WOW!!! This episode is a must-listen, especially for those in eating disorder recovery or dealing with any kind of disordered eating. In just one hour, Dr. Anita will enlighten you with her wisdom, humor, and helpful tools for healing your relationship with food.

You will learn...
- how disordered eating can be healed through spiritual stories and metaphors
- why an eating disorder is a unique type of addiction
- the role of “power” in one’s struggle with food - how to uncover symbolic meanings in food
- why recovery is FUN!
- how to find your hunger and fullness cues - and so. much. more.

Remember: full recovery is possible (this is coming from a renowned psychologist who runs a residential treatment center and has helped thousands of people recover for good).

Anita Johnston, Ph.D., is a Depth Psychologist, Certified Eating Disorder Specialist, and author of Eating in the Light of the Moon: How Women Can Transform Their Relationships with Food Through Myth, Metaphor, and Storytelling, which has been published in seven languages. A pioneer in the field, Dr. Johnston has been treating eating difficulties and body image distress for over 35 years. She has developed eating disorder programs nationally and internationally and currently serves as Founder & Executive Director of ‘Ai Pono Hawaii Eating Disorders Programs which has a Residential Program in Maui. She is the co-creator of the Light of the Moon Café, an online resource with interactive and self- study courses for women around the world.

Get Dr. Anita’s free Food Metaphor Guide here.

And sign up for her Feminine Psyche course here.

As a recognized international workshop presenter, Dr. Johnston lectures globally to professional organizations, conferences, universities, medical institutions, and the community at large and provides virtual consultations. She is best known for integrating metaphor and storytelling into her training as a clinical psychologist to explain the complex issues that underlie disordered eating behavior and other struggles with eating and body image. You can find Dr. Anita at https://dranitajohnston.com/ and follow Dr. Anita on Instagram: @dranitajohnston

Mary shares her candid thoughts on modern dating, relationships, marriage and how to approach romantic love with self-love. From the age-old debate about who should pay for the first date to the importance of embodying the qualities you seek in a partner, this episode is filled with honest reflections and thought-provoking insights. Mary challenges traditional relationship narratives, encourages self-reflection, and reminds us that love is not the only path to a fulfilling life.

You will learn about...

• why the person who makes the invitation should pay for the date (and why this often falls on men)
• the unseen emotional and energetic labor women contribute to relationships
• the importance of becoming the person you want to be with
• rethinking the idea that relationships must be hard work
• why love alone is not always enough

Remember: You teach people how to treat you by how you treat yourself.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify. Your feedback helps Mary’s Cup of Tea reach more people who need these self-love reminders!

Get Mary’s self-love books:

1. The Gift of Self-Love, an interactive workbook that will help you build confidence, recognize your worth, and learn to finally love yourself.
2. 100 Days of Self-Love, a guided journal with 100 prompts to help you calm self-criticism and learn to love who you are.

Mentioned In This Episode...

• Ep. 231 talking neurodivergence and 2025 goals with my bestie Dahli Durley
• Ep. 219 of Mary’s Cup of Tea: Should Your Partner Be Your Best Friend? with Rhaina Cohen
• Ep. 234: Reflecting on my trip to Cuba

If you’ve gone through a break-up recently, this episode is for you. We're talking with breakup coach Kendra Allen to learn...

• how to cope with a situationship ending
• why going “no contact” is beneficial to a break-up
• ways that break-ups are similar to addiction recovery

Kendra Allen is a breakup coach, host of the Heal Your Heartbreak Podcast, author of The Breakup Workbook, and founder of Break Up Bestie. After going through a series of painful breakups, Kendra realized there was a huge gap online for practical and healthy heartbreak advice and she set out to fill it. She first launched the @yourbreakupbestie Instagram account in 2017. Since then, Kendra has helped hundreds of thousands of people recover from heartbreak through her blog, social media, coaching, and podcast. Kendra has been featured in Cosmopolitan, On Air with Ryan Seacrest, ABC News, and more.

Follow Kendra on Instagram: @yourbreakupbestie

Learn more about Kendra’s breakup courses

And if you enjoyed this episode, screenshot it and share it on social media! Make sure to tag @maryspodcast and @yourbreakupbestie

For her 27th birthday episode, Mary shares 7 lessons she’s taking into her late-20s. Tune in for learnings on self-acceptance, self-awareness, confidence, joy and self-love as a whole. Hopefully these lessons will change your perspective on what it means to love yourself.

You will learn about...

• the dual nature of self-love
• the surprising secret to discovering your strengths
• a powerful mindset shift that will help you embrace joy—even in the midst of struggle

Remember: Self-love comes not from overcoming our insecurities, but rather from embracing them. We must be-friend our demons and invite all parts of ourselves to sit at the table.

If you want to make Mary’s birthday extra special, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify. Your positive feedback is the best gift ever!

Get Mary’s self-love books:

1. The Gift of Self-Love, an interactive workbook that will help you build confidence, recognize your worth, and learn to finally love yourself.
2. 100 Days of Self-Love, a guided journal with 100 prompts to help you calm self-criticism and learn to love who you are.

Mentioned In This Episode...

• Ep. 150 of Mary’s Cup of Tea: Hidden Meanings in Disordered Eating with Dr. Anita Johnston
• No Bad Parts by Dr. Richard Schwartz

If making friends feels hard, then this episode is for you.

