Identity and Eating Disorders in Ultramarathon with Maddy Palermo | KoopCast Episode 174

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is all about how we identify as athletes and how that identity can impact disordered eating and eating disorders now before we start in with the main part of this podcast i do want to make something abundantly clear i'm not a specialist in this area nor will i ever pretend to be and it's with that sensitivity that whenever i want to discuss a topic such as eating disorders i want to bring in the real experts into the room with me you long-time listeners of the podcast will remember two separate podcasts i did with a fabulous dr kate bennett on this subject and this podcast is an excellent extension of those conversations so on the podcast today we have maddie palermo maddie is a fifth year doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the university of south florida where she is studying disordered eating behaviors and their connection to identity among athletes i got to know maddie's research in the work that the university of south florida is doing as i was drafting some of the content of my book and in background research i had done with the podcast

with dr k bennett i find maddie's work absolutely fascinating and relevant to this ultra marathon audience i don't need to tell you all that ultra runners are a high identity group we identify with our sports so much so that almost all of our friends our entire peer group and even the social bonds tend to highly revolve around our activities and training at as ultra marathon runners so it's with this social and behavioral context as a backdrop that i wanted to explore the connection between athletic and exercise identity a bit further and maddie's research neatly folds into this narrative with that as a backdrop open your ears and open your minds and i'm going to get right out of the way get ready for this conversation with maddie palermo all about identity and eating disorders so you know what's kind of kind of interesting related to that is is i've been familiar with your work for a few years and you know when i actually wanted to bring you on the show it was surprising to me that you hadn't finished your doctorate yet and i don't know whether that's just a representation of like like your work and when it's been published or or what how so how can you explain that to me because when we had the correspondence i was like oh my gosh like not that it's bad or anything like that but it really surprised me because i've run across your work a couple of times before yeah well i mean i'm happy to hear that my work is is kind of reaching the right people um so i am doing a clinical psychology PhD which is typically four or five years of grad school in

the traditional sense of classes and you do research during that time and you also do some clinical training so i see clients and provide therapy as part of that um and i'm in my fifth year now so i'm rounding out that that cycle and then um in order to earn your degree you have to do a one-year clinical internship so very similar to how med students match for residency we all match for our one-year internship and that's like a 40 hour a week we are providing therapy services um as part of your internship so that's where i'm going next um july 1st is my start date and i'm doing my internship at um university of california san diego oh other side of the other side of the other side of the country yes so and and most people move for internship that's just part of kind of the process so once i complete that year i finally earn the PhD um but you know i think a really important part of of earning the PhD is you're actively doing your research the entire five years and you really come out ready to be an independent researcher and start your career yeah it's very thorough i mean once again i've been kind of familiar with the work that you've done and the work that your lab has done for for a while but for the the almost all the listenership is not going to be familiar with that so explain to the listeners what the depth lab at uh the university of south florida actually does and

who's involved and what kind of research are you are you guys working on absolutely so the depth lab stands for disordered eating prevention treatment and health and it's run by dr diana rancourt who also studies eating disorders disordered eating and maldaptive exercise so i am one of her five grad students and we all kind of work within our different niches within the lab so i really focus on identity and disordered eating and exercise behaviors um one of my fellow lab mates he's really invested in sort of males and disordered eating and even exercise behaviors within that realm um another one of my lab mates really does look at things um like weight stigma and how that affects disordered eating behaviors so we kind of all do our own little things under the same umbrella of trying to work towards understanding preventing and treating disordered eating and exercise behaviors and the the exercise behaviors piece it's not like unique or novel but it's something that you're like kind of like deliberately incorporating into this mix of how you guys are studying this this complex mental health issue right so why is that a specific focus of what you guys are doing so that's really important to me actually so for a really long time exercise was just kind of thought of as you know a component of an eating disorder so someone might

