Episode 42: Why Internal Family Systems Therapy Works for Healing Emotional Eating

This episode and article contain discussions around emotional eating, disordered eating, complex trauma, and relational trauma. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects clinical perspective and personal experience. It is not intended to replace medical, psychological, or mental health support. If you are struggling with an eating disorder or severe distress around food or your body, please reach out to a qualified healthcare professional or contact an eating disorder support service in your region.

This isn't a surface level overview of IFS. This is the actual clinical and human reality of why this model reaches what other approaches miss.

I want to talk about why I believe Internal Family Systems therapy is one of the most effective frameworks available for healing a disordered relationship with food. Not because it's the latest trend in the wellness space, but because it goes underneath. Because it's body based. Because it works with the parts driving the pattern, not just the pattern itself. And because it doesn't pathologize. It gets curious.

What IFS Actually Is

When people hear Internal Family Systems, they think it's family therapy. Couples, parents, siblings all sitting in a room together. It's not.

IFS is individual therapy. But what we're working with is your internal family. The different parts of yourself that have developed over time, each with their own perspective, their own role, and their own way of trying to keep you safe.

And here's what I find so remarkable about this model. The internal family tends to mirror the external one. The dynamics you grew up in, the roles people played, the way emotions were handled or not handled, the unspoken rules about what was acceptable and what wasn't. Those patterns don't just live in your memories. They get internalised. They become the architecture of your inner world.

The critical voice inside you often sounds like someone from your past. The part of you that overfunctions and takes care of everything probably learned that role very early. The part of you that shuts down when things get too intense learned that too. Your parts took on the dynamics of your family. And understanding that changes everything about how we approach healing.

The Model: Exiles and Protectors

IFS was developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz in the 1980s. He was a family therapist who started noticing that his clients described their inner experience in a fragmented way. Part of me wants to stop. Another part of me doesn't care. Part of me knows this is hurting me but I can't seem to stop.

Instead of treating that as irrational or pathological, he got curious about it. What he found, and what decades of clinical work and growing research has since supported, is that the mind is naturally multiple. We all have parts. And those parts make complete sense when you understand what they've been through and what they're trying to do.

In IFS there are two main categories of parts.

Exiles are younger, more vulnerable parts carrying pain, shame, fear, and unmet needs from the past. These are the parts that got hurt. The parts that learned they were too much or not enough, or that certain feelings weren't safe to have.

Protectors are parts that formed around the exiles to make sure that pain never had to be felt again. Some protectors manage. They keep us busy, in control, performing, achieving, so we never have to slow down enough to feel what's underneath. Some protectors react. They come in fast when pain gets too close and do whatever it takes to make it stop.

Emotional eating is almost always a protective part.

The part that reaches for food at 10pm is not weak. There is nothing wrong with it. It learned, very accurately at some point, that food works. That it soothes, numbs, regulates, comforts. That it fills something that nothing else was filling. And it has been doing that job faithfully ever since.

Why Family Dynamics Matter

If you look at what research consistently shows about adolescent girls who develop eating disorders, whether that's restriction, binging, or emotional eating, one of the most significant factors is what's happening in their family system.

Family dysfunction, parental conflict, a parent who is emotionally unavailable or unpredictable, an environment where the young girl feels like nothing around her is stable or safe. And what does a child do in that environment? She looks for something she can control. And the one thing a child has genuine control over in her world is food.

So restricting, binging, or emotional eating starts as a way of creating some sense of agency in a world that feels completely out of her hands. It is an intelligent response to an environment that isn't meeting her needs.

This is precisely where IFS becomes so important. Because IFS understands that. It doesn't pathologize the behaviour. It looks at it and says, of course. This part made complete sense given what was happening around you. Let's understand what it's been doing and what it actually needs.

Why IFS Is Body Based and Why That Matters

Most conventional approaches to emotional eating work at the level of thought. They identify the thought pattern, challenge it, replace it with something more helpful.

And for a woman whose struggle with food is rooted in unresolved trauma and a nervous system that learned early that certain feelings weren't safe, staying in the mind helps keep her at the surface. Because you cannot think your way out of a felt experience.

We actually have to feel our emotions, the physical sensations of them in the body, to be able to move through them. Not analyse them, not understand them intellectually. Feel them.

In IFS we track sensations. We notice where a part lives in the body. We work somatically, not just cognitively. Which means we're working at the level where the pattern actually lives.

That's why a woman can spend years understanding her patterns and still find herself in the kitchen at 10pm doing the exact thing she's understood a hundred times. Insight alone does not change a nervous system. What changes the nervous system is a corrective emotional experience. When the part that has been using food for years finally has someone, the self, turn toward it with genuine curiosity and compassion. And that lands in the body as real and felt, not just understood. That is when things shift.

Complex Trauma and What It Actually Looks Like

When most people hear the word trauma, they think of single catastrophic events. And those are absolutely traumatic. But complex trauma, the kind that underlies the vast majority of disordered eating I see in my practice, often doesn't look like that at all.

Complex trauma comes from chronic relational experiences, usually in childhood, of not being seen, not being attuned to, not having your emotional world consistently met with warmth and presence. It can come from a parent who was physically present but emotionally unavailable. From being told your feelings were too much. Stop crying, you're too sensitive, don't be dramatic. From learning that love felt conditional on being easy, being the good girl, being manageable. From a parent whose mood was unpredictable, so you became hypervigilant, constantly scanning, learning to manage everyone around you to keep things safe.

It can come from emotional neglect. Not being asked how you felt. Not having your inner world reflected back as real and valid and worthy of attention.

And none of this requires a single catastrophic event. It is cumulative, relational, and it shapes the nervous system just as profoundly.

What it creates is a woman who is high functioning, capable, competent. Someone everyone relies on. Who learned, because she had to, that her emotions were not welcome, that her needs were inconvenient, that the way to stay loved and accepted was to hold it all together.

So she holds it all together. And then she gets to the end of the day of holding it together, and it has cost her something. And the food is there, and it's always worked, and nobody else has to know.

This is not weakness. This is a woman whose nervous system learned very early to manage everything internally, because there was no one consistently available to help her manage it externally.

Signs You Might Be Carrying Complex Trauma

You may struggle to identify what you're actually feeling. You may find it easier to care for everyone else than to ask for what you need. You apologize constantly, perhaps for taking up space, for having needs, for being too much. You feel responsible for other people's emotions. You have a deep fear of getting things wrong or not being enough. You shut down or disconnect when things get emotionally intense. You second guess your own perceptions constantly. You may feel chronically exhausted and can't seem to slow down. You feel empty or flat in quiet moments and fill those moments with food, scrolling, or busyness. You feel like you have to earn rest, earn pleasure, earn the right to need anything at all. You have a very harsh inner critic that sounds a lot like someone from your past.

What the Research Shows

Studies consistently find significantly higher rates of childhood trauma, emotional neglect, and complex relational trauma in women with disordered eating than in the general population. Family dysfunction, conflict between parents, emotional unavailability, and unpredictability in the home environment are among the most significant factors in the development of eating disorders in adolescent girls.

And treatment research consistently shows that when unresolved trauma is present, approaches that target behaviour without addressing what's driving it produce limited results. Women with trauma histories are significantly less likely to reach remission from conventional treatment. Not because they aren't trying. But because the treatment isn't reaching the thing that needs to be reached.

The Self

At the center of all of this is the self. Self with a capital S is who you are underneath all of it. The calm, curious, compassionate, clear, present version of yourself underneath all the protective layers. And it has never been damaged by whatever has happened to you.

IFS works by helping you access more of that self and bringing it into genuine relationship with your parts. When the part that has been using food for years finally has a self who can turn toward it, not with judgment, not with another strategy to stop it, but with real curiosity and care, and that lands in the body as felt not just understood, that is where things shift.

Not because you've learned something new. But because something old has finally been met.

What Finally Worked for Me

Nothing resolved my own relationship with food until I found this work and started excavating the layers I was still holding. Not understanding them intellectually. Actually going in and meeting them.

The eating was a part of me that had been trying to survive something. And until I went back and found that part, until I sat with it and understood what it was carrying and gave it what it had actually been asking for, it didn't need to do it anymore.

That is the work.

And if you have been trying to change this pattern for years and wondering why nothing has touched it, it's not because you're beyond help. It's because you haven't yet found the thing that goes to where the problem actually lives.

That is the thing.

If this episode resonated, please share it with a woman who needs to hear this.

And if you're ready to do the work, the link is in the show notes to book a free consultation.

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing.

Episode 41: Food Is Not the Problem. It's the Message - Somatic Eating, Trauma and Nervous System Healing with Stephanie Mara Fox

This episode contains discussions around emotional eating, binge eating, body image, and trauma. Please engage gently. This content is educational and is not a substitute for professional support. If you are struggling with your relationship with food, please reach out to a qualified healthcare professional.

What if your food behaviors were never the problem, but the most intelligent thing your body could do in a moment that felt unsafe?

In this episode of the Self Led Woman Podcast, Megan sits down with Stephanie Mara Fox — somatic nutritional counsellor, creator of Somatic Eating, and PhD candidate in somatic psychology — for one of the richest, most reframing conversations this podcast has ever had.

Listen to the full episode

🎙️ Listen to the episode on the Self Led Woman Podcast.

What somatic eating actually is

Most therapeutic approaches work top-down. They start with the mind — the thoughts, the patterns, the beliefs — and try to work their way down to the body.

Somatics flips that entirely.

Somatic eating starts with the body. The nervous system. The felt sense. The physical sensations that show up before the thought even forms. And when we address how we feel at that level, it sends a completely different message up to the brain.

Because the brain and the body are in constant conversation through the vagus nerve — what Stephanie describes as the highway of communication in the body. And sometimes the fastest way to change what we think is to change what we feel first.

Food as a substitute for secure attachment

One of the most profound reframes in this conversation is Stephanie's take on hyperpalatable and processed foods.

We give them such a bad name. But have you ever noticed how they taste exactly the same every single time?

There is something about that consistency that mimics a securely attached parent. Reliable. Predictable. Always the same experience when you return to them. And if that kind of consistency wasn't available in your early relationships — your body went looking for a substitute.

That is not weakness. That is intelligence.

Why Stephanie no longer uses the term eating disorder

What you were doing with food was the most adaptive, wisest thing your body could do in a time it felt unsafe, unseen, unheard, and dysregulated.

That is not a disorder. That is an adaptation.

And you cannot heal something you have been taught to be ashamed of.

What restriction actually does to the nervous system

Reactance theory — developed in the 1950s — explains why the moment you decide you cannot have something, your body perceives a famine and goes after it harder.

It does not have to make logical sense. As soon as your freedom to choose feels threatened, your nervous system responds. This is why restriction so often leads to the very behavior you were trying to stop. It is not a character flaw. It is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

What happens when you stop fighting your emotions

We have this idea that if we let ourselves feel fear or grief or anger, it will be endless. That if we open the door even a little, we will drown in it.

But what Stephanie sees consistently in her sessions is the opposite.

When we say to fear, I see you, you're welcome here, the intensity immediately decreases. Your emotions don't need to be contained in a tight corner of your body. They need a bigger container. And you are big enough to hold them.

Where to find Stephanie

Free 5-part somatic eating series: https://www.stephaniemara.com/subscribe
Website: https://www.stephaniemara.com
Somatic Eating: https://www.somaticeating.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_stephaniemara
Satiated Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/satiated-podcast/id1494607245
Substack: https://stephaniemara.substack.com
Contact: support@stephaniemara.com

Join the waitlist — Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle

My self-paced course — Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle — is coming soon. Join the waitlist now and receive founding member pricing. The lowest price it will ever be.

https://www.megandarnell.com.au/waitlist

This content is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional support. If you are struggling with your relationship with food, please reach out to a qualified healthcare professional.

Episode 40: Comparison, Belonging and Coming Home to Yourself | Part 2

This episode and article contain discussions around body image, comparison, and disordered relationships with food and the body. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and therapeutic perspectives. It is not intended to replace medical, psychological, or mental health support. If you are struggling, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.

If you haven't listened to episode 39 yet, start there. This one picks up where that one left off.

Last week I talked about comparison as a nervous system response. About belonging as a biological need. About what oestrogen actually does to teenage girls and why dressing exactly like your friends was never shallow. And I shared one of the most profound experiences of my life and what happened the Monday morning after that changed something in me I don't think will ever go back.

This week I want to talk about what's actually on the other side of all of that. What it looks like when you stop trying to become someone else and start coming home to yourself.

The Grandma's Bathroom Memory

When I was about ten years old I was at my grandma's house and I found one of those little makeup powder compacts in the bathroom. And I started putting it on my face and looking at myself in the mirror and just thinking, yes. Sign me up to this. I am absolutely in.

I love makeup. I love clothes. I love the self expression that comes with all of it. And I still do.

What I love about that memory is that it had nothing to do with perfection or changing things to meet some external ideal. It was about play. Creativity. The pure joy of being a woman. Beauty felt like something I could explore, not something to correct.

And somewhere along the way, for so many women, this flips.

When Getting Dressed Becomes Corrective

Beauty stops being about expression and starts being about performance. And this is really a shift from the feminine to the masculine. Expression and creativity are so feminine. Performance is so masculine.

Getting dressed stops being creative and starts being corrective.

You stop asking, what do I love, what feels like me, what brings me joy. And you start asking, does this make me look smaller, does this hide the right parts, will I get away with this today.

And sometimes you are doing it four times before you leave the house and still walking out the door feeling like nothing actually worked.

Some of that is the healing work. The relationship with your body, the patterns underneath, the parts of you still carrying old pain. That matters and it is absolutely worth going there.

