26. Body Image and Perfectionism: Why It Never Feels Like Enough (A Conversation with Kristina Bruce)

How much power have you given your body image to determine whether you're going to have a good day? If your pants fit comfortably, your eating feels under control, or the scale says what you want it to say, maybe everything else feels a little easier to handle. But when those things don't go your way, the whole day can feel compromised. In this shorter episode of Full But Not Finished, a morning with my nine-year-old daughter and our dog gets me thinking about how we develop our "morning sense" of safety, and what happens when we become dependent on one thing to feel okay. I also share what five weeks away from Instagram have taught me about my own dependence on external reassurance, and why finding other sources of meaning in our lives may be an important part of changing our relationships with food and our bodies. Because sometimes food and body image are being asked to carry far more responsibility for our well-being than they can realistically sustain.

Why does dinner feel so much harder than breakfast when it comes to binge eating, overeating, or feeling out of control with food? Maybe you can eat breakfast without much thought, but by dinner you're picking at food while cooking, struggling to feel satisfied, or experiencing a level of urgency around eating that wasn't there earlier in the day. In this episode of Full But Not Finished, I explore five reasons evening eating can become more complicated, including the buildup of hunger throughout the day, decision fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and the way our nervous systems respond to the transition from daytime activity to nighttime stillness. If you struggle with nighttime binge eating, emotional eating, or feeling like a completely different person around food after 5 PM, this episode offers a more specific way to understand what's happening and where you might begin to make changes. https://iamstefaniemichele.com

If you've been feeling more impulsive with food, more critical of your body, or unusually impatient with everyone and everything, you may be dealing with a capacity problem. After unexpectedly stepping away from Instagram for a couple of weeks, I noticed some surprising changes: more patience with my kids, more attunement with food, less impulsivity, and more...lightness. It made me look more closely at how stress, stimulation, and constant demands can take up space in the nervous system without our awareness. In this episode, I explore nervous system capacity and the window of tolerance, and how reduced emotional bandwidth can show up through food impulsivity, body image distress, and everyday reactivity. I also look at why recognizing that something is affecting you doesn't necessarily mean you're ready to change it. Sometimes food and body image feel harder because they're happening inside a system that already has very little room left. MORE FROM STEFANIE MICHELE Somatic Experiencing Practitioner & Binge Recovery Coach Website: https://www.iamstefaniemichele.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamstefaniemichele Contact: [email protected]

Therapist and binge eating recovery coach Becca Robinson joins me to talk about the ways sexual trauma changed her relationship with food, her body, and herself. For Becca, bingeing, purging, and restriction became much more intense after her assault. Fullness could feel physically overwhelming and bring her back into sensations she wanted to escape, while restriction created a sense of distance from her body and a feeling of agency she was struggling to find elsewhere. We also talk about how trauma shaped the way she saw her body, including the shift toward seeing herself as a sexual object, and why behaviors that looked confusing or self-destructive made more sense once she understood what they were doing for her. Becca shares how trauma education, therapy, and somatic work eventually changed both her eating disorder recovery and her relationship with her body, and what it has meant to move from feeling disconnected from her body to experiencing it as her own. Content note: This episode discusses sexual assault, binge eating, purging, restriction, and trauma responses. There are no graphic descriptions of sexual violence. Becca is an integrative, relational therapist who uses her lived experience, therapeutic knowledge and experience in the field of eating disorders to help people find food freedom and body acceptance so they can give a more authentic life. Becca is also the host of the Food and Body podcast where she has conversations with guests about breaking free from food rules, the binge-restrict cycle and make peace with their bodies.

If you've ever thought, I know why I binge. I know what triggers it. I know what I'm supposed to do instead. So why am I still doing it? I wanted to talk with clinical hypnotherapist Emelia Armstrong-Crews about this. Can hypnosis be useful when talking and insight have only gotten you so far? We ended up having a much bigger conversation about how people change. Emelia talks about what it means to stop trusting your own instincts, which felt especially relevant to eating disorders, and how hypnosis may help someone have a different experience without needing it to make logical sense. I share some of my own experience with this too, including how hard it used to be for me to relax enough to feel anything during embodiment work, and how different that is now. So can hypnosis help with binge eating? What becomes possible when we stop assuming that understanding the problem is the same thing as changing it? CONNECT WITH EMELIA ARMSTRONG-CREWS Clinical Hypnotherapist Institute of Applied Psychology Australia Website: https://hypnotherapywithemelia.com Email: [email protected] MORE FROM STEFANIE MICHELE Somatic Experiencing Practitioner & Binge Recovery Coach Website: https://www.iamstefaniemichele.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamstefaniemichele Contact: [email protected]