When the Focus On Health Stops Being Healthy: Understanding + Addressing Or…

I (Rebecca) am an 80’s kid and grew up on a big dose of John Hughes movies, tanning, Duran Duran, Paul Mitchell Freeze and Shine Hairspray (I sometimes went through a bottle a week - because 80’s hair), Doritos and VHS videos of Buns of Steel played on repeat.

Conversations about health were usually about cleaning my plate, getting outside when the sun was out, eating my vegetables and buying all things fat free.

Over time, the war on fat moved to carbohydrates, to sugar, to processed/refined foods, animal products/dairy, and so on….

But the war on our bodies has been consistent over time - even though the ideals of beauty and health have varied - sometimes drastically. There is a lot invested to get our attention and our purchasing power with many marketers playing on our primal need for love, belonging, community.

Today, the obsession with eating healthy is taking well-intentioned focus on health and turning it into a multi billion dollar industry that is fostering body and food shame, confusion, and despair - and impacting the emotional and physical well being of thousands upon thousands.

It is hard to discern the various claims promising the best evidence on what it takes and means to be healthy. This information overload - along with really good marketing - leads many to look outside of themselves for how to best feed and move their bodies - in the process losing trust and respect for their own body’s unique needs and preferences.

What are we to do? As helping professionals, parents+family members, educators, lay leaders+ministry leaders, fitness coaches, business leaders - we want to offer the best support and not do unintentional harm - as the arena of health can be a filled with landmines. And let’s be honest, it is dang confusing to know what it means to be healthy today.

You’ve been there...

• you see the hurt, the pain, the confusion, the overwhelm in the people you support and care about as they try to heal their relationship with food and their body and seek to be healthy.

• you are well-read, a student of science, research, homeopathic and alternative healing and see the often contradicting and confusing messages about health and wellness.

• you have developed your own views, your own practices and do your best to offer consistent wisdom and support when people are seeking relief to their pain.

• you want to be ethical and not do harm in your work and your impact. And yet, navigating the quagmire of health information can be a bit overwhelming.
• you are seeing how fad diets and “lifestyle” changes are doing more harm than good.

• you rely on your own intuition, your own personal experience as that is where you have the most confidence.

• you are not immune to good marketing and advertising and can find yourself - and those you know - caught up in the wave of a good marketing campaign.

• you often see people (and maybe yourself, too) struggle with follow-through, shame, fear, and self-sabotage and you want to be a different voice in their life and not unintentionally collude with the shaming messages of obsession that take the joy out of how we feed, move, rest, talk to our body.

This workshop is for you if you:

• are a helping professional, educator, parent, fitness coach, business leaeder, ministry leader, or anyone interested in learning more about identification, assessment, and treatment of Orthorexia
• want a better understanding of various health claims and measures of health we often see online and in the media
• want to learn more about how to become a savvy consumer of research claims and how to best support your communuty/business/school/family
• want to learn more about how to support shame resilience and trauma informed approaches when talking about weight/size, food, movement
• are tired - even exhausted - by the relentless conversations around food, weight, size, and fitness and want to find joy in these areas again
• want to be an advocate for your family, your clients, your students, your community on matters of health
• are curious to learn more about the disordered eating spectrum and how slippery a slope it can be to care about health and have that care turn into an obsession
• want to learn more about the intersection of purity culture and orthorexia - and what you can do to respond to a destructive mindset about what it means to be good enough and desirable.

During this workshop, you will receive:

• Information you can apply right away in your own life and with those your support
• Q&A and immediate feedback/coaching at various points in the workshop
• A handout of the presentation
• A bag of goodies
• Lunch and snacks
• Six CEU’s (check to make sure your needed CE’s our offered through our provider

Just think…

• How great it will feel to have more clarity and confidence when supporting your clients, students, families
• You will be a part of a growing community that is helping pushback on the noise and the dangers of businesses marketing to people’s fears and pain with dangerous practices.
• You can become a better consumer of information around health and wellness
• You will have a better understanding of the dangers of being too focused on “health’

When the Focus On Health Stops Being Healthy: Understanding + Addressing Orthorexia in Our Culture of Never Enough

Hosted by: Potentia Family Therapy, Inc.

Skill Level: All-Levels

For: Therapists, registered dietitians, fitness + coaching professionals, health + wellness professionals, doctors, nurses, educators, lay leaders, parents

When: February 23, 2019, 9am - 5pm (registration opens at 8.30am). Includes a 60 minutes lunch break as well as a couple of 15 minute snack breaks.