But some of it is that you are also trying to dress like someone else entirely. You are buying the dress because it is fashionable or because it looked incredible on the model on the website. And then wondering why it doesn't feel right on your body. You are forcing yourself into things that were never really going to honour you and your beautiful uniqueness in the first place.

Dressing for Your Actual Body Is a Regulation Practice

When something doesn't fit right, when your clothes are working against you instead of with you, your nervous system feels that. And this is not a small thing.

Because comfort is not just about wearing your tracksuit pants around the house. Comfort is fabric that feels good on your skin. Clothing that moves with your body. The weight of it, the texture of it, the way it sits on your shoulders. Your nervous system is responding to all of that all day long.

We all know what it is like to wear a pair of jeans that are a size too small. You are not present. You are not comfortable. You just cannot wait to get home and take them off. That is not just physical discomfort. That is your nervous system in a low grade state of tension for the entire day.

And if you are already dysregulated, already stressed, already using food or other things to cope, adding physical discomfort on top of that is just more for your system to manage.

Dressing for your actual body, in things that genuinely feel good, is a regulation practice. And I mean that.

So I went on a bit of a deep dive with this. I got my colours assessed and learned I am a true winter. High contrast, structured clothing, a full face of makeup. Everything I had already gravitated towards for years suddenly made complete sense. Of course I like these things. They suit me.

And I went even further. I created a ChatGPT styling thread with my colour palette, my height, and my body shape. Now whenever I am considering buying something I screenshot it and drop it into that thread. It will tell me exactly why something works, exactly why it doesn't, whether it is a full yes or whether the high waist is going to cut me in half. It has made my shopping so much more intentional and so specific to me and my uniqueness.

‍ ‍

You Forgot That Being a Woman Is Meant to Be Fun

Approaching 40, a part of me kept coming up that was quite concerned about aging. So I did an IFS session on it.

And it took me back to that memory of being in my grandma's bathroom. And the wisdom that came through from that part was so simple and so clear.

You forgot that it is meant to be fun!

Being a woman is fun. You get to experience the joy of this. It is not about doing it for someone else's approval or fitting yourself into a box. It is about you remembering this gets to be yours. The creativity. The self expression. The joy of finding what actually suits you and wearing it just because you love it.

Men don't get to experience the joy of all of this. And there is nothing more magnetic than a woman who has remembered that.

What It Means to Be Self Led

In IFS we talk about the concept of self. And that is why this podcast is called The Self Led Woman. Self is who you really are underneath all your protective patterns, your trauma, your conditioning. She is calm, compassionate, curious. She has clarity. She is creative. She makes choices from a grounded place that feel genuinely aligned.

Self is not the part of you that criticizes your body. That is a protective part doing its best to keep you safe from something that happened a long time ago.

Self is not the part that impulsively shops or emotionally eats or scrolls for two hours trying to regulate something she doesn't have words for. Those are all protective parts. And if you did the work on them you would understand exactly why they are doing what they are doing.

But when those parts don't have to work so hard, something shifts. You start making what I can only describe as self led decisions. They don't come from shame or urgency or I need to fix this about myself. They come from clarity. From congruence. From this is actually mine and this feels true for me.

The same question applies to everything. Your food. Your body. How you dress. How you show up. Does this honour me?

Not, I want to look like her. Not, I should be more grateful. Not, I need to be more disciplined.

Just, does this honour me?

That is what returning to yourself feels like. That is what it feels like to be self led. Not someone else's approval. Not becoming someone else. Not being more optimised.

A coming home to yourself.

And when we do the healing work, we are actually able to do that.

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing.

Episode 39: Comparison, Belonging and Coming Home to Yourself | Part 1

This episode and article contain discussions around body image, comparison, mother wounds, therapeutic MDMA, and disordered relationships with food and the body. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and therapeutic perspectives. It is not intended to replace medical, psychological, or mental health support. If you are struggling, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.

Comparison isn't about vanity. It never was.

It's about belonging. It's about safety. It's about what your nervous system learned was acceptable, what got praised, what got rejected, and what got mirrored back to you when you were too young to question any of it.

And when you understand it that way, something begins to shift.

Belonging Is a Nervous System Need

When you feel like you belong, when you feel accepted and chosen and safe within your group, your nervous system regulates. It stops scanning for threat. It settles.

And when you don't feel like you belong, your nervous system treats that as danger. Not metaphorical danger. Actual danger. Because for most of human history, being cast out of the group meant you didn't survive. Particularly when we lived in tribes.

So the drive to fit in, to be acceptable, to not stand out in the wrong way, that is not weakness. That is biology.

And when we go through puberty as young girls, something happens hormonally that amplifies this even further. Oestrogen rises during puberty and it doesn't just change our bodies. It increases social attunement. It makes you more agreeable. More attuned to how others see you. More sensitive to belonging and rejection.

This is why teenage girls dress exactly like their friends. Same clothes, same slang, same hairstyles. We can write that off as herd mentality or vanity but it isn't. It's a nervous system response. A young woman's biology saying, stay inside the tribe, stay safe, stay chosen.

That is adaptation. That is intelligence.

The problem is that so many women carry this adaptation into adulthood without ever questioning it. Still dressing for belonging. Still eating in ways that might work for someone else. Still trying to fit themselves into boxes that were never designed for them. Still measuring themselves against women whose nervous systems, trauma histories, hormones, support systems, and life circumstances are completely different.

And social media has made this so much worse. Because now it's not just about comparing bodies. It's about comparing morning routines, skin, supplements, healing journeys, productivity, relationships, nervous systems. The more we go into that world, the more women slowly lose touch with themselves trying to become copies of other women they were never meant to be.

Why Two Women Can Eat the Same Thing and Have Completely Different Experiences

A woman carrying chronic stress and unresolved trauma with little to no support is going to have a completely different relationship with food than a woman who feels safe and regulated in her life.

A dysregulated body craves things differently. Metabolises things differently. A body that feels hypervigilant, that is always scanning for danger or bracing for worst case scenarios, will seek quick comfort, quick energy, quick numbing, quick relief, quick regulation. And food is very reliable at doing that. The body will choose whatever works fastest.

So instead of understanding this, women moralize themselves. They say I have no discipline. What is wrong with me. Why can't I just stop.

But the body is just trying to survive. It is doing exactly what it learned to do. And the woman who seems to eat effortlessly and feel fine is not more disciplined or more worthy. She is just operating from a different nervous system baseline. A different history. A different set of circumstances.

Understanding this changes everything about how we approach healing.

What Oestrogen Decline Is Actually Revealing

When oestrogen starts to decline later in life, in perimenopause and menopause, a lot of women describe something that feels like something has been unleashed. Anger. Rage. A sudden intolerance for things they used to manage. A loss of patience that feels almost shocking in its intensity.

And the narrative I hear online is that the hormones are causing the anger.

But I don't think that is quite right.

Oestrogen functions like a veil. It helps women tolerate things they should never have had to tolerate. It keeps you agreeable. It keeps you people pleasing. It makes the boundary crossings manageable. It keeps the peace.

And when that veil lifts, the anger that was always there finally has a voice.

It is not new. It is just finally being heard.

And if you have spent decades abandoning yourself to stay belonging, stay acceptable, stay safe, this is what catching up looks like. This is why the healing work matters so much. Not just for now. For the woman you are becoming.

The MDMA Journey

In 2022 I had a therapeutic MDMA journey. I went in with the intention to forgive my mum. We have always had a very challenging relationship and we don't have a relationship now. And one of my biggest wounds was around my body. My mum was very beautiful and very thin. And there was always this underlying message that I never quite lived up to her expectations.

What I didn't consciously realise until that journey was that underneath everything was a younger part of me that genuinely believed, if I can just become thin enough, beautiful enough, perfect enough, my mum will finally love me.

That was the wound.

And that is what children do. They interpret their parents' limitations as, there must be something wrong with me. Not, my parent has their own unresolved pain. Children think, I am not lovable.

So that journey took me back through every single challenging experience I could remember with another woman. Tiny memories, things I hadn't thought about in years. And I said to every single one of them, I forgive you.

And then it went the other way. It showed me every moment I had judged another woman, compared myself, been unkind, been insecure. And I said to each of them, I am so sorry and I send you love and healing energy.

And then I turned towards myself and said, I am so sorry for every single mean thing I ever said to you or about my body. And I love you and I forgive you.

And then it showed me all these women, from all different cultures, different ages, different lives, all around the world. And every single one of them was carrying a suitcase. Some on their backs, some in their hands, some on their heads, some dragging them behind. And these suitcases were a symbol of their pain. Body shame. Comparison. Mother wounds. The pressure to be beautiful. The pressure to hold everything together.

And I said to all of them, I send you love and healing energy, and you don't have to carry your pain anymore.

It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.

The Monday Morning After

I went home after that weekend and on Monday morning I got up to go to the gym like I normally do. I went into the bathroom to get dressed.

And probably since I was at least thirteen years old, I would get up in the morning, stand in front of the mirror, and criticize my body. Tell myself I was disgusting. Saying your stomach is disgusting. Because it was exactly what my mum would say to me. And I had internalised that voice so completely I stopped being able to tell the difference between hers and mine.

That morning I stood in front of the mirror and I cried.

And I said to myself, I love you and I'm so sorry.

And I thought, my body has done nothing but love me and keep me alive.

And that was the end of the war with myself.

I share this not because I think everyone needs to do what I did, or because healing looks the same for everyone. But because I know what it is like to look in the mirror and feel nothing but contempt for the body looking back at you. And I want you to know that it doesn't have to stay that way.

Part two of this episode comes next week. And it's about what actually becomes possible on the other side of all of this.

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing.

EPISODE 38: Why Ignoring Your Cravings Makes Emotional Eating Worse, Not Better

This episode contains discussions around emotional eating, cravings, and our relationship with food and desire. Please engage gently. This content is educational and is not a substitute for professional support. If you are struggling with your relationship with food, please reach out to a qualified healthcare professional.

You wanted the chocolate.

You chose the rice cake instead. You told yourself you were being good. And then an hour later you were still thinking about the chocolate, and probably ate more than you would have if you'd just had it in the first place.

If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you.

The problem starts before you open the fridge.

Diet culture has taught us that food is moral. That there are good foods and bad foods. That eating certain things makes you good and eating other things makes you bad.

Think about the language most of us use without even noticing. I've been so good today. I was so bad on the weekend. I need to earn this. I'll work it off later.

What this language does is take something entirely neutral, food, and turn it into a referendum on your worth, your character, and your self-control. And when you approach food with that kind of charge around it, when there's already guilt before you've taken a single bite, you are not in a regulated state. You are already slightly activated, already slightly braced.

The food isn't the problem. The charge around the food is the problem. And that charge was handed to you by diet culture long before you ever developed a complicated relationship with eating.

What actually happens in your brain when you ignore a craving.

Your brain has a seeking system driven by dopamine. Its job is to motivate you toward things that matter, things that keep you alive, things that bring you relief. And when that seeking system is activated, it doesn't quietly wait to be satisfied. It keeps searching. It keeps the wanting alive until the thing is found.

So when you want chips and you have popcorn instead, your seeking system does not go, great, close enough, we're done here. It goes, that wasn't it. Keep looking.

This is why you can eat an enormous amount of food that isn't what you actually wanted and still feel completely unsatisfied. Your brain was never looking for calories. It was looking for a specific thing. And until it finds it, the seeking continues.

But this isn't just about neuroscience.

When you override a craving, swap it out, tell yourself you shouldn't have it, something else is happening underneath. You are relating to your own desire as something that cannot be trusted. Something that needs to be managed.

And for so many women, that relationship with desire didn't begin with food. It began much earlier. In a family system where expressing a need or an emotion got a response that taught you your needs were not welcome. Where you were told, don't cry, stop being so dramatic, you're too much.

Where you learned that the way to be loved and accepted was to shrink your needs, manage your feelings, be easy, be quiet, be good.

And so you got very good at it. At overriding what you actually wanted. At finding the substitute. At performing okayness while something underneath kept quietly searching.

And now here you are, doing the exact same thing with food.

Every time you swap the chocolate for the bliss ball, you are not just substituting a food. You are reenacting a very old pattern of telling yourself your needs don't matter.

The rebel parts.

When you label a food as bad, when you tell yourself you're not allowed to have something, you don't just create a seeking system that keeps searching. You also activate what Megan calls rebel parts.

Parts of you that have been told no too many times. Parts that are tired of being the good girl. And those parts will want the thing more, not less, precisely because it's been forbidden.

This is why binges so often involve the exact foods on the forbidden list. Not because you're weak. Because your system is trying to find balance and meet the needs that have been suppressed for so long.

What food freedom actually looks like.

It doesn't look like eating only salads. It doesn't look like having no preferences or never eating for comfort.

It looks like food just not being a big deal. Not carrying that charge. Not consuming mental energy that could go somewhere else entirely.

It looks like wanting something, having it, enjoying it, and moving on without it meaning anything about you.

It looks like getting curious rather than judgmental when you notice the urge to eat. Asking, am I actually hungry? What do I actually need right now? And being honest about the answer without shame.

If you are someone who thinks about food constantly.

Your brain is searching. It's doing its job. But underneath that search there is usually a need that has gone unmet for a very long time.

Not just a need for a specific food. A need to be heard. To have your desires matter. To stop performing okayness and actually get what you're looking for.

The path forward is not more discipline or better substitutes. It is getting curious. Building a relationship with your own needs based on trust rather than management.

That is what this work is about.

Ready to go deeper?

Book a free consultation with Megan: https://megandarnell.as.me/?appointmentType=69722155

Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle, Megan's self-paced course, is coming soon. Join the waitlist now and receive founding member pricing. The lowest price it will ever be. https://www.megandarnell.com.au/waitlist

This content is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional support. If you are struggling with your relationship with food, please reach out to a qualified healthcare professional.

