Satiated Podcast

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

How do you feel about eating around others?

I remember in my years of struggling with food how scary it would feel to eat with others. There was a constant inner dialogue about eating the "right" things in the "right" amount. 

I would find myself consistently undereating when going out and then overeating or binge eating when I would get home, as I felt starving and dysregulated. 

Eating ar...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

A common theme I've seen over the years working with women 1:1 is that for many (myself included), body image concerns started during teenage years. 

Ugh, a shifting and changing body is so difficult to be with, to trust, and to come home to. 

Your body is going to change again and again throughout your life. That can feel terrifying. When you've experienced past trauma where everything felt unknown...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

Many of you may know that touch has been linked to the release of oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone related to reproduction, social bonding, stress regulation, and promotes feelings of love, trust, attachment, intimacy, and calm. Ya know what else stimulates the release of oxytocin? Eating. 

Research studies have found that an increase in oxytocin can decrease the urge to eat. So you can imagine that if you&ap...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

It can be confusing what path to choose for your food recovery when there are many different paths you can walk. When exploring all the various avenues, you can focus on your experience of choice. 

There is no "right" way to decrease your food coping mechanisms. It gets to be unique to you, your body, and what supports you in feeling the way you want to feel in your life. Your recovery resources ar...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

When you're feeling threatened in your body, hunger and fullness cues can feel wonky and also frightening. 

Hunger can come out of nowhere and remind you how little control you may feel in your life right now. The felt sense of hunger can be similar to past experiences you've had that left you feeling unsafe. 

The empty feeling may remind you of being abandoned as a child and the hurt and pain of no...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

What if diet culture wasn't actually the "problem"? 

Focusing on diet culture can become a distraction. It keeps the conversation circling around the same point—being controlled around our food choices is the problem, and we need to regain our experience of choice with food. 

Yet, when all of our attention stays on food, we miss out on exploring the deeper layers of who we are, beyond what we e...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

Intuition has been fascinating for me. 

I first started getting into the mind-body connection through practicing and learning about yoga and yoga philosophy. In yoga classes, I would often hear teachers talking about trusting your intuition. To be guided by your intuition. 

But, what I rarely heard was descriptions of how do you know something is intuition. Is what you're feeling intuition or fear? The m...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

How do you currently view symptoms or impulses in your body?

Are they something to be fixed? Are they wrong or bad? Are you afraid of them when they increase? 

If you said yes to these questions, you might notice how does it feel in your body to view the body's symptoms and impulses as wrong, bad, fearful, and need of fixing? Something I've been teaching for a while is that your food coping mechanis...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

While trauma-based food coping mechanisms, like binge eating, can feel dramatic, healing can sometimes (not always) be incredibly boring. 

Decreasing food patterns can look like simple acts of body care, like:

• Eating consistent, balanced meals
• Moving your body in nourishing ways
• Taking time to breathe and enjoy a moment
• Fostering a validating inner dialogue 
• Finding ways to laugh and have fun 

These are t...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

I have one published article in a journal titled, The Enteric Nervous System and Body Psychotherapy: Cultivating a Relationship with the Gut Brain.

I have a fascination and curiosity about the gut. The gut contains about 100 trillion bacteria that contribute to your mood, mental health, immune system, cravings, and nervous system.

Some studies have found that there are some missing microbes in the guts of peo...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

When I started to learn about the mind-body connection through yoga, I dove deep into all things yoga. I became a bit of a yoga fanatic and that led me to learn about Ayurveda, which is yoga's sister science. 

Ayurveda is a whole-body system of medicine. Rather than seeing symptoms as problems to be fixed, Ayurveda approaches symptoms as imbalances that can be brought into balance with foods, movements,...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

Have you ever noticed that the strongest memories are the ones where you felt the most presence and embodiment? I will never forget my first yoga class because when I was shaking while holding a plank, I couldn't be anywhere else but in my body. 

At the beginning of your eating recovery, you may feel disconnected and dissociated. Your body has felt like an unsafe place to inhabit. Food has served as a w...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

Proprioception is your body's ability to sense movement and know where you are in space. When you've experienced past trauma, you dissociate from your body out of protection. 

This can decrease your proprioceptive awareness where food comes in to experience movement, embodiment, and have a moment of presence to feel where you are right here and now. 

In this week's Satiated Podcast episode, I c...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

In April of 2022, I went to Disney World with my family and came back with covid. It was, unfortunately, the Delta strain that left me with long covid. 

I had to use an oxygen concentrator while I slept for about a year while my lungs healed through nebulized steroids and inhalers. I also had the lovely long covid symptom of losing my ability to swallow where I was on an all-liquid way of eating for almost t...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

Your body loves to be in movement. Yet, movement or exercise can also be a way to create distance between you and how you feel. There is a different felt sense when you move to express a fight or flight response or dissociate from the feeling of threat in your body. 

You can ask yourself before you move: Am I using movement as a way to push myself further away from me? Am I using movement in a way that conne...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

I take a different approach to body image healing. I apply the same explorations I do with food from a somatic perspective to body image. I started to wonder why is it that you can look in the mirror and love what you see one day and then later that day or the next day look in the mirror and feel like everything needs to change. Your body did not change within 24 hours. 

The answer is your nervous system. Yo...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

Somatic practices have become a buzzword as the new supplement you can take to “calm” yourself down, to shake off a trauma response, and maybe not binge eat. 

They can feel alluring. When you’re struggling with food, you just want an answer. There can be panic and desperation at willing to try anything to make sure you won’t binge again. You may find yourself trying to shake, or tap, or dunk your face in ice...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

Every semester in my undergraduate studies, I would receive all my coursework & experience a full-body panic. 

I would look at all that was due & some perfectionistic part of me thought I needed to hand in everything tomorrow. 

This typically led to a phone call to my mother who would say, "Stephanie, you eat an elephant a bite at a time."

This would often remind me that when faced with big t...

Happy Satiated Saturday! 

Body shame is body communication. 

If body shame could speak, it might say, “It doesn’t feel safe to be as you are. I’m trying to protect you from the pain you’ve already endured.”

Body shame often acts as a shield, guarding against judgment and rejection. No one could be as cruel to you as you are to yourself. This can feel like a defense, ensuring that no one else’s words can hurt you more than yo...