When Someone Famous Makes It Easier to Talk

If you’ve watched Noah Kahan: Out of Body and found yourself unexpectedly emotional, you’re not alone. There’s something about watching someone be genuinely honest about struggle — not polished, not resolved, just honest — that has a way of loosening something in people who have been holding their own stuff very tightly for a very long time.

I’ve been a dietitian specializing in eating disorders and disordered eating for over 25 years, and the thing that strikes me most about what Noah Kahan does isn’t the music, it’s that he makes people feel less alone in experiences they assumed were too messy or too shameful to talk about.

Here’s what I know from sitting with people through this work: most of the time the hardest part isn’t addressing what’s happening with food or with your body, it’s admitting that something is happening at all. It’s finding the words. It’s deciding that what you’re carrying is worth saying out loud to another person.

Shame is good at convincing you otherwise and so is the voice that says you’re not sick enough, or that it’s been too long, or that you’ve always just been this way so what would be the point. I hear those thoughts reflected back to me constantly, and they are never true.

What someone like Noah Kahan does, whether he intends to or not, is interrupt that voice. Not by having answers or by being recovered, fixed, or figured out, but just by being visible in his struggle in a way that makes someone watching feel like maybe their own experience deserves some air too.

If that’s where you are — if something in that documentary stirred something you’ve been pushing down — it might be worth paying attention to it. You don’t need to have it all sorted before you talk to someone and you don’t need a diagnosis, crisis, or compelling enough story. You just need to be curious about whether things could feel different than they do right now. Contact me here if you are ready to begin!