Grief Hunger: Integrating Grief & Eating Disorders a Specialized Training for Registered Dietitians

Grief is all around us: we experience it through death, through divorce/separation, through an unrealized dream we had, when launching our child to college, and when we say goodbye to the eating disorder. So why is it so uncomfortable to talk about or to even admit that it exists? Simply put, we live in a grief-phobic culture, preoccupied with avoidance and remaining comfortable. Come learn the basic tenets of grief and loss, how it may show up for your clients, and ways you can acknowledge their grief and support their recovery. Grieving is just about as natural and necessary to live well as eating is.

Learning Objectives:

Following this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Grief 101: Learn the different types of grief (ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, anticipatory grief, complicated grief) and how grief impacts eating disorder symptoms.
2. Learn the 7 mediators of mourning and their impact on grief outcomes. 
3. Understand how grief myths (like dieting myths) keep individuals frozen in their loss.
4. How saying goodbye to the eating disorder through restoring weight, change in body image, surrendering control, and cessation of using symptoms can trigger grief and loss.
5. Strategies and interventions to use from William Worden’s 4 Tasks of Grief & Pauline Boss’s Ambiguous Loss Theory.

Stacy Saindon, M.A., L.M.F.T. (she/her) Bio:

Stacy Saindon is a licensed marriage and family therapist and grief coach in private practice in Minneapolis, MN. She supports individuals, couples, and families primarily on themes around grief, trauma, relational wounds, body image struggles, relationship with food, and how to cultivate joy. She also provides CEU training for helping professionals who are in the midst of their own grief journey. She worked eight years at an Eating Disorder Clinic, The Emily Program, as a clinical manager and therapist with adolescents and adults. During that time, she worked in different levels of care from outpatient to residential treatment. This is where she was lucky enough to work within a milieu team, including learning from incredible RDs. She got her BS in 1995 at the University of MN in Family Social Science and her MA at Alfred Adler Graduate School in 1998 in Psychotherapy & Counseling. She strongly identifies as a middle child, motherless and fatherless daughter, wife, mother, sister, friend, yogi & reiki master. She uses she/her pronouns.