Meet Julie Kerr

MEET
JULIE
KERR.

30+ years free.
Not because she followed conventional recovery methods —
but because she never knew there were any.

Now she helps other women find their freedom
FULLY, FINALLY and FOREVER.

Julie Kerr — Bulimia Recovery Coach

WHO THIS IS FOR

Your life may look perfectly ordinary from the outside while, secretly, you are struggling with bulimia or bingeing and purging — and hoping no one notices what is really going on.

You may be working, managing relationships, raising a family, getting things done — and still wondering why, despite your best intentions and all the promises you make silently to yourself, it keeps happening.

I work privately and individually with each woman to understand what is really happening, bring the hidden structure into view, and discover what her path to freedom requires.

Her Journey

THE STORY
BEHIND THE WORK.
AN UNCONVENTIONAL
RECOVERY.

It was the late 1970s. There was no diagnosis available to me, no recovery framework and no obvious place to go looking for an explanation. To be honest, I would not have known what to look for anyway.

As strange as it sounds now, I had no idea what was happening to me. There was no internet saturated with recovery narratives telling me what I had, why I had it, or how hard it would be to recover. That was decades away.

What made it so difficult was that I did not feel the same way about it all the time.

There were times when I desperately wanted it to stop. I felt overwhelmed, frightened and completely distraught. I thought about getting help, but I did not know where to turn — and the shame and disgust I felt towards myself made telling someone seem almost worse than carrying on.

Then the fear would subside. I would tell myself, next time.

And at other times, I felt I needed it.

The idea of letting it go was frightening in a completely different way.

So, there I was, a young woman carrying what felt like an all-consuming secret. And then, after fifteen years of struggle while building a successful career, I realised something remarkable had happened.

It was gone.

The thing that had haunted me for so long no longer had any hold on my life. I was surprised, I was delighted — and I was free.

I did not stop to analyse how it had happened. I was just happy to get on with living my life.

For years, that part of my life stayed a secret, until a casual conversation over a morning coffee changed that — and, ultimately, the direction of my work.

It was during one of the training days of my professional life-coaching accreditation. I was chatting with another participant, a psychiatrist, and happened to mention that I had once had bulimia. She told me, in effect, that with bulimia:

"you never really recover."

I remember being shocked. Because I clearly had.

By then I had been completely free for around 15 years, so I told her that. Now she seemed the shocked one. She then asked me: "How did you do it?"

But I had no answer for her.

And for the first time, I asked myself a question I had never needed to ask before:

How had I become free?

I went back to those fifteen years and began retracing what had actually happened: before bulimia began, while I was living with it, and as I became free. What had seemed inexplicable, confusing — even crazy — at the time, with hindsight and distance began to make sense.

There was a structure and a sequence to it that I simply had not been able to see from inside it. My freedom had been no accident.

Once I understood more clearly what had happened, I began reading more widely about bulimia and recovery. Much of what I found painted a very different picture from my own experience. The contrast made me wonder:

If I had been given that information when I was struggling, would I have found the same way out?

I don't believe I would have.

And it was that conclusion that led me to found BulimiaFree.com in 2012.

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Julie Kerr — coach

Credentials & Experience

  • 15 years lived experience of bulimia
  • Self-recovered more than 30 years ago
  • Professionally trained life coach since 2007 — qualified with Distinction
  • Founder of BulimiaFree.com in 2012
  • Guiding women worldwide to freedom from bulimia since 2013
  • Writer, educator and independent researcher
The Full Picture

WHAT FREEDOM
CAME TO MEAN.

For me, freedom was much bigger than the end of bingeing and purging. It was the complete absence of bulimia — and in its place, the emergence of peace and space.

The part of my mind that had been consumed by an almost continuous second process — the conflict, the resisting and giving in, the anticipating and negotiating, the planning and concealing, the cleaning up, the lies and cover-ups, the fear of being found out, the shame, the self-disgust, the physical discomfort, the constant need to appear as though everything was fine — became available for something else.