Episode 37: Tired of Being Good | Fawning, the Nervous System and Reclaiming Your Body With Kallie Klug

This episode and article contain discussions around trauma responses, fawning, body image, disordered eating, sexual fawning, and nervous system dysregulation. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and therapeutic perspectives. It is not intended to replace medical, psychological, or mental health support. If you are struggling, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.

What if the people pleasing, the over giving, the inability to say no, the way you manage everyone else's feelings before your own, what if none of that was a personality flaw? What if it was your nervous system doing the most intelligent thing it knew how to do to keep you safe?

That's the conversation at the heart of this episode. And it's one I think a lot of women have been waiting for.

Kallie Klug is a certified somatic practitioner, yoga teacher, and author of Tired of Being Good, a nervous system map for reclaiming your body after a lifetime of fawning. Her work sits at the intersection of somatic trauma therapy, the fawn response, and the deeply intelligent ways our bodies learn to survive.

What Fawning Actually Is

Most people are familiar with fight or flight. Some people know about freeze. But the fourth trauma response, fawning, is the one that flies under the radar most consistently. And it's the one that shapes so many women's lives without them ever realising it's happening.

Fawning is the appeasement response. It's the body moving towards the threat, not away from it, to secure safety through relationship and connection. And what makes it different from simply being friendly or easy to get along with is this: there is always an inner tension present. Always a suppressed boundary underneath. Always something that got frozen so the connection could be maintained.

Kallie describes it as not just being nice. There is always this coupling of an inner frozen boundary expression with fawn. And for many women, this response became so automatic, so rewarded, and so consistent that it stopped feeling like a survival strategy and started feeling like a personality. Like who they are.

Good Girl Conditioning and the Nervous System

This is something I see constantly in my work with women around food. The most sensitive, most intuitive little girls, the ones who felt everything deeply, who were told they were too much, too emotional, too sensitive, those are often the women sitting across from me decades later wondering why they can't stop eating, or why they can't stop giving, or why they feel so disconnected from themselves.

Because what happened to those little girls is that their emotional expression got squashed. And fawning, becoming agreeable, becoming palatable, becoming small, got rewarded instead. In families. In friendships. In workplaces. In relationships.

And Kallie makes a point I find so important: this doesn't just shape behaviour. It physically reshapes the body. Any posturing we hold long term, the body is so intelligent that it literally assembles our tissues to support it. Chronic bracing creates issues in the neck, the thyroid, the jaw. The hunched posture of someone who learned not to take up too much space isn't just emotional. It is structural.

Kallie even uses the example of Taylor Swift, and once she said it I couldn't unsee it. Early in her career, hunched, making herself smaller. And now, heart open, taking up every inch of space she deserves. The body tells on you. And when it's safe enough, the body changes too.

‍ ‍

Fawning as Chemical Addiction

One of the most surprising ideas in this conversation is the neurological piece. Kallie references the work of social worker April Dawn Harter, who proposed that enmeshment, that fast, unboundaried, I want to crawl into your skin kind of connection, releases endogenous opioids in the brain. There is a euphoric, numbing quality to it. A high.

And that is why fawning is so hard to step out of. Not because you're weak or codependent or don't know better. But because your nervous system found something that works. Something that creates relief. Something that changes the state.

If you've been following my work for a while, you'll recognise this immediately. It's the same mechanism as reaching for food when you're overwhelmed. Or the wine at the end of a long day. Or the scroll that goes nowhere but you can't put the phone down. It's not about the thing. It's a nervous system looking for regulation using whatever tool it has learned to trust.

Fawning and Freeze

Kallie also talks about the relationship between fawning and freeze, and this is a piece I think gets missed a lot in conversations about the fawn response.

Freeze is sometimes called the saviour response because it saves you from experiencing whatever horror is currently happening. There is numbing. There is dissociation. And very frequently, fawning and freeze show up together. Because if you are interacting with someone your body finds threatening and you are appeasing them to secure connection, something underneath has to be numbed out to make that possible.

And freeze carries so much shame, particularly in a world that overcouples movement, productivity, and mobility with value. When you have a response that immobilises you, it can feel confusing and shameful in a way that fight or flight never does. Kallie holds so much compassion for this, and it comes through in the conversation.

Sexual Fawning

This is one of the most common and least talked about expressions of the fawn response, and I was so glad we got to go there in this conversation.

Sexual fawning is the fawn response showing up in intimate contexts. The orientation shifts from is this feeling good for me, am I present, what do I actually want right now, to how can I move, what sounds should I make, how do I keep this person happy and close. It's not a conscious performance. It's a nervous system doing what it always does. Securing safety through connection. Getting attachment needs met in the only way it knows how.

And Kallie points out something that is both funny and deeply true. There are a lot of men walking around thinking they're really great in bed. We've just been faking orgasms.

The path back isn't about forcing presence or pushing through. It's slow and titrated. It starts with building capacity for pleasure in non-sexual ways first. Kallie references Deb Dana's glimmer practice here, which is essentially putting pleasure down into its smallest possible unit. Noticing that you like how the sun is coming through the window. That this blanket feels nice against your skin. Starting there before working up to anything more.

Honoring the Fawn Response Without Staying Stuck in It

One of the most important reframes in this episode is this: the goal is not to get rid of fawning. It is to honour it as the brilliant adaptation it was while slowly, carefully, titrating your way out of the places it no longer serves you.

Kallie talks about the gap of incongruence. The greater the gap between what your body actually wants to express and what fawning performs instead, the greater the whiplash afterwards. And so unfawning work isn't about suddenly telling your boss to go screw himself. It's about closing that gap a little. Finding the places where fawning isn't really necessary and starting there.

And she talks about what tends to shift last, what tends to be the stickiest. Sexual fawning. Because sex is so often nonverbal, so highly relational, and the body's success is survival. It got you this far. So of course it holds on the tightest there.

If Her Body Could Speak

At the end of every episode I ask my guests the same question. If a woman's body could speak to her uninterrupted, what would it most want her to hear?

Kallie's answer came from David Bedrick's book The Unshaming Way. And it stopped me in my tracks.

What if every single sensation and experience we're having was the utmost intelligence of the body? Jealousy. Anger. Insecurity. Whatever's there is perfect.

I don't know what's there for her. But whatever's there is perfect.

Find Kallie:

Website and courses: https://stan.store/kalisomatics
Instagram and TikTok: @kalisomatics
Podcast: Your Own Medicine Podcast

Book: Available on Amazon Tired of Being Good

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing.

Episode 36: Your Cravings Might Be Older Than You Think - Epigenetics, Ancestral Trauma and Emotional Eating

This episode contains discussions around emotional eating, binge eating, body image and trauma. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and is not a substitute for professional support. If you are struggling with your relationship with food, please reach out to a qualified healthcare professional.

What if the urge to reach for food when you're not physically hungry isn't just about today?

What if it's older than that — much older?

In this episode of the Self Led Woman Podcast, Megan explores one of the most undertalked pieces of the emotional eating conversation. The intelligence your body is carrying that has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with thousands of years of human survival.

Listen to the full episode

Your body is not broken. It's been trying to tell you something.

We spend so much time talking about the war we're in with our bodies. Why can't I just stop? Why do I keep doing this? Why am I so out of control?

But what if those are the wrong questions entirely?

What if your body isn't out of control — what if it's doing exactly what it was designed to do?

Every craving, every urge, every moment you find yourself standing at the fridge at 10pm — that's not a failure. That's a signal. Your body and your nervous system saying: something needs attention here. Slow down and listen.

The eating is not the problem. The eating is the smoke alarm going off.

And most diets ask you to rip the battery out of your smoke alarm and wonder why the house keeps burning down.

You are carrying thousands of years of wisdom

You are not starting from scratch.

You are the result of thousands of years of human survival. Every single ancestor in your bloodline survived long enough to reproduce — through famine, through war, through poverty, through illness, through things we can barely imagine.

The intelligence they accumulated — the lessons their bodies learned about how to stay safe, how to survive, how to read danger — that didn't disappear when they died. It got passed down. To your parents. To you.

This isn't a spiritual idea. This is science. This is epigenetics — the study of how our experiences change the way our genes are expressed.

Research on Holocaust survivors found measurable stress response differences in the children and grandchildren of survivors — people who hadn't lived through the Holocaust themselves, but whose bodies were carrying the imprint of it. Trauma can alter our DNA. Not just psychologically. Physically. At a cellular level.

Your body is carrying thousands of years of intelligence like this. And we've been taught to dismiss it. To override it. To go to war with it.

Emotional eating is not a character flaw

When you reach for food when you're not physically hungry, the story you've been told is that you're weak. That you lack willpower. That there's something wrong with you that needs to be fixed — preferably by another diet or another set of rules.

That story is a lie.

Emotional eating is not a character flaw. It's a coping strategy. And more than that, it is a signal. The part of you reaching for food has a job. It's trying to protect you. To soothe something, regulate something, or numb something that feels unbearable.

And it learned to do that for a reason. At some point in your life, that made complete sense.

How to start turning toward instead of away

This isn't about never emotionally eating again. It's about beginning to build a different relationship with the part of you that's been trying to get your attention for a long time.

The next time you notice the urge to eat when you're not physically hungry, try this.

Just pause. One breath. That's it. You're not committing to anything — just creating a tiny gap between the urge and the action.

Then get curious. Where do you feel it in your body? A tightness? A heaviness? A restlessness in your chest or your stomach or your throat?

Then ask it — what are you trying to tell me? What do you need right now?

And wait. See what comes. It might be a word, an image, a feeling. It might be nothing the first few times. That's okay. You're building a relationship. It takes time.

Whatever comes up — meet it with compassion. Not judgment. Not "god, not this again." Something closer to: I hear you. I see you.

The most radical thing you can do

In a world that constantly tells you to outsource your power to the next diet, the next expert, the next plan — the most radical thing you can do is come back to yourself.

To trust yourself. To listen.

That's what it means to be a self-led woman.

Join the waitlist — Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle

My self-paced course — Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle — is coming soon.

Join the waitlist now and receive founding member pricing. This will be the lowest price it will ever be.

[WAITLIST LINK]

Disclaimer

This podcast and blog content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical or psychological advice. If you are struggling with your relationship with food or your mental health, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.

Episode 35: Why Emotional Eating Isn't a Willpower Problem - An Open Letter to Women Who Are Ready to Hear the Truth

This episode is different.

There are no guests, no frameworks, no listicles. Just me, speaking directly to every woman who has been fighting herself around food for years — and is tired of being told the answer is more discipline.

Because it isn't. It never was.

You've been trying to solve the wrong problem

If you've spent years starting over — new plan, new Monday, new version of the same hope that this time will be different — and it keeps not working, there is a reason.

And the reason is not you.

It's that every approach you've tried has been aimed at the behaviour. The eating, the restriction, the rules. As if changing what you put in your mouth is the thing that needs to happen.

But emotional eating is a disconnection problem. It's what happens when, usually early in life, something teaches you that certain feelings aren't safe to have. That your emotions are too much, or not acceptable, or need to be managed quietly rather than felt and expressed and met.

And food becomes the solution. Loyal, available, reliable. There when nothing else is.

That's not weakness. That's an adaptation. And it makes complete sense.

What this is actually costing you

Your emotional eating is not a failure. But I also know it is costing you.

The dinner out where you're only half present because the other half of you is in your head. The holiday where you spend two weeks quietly at war with yourself while pretending to everyone around you that you're having a wonderful time. The morning in front of the mirror, negotiating with yourself before you can feel acceptable enough to leave the house.

It is costing you the version of your life where you're actually in it. Fully. With presence and pleasure and without the constant background noise.

And you deserve to get that back.

What's on the other side

In this episode I talk about what actually becomes possible when women heal this at the root.

Not a perfect relationship with food or the permanent absence of hard days. But a life you can actually inhabit. Ordering what sounds delicious and being completely present in that evening. Going on holiday and trying everything and coming home reminiscing about how beautiful it was. Getting dressed in the morning and leaving the house. That's it. Just leaving — without the negotiation, without the commentary, without the exhausting performance of trying to feel acceptable enough to be seen.

That is not a fantasy. That is what becomes possible when you heal what is actually driving this.

I was you for 30 years

I started dieting when I was around eight years old. I was on the merry-go-round for three decades. I know every inch of it — how convincing it is, how it keeps promising that the next plan will be the one that finally changes things.

And I also know what it's like to step off it. To do the real work. To find something so much better on the other side.

That is available to you too.

You are not too far gone

Wherever you are, however long you've been at this — you have not missed your chance.

But you will not find your way off the merry-go-round through a better diet. You will find your way off it by finally being willing to hear what is underneath. The feelings, the parts, the old stories the food has been managing all this time.

That's the work. And it is absolutely possible.

Join the waitlist — Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle

My self-paced course — Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle — is coming soon.

Join the waitlist now and receive founding member pricing. This will be the lowest price it will ever be.

[WAITLIST LINK]

Disclaimer

This podcast and blog content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical or psychological advice. If you are struggling with your relationship with food or your mental health, please seek support from a trained professional.

Episode 34: What Ozempic Is Actually Doing to Your Brain | GLP-1s, Food Noise and Nervous System Healing

This episode and article contain discussions around emotional eating, binge eating, body image, trauma, and weight loss medications including GLP-1s such as Ozempic and semaglutide. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects published research and personal perspective. It is not medical advice and does not recommend for or against any medication. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any medical decisions. If you are struggling with an eating disorder or severe distress around food or your body, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.