exercise to burn off food or exercise in order to um eat and that was really thought of as almost like a uh sort of behavior that goes along with having an eating disorder and my whole thought process behind it is i think that that someone can have disordered exercise and this maladaptive relationship with exercise without some of the other eating disorder behaviors so maybe you're not binging purging or restricting but it's really only this sort of exercise component that you're doing and we often don't really look at that as its own independent maladaptive health behavior so kind of taking a focus away from having that traditional eating disorder outlook outlook and focusing more on okay are you having this maladaptive relationship with exercise that maybe you don't fit the classic eating disorder mold and looking at it that way well and here's the thing here's why this research is kind of like so fascinating and also kind of almost befuddling to be honest with you in the endurance world and particularly in the world that i am which is the ultra endurance world is that the exercise behaviors are extreme by default right yes and it's very hard to to unentangle extreme exercise behaviors with just normal like kind of like normal day-to-day training because the clinical definitions of what many of you and your colleagues kind of like see uh either in practice

or in research those might be abnormal or atypical behaviors in a in your average population your average populations of students which is a lot of what uh of what you all study but they're more indicative or they're more normalized in the in in the cohort of ultra marathon athletes as is the parallel to that is is as is their eating behaviors right and so it becomes this really kind of like messy ball of wax to try to to try to try to unentangle especially for me as a coach when i'm when i'm working with athletes to try to try to pick up on some of the some of the the cues and the identifiers for when i need to bring in like external assistance from people like you or people like my my colleague kig bennett who i've uh had on the on the podcast before so i'm hoping this podcast can kind of enlighten us to to to all to try to unentangle you know some of the stuff that i know that a lot of people are are are kind of kind of kind of confused by so one of the things that you just mentioned is one of the areas of focus that you have is on athletic and exercise identity and trying to create a little bit of a separation between those two and how that actually affects disordered eating or eating disorders before we get into it too much because the topic is going to be you know the topic is going to be really novel for a lot of listeners what are what are those two things very specifically and how can we view them from more of a practical standpoint absolutely and so i think when you're thinking of an eating disorder

that's something that meets clinical diagnostic criteria you're hitting all the boxes of someone who has you know anorexia nervosa bulimia nervosa it's it's really a clinical diagnosis that someone is given and disordered eating behaviors i think is almost like a step back from that so it's not so much that you're hitting clinical criteria for these things but they might still be a little bit um abnormal or they could still interfere with day-to-day functioning maybe you're not doing it enough to where it reaches that clinical threshold things of that nature so it's it's a little nuanced um behind it but it's more thinking of clinical diagnostic or maybe just a little bit less severe than that um and one thing i also want to clarify too is when i talk about compulsive exercise because that is can be very nuanced as well i really try to stay away from thinking about exercise frequency as something that tells me if it's adaptive or maladaptive because i think someone who trains for marathons or ultra marathons you're probably running a lot and if you come into the clinical room and you're like yeah i run 18 miles a day or whatever and if someone's only going on frequency yeah that might raise a flag but what i really more like to think of it is your thoughts and feelings behind your exercise behavior so is there flexibility there can you take a rest day when you're feeling unwell or when you're injured how do you

feel about taking a rest day or your thoughts and feelings about food consumption and exercise so i think it's i try to really take a nuanced approach to that instead of just looking at it from a clear oh you're exercising a lot this must be bad yeah it can't be it can't be it can't be volume dependent right because you know when you're getting into like 20 or 30 hours a week of training like a lot of ultra marathon athletes do and a lot of ironman athletes do and i'm thinking about it it kind of throws those norms it throws a lot of those norms out of the window so i want to get back to this identity piece right this identity between an athlete versus your kind of like exercise identity and the the point of view that i'm coming from is is a lot of people find ultra running as a byproduct of an extension of a sport that they used to do either running or team sports in college and things like that and they end up finding like their tribe right their community and that's a big that's a big part of the trail running culture so to speak is it is a very kind of like tight-knit you know tight night tight-knit community and i always like to say it's the same group of idiots we just go to different locations and it really is i mean you get you know you're in the sport for a few years and you kind of know everybody uh at that point but in some in some cases i've always viewed that as a potential negative right we're over identifying with the sport that we are participating in and so i want i want this is your area of expertise how would you view that i mean how first off how are we separating an

