The Full of Beans Podcast

Have you ever been in and out of hospital so many times that everyone around you quietly stopped believing you'd ever get better, so you started to believe it too? This episode is for you."
This week on the Full of Beans Podcast, I'm joined by Hannah Whitfield, a creative activist, writer, speaker, performer and founder of Legally Detained - a lived-experience-led creative platform transforming survival into power through art, activism and unapologetic storytelling. Her work explores neurodivergence, trauma, mental health systems, eating disorder recovery, inclusion and the power of creative expression.
Through speaking, writing, performance, consultancy and her podcast No Longer Legally Detained, Hannah challenges systems that ask people to become smaller to survive, and instead creates work that says: we were never broken - we were surviving worlds that were never built with us in mind.
In this episode, we explore:
Where Legally Detained came from
Hannah's experience of psychiatric admissions
Being placed on a ward that didn't believe her eating disorder was "real"
Becoming a "revolving door patient" across CAMHS, adult services, and secure care
The problem with BMI criteria as a gatekeeper for treatment
Where restrictive practice crosses the line from safety into cruelty
The rock-bottom moment that changed everything
How an ADHD diagnosis helped Hannah understand her own patterns for the first time
Reframing recovery: it's not a "utopia," it's learning to ride the wave
Why purpose and belonging, not just words, are what help people recover
Connect with Us:
Subscribe to the Full of Beans Podcast
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Listen on YouTube
Connect with Hannah via Instagram @legallydetained, her website, blog, or podcast: No Longer Legally Detained.
⚠️ Content Note: This episode contains discussions of eating disorder treatment, inpatient care, and iatrogenic harm. Please take care of yourself while listening.

Have you ever walked into a healthcare setting and felt like one part of your identity was being used to explain away everything else? This one is for you.
Eva Echo (she/they) is a distinguished activist, writer, and TEDx speaker, focusing on transgender+ rights, intersectionality, and eating disorders. After hearing Eva speak at the Dump the Scales march, I basically ran after her to get her on the podcast, and I am so glad I did.
Eva has spent years fighting for trans+ people in healthcare, including taking NHS England to the High Court over unlawful waiting times, and many other incredible projects. She also has her own lived experience of an eating disorder, autism, and ADHD, and this conversation weaves all of that together in a way I haven't heard anywhere else.
In this episode, we explore:
Eva's experience of restrictive eating and how it developed alongside her identity as a trans woman
How autism and ADHD intersect with her eating disorder
The moment a GP told Eva she couldn't have an eating disorder and it's lasting impact
Eva's experience of Trans broken arm syndrome
What medical gatekeeping looks like across eating disorders, gender identity, and neurodivergence,
Eva's legal challenge against NHS England and the landmark ruling that came from it
Why the NHS can feel like a conveyor belt instead of individualised care
Eva's path analogy in relation to eating disorder recovery
Eva's message to anyone who has never felt truly seen or heard
Eva's message is simple, and I think it is everything: be your own kind of beautiful.
Connect with Us:
Subscribe to the Full of Beans Podcast
Follow Full of Beans on Instagram
Check out our website
Listen on YouTube
Connect with Eva via Instagram (@evaech0)
⚠️ Content Note: This episode contains discussions of eating disorders, medical gatekeeping, gender identity, neurodivergence, and experiences of suicidal ideation. Please take care of yourself while listening.
Photo credit: Lunar Sea.

