Chronic Illness & Eating Disorders: How Sick Is "Sick Enough" with Tamie Gangloff

In today’s episode, I am joined by therapist, author, and educator Tamie Gangloff to blow the lid off a massive blind spot in women's healthcare: the intersection of chronic illness and disordered eating.When you live with chronic pain, inflammation, or conditions like endometriosis, adenomyosis, or hEDS, your relationship with food automatically gets complicated. We try so hard to control our symptoms through what we eat that we can easily slide into disordered patterns without even realizing it.Tamie opens up about her own journey, from hearing the word "deformity" and it shaping her experience throughout life to her recent hysterectomy where Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) made recovery much longer and harder than expected, triggering intense post-surgical anxiety.We dive deep into why the "sick enough" mentality is keeping you from getting the help you deserve and how to actually rebuild body trust when healing isn’t linear.In This Episode, We Discuss:The Intersection of Chronic Illness & Disordered Eating: Why living with a chronic condition automatically complicates your relationship with food and movement.Eating Disorders vs. Disordered Eating: Unpacking the crucial nuance between a clinical diagnosis and the survival-driven food anxieties that develop around chronic pain.The "Sick Enough" Trap: How internal gatekeeping and medical dismissal convince women their pain isn’t severe enough to warrant deeper lab investigations or specialist care.The Control Fallacy: How to use food as a supportive tool for your health without slipping down the slope of self-blame when a diet doesn’t "cure" your chronic illness.Weight Bias in Medicine: The dangerous assumption that thin equals healthy and heavy equals unhealthy, and how this bias delays care.Connect with Tamie:Website: https://www.tamiegangloff.com/Book: Chronic Illness and Eating Disorders: Assessment, Clinical Skills, and Lived ExperiencesAs mentioned in class:National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated DisordersFree Medical Appt Pre-Planning GuideInsight TimerEDS Conference at University of Virginia