You will learn...

• why making friends as an adult feels hard
• exactly WHERE you’ll find your people
• how to make friends who live close to you
• actionable tips to help you find, keep, and strengthen your friendships

Our guest, Kat Vellos, is a trusted expert on the power of cultivating meaningful friendships. She’s a speaker and author of the book, We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. She’s also the creator of the Better than Small Talk conversation cards and the Better Conversations Calendar. Her work helps people transform disconnection and platonic longing into authentic connection and belonging.

In her former career as a user experience designer at Slack and Pandora, she helped millions of people find music they love and enjoy work a lot more. While working full-time at both of those iconic companies, Kat spent her free time researching and writing her debut book We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. She couldn’t stop herself from writing this book because the thirty-something friendship desert is real and she refused to take “how about we meet up in six weeks?” for an answer. So she used her UX research-n-design superpowers to explore the question “how might we design a better experience of adult friendship and simultaneously put a sizable dent in the loneliness epidemic?” Thousands of readers use her book to improve their friendships every day and her writing is read in over 100 countries. She’s been interviewed by The New York Times, NPR, Communication Arts, The Good Life Project, and many more.

Sign up for Kat’s newsletter here and check out her course, Platonic Action Lab.

And if you enjoyed this episode, screenshot it and share it on social media! Make sure to tag @maryspodcast

Mentioned In This Episode...
How Long Til’ Black Future Month? by N.K. JemisinEp. 195 on Mary’s Cup of Tea: The Most Underrated EmotionWhat if friendship is easier than you think?

(Trigger Warning: Talk of EDs & Fatphobia)

Dear Mary,

How do I navigate friendship with a very fatphobic and generally-judgmental friend?

She is someone I met when I had anorexia. A lot of what we bonded over was the understanding of restrictive eating, because she had struggled with that as well. She is former military and has a lot of military influences to the way she views health and fitness, as well as having parents who engrained fatphobia into her. They would literally sit in the car outside grocery stores and make fun of fat people leaving(not to their faces). Her views and the vocalization of them hurt my soul, they are not an outlook on other people I have ever had, nor would want to have. She talks about these things pretty frequently. A lot of the things she says I would never want my younger sister hearing because I don't want those hurtful views in her head.

I know you wonder, this person sounds awful, why do you have this friend? She is in many ways a wonderful person and a good friend. She is thoughtful, she and I just click in many ways, she is giving and loving to the people close to her, I could go on about qualities I love. But lately my feelings toward her are not good. I don't want to be around her because inevitably she will end up saying some things that really bum me out. I want her to be a lifelong friend, I want to be there for her for anything, I want to babysit her kids...but I would never want her views to be shared with mine.

How do I talk to her about this? Though we challenge each other's views pretty often and are used to confrontation, she is not looking to change her mind on this. For months now I have been avoiding spending as much time around her. Neither of us have many other friends...she is a treasured person for me. What's your advice on keeping or losing a friend because of this?

If you enjoyed this Dear Mary episode, share and tag @maryspodcast on social media!

Get Mary’s self-love books:

The Gift of Self-Love, an interactive workbook that will help you build confidence, recognize your worth, and learn to finally love yourself.
100 Days of Self-Love, a guided journal with 100 prompts to help you calm self-criticism and learn to love who you are.

I went to Cuba knowing it wouldn’t be a typical vacation, but I wasn’t prepared for just how profoundly it would move me.

To every question I asked my tour guide, the answer was almost always, “It’s complicated.” They say you will leave Cuba with less answers and more questions— here are some of mine:

How can something be equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming? Where is the boundary between suffering and resilience? How does history encapsulate both truth and fabrications? Why do we cling to binary thinking when life is a spectrum of endless complexities? How can humans be simultaneously broken and whole, like mosaics made of shattered multitudes?

Cuba was a lesson in coexistence—where beauty and struggle, joy and pain live side by side. It reminded me that we, too, are complex and layered, yet capable of holding contradictions within us. I hope you get to experience this beautiful island one day too.

Mentioned In This Episode... Ep. 126: Travel That Makes You a Better Person with Chelsea Glass, Founder of Heart of Travel

Chen Lizra’s TEDx talk: “The power of seduction in our everyday lives”

Check out Heart of Travel, an ethical travel company that does tours all over Latin America and use code MARY150 for $150 off your next trip.

Self-criticism is NOT a good long-term motivation strategy. Let’s talk about how to motivate yourself with self-compassion instead.

Tune in to learn...

• Why you might be feeling de-motivated
• A technique called “10 WHYs” to find intrinsic motivators
• How to employ self-discipline (but not in the way that you think…)
• Tools to find and create motivation through a lens of SELF-LOVE

Remember: You don’t need to wait until you’re perfectly motivated to start taking action. Imperfect, messy, reluctant action will often be enough to prove to yourself that you CAN do it, that you DO have it in you which creates a positive feedback loop. Micro steps matter.

If you enjoyed this episode, screenshot it and tag @maryspodcast on social media! And make sure to get Mary's book, The Gift of Self-Love. It’s a self-love workbook that will help you build confidence, recognize your worth, and learn to finally love yourself.

Mentioned In This Episode...

Self-Compassion Researcher Dr. Kristin Neff on Mary's Cup of Tea

The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity Research Study