Satiated Podcast

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, "Did you see this dissertation defense coming...

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 kid and teenager how to interac...

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 with it. 

I know I spent years ...

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 deeply loved myself thro...

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 hated the way my body looked. So, I tried...

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 are 4 days ...

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 problem, but it was the strategy ...

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 through food cravings or body image worri...

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'm seeing that others have a...

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 Dr. Deanna Minich. I had been followi...

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." That is great! 

But, what I've notic...

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 to be ...

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 and nervous system now though and feel e...

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 these words ...

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 questioning if you'r...

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 a...

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 situa...

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 into activated ...

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 i...