There's a conversation happening right now about weight loss medications. And almost everyone is either for them or against them.

But that's not the conversation I'm interested in.

What I'm curious about is what's actually happening in the brain and the nervous system when people take these medications. Because when you look at the research, what you find isn't just about appetite. It's about regulation. It's about what it feels like when a system that has been running on threat and scarcity for years finally gets a different signal.

And that's a conversation worth having.

First, a note on what this is and what it isn't

I'm not a medical doctor, a pharmacist, or a prescribing practitioner of any kind. I'm an IFS practitioner who is deeply curious about what's happening in the nervous system. Everything in this episode and this post is drawn from published research, which I'll reference throughout, and from my own reading and learning in this space.

This is not medical advice. It is not a recommendation to take or not take any medication. If you're considering any kind of medical intervention, please talk to a qualified health professional who knows your individual situation.

What I'm bringing here is a layer of this conversation that I don't think is being talked about enough. The medical side is for your doctor. The nervous system piece is what I want to explore.

What regulation actually means

Before we get into the medications, I want to talk about regulation. Because I think the way it gets described online, particularly on social media, does it a disservice.

Regulation is not about being calm all the time. It's not about being unbothered or always having it together. Regulation is simply the capacity to move through different states, whether you're activated or resting, whether things are intense or easy, without getting stuck at either extreme.

A regulated system can get stressed and then settle again. It can be pulled off centre and find its way back. It can feel something intense and return to baseline.

Dysregulation is the opposite. It's where the system gets stuck. It's a low grade state of activation that never fully turns off. Not crisis, but never fully calm either. Always slightly braced. Always scanning. Always on.

For many people, particularly those who grew up in environments that were unpredictable, chaotic, or emotionally unsafe, that low grade activation isn't a bad habit or something to breathe your way out of. It's a trained physiological response. The body learned early: don't relax, something bad might happen. And over time that becomes the baseline. That becomes normal. Because it's what kept you safe.

Most people don't know they're dysregulated if they've never experienced the alternative. Until something changes.

The brainstem: the oldest part of you

At the base of the brain sits the brainstem. It's the oldest part of us evolutionarily. It was here before we had language, before we had memory, before we had the capacity to reflect on our own experience. Its job, always, is asking one question: am I safe enough right now?

It regulates things we don't consciously control. Heart rate, breathing, gut motility, baseline muscle tension, where our attention automatically goes. And based on what it reads in the body and the environment, it either signals safety or signals threat.

Here's the critical thing. This system does not use logic. It doesn't read context. It reads patterns and it reads history. When the brainstem is activated, the prefrontal cortex, the logical, rational part of the brain, is generally not online.

Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist who developed polyvagal theory, introduced the concept of neuroception. A subconscious threat detection process that operates below the level of conscious awareness. Your nervous system is constantly reading cues in your environment and your body and deciding whether you're safe or not before you've had a single conscious thought about it.

Which means you can be sitting in a completely safe environment, objectively fine, nothing actually wrong, and your brainstem can still be running a threat response. Because it's operating off older data. Off a system that learned, back then, that calm meant stay ready.

What does that look like from the inside? Tightness in the body you can't quite explain. Attention that keeps scanning for what's wrong. An inability to fully settle. Subtle irritation without a clear cause. A sense of always being slightly behind, slightly on the edge of something.

This isn't a personality trait. This is a brainstem that learned its job very well.

The hypothalamus: your internal accountant

Sitting above the brainstem is the hypothalamus. It's doing something related but distinct. It's managing resources. Integrating signals about energy availability, blood glucose, hormones, stress, hunger, thirst, temperature, sleep. And it's constantly asking: do we have enough, or do we need to mobilize?

Like the brainstem, the hypothalamus works off pattern recognition as much as real time data. If you grew up in an environment of scarcity, whether that was emotional scarcity, physical unpredictability, chronic stress, or even food scarcity, the hypothalamus may have calibrated towards a bias of there's not enough.

A 2022 review published in Frontiers in Psychiatry looked at childhood trauma and its effects on the HPA axis, the body's central stress response system. It found that early trauma can sensitize this system, altering how it responds to stress long into adulthood.

A 2023 paper published in Psychoneuroendocrinology looked specifically at people with eating disorders and found that early traumatic experiences were consistently associated with HPA axis dysregulation, and that this dysregulation was linked to disordered eating behavior. Not as a personality flaw. As a measurable biological consequence of what the system went through.

What does that hypothalamic bias feel like in the body? A chronic preoccupation with food that isn't really about physical hunger. Difficulty feeling truly satisfied after eating. A sense of urgency without a clear object. A restlessness. A feeling of always being slightly depleted.

And here's where it gets interesting. The brainstem and the hypothalamus are in constant communication. The brainstem's threat signal feeds directly into the hypothalamus's resource assessment. So when the brainstem is activated, the hypothalamus reads: conditions are unstable, keep looking, don't fully settle, find resources.

You end up with a system where both the safety signal and the resource signal are biased towards alert. Not because anything is currently wrong. Because the system was shaped in a context where things were.

The reward system and food noise

The brain's reward circuitry is driven primarily by dopamine and centered in a region called the nucleus accumbens. It's designed to motivate us towards things that keep us alive. Food, connection, safety, novelty. It creates urgency and a pull towards things that matter.

But in a chronically activated nervous system, this system gets recruited for something else entirely. Regulation.

When your baseline state is dysregulation, when you're carrying that low grade brainstem activation and that hypothalamic seeking signal, your brain is going to look for fast ways to change the state. Fast ways to find safety and resources. Things that offer quick relief, a quick shift in how the body feels.

Food is the most efficient option available. Not because of a character flaw or lack of willpower. Because your nervous system learned, very accurately, that this works. Eating, particularly high reward food, creates a rapid dopamine response that briefly interrupts the activation. It changes the way you feel.

So does scrolling. So does the mental loop of planning and researching and obsessing. So does anything that creates a hit of novelty or sensation.

These aren't bad habits. They are a dysregulated nervous system doing precisely what it was wired to do. Finding a way to regulate itself using the tools available.

What we call food noise, that constant hum of thinking about food, wanting something, searching, it's not really about food. It's the sound of a system looking for relief. Looking for regulation.

And a 2021 systematic review published in the journal Nutrients found that the same class of medications we're about to discuss appeared to modulate reward circuitry in ways that reduced seeking behavior across multiple domains, not just food. People reported drinking less alcohol, smoking less, feeling less of that compulsive pull towards relief across the board. Because these aren't separate problems with separate solutions. They're expressions of the same underlying system.

So what are these medications actually doing?

When people take GLP-1 medications like Ozempic or Wegovy, many report something unexpected. Not just that they eat less, but that the food noise quietens or stops entirely. The mental searching, the urgency, the constant low level pull. It quiets.

For many people, especially those who've experienced that noise their whole lives and just assumed that's who they were, that quiet is enormous.

The research points to three main mechanisms.

The first is blood sugar stabilization. These medications slow gastric emptying, creating more consistent satiety signals and reducing glucose volatility. Blood sugar dips, even small ones, are read by the nervous system as a low level stress signal. When that smooths out, the hypothalamus receives more consistent data that says we are resourced, we are okay. And the seeking signals begin to quiet.

The second is that these medications act directly on receptors in the brainstem and hypothalamus. Research published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2024 mapped specific populations of neurons in the brainstem that carry receptors for this class of drug and found that these neurons send projections all the way up into the hypothalamus and the limbic system, the emotional brain. When the medication activates these receptors, it's changing the input data that the brainstem and hypothalamus are receiving. Less urgency in the signal. Less of the mobilize now.

The third, and the one drawing the most attention in recent research, is that these medications appear to change activity in the reward system. Specifically they reduce what researchers call reward salience, the degree to which something feels urgent and necessary. A 2025 paper found that semaglutide reduced appetite while actually improving the quality of dopamine reward signaling. The compulsive restless seeking quietens. But the capacity for genuine satisfaction remains. And in some cases deepens.

Food stops feeling like it needs to happen right now. The urgency quietens. The searching quietens.

And in that quietness, something remarkable can happen. People start to notice things they haven't noticed before. The quality of light in the afternoon. The warmth of the sun. A feeling in the chest that might be described, carefully, as peace.

Some say: for the first time I feel like I'm starting to see the world.

This isn't a side effect. This is what becomes available when the threat in the brainstem quietens. When the brainstem finally gets consistent enough safety data to shift towards what polyvagal theory calls a ventral vagal state. A state of genuine safety, openness, and connection.

These states are not created by the medication. They're uncovered. They're what's there when the noise drops low enough.

Which means something important. The capacity you didn't think you had was always there.

What this means for healing

Understanding all of this at a biological level changes the way we frame emotional eating entirely. Because what looks like compulsion, or lack of discipline, or food obsession, is actually a nervous system doing the job it was trained to do in the context it was trained in.

And you can't think your way out of a brainstem response. You can't journal your way to a regulated hypothalamus. What these systems respond to is evidence. Consistent, repeated, embodied evidence that things are different now.

That looks like physiological stability. Stable blood sugar, sleep, hydration. These aren't boring basics. They are literally changing the data your brainstem is working with. Every stable meal is a signal. Every consistent sleep is a signal.

It looks like reducing internal conflict and building a relationship with your experience that doesn't require constant management and suppression. In IFS we call this working with polarizations, the parts of you that are in conflict with each other, pulling in opposite directions. You can't fix a polarization until both parts feel seen and heard.

It looks like predictable safety. In your environment, your relationships, your own nervous system's rhythms. A slow accumulation of evidence that when I relax, nothing bad happens.

For some people, these medications create a window where this work becomes possible. When a protector part quietens, even temporarily, the parts underneath have room to come forward. Healing becomes accessible in a way it wasn't when the system was working so hard just to survive the day.

But the medication doesn't do the healing. You still need to heal what's underneath. What it can do is create the conditions where healing has more space to happen.

The question I keep coming back to

Why do some people feel more like themselves on these medications? What does it mean when someone says they feel regulated for the first time? And what does that reveal about what was happening before?

Those are the questions I care about. And they're the ones I'll keep pulling on. In a future episode I'm going to sit down with an expert at the forefront of the conversation around metabolic health, peptides, and what these medications are actually doing at a nervous system level. We're going to take everything covered here much deeper.

If this episode resonated, stay tuned. And if someone in your world needs to hear that what they've experienced is real, that there's a biological explanation for it, please share it.

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing.

References

1. Childhood trauma and the HPA axis Murphy, F., Nasa, A., Cullinane, D., Raajakesary, K., Gazzaz, A., Sooknarine, V., Haines, M., Roman, E., Kelly, L., O'Neill, A., Cannon, M., & Roddy, D.W. (2022). Childhood Trauma, the HPA Axis and Psychiatric Illnesses: A Targeted Literature Synthesis. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 748372. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.748372

2. Early trauma, HPA axis dysregulation, and eating disorders Cascino, G., et al. (2024). Early traumatic experiences and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis in people with eating disorders: A narrative review. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 159, 106665. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106665

3. GLP-1 and reward system related disorders (food, alcohol, drugs) Eren-Yazicioglu, C.Y., Yigit, A., Dogruoz, R.E., & Yapici-Eser, H. (2021). Can GLP-1 Be a Target for Reward System Related Disorders? A Qualitative Synthesis and Systematic Review Analysis of Studies on Palatable Food, Drugs of Abuse, and Alcohol. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, 614884. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.614884

4. Hindbrain GLP-1 neurons and projections to the hypothalamus (Journal of Neuroscience 2024) Randolph, A.B., Zheng, H., & Rinaman, L. (2024). Populations of hindbrain glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP1) neurons that innervate the hypothalamic PVH, thalamic PVT, or limbic forebrain BST have axon collaterals that reach all central regions innervated by GLP1 neurons. Journal of Neuroscience, 44(31), e2063232024. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2063-23.2024

5. Semaglutide, appetite reduction and dopamine reward signaling Kooij, K.L., Koster, D.IJ., Eeltink, E., Luijendijk, M., Drost, L., Ducrocq, F., & Adan, R.A.H. (2024). GLP-1 receptor agonist semaglutide reduces appetite while increasing dopamine reward signaling. Neuroscience Applied, 3, 103925. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nsa.2023.103925

6. Polyvagal theory and neuroception Porges, S.W. (2004). Neuroception: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24. (Foundational reference for polyvagal theory)

A note worth including on your blog post: the Psychoneuroendocrinology paper was published online in November 2023 and appears in the January 2024 volume, so it may be listed as either 2023 or 2024 depending on where you look. Both are correct.

Episode 33: Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm | Somatic Healing, Body Image and Eating Disorder Recovery With Dr. Ann Saffi Biasetti

What if the body you've been at war with has actually been trying to protect you this whole time?

That's the question at the heart of this conversation with Dr. Ann Saffi Biasetti, transpersonal psychologist, somatic psychotherapist, and author of Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm. Ann has spent over 35 years working in the space of eating disorders and trauma recovery, and this episode is one of those conversations that stays with you long after it ends.

Where It Begins: The Belief That Your Body Has Failed You

One of the most common and most painful things Ann encounters in her work is the belief that a woman's struggles with food and her body are somehow her fault. A personal failing. A lack of willpower or discipline or self-control.

Ann is clear: that belief didn't come from nowhere. It came from deep sociocultural conditioning, messages so embedded and so consistent that most women have never stopped to question them. The first chapter of her new book is dedicated entirely to unpacking how we got here, because before any healing can happen, we have to understand the world that shaped us.

Her book title, she shares, was intentional. She insisted on it because she knew it would land differently for every woman who read it. Some would feel relief. Some would feel grief. Some would want to put it down and walk away. And she says, pay attention to that response, because there's a reason it's happening inside you.

