Satiated Podcast

It is that time of year again. The end of October often feels like it marks the beginning of a three month cultural focus on food and body image. It starts with Halloween, and then a multi-week break to potentially recover from any sugar binges or hangovers. Then comes Thanksgiving, which feels like a societal condoned binge where you’re supposed to overfill your physical body.  After that is Chri...

There is a lack of nuance in the field of food and body image recovery.  You have one side that tells you that you need to eat all foods, all foods fit, and that you need to keep eating all foods to habituate to them so that you're not as drawn to them anymore. And then you have the other side that says you're addicted to food, you need to eliminate these addictive foods from your life a...

If you've been here for a while, you may have noticed that I'm a big fan of parts work. Knowing what part of you is telling you to eat, not eat, eat something specific can be empowering.  Rather than feeling like you're lacking willpower or out of control, you can start to understand your food impulses as communication from a younger part of you that is trying to support you.  This...

Something I have seen over the years is that how you relate to one thing is often how you relate to everything. So the relational wounds you experienced in childhood can also show up with food.  This is why I feel it is crucial to understand your attachment or relational traumas so you can better understand what may have shaped your current relationship with food.  Others have sometimes joked with...

If someone had told me the truth that going on Weight Watchers at 13 years old would lead to a lack of trust in your body, obsession with food for years to come, an intense fear of food and anxiety around what to eat, and a decade in the restrict-binge cycle, I’m curious if my smart little self would have said, “No thank you. I’ll find a different way to feel safe.”  But now I know I was drawn to...

About a year ago in one of my PhD classes, I voiced a huge gripe I had about somatic and nervous system practices.  I shared that my friction with them was that they have been stripped down and depersonalized into these practices that anyone can do at any time and will support everyone in any moment to feel calmer or more grounded or safer or more regulated.  My teacher replied with, "Well ev...

One underdiscussed aspect of a body image or food recovery adventure is the importance of rage.  What can occur is that all the anger that might be felt about how you were treated in the past gets turned in on your body. Your body becomes the focus of all your rage rather than on a culture that ever taught you that your body should be different than it is. Your food behaviors become a way to expre...

You may have picked this up by now about how passionate I am about the field of somatic psychology. Learning about how to experience my body on all levels and build awareness of my nervous system states felt like it was learning how to come home to myself.  I have often joked that many people who are somatic practitioners were drawn to this work because they have lived much of their life disconnec...

Your history with food and dieting didn't start with you. You saw your mothers or fathers diet and their grandparents also dieted and their grandparents also dieted.  There is a long history of diet culture passed down from generation to generation and expressed differently in the trendiest, most common diet of the time. This isn't about the food, but that nervous system states, traumas,...

Something I learned from diet culture was that the taste of sweet was "bad." If I craved sweetness then something must be out of balance. There was probably a period of time where craving sweetness sent me into a panic where I had to become a detective to understand why I wanted something sweet.  Learning about the five tastes changed my perspective. We have 5 basic tastes that include s...

It is difficult to talk about food without talking about body image. The two are intertwined.  For many of you, it was your body's appearance that started the dieting, restricting, and binge eating. It was the internalized messages from a culture that wants to control women's bodies that shaped how you interacted with food.  And for many, you may create a stabilizing relationship with fo...

This is actually a pretty wild story.  During my first year in my PhD, a woman reached out to me through the contact form on my website and was like, "Hey, we're doing similar work! I would love to connect."  I starred the email as something I needed to follow up on and then it got completely buried in my inbox. Then, several months later, one of my teachers emailed me and said, &qu...

As many of you know, I went on my first diet when I was 13 years old.  It was Weight Watchers and it shifted how I viewed my body for a decade. I saw it as something weak and that I could control. It would take years of nutritional, mind, and body studies to realize my body was never the enemy I was taught to see it as. I sometimes wonder how things might have been different if I had learned as a...

Diets teach us to view the body as a project. You can tinker with what you're eating and transform your body into something different.  Then fitness culture doubles down and provides the message that you can shape your body to be whatever you want it to be, you just have to put up with messages like no pain, no gain and a complete disconnection from your body, how it feels, and what resonates...

I have often felt like talking about self love can feel frustrating and confusion. What does loving oneself actually mean and look like?  Early in my twenties, I think I thought self love looked and felt like self discipline. I went to yoga and meditated almost every day, I was strict with myself on what and when I would eat, I went to bed early and woke up early.  From the outside, it looked like...

I've been through a similar trajectory that so many have in food and body image recovery.  In my twenties, I got to a place where food was less of a concern. I wasn't skipping meals anymore and I was balancing those meals and eating all macronutrients. I felt much more grounded and regulated.  But, the body image struggles continued to hang around. I felt good in my body but I still hate...

In this week's episode, I chat about:  I read 3 different food recovery Reddit stories  I talk about recovery into a world that is just going to want to push you back into your food behaviors  Grieving the time that has passed since your food coping behaviors began  The comfort with being in the sympathetic nervous system making it difficult to recover  The optimal pace of food recovery There...

My current perspective on eating disorders is that labeling food behaviors as a disorder has kept the field of food recovery distracted, continuing to focus on that food is the problem.  Patterns of binge eating, restriction, yo yo dieting, food noise, and body image struggles need to be re-labeled as nervous system dysregulation or a trauma response.  Food, for many, was never actually the proble...

I have a saying, Embody first, Examine later. When you're feeling like you're drowning in body image concerns or food impulses, your prefrontal cortex is shut down. This is the part of your brain where you rationalize and can think through what is going on.  When that part of your brain is diminished, it can be much harder to try to understand what message your body is trying to send you...

Since my time in graduate school for somatic psychotherapy, I have shared with anyone who would listen about the connection between somatics and nutrition. It has felt absurd to me that food was never talked about in my somatic studies.  In my PhD interview, I passionately shared that I believe there is a need to bring the field of nutrition into somatics.  This has been a 20-year journey where I&...

Around 2018, I was living in Denver, Colorado and I was in my ongoing process of combining the fields of somatics, nutrition, nervous system, and trauma. I've wanted to learn as much as I can about all of the possible perspectives of what affects and shapes our food interactions.  I was a member at the Denver Botanic Gardens and found out they were holding an all day nutrition workshop with D...

When I first entered into the world of wellness culture, I was swept up in the promise of health, vibrancy, and fixing every symptom I had and could ever have.  I did the detoxes, the cleanses, the supplements, the colonics, the detox foot baths, the energy work, and the elimination diets.  Now, if you're thinking, "Wait. I have done some of those things and they were helpful to me.&quot...

The statement, “You are not your body,” needs some somatic updating. This statement, which has been said countless of times to try to decrease body image struggles, actually guides you in detaching from the body, further causing separation from safely inhabiting the body. René Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” reinforced a mind-body split. This contributed to the belief that the body is meant...

Once I started to connect the dots that the sympathetic nervous system plays a prominent role in food impulses and behaviors, I began teaching everyone I work with how to identify when their sympathetic nervous system is activated.  This isn't something we're often taught as a kid and would be a game changer to learn earlier on in life. You may just be learning this language of your body...

As I was editing this week's podcast episode, I accidentally deleted half of it and thought it was gone forever.  At first, my heart sank, I was in shock, the blood drained from my face, and I literally said out loud, "Nooooooo!!!" I was ready to call it and my brain started quickly going through my options. As I went through my options, I paused and wanted to connect with my experi...