We think about binge eating and emotional eating as responses to feeling down or upset, but I was just as likely to overeat when things were going well as I was when they were falling apart. I almost always binged on occasions we consider “happy”: birthdays, graduations, and after hanging up the phone to accept my first job. I would binge after a good date. On vacation. On days when I started to feel a little bit hopeful because I wasn’t bingeing.

We talk about happiness like an emotional all-clear, as though feeling good lacks the complexity that burdens darker emotions. But happiness can have more going on than its connotations suggest. Relief can be activating, and hope can make us feel vulnerable to disappointment. Get that thing you really wanted? Now you may suddenly have to live inside a version of your life that had safely existed only in theory.

Happiness can involve more than meets the eye.

And food is good at mediating that.

I used to think of this as self-sabotage, but “sabotage” implies something sinister, like living with an internalized enemy. I have more hope than that. I think what we call “sabotage” are actually overprotective parts that trust danger more than safety, perhaps due to experience. I believe these parts can change, but that first we need to validate their function.

Here are some of the reasons why happiness may bring on symptoms that feel contradictory to growth and change:

Grounding the high

What do you think about when you hear the word “activation?” Usually, we associate it with things like anxiety, fear, and anger. But that’s the kind of activation that we instinctively want to calm down, so we notice it more. Excitement is more welcome, so we don’t notice the physiology underneath it as much. But the heart can speed up and the mind can become more alert as energy rises. Even relief, an emotion we don’t think about as activation, can be a type of intensity as it finally expels all the energy that built up while we were anticipating something.

The nervous system has to do something with that energy, especially if we’re not comfortable with energy that feels less civilized, less controlled.

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This week, I’m down the shore with my family, soaking up the final stretch of summer. It’s one of my favorite parts of the year for the ice cream cones, slow mornings, and walks on the boardwalk.

There’s a stretch of road leading up to the boardwalk where some of the grandest homes in the area line the street. They face the ocean and sprawl across luxurious lots, their floors and windows stacked high like real-life sandcastles.

Every year, I walk by and take in the cedar-shingle siding, steep gabled roofs, balconies tucked into little pockets, hydrangea bushes like pillows across the lawns. Through the windows, I can see staircases rising into turrets that might house libraries or home gyms overlooking the ocean.

I picture what it would be like to live in one. I imagine, without meaning to, that life would be “better” there.

And indeed it would be more luxurious, more privileged. The implication is that (at least financially) there would be less to worry about. In my mind, I would have a standing massage appointment at least once a week, and manicured gardens to sit in while writing these emails. (I really do picture this.)

For those reasons alone, some parts of it probably would be better.

But what is better?

I’d still be a human being with the same vulnerabilities and problems I have now, just with Sferra sheets and morning sunshine slapping me in the face through all those windows. (In the best of ways, of course. Because you’d want to wake up early if you lived there. You’d have the kind of energy that bounces out of bed.)

Walking by those houses this week, I realized I recognize this fantasy.

It’s the same one we can have about our bodies.

There is a specific version of life waiting on the other side of if. If we lived in a certain body, if our stomach was flat, if we had more energy, if we didn’t wrinkle where we smiled.

It’s all part of the same dream sequence.

And yes, in some ways, ease is an upgrade. It’s lighter not having to worry about money. It’s one less daily obstacle to get dressed without thinking about how clothes will look on your shape. There are mental-health benefits to having a turret with a library and ocean waves that roll and roll and roll you to sleep.

I wouldn’t pretend these things don’t make a difference. I think they do.

But I also think we tend to attach more to them than they can really provide. We imagine ourselves inside that life calmer, happier, more confident, less burdened by the things that bother us now.

That’s why the I’ll be happy if or I’ll be happy when fantasy has such an easy time smuggling us in. From the outside, we get to fill in all the details. It’s easy to imagine perfection from a distance.

But we’d still walk through those grand, gorgeous, glass-paneled mahogany front doors as ourselves.

It’s not such a disappointing ending. Because if we’re still ourselves when we get there, then the life we want doesn’t have to depend on becoming someone else. Maybe what we’re all asking for is just a little more ease.

