My story
you have the power to heal your relationship with your body.
I know because I healed mine.* It didn’t happen in a week, month, or year; healing is an on-going process. I’ve been growing and healing for the past seven years, and it started at a time when I felt the least alive and the least happy.
I had a difficult breakup when I was 25. Through that experience, I confronted a lot of unprocessed trauma from childhood and young adulthood. I knew I wouldn’t be able to crawl out of that hole alone, so I began to see a therapist.
During the first year of therapy, I spent a good amount of time walking around my neighborhood, talking to my Dad on the phone. I don’t know what about those walk-and-talks was so healing, but I do know this is where my health journey began. The 3-5 mile radius of residential streets around my apartment was as healing as any medicine or vegetable.
After a few years of therapy and walking, I began to feel better. I began to try other things that made me feel better. I went hiking regularly. I took long baths. I was able to stop taking medication for panic attacks. I saw friends often and found ways to self-soothe. In this sense, I was finally understanding what mental health looked like for me.
But there’s a missing piece to this puzzle: my body.
Growing up, I didn’t have a healthy relationship with food or my body. My childhood was stressful and tiring. There was a lot of bingeing behavior at home, and later, especially through college and graduate school, restriction. Through my breakup, I lost a lot of weight. This was mostly due to my daily panic attacks, which caused stomach pain and loss of appetite. The trouble with losing weight through ill-health is manifold. Hoards of people came out of the woodwork to compliment my newfound slenderness. It seemed to them as though I was healthier than ever. In reality, I was incredibly sick. I was high on the euphoria of achieving my childhood dream: I was finally skinny. And I was about to get sicker.
Sometimes when you feel buried, you’re actually planted.
But despite all of my mental growth, I was incredibly stressed from obsessing over my body. As I grew smaller, I got even more sick. I was healing one aspect of my mental health and diving into the illness of another. I ate as little as possible, terrified of gaining weight. I tracked every calorie every day, and worked myself to the bone with over-exercise. I was chasing perfection even though my body was starting to show the dangerous receipts of my behaviors. After having been bullied for my weight as a child, to finally receive the privileges of a thin body was irresistible. And yet, I never felt “skinny enough," even though I told myself I was really concerned with my “health.” I was obsessed with my weight. I would weigh myself every morning and break into tears if that number was even one pound up from the previous day. I experimented with not weighing myself for a few months only to find out, when I resumed weighing myself, that I had gained 10 pounds. The panic was instant. I called my sister for support. She had just worked with a friend who had become a health coach, and she suggested I reach out for a consultation. That’s when I made the second best decision for my wellbeing: I hired a health coach.
In working with a health coach, my life of tightness, food fear, and restriction began to blossom. In addition to my therapist, I now had a person who was there to support my body in addition to my mind. Through working with her, I safely transitioned from being a vegetarian to a vegan, something I had been wanting to do for years. I started strength training and proved to myself that I could do a pull-up! I advocated for myself at the doctor’s office for the first time. I began to feel like I was actually in charge of my own health!
Most importantly, I confronted my eating disorder and body dysmorphia. In her presence, I felt safe enough to be vulnerable: to share with her how little I was tempted to eat, how much I hated my body, how many of my thoughts were centered on food and weight. Slowly, after nine months of working together, I started to focus more on my actual health goals: sufficient iron and protein intake, holding crow pose in yoga, reducing and eliminating all psychiatric medications, eating a wider variety of foods, letting go of counting calories, etc. My weight was no longer the summation of my health. I was starting to heal.
In fall 2019, I left my job as a buyer at a local indie bookstore - I enjoyed this job, but I suffered from being over-stressed and underpaid, and I yearned to dedicate my time in service to others. I made a decision: I knew that I wanted to spend my life helping others; to pay forward the gifts, tools, and lessons I had been given that allowed me to save my own life. I enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition to receive my Integrative Nutrition Health Coaching credential.
And then…COVID-19 happened. At first, I thought: no sweat! I’ll be fine without the gym for a few weeks. I’m an introvert - I don’t mind staying at home! Instead, these unusual circumstances forced me to confront the truth: I was still suffering with my food and body obsession. I was not, in fact, recovered. I had traded anorexia for orthorexia, something my nutrition schooling addressed while also amplifying with its sugar-demonizing and carb-fearing lectures. With so much time at home, with all of my self-care routines thrown out-of-whack, with my full-length mirror constantly taunting me, with my jeans no longer buttoning, I had to address my issues in a way I never had before.
While I appreciated my education, it was really a crash course in the never-ending circus of diet culture. So many of my classmates walked away EVEN MORE stressed about what they were eating, even more concerned about weight, BMI and “obesity.” There were no lectures on the dangers of anti-fat-bias in the medical field. No mention of racism, class disparity, and environmental factors. What does it matter how much kale we eat if we don’t have access to clean air and drinking water? Does an apple a day help when we can’t even afford to go to the doctor? It felt so utterly wrong to me. What was the point of learning the nutritional value of foods if that knowledge led to restriction, stress, eating disorders, and diets? What’s the point of nutrition if it’s focused on eliminating foods rather than adding them in? That’s not health, that’s misery. It lit a fire under my ass, and I started my business with the aim of helping to tear down the toxic system of diet culture, one liberated client at a time. I knew in my heart: I wanted to help people become their healthiest selves, using nutrition to help with this aim, while also liberating them of body-hatred and food anxiety.
This is the truth: health is a process, not a place. It’s not a weight, a scan, or handful of supplements. It’s not cutting carbs or eating meat or eating plant-based. It’s individual. It’s about stress and rest and love and joy. It’s never “over;” we don’t “achieve health” and stay there, unmoving. We can’t “achieve” health if we don’t have access to it, which is the case for most folks in America. All we have to do is try, every day, to listen to our bodies without judgement and make choices from a place of love.
Which brings me to here, to now: ready to help you thrive. To grow beyond the patterns and behaviors rooted in suffering into the life you deserve to live—a life of freedom, love and joy. A life without starvation, bingeing, constantly weighting yourself, and an endless cycle of diets. A life of true health: in body, mind, and spirit. I’m here to help you with all of it, as your friend, mentor, and supporter. Let’s take back what’s rightfully yours. Let’s live.
*There are so many threads to this story; it would be impossible to tell you every factor that went into my growth and healing. There is not just one component to a healthy life. It includes every aspect of who you are, which is why I’m so passionate about practicing holistically. Together, we will examine all the aspects of your life that contribute to your health.
Professional Bio:
Sara Vander Zwaag is a Holistic Health Coach working out of the Bay Area with clients from all over the country. She is a former Adjunct English Professor, Bookstore Buyer, and Nanny. She is also a poet; her debut chapbook Good River was released with White Stag Press in January 2021. She is passionate about weight-inclusive healthcare; HAES; Intuitive Eating; and food ethics, including the history of systemic racism and its effects on health; climate change; and animal rights. She strongly believes in bio-individuality: the knowledge that each body is different and that health and food choices are different for each person. She lives in Oakland, CA with her fiancé, Tyler and her cat, Timo. Her favorite flowers are sunflowers.
Credentials:
Integrative Nutrition Health Coach Certificate - Institute of Integrative Nutrition, 2020