Episode 48: How I Actually Work With Emotional Eating | Inside My 12 Week Self Led System

This episode and article contain discussions around emotional eating, binge eating, restriction, shame, and trauma. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and clinical perspective. 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.

Most people understand emotional eating as a concept. Far fewer understand what it actually looks like to work with it at the level it needs to be worked with.

In this episode I pull back the curtain on my 12 week one on one container and walk you through exactly how the work is structured, why it is built the way it is, and what each part of the cycle actually looks like in real life.

The Foundation

In my years of doing this work I have never worked with a woman who struggles with emotional eating, binging, alcohol, spending, or any other cycle who does not have a history of trauma. I want to say that clearly because I think it is one of the most important things I can tell you.

This is not just my observation. It is consistent with what practitioners across trauma-informed therapy, somatic work, and nervous system-based approaches have been saying for years. The two things go together, not always in obvious ways, and not always in ways that look like what we might typically think of as trauma.

It does not have to be a single dramatic event. Relational trauma is the accumulated experience of having your needs unmet, your emotions dismissed, and your sense of safety disrupted. It is very real. It is very common. And it is why working with the behaviour alone will never be enough.

The Two Phase Architecture

The work follows what I call the Self Led System, built across two phases. The first six weeks are called Release and the second six weeks are called Reclaim. Each phase addresses a different layer of what keeps the cycle in place.

Phase One: Release

The first phase is about the inner cycle. The cycle itself always follows the same structure, even if the behaviour changes from person to person.

It starts with pressure. This is the slow accumulation that happens before anything else is visible. The mental load, the responsibilities, the feeling of always holding everything together. Most women do not even notice this stage because they are functioning beautifully on the outside. The pressure is there though, and it is building.

Then comes restriction and control. This is the part that tries to manage the pressure before it gets out of hand. Restriction and control does not just mean food rules. It can mean controlling spending, emotions, schedule, intake of anything that might tip the balance. It looks like discipline. It feels like being on top of things. But it is just the cycle at its quietest stage.

Then comes the trigger. Usually something small. A conversation that did not go well, an unexpected bill, a hard day, a moment of exhaustion where you simply cannot hold it together for one more minute. Think of it like a glass of water filled to the very brim. The pressure has been building and building until the glass is completely full. Then it only takes one drop for it to spill over.

Then the behaviour arrives. The eating, the drinking, the spending, whatever the fastest exit is. Something to give relief. This is the stage most women identify as the actual problem. It is not the problem. It is relief. It is the nervous system finally getting to exhale.

Then comes the shame spiral. This is where I want to make an important distinction because most people confuse guilt and shame. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am bad. Guilt is about action. Shame becomes about identity. The shame spiral that follows a behaviour is not just about what you did. It is your system making it mean something about who you are.

Then comes compensation. Starting over. Being stricter this time. Telling yourself this will not happen again. Deleting the number of the situationship. Going back on the plan. That is the cycle completing itself and preparing to begin again.

In these first six weeks we work with each of those parts that are keeping the cycle in place. Not to eliminate them. That is what discipline tries to do and it is why discipline only works for a while. All of these parts have a job and a history and a purpose. The work is helping them individually feel safe enough to soften, so they do not have to keep doing that job.

Phase Two: Reclaim

Once we have done the foundational inner cycle work, we move to the outer layer. The outer layer keeps the inner layer in place. This is where it gets really interesting because these outer parts often do not look like they have anything to do with the cycle. They look like personality. They look like character. They look like just who you are.

The perfectionist is the part that applies relentless pressure. The impossibly high standards. The belief that if you just get it right this time everything will be okay. The perfectionist feeds directly into restriction and control. It also feeds into the shame spiral because when the cycle breaks, as it always does eventually, the perfectionist is right there to say you failed again.

Body and behaviour checking is the part that scrutinizes. The checking in the mirror. The three outfit changes before leaving the house. The rigidity around monitoring what you ate or how you moved. The way a single deviation can feel like the whole thing has collapsed. The behaviour that gets checked does not have to be food. For some women it is exercise. For others it is spending or alcohol. The behaviour can migrate because the underlying system has not changed. The behaviour was always just the exit. When you close one exit the pressure finds another.

The fear of being seen shows up in every single one of my clients. You might not recognise yourself in the obvious version so let me name a few. For some women it is a very specific fear of receiving unwanted attention from men, often rooted in experiences from a time when they were far too young to have been put in that position. For others it is a fear of jealousy, the belief that if they heal or become the fullest version of themselves other women will resent them. For others it is about success itself, the sense that if they actually get what they want something bad will happen. For some it is about belonging, if food is how my family shows love and I change my relationship with it what does that mean for how I fit there.