Have you ever sat in a treatment room and felt like the real you was completely invisible, like the system was so focused on your weight, your behaviours, your diagnosis, that it forgot there was a whole person underneath? This episode is for you.
This week on the Full of Beans Podcast, I'm joined by Tanya Francis, a research psychologist, lecturer at the Open University, and psychotherapist in private practice, who also brings her own lived experience of an eating disorder to this conversation.
Tanya's background is in domestic violence research and gender-based violence, and the more she looked at how systems respond when someone is harmed, the more she saw uncomfortable parallels with eating disorder care.
In this episode, we explore:
What iatrogenic harm means and why care systems can sometimes cause harm
The role of BMI and weight in treatment,
How rigid care centralising numbers can reinforce eating disorder logic
How weight stigma in healthcare shuts people out before they've even begun
The culture of mistrust around eating disorders and the damage it does
Why people pleasing in treatment can look like recovery but lead straight back to relapse
Moral injury and what happens when clinicians can't act on their own values
Tanya's own experience of not being believed in her body during inpatient care
Why truly humanising care is both simpler and more complex than it sounds
How two things can be true at once, e.g. a broken system and incredible people working within it
Connect with Us:
Subscribe to the Full of Beans Podcast
Follow Full of Beans on Instagram
Check out our website
Listen on YouTube
Connect with Tanya via Instagram (@drtanyafrances), LinkedIn or her website
⚠️ Content Note: This episode contains discussions of eating disorder treatment, inpatient care, and iatrogenic harm. Please take care of yourself while listening.

Have you ever found yourself trying to balance the needs of your eating disorder, your treatment team, your family, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, completely losing sight of yourself? This episode is for you.
This week on the Full of Beans Podcast, I'm joined by Sarah Parker, a psychotherapist based in West Yorkshire, who brings both professional expertise in eating disorder therapy and her own lived experience of fifteen years of anorexia.
Sarah knows firsthand how people pleasing can keep you stuck in recovery, doing all the right things, saying all the right things, but doing it for everyone else rather than for yourself. That can be motivating to start with, but after time, motivation can fade and a true commitment to recovery is required.
In this episode, we explore:
Sarah's own experience of anorexia and what kept her stuck for so long
Sarah's experience of detainment, tube feeding, and how collaboration changed this
How people pleasing shaped Sarah's experience of treatment
Why bringing out the rebel can be more supportive than praising compliance in recovery
The difference between motivation and commitment in eating disorder recovery
Why commitment helps long-term recovery more than motivation
How to keep going on the days when every part of you is telling you not to
Why anger can actually be a sign that recovery is working
The role of compassion in recovery
Connect with Us:
Subscribe to the Full of Beans Podcast
Follow Full of Beans on Instagram
Check out our website
Listen on YouTube
Connect with Sarah via her website or on Instagram (@wellofbeing13)
⚠️ Content Note: This episode includes discussion of eating disorders, anorexia, detainment and tube feeding. Please take care while listening.

Have you ever felt like your eating disorder didn't have a name, or that what you were going through just didn't quite fit? This episode is for you.
This week on the Full of Beans Podcast, I'm joined by Dr Ruth Cruickshank, Associate Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. Ruth has a background in French literature, but has carved out a truly unique space in eating disorder research, using her expertise in critical reading, food studies and her own lived experience of OSFED to ask the questions that others simply aren't asking.
Ruth is the only academic in the humanities working on OSFED, and she is doing extraordinary work to challenge why the most common eating disorder diagnosis remains so systemically overlooked.
In this episode, we explore:
How Ruth's career took her from French literature and advertising to eating disorder research
How representations of food in fiction carry deeper psychological and cultural meanings
What OSFED is and why it matters that so many people have never heard of it
Why OSFED and UFED remain under-researched despite being the most common eating disorder diagnoses
The danger of diagnostic criteria focused on weight and behaviour rather than distress and daily impact
Why not having a name for your experience can be so isolating and why that validation matters
The "not sick enough" narrative and how diagnostic language can keep people stuck
Whether a truly person-centred approach to eating disorder treatment could change everything
What Ruth wants anyone to know if they've never been able to name their experience
Connect with Us:
Subscribe to the Full of Beans Podcast
Follow Full of Beans on Instagram
Check out our website
Listen on YouTube
Connect with Ruth via her Research Profile
Read Ruth's research:Challenging the enduring epistemic injustice of eating disorders: Critically re-reading Occupation food insecurity in the Trente Glorieuses with Elsa Triolet and the 1944–1945 ‘Minnesota Starvation Experiment’
Not knowing and the problematics of naming eating disorders: OSFED/EDNOS/TCA-NS and Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille [A Girl’s Story]

⚠️ Content Note: This episode includes discussion of OSFED, anorexia, bulimia, and the difficulty of language in eating disorder treatment. Please take care while listening.