The Body as Protector, Not Enemy

One of the most powerful reframes in this conversation is the idea that the body has always been working in your service, even when it hasn't felt that way.

Ann draws on her background in yoga therapy and anatomy to help clients understand what the body is actually doing at any given moment. When cortisol creates a protective layer of weight around the midsection, that's not the body failing. That's the body finding a way to create safety when a woman didn't feel she could use her voice. When food becomes a source of soothing or control, that's not weakness. That's an intelligent system doing what it knows how to do.

This is something that resonates deeply with IFS work too. When we look at the parts of us that are driving these behaviours around food and the body, they all have the same intention underneath. To keep us safe. To protect us. And when two parts that seem to be working against each other finally get to speak to one another, they almost always discover they're protecting the exact same thing, just in opposite ways. The softening that happens in that moment is profound.

Ann puts it beautifully: what would happen if we got on the same team?

Body Forgiveness Is Not About Doing Something Wrong

Ann's research has centred on body forgiveness, and her definition of it is one I want every woman to hear.

Body forgiveness is not about exonerating yourself for something you did wrong. It's not about shame or blame or fixing. It's about understanding, deeply, that you couldn't have done anything differently with what you knew at the time. And neither could your body.

What she describes is more like a relational repair. A grief, even. An acknowledgment that you and your body have both been trying to get to the same place, safety, belonging, peace, and somewhere along the way you ended up feeling like you were on opposite sides.

That grief, she says, is part of the path back.

You Don't Have to Like Your Body to Take Care of It

This is one of the most grounding things Ann shares in the whole conversation, and I think a lot of women need to hear it.

You don't have to be at peace with your body every day. You don't have to love it or feel grateful for it or feel good inside it. There will be days that feel hard. That's not a sign that you're doing it wrong. That's just the reality of being in a relationship, with your body, with other people, with yourself.

Ann uses the example of her three teenagers. Were there days she liked them? No. Did she still make their lunches and send them off to school? Yes. The relationship continues even when the feeling isn't there. And it's the same with our bodies.

The work isn't about arriving somewhere perfect. It's about the constant return.

Pleasure, Comfort, and Why We've Made Both So Complicated

We spend some time in this conversation talking about pleasure, and specifically how fraught that word has become for women.

Ann points out that when she went to research the word pleasure in relation to women's bodies, everything that came up was sexual. And while that's a whole other conversation, what she really wants women to understand is that pleasure starts much smaller than that. It starts with comfort. With knowing what it feels like when your body is comfortable versus uncomfortable. With a warm cup of tea in the sun. With clothes that feel good against your skin. With a moment of stillness.

These tiny sensory experiences of comfort are actually acts of internal kindness, whether we call them that or not. And they are the foundation that everything else gets built on.

How to Start Listening to Your Body When You Feel Completely Disconnected

For anyone who feels like their body is speaking a language they don't understand, Ann offers a simple starting point.

Ask yourself: what is this like inside?

Not what is this like. What is this like inside. Those two words change everything. They redirect the mind inward rather than outward. You can ask it while you're holding your coffee, walking the dog, sitting in traffic. What is this like inside right now?

And then get as descriptive as possible. Build a language for what you notice. This is what Ann calls body literacy, and it is the foundation of interoception, our ability to sense and understand what's happening inside our bodies.

She's careful with her words too. She doesn't ask people what it feels like in their body, because for someone who has been disconnected for years, the body can feel like a foreign or threatening place. Inside is softer. More accessible. Less loaded.

The goal in the beginning isn't to get it right. It's just to get curious. To start asking: is this my mind, or is this actually a sensation? Is this a thought, or is this something my body is telling me?

And what she finds, over and over, is that once people start to touch this, something feels familiar. Like a language they once knew. Like coming home.

If Her Body Could Speak Uninterrupted

At the end of every episode I ask my guests the same question. If a woman's body could speak to her uninterrupted, what would it most want her to hear?

Ann's answer was the same place we began.

I never meant you any harm.

About Dr. Ann Saffi Biasetti

Dr. Ann Saffi Biasetti is a transpersonal psychologist, somatic psychotherapist, mindfulness and self-compassion teacher, and certified yoga therapist with over 35 years of experience in eating disorder and trauma recovery. She is the creator of the Befriending Your Body program and the author of Befriending Your Body and the upcoming Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm, releasing July 21st 2026. She trains clinicians internationally and maintains a private practice in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Find Ann: Website: www.anembodiedlife.com Befriending Your Body Program: www.befriendingyourbodyprogram.com Instagram: @anembodiedlife | https://www.instagram.com/anembodiedlife/

Get her book - Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm: https://amzn.to/4njxbhp

Also available via Shambhala Publications: https://www.shambhala.com/authors/a-f/ann-saffi-biasetti/your-body-never-meant-you-any-harm-9781645474418.html

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing.

Disclaimer: This episode and article contain discussions around emotional eating, binge eating, body image, shame, compulsive eating behaviours, and disordered relationships with food. Please engage with this content gently and use your own discretion if these topics feel activating for you. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and therapeutic perspectives. It is not intended to replace medical, psychological, nutritional, or mental health support. If you are struggling with an eating disorder or severe distress around food or your body, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.

Episode 32: Emotional Eating, Bingeing & the Search for Something Food Could Never Fix

There’s a very specific feeling I think a lot of women know intimately, even if they’ve never said it out loud.

The driving from place to place.
The “just one thing.”
The secrecy.
The shame.
The searching.

Not shopping.
Searching.

Searching for the exact thing that’s finally going to scratch the itch.

And if you’ve ever found yourself standing in a supermarket aisle late at night scanning shelves for something you can’t quite name, I want you to know this:

You are not crazy.
You are not weak.
And this was never just about food.

Emotional eating is rarely about hunger

For years, I thought emotional eating meant there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

I thought I lacked discipline.
I thought I had no self control.
I thought if I could just become stricter, more controlled, more “good,” I’d finally stop.

But what I understand now is that the food was never actually the point.

The food was something I could do when my nervous system became overwhelmed.

Something to interrupt the discomfort.
Something to soften the noise.
Something to focus on that wasn’t the weight of what I was carrying emotionally.

And this is the piece I think so many women miss when they’re trapped in cycles of emotional eating or bingeing.

They keep trying to control the behaviour without understanding what the behaviour is trying to do for them.

The Melbourne winters, the loneliness, and the nervous system overload underneath it all

In my late 20s, I was living alone in Melbourne during one of those heavy, grey winters that seem to get into your mood as much as your body.

At the time, I was also working in retail banking in a highly stressful environment where I was absorbing emotional intensity all day long.

People came in angry.
Frustrated.
Hostile.
And because I’m highly sensitive, I carried all of it home with me.

What I didn’t understand back then was that my nervous system had no way to come down.

No regulation.
No softness.
No emotional outlet.
No real sense of safety inside my own body.

So by the time I’d leave work, there was this unbearable feeling underneath my skin.

Restlessness.
Irritation.
Overwhelm.
A desperate need to escape myself.

And somewhere along the way, my brain had learned:
Food can interrupt this.

Temporarily.
Not deeply.
Not permanently.
But enough to keep repeating the cycle.

“You’re not shopping, you’re searching.”

I talk about this in the podcast episode because it’s something I’ve observed so many times in women, both in myself and in others.

You walk into the supermarket and you’re not really shopping anymore.

You’re searching.

Searching for the exact thing that will finally make the feeling stop.

You pick things up.
Read labels.
Put them back.
Walk to another aisle.
Try to find the “healthier” option.
Circle back again.
Negotiate with yourself.
Convince yourself.
Hide what you’re doing.

And underneath all of it is shame.

Because emotional eating and bingeing often carry this invisible layer of secrecy.

The rules.
The hiding.
The “one thing at each shop.”
The trying to make it look normal.

But what’s actually happening underneath is usually far deeper than food itself.

A body that doesn’t feel safe being still

One of the biggest things I understand now is this:

The difficult clients weren’t the trigger.
The cold weather wasn’t the trigger.
Living alone wasn’t the trigger.

Those things amplified what was already happening underneath.

A body that didn’t feel safe being still.
A nervous system that had been running all day with nowhere to put the overwhelm.
A loneliness I didn’t know how to name.
An emotional hunger I didn’t yet have language for.

And because I didn’t understand any of that, I kept trying to solve the problem through discipline.

More control.
More rules.
More restriction.
More shame.

But you cannot willpower your way out of a wound.

And you cannot calorie count your way into feeling safe inside yourself.

Emotional eating is often a coping strategy, not a character flaw

This is why I feel so passionate about helping women understand emotional eating differently.

Because so many women are carrying enormous shame around behaviours that actually make perfect sense when you understand the nervous system underneath them.

Emotional eating is often a coping strategy your body learned long before you had the capacity to understand what you were feeling emotionally.

It becomes a way to:
• soothe
• numb
• regulate
• distract
• comfort
• interrupt overwhelm
• create temporary relief

And healing starts when we stop asking:
“What’s wrong with me?”

And start asking:
“What is this behaviour trying to do for me?”

The deeper hunger underneath emotional eating

One of the most profound shifts in my own healing journey came when I realised I wasn’t actually hungry for food.

I was hungry for:
• softness
• safety
• relief
• emotional connection
• rest
• permission to feel
• somewhere to put my overwhelm

But because those needs didn’t feel safe to acknowledge, the food became the substitute.

And no amount of shame, restriction, or control could ever truly resolve that.

There is another way

If you recognise yourself in this, I want you to know there is nothing wrong with you.

You are not broken.
You are not failing.
And this is not about lacking discipline.

There is a reason your system learned this pattern.
And there is a way to heal it that goes far deeper than food rules or trying harder.

This is exactly the work I teach inside Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle, my self paced course designed to help women understand the nervous system, emotional, and relational roots underneath emotional eating and bingeing patterns.

The waitlist is now open and women who join before launch will receive founding member pricing.

You can join the waitlist here

Disclaimer

This episode and article contain discussions around emotional eating, binge eating, body image, shame, compulsive eating behaviours, and disordered relationships with food. Please engage with this content gently and use your own discretion if these topics feel activating for you.

This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and therapeutic perspectives. It is not intended to replace medical, psychological, nutritional, or mental health support. If you are struggling with an eating disorder or severe distress around food or your body, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.

Episode 31: The Desire to Be Smaller Didn't Start With You

There's a question I come back to again and again in sessions with clients.

Is this actually your belief, or is it something you inherited?

So much of what women carry around food, their bodies, visibility, and taking up space was never consciously chosen. It was absorbed. Passed down through generations of women adapting to environments where being smaller, quieter, more agreeable, and less visible was genuinely safer.

In this episode, I explore the generational, historical, and nervous system roots underneath body image struggles, emotional eating, and the quiet pressure so many women feel to shrink themselves. Not just physically, but energetically, relationally, and in how much space they allow themselves to occupy.

I also share a personal memory from when I was twelve years old, a moment I didn't have language for at the time, and why it sits at the centre of something so many women experience but rarely talk about.

This episode is for the woman who has spent years trying to fix herself and keeps coming back to the same place. Because what you've been trying to fix may never have been fully yours to begin with.

Whose voice have you been listening to this whole time?

It Was Handed Down

The beliefs so many women carry about their bodies were absorbed, not chosen. A mother standing in front of the mirror criticising her body. An auntie making a comment about weight at a family gathering. A grandmother equating thinness with worth, with desirability, with discipline.

These women weren't trying to cause harm. They were carrying something too — passing on what they themselves had absorbed without ever being given the chance to question it.

In Internal Family Systems therapy, which is the modality I work from, we call this a legacy burden. These beliefs are held by parts of us that were shaped by families and generations before us. And at some point, they made complete sense. They were adaptations. Strategies for staying safe.

Being Small Was Never Just About Aesthetics

If we zoom out and look at history, this starts to make a different kind of sense. Women being small was never purely about how they looked. It was about safety.

Not ancient history — recent history. Women couldn't own property. Couldn't open their own bank accounts. Couldn't leave marriages without severe consequences. In many places, marital rape wasn't even legally recognised until the 1990s. A woman's legal identity was often absorbed entirely into her husband's.

What kept women safer in those conditions wasn't taking up space. It was compliance. Being agreeable, quiet, non-threatening, digestible, easy. Not having too many needs. Not becoming too much.

Being small — in every sense of that word — was protective.

And your body remembers that, even if your conscious mind has never framed it that way.

Your Nervous System Inherited More Than You Think

Your nervous system — the part of you that decides what's safe and what isn't, what to reach for and what to pull away from — doesn't just inherit physical traits. It inherits ways of interpreting the world.

What's safe? When to speak? How to belong? What happens when you take up too much space?

These patterns don't live in our thoughts. They live in our nervous systems, in our tissue, in our bodies — in the parts of us that respond before our conscious mind has even had the chance to catch up.

You can see it in how people move through the world. Some bodies feel open, grounded, like they're allowed to be where they are. Others feel slightly curled in, contained, taking up only as much space as seems permissible. The body quietly, constantly learning to be smaller.

The Moment the World Started Looking Differently

There's a layer to this that rarely gets spoken about, and I want to share it because I think it matters.

I was about 12 or 13, walking through my small town to visit a friend. I ran into one of my parents' friends — a family man, married, liked and respected in the community. We chatted for a couple of minutes on the street. And when I left, I remember the way he looked at me. Up and down. With this big smile on his face.

Something in me felt deeply uncomfortable. Uneasy in a way I couldn't name. I was 12. I didn't have the language for it. He was someone safe, someone my parents trusted. And yet my body registered, very clearly, that the way he was looking at me was not okay.