These fears are not irrational. They are the system doing exactly what it was designed to do. The work is not to argue with those fears. It is to work with the parts that are holding them so they can safely and gently let them go.

The need for approval and people pleasing often live so close together they are hard to separate. The need for approval is the constant scanning for signs that you are okay, that you are enough, that you are doing it right. People pleasing is the behavioural expression of that need. Saying yes when you mean no. Managing everyone else's emotions before your own. Keeping the peace. Making yourself smaller so others feel comfortable. People pleasing was learned in relationship, usually early, and it made complete sense at the time. But it directly feeds the cycle.

The part that cannot speak up runs so deep for so many women that it does not even register as a problem. It feels like politeness. But underneath the inability to speak up for your needs is almost always a belief that was handed to you very early. The belief that your needs are too much. That asking for what you want makes you ungrateful or selfish or difficult. When you cannot speak up, the feeling goes somewhere. It does not disappear. It just swallows. Then it needs an exit. That is often where the behaviour comes in.

The Good Girl Template

Here is what I want you to understand about all six of these outer parts. The perfectionist, the body and behaviour checking, the fear of being seen, the need for approval, the people pleasing, the part that cannot speak up. They do not operate independently. They all run on the same underlying script that most of us were handed very early on.

Don't be too much. Don't be too sensitive. Don't cry. Don't express your needs. Don't be selfish. Put others first. Be easy. Be manageable. Be good.

That template was handed to most of us, sometimes explicitly but often implicitly, through the way needs were responded to, through the emotional climate of the family, through the messages absorbed from culture and school and the adults around us.

That template kept us safe once. It felt like it did. But it is also what keeps the cycle in place. A woman running on the good girl template cannot meet her own needs. A woman who cannot meet her own needs will always find something else to meet them for her.

Why Both Phases Matter

You can do the inner cycle work and see real shifts. The pressure will start to soften and the behaviour will become less urgent. The shame spiral will get quieter. But if the outer layer is still running, the perfectionist still demanding impossible standards, the people pleaser still swallowing resentment, the fear of being seen still keeping you small, those outer parts will keep feeding back into the inner cycle. Slowly and quietly the pressure will build again and the whole thing will reset.

That is why the 12 weeks covers both layers. Not because more is always better but because the architecture of the cycle requires it.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

This is not a rigid protocol where every woman follows the same path. The structure gives us a map but the work itself is deeply personal and adapts to your system. Every woman's cycle has its own shape, her own particular parts, her own history, her own version of the pattern.

What we are doing in those 12 weeks is finding precisely where your system is holding things and working with it there. Not where you think it should be. Not the obvious place. Exactly where your psyche is ready to go.

When we slow down and actually ask, your system knows. It will show you what needs to be worked with. If the approach is right and the safety is there, it will take you exactly where you need to go.

The things that shift as a result go far beyond the original pattern. Relationships change. Careers change. The sense of self changes. Because the cycle was never just about the behaviour. It was always about so much more.

If you want to find out what your cycle actually looks like, the first step is a free consultation. We look at your specific patterns, what is driving them, what is keeping them in place, and whether this work is the right fit for you. If it is we will talk about next steps. If it is not I will tell you that honestly. The link to book is in the show notes.

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing. Link here: https://www.megandarnell.com.au/waitlist

Episode 47: The Binge and Restrict Cycle | Why It Shows Up With Food, Money, Wine and Situationships

This episode and article contain discussions around emotional eating, binge eating, restriction, spending patterns, and relational cycles. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and clinical perspective. 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.

When was the last time you had a blowout?

Not necessarily with food. Maybe it was a bottle of wine when you told yourself you'd have one glass. A Friday night that turned into a whole weekend and a Monday morning credit card statement that made your stomach drop. A midnight online order. Going back to the situationship you said you were done with because after weeks of almost nothing, they said one thing that felt like a win. And it wasn't even that amazing. It's just that when you're starving, breadcrumbs feel like a feast.

The behaviour changes. The cycle stays exactly the same.

Today I want to talk about that cycle. Because I think it applies to far more women than just those who identify with emotional eating.

Being Good Is Not Outside the Cycle

Most women are so focused on the blowout, the thing they swore they wouldn't do again, that they either don't know what's actually creating it, or they think the blowout is the outlier and the rest of the time is who they really are.

But being good is not outside the cycle. It is one half of it.

