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/
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