I wish I could say that was an isolated moment. But when I sit with women in sessions and we explore certain memories, this is one of the most common things that comes up. The moment she first noticed that men were looking at her differently. Her body had become something that invited a certain kind of attention — before she was anywhere near ready to understand what that meant.

Research shows that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviours often begin in early adolescence, frequently around the onset of puberty, when the body starts to change and that kind of attention increases. A connection forms — not consciously, but deeply in the body: when I was smaller, I felt safer. And when my body changed, something about the world changed with it.

Adaptation, Not Failure

For some women, this looks like trying to return to something smaller — restricting, minimising, becoming less visible. Trying to exist in a body that feels less like a target.

For others, the body adapts in the opposite direction — creating protection through size. A buffer. A barrier. A way of putting distance between herself and a world that hasn't felt safe to be seen in.

Neither of these is about willpower or failure. They are intelligent, embodied responses to experiences that felt overwhelming or unsafe. And food sits right at the centre of all of this — because food can soothe, control can create predictability, and restriction can feel like order when everything underneath is overwhelming.

These aren't failures of character. They're adaptations. They're survival.

So when we approach this purely at the level of behaviour — trying to change what you eat, enforce more discipline, fix the pattern by controlling the surface — we miss what's actually driving it. Because underneath the behaviour, there is a system that has been carrying a lot. Not just your own experiences, but inherited ones. Unspoken ones. Generational ones.

Where the Real Shift Happens

This is where something genuinely begins to shift. Not when you try harder — but when you begin to gently separate what actually belongs to you and what doesn't. What's yours, and what you've been carrying for generations of women who adapted to surviving conditions they didn't choose.

When that kind of legacy burden is released — and I have witnessed this over and over in my work — something shifts in a way that's hard to explain but very clear to feel. Women will pause and say: I feel lighter. Because they are.

This work is not about becoming physically smaller. It's about becoming safer in being seen. Safer in having needs. Safer in taking up space — in your body, your voice, and your life — without feeling like a threat.

If you've spent years trying to fix your relationship with food or your body and it hasn't shifted in the way you hoped, it might not be because you're doing it wrong. It might be because what you've been trying to fix was never fully yours to begin with.

So before you try to change yourself again, it might be worth asking one question:

Whose voice have you been listening to the whole time?

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join the waitlist before launch receive founding member pricing. You can join the waitlist here

Disclaimer: This episode contains discussions around emotional eating, body image, generational trauma, and unwanted attention during adolescence. Please engage gently. This podcast is not a substitute for professional support.

Episode 30: Emotional Eating & the Hidden Cost of “I’ll Deal With It One Day”

In Episode 30 of the Self Led Woman Podcast, I’m unpacking something that so many women experience but don’t often have language for.

How long have you known that your relationship with food or your body is something you want to change?

Not how long you’ve been trying.
How long you’ve known.

For a lot of women, the honest answer is years. Sometimes decades.

And yet they’re still in it.
Still circling the same patterns.
Still having versions of the same conversations with themselves.

“I’ll start again Monday.”
“I just need more discipline.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“I’ll deal with it one day.”

And I think this is one of the biggest things people misunderstand about emotional eating, body obsession, and the constant mental noise so many women live with.

Most women are not stuck because they don’t understand the pattern.

They’re stuck because the pattern has become tolerable.

That sounds harsh, but I don’t mean it critically. I mean it honestly.

You can still function.
You can still work.
You can still show up.
You can still be successful.
You can still look like you have your life together from the outside.

So the issue gets pushed into the background.

But just because something is functioning in the background doesn’t mean it isn’t costing you.

The quiet exhaustion women adapt to

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from having part of your attention permanently occupied.

Thinking about food.
Thinking about your body.
Checking yourself in mirrors.
Negotiating what you’ll eat later.
Promising to “be good tomorrow.”
Feeling different about yourself depending on how your body looks that day.

For many women, this has been happening for so long it feels normal.

Not because they enjoy it.
But because they’ve adapted to it.

And adapting to something is not the same thing as it being okay.

I often think about it like having 50 apps open on your phone all day.

Even when your battery says 100%, it drains faster because there’s so much running quietly in the background.

That’s what emotional eating patterns and body obsession can feel like.

Not always dramatic.
Not always obvious.
But constantly consuming energy.

“I understand my patterns… so why am I still doing this?”

This is where so many high functioning, self aware women get stuck.

Because they do understand their patterns.

They know they emotionally eat more when they’re overwhelmed.
They know comparison makes things worse.
They know stress impacts their body image.
They know they use food to soothe, numb, distract, regulate, reward, or escape.

And yet they still find themselves back in the same cycles.

This creates one of the most exhausting emotional experiences possible:

The gap between what you know and what you actually do.

You can intellectually understand your behaviour and still feel completely trapped inside it.

And that doesn’t mean you’re failing.

It means understanding the pattern and changing the pattern are two completely different things.

Why awareness alone doesn’t heal emotional eating

This is the part I wish more people understood.

Insight is not the same thing as healing.

You can know exactly why you do something and still feel powerless to stop it.

Because emotional eating patterns don’t just live in thoughts.

They live in the nervous system.

They live in the parts of you that learned food created relief.
Comfort.
Numbing.
Safety.
Distraction.
Regulation.
Control.

Which is why so many women stay stuck trying to “think” their way out of something their body learned long ago as survival.

And then they blame themselves when more information doesn’t fix it.

The problem with waiting for rock bottom

A lot of women unconsciously believe they’ll finally deal with this when it gets “bad enough.”

When they hit a breaking point.
When they gain more weight.
When they binge harder.
When they feel more miserable.
When things become unbearable.

But honestly?

Rock bottom often never comes.

Instead, what happens is much quieter.

You just slowly adapt.

You keep functioning while carrying this constant low level drain in the background of your life.

And because it’s manageable, you minimize it.

You tell yourself:
“It’s not that serious.”
“Other people have it worse.”
“I can handle it.”

But I really want women to understand this:

There is life to be lived on the other side of this.

Life where food is not taking up this much mental space.
Life where your body is not something you’re monitoring all day.
Life where your self worth is not fluctuating based on what you ate yesterday or how flat your stomach looks that morning.

Emotional eating is rarely about the food

One of the biggest shifts in my own healing journey was realizing food was never actually the issue.

Food was the strategy.

The strategy for managing discomfort.
Managing overwhelm.
Managing loneliness.
Managing emotional pain.
Managing nervous system dysregulation.
Managing parts of myself that didn’t feel safe.

And when you understand that, the conversation changes completely.

Because now the question becomes:
“What is the eating trying to do for me?”

Not:
“What’s wrong with me?”

That shift changes everything.

You do not need to wait until this gets worse

If you’ve been saying “I’ll deal with this one day,” I want you to gently ask yourself:

How long have you been saying that?

And if nothing changes, how will your life look a year from now?
Five years from now?
Ten years from now?

Not because I want to scare you.
But because so many women are quietly exhausted by this pattern while simultaneously convincing themselves it isn’t serious enough to deserve support.

It is.

You do not need to hit a breaking point for your pain to count.

And you do not need to wait until things fall apart before deciding you want something different.

Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle

If this resonates with you and you’re tired of living in the gap between knowing and actually changing, my self paced course Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is opening soon.

This work goes far deeper than food rules, discipline, or behaviour management.

We work with the nervous system patterns, emotional survival strategies, and protective parts underneath emotional eating so you can finally understand what’s actually driving the cycle.

The waitlist is now open and women who join before launch will receive founding member pricing.

You can join the waitlist here

Episode 29: Emotional Eating, Control & Parts Work with Ivana Legnerova | IFS Therapy for Healing Your Relationship with Food

Listen to the full episode

If you’ve ever felt like you should be able to “fix” your relationship with food but haven’t been able to, this episode will help you understand why.

Emotional Eating, Control & Parts Work

Why your relationship with food isn’t about willpower, with IFS therapist Ivana Legnerova

In Episode [insert number] of the Self Led Woman Podcast, I’m joined by Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapist Ivana Legnerova for a grounded and compassionate conversation about emotional eating, control, and what’s actually happening underneath our relationship with food.

Because for so many women, the struggle with food doesn’t make sense on the surface.

You can be high functioning.
Disciplined.
Self-aware.

And still feel like you’re losing control with food behind closed doors.

This episode helps make sense of that.

It’s not about control

One of the biggest themes in this conversation is the idea that eating behaviours are not failures.

They are protective.

When someone says, “I just need more control around food,” what’s often sitting underneath that is not a lack of discipline, but a system that is trying to manage something deeper.

As Ivana shares, there is always a reason for these patterns.

Parts of you that restrict, binge, or control food are not random. They are trying to help you cope with something that feels overwhelming, vulnerable, or unsafe.

And when you begin to understand that, the way you relate to yourself starts to shift.

Why high-functioning women struggle in private

Something we both see in our work is how common this is for high-functioning women.

From the outside, everything looks together.

They are capable. Productive. Reliable.
They are the ones holding everything together.

But behind closed doors, there is often another part of the system trying to balance that.

A part that turns to food to soothe, numb, or create relief after a day of holding too much.

This isn’t a contradiction.

It’s a system trying to regulate itself.

In IFS terms, these are often different parts working in opposition. One part pushing, performing, achieving. Another part stepping in to release the pressure.

And when you don’t understand that dynamic, it can feel like you’re fighting yourself.

The role of shame in eating patterns

Shame is one of the most powerful forces that keeps these patterns in place.

There is shame around food.
Shame around the body.
Shame around not being able to “get it together.”

And then there is another layer of shame for even having the struggle in the first place.

As Ivana explains, shame often creates more protection.

Parts step in to fix it. To control it. To make sure you don’t feel that way again.

Which only deepens the cycle.

This is why trying to force behaviour change rarely works.

Because the behaviour isn’t the problem.

What IFS therapy offers that other approaches don’t

Internal Family Systems offers a completely different way of working with these patterns.

Instead of trying to eliminate behaviours, it helps you build a relationship with the parts of you that are driving them.

Not with judgment.
Not with control.
But with curiosity.

When parts feel understood instead of pushed away, something shifts.

They begin to trust.
They soften.
They no longer need to work as hard.

And from there, change happens in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

What healing actually looks like

Healing your relationship with food isn’t just about changing what you eat.

It’s about changing how you relate to yourself.

As Ivana describes, healing often looks like:

More space in your mind
More presence in your body
More compassion towards yourself
Less urgency, less control, less noise

And something that’s hard to describe but easy to feel…

A sense that you are no longer fighting yourself.

There is life on the other side of constantly thinking about food and your body.

And many people don’t realise how much energy it’s taking until it’s no longer there.

Connect with Ivana Legnerova

Link to website
https://www.ivanatherapy.co.uk/

Disclaimer

The Self Led Woman podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy, medical advice, or professional healthcare.
If this episode brings up anything difficult for you, please consider reaching out to a trained healthcare professional, therapist, or support service.

In Australia you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or the Butterfly Foundation National Helpline on 1800 33 4673, which provides support for people experiencing eating disorders and body image concerns.

Work with me

If you’re listening to this and recognising yourself in these patterns, you don’t have to keep navigating it on your own.

You can book a free 30-minute consultation below where we’ll map out what’s actually going on in your system and what support could look like. Book here

https://megandarnell.as.me/?appointmentType=69722155

Episode 28: Why Knowing Your Emotional Eating Patterns Still Doesn’t Change Them

A woman said something to me recently that I hear all the time in my work.

She said,

“I already know where this comes from. It’s because of my childhood. It’s because of trauma. I understand exactly why I do it.”

And then she paused for a moment and said something really honest.

“But I’m still doing it.”

She still finds herself standing in the kitchen late at night.

Opening the cupboard.

Eating something even though a part of her is thinking,

Why am I doing this again? I know better.

And the question she asked next is the one I want to talk about.

“If I understand my patterns so well… why haven’t they changed?”

The Moment Emotional Eating Often Happens

Let me describe what this moment often looks like.

You’ve had a long day.

Work has been demanding.
Maybe the kids needed you.
Maybe your partner needed something.
Maybe someone at work dropped the ball and it landed on your plate at the last minute.

You’ve been capable all day.

Responsible.
Strong.
Holding it together for everyone.

Then the house gets quiet.

You walk into the kitchen.

In that moment you are not analysing your childhood or thinking about trauma.

You’re just feeling something.

Maybe it’s exhaustion.
Maybe it’s loneliness.
Maybe it’s resentment.
Maybe it’s the feeling of being unseen or unappreciated.

Instead of saying to someone,

“I’ve had a really hard day.”

Instead of asking for a hug.

Instead of calling a friend and saying,

“I feel really alone tonight.”

You open the cupboard and grab something to eat.

Because that’s what you learned to do.

Handle it yourself.

Why Food Becomes a Way to Regulate

The truth is food works.

Food regulates the nervous system.

Warm food can slow your system down.
Warm food can mimic the feeling of being held.

Sweet foods can create a moment of comfort.

Sweetness can represent love, care, and nurturing.

Crunchy foods allow you to bite, break, and release tension.

Sometimes when people crave crunchy or salty foods, they are releasing frustration or anger that has been pushed down all day.

The body is incredibly intelligent.

It is always looking for ways to regulate.

When you’re standing in the kitchen eating chocolate late at night, sometimes you are not reaching for sugar.

You are reaching for comfort.

You are reaching for softness.

You are reaching for the feeling of being held.

The Connection Between Cravings and Emotional Needs

In Chinese medicine, sweetness is associated with the earth element.

Earth represents the mother.

It represents nourishment, care, and stability.

So when you crave sweetness, it can sometimes reflect a deeper longing for nurturing.

For comfort.

For someone to hold you in the way you needed when you were younger.