When you restrict with food, with money, with emotions, with your needs, with your words, you create pressure in your system. Not all at once. It builds slowly over days or weeks or sometimes months. You create pressure when you say yes when you wanted to say no. When you swallow the words you actually wanted to say. When you stay in on a Saturday night missing something you really wanted to do because you're saving money. When you smile through the moment when you just wanted to say no, that actually doesn't work for me. When you're the responsible one, the strong one, the one who holds it all together.

You don't notice the pressure building because you're proud of yourself. The discipline feels like the real you. The capable version of you. The one who has it together.

But that pressure has nowhere to go.

And at some point something tips the scale. Something small, usually. A hard day. A bill that arrives at the wrong moment. A conversation that went badly. Or just a point of exhaustion where you cannot hold it together for one more minute.

So your system reaches for relief. And the relief is real. In the short term the blowout works. It discharges the pressure. You get a moment of exhale where everything feels softer.

And then the shame arrives. I need to be better. I need to get back on track. And you do. And the cycle begins again.

The Money Example

I want to stay with money for a moment because I think it illustrates something that gets missed when we only talk about food.

Imagine you have been really good with money. Months of it. Staying in on weekends, saying no to things, watching your savings grow. And then an unexpected bill arrives. Not a catastrophic one, but one that creates discomfort. And something about it feels out of proportion to the actual bill itself. So instead of looking at a payment plan or finding another way to manage it, you clear out some or all of your savings just to make the feeling stop.

There is a moment of relief. And then resentment. I did everything right and I still ended up back at zero.

That is a binge. It does not look like one. But the structure is identical. Restriction creates pressure. Pressure needs relief. The bill was just the trigger. The cycle was already running.

Why the Pattern Runs So Deep

Most of our patterns form before the age of seven. They do not look the same as they did back then. They show up in different shapes across different areas of life. But the pattern underneath is the same one that formed in a little girl who was learning what she needed to do to feel safe, loved, or acceptable.

Be a good girl. Don't be difficult. Handle it yourself. Don't cry. Don't need too much. Keep the peace. Be responsible. Be easy to be around.

She learned that so well that decades later she can go for months being impeccably good, holding everything, carrying everyone, saying yes and fine and no worries and I'm okay, I don't mind. And then driving home furious, reciting in her head exactly what she should have said. Going to bed with resentment sitting in her chest, playing it over and over for days.

Maybe what feels like the heaviness you carry, the reason it feels so disproportionately heavy, is not just because you're carrying it. It might be your six year old self carrying responsibilities that were never hers to carry. Because she was six. And that was always going to be too much for her.

You're Not Addicted to the Behaviour

These things that you get drawn back into, the food, the spending, the person, you might sometimes feel like you're addicted or that you can't stop yourself. But you are not addicted to the behaviour.

The food is not the addiction. Neither is the spending or the person. It is the cycle. The rhythm of it. The predictability. The way it has become your nervous system's default response to pressure. The system will choose the familiar over the unknown almost every time, even when the familiar is painful.

When you are in the being good phase the discipline feels like the real you. And the blowout feels like the exception. But they belong to each other completely. One creates the other. And you cannot address one without addressing both.

The Alternator Fault

If you have a car with a fault in the alternator, you can put better fuel in, service it regularly, be meticulous about maintenance. It will run well sometimes for long stretches. But the alternator fault is still there. And if there is enough pressure, the car breaks down again.

The blowout is not evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you. It is the alternator fault showing itself. The system telling you as clearly as it knows how that the pressure underneath has nowhere else to go.

You can keep putting in better fuel. You can have a stricter plan, a tighter budget. You can bully yourself into being more disciplined. It will work for a while until it doesn't. Because you have not looked at the alternator. The thing underneath.

What the Real Work Looks Like

This work is not about stopping the behaviour. It is not about finding better strategies to white knuckle yourself through to the next blowout. It is not about building enough discipline to stay good all the time.

It is about going to the exact part of you that is still carrying something that was never meant to be hers. Understanding why she has been doing it. Meeting her not with shame or frustration but with curiosity and compassion that allows her to finally feel safe enough to let go of what she has been holding.

When that happens something internally shifts. Not because you tried harder. Not because you finally found the right plan or got back on track. But because the pressure that was driving the cycle has been addressed at the root.

Then the cycle can unwind. Not all at once. But enough that you stop swinging so far in either direction. Enough that the relief seeking loses its urgency. Enough that being good stops feeling like something you have to maintain through sheer force of will.

The part of you that has been swinging between control and relief for as long as you can remember slowly starts to find somewhere to rest.

If this episode resonated please share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you are ready to look at what is going on underneath, you can book a free consultation in the show notes.