I was no longer divided between the life I appeared to be living and everything that was happening inside me. Food and eating became an easy, enjoyable and ordinary part of my life.

I could simply be where I was.
Present in a conversation.
Absorbed in my work.
Lost in an idea.
Travelling somewhere new.
Laughing with someone I loved.
Changing my mind.
Being spontaneous.
Doing absolutely nothing.

With that space came another kind of freedom. The freedom to decide what my life was for.

For me that has meant curiosity, creativity, work I care about, travel, love, reinvention and continuing to follow what interests and excites me. But that is my life. Yours will have its own shape.

Freedom does not replace one set of rules with another. It does not tell you who to become or how your life should look. It gives something back to you:

Presence;
Aliveness;
Self-trust;
Agency;
and the sovereignty to decide what you want to do with them.

More than thirty years of life have tested that freedom. There have been difficult times, stressful times and things that have gone badly wrong. But I have never again turned to bingeing, purging or controlling food as a way of dealing with any of them.

Nor have I needed to replace bulimia with something else.

Freedom gives you more of yourself with which to meet whatever life brings — the difficult, the unexpected, the beautiful and the ordinary.

And this freedom has never needed protecting. That is what freedom came to mean to me.

Principles

WHAT GUIDES
MY WORK.

I have met — and continue to meet — women who have lost years, real years of a real life, struggling with bulimia and trying to recover.

Those years cannot be reclaimed.

What concerns me is how many more will be lost if nothing changes. Experience, practice and inquiry bring me back, again and again, to a few simple principles.

TRUTH MATTERS

Truth is not something I claim to possess. It asks us to stay curious, question what we think we know and be willing to see what is actually there — even when it challenges our assumptions or what we would prefer to be true. Because truth is not in the service of comfort. It is in the service of freedom.

WHERE WE BEGIN MATTERS

Bulimia gives a name to a recognisable set of experiences and behaviours. But naming and describing something does not tell us the whole story. By the time bingeing and purging have become the visible problem, a great deal has already happened. Where we begin looking changes what we can see — and what we believe needs to change.

UNDERSTANDING MATTERS

It is difficult to make sense of something when part of what you need to understand remains outside your view. Explanations, language and inherited ideas can shape what we notice, what we overlook and what we believe is possible. Understanding more of the whole picture does not give you agency. You already have it. It gives that agency greater clarity about where and how to act.

FREEDOM IS POSSIBLE

Difficulty is not evidence that freedom is impossible. Neither is struggling to recover. I work from the conviction that every woman can be free from bulimia — not because freedom will look the same or be the same journey for everyone, but because the capacities needed to move towards it are already there in every woman.

THIRTY+ YEARS FREE.
How Julie Works

HOW JULIE WORKS.
THE THREE PRINCIPLES.

True transformation follows a process. Ancient in origin. Proven in practice.

THE DISSOLVING

Before anything can be transformed, it must first be understood. Not managed, not suppressed, not wished away — but looked at honestly and completely. The solution has always been inside the problem. This is where we begin.

THE CLARIFYING

What was once chaotic and confusing begins to make sense. Old patterns, old beliefs, and old contexts are examined in the light of new information. Clarity arrives — and with it, the first real experience of freedom becoming possible.

THE BECOMING

Clarity becomes transformation. A new context, a new relationship with yourself, a new experience of living. Not recovery as management — but life, fully and finally restored. This is the alchemy.

Client Stories

THEIR WORDS.

"I learned more in 4 months working with Julie than in 20 years of therapy. She doesn't just help you recover — she helps you understand yourself completely differently."

ER, 43 — USA

"Julie gave me a completely new perspective on my relationship with food and myself. The change is lasting. I'm grateful every single day for the work we did together."

BB, 33 — USA

"I'd tried everything. Nothing worked until I found Julie's approach. It finally made sense for me and my life. I feel genuinely, completely free."

Client — UK
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LIVE FULLY?

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