Truce with Food with Ali Shapiro, MSOD, CHHC

You find yourself standing in front of the kitchen counter, not knowing why you’re there. Or you’re out at a work event already thinking about when you’ll be able to get home and be alone with food. You’re not actually hungry, but you feel pulled there anyway. It’s urgent, buzzy, and hard to talk yourself out of, even when some part of you knows this isn’t really about the food. What we often call...

Women are hearing a lot right now about eating more, building muscle, healing their metabolism, and using GLP-1s for weight loss. But so much of the conversation still skips over what actually matters for women’s bodies, especially in perimenopause and menopause. If you’ve ever tried to nourish yourself more and immediately watched the scale go up, it can feel like your body is broken. It’s not, b...

"What's wrong with me?" You've probably asked yourself this after another night of eating when you weren't hungry, scrolling when you meant to go to bed, or saying yes to something you had no energy for. The late-night sugar, the people-pleasing, the crashing after weeks of overdoing everything. You're not lazy and you're not broken, but you are asking the wrong...

For many of us, the body has long felt like an inconvenient, separate entity. Our intellect does the heavy lifting while our physical selves get relegated to the background. You know how to think your way through problems, build a career, figure things out. But when it comes to looking down and asking your body what it actually needs, there's a tight ball of feelings most of us would rather n...

The world is a lot right now. Globally, personally, often both. And when things are this intense, it can be easy to feel like your relationship with food is a first world problem, or that nothing matters, you're just going to eat. To dismiss the battle as something to deal with later, when things calm down. But this is exactly when it matters most. We can't all collapse at the same time....

Twenty years ago, functional medicine changed everything for me. My IBS cleared. My skin cleared. My depression lifted. And for the first time, I understood food as medicine instead of just calories. But somewhere in the last five years, functional medicine started looking a lot like what it was railing against. A supplement for every lab marker. A protocol for every person. A business model that...

You've tried the plans. The protocols. Maybe therapy, journaling, intuitive eating. And food still feels like a battle. The problem isn't that you haven't tried hard enough. It's that no one has ever shown you where you actually are. I've spent 19 years working with women who've tried everything and nothing's worked long term. What I keep finding is that the appr...

After nearly a decade of conversations about food, culture, and psychology, this podcast has a new name. What was Insatiable is now the Truce with Food Podcast. What started as a rebrand turned into an honest look at how success, ambition, and identity shift over time. Ten years ago, metrics like downloads and productivity felt like the scorecard. Then motherhood happened. Menopause happened. The...

Diet culture, anti-diet rhetoric, and functional medicine all live in a messy middle ground. Our culture trains us to outsource authority, chase gold stars, and equate thinness with worth. We're taught to live by someone else's food rules, health rules, weight rules. So if you're still struggling to figure food out, it's not a failure of discipline. It's a misunderstanding...

What happens after you've tried everything? The plans, protocols, cleanses, and tracking apps. The running, the restriction, the attempt to outrun the fork. At some point, the effort becomes its own kind of exhaustion. You're no longer chasing health, you're chasing relief. In this episode of Insatiable, I sit down with Dee, a graduate of the Truce with Food: Consistency program, to...

You tell yourself you're too busy and too tired to focus on yourself. You'll do it when things calm down, when work eases up, when the kids need less, when you finally get a good night's sleep. But food still calls your name at all the wrong times. You've tried to fix it, but the cycle keeps repeating. You're not lazy. You're not broken. You're trying to solve ex...

You've followed the plans. Upped the discipline. Doubled down on getting back on track. And still, food and taking care of yourself feel harder than they used to. You're not the problem. The problem is trying to apply the same strategies you relied on in your twenties and thirties to a body and life that have fundamentally changed. In this episode of Insatiable, I share the five shifts t...

You've done the work. Tried the protocols, followed the plans. And yet food still takes up way too much mental space. You're not the problem. Those one-size-fits-all protocols you've been handed were never going to work for where you actually are. After nearly two decades working with clients, I've watched the wellness space get louder and louder with protocols and plans tellin...