exercise identity versus an athletic identity and when does that actually become potentially problematic yes and you know i think this is something in my research career that really i was trying to tease apart as well um so at first you know i was really interested in working with athletes and this idea of athletic identity and how it is measured in the classic literature which you know the scale we use to measure athletic identity is has items on it that's like i see myself as an athlete i have many goals related to my sport things of that nature so it's very sport focused um i spend more time thinking about my sport than anything else and it's really how much you know and it can go from like let's say zero to ten um ten being athletic identity is this the most important thing in your life um and what i found is sometimes that classification fits athletes but sometimes it doesn't necessarily always fit everyone because it's really focused on sport and it depends how people think about their sport involvement um you know some people who you know i've spoken to who do more of a crossfit they're like well you know i don't know if it's my sport necessarily but it's really my passion and it's something i i love and that kind of brought me to the idea of exercise identity which is asks more things like um being an exerciser is

more than just exercising to me i would feel a real loss if i couldn't exercise anymore and i think a person can have both i think a person can have both athletic and exercise identity um and i think it's really individual to what resonates more with the person however having too much of either one is where it gets to more of a problem so if this is like the only thing in your life exercise or athletic identity and there's not much flexibility around it then we start to see some problematic behaviors emerge occasionally from this and the paper that we're referring to or most of the content that you were just referring to kind of relates back to a paper that you wrote this is a 2001 paper in uh eating weight disorders is that the name of the paper so i just got the abbreviation abbreviation yeah eating and weight disorders is the journal and then it's called understanding athletic and exercise identity in relation to disorder needed behaviors and so can you try to try can you try to expand upon when it becomes too problematic and because i know the listeners are trying to like well you know identify as an athlete but and i did and i identify and i like to you know i like to run and these are my people as i as i spoke about earlier but is there is there a threshold or even behavioral cues that you can focus in on that you as a clinician when somebody kind of like

comes into you and is consulting with you that you would say yeah we need to reframe the way that you view yourself as an athlete or as somebody who exercises or has somebody who participates in this sport yeah so that's a great question and i think what it really comes down to is how this identity is showing up in your life so for instance if you have this really high athletic identity but it's not causing you interpersonal difficulties you're not having a difficult relationship with exercise you're not engaging in disordered eating behaviors maybe this athletic identity at its height it is okay for you i think where it comes into play is sometimes when this identity becomes very strong then individuals engage in maladaptive behaviors to reinforce this identity so when you're thinking about an athlete and i've seen this you know just anecdotally in my own clinical work thinking about athletes and that identity is so strong and they want to succeed so well that they're willing to then they think it makes sense to reduce food intake to increase performance or lose weight to increase performance because i want to strive and succeed as an athlete and that's actually going to be more harmful in the long run to to your athletic performance and and to yourself mentally and so i think that that's where the question really leads to is this something that can be maladaptive but what's really interesting about this paper that we're

speaking about is athletic identity was not really associated with many disordered eating behaviors or maladaptive exercise it was that exercise identity that was more strongly associated with these things which is which is interesting in and of itself because i think a lot of people often think of athletes as this really at-risk population and maybe for a lot of individuals that's not the case so it's not the worst thing in the world to highly identify with the sport that you're doing or highly identify as an athlete within that particular sport from an eating disorder standpoint it doesn't appear to be as as problematic as as maybe previously hypothesized once again that's why i found that interesting right because we've heard that for we've heard that for years that this very strong identity towards whatever sport that you were doing whether it was running or gymnastics or you know archery or wrestling or kind of whatever like if you were like really like really into it for whatever reason that behavioral uh those behavioral qualities that really drew you into the sport where you had high identification within that one sport group also led to these these you know disordered eating behaviors and kind of finds out or turns out to be that link isn't quite as uh strong as we initially thought yeah i know it's surprising to me as well and that really kind of changed my focus to okay maybe it's not athletes maybe it's not this athletic component maybe there's something with exercise and uh so yeah i was