Why Many Women Struggle to Ask for What They Need

Here is the deeper part of this conversation.

Many women struggle to ask for what they need.

They cannot pick up the phone and say,

“I’m having a really hard time.”

Or

“I feel really lonely tonight.”

Because somewhere earlier in life they learned that their emotions were not welcome.

Maybe when they cried they were told,

“Stop crying.”

“Don’t be so sensitive.”

“You’re fine.”

Maybe when they were upset, the adults around them were too overwhelmed to respond.

So as little girls they learned something important.

Handle it yourself.

Don’t be too much.

Don’t ask for too much.

And those patterns don’t disappear just because you understand them.

They live in your nervous system.

They live in your body.

Why Awareness Alone Doesn’t Change the Pattern

This is where many self aware women feel stuck.

They can explain their patterns perfectly.

They might say,

“I emotionally eat when I’m overwhelmed.”

“I know I carry too much responsibility.”

“I know this started in childhood.”

But knowing does not stop the behaviour.

Because awareness alone does not create a new experience.

Understanding your childhood does not automatically teach your nervous system how to receive support.

Understanding your patterns does not automatically teach you how to ask for connection.

Those are relational experiences.

They have to be felt.

When Food Becomes the Reliable Source of Regulation

If you learned early in life that you couldn’t express your emotions or ask for what you needed, food may have become a reliable way to regulate.

Warm food can soothe.

Sweet food can comfort.

Carbohydrates can ground an anxious nervous system.

These are not random behaviours.

They are intelligent adaptations your body developed to take care of you.

Learning the Skills You Were Never Taught

For many women, there is another layer.

They are not connected to their bodies.

They cannot feel their hunger cues.

They cannot feel their fullness cues.

They struggle to recognise what they actually need emotionally.

And this is not a personal failure.

It is simply a skill that was never taught.

Learning to feel into your body is a skill.

Learning to recognise your emotional needs is a skill.

Learning to ask for support is a skill.

The Deeper Work Behind Emotional Eating

The work I do is not about controlling food.

Food is simply where the pattern shows up.

The real work is underneath.

Learning how to recognise what you actually need.

Learning how to say,

“I’m not okay today.”

Learning how to reach for connection instead of isolation.

Learning how to soothe your nervous system in ways that do not require food to carry the emotional load.

This process is often about learning how to mother yourself.

Learning to Mother Yourself

Self mothering means offering yourself the care, compassion, and support that you needed when you were younger.

It means learning how to listen to your body.

Learning how to respond to your needs with softness rather than criticism.

It is like becoming deeply attuned to yourself in the way a loving parent would be attuned to a child.

When you can offer yourself that kind of care, something begins to shift.

The need underneath the behaviour starts getting met somewhere else.

And food no longer has to do the emotional work it has been carrying for years.

Why This Work Changes Everything

Many women who work with me say the process feels incredibly gentle.

But it creates deeper change than anything they have tried before.

Because instead of trying to force behaviour change, we work with the nervous system and the parts of you that developed those patterns in the first place.

When your system experiences safety, connection, and support, the behaviours that once felt impossible to change begin to soften.

If You Understand Your Patterns But Still Feel Stuck

If you understand your patterns better than most people but still find yourself repeating them, I want you to know something.

You are not failing.

You do not lack discipline.

Insight is just one part of the healing process.

Real change happens when your nervous system begins to experience something different.

Support.

Connection.

Safety.

And when that happens, the patterns that once felt impossible to change start to loosen their grip.

Because healing always happens from the inside out.

Episode 27: All the Things I Tried to Stop Emotional Eating (And Why None of Them Worked)

Content Note

This article discusses eating disorders, binge eating, restriction, and exercise used as punishment around food.

This blog and podcast are intended for educational and informational purposes only and are not a substitute for therapy, medical advice, or professional healthcare.

If this topic brings up anything difficult for you, please consider reaching out to a trained therapist or healthcare professional.

In Australia you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or the Butterfly Foundation National Helpline on 1800 33 4673, which provides support for people experiencing eating disorders and body image concerns.

For years I thought my emotional eating was a discipline problem.

I believed I lacked willpower.

I thought if I could just control myself around food, everything would finally change.

So I tried everything.

I tried hypnotherapy.
Acupuncture.
Kinesiology.
Past life regression.
Self help books and affirmations stuck to my walls.

I hired personal trainers.
Followed high protein diets.
Low carb diets.
Nutrition plans.

I tried intuitive eating.

At one point I even ran a marathon because I was trying to run off all the food I had eaten.

I tried appetite suppressants, herbal teas, juice cleanses, and the lemon detox diet.

I even taped my mouth shut at night hoping it would stop me from waking up and binge eating.

None of it worked.

And for a long time, I thought that meant something was wrong with me.

But what I understand now is that I wasn’t failing.

I was just trying to solve the wrong problem.

The Therapy Session That Changed Everything

I remember sitting in a therapy office in my late twenties.

I was sitting across from the therapist, and my mum was sitting next to me.

Even before the session started I remember thinking this was a terrible idea.

But my therapist said that if I wanted to move forward with my healing, I needed to work on my relationship with my mum.

She said we needed to address some things that had happened when I was younger.

So I asked my mum to come along to therapy.

During the session the therapist asked her about some things from my childhood.

My mum responded the way she had many times before.

“That never happened. I would never do that.”

And I remember saying to her,

“Why would I make that up?”

Eventually she admitted that some of those things had happened.

But then she said something many people with emotionally immature parents will recognise.

“It’s not a big deal Megan. It was so long ago. Why don’t you just get over it?”

The therapist gently said to her,

“This might not be a big deal to you, but it’s a big deal to Megan.”

For a moment I thought maybe something had landed.

Maybe she understood.

But nothing changed.

I never received the repair I was hoping for.

At the time that felt devastating.

All I wanted was for my mum to understand and see me.

What I understand now is that I was looking for something she didn’t have the capacity to give.

Emotional Eating Was Never Really About Food

For a long time I thought my struggle was about food.

But when I look back, that therapy session was actually a pivotal moment in my emotional eating journey.

Because what I was really longing for was something much deeper.

I wanted to feel mothered.

I wanted to feel held.

I wanted someone to understand what I had been carrying.

Food became the place my nervous system tried to regulate that longing.

The Cycle of Bingeing and Punishing Myself

In my twenties I lived in a cycle of restriction, binge eating, and punishment.

I would binge at night.

Then the next morning I would wake up with a sense of shame.

The first thought in my head was essentially,

“I need to punish my body for what I’ve done.”

So I would go to the gym and push myself as hard as I possibly could.

Sometimes I would train twice in one day.

Not from a place of self care.

From a place of punishment.

The strange part is that people praised this behaviour.

When I was mentally at my worst, I received the most compliments.

I might say something like,

“I ate so much last night so I’m smashing myself at the gym today.”

And people would respond,

“Good on you.”

Looking back now, I realise how socially acceptable that form of punishment is.

The Hunger That Food Could Never Satisfy

During that time there was a hunger I couldn’t explain.

No matter how much I tried to control my eating, the hunger didn’t go away.

I would tell myself,

“You’re not hungry. You just ate.”

And technically that was true.

But what I didn’t understand then was that it wasn’t physical hunger.

It was what I now call developmental hunger.

A hunger for something food could never satisfy.

Connection.

Comfort.

Support.

To feel held and understood.

Why Diets and Food Plans Don’t Heal Emotional Eating

This is why so many strategies failed for me.

None of them addressed the real thing underneath.

Diets focus on food.

Exercise focuses on calories.

Nutrition plans focus on discipline.

But emotional eating is not a food problem.

Food is simply where the pattern shows up.

Underneath emotional eating there is often grief, loneliness, suppressed anger, resentment, or years of carrying too much responsibility.

Very often there is a longing to feel nurtured.

To feel cared for.

To feel safe.

The Deeper Meaning Behind Cravings

This is something I spoke about with my guest Lottie Davies on the podcast.

In Chinese medicine the taste of sweetness is associated with the earth element, which represents the mother.

Sweet foods are often linked to comfort, nurturing, and care.

So when someone is craving sweetness, it is not always about sugar.

Sometimes it is the body looking for softness.

Looking for love.

Looking for comfort.

The body is always communicating something.

Learning to Mother Yourself

The deeper healing work for me was not about fixing my eating.

It was about learning something I had never been taught.

How to mother myself.

How to offer myself the compassion, care, and emotional support I needed.

Instead of trying to force the behaviour to stop, I began working with the parts of me that were protecting me.

These protective parts were trying to keep me safe.

They were just running an old script that was no longer helping.

As those parts began to heal, the behaviours started to soften.

The pressure and perfectionism that had been driving my emotional eating slowly began to dissolve.

Healing Emotional Eating Starts Beneath the Behaviour

If you have tried everything to stop emotional eating and nothing seems to work, I want you to hear this.

You don’t lack willpower.

There is nothing wrong with you.

You have simply been trying to solve a deeper emotional need with food.

When you begin healing the nervous system and learning how to support yourself with compassion, things start to change.

Not through force.

Through understanding.

Through safety.

Through care.

Episode 26: The Hidden Link Between Emotional Eating, People Pleasing and Boundaries

Emotional eating is usually treated like a food problem.

Most conversations focus on cravings, discipline, willpower or learning to control what you eat.

But when I work with women around emotional eating, the story rarely begins with food.

It usually begins with a moment where something didn’t sit right.

A comment that hurt.
A boundary that was crossed.
A moment where you felt dismissed, unseen or taken for granted.

And instead of expressing it, you swallowed it.

The Moment That Often Starts the Pattern

Imagine something small happens during the day.

A partner says something that hurts your feelings.
A colleague drops more work on your desk when you already feel overwhelmed.
A friend makes a comment that lands badly.

Your body registers the moment immediately.

You feel tension.
You feel irritation.
You feel something shift inside.

But instead of saying something, the system often defaults to keeping the peace.

You tell yourself:

“They probably didn’t mean it.”
“I don’t want to make a big deal out of this.”
“I should just let it go.”

So you swallow it.

The frustration.
The hurt.
The resentment.

And your body holds the emotional charge.

People Pleasing Is Not a Personality Trait

When we talk about people pleasing, it is often framed as a confidence issue.

But people pleasing is rarely about weakness.

It is usually a very intelligent survival strategy that begins early in life.

Girls are socialised to be accommodating.

We are taught to be nice.
Be polite.
Don’t be difficult.
Don’t be too much.
Don’t upset people.

Over time, the nervous system learns something important.

Connection depends on keeping others comfortable.

Belonging depends on being agreeable.

Love depends on being helpful.

Children are incredibly intuitive.

They know that connection with caregivers is essential for survival.

So the nervous system adapts.

It learns to read the room.

To anticipate what other people need.

To smooth things over before conflict happens.

These skills often create adults who are highly perceptive and empathetic.

But they come at a cost.

Instead of asking, “What feels right for me?”

The system asks, “What will make everyone else comfortable?”

Why Boundaries Are Not Just Communication Skills

Most advice around boundaries focuses on scripts.

Say this.
Communicate that.
Just state your needs clearly.

But the nervous system does not operate through scripts.

It operates through one core question.

Am I safe?

If expressing needs once led to rejection, punishment, dismissal or withdrawal of love, the body remembers.

Years later, when you try to set a boundary, your nervous system can react as if you are stepping into danger.

You might say no to someone and then spend hours spiralling afterwards.

Replaying the conversation.
Worrying you were too harsh.
Feeling guilty.

You might even go back and soften the boundary.

Not because you lack confidence.

But because your nervous system believes connection might be at risk.

The Fawn Response

Most people are familiar with fight or flight.

But there is another trauma response that often sits underneath people pleasing.

It is called fawning.

Instead of fighting a threat or running from it, the nervous system learns to appease it.

To smooth things over.

To keep the peace.

For children who could not escape conflict or fight back against authority figures, fawning becomes a very efficient strategy.

Keep everyone happy.

Avoid conflict.

Ignore your own needs.

Preserve connection at all costs.

The problem is that the strategy does not disappear in adulthood.

It becomes automatic.

Where Emotional Eating Enters the Picture

When emotions are suppressed, the energy does not disappear.

It stays in the body.

That tension has to go somewhere.

This is where food often becomes the outlet.

Food creates relief.

It softens the tension that has built up from holding emotions inside.

It gives the nervous system something to do with the emotional activation that never had a place to go.

What we call emotional eating is often the body attempting to process feelings that were never allowed to be expressed.

Why These Patterns Can Last for Years

Over time these moments accumulate.

Years of accommodating.

Years of saying yes when you meant no.

Years of prioritising connection over authenticity.

All of those swallowed emotions settle in the body.

And they eventually settle into the relationship you have with food.

Emotional eating becomes the place where the nervous system finally releases pressure.

Healing the Pattern

Healing emotional eating is not about controlling food.

It is about helping the nervous system feel safe enough to experience emotions that were once dangerous to express.

Safe enough to feel anger without collapsing into guilt.

Safe enough to say no without fearing abandonment.

Safe enough to hold a boundary even if someone else is disappointed.

This work is not about pushing past your system.

It is about helping your body discover that it is safe to exist without disappearing.

Because when that internal safety begins to return, something powerful happens.

The pressure that was driving the emotional eating begins to dissolve.

Food no longer has to carry the emotional load.

And the relationship with food begins to change naturally.

Not because you forced it.

But because the relationship you have with yourself has finally begun to repair.

Episode 25: Emotional Eating Isn’t About Food | Dr Anita Johnston on Body Image, Cravings & What Your Body Is Really Saying

In Episode 25 of the Self Led Woman Podcast, I’m joined by depth psychologist and eating disorder specialist Dr Anita Johnston, author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, for a conversation that will completely shift the way you understand emotional eating.

