Disordered Eating in Active and Sedentary Individuals

Marsha Hudnall, MS, RD, CD, and Karin Kratina, PhD, MPE, RD, LD/N

In this interactive course you will participate in activities designed to help you understand and apply the principles of the nondiet approach to working with individuals with disordered eating. The course is supplemented by the text, Disordered Eating in Active and Sedentary Individuals by Marsha Hudnall and Karin Kratina. The text provides advanced nutrition information that will help you as you work through the course.

In the course you will assume the role of a newly hired fitness trainer at a company called CityCenter Fitness Facility, where you will start a 5-day orientation to your job. During your orientation period, Sandra Carter, CityCenter Fitness Facility's dietitian, will introduce you to concepts you'll need to be familiar with to do your job. Before you begin each section of the course, please be sure that you've read the assigned chapter in the student text. The approaches outlined in this course are appropriate for all individuals whether they experience disordered eating or not. In fact, clients with "normal" eating can develop disordered eating when trying to follow traditional recommendations such as focusing on caloric intake. However, clients with "normal" eating would not need the more extensive interventions outlined and instead could begin working on refining their responses to hunger and satiety and quality of diet work.

Consequences of Dieting

In your first session with Sandra you’ll discuss the consequences of dieting, externally regulated eating, and weightism. The session will help you learn to identify the consequences of dieting and its impact on development of disordered eating and eating disorders. You’ll explore fat discrimination and understand the concept of weightism. You’ll learn the definition a natural, healthy weight and learn to apply measures of metabolic fitness to assess a client's health and fitness.

Attuned Versus Disordered Eating

Building on what you learned in the first session, you now take a look at your eating style so that you can better understand your personal eating behaviors and begin to recognize how they may affect your opinions about eating. Then, you'll look closely at normal eating and compare it to three other types of eating. Finally, you'll take a close look at how disordered eating can be difficult to identify in an active individual.

Reframing Relationships With Food

In this unit, you're going to explore a new way of looking at healthful eating: a way that includes all foods, even if they are richer and commonly considered forbidden. You're also going to explore the impact of judgments and moralizations about food choices, to begin to understand the negative impact of such criticisms on an individual's ability to make food choices that truly support them. Finally, you'll look at several techniques you can use to help your clients learn how to eat foods they previously thought were forbidden, and learn how to eat them without anxiety.

Internally Regulated Eating

This unit will focus on HungerWork, a method by which to help your clients begin to use their internal cues to guide their eating. In modern society, where many people view diet advice as the way to eat healthfully whether they are trying to lose weight or not, internal cues for eating commonly go unrecognized. Many of us do not realize they exist, and when we do realize it, we ignore them, not understanding that they are our best guide for eating well. In this unit, you're going to walk through a process for beginning to recognize and interpret internal cues for eating, and explore the very common misconception that food makes us fat. You're also going to look at how to guide clients in using food journals and how to interpret their results so that you can help clients focus their efforts to eat well on the primary, real obstacles that are creating problems for them.

Joyful, Healthful Eating

In this unit, you're going to move on to what many clients look for when they seek eating advice. You're going to look at how you can best help them achieve a nutritional intake that will support their physical performance and health, but you're going to focus on how to do so without setting up disordered eating.

Scope of Practice

In this final unit, you're going to look at the extremes of disordered eating: eating disorders. This unit will help prepare you to recognize eating disorders when they occur in clients, and to find and refer them for help by professionals skilled in treating eating disorders. That's the bottom line with eating disorders. Because they can quickly become very serious and even life threatening, eating disorders are outside the scope of practice of fitness or nutrition professionals who are not specifically trained in this area.

Course Test

Finally, you’ll take the online course test, which covers material from the interactive study guide and from the reading assignments.

System Requirements

This course is designed to work best when your computer and Internet browser are configured to the following technical requirements and setup specifications:

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