when i wrote this paper we totally were thinking oh yeah athletic identity definitely going to give us a disordered eating and was not the case huh okay so there's going to be some people that are listening to this podcast that are going to go to these this this paper that i mentioned and i'm going to link it up in the show notes and one of the common themes that that kind of resonates throughout a lot of you and your colleagues works is you guys are doing it on college people which is not indifferent from the sports science literature that's the world that i am i'm in right we're in actually science sports science and it's all college dudes like let's just like face it like most of the sports science literature out there they're a good population to bring into the lab and to poke and prod and you can do it for relatively free and there's a lot of them out there and in in the literature that that you're producing has a similar tone where it's a lot of college age athletes and so people out there will want to know well is this translatable post-college when they're in normal life when they're outside of the dorm they're outside of the campus they're grown they've got kids and a job and a 401k and all this stuff like it how what things might be may or may not be translatable from what you guys are studying in that specific population group yeah so you know i think that that's one thing with psych as a literature we've we love our college students um and i think although we haven't had any data to support this yet there probably are some levels of transition i think if you're thinking about someone who's no longer a college student and is more of you know adult functioning day to day it may be that

athletic identity doesn't have as much space or time or it could be that athletic identity becomes one thing that someone really focuses on because there's not other distractions of college classes etc so i do think in some ways this could transition out and thinking of okay well what does this look like if someone's really experiencing high athletic identity or high exercise identity again is this identity driving these maladaptive behaviors and if so maybe that's something to look in where it's in question and and wonder about your own experience with those identities i do think that identity does go past the college student level um and is probably in some ways can be more important to someone post college yeah i mean i i find both ends of the spectrum right where i work with athletes that are immediately post college and they're still a runner and you know being becoming a trail runner and ultra runner is kind of an extension of that identity that they formed in college and then also find you know adult athletes later on in life that had no previous sport background that have now found some identity that they really connect with through kind of through that particular sport and so your idea of like this like transitioning layers i think kind of like really holds true because people are coming at it from different parts of the continuum yeah and i do think that links up to another paper i wrote in a way um it's still among college students but it was looking at athletic identity self-reported

athletic identity so how much someone identifies and their self-reported level of competition and what we found was in individuals with high athletic identity but were engaging in low levels of competition that they were engaging in more disordered eating behaviors wait a minute say that say that again because i want that to kind of like resonate because everybody thinking wait a minute high this low this leads to that like say that again because i think that's going to resonate with a lot of people yes so someone who has high athletic identity so your athletic identity is really salient and important but participating at low level of competition so let's say rank your competition level on a scale of one to ten someone on that lower side of engaging in competition level that individual is engaging in more disordered eating behaviors that's so interesting yeah and you you you kind of um uh you just you you can speculate a little bit on why that actually is from a clinician's point of view why yeah i mean you think it's i think it's all about that identity not being fulfilled yeah so if it's so important to you you know athletics and engaging in athletic activities and then you're kind of like let's say you came from so again this is among college students let's say you came from being a high school varsity athlete and now you're playing like intramural level that's a huge shift you know maybe you weren't weren't going to play in college but that's still

a huge shift in expectations and um you know sport level that you're you're really engaging in and that could be really unfulfilling because you're so used to something else well it's important because it's not the other way around too right people with low low athletic like low athletic identity that are competing in a high a high level or think that they have a high level of competition don't have those same behaviors no and it's all about the fulfillment gap or what i'm calling the fulfillment gap that feels accurate to me yeah wow so like so freaking interesting so um one of the things that uh uh that i wanted to get your opinion on is ultra marathon has this kind of like rich history of trying to manipulate eating behaviors in an ergogenic way right so we have all of these different uh types of nutrition tools at our disposal we can manipulate macronutrient intake we can manipulate the total energy intake and it's all done mainly at the elite level but it also kind of like trickles down into the recreational level to try to improve performance and i wanted to get your take on this as a clinician because i'm i'm kind of like fascinated by it because some people will take the position or take the argument that doing that is a slippery slope right you're kind of like you have a you have a kind of a primed population right for eating disorders and disordered eating and now you're throwing in and in like an intentional you know carrot to them no pun intended to to to