Happy New Year, Insatiable listeners! Welcome to 2026. Today I’m resharing my conversation with parenting expert Dr. Deborah MacNamara, where we explore how food connects to our deep need for belonging, how feeling significant plays into belonging and food choices, as well as the many ways we can heal our relationships with food, fullness, and needing other people. If you want to make real changes...

What if your inability to change isn't a failure of willpower, but your heart's way of protecting you from something you're not ready to face? Today I’m sharing a conversation I had with Meghan Telpner for the Courageous Pivot podcast about how my journey from overworking addiction to radical life redesign began with a simple question: "Why does this make sense?" I reveals...

Today, Sas Petherick returns for the fifth installment of our Body Stories series — and she’s nearly a year into her holistic weight-loss journey! In this conversation, Sas shares what’s become unmistakably clear along the way: true change happens at the pace of your body, and all-or-nothing thinking around food and movement is far more pervasive (and sneaky) than we realize. Together, we discuss:...

You’ve probably heard the advice: “Feel your emotions.” But what does that actually mean in everyday life? Especially when so many of us believe we’re feeling our feelings when we’re actually thinking our feelings. And thus, not feeling better or resolving our stubborn bad habits. In this episode, Mary Tilson joins me to explore how we’ve each learned to stay with and move through our emotions. Ma...

This week, Beatriz Victoria Albina returns to Insatiable for part two of our conversation on ending emotional outsourcing — the habit of looking outside ourselves for validation, safety, and worth. In this episode, we explore the practices that help you come back home to yourself: tuning into your needs, regulating your nervous system, returning to your body, and reclaiming your center. It all beg...

Today, I’m joined by Beatriz Victoria Albina for a conversation about the emotions that often hide beneath common gut issues—and why codependency isn’t the real problem (and boundaries aren’t the full solution). We also dive into her new book, End Emotional Outsourcing: A Guide to Overcoming Codependent, Perfectionist, and People-Pleasing Habits , where Beatriz offers powerful reframes on parentin...

Today I’m joined by everyone’s favorite poet, Kate Baer , for a tender conversation about midlife transitions, medical anxiety, and the power of female friendship. We talk about how to orient around ideas instead of problems, and we share a few poems from Kate’s forthcoming collection, How About Now , out November 4th. If you’ve been feeling a little lonely, uncertain, or in-between — or all three...

This week Liz Wolfe returns to the show for a candid conversation about all the fitness myths we’re seeing around the wild world of wellness in 2025. Together, we get into why people are slapping the word “perimenopause” on everything, how to focus on agility as much as strength training, and everyone’s favorite fall purchase: weighted vests. We also discuss: Taylor’s new album and why we love her...

This week, I’m joined by my former cohost Juliet Root for a fun, truth-seeking conversation about how our perspectives on food, body, and movement have shifted in 2025. Together, we share the biggest things we’ve changed our minds about—what no longer feels true, what surprised us, and what new possibilities opened up when we let old beliefs go. We discuss: Releasing restriction and shame Protein,...

If you’ve ever thought “Why can’t I just stick with it?” , this episode is for you. Today I’m resharing a conversation I had with Noelle Tarr of Coconuts & Kettlebells for her podcast, Well-Fed Women . We discuss why willpower isn’t the problem, how shame hijacks true behavior change, and what it really takes to heal your relationship with food and your body. We also dive into emotional eating...

It’s officially back-to-school season! Which means you might be thinking it’s time for a new nutrition plan, exercise routine, or self-improvement challenge. But before you set out once again, I want you to ask yourself: “Will I just end up back here in six months if I don’t get to the root of what’s really going on with my relationship to food?” In this episode, I share the three most common thin...

Tara Schmidt, M.Ed., RDN, LD is the lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet, host of the Mayo Clinic On Nutrition podcast, and Medical Editor of the Nutrition & Fitness channel. Today she joins me for a holistic, evidence-based conversation about GLP-1s, where we cut through the misinformation around these drugs and offer information you can really trust. If you’re already taking Ozempic or We...