For years I have talked about binge eating, compulsive eating, and the binge & restrict cycle — and how chaotic and dysregulated those patterns feel in the body. But what if restriction itself is also a form of nervous system dysregulation?

In this episode, I break down how food restriction shows up inside the four trauma responses — fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — using polyvagal theory, nervous system regulation, and real lived experience to give it context.

I also announce that my SENSR course is open for enrollment: all of the details are right here!

In this episode, you'll learn:

• why restriction can be an expression of anger and control (fight)
• how chronic dieting becomes emotional avoidance and hyper-vigilance (flight)
• why restriction is often about belonging, approval, and social safety (fawn)
• how food restriction becomes self-punishment, penance, and disappearing after trauma (freeze)
• how the body uses restriction to regulate overwhelm, threat, and emotional overload
• why both binge eating and restriction are attempts at safety, not failures of character
• how diet culture, weight stigma, and cultural power feed these nervous system loops
• and why true healing requires learning how to complete stress cycles and build regulation without food control

This conversation connects ED recovery, intuitive eating, body image, trauma, somatic therapy, and nervous system education — showing how our relationship with food is inseparable from how our body experiences safety, threat, and connection.

If you struggle with restriction or periods of restriction, this episode offers a radically different lens — your nervous system is trying to protect you.

If you want support applying these ideas to your actual life (not just your notes app), I offer 1:1 coaching for binge eating recovery, intuitive eating, and body image healing. Apply here!

If this episode helps, subscribe and leave a rating or review—it's the best way to support the podcast and get this message out there!

Nostalgia, body image, and high sensitivity are connected—and this episode explains why.

This is for highly sensitive people who experience nostalgia as a full-body emotional event. Do you notice that when the past gets stirred, food and body stuff gets louder? Songs, places, photos, endings, and transitions don't just bring up memories, they can trigger urges to control food, reconsider our appearance, check, plan, restrict, overeat, or isolate.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why highly sensitive nervous systems experience nostalgia as embodied memory, not just thought
• How childhood and adolescence can leave open stress loops that keep pulling us back
• Why food and body control can become a reliable way to contain emotional overwhelm
• Why you can feel pulled toward a time in your life that was actually painful or unstable
• Why longing for an old body and old coping patterns is often about unresolved emotional safety
• What recovery looks like when the buffer is gone and emotions come back online
• How to feel deeply without getting swallowed by it

You'll also get a practical way to work with this when it hits: how to recognize the moment nostalgia arrives, how to give your body a short, contained window to feel what's there, and how to return to the present on purpose through simple routines that re-anchor you.

If you want support applying these ideas to your actual life (not just your notes app), I offer 1:1 coaching for binge eating recovery, intuitive eating, and body image healing. Apply here!

If this episode helps, subscribe and leave a rating or review—it's the easiest way to support the podcast and get this message out there!

In this episode, I explain my all-in recovery process and how it helped me stop binge eating after decades of battling food noise. I break down what "all in" actually means in practice, why unconditional permission to eat means (and doesn't mean), and how body image work played a central role in becoming binge-free for over six and a half years. I'm sharing my personal all-in recovery process—the shift that helped me become binge-free for over 6.5 years—and what I learned about unconditional permission to eat, food scarcity mindset, body image, and body neutrality along the way.

This isn't a quick fix or a one-size-fits-all method. But if you've tried "moderation" a hundred different ways and it keeps turning into a failure, this episode will give you a different framework to consider.

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• What "all-in recovery" means (and why it doesn't have a formal clinical definition)

• Why unconditional permission to eat was the turning point for my binge eating recovery

• How restriction fuels binge eating through scarcity (not lack of "willpower")

• How intermittent fasting pushed my binge eating further (and what that taught me)

• The role of body image, culture, and conditioning (capitalism, feminism, racism) in food + self-trust

• What changed over time as my appetite regulated and food stopped feeling urgent

My relationship with food was chaotic from my teens until I turned 40—years of negotiating, compensating, and trying to outthink my body. Eventually it became clear that the "careful" approaches weren't working for me. I needed a more radical reset.

A huge catalyst was reading "The F**k It Diet" by Caroline Dooner, because it named what I had been living: the bingeing wasn't some character flaw—it was an understandable response to deprivation and fear.

The core of the all-in process (for me) was stopping the constant bargaining. When eating is no longer treated like a limited resource, binge urges lose their job. That's the part people miss: binge eating is often a scarcity response, not "lack of control."

