Full But Not Finished

Therapist and binge eating recovery coach Becca Robinson joins me to talk about the ways sexual trauma changed her relationship with food, her body, and herself. For Becca, bingeing, purging, and restriction became much more intense after her assault. Fullness could feel physically overwhelming and bring her back into sensations she wanted to escape, while restriction created a sense of distance f...

If you've ever thought, I know why I binge. I know what triggers it. I know what I'm supposed to do instead. So why am I still doing it? I wanted to talk with clinical hypnotherapist Emelia Armstrong-Crews about this. Can hypnosis be useful when talking and insight have only gotten you so far? We ended up having a much bigger conversation about how people change. Emelia talks about what it means t...

Eckhart Tolle says a dog doesn't have body image issues because a dog doesn't have an image of itself. My first reaction was basically: okay, but we're not dogs. We know what we look like. Other people see us. Our bodies exist in a world that assigns meaning to appearance. We can't just opt out of all of that. But there is something useful in what he's saying. How much of our body image distress i...

A listener wrote in about something I know a lot of people experience in recovery: hearing someone talk about cutting sugar, seeing a weight-loss commercial, or coming across an article demonizing certain foods, and then feeling almost compelled to do the opposite. Not because you suddenly want the food more, exactly. Because something in you is saying, absolutely not. You will not take this away...

In this episode, I'm joined by Suanne to talk about a recovery story that began in a fairly textbook way: regular meals, consistency, and learning to stop bingeing. But stopping the binges didn't automatically resolve everything underneath them. Food choices could still be shaped by ideas about weight, volume, and what counted as "healthy." Years later, a kidney cancer diagnosis complicated those...

Still having food noise even though you've stopped dieting? Mental restriction can keep binge eating and overeating going long after you've stopped counting calories or labeling foods "good" and "bad." In this episode, I share a client story that explains mental restriction a little differently than we usually talk about it. She wasn't afraid of cookies, worried about calories, or judging herself...

Why does a travel day, a Sunday night, or the first day back after being away sometimes make you want to graze, overeat, or binge? Transitions can do strange things to our relationship with food, especially in the hours when one routine has ended and the next one hasn't quite begun. More free content in weekly emails Instagram too

In this episode of Full But Not Satisfied , Stefanie shares four hidden behaviors from her 25 years with disordered eating and an eating disorder — things she assumed were evidence of bad character, but were actually nervous system threat responses. From neglecting hygiene and hoping for a hospital stay, to feeling jealous of other people's diets, to stealing and lying about food, these are the pa...

Why is listening to your body so confusing? You might be trying to follow your hunger and fullness cues but still have no idea whether you're feeling hunger, anxiety, habit, adrenaline, an emotion, or the pressure of paying far too much attention. In this episode, I talk through five reasons body cues can be difficult to interpret, especially after disordered eating or years of overriding them. Cu...

Why do we eat when we're bored, even when we know we aren't hungry?  In this episode, I look at boredom eating through a nervous system lens and question the assumption that boredom simply means we cannot tolerate being alone with ourselves. Stillness can leave us with a mind that is anything but still, especially when the brain shifts into the default mode network and begins revisiting everything...

Can you work toward body acceptance while considering a GLP-1 medication? In this unscripted collaboration, body image coaches Kristina Bruce of Unlearning Beautiful and Stefanie Michele of Full But Not Finished talk about what happens when you have spent years stepping away from dieting while the culture around you appears to be moving toward weight loss again. We discuss the pressure on both sid...

In this Q&A episode, I'm answering two questions about eating disorder recovery. The first is about how to make peace with the years an eating disorder took — the grief of looking back and realizing how much of life was shaped by food, body image, fear, and survival, without blaming yourself for not recovering sooner. The second question is about why body image can still matter, even when part of...

In this episode, I'm joined by Marcus Kain Murray of Strong Not Starving for a conversation about strength training that goes beyond reps, programming, and pushing harder. We talk about what changes when training becomes something you practice instead of something you perform for approval. Marcus gets into why a workout can feel hard and still be the wrong kind of hard, how the fitness industry se...