to kind of fuel that behavior and so knowing what you know about the behavioral side as well as the predisposition side which is what we're talking about earlier how these how these behaviors kind of predisposition people what do you what do you have to say about incorporating some of these strategies intentionally as like a ergogenic aid of sorts you know i think it would to me i'd really want to be mindful of how the client or the individual was talking about flexibility of these behaviors so for example you got a race coming up in a month and maybe you're going to do some uh different eating patterns or try different things to improve performance for that month and then you're going to go back to eating normally and or you know even within that month you've got a couple days where you're you know you're having different meals that might not follow that exact diet and it's not it's not the end of the world it's not something that is is so distressing and i think that's where i really come at it from a clinical perspective is their distress created by this diet is their rigidity created by this diet and how long does that last because i think if something is is a temporary option to improve performance and there's flexibility and ability to kind of go back then it might not raise as much of a red flag when i'm thinking of a clinical perspective as someone who's adopting this and

is going to these extreme lengths for a long period of time you know it's interesting i'm going to link this up in the show notes to my previous uh discussion uh with with kate who that i mentioned earlier that's basically the exact same thing that she tuned in that she always tunes into she said she she'll always tell me whenever whenever i'm helping whenever she's kind of like helping me navigate these things or whenever i'm kind of like asking her counsel on stuff that the lack of flexibility or rigidity in the whatever strategy that you're actually trying whatever nutritional strategy that you're actually trying that's the kind of the the kind of the linchpin in everything if you if the client or the athlete can demonstrate flexibility once the competition is over i'm going to go i'm going to change my pattern up no problem no problem right because they're using it as a tool for a specific and for specific end goal when that flexibility is not there the rigidity is there the competition's there and the behavior continues those are when the kind of the alarm bells start to sound totally exactly yeah i'm not surprised i think a lot of us come from that same perspective of okay is there flexibility is there room for movement and trying to identify the problematic behaviors because there's a lot of here here's also where i come out of there's a lot of peanut gallery stuff going on too which i i personally detest you know because you never really know what's going on with the individual but i do think that people are genuinely trying to be help like helpful like just people out in the

community that are concerned with people's you know health and welfare that are not on the clinical side such as you know yourself and some of my other colleagues they're just genuinely trying to be helpful but a lot of times they don't have like uh on almost all cases they don't have it kind of have the toolkit right to actually provide like advice and counsel and to have the right you know filter put on put on things so that they can actually do the right thing so a lot of the you know kind of a lot of the like the peanut gallery it's not due to them it's just due to them being kind of like unequipped i guess is what what i'm saying they want to help and i want to try to bring tools into for people to where they can actually where they actually can help absolutely and i think you know a lot of people might think hey this really was effective for me this could be effective for someone else and you know i'm a big proponent of everybody needs different fueling and nutrition and although that's not what i'm an expert in i still think it's really important that everyone looks genetically different and you know you might need something that someone else might not so what would you say to uh what would you say to a runner um that is kind of like coming into the sport that has just a really high uh identification with um their particular type of exercise right they really crave it they want to do it all the time and they somehow and it's somehow and they start to start to display behaviors that are um

uh that that are just not conducive to them kind of like living a full life and think of their like they're like um they don't see their friends and family as much because they're training they kind of like forego their responsibilities home at home because they are you know too like engaged in their training like how do you start to counsel that how do you start to counsel those athletes initially yeah you know i think initially we talk about what it would look like to take a rest day or a lot of individuals with these um sort of behaviors are exercising two three times a day even and it's like what would it look like to skip one of those how how would that feel just a little bit like not a lot a little bit right you know and i think i think that that is so important is um you don't just want to rip it away because that is you know an athlete is who they are running is running or whatever sport you're engaging in that's an important part of of your life and so ripping all of it away at once can be very distressing and i don't want to have you never run again that's not something that would be joyful for anyone it's more of a how can we build this relationship with running or whatever the sport may be that that is allowing you to live this life so instead of taking three daily runs could could you take two on a wednesday how would that look for you and then slowly trying to get it back to a more manageable space and i think that that looks different for everyone because i know i i ran a marathon

