Full But Not Finished

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: stefanie@iamstefaniemichele.com

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.
 
Website - www.beccrobinsonchinntherapy.com (coming soon) 
Email - becca@beccarobinsonchinntherapy.com 
Instagram - becomingwithbecca_therapist
Podcast instagram - thefoodandbody_podcast
Email - thefoodanbodypodcast@gmail.com
 
MORE FROM STEFANIE MICHELE
Website: https://www.iamstefaniemichele.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamstefaniemichele
Contact: stefanie@iamstefaniemichele.com

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: emelia@hypnotherapywithemelia.com
MORE FROM STEFANIE MICHELE
Somatic Experiencing Practitioner & Binge Recovery Coach
Website: https://www.iamstefaniemichele.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamstefaniemichele
Contact: stefanie@iamstefaniemichele.com

Eckhart Tolle says a dog doesn't have body image issues because a dog doesn't have an image of itself. My first reaction was basically: okay, but we're not dogs.
We know what we look like. Other people see us. Our bodies exist in a world that assigns meaning to appearance. We can't just opt out of all of that.
But there is something useful in what he's saying. How much of our body image distress is intensified by the amount of attention we give our image?
In this episode I talk about mirrors, photos, technology, aging, body checking.
There is a difference between avoidance and choosing not to always look at yourself, and why moving your attention away from your body can actually feel unsafe.
I also share how I use non-attention when I get pulled into that tunnel myself, and a simple practice for getting better at moving attention between threat and the rest of your life.
MORE FROM STEFANIE MICHELE
Stefanie Michele is a certified coach and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner who helps people understand the deeper psychological, emotional, and nervous-system patterns shaping their relationships with food, body image, and themselves.
Instagram : @iamstefaniemichele
Substack : @iamstefaniemichele
1:1 Coaching with Stefanie (apply for January 2027)
Full But Not Finished on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@iamstefaniemichele

A listener wrote in about something I know a lot of people experience in recovery: hearing someone talk about cutting sugar, seeing a weight-loss commercial, or coming across an article demonizing certain foods, and then feeling almost compelled to do the opposite.
Not because you suddenly want the food more, exactly. Because something in you is saying, absolutely not. You will not take this away from me again.
That rebel response makes sense, especially if restriction has hurt you before. But it can also become its own kind of trap if someone else talking about their diet ends up changing what you eat.
This week on Full But Not Finished, I'm talking about how to stay with yourself in those moments, without complying with the message and without having to prove anything to yourself (or the universe at large).
MORE FROM STEFANIE MICHELE
Stefanie Michele is a certified coach and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner who helps people understand the deeper psychological, emotional, and nervous-system patterns shaping their relationships with food, body image, and themselves.
Instagram : @iamstefaniemichele
Substack : @iamstefaniemichele
1:1 Coaching with Stefanie (apply for January 2027)
Full But Not Finished on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@iamstefaniemichele