What is disordered eating? What is the difference between disordered eating and an eating disorder? Disordered Eating in Active and Sedentary Individuals will distinguish between disordered eating and eating disorders and will help you learn how to teach proper eating habits to active and sedentary individuals. 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 people with disordered eating.

Throughout the course you will do the following:

• Identify the consequences of dieting and its impact on development of disordered eating and eating disorders
  
• Evaluate personal eating behaviors and begin to recognize how they may affect opinions about eating
  
• Explore a new way of looking at healthful eating: a way that includes all foods, even if they are commonly considered forbidden
  
• Become familiar with HungerWork, a method to help your clients begin to use their internal cues to guide their eating
  
• Help clients achieve a nutritional intake that will support their physical performance and health, and focus on doing so without encouraging disordered eating
  
• Learn to recognize eating disorders in clients and refer them to professionals skilled in treating eating disorders

The course is supplemented by the 80-page text, Disordered Eating in Active and Sedentary Individuals, by Marsha Hudnall and Karin Kratina. The text contains advanced information on nutrition 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, the dietitian at CityCenter Fitness Facility, will introduce you to the virtual clients you will be working with throughout the course and will discuss the concepts you’ll need to be familiar with to do your job.

The approaches outlined in this course are appropriate for all people, whether they have 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 and instead could begin working on refining their responses to hunger and satiety and working on the quality of their diets.

Unit 1: Consequences of Dieting
In the 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 of a natural, healthy weight and learn to apply measures of metabolic fitness to assess a client’s health and fitness.

Unit 2: 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.

Unit 3: Reframing Relationships With Food
In this unit, you’ll explore a new way of looking at healthful eating: a way that includes all foods, even if they are commonly considered forbidden. You’ll also explore the effects of judgments and moralizations about food choices so that you can understand each person’s ability to make food choices that truly support him or her. 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.

Unit 4: Internally Regulated Eating
This unit focuses on HungerWork, a method that will 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 these cues 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’ll walk through a process of recognizing and interpreting internal cues for eating and explore the common misconception that food makes us fat. You’ll also consider how to guide clients in using food journals and how to interpret their results so that you can help them focus their efforts to eat well and to discover the primary obstacles that are creating problems for them.

Unit 5: Joyful, Healthful Eating
In this unit, you’ll move on to what many clients look for when they seek advice on eating well. You’ll look at how you can best help them achieve a nutritional intake that will support their physical performance and health, and you’ll focus on how to do so without encouraging disordered eating.

Unit 6: Scope of Practice
In this final unit, you’ll 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 refer these clients to 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 an online course test, which covers material from the interactive study guide and from the reading assignments.