead and put it in the overhead compartment.” And that's a good goal.

So I just think that you make such a good point about that idea that we push so much of this performance ideal and our success into the value of being the best, instead of the value of doing what feels good or doing it because it’s a healthy thing to do, you know?

I’m really curious how you see that show up in your work– both the challenge of dealing with mixed messages for parents trying to navigate feeding children and for kids trying to figure out how to listen to their own bodies.

VANESSA: Well, from the time we're born, we know how to intuitively eat. That is just something we come out knowing and then how quickly it gets taken away from us. And I'm guilty of this too. I think we all are. If someone's a parent, it can feel weird to just let your child make choices based on what you give them all the time. And to trust them to make what we, as parents, believe to be the right or best choices for them.

That can actually feel really scary. So in terms of feeding children, I think we're all just trying to do it the best we can when we're in those moments, but I see it with my clients so frequently who have a history of disordered eating.

They don't trust themselves at all and they also have such a hard time trusting their kid to make choices about food, and then they have this internal conflict.

It sounds like, “I know what I'm supposed to do, but this is hard. I gave my child the choice, and now they're picking. But wait. They picked a lot of sugar today. How does that sit with me? What am I supposed to do with that?”

Being able to work with my clients on their own intuitive eating and see where they are in that process is helpful. Asking them, “how is your intuitive eating going? How are you feeling?” It starts there.

It's also hard to stay focused on what feels right in a certain moment and then you've got a grandparent visiting, and all of a sudden, you were feeling solid for one week, and now you're like, “wait a minute. Now we cannot have red dye in the house, and we're not eating bagels anymore.”

So asking questions like, “How did we land here?” And then realizing, “Oh, the grandparents were visiting. This isn’t me. This is something else. I get it.”

So a lot of what I do with clients is trying to remind them that they do know much more than they give themselves credit for and how to stay focused on that.

I also think the idea of saying, “keeping your eyes on your own practice” can be applied to any practice, like the practice of feeding your child and how to do what feels right in your household. Does it feel right to offer vegetables and fruits and all these different things and then comment on what your child is eating? So often that does not feel right for them.

If you gave your kid the choice and they didn't choose that stuff, that's okay. And being okay with that, oh, it's so hard.

NAOMI: Oh my god. It's so so hard – speaking from direct personal experience to the exact type of person you just referenced.

VANESSA: It's also painful because we think we're gonna totally mess up our child forever and ever and ever if we interact with them in this one instance in a way that doesn't feel good. Or the idea that we can't revisit it with them.

That's something I'm always talking to my clients about is that you can totally revisit this with them. If it doesn't feel good, if you let them reach for something and you think, “oh gosh, maybe I don't want them to have a total access to a certain snack for all the time. I'll say, “just revisit that. You can totally work that in a different way.”

So I think there's so much space for nuance. There's so much space for gray. But when you have a history of disordered eating, it feels like it's black and white. It feels like I have to get it. If there's a right way and there's a wrong way.

And if I am in the wrong, I'm gonna totally mess my child up. They're gonna have an eating disorder for the rest of their lives.

NAOMI: I feel that. I remember being pregnant with my first child and making myself a promise that I have kept for twelve years, which is that I would never negatively comment about my body in her presence. That doesn't mean I don't ever have negative thoughts about my body, but when I do, I keep them to myself. My kids won’t ever hear me talk trash about my body.

Another promise I’ve made and kept is that if any of my children make a comment about my body that I perceive as negative, I am not going to say “don't say that.” I'm not gonna say that what they said was wrong or bad. I will just let the statement be what it is. And if I say anything about it, it will be to ask, “what makes you think that?” I've had my kids poke at my belly and say, “is there another baby in there, mommy?”

VANESSA: So often when kids say things about a person’s body, they're just making an observation.

NAOMI: Exactly. I made that promise to myself because I didn't want them to think that I thought my body was bad or that any bodies are “bad bodies."

That’s not something I grew up knowing or that I always believed. It's something that I continue to learn from fat activists and folks just bringing more education about body size across a wide spectrum of bodies. Listening to and learning from people who come from a very different experience from my own has also been really helpful.

Another way I try to approach this is that if my kids say that person is fat or if they use fat as a descriptor I don’t immediately correct them and say, “don't call someone fat! That’s not nice”.

VANESSA: Right! That’s so damaging, when we suggest “fat” is somehow a bad way to be.

NAOMI: I don’t want to stigmatize fatness and to elevate thinness. That’s already happening in a widespread way. My kids don’t need to hear it from me. I want them to know that what their bodies look like doesn’t change how I feel about them.

As the mother of a preteen, I can already feel this issue of stigmatizing fatness and elevating thinness in the questions my daughter asks me. My preteen will come home and say, “mommy, do you think I look fat in this?”

When she asks me those questions, it breaks my heart. Not because I care whether or not she looks fat, but because I know that there's a part of her that is thinking, “I don't want to be fat.” Because it has already been communicated to her through social interactions, through media, through other adults in her life, that the only body type that is acceptable to have is a thin body.

And so when she does ask me that, I ask her “what makes you think that? Would it be a bad thing if you are. And if people are making those comments about you in a negative way, that sounds more like their problem than your problem.”