Workshop Leaders: Rebecca Ching, LMFT + Megan Holt-Hellner, DrPH, MPH, RD

Where: Point Loma Nazarene University Fermanian Business Center, 3900 Lomaland Drive, San Diego, CA 92106 (click for map).

Price: $200 including lunch, snacks, gift bag and CEU credits. (Student rates + groups rates also available)

*2 month payment plans available if you register in January!

This interactive workshop provides participants with a thorough understanding of the etiology, diagnosis, treatment of persons struggling with orthorexia and how to respond to clients, students, and loved ones when orthorexia symptoms present. We will review case studies and review current literature on orthorexia. We’ll also cover peripheral issues such as weight stigma, identification of personal biases, purity culture, and media consumption.

Workshop Educational Objectives:

1. Participants will define orthorexia, and will gain insight as to how to identify orthorexic behaviors as they may present across the disordered eating spectrum.

2. Participants will learn about biases faced by persons of size, the impact of diet culture, and how this relates to development of orthorexia.

3. Participants will be able to recognize the medical and psychological implications of orthorexia, best guidelines and approaches for treatment (and rationale) and importance of a treatment team.

4. Participants will gain insight into their personal biases around food, fat and weight/shape, and will better understand weight stigma in western culture.

5. Participants will learn how to empower themselves and others to become savvy consumers of research and media around matters of health, wellness, beauty, and fitness.

Ce-Classes.com will be providing 6 CEs for this workshop. Professionals can obtain their CEs by clicking on this weblink.

Certificates are awarded online after completion of the workshop. Participants print their own certificate after registering at ce-classes.com, entering a keycode, and completing an evaluation form.

About The Instructors:

Rebecca and Megan have been working together for over 12 years now. This workshop brings together their years of experience, training and insight on this pervasive issue along with their deep professional respect for each other and this work.

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Rebecca Ching, LMFT has been been practicing as a psychtherapist for over 15 years. She is the founder and owner of Potentia Family Therapy, Inc. which is an integrattive mental health practice that treats the whole person and the whole spectrum of mental health struggles and offers specialized care in the treatment of disordered eating spectrum, trauma/anxiety, shame and peffection struggles, addiction + compulsive behaviors, parinatal mental health, and entrepreneur health + wellness. Rebecca is a Certified Daring Way™ Facilitator + Consultatnt, Certified Eating Disorder Specialist + iaedp™ Approved Supervisor, Certifed Internal Family Systems Therapist, Certified EMDR Theraist, and AAMFT Approved Supervisor. Rebecca is a writer and served as the mental health contributor for Darling Magazine and also a speaker - regularly presenting at academic and professional conferences. Prior to becoming a therapist, Rebecca worked in Washington, DC on Calitol Hill, in NYC for an issue-advocacy advertising firm, and in Europe for an international youth organization.

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Dr. Megan Holt-Hellner has been practicing as a registered dietitian in California for the past fifteen years. Additionally, she earned her doctorate in public health, with an emphasis in preventive care, from Loma Linda University. Her doctoral work examined the bidirectional relationship between dietary intake patterns and emotion regulation. A proud alumna, Dr. Holt-Hellner earned a BS in Nutrition, Registered Dietitian’s license and Master’s Degree in public health epidemiology at San Diego State University.

Dr. Holt-Hellner spent a number of years working in many eating disorder treatment programs prior to settling into private practice. She now serves as Nutrition and Wellness Coordinator for Potentia Family Therapy, where she helps persons struggling with disordered eating as well as elite athletes (and weekend warriors alike) meet their needs using a non-diet philosophy and ‘food first’ approach. Prior to this, she served as the Team Dietitian for University of San Diego’s Athletic Department, and as a consultant for a number of youth sports programs throughout San Diego County. She also worked as a clinical dietitian for years in the acute care setting. She is driven by a desire to help individuals understand and appreciate the synergistic influences of nutrition, exercise, stress management and other protective lifestyle factors on health using evidence-based practices. She thoroughly enjoys the interdisciplinary approach, as we know that having a strong and collaborative team of licensed professional in place leads to improved treatment outcomes. She has also concurrently worked on various research projects over the past ten years (areas of focus included restaurant nutrition, healthy aging and alcohol/substance abuse). A list of publications is available upon request.

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This workshop is held in facilities which are in compliance with the Americans Disabilities Act. Please contact info@potentiatherapy.com if special accommodation is required.

All complaints and grievances are reviewed within 5 working days. Formal grievances are required to be written, and will be responded to within 10 business days.

Cancellation Policy: Full refunds will be provided up to 10 days before the event. If cancellation occurs less than 10 days before the event then no refund will be issued.