Full But Not Finished

If you're already thinking about how to "fix" your eating in 2026, listen to this first.    This Q&A episode covers three of the biggest pressure points people hit at the end of December and the start of January:   Last Supper eating, diet-culture talk in fitness spaces, and the anger that can come from getting food gifts from friends in their own food dysfunction.   I'm answering these questions...

Nostalgia, body image, and high sensitivity are connected—and this episode explains why. This is for highly sensitive people who experience nostalgia as a full-body emotional event. Do you notice that when the past gets stirred, food and body stuff gets louder? Songs, places, photos, endings, and transitions don't just bring up memories, they can trigger urges to control food, reconsider our appea...

In this episode, I explain my all-in recovery process and how it helped me stop binge eating after decades of battling food noise. I break down what "all in" actually means in practice, why unconditional permission to eat means (and doesn't mean), and how body image work played a central role in becoming binge-free for over six and a half years. I'm sharing my personal all-in recovery process—the...

Celebrity weight loss is back in the spotlight — in headlines, before-and-after photos, GLP-1 speculation, and nonstop commentary online. Alongside that has come a louder insistence that we "shouldn't talk about people's bodies" at all. But should we really keep quiet? This episode focuses on body image, diet culture, celebrity bodies, and how weight loss is discussed on social media. I talk about...

In this guided meditation, I use pendulation to help you work with fullness without getting pulled into the usual fear or anxiety. You'll move between the sensation itself and calmer places in your body or environment, so your nervous system has room to settle in the here and now. This practice supports both everyday fullness and the kind of fullness that can happen after a binge. We keep the focu...

Thanksgiving can bring up a lot for people who are working on binge eating recovery, intuitive eating, or nervous-system regulation. Big meals on holidays have more stimulation, more exposure, more history, and more pressure to "be good" even though your nervous system is doing its own thing underneath. In this episode, I talk through why the holiday environment makes appetite, pacing, and fullnes...

In this episode of Full But Not Finished , Stefanie breaks down somatic work in a practical, accessible way for anyone who has ever felt confused, skeptical, or resistant to it. She shares her own path toward becoming a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and how body-based work shifted patterns that mindset alone doesn't fully address -- including anxiety, depression, and long-standing food and bod...

Are you eating out of  habit  or because your body  actually needs something? In this episode of Full But Not Finished , I'm breaking down one of the most common recovery questions I get: how to know when it's a true habit versus a leftover pattern from restriction or stress eating. This isn't another "habit stacking" podcast. We're talking about how  nervous system coding, allostatic load, and em...

In this episode, Stefanie Michele shares the full story of her ED — from early dieting and body image issues to decades of binging, restriction, and an obsession with healthy, clean eating. She explains how family dynamics, cultural pressure, and the physiology of restriction shaped her relationship with food, and what finally changed in her late thirties that led to recovery at forty. This episod...

When we're back around family, something ... regressive happens. Old dynamics resurface, our nervous systems fire, and parts of us we thought we'd outgrown suddenly take the wheel. In this episode of  Full But Not Finished, I explore how family gatherings activate protective parts of the psyche, and how that shows up in our relationship with food. Drawing from Parts Work (Internal Family Systems t...

Struggling with weight gain or needing to size up your clothes?   In this episode of  Full But Not Finished , Stefanie Michele explores the emotional and psychological side of upsizing — the moment you realize your clothes no longer fit the same, and what that stirs up in a culture obsessed with shrinking. We talk about why sizing up isn't a failure or loss of control but a reflection of healing,...

Have you ever found yourself eating when you weren't hungry—but something in you  needed to? This episode explores how the body remembers the trauma of restriction, overexercise, and food insecurity long after the behaviors end. We'll talk about how those old survival codes get reactivated—like feeling an urgent pull to eat after movement, or panic when food feels limited—and why this isn't a lack...

In this very first episode of Full But Not Finished , host Stefanie Michele (formerly of Life After Diets ) shares why this new podcast exists, what's changing in her own life, and how the themes of food freedom, body image recovery, and ED healing always circle back to the larger work of self-development. From 25 years of binge-compensation cycles to going "all in" on recovery in 2019, Stefanie r...