More from Stef: Binge Eating to Intuitive Eating (BE2IE) Self-Study Course iamstefaniemichele.com/iamstefaniemichelecourse.com What happens when a food restriction is not coming from diet culture, but from an actual health need? In this episode of  Full But Not Finished , I'm answering a listener question about giving up gluten for an autoimmune condition, feeling better physically, and then sudde...

In this episode, I'm joined by Minea for a conversation about food recovery, body image, control, and what happens when you understand the concepts but still don't feel safe enough to let go. This is not a neat success story, and that is exactly why I wanted to share it. Minea talks about growing up as a child who loved food, the moment her body began to feel like something other people could judg...

Last week, I talked about resistance to exercise and how movement can become safer when it is no longer tied to weight loss, punishment, or proving yourself. This week is the other side of the coin: what happens when exercise becomes compulsive and rest starts to feel threatening. Movement can be genuinely regulating. It can help us feel strong, embodied, capable, grounded, and in control. But tha...

Exercise can be hard to separate from weight loss, calorie burning, food compensation, discipline, and body control. In this episode, I'm talking about how to rebuild your relationship with movement after dieting, binge eating, restriction, or years of using exercise as a way to change your body. For a lot of people, exercise does not feel neutral. It can bring up old rules, old pressure, old fear...

  In this episode, Stef talks with her husband, Mike, about what it was like to support her through years of binge eating, restriction, body shame, and recovery. They talk about what he noticed in the early years of their relationship, what he misunderstood, what helped him understand binge eating more clearly, and why trying to "fix" it usually didn't work. They also discuss the quieter parts of...

Hilary Duff's "Strong Not Small" campaign has brought up a bigger conversation about wellness culture, diet culture, fitness ideals, and the way bodies are still expected to show up. On the surface, "strong not small" sounds like progress, especially for millennial women who grew up in the early 2000s celebrity body-shaming era. We were taught to fear weight gain, compare ourselves to famous women...

Aging is natural, but women are rarely allowed to experience it that way. In this episode, I talk with Deb Benfield, author of Unapologetic Aging , about the pressure women face to keep defying the evidence. This conversation is really about the promise underneath anti-aging culture: that if we can stay young enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or close enough to the ideal, we might stay safe, wan...

Nutrition is a complicated, sometimes scary word after ED recovery or dropping out of diet culture. You may want more energy, steadier meals, better digestion, or a way of eating that supports your body more consistently. But the second nutrition enters the conversation, it can start to feel threatening. Old rules come back. The pressure to get it right comes back. Even a small thought about prote...

In this episode of  Full but Not Finished , I'm talking with Alison about finding food freedom as a mom after weight gain, years of dieting, and years of living in the binge/restrict cycle. The Body Image Workshop is open! Allison grew up in peak 90s diet culture, with cottage cheese, "Can't Believe It's Not Butter," and the message that gaining weight was something to fear. When her body changed...

Bad body image day? I'm sharing five things I use in real time to interrupt the spiral, work with nervous system dysregulation, and get through a trigger without letting it take over the whole day. We talk about body neutrality, somatic tools, movement, distraction, and what to do when you're too flooded to think clearly. (This episode idea came to me as I was talking to a client on Whatsapp and w...

What happens when two body image coaches start talking "off the record"? (also: Join The Body Image Workshop this May for more of this type of conversation) In this special joint episode, Stefanie Michele - a Binge Eating Recovery Coach and Kristina Bruce, a Body Peace Coach share a raw, unedited conversation that was originally happening offline. We realized the "good stuff" coming up was too imp...

If you feel like you think about food more than other people, or your appetite just seems… bigger — this episode is going to matter. This episode is about   appetite and mental hunger , and why both are so often misunderstood in binge eating recovery. A lot of people assume that thinking about food a lot means something is wrong. Or that if a "normal" meal doesn't satisfy them, they're doing somet...