Because for most women, the struggle with food isn’t actually about food.

Listen to the full episode

If you’ve ever felt stuck in cycles of food guilt, confusion, or disconnection from your body, this episode will help you see your experience in a new light.

🎙️ Listen to Episode 25: Emotional Eating Isn’t About Food on the Self Led Woman Podcast.

Why emotional eating is misunderstood

When you’re stuck in cycles of emotional eating, restriction, or food guilt, it’s easy to assume the problem is your behaviour.

That you need more discipline.
More control.
A better plan.

But as Dr Anita Johnston explains, these patterns are rarely random or dysfunctional.

They are meaningful.

They are often your system’s way of coping, regulating, or communicating something deeper that hasn’t yet been met.

Cravings are not the problem

One of the biggest shifts in this conversation is understanding that cravings are not something to fight.

They are something to listen to.

Dr Johnston uses metaphor to explain how food can symbolise deeper emotional needs.

For example, certain foods may be connected to comfort, warmth, or safety. Others may be linked to stimulation, expression, or relief.

This doesn’t mean every craving has a direct or obvious meaning, but it does point to something important:

Your body is communicating with you.

And when that communication is ignored, overridden, or judged, the cycle around food often intensifies.

Understanding “soul hunger”

Not all hunger is physical.

Physical hunger can be satisfied with food. It comes on gradually and settles once you’ve eaten.

But many women are experiencing a different kind of hunger entirely.

A deeper sense of longing that food alone cannot resolve.

Dr Johnston refers to this as “soul hunger.”

This can show up as a need for rest, connection, creativity, expression, or emotional support. And when those needs aren’t acknowledged, they often get redirected toward food.

Not because food is the answer, but because it’s accessible.

What’s really happening during “fat attacks”

Many women experience moments where their focus becomes intensely fixated on their body.

You might suddenly feel uncomfortable in your skin. Critical. Hyper-aware of your appearance.

Dr Johnston describes these as “fat attacks.”

But what’s important to understand is that these moments are rarely about your body itself.

They are often triggered by something deeper.

A feeling of vulnerability.
A lack of control.
An emotional experience that feels unsafe or overwhelming.

The mind shifts the focus onto the body because it feels more tangible. More manageable.

But addressing the body will never resolve what’s actually underneath.

Your body is not working against you

One of the most important takeaways from this conversation is this:

Your body is not the problem.

The patterns you’ve been trying to control, whether it’s emotional eating, restriction, or food obsession, may actually be your system’s way of trying to support you.

When you begin to see these behaviours through that lens, something shifts.

Instead of fighting yourself, you begin to understand yourself.

And from there, change becomes possible in a very different way.

Connect with Dr Anita Johnston

You can find Dr Anita Johnston and her work here:

Website: https://dranitajohnston.com/
Instagram / Facebook: @dranitajohnston

Light of the Moon Cafe: https://lightofthemooncafe.com/
Instagram / Facebook: @lightofthemooncafe

Ai Pono Hawaii
Instagram / Facebook: @aiponohawaii

📖 Purchase her book Eating in the Light of the Moon

Resources:
Free Food & Metaphor Guide
Cracking the Hunger Code (special offer)
New Crescent Moon (interactive course)

Disclaimer

This podcast and blog content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical or psychological advice. If you are struggling with your relationship with food or your mental health, please seek support from a qualified professional.

Episode 24: Why Weight Loss Is Not the Goal of Healing Emotional Eating

When people hear that I work with women who struggle with emotional eating, food, or their bodies, there is often an assumption.

That the goal must be weight loss.

But weight loss is never the goal of this work.

And there are important reasons for that.

The Message Women Are Already Receiving

We already live in a culture that constantly tells women their bodies need to be smaller, better, or fixed in some way.

Diet culture.
The wellness industry.
Fitness marketing.

Everywhere you look there is another message suggesting that your body is a problem that needs solving.

A new plan.
A new protocol.
A reset.
A before and after photo.

Another promise that if you just lose the weight, your life will finally work.

Underneath all of these messages is the same belief.

That something is wrong with you.

I fundamentally disagree with that.

The Body Is Often Trying to Protect You

One of the reasons I never position weight loss as the goal is because the body is far more intelligent than we often give it credit for.

Sometimes the body holds weight for protective reasons.

For many women, there have been experiences where their boundaries were crossed.

Sometimes these experiences were obvious and significant.

Other times they were subtle.

Unwanted attention.
Being sexualised at a young age.
Feeling exposed or uncomfortable as the body changed during puberty.
Comments that made them feel unsafe in their own skin.

Even if these experiences seemed small at the time, the body remembers them.

Parts of the nervous system can develop beliefs like:

If I stand out, something bad will happen.
I don’t want unwanted attention.
I don’t want people looking at me.
I don’t want jealousy or backlash.

These parts are not irrational.

They developed because something happened that taught them it wasn’t safe to be fully seen.

The body adapts.

Not because something is wrong with you.

Because your system is trying to protect you.

Emotional Eating Is Not About Food

Even though my work sits in the emotional eating space, the truth is that this work is not really about food.

Food is simply the place where the pattern shows up.

Underneath emotional eating there is often something much deeper.

Grief.
Loneliness.
Resentment.
The pressure of carrying too much responsibility for too long.

Sometimes these patterns started when someone was very young.

When emotions didn’t feel safe to express.

When there wasn’t a safe adult to sit with those feelings.

Food becomes the place where the nervous system can finally get a small moment of relief.

It might numb the pressure.
Soften the overwhelm.
Create a brief sense of comfort.

The behaviour is not a failure.

It is an adaptation.

And often a very intelligent one.

Why Focusing on Behaviour Alone Doesn’t Work

When the focus stays on controlling food, the deeper reason for the behaviour is never addressed.

Women often end up stuck in a cycle of trying to control their eating, feeling ashamed when they can’t maintain it, and then trying even harder.

All of that attention stays locked on the body.

But the real reason the behaviour exists underneath remains untouched.

My Own Experience With This

This is also personal for me.

I have my own recovery journey with food.

When I was at the worst point in that struggle, the least helpful thing I could have done was focus on fixing my body.

But that’s exactly what I was doing.

I was dieting more than ever.
Restricting more than ever.
Obsessing about my body more than ever.

And it made everything worse.

Restriction intensified the bingeing.

The desire to lose weight only increased my obsession with food.

My attention stayed locked on my body instead of understanding what my system was actually trying to cope with.

Why Intuitive Eating Is Not Always Simple

Another important piece of this conversation is intuitive eating.

Today I eat intuitively.

But when people say “just listen to your body,” they often forget something important.

Many women don’t feel safe in their bodies yet.

If you’ve spent years living in your head or disconnecting from your body, you might not be able to feel hunger or fullness clearly.

For some people, even being present in their body for a few seconds can feel overwhelming.

Reconnection with the body is a process.

It takes time.

It takes safety.

It takes learning to rebuild trust with yourself.

You cannot flip a switch and suddenly feel your body clearly.

The Sensitive Little Girl

Something I see over and over again in my work is that women who struggle with emotional eating were often highly sensitive children.

They noticed everything.

They could feel emotional shifts in the room before anyone said a word.

They were deeply intuitive.

But that sensitivity was often not celebrated.

They were told:

You’re too sensitive.
You’re too emotional.
Don’t cry.
Stop being dramatic.

So they learned to suppress it.

Those sensitive girls often grow into women who carry enormous responsibility.

They manage everyone around them.
They hold everything together.
They rarely express what they are carrying.

And eventually the body looks for somewhere to release the pressure.

Often that place becomes food.

Healing Happens in Safe Relationships

One of the most important parts of healing emotional eating is understanding relational trauma.

Relational trauma does not always come from dramatic moments.

Sometimes it comes from small, repeated experiences where a child’s emotions were not met with care.

Moments where there was no safe adult to say:

“I can see you’re upset. Let me sit with you.”

Those moments shape how we show up in relationships later in life.

And healing those wounds cannot happen completely alone.

Relational trauma heals inside safe relationships.

Including within a therapeutic relationship.

This is why the container of therapy matters so much.

Repairing small ruptures, speaking up for parts of yourself, and having those experiences received safely can become powerful moments of healing.

The Real Goal of This Work

This is why weight loss will never be the goal of the work that I do.

Not because bodies can’t change.

Bodies change all the time.

But weight loss is not the point.

The point is helping women reconnect with themselves.

To rebuild safety in their bodies.

To understand the parts of them that developed these strategies.

To trust their internal signals again.

To feel supported instead of punished by their own system.

Because what women actually need is not another plan to fix their bodies.

They need safety.

Connection.

Compassion.

And the space to understand what their system has been trying to protect them from all along.

Episode 23: My Bipolar Diagnosis and the Gut Brain Connection: How Nutrition Changed My Mood Stability

There is something about me that many people who are new to my work might not know.

At 35, I was diagnosed with bipolar type 2.

For a long time, that diagnosis felt like a life sentence.

I had struggled with depression on and off since I was young. Probably since primary school. There were periods where everything felt heavy, flat and difficult.

Then there were other periods where I felt energised, creative, productive and social. I needed less sleep. I had more ideas than I could keep up with.

I now understand that those periods were hypomania.

But at the time, I believed that was the version of me I needed to maintain.

That was the version of me that felt capable.

When depression returned, it felt like failure.

The Moment Everything Changed

The diagnosis itself was confronting, but what really impacted me was what I was told afterwards.

I was told that I would likely need medication for the rest of my life.

That bipolar disorder would always be something I would have to manage.

That conversation changed something inside me overnight.

It wasn’t just about mood anymore. It affected how I saw myself.

I started questioning whether I was reliable.

Whether I could run a business.

Whether I could build the life I imagined.

Because depression could return at any moment and take everything down with it.

That belief was devastating.

My Early Curiosity About Nutrition and Mood

Long before I received that diagnosis, I had already started noticing something important.

What I ate affected my mood.

If I ate enough protein, I felt more stable.
Too much sugar made me crash.
Refined carbohydrates made me sleepy and then hungry again later.

Alcohol made everything worse.

Eating too little made me anxious.
Eating too much made me feel heavy and low.

I was constantly observing these patterns.

Looking back, I was essentially treating my body like a science experiment.

Some of this curiosity was healthy.

Some of it was also tangled up in diet culture and an obsession with doing everything perfectly.

But even then I could feel that my mood was not separate from my physiology.

When My Gut Health Collapsed

In my early thirties I developed a parasite infection.

That experience sent my gut health into chaos.

Suddenly I was reacting to foods that had never been a problem before.

Dairy would make my throat tighten.
Certain foods made me feel hungover the next day even though I hadn’t been drinking.

My digestion was unpredictable and uncomfortable.

At the same time, I noticed something else.

When my gut was inflamed, my mood was worse.

When my blood sugar was unstable, my mood swung with it.

When I was undernourished, my brain felt under resourced.

These connections were impossible to ignore.

Discovering the Gut Brain Connection

A couple of years after my diagnosis, I came across a book called Madness: A Bipolar Life.

The book explored the role that things like nutrient deficiencies, inflammation, mineral imbalances and mitochondrial health can play in mood regulation.

It didn’t promise a cure.

But it gave me something incredibly important.

Agency.

One metaphor from that book stayed with me.

The brain is like a baby.

If a mother isn’t getting enough nutrients during pregnancy, the baby will still take what it needs from her body.

And when a baby is born, it cries when it needs nourishment.

The brain does something similar.

If it is not receiving the nutrients it needs, it will signal distress.

Supporting My System Differently

After reading that book, I decided to explore these ideas further with professional guidance.

I worked with a naturopath alongside my doctors.

We ran tests.
We looked at mineral levels.
We explored gut health and food intolerances.

We made adjustments slowly and carefully.

Over time, my system began to stabilise.

I continued to monitor my nutrition, blood sugar stability and stress levels.

Today I still do regular testing and pay close attention to what my body needs.

And since January 2020, I have not experienced another bipolar or depressive episode.

Trauma, Stress and Digestion

Something I understand now that I didn’t fully understand back then is this:

The brain is not separate from the body.

Around ninety percent of serotonin is produced in the gut.

The vagus nerve directly connects the gut and the brain.

When the nervous system is under chronic stress, digestion is one of the first systems that gets deprioritised.

If you grew up in an environment where your nervous system was constantly on high alert, your body likely spent years in survival mode.

When the body is in survival mode, digestion slows down.

Digestive enzyme production drops.

The ability to absorb nutrients from food becomes compromised.

Over time this can influence gut health, nutrient status and mood regulation.

Trauma lives in the body, not just the mind.

And the gut is one of the places where that story shows up.

From Control to Self Leadership

For years I tried to control my body.

I tried to optimise it, override it, fix it.

What eventually changed things was learning to support it instead.

That looked like:

Maintaining stable blood sugar
Eating enough protein
Supporting mineral balance
Prioritising sleep
Reducing stress where possible
Healing trauma
Setting boundaries

None of these things are glamorous.

But they are powerful.

A Very Important Disclaimer

This is my personal story.

It is not medical advice.

Mental health conditions like bipolar disorder are complex. They are biological, psychological and environmental.

Medication can be essential and life saving for many people.

What I am sharing here is simply the path I chose to explore under the guidance of qualified professionals.

What This Journey Taught Me

The biggest shift wasn’t just physiological.

It was relational.

I stopped treating my body as an enemy that needed to be controlled.

And I started learning how to support it.

I stopped chasing the highs and trying to avoid the lows.

Instead I focused on resourcing my nervous system.

That shift from control to self leadership changed everything.

Because the brain is not separate from the body.

And stability is not built in one place alone.

It is built in layers.