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing. Link here: https://www.megandarnell.com.au/waitlist

Episode 46: What the Obsession With Your Body Is Actually Trying to Tell You

This episode and article contain discussions around emotional eating, body image, disordered eating, and trauma. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and clinical perspective. 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.

The obsession with your body, the fixation on fixing it, changing it, improving it, the constant mental noise around food and what you should or shouldn't be eating, that is not the problem you think it is.

It's the clue.

It is your nervous system pointing you very loudly and very persistently away from the exact thing that needs your actual attention.

The Body as a Protection Strategy

When we focus on our bodies, we are in our heads. When we are calculating, monitoring, planning, criticising, comparing, thinking about food, thinking about our bodies, thinking about what we ate yesterday and what we will do differently tomorrow, while we are up there thinking all those thoughts, we are not feeling.

This is not an accident. The neuroscience here is important.

When the brain's threat response system is activated, it pulls resources from the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reflection, insight, and emotional processing, and redirects them towards survival functions. Scanning, monitoring, managing.

So for a woman who learned early that certain emotions weren't safe to feel, that her needs were too much, that the way to be loved and accepted was to hold everything together, to manage everything quietly, to be good, the body and food become a perfect object of focus. There is always something to fix, something to improve, something to control. And as long as that is where her attention goes, she never has to feel what is underneath.

The fixation on the body is not vanity. It is a protection strategy. A sophisticated, unconscious, incredibly effective way of staying out of the emotional experience that is quietly waiting underneath it all.

What Is Actually Underneath?

In my work with women, I help them find the precise root of what is driving these patterns. Not a general understanding of why emotional eating happens, but the exact emotions, experiences, and unintegrated memories that are specific to them and their system.

And what we find without exception is that underneath the food obsession, underneath the body criticism, underneath years of cycling and starting over, there is something that has never been fully felt.

Grief. Loneliness. Rage. Shame. Fear. A particular ache of having needed something as a child and not having received it.

These are not abstract concepts. They are physical experiences. They live in the body as sensation. Tightness in the chest. Heaviness in the stomach. Constriction in the throat. A particular quality of numbness or flatness that settles over everything.

And the reason they have not been fully felt is that at some point, feeling them felt too dangerous. Too much. Too overwhelming. And there was no one to help regulate the experience. No one to say, I see you, I am here, and this is safe to feel.

So the system finds another way. And food was there.

What Years of Cycling Does to the Body's Signals

Women who have spent years cycling between restriction and emotional eating have often lost touch with the most basic signals their body sends.

Hunger cues, ignored for so long, become unreliable. The body stops trusting that it will be fed, so it stops sending clear signals. Or it sends them in ways that feel like anxiety or restlessness or the urge to eat when there is no physical hunger present. Because the system has learned that those signals get a response when the straightforward ones do not.

Fullness cues, overridden again and again, become similarly distorted. And underneath all of that, the emotional signals, the felt sense of what is actually happening inside, become equally unreliable. Because ignoring the body's signals is not a skill you can apply selectively. When you learn to override one layer of sensation, you override them all.

This is why so many women in this cycle describe feeling completely disconnected from themselves. Not just from their bodies but from their emotions, their desires, their instincts, their intuition, their sense of who they actually are.

And the very thing that is asking for attention, the felt emotional experience of living in a body, is the thing the obsession with food has helped them avoid for years.

What Coming Back to the Body Actually Means

I think this gets misunderstood. Coming back to the body is not about learning a technique. It is not another thing to add to the list. It is not a mindful eating practice or a breathing exercise or a morning routine.

It is about returning to something that was always there.

In practical terms it means learning to notice the physical sensations in the body without immediately trying to fix, change, or escape them. Tightness, heaviness, restlessness, irritability, the particular quality of what is present right now. It means learning that emotions are not abstract things that happen in the mind. They are physical events. They have texture and location and temperature. They move and shift when they are given space. And they tend to intensify when they are suppressed and soften when they are met with genuine attention.

It means learning that the urge to reach for food is often preceded by a moment, sometimes just a fraction of a second, of a feeling that is asking to be acknowledged. And that the gap between the feeling and the action of reaching for food is where the real work lives. Not to stop eating, but to get curious about what is there. What am I feeling right now? Where do I feel it in my body? And what does it actually need?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the beginning of a different relationship with yourself.

This Is Not a Quick Process

For women who have spent years disconnected from their bodies, returning to a felt experience requires patience, safety, and support. You cannot think your way into it. You have to be accompanied back.

The nervous system needs consistent, repeated evidence that it is safe to feel. That the emotions it has been managing through food are survivable. That there is someone there to help hold the experience while it surfaces. A container to help with pacing so it does not go past capacity and become overwhelming.

