123 – The Real Life Impact of Eating Disorders ft Carissa Dyer

Through her teenage years Carissa experienced the pressure of managing her eating disorder on top of all of life's stressors. How does this hyper focus on food, eating, comparison, judgement and hiding all of the above from your closest people impact your life? Carissa was amazing enough to come in and share her first hand experience.

This experience has shaped her journey into OT and where she is wanting to take her career.

Look after yourself, look after others, and always keep Occupied

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Transcript

Brock Cook 0:00Hi, and welcome to another episode of occupied. Today I had the absolute pleasure to speak with the lovely Clarissa Daya around her experience of an evening having an eating disorder going right through and into a recovery program for that right through to now studying occupational therapies impact, or potential impact for people with eating disorders through her doctoral Capstone, so just a trigger warning, but gonna be talking about eating disorders and the impact that it has on people's lives. If there's a trigger for you feel free to skip ahead or not listen to this one. It's definitely an amazing episode was just so open and honest, and I can't thank her enough. So strap in, get ready and roll the episode. Get a My name is Brock Cook and welcome to occupied. In this podcast we're aiming to put the occupation in occupational therapy. We explore the people, topics, theories and underpinnings that make this profession so incredible. If you're new here, you can find all of our previous episodes and resources that occupied podcast.com. But for now, let's roll the episode.

Carissa Dyer 1:30Oh, yeah, yeah, um, well, originally when I went to undergrad, I was going in as a physical therapy major. And in the States, we don't have like, this is my physical therapy like bachelor degree, or at least at my university, we did it. So I was exercise science with a concentration in physical therapy. But my family and I went on vacation in Florida, like down a little further south in Florida. And we were on the beach and I heard this baby just like wailing crying, I think I was about I was a spouse be a sophomore in college. And I was like, Mom, that dad back there who looked so stressed out. He added like a little kind of toddler on the sand. And then somewhere was a baby wailing. And he just looked really stressed. His wife had just walked away with their other child to go into the ocean. And I'm like, I'm gonna go ask him if he needs help. And she goes, Okay. Um, so yeah, I went out and like, sir, you look really stressed. Like, are you okay? Like, I hear crying? What's going What's wrong? And he's like, Oh, my gosh, you're a lifesaver. So I started talking to this family, who, such a small world lives, 30 minutes away from where I grew up in Kentucky, and the mom comes back and her little boy has Down syndrome. And I love kids. I've always, you know, worked with kids growing up babysitting kids. And he has Down syndrome, and I'm just, you know, talking to her about her kid and, you know, services that he gets, because I tell her I'm a physical therapy, Exercise Science, pre PT. And she goes, Oh, well, we really got a lot out of occupational therapy. I'm like, Oh, what's that? And that kind of just started this spiral of me, really researching OT and I just really like how it's more holistic, and really client centered,