Coming Full Circle: Dietitian inspired to help others from care she got as an anorexia sufferer
By Aimee Zink
For The Corvallis Clinic
It all started with some seemingly harmless comments.
“Have you lost weight?”“You look good!”
Laura Luczkiw (looch-Q) was flattered by the compliments, which she began receiving when she changed her eating habits while working around an unconventional work schedule during high school.
“Before I knew it, I was counting calories a lot,” explains Luczkiw, now a dietitian nutritionist at The Corvallis Clinic’s Weight Loss Center.“I was super restrictive with how much I would eat. It was a quick spiral.”
Luczkiw didn’t realize it at the time, but she had thedangerous eating disorder of anorexia nervosa.She was deeply in denial for a long time, justifying her low food intake by telling herself that she was trying to be healthy by losing weight. Eventually her parents, friends, and teachers couldn’t help but notice and express their concern.
However, like many eating disorder sufferers, she became angry when confronted and denied that she had a problem. “I was so mad at everyone who asked me about it. I thought, ‘how dare you?’”
The Toll
Anorexia began to take more and more of a physical toll on Luczkiw’sbody. When her parents brought her to see a doctor, he found that her heart rate had slowed to a dangerous level.
Her hair had begun falling out, too.
And, her body was wasting away.
But even with this medical evidence, Luczkiw was still in stubborn denial. “I was unaware and unwilling to face it,” she says. Eventually, though, she went through a remarkable change. She developed a special understanding of what it’s like to have an unhealthy relationship with food, and it sparked in her a desire to help others battling food issues.
The Breakthough
“When I look back on myself from almost 10 years ago, it feels like a different person,” Luczkiwsays.
What finally broke through her wall of denial was a spiritual and emotional experience at a Christian women’s conference. She describes the scene: “This girl gets up and says, ‘Hi, my name is Laura,’ so my ears perk up a little. Then she goes on, ‘and I used to be anorexic.’ At that moment, it felt like all the weight of the world came on my shoulders. It finally hit me: I have an eating disorder.”
It was finally time to ask for help.
The Road to Recovery
Her parents took her to a dietitian in her native Illinois. The dietitian had suffered from an eating disorder herself when she was Luczkiw’s age. “She was the first person that I talked to who I felt really got me,” Luczkiw says. As much as her loved ones tried to understand her situation, there was no way that they could relate because they hadn’t experienced an eating disorder themselves. “Something that people would say to me that was really hard to deal with was, ‘Just eat, why can’t you just eat?’ But it’s not that simple. That’s why seeing her was such a relief.”
Luczkiw recalls that one of the first things the dietitian asked her was if she could hear voices in her head. “It sounds creepy,” Luczkiw says with a laugh. “But I did. I had this voice that was telling me to restrict. The fact that she knew that was so helpful to me.”
She helped Luczkiw understand the biological impact of her disorder. She explained to her that she needed to give her body a certain number of calories for it to be able to function. She also helped her take steps to understand her personal, emotional relationship with food. She had her take a personality quiz that revealed that she had a perfectionistic streak, which is common in anorexia sufferers.
When they were coming up with a treatment plan together, the dietitian asked Luczkiw about her “feared foods,” which will set her off in a restricting spiral if she eats them. “She told me that at first I shouldn’t try to eat those, I should eat what feels safe. So that made me feel much more comfortable.”.
It was this experience with a dietitian that helped her become the happy and healthy person she is today and that inspired her to become a dietitian herself. “After seeing her for a little bit, I got to the point where I realized that I really want to help people.”
Full Circle
Now with an MS in nutrition and dietetics, Luczkiw has come full circle and finds great joy in helping others who struggle with food in a variety of ways. Like her dietitian in Illinois, her own experience allows her to empathize with her patients in a special way. “There are so many things that are scary and unknown for people about food. It’s this area that we can control, but we feel like we can’t. That’s the emotional side of things.”
Emotions such as happiness, sadness, and guilt are deeply intertwined with food, Luczkiw says, and this can be a difficult challenge for those who are trying to change their eating habits. “It’s interesting because you think of food as a celebratory thing,” she says. “But it’s also something you do when you’re stressed out. It’s something you do mindlessly. It’s an easy thing to turn to for any sort of emotion or lack thereof. So it’s something that we have to learn to be aware of.”
Luczkiw truly loves the work she does at the Weight Loss Center. “The people who come here are motivated, and they want to learn,” she says. “That’s been so fun, to be able to teach people. You can help somebody get to freedom with food,especially when it’s not about the scale. Like when somebody can make it up the stairs, or get off medications, or go on a hike with their family. I love helping people get to those moments.”