I'm sitting down with Amy - a nutritionist of nearly 25 years and a licensed EMDR trauma therapist who got into this work the hard way, through her own ten-year battle with anorexia.

Amy doesn't hold back. She talks about recovering from an eating disorder in the '80s when there was basically no treatment for it, the abuse and constant moving that marked her childhood, and losing her brother to addiction eight years ago. Along the way she drops the kind of ideas that stick with you: that an addiction is usually the solution, not the problem. That there's a 1940s starvation study showing how restricting food can turn a perfectly healthy person anxious, obsessive, and depressed in three months. That so much of what we call willpower or personality — the overspending, the doom-scrolling, the not being able to sit in a quiet room — traces back  ...