The Full Story with Virginia!

I’m so excited to introduce Virginia Newman today to the Full Story. Virginia Newman (she/ her) is the owner of her practice, the Radical Dietitian, based out of Seattle, WA, where she virtually provides eating disorder care for queer, disabled, and fat communities. She has her Master’s degree in Nutrition and Dietetics, an undergraduate degree in Sociology, and is a certified body trust provider through the Center for Body Trust.

Passionate about healing, Virginia melds her personal experiences of neurodivergence, survivorship, and recovery from orthorexia, in combination with a strong clinical background and understanding of systemic factors in healing and health, as a means to support clients in understanding and gaining agency with their own stories.

She supports clinicians in understanding anti-fatness, trauma, and neurodivergence and provides them with the tools to provide safer containers for care within their practices. She authored the chapter on Orthorexia in Springer’s 2020 Adolescent Nutrition.

Because this work has such a heartbreaking component, Virginia fills her heart in her free time with gardening, crafting, dancing, snuggling with Bug and Filius (her cats), cooking delicious food, and going on adventures with her partner.

My partner makes a pork loin roast from our friend’s farm’s pigs, and it is so deeply delicious. We brine it, and then he makes a spice rub that forms a crust with the fat cap, and it is SO GOOD! We often don’t eat much with it, a side salad with (now) local greens and feta cheese and store-bought dressing- either a feta vinaigrette or caesar. It’s a new way for me to enjoy pork, one of my favorite meats. And it’s always more delicious when someone is making it for you!

But, now that I’m thinking about food, we are going out tonight for his birthday to a steakhouse, where I usually get a pork chop and some fried artichokes with a caesar salad and a pot de creme dessert! It’s a fancier restaurant that we go to on special occasions (or when we need a pick me up), and I love the people, the atmosphere, the time with my partner, and they have a cocktail “the French teacher” which I love so much I literally talk about it with my partner, wondering the next time I’ll get to have one. I’m so excited- it’s a special time, and that makes the already delicious food taste even better.

I deeply cherish my relationship with food. It feels filled with trust, pleasure, nostalgia, and practical functionality. My relationship to food meets me where I am at. From a provider’s lens, my relationship with food is trauma-informed. It is gentle, forgiving, deeply satisfying, and nourishing. It is a source of pleasure, a source of grounding, and a source of calm. It has been a beautiful gateway into a deeply nourishing embodied relationship to myself. Because I have a history of an eating disorder, this relationship with food has not always been the case! For the first part of my life, like so many, I was indoctrinated into the system of body control, pursuing thinness and later pursuing health, which led to my eating disorder. My dieting behaviors were always disguised as health choices, and I think that is related to growing up in a family with two medical providers as parents. All of this formed the foundation for my eating disorder, orthorexia.

My orthorexia arose from a back injury, chronic digestive distress, and seeking help in the naturopathic realm. Within it, I was praised for my health behaviors. I smugly made my ketchup from scratch and bought only local organic foods and products (that my financial lineage made possible for me at that time). Meal planning took my mind off my- at times- crippling anxiety and depression. The pursuit of relief, the perfect way of eating, propped me up with thin privilege and the social praise I gained from both that and for performing health. It also gave my undiagnosed ADHD a place to both focus and rest in containment. Underneath, I was undernourished and deeply self-loathing.

Today, that self-loathing has shifted enough such that I have permission and access to the foods that I enjoy, love, and that provide me comfort, relief, nostalgia, and connection.

I’m super stoked that right now, I have peanut butter (from the grinder at the grocery store), cheese, the crackers I like, and a few other easy, delicious items that will work for me when I feel badly or don’t have much access to my appetite. Foods that I’ll still light up around in those instances, so I can still nourish myself. Because I’m currently in a perimenopause flare with hormone shifts making me feel crappy and unmotivated to eat, it’s nice to have the things I need. It feels like self-care when I look in my pantry and see multiple things that will make food possible and even a little enjoyable during these times.

Such a good question! I think the thing I pay attention to in my body is when I feel crunched over and clenched. Sometimes I notice it in my posture (or other people point it out to me). Alongside it, my brain is usually whirring on something that I don’t have any control over, but I’m trying to force some control onto. It’s usually an indicator that I need to take a few things off of my plate if I can, and or that I need a day or a weekend or an afternoon to just dink around, putter, or tinker. Time to be unproductive and nonlinear and to follow a flow.

That usually helps reset me back towards the full life, which for me has me broad chested and head held high, so that I can see and take in everything around me in my world. Because there is so much beauty for me right now, I feel privileged to say. There is so much grief in my heart, always, but there is so much goodness in my life all around me all the time, and the full life for me is letting that soak in and fill me up as it’s meant to.

Ugh, celebrating myself is still a learning curve I’m on, but I’m getting there! I like to light a candle and take a bubble bath, go out for a nice dinner with my partner, purchase something I’ve had my eye on for a bit, or give myself some other kind of gift (dink around time, a favorite movie or show, etc)

You know, I think back to younger me who was just trying to do it the way I felt it was supposed to be– eating the foods I liked, consistently, engaging in movement that felt good and pleasurable when I felt like it– but because I was on the higher end of the weight spectrum that intuitive nature of being with food and movement was taken from me and pathologized as wrong because my body became a beacon of the problem.

I would restrict and exercise would feel punishing. This would get me the results I wanted, and then I’d burn out and do the whole diet deal that so many of us have done.... Eventually, I had my eating disorder and then later, recovery. Essentially, I’d do what adolescent me did, what felt best to her, and I’d keep doing that no matter where my body wanted to be within it.

Anyway, I wish I could go back and tell younger me to skip all those chaotic steps and just keep doing what feels best and learn to be okay with where your body wants to be, despite how painful it can be to navigate all the anti-fatness, diet culture, and healthism. I wish I could go back and tell younger me that her intuition was right, she had good instincts on what felt best, and that she can keep on trusting that.

Another great question! Lately, it has been within boundaries. I’d say I first really learned boundaries starting in 2019, and although setting them is getting easier, I still really struggle with the process. I set them, but they are accompanied by so much internal grappling. I maintain them, but it is always alongside internal chatter about my meanness or wrongness. I’m in a couple of life situations where boundaries are how I show up for myself, to protect my peace. Because of the nature and complexity of these relationships, I navigate internal strife while knowing that setting boundaries is necessary and the only way to show up for myself.

I’m getting married in July, which has me thinking about my relationship to my partner, and he is the thing that I really love about my life right now. Life with him is just so sweet and fun and supported and safe. We have so much fun together, eat delicious food together, work hard alongside each other, and cherish the lives we share together with our two awesome cats. I’m really marveling at all of that right now.

For me, the definition of “the full life” is expanding my capacity to hold both the grief and joy and all of the complexity within. I often talk about it with my clients, as getting really wide to build the capacity to hold it all. There will always be grief, and there is so much of it these days, which I think beckons us to look at the glimmers, the beauty, the connection, and the love that is all around us while our hearts break with our own griefs and traumas and the collective systemic violences happening all over right now.

Thank you so much, Virginia. I loved reading through your journey and relationship with food, and I know that so many people will see themselves in your experiences. Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing your story with us. You are doing amazing work! We are so lucky to have clinicians like you in the world!

Work with Virginia

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