I’m trying to remind her that what matters most is not someone else’s opinion of her body, but about how she feels in her body.

And it's coming back to this same idea of eyes on your own body.

That how you feel about your body is actually what matters more than what somebody else thinks about your body.

Bringing it back to what you said about feeding kids and letting them make their choices. that is something that I struggle with in a really big way. It's so scary for me.

Even though I made myself this promise that I would not talk about my body negatively, I still struggle with commenting about their food choices. I still struggle with letting them make their own choices.

But I struggle with it and I try. I never force them to eat anything that they don't want to eat. I never penalize them for not eating certain things. So I do try to be better about food and choices, and it's also still really hard.

VANESSA: It's so hard. You know? And I think the fact that there's so much space for neutrality in your house, though, like, that's the thing that I, I've had clients who are so terrified of, like, I I know I can sort of insulate and protect my kid and do all these things at my house, but, like, the world is scary. My mother-in-law is scary. She's gonna say negative things, and they're gonna hear this stuff at school.

They're gonna hear this stuff at dance or whatever. That's all true, but to have a foundation at home that's, like, a neutral approach to to one's body, it sounds like all the time, most of the time. And also as much of a neutral approach to food, like, that's huge compared to what is out there. You know? Like, you're giving I feel like this is what I talk to clients about so much.

You're giving them a foundation that is hard to come by. It's not the norm. I had a friend recount a situation with her daughter in a dance class, and it was the typical one girl called the other girl fat or asked the other girl something, like, "why are you so fat?” And the dance instructor came over and said, “we don't say that word.”

And my friend, who was very savvy about all of this, talked to the instructor and said, “I would appreciate it if you didn't comment on someone commenting on someone's body because that's just teaching them that there's an ideal and fat is bad and all these things that we actually are trying to move away from in our house.”

So, there's going to be things out of our control, but that little girl, I think, did not walk away from that experience internalizing any of it because at home, her foundation is so neutral. She loves what her body is doing for her. She talks more about all the backflips she can do these days.

So I think there's a way that we can really put this pressure on ourselves to get it right all the time, and it really just has to be most of the time or some of the time. It doesn’t have to be every single time.

It's some kind of antidote to what's going on out there. Because they'll have a foundation that they can start to question things with, just like, we're questioning the people saying the things at the gym.

Here’s another example: my son, who’s 7, just started swimming, and his coaches had this whole conversation about sugar. They told the team that they shouldn't eat sugar on the day of the swim meet. And then he gets the swim meet, and they're giving them donuts. And he looked at me like, “am I crazy, or did they tell us that we shouldn't have sugar?”

And I said, “we'll talk about it later. Eat the doughnut.”

But I think if we can just provide as much of the neutrality stuff as possible, then we're setting them up for a lot more success than we were ever set up with.

NAOMI: I think as parents, we tend to be so worried about the damage that we're going to do to our children and we get so worried about getting it right. I think that it comes from all of those different voices that we hear around us. And it keeps coming back to where we started this conversation.

Eyes on your own plate. Eyes on your own parenting. You know, there are things that are gonna work for me as a parent that are not going to work for you.

There are things that are going to overlap, absolutely. But for example, 2 of my kids have growth hormone deficiency. They lack a necessary hormone that stimulates growth in their cells that most kids have.

So I actually do have to talk about nutrition with them a little bit because if they don't get adequate protein, then the drugs they take won't work. And so there is a place where I have to say to them, you can't just have bread and candy forever.

I don’t talk about it as much as I used to because I think at this point they’ve heard it enough. Plus, I am trying to give a lot more space around food choices. But there is an occasional reminder that if you’re only making limited food choices, the drugs will only take you so far.

VANESSA: But you're teaching them to keep their eyes on their own plate because their plate, their body needs that. So I actually think that's great.

NAOMI: I just think what is so hard in modern parenting is that there are so many different places that we can look, so many experts, and so many people who, with very good intentions, want to help us be better parents.

Sometimes that can make us look everywhere else except for what's right in front of us. And it's not to say that we should ignore the advice or to never listen to what people would have to say.

But we do need to learn to trust ourselves, too. And it just keeps coming back to this idea of listening to your body. Listen to your instincts.

Listen to other people, but let there be a filter there.

VANESSA: I was just gonna say the filter part is so important.

NAOMI: Well, talk about the filter really quickly because I wanna know.

VANESSA: I was just going to say as long as that is filtered through your value system and what feels right for you, all that information is great.

We’re just oversaturated and we're inundated. We cannot take it all in. It has to be that we put together what feels right for us and piece it together.

I was thinking about a stat that I heard a long time ago about the baseball hall of fame. In order to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame, you need to hit 30% of the time when you're at bat. I don't really know baseball that well, so there might be more you need to do in order to get into the baseball hall of fame, but I like the idea that in order to be successful at hitting a baseball, you just need to hit the ball 30% of the time.

And so as a parent, if we're doing something that's right 30% of the time, we're winning. I love that. I just think about that all the time. There was 70% of the time that I probably said the wrong thing or I handled it the wrong way, but 30% of the time, I was pretty much killing it.

You clear that threshold and you're amazing. You're doing pretty great.

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