Trauma, Health at Every Size and Supporting Black Women with Eating Disorders, with Dr. Carolyn Coker-Ross

Today, I’m talking to Dr. Carolyn Coker-Ross, based in the USA and a medical doctor specialising in eating disorders, trauma and addiction.  She presented a TEDxPleasantGrove talk on “The Gifts of Intergenerational Trauma'' in January, 2020.

Dr. Coker-Ross is the author of 3 books, which are recovery workbooks - including: The Food Addiction Recovery Workbook, The Emotional Eating Workbook and The Binge Eating Disorder and Compulsive Overeating Workbook.

She is a contributing author to the recently released book: “Treating Black Women with Eating Disorders: A Clinician’s Guide,” and offers anti-racism consulting work to companies and organisations.

Dr. Coker-Ross came from a family of business entrepreneurs.  When she went into medicine, she founded three women's centres in San Diego offering general medicine and office gynaecology for women. She was named “San Diego Business Woman of the Year."  She later went on to do consulting work at eating disorder treatment facilities where she then founded “The Anchor Program”. This included developing a line of supplements that were used in her consulting work.

The Anchor Program is a 12 week online non-diet approach to treating binge eating, food addiction and emotional eating. The program helps people get to the root cause of food and body image issues, enabling them to make peace with food and their body.

This conversation explores Dr. Coker-Ross’s journey in working with eating disorder patients. She discusses the need for trauma work in healing patients with eating disorders, including intergenerational trauma and race-based trauma, where relevant. Dr Coker-Ross is a strong advocate of HAES (Health at Every Size) and understanding Adverse Childhood Experiences and these are central to her ethos in treatment.

This is an incredibly inspiring conversation, appreciating how much change can be made in the world, from an individual with such passion and dedication to supporting others to heal and to change the world for the better.

To find out more about the Anchor Program, free book, Ted Talk, Podcast and lots more, please go to www.anchorprogram.com and https://carolynrossmd.com/