That is the work. Not understanding it, but experiencing it in the body in real time with support.

And what becomes available on the other side is not just a different relationship with food. It is a different relationship with yourself.

The question I want to leave you with is not what should I eat or how do I stop or how do I finally get this under control.

It is this.

What am I not feeling?

What is the emotion that has been asking for my attention, quietly and persistently, that food has been answering on its behalf?

That is where the real work is.

Book a free consultation where we look at your specific patterns together and work out whether this work is the right fit for you.

The waitlist for Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is now open. Women who join before launch receive founding member pricing. Link here: https://www.megandarnell.com.au/waitlist

Episode 45: Unburdened Eating | Healing Your Relationship With Food and Your Body Through IFS With Dr. Jeanne Catanzaro

This episode and article contain discussions around eating disorders, disordered eating, body image, trauma, and emotional eating. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and is not a substitute for professional 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.

What if the preoccupation with food and your body had nothing to do with food or your body at all?

It is genuinely one of the greatest honours of this podcast to welcome today's guest. Dr. Jeanne Catanzaro is a clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of experience working with eating disorders, disordered eating, and trauma. She is the author of Unburdened Eating, vice president and co-owner of the Internal Family Systems Institute, and one of the most respected voices in both the IFS and eating disorder fields in the world. She is also married to IFS founder Dr. Richard Schwartz. I have admired her work for a long time and this conversation did not disappoint.

What's Really Driving the Pattern

The focus on food and the body is almost never really about food or the body. What Jeanne helps people understand is that the preoccupation relates to much deeper wounds, wounds of shame and low self-worth, that drive people to focus on food and the body in various ways. Whether that is weight loss, clean eating, hyper-focusing on health, or disconnecting from the body entirely, these are all ways of managing emotional distress, traumatic events, and attachment disruptions that have nowhere else to go.

The goal of the work is to lay bare what really needs healing. And when those underlying wounds are healed, the parts that focus on food and the body or disconnect from it no longer need to do that.

Every Part Has a Positive Intention

One of the most important reframes in IFS is this. Every part of you that is debating, restricting, binging, criticising, or obsessing around food is trying to do something for you. Within you is a core wisdom that knows what you want and what you need. And every part that is polarizing around food has a positive intention underneath, even if what it is doing is causing harm on the surface.

When you can hold that awareness, something shifts. You stop being dominated by the thoughts and feelings. You start to unblend. And from that slightly more spacious place, you can get curious about what each part is actually trying to protect.

The Inner Critic and Why It Often Brings People Into Therapy

Something Jeanne says in this conversation has stayed with me. The inner critic is often the part that brings people into therapy. It is the part that says I need to stop binging, I need to get this under control, something is wrong with me. And it is so familiar, so much a part of the background, that many people do not even experience it as a part. It is just who they are.

But when that critical part blends, it blocks access to self energy, to curiosity, compassion, and clarity. And you cannot get anywhere else until you establish some relationship with it. Even just noticing it, pausing it for a moment, and asking what are you afraid would happen if you relaxed back just a little right now, that is a significant step.

Rebuilding Trust Through IFS

IFS is a deeply relational model. And the trust that gets rebuilt through it is not just trust with a therapist. It is trust with yourself. After years of dieting, of starting over, of feeling like the wisdom must exist in someone else but certainly not in you, rebuilding that trust takes time. It requires borrowing self energy from someone who holds the awareness that it is possible. And then over time, through repeated, consistent, relational experience, the parts begin to consider that maybe there is a different way.

Slow is fast. You cannot rush a protective part. But with patience and persistence, they do begin to soften.

Eating for Pleasure Is Not the Problem

Jeanne says something in this episode that I think needs to be said more clearly and more often. Eating for pleasure is not a problem. Food is enjoyable. That is just true. We eat for pleasure, for connection, for celebration. And making that a moral issue is where so much of the suffering begins.

If a part of you is eating for pleasure a lot and feels out of control, that is worth getting curious about. Not because pleasure is the problem, but because that part probably needs something. Connection, rest, comfort, care. And getting curious about what it actually needs is where the real shift happens.

What Happens When You Stop Treating Your Body as a Problem to Solve

This is the question I asked Jeanne and her answer is one I keep coming back to. When a woman stops treating her body as a problem to solve, she can finally get curious. The false binary of good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, begins to dissolve. There is room to ask what do I actually want, what do I actually feel, which of these beliefs have I adopted because other people thought I should.