several years ago now and i know that i was running a lot to be successful so you know backing it off to being like hey don't do your long run that might not be effective in that moment it's all about trying to rebalance and restructure around it it's almost like a progressive overload approach just like we would use as an athlete you know if you're lifting 20 pounds today you know tomorrow let's try 22 pounds right if you're right if you're running 30 miles a week let's try 35 miles a week right i mean you're kind of taking that same approach it's more of a deloading approach but it's not taking everything away at once which i'm calling overload it's just taking the manageable pieces away at once yeah and i think too a lot of people listening might think oh yeah i could skip my you know whatever my saturday run to go to a birthday party no problem and there's other people that might be listening and thinking i i could not do that so i think it's you know it's easy it's easier said than done for many individuals who should who struggle with this yeah i often so when i'm when i'm working with athletes that have a hard time like letting go of something very specific i have them put that in context of the big picture to see if it will make sense to them okay this one workout or this one thing is 10 kilometers 10 kilometers is probably one tenth of the entirety of training that you're doing yeah if that is still a big deal to you we need to work on other things because it's not right let's just hashtag math the situation out right like from a training perspective if your goal is to you know get better in your sport

and all that other thing that is not a material aspect of it yet you are blowing the the you're blowing out of proportion the meaning of this very small fraction of the entirety of training and and what is the meaning behind that is it is it that because i didn't do this one training component i can't eat lunch is it because i didn't do this one training that i won't be good at my sport like what you know what is it behind it because missing things occasionally you're skipping should be okay you know yeah 100 okay so um i mentioned earlier kind of the peanut gallery and i want to give the opportunity for for like you because you are in the field right you know where all the tools are and there are people in the ultra marathon world that are that absolutely need to see somebody like yourself or my colleague kate or you know whoever where how do you get people into those resources like what can you tell a friend who know who their training partner somebody on their team somebody in their running club or whatever they want to like get them some counsel in that area how would you counsel those people to approach that with their friends and training partners yeah i mean i think we're really in a public mental health crisis to a certain extent it is very hard to find a therapist right now in a general sense um i think if you want someone who is going to feel like they can understand what you're going through um a lot of the times there's the academy for eating disorders and

we have eating disorder clinicians like a um director of eating disorder clinicians and some of those individuals will say i work with athletes um there's also nutritionists through that that you can see you can find sort of more tailored individuals to your needs um i think in general when you're searching for a therapist if some if you're someone who exercise is really important to you'll want to suss that out in your therapist um can they understand this if someone's like okay you run ultra marathons cool but right now we really need you to not do that that might not be something that really is like the most effective therapeutic relationship and i don't know if that would make you feel understood so i think going in with a perspective of you know reading bios looking if if you are searching for someone with an eating disorder background the academy for eating disorders is a great place to start um there's also the female athlete conference every uh every other year and they present on some amazing research and there's really great clinicians linked up with that as well and i know that's right now now it's female athlete only but um hopefully that'll still resonate with enough people and in the list listener base yeah because the resources are out there but it's not as common as like a physical therapist right i think that's a that's a that's a more common thing where people know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody that had their it band fixed by so and so yeah yeah

