Stephanie Mara Fox @_stephaniemara

Your Saturday PSA: Your food behaviors are a response to trauma. Your nervous system got stuck in a hypervigilant state & eating has been a strategy to create a threat to focus on or to get a reprieve from the exhaustion of constantly feeling like you have to protect yourself.

Your Saturday PSA: The first time you reached for food to soothe was after a dysregulating event. A somatic marker was created that when you feel dysregulated, food is the answer. The practice will be to recognize the dysregulation & show up for your body in new non-food ways.

Your Saturday PSA: Physical touch has a calming effect on the nervous system. Touch can convey compassion, which can be soothing in times of emotional dysregulation. If there was a lack of loving & safe touch growing up, food came in to get your needs met for physical connection.

Your Saturday PSA: Fitness culture has warped our beliefs of movement's purpose. It has become synonymous with sculpting the body to look a certain way. The impact is much more. Emotion comes from the Latin word emovere: to be moved. Movement can move emotion through your body.

Your Saturday PSA: Since birth, you've observed your surroundings. Your body created a suit of armor through how it expressed itself to protect you. Your eating patterns became a part of this armoring from a world that didn't know how to hold you the way you needed.

Your Saturday PSA: You're not meant to heal your food & body struggles alone. Coregulation with another person is crucial. When food has been there as your coregulator, you will need another person's regulated nervous system to support your body in feeling safe in non-food ways.

Your Saturday PSA: If you're not giving your body the nutrition it needs, your body is going to take over. Instead of experiencing this as binge eating, reframe it as protective eating. Your body is keeping you alive. Eating, every day, no matter what can alter this behavior.

Your Saturday PSA: Before you try to change your trauma-based food coping mechanisms, you will need to practice being an observer of your food behaviors. In this embodied state, you will be able to bring in compassion for how your eating patterns have been trying to support you.

Your Saturday PSA: Other's comments on your body & eating is a reflection of their beliefs, internalized diet culture messages, & has nothing to do with you. When on a disordered eating healing adventure, practice responding in ways that keep your body's safety as a top priority.

Your Saturday PSA: Toxic shame fuels food coping mechanisms through putting your body into a fight, flight, or freeze response. Shame needs to be explored, discussed, and met with compassion so that food behaviors are no longer needed to support you in feeling safe.

Your Saturday PSA: When you start feeling more regulated, that's when binge eating may intensify. The memories of the last time you felt fun with food may include traumatic memories. A bodily state of safety can feel more activating, at first, that food comes in to protect you.

Your Saturday PSA: We learn from a young age what different body shapes mean. So when your clothes stop fitting your body perceives this as you're in danger. You feel anxiety as this has become symbolic for being loved, belonging, and being treated with respect.

Your Saturday PSA: You don't need to know why you binge eat, restrict, judge your body, or yo yo diet. Trying to find the answer can push you further away from your body. View your food & body impulses as your body's language & how it communicates that it needs your attention.

Your Saturday PSA: Disordered eating behaviors will decrease as you feel safer to be in your body. You'll have the opportunity to fall back in love with the nourishing quality of food. You can explore the kind of food that most resonates and supports you in feeling vibrant.

Your Saturday PSA: Resistance to changing patterns of binge eating has wisdom to offer. Give the resistance a voice. What is it trying to protect you from? What does the resistance look like? Where do you feel it in your body? Make friends with resistance to decrease shame.

Your Saturday PSA: When the body says NO to a food, it can feel like you're on a diet not eating it. Not eating that food can be a sign of respecting your body instead of restriction. You're allowed to say no to a food that doesn't leave you feeling regulated and safe.

Your Saturday PSA: Experience eating as a metaphor. Your food impulses are symbolic of your needs. Get curious about the quality of the foods you crave. Are they Sweet? Smooth? Spicy? How are those things something you desire in your relationships. Your career. Your life.

Your Saturday PSA: You will hear that it's your emotions that fuel emotional eating. Actually, it's your reaction to your emotion. It's the judgment of your emotions that sends you to eat to regulate. Instead of focusing on your eating, explore your reactions to your emotions.

Your Saturday PSA:Wellness culture teaches to blame food for every ailment. Figure out the "perfect" way to eat, symptoms will go away. It's not about the food. It's about the state you're eating the food in. When food is paired with threat, it changes how that food is processed.

Your Saturday PSA: If undereating and overexercising supported you in feeling healthy, vibrant, and energetic, you wouldn't keep hopping from diet to diet. This approach to the body often leaves you feeling drained, exhausted, and obsessed with food because your body is starving.