That is a huge shift. And it opens up something that is genuinely different. Not fixing, not optimising, not performing. Just curiosity about what is actually true for her.

What Her Body Would Most Want Her to Hear

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?

Jeanne's answer was this.

“I am supposed to change. I am supposed to be different. I am not supposed to stay the same. I am supposed to want and need different things. I deserve love and compassion and support.”

Find Jeanne and her upcoming retreats, workshops and webinars at https://jeannecatanzaro.com/

Unburdened Eating the book

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

Episode 44: What Emotional Eating Is Actually Telling You About the Rest of Your Life

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

What if your pattern around food wasn't the problem to solve, but the window into something much deeper?

Today I want to take you through each of the layers that sit underneath emotional eating. Not to give you more things to fix. But to help you get genuinely curious about what the pattern might be trying to show you about the rest of your life.

The Moment It Starts

Let's start with a moment where you want something. Maybe it's chocolate, maybe it's something else entirely, maybe you're not even sure what it is. And before you've done anything about it, something kicks in. There's a voice or a calculation or an override where you decide to find the healthy substitute, the safer option, the thing that feels more acceptable. And you perform an okayness around it. But something underneath keeps quietly searching.

That moment, that specific sequence of wanting something, overriding it, finding a substitute, performing that you're okay, it's not just about food. It is the story of how you learned to relate to your own needs and desires. And it is almost certainly showing up in every other area of your life too.

Your relationship with food is a mirror. Not the mirror you might think, not about your body or how you look or whether you're being good or bad. A deeper mirror. One that reflects back your relationship with desire, with receiving, with control, with pleasure, with trust, and with yourself.

Your Relationship With Desire

When you're overriding a craving, swapping it out for something healthier, suppressing it or negotiating with it, you are relating to your own desire as something that can't be trusted. Something that needs to be managed. Something that if you let it, will get you into trouble.

And for most women, that relationship with desire didn't begin with food. It began much earlier. In a family system, in a culture, and with a set of messages absorbed so young they stopped feeling like messages and started feeling like truth.

Don't want too much. Be easy. Be quiet. Be manageable. Your needs are inconvenient. Just be a good girl.

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

And now if you look at your relationships, your work, your life, where else are you overriding what you actually want? Where else are you settling for the substitute? And where else are you performing okayness while something underneath goes unmet?

Your Relationship With Receiving

Every time you reach for the substitute when you wanted the real thing, you are reenacting a very old pattern of deciding that what you actually want is not something you get to have. There is a version of you that is acceptable, controlled, moderate, good. And a version of you that isn't. And the acceptable version gets fed. The other has to make do.

This isn't about food. This is about receiving. About whether you believe in your body that you are allowed to want things and actually have them.

So many women are extraordinarily good at giving. Anticipating other people's needs, meeting them, showing up, holding space. And extraordinarily uncomfortable with being on the receiving end. With letting something in without immediately calculating whether they've earned it.

Where else in your life do you struggle to receive? To let someone help you. To accept a compliment without deflecting. To ask for what you need without apologizing for needing it. The food is just where it's most visible.

Your Relationship With Control

The rules you might have around food, the tracking and calculating and compensating, they feel like safety. And in a way, they are. If your early environment was unpredictable, chaotic, or emotionally unsafe, control becomes the thing that keeps you regulated. If I can control this then I'll be okay. If I follow the rules nothing bad will happen.

But where else does this show up for you? Where else are you gripping so tightly because letting go feels unsafe? Where else are you managing and monitoring and compensating? Where else are you exhausting yourself trying to keep everything in order because the alternative feels too uncertain?

Food rules are not really about food. They are a nervous system trying to create order in a world that didn't always feel orderly. And that same nervous system is running the same strategy in other areas of your life too.

Your Relationship With the Good Girl

Diet culture didn't invent the good girl. It just found a very efficient vehicle for her. She already existed. Created in a family system that rewarded her for being easy, for not needing too much, for managing her emotions quietly, and for being the one who held it all together.

She learned that approval was available if she performed well enough. So she performed. And now she performs with food. She is good during the week. She earns her weekends. She is controlled and measured and disciplined. And when she slips she feels it in her body like she has failed at something fundamental.

But she is also performing everywhere else. Saying yes when she means no. Staying quiet when she actually wants to speak up. Making herself smaller to keep the peace. Managing everyone's emotions while suppressing her own. Giving endlessly and struggling to ask for anything in return.

The good girl pattern is not a food pattern. It is a survival pattern. And food is just one of the places it shows up most clearly.

Your Relationship With Pleasure

Genuine, uncomplicated pleasure. The kind where you eat what you wanted, enjoy it, and move on without it meaning anything about you. That sends a signal to your nervous system that says we are safe, we are resourced, we are okay.

