victoria schonwald

A starved brain cannot self-regulate. A stressed body cannot digest. And a child sitting at the dinner table with an eating disorder is experiencing both at once — not as a choice, but as neuroscience. The nervous system state of the people around them is information their threat-detection system is reading constantly. Your calm is not just emotional support. It is functional medicine. Here is the science behind why — and what it means for mealtimes.

This one might make some of you uncomfortable. Good. Stay with it. I started my workout today on the treadmill. Nothing unusual there. But then I stopped at seven minutes and something seconds in. Not ten minutes. Not fifteen. Not a round, satisfying, socially acceptable number. Just, I'm ready to lift now. A Forrest Gump moment, if you will. I just stopped. I also left my phone at home, no distractions, no chasing calories, or how long I worked out for. Gosh, it was so relaxing. Younger me...

One of the things families often say to me is: "She knows she needs to eat. So why won't she just do it?" It's a fair question. And new research is starting to give us a better answer. The old explanation For a long time, the dominant idea in science was that compulsive behaviours, including the rigid food rules, rituals, and repetitive thinking seen in anorexia, were essentially habits gone wrong. The idea was that the brain had slipped into autopilot. That restriction or avoidance had...