Working with body image coach Jessi Kneeland expanded the whole conversation for me. It helped me see that body hatred doesn't exist in a vacuum—there's a system that benefits when we stay preoccupied with shrinking ourselves. Body neutrality became a steadier foundation than chasing body "confidence."

If you haven't listened to my episode about losing control with food (episode , start there—it'll give you helpful background for this conversation.

If you want support applying these ideas to your actual life (not just your notes app), I offer 1:1 coaching for binge eating recovery, intuitive eating, and body image healing. Apply here!

If this episode helps, subscribe and leave a rating or review—it's the easiest way to support the podcast and get this message in front of more people.

Celebrity weight loss is back in the spotlight — in headlines, before-and-after photos, GLP-1 speculation, and nonstop commentary online. Alongside that has come a louder insistence that we "shouldn't talk about people's bodies" at all.

But should we really keep quiet?

This episode focuses on body image, diet culture, celebrity bodies, and how weight loss is discussed on social media.

I talk about why I personally don't comment on bodies in everyday life, why praising weight loss is never neutral to me, and why that rule becomes harder to apply once bodies move into public media, celebrity culture, and influence.

The episode moves through the different ways this conversation shows up right now — criticism, praise, silence, and backlash — and what happens when the only option we allow is not speaking.

I also touch on kids growing up inside these images, the "double standard" argument, and the tension between personal body autonomy and cultural symbolism, and Lizzo's recent essay on "weight release."

This is a conversation about what we're allowed to say, what we're told not to say, and how to redefine the conversation.

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In this guided meditation, I use pendulation to help you work with fullness without getting pulled into the usual fear or anxiety. You'll move between the sensation itself and calmer places in your body or environment, so your nervous system has room to settle in the here and now.

This practice supports both everyday fullness and the kind of fullness that can happen after a binge. We keep the focus on separating sensation from story, giving your body a way to process what's happening without getting lost in meaning-making.

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Thanksgiving can bring up a lot for people who are working on binge eating recovery, intuitive eating, or nervous-system regulation. Big meals on holidays have more stimulation, more exposure, more history, and more pressure to "be good" even though your nervous system is doing its own thing underneath.

In this episode, I talk through why the holiday environment makes appetite, pacing, and fullness feel different than they do on regular days, and what actually helps your body stay steady here.

We look at the nervous-system side of hunger and fullness, why predictability matters (and how to use it), and how the pace of the room may be influencing you in ways you didn't even realize.

I also talk about widening your focus so the entire holiday doesn't reduce down to "fixing this." You aren't broken!

The goal isn't a perfect Thanksgiving; it's a more regulated one.

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Timestamps

00:00 — Intro: why holidays feel different
00:33 — Eating earlier vs. "saving up"
08:26 — Checking your pace
15:53 — Building a satisfying plate
22:11 — Navigating fullness
26:19 — Expanding the day beyond food

In this episode of Full But Not Finished, Stefanie breaks down somatic work in a practical, accessible way for anyone who has ever felt confused, skeptical, or resistant to it. She shares her own path toward becoming a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and how body-based work shifted patterns that mindset alone doesn't fully address -- including anxiety, depression, and long-standing food and body struggles.

Stefanie explains the core ideas behind somatic therapy and nervous system regulation, then walks through the five most common barriers people face when trying to engage in somatic practices: resistance, lack of time, the belief that it's "too slow," assumptions that it's "woo woo," and not knowing where to begin. Each barrier is approached with clear language and real-world context.

The episode also includes simple, effective somatic exercises to help you reconnect with interoception, regulation, and a steadier internal baseline — especially useful if you're navigating binge-restrict cycles, body image distress, or chronic stress responses.

If you've been wanting a grounded entry point into somatic work, nervous system science, and the body-based side of healing your relationship with food, this conversation gives you the outbreath and direction you might need to start.

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00:01 What is Somatic Work
00:11 Personal Journey and Initial Skepticism
01:48 Understanding Somatic Therapy
03:06 Top Five Barriers to Somatic Work
06:09 Barrier 1: It Doesn't Work
12:39 Barrier 2: I Don't Have Time
18:14 Barrier 3: I Can't Slow Down!
26:29 Barrier 4: It's Too Woo Woo
30:49 Barrier 5: I Don't Know How
33:04 Practical Somatic Exercises