Many women have never experienced food in that way. Food has always carried some kind of charge. Always been something to negotiate with rather than simply enjoy.

But this extends well beyond food. Can you rest without earning it first? Can you enjoy something fully without guilt following close behind? Can you receive pleasure, whether that's a good meal, a compliment, an evening with no obligations, without feeling like you have to justify it?

Pleasure is regulating. And a woman who cannot access genuine pleasure without guilt is a woman whose nervous system never fully gets to rest.

Your Relationship With Trust

At the heart of all of this is trust. Trust that your body knows what it needs. Trust that your desires are not the enemy. Trust that if you stop managing and controlling and overriding, you will not spiral into something unmanageable.

Trust is built slowly through paying attention to how things actually feel. Not through the lens of rules, but through genuine curiosity. Through learning over time that you can be trusted with your own hunger, your own needs, your own desires.

Do you trust yourself? Not just around food, but in your decisions, your instincts, your intuition, your sense of what is right for you? Or do you constantly second-guess yourself, override your own knowing, or look outside yourself for permission?

Because that relationship to self-trust, the one you have around food, is almost always the same relationship you have with yourself everywhere else.

What's on the Other Side

Here is what women tell me after doing this work. And it's almost never what they expected.

They stop saying yes when they mean no. They start asking for what they need without apologizing for needing it. They can receive care, help, compliments, rest without deflecting or calculating whether they've earned it. They trust themselves in other areas of their life where they couldn't before. Their relationships change. Not because they changed other people, but because they stopped abandoning themselves to keep the peace.

The food was never just about food. It was the window into the whole thing. And when you go through that window and do the real work, what's on the other side is so much bigger than a healed relationship with eating. It's a healed relationship with yourself.

I'm not asking you to fix anything today. I'm just asking you to get curious. Where does this pattern live in your life beyond food? Where are you overriding your own desires? Where are you settling for the substitute? Where are you performing the okayness? Where are you gripping for control? Where are you struggling to receive? And where are you not trusting yourself?

Because that's where the work is waiting.

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

Episode 43: Why Emotional Eating Won't Budge No Matter What You Try | Trauma, the Nervous System and the Wellness Merry-Go-Round

This episode and article contain discussions around emotional eating, disordered eating, restriction, trauma, and the binge cycle. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and clinical perspective. 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.

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If you have tried everything and you keep finding yourself back at the beginning, starting again, I want you to understand something. This is not an accident. That is by design.

Today I want to talk about something that doesn't get said nearly enough. Not about what you're eating or your nervous system, although we get there too. What I want to talk about is why you keep going back.

When I was deep in my own cycle around food, I went through a period where I was trying very hard to stay in a calorie deficit. Just what every diet and eating plan tells you to do. And what happened to my body when I did that was not what I expected.

It didn't matter how small the deficit was. It didn't matter if I was being sensible about it. The moment my body registered that it wasn't getting enough, my whole system would flood with cortisol. I would feel it physically. My back muscles would seize up, my neck and shoulders would become so tense that it caused physical pain. Not just discomfort. A full body bracing, a physical holding that wouldn't release until I ate again.

And I remember thinking, what is wrong with me? Why is this so hard? Why does something that seems so simple for other people feel like this for me?

The answer I now understand is that I grew up with a lot of relational trauma. And a body that has lived through relational trauma doesn't experience restriction the way a regulated, supported, and well-resourced body does. For my nervous system, restriction wasn't just uncomfortable. It was a threat signal. And my body responded accordingly.

I want you to hold that story while I explain something about the industry that has been selling you solutions for years.

The Poker Machine Model

The wellness industry runs on the same psychology as a poker machine. I want you to really sit with that for a moment.

If you've ever seen research on gambling addiction, you'll know about something called intermittent reinforcement. It is one of the most powerful psychological mechanisms ever studied.

Here's how it works. You pull a lever and nothing happens, you stop pulling. You pull a lever and something always happens, you get bored and stop pulling. But when you pull a lever and sometimes you win, sometimes you don't, sometimes the reward is big and sometimes it's small, sometimes it doesn't come at all but you cannot stop pulling. The unpredictability is the addiction. The occasional win is what keeps you going back. Not the consistent outcome. The possibility of one.

This is how poker machines are designed. It is how social media is designed. The unpredictable scroll, the occasional post that makes you feel something, the algorithm that gives you just enough to keep you coming back. It is how gambling is designed. And it is, whether intentionally or not, exactly how the wellness and diet industry works.