exactly and they struggle a lot with trying to find kind of the right resources so i'm going to link those up in the show notes and obviously after the recording if you want me to to put anything else in there i'll i'll link them up as well definitely so before we let you go maddie what's next for you i mean you mentioned that you're going to move out to the west coast it's a big you know it's the longest journey across the u.s that you can probably imagine what what are you what are you looking to do next in your academic in your clinical career so uh after clinical internship year i'm really hoping to have like sort of a research and clinical career my hope is to develop identity um identity related treatment and modules so right now in eating disorder treatment we don't really talk about identity um we don't talk about exercise identity or athletic identity some treatments really don't address exercise behaviors at all so i'm really hoping to get into that space and work towards creating identity focused treatment um and working with individuals with with exercise um problematic exercise i i have a i have a feeling that there's going to be uh you know i hate to i hate to say this because i'm like predicting a doomsday event or something like that but there's going to be there are people out there just because of how society is becoming like more and more attached to the sport groups they're doing as a as more of a research to cling on to something you know so i think that that's something like that is going to end up being you know incredibly value an incredibly valuable resource and practitioners in

the space are going to be needed yes i would hope so and i think too right now we're in this weird space with like all these different online platforms of telling people what we should or shouldn't be doing for exercise and so much of that can get internalized when it's maybe that's not safe for you or something so you know i think the exercise space in these next couple years will be really interesting well there's a lot of like practitioners in the space like like like myself that are starting to realize that we're kind of like woefully adequate in this area um and i would i would broaden it out to psychology in general because yeah we have an incredible sports science uh history and background within training coaches and people that kind of interact with athletes coming from that sports science side of things and because of that because of that kind of like dominance we lack a lot in these other sides and that's why i have to bring people like you know like you on a podcast to like help me figure out and help me at least get to like a kindergarten or a fourth grade level you know with a lot of this stuff because the fact of the matter is it is like you said we're in a mental health crisis and it's becoming more and more important for not only the athletes out there to become educated on it but the coaches out there that have to be interdisciplinary to become educated on it as well all absolutely and i think i think especially with disordered eating and these things are scary for people to want to touch um you know and so i think the more that we can kind of educate and understand

what this might look like and help people question their own relationship with these things the better off we will all be i 100 agree with you i appreciate you coming on the podcast it's always enlightening for uh for me because like i said it's an area where i'm trying to get to an elementary school level of proficiency and it's a constant it's a constant learning exercise uh so i've always been appreciative of of people like you in the space where can people get to know more about you or the depth lab or any of the work that you're uh that you're doing yes so um the depth lab has a website let me see if i can remember the i'll link it up in the show notes yeah you can link it up like it's usf depth lab and then i'm on um twitter as maddie a palermo um and i tweet about a lot of my research that i do that's actually a big space where i interface with um a lot of different clinicians people i've never met different researchers it's a really great resource just for sharing articles and things of that nature so feel free to check me out there as well twitter's getting a lot of hate in the mental uh health space right now but there are some shining lights in it if you can kind of like stay in your circle so curated you know like i've got my people and that's what i need and yeah it's a very safe space for me keep it on the following tab and don't switch over to the four you suggested there you go advice from a professional right there on how to navigate to where these days i've always said that

my mute my mute list and my follow list if i can like curate those really tightly i've got a good effective twitter feed at what i want it to do which is to serve me the best information possible absolutely yeah gotta be careful maybe we'll have a whole episode on how to curate twitter we can bring in people from all sides of the space that'll leave that for the future anyway i appreciate it links to the notes links in the show notes will be to everything we talked about but once again thank you for what you do and coming on the podcast today of course good to speak with you all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to maddie for coming on the podcast today and helping me understand a lot more about a topic that i am continually trying to learn about as a coach as i mentioned from the onset of this podcast whenever i discuss eating disorders or disordered eating i always want to make sure that i'm really bringing in the true experts in the room the people that are at the coalface of working with athletes and working with people in order to help them overcome this type of disease or these types of behaviors maddie is an excellent example of that and i encourage everybody out there if you think you are suffering from disordered eating or an eating disorder or you have a friend a training partner or one of your loved ones that you feel needs help go to one of the links that i'm leaving in the show notes for the academy for eating disorders there are a number of resources there as well as an area where you can find a practitioner or clinician in your area if you choose to reach out

to them appreciate the heck out of all the listeners out there if you find this podcast valuable please share it with your friends your colleagues and your training partners that is the way that we get the word about this podcast out and i appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails