Satiated Podcast

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 experience of this. I felt the sadness of th...

Something I've noticed in food recovery is that certain foods and meals become associated with dieting. 

Suddenly, you're afraid or feeling resistance to eating certain vegetables or fruits because these foods have been somatically connected to deprivation and restriction. Your body tenses, your breath gets shallow, you feel tight, and you hear an internal, "NO, don't eat that." 

You might find yourself quest...

Diets can be a reminder of what no can feel like. The issue occurs that over time a no somatically gets connected with deprivation and restriction. So when you really don’t want to eat something, a no sends your body into a survival response. It can feel like you’re not allowed to say no because now all you feel is tight, tense, and constricted. 

And then anti diet culture swoops in and tells you that you’re allowed to eat and to ea...

Every Saturday, my husband and I listen to a podcast that reads Reddit stories. 

For a long time, I have wanted to do something similar but with a focus on food and body image behaviors. I even set up a whole form for people to send in questions, but I got very few responses. So I decided to move forward on this anyway and find my own Reddit stories to read and share my thoughts on how I might support that person in their situation....

Over the past few years, I've become more interested in neurodiversity. I've had more people come to work with me navigating being on the ADHD or autism spectrums and telling me that intuitive eating didn't work for them. I saw that many of the bodily changes that can occur as a response to trauma can already be happening in someone's brain when in the spectrum of neurodiversity. 

This can include quicker shifts ...

Digestion and cravings can all start in your nervous system. Food decisions made from a stressed, sympathetic nervous system state will lead you to specific foods for your survival. 

You then struggle to digest those foods, not because there is something “wrong” with the food or your gut, but because your digestion has shut down to prepare you for battle. 

You can start to see that every food behavior you have is trying to do somethi...

Wellness culture teaches you how to NOT feel enough. It is never enough biohacking, protein, red light therapy, organic, sprouted, activated, pure, lectin free food. Feeling like you’re never going to get it “right” does not create wellness. What creates "wellness" are things that cannot be commodified and sold to you as the answer to your fears and worries. 

In this week's Satiated Podcast episode, I chat with Jenn T...

When the focus is always on finding a root cause, it keeps you looking for the next answer and the next answer and the next answer to your food issues. This can keep you stuck in a survival response. This constant searching sends signals of danger to the body that something is wrong, and it has to keep the sympathetic nervous system turned on (where food behaviors intensify).

What if there is no root cause to your binge eating or em...

I wanted to approach the transition into a new year differently. 

For the past couple of years, I felt like it was more somatically aligned to explore a feeling word for the year rather than resolutions. This feeling word could then be a guiding light throughout the year toward actions or food or environments or hobbies that support you in feeling the way you want to feel. 

But, I decided to move away from that this year because I se...

This holiday week might have been really hard. Surrounded by family, arguments, familial patterns, working on staying connected, trying to enact different patterns with food, and feeling overwhelmed and dysregulated. 

And for others, ​this week may have included huge wins. You noticed yourself regulating your nervous system, staying connected, choosing other options besides food to connect with yourself, and you got to witness just ...

One of the aspects of food recovery I wished that I had greater guidance around (and had to learn for myself) was discovering how to listen to my body. 

 Even within different food recovery approaches, there are still all of these rules about what to eat to "prove" recovery or what to do to ensure recovery. 

I've seen more confusion over the years about what will or will not lead toward a decrease in food coping mechan...

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) are traumatic events that occur in childhood and affect your sense of safety. 

ACEs have been found to be higher in prevalence among those who struggle with food and body image. As the experience of safety diminishes, the likelihood of binge eating increases.

This is why you can't shame yourself for your food behaviors. They are not your fault. You’ve been made to believe that your food choice...

The number one question I often get asked in sessions is, "What is the somatic practice I should be doing to calm myself down?"

Somatic and nervous system work has been completely misconstrued and misrepresented, and I get why. 

If all you're seeing on social media is a list of suggestions on practices you can do to make things better or calm yourself down, it can feel like there is some magical tool you can utilize to...

We were all taught how to eat and move and exist in our bodies. 

The “shoulds” that you learn from your parents, diet/wellness/fitness culture, magazines, media, movies, family and friends can keep your nervous system stuck in a sympathetic response.

When you live in chronic stress or survival states, your system prioritizes safety over sensation. That means you may default to habits that feel familiar and not ones that feel nourishi...

​I remember the very slow realization as I started to embody my binges that food was never going to give me what I was looking for. 

It felt crushing to face. 

I'd been utilizing food as a way to try to help myself feel better, safer, more grounded and I felt so much grief that this strategy was never going to work.

Over the years in private practice, I noticed almost every single person I worked with experience this moment of de...

I'm currently visiting family in Connecticut where I grew up. I was here until I went off to college and then I moved back for about a year before I moved west to go to graduate school. 

Connecticut has been a witness to every stage of my food recovery. From the beginnings of starting to choose food to self soothe, my diet culture years, stuck in the binge-restrict cyle, a short stint into orthorexia and over exercising, and no...

In this week's Satiated Podcast episode, I chat with Jay Moon Fields, MA, Coach, and author about: 

• How to build more self trust
• The felt sense of self worth
• Enhancing your decision making skills
• The embodiment of emotions
• The process of stepping into self trust: presence, guidance, service, and trust, and how these elements contribute to personal growth and emotional regulation

You can also read the transcript to this week...

In this week's Satiated Podcast episode, I chat with Béatriz Victoria Albina, MA, Somatic Master Coach, and author about: 

• What emotional outsourcing is
• How it affects physical and mental health
• The impact of codependency
• The journey toward self acceptance
• Understanding emotions
• How to approach change through gentle regulation and kitten sized steps

You can also read the transcript to this week’s episode ​here​: www.stephani...

I've been reflecting recently on how much I talk here about the reasons food behaviors like binge eating have nothing to do with the food, but the state you're eating the food in. As I've explored here many times, there are so many somatic, trauma, and nervous system layers to your food patterns. But part of food recovery has to include explorations around food itself. 

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