You go on a plan. Maybe it works for a while. Maybe you feel better for a few weeks. You have a run of good days and that's the win. That's the lever playing out. And then it stops working. Or life gets in the way. Or you go on a holiday and come home feeling like you need to start over. And instead of concluding that the plan didn't work, your brain concludes that you need to pull the lever again. Because it worked last time. Maybe this time will be the big win. This time I'm going to get it right.

That determination, that I'm starting again and this time it's going to be different energy, is not a character flaw. That is one of the most well documented psychological responses in existence.

The wellness industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. And it stays that way because the product only works sometimes, for some people, temporarily. If it worked completely and permanently, you would never need to buy again. The merry-go-round is profitable. Your freedom from it is not.

The Neuroscience of Why This Cycle Is So Hard to Break

Your brain has a system driven by dopamine, centered in a region called the nucleus accumbens. Its job is to motivate you towards things that keep you alive. Food, connection, safety, novelty. It creates urgency, a pull, a seeking energy towards the things that matter.

Here's what happens when you restrict. Restriction is a physiological stressor. For some people it's a mild one. For others, particularly those with a history of trauma or chronic stress, it is significant. The body interprets a deficit not as a lifestyle choice but as a threat. Cortisol rises, the nervous system activates, the body begins scanning for resources.

When you finally eat, particularly something high reward and immediately satisfying, the dopamine response is significant. The seeking system in your brain finds what it was looking for. The cortisol drops. Your nervous system can exhale.

A binge doesn't just feel like relief emotionally. It is relief neurologically. Your brain registers it as the resolution of a threat.

This is why the restrict and binge cycle is so hard to interrupt through willpower alone. You're not fighting a bad habit. You're fighting a physiological sequence that your nervous system has learned very accurately produces relief.

And for a body carrying relational trauma, restriction doesn't just produce mild discomfort. It can produce something that feels like survival level distress. Physical pain. Full body tension. A cortisol response so significant that eating isn't just desired. It's the only thing that makes the pain stop.

And then we wonder why we can't just stick to the plan.

The Swimming Lessons

Here is the analogy I keep coming back to. Imagine someone hands you a meal plan, a protocol, a set of rules designed to change your relationship with food. And it works for a lot of people genuinely. For some women this is exactly what they need and it changes things.

But those women had swimming lessons.

Some women come to food plans with a regulated nervous system, a history of feeling safe, a body that doesn't interpret restriction as threat. They have the internal resources to follow that protocol. They have the emotional capacity to tolerate discomfort without their system flooding. They have the foundational safety that allows them to be in the water without panicking.

For women who didn't get those swimming lessons, food became their floaty. The thing that keeps them above water. The thing that regulates them when nothing else does. The thing that provides relief, comfort, numbing, or grounding, whatever that moment needs.

And when someone comes along and takes the floaty away and gives them a new plan instead, what they don't realise is that woman is now in the water without the one thing that was keeping her afloat. She's not struggling because she's weak. She was never given swimming lessons.

So she goes back to the lever. Because the last time it worked for a while, and maybe this time will be different. And the industry is right there with a new plan, a new protocol, a new version of the same thing with a different name. And the promise that this time is the one.

And the cycle continues.

What the Swimming Lessons Actually Look Like

This isn't about blaming the wellness industry entirely. Some of what exists in that space is genuinely helpful for the right people. Some practitioners are doing beautiful work. But if you are a woman who has been trying for years and you keep ending up back at the beginning, I want you to hear this clearly. The problem is not you. The problem is that you have been given bathing suits when what you actually needed was swimming lessons.

And until you get the swimming lessons, your floaty will keep being necessary. Not because you're weak. Because you're still in the water.

The swimming lessons look like going to the parts of you that learned to use food to cope and actually understanding what they've been doing and why. Not trying to stop them. Just understanding them. They look like building enough nervous system safety that a hard day doesn't automatically end in the kitchen. They look like healing the relational wounds that taught your system it wasn't safe to have needs, to want things, or to be supported. They look like getting off the merry-go-round, not by white-knuckling your way through another plan, but by no longer needing the plan in the first place.

And I want to say something about the floaty here. Getting the swimming lessons doesn't mean you'll never use a floaty again. There are seasons of life that are genuinely hard and you will reach for comfort and that is okay. The goal was never perfect eating or the permanent absence of hard days. The goal is that the floaty is no longer required for daily survival. That you can be in the water and in your life without needing it to keep you afloat every single day.

And that is what becomes possible when you do the real work.

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

And if you're ready to get the swimming lessons, the link is in the show notes to book a free consultation with me.

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

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.

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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