And I don’t think we need a fantasy for that.

Let’s get more specific about what ease means.

Maybe it’s fewer things on the calendar, less to-dos. Or finally going through our closet to get out-of-view the aspirational items that ask us to negotiate with our past and future. Perhaps we can get a massage more often, or read by windows where we typically scroll on couches. Do something the easier way instead of assuming the hard way is the only respectable way. Get help. Redirect thoughts. Unfollow. Follow. Walk. Sit. Heck, buy new sheets.

Maybe ease can also mean confronting something instead of clinging to the fear of losing it. There is ease in relief, of setting down a burden by not running so furiously away from it.

Ease is not only found in an oceanfront house or a body that never gives us trouble. It is not all-or-nothing. It can exist in pieces, and inside lives that are still complicated and imperfect.

The fantasy doesn’t have to deliver an entire new life. Easier might be available here, today. Right now, in an hour, or this evening, next week.

What is the next thing you can do to offer yourself a little more ease?

Hi, I’m Stefanie Michele. I’m a coach and writer who helps people understand their relationship with food and body image through nervous-system and psychology-based approaches. I write about the places where food, body image, culture, anxiety, shame, and safety intersect.

Full But Not Finished Podcast on YouTube and Apple/Spotify.

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A few years ago, I posted a list on Instagram titled: 5 Reasons Why You Might Binge Eat.

(There are far more than five — it was just a starter pack.)

The fifth one read: to fail at something familiar.

I came across the post again about a year ago, and that fifth one felt dusty, like “oh yeah!” A sentiment resolved enough that I’d forgotten food was once a place I used to put it.

But in recent months, I’ve started to remember that feeling again. Perimenopause has stirred up a lot of old demons lately, feelings I thought I’d outgrown suddenly being all hiiiii.

The idea of “failure” has returned.

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I went to see Les Misérables (the Arena) in NYC recently and came home wondering if Javert would have had an eating disorder.

I realize this was probably not really what Victor Hugo was going for.

But I work with eating disorders, and have had one myself, and the psychology of it intrigued me.

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Javert, I think, would be a restrictor. He finds order in rules. He sees Jean Valjean as a criminal because Valjean stole bread, and stealing bread — even if it is to feed a starving child — is wrong. It is a crime because the law said so. Right and wrong are not debatable categories, nor are they subject to change once written. Certainty is the glue holding down Javert’s sense of gravity. There is no gray area.

I imagined him eating breakfast. Would he eat breakfast? I contemplated his instinct to fast, but figured it might be too trendy for him, and would disrupt the three-meal cadence I imagine he grew up with. “I was born inside a jail; I am from the gutter, too.” Yes, breakfast would have been part of the regimen, and I don’t see Javert changing things.

I imagine he would eat from a small rotation of breakfast foods every day: bread, an egg, black coffee. It is hard to imagine him eating lunch, and in fact hard to imagine him eating at all. There is something about the vulnerability of needing that I imagine he would shun, but he would also understand the logic of needing in this case, and perform it dutifully. But only dutifully.

So perhaps some cabbage or bean soup, a piece of bread, and, on appointed days, a little boiled meat. The foods would change just enough to constitute a rotation, but the meal itself would remain essentially the same: one bowl, one piece, one portion, eaten at the same hour. He would weigh and measure, but without fear or resentment. It would simply be about confirming the correct amount.

Hunger would be information to disregard as erroneous. He would not stand in his kitchen after dinner debating whether or not he was allowed a little extra, or contemplating dessert. The decision would have been made several hours earlier and, as far as he would be concerned, decisions were final.

An eating disorder does not have to be rooted in body image, and Javert would have no head for body image anyway. I don’t imagine him checking his stomach in a mirror or worrying about how he looked in his uniform, only that he would continue to fit into it reliably and without deviation.

But rigidity around food is not automatically an eating disorder, either. Food rules can also come from neurodivergence, sensory factors, obsessive-compulsive patterns, trauma, or even strong preferences.

The overlap makes me wonder what, exactly, turns any of these things into an eating disorder. Behavior alone cannot account for it. A person can eat the same breakfast every morning and feel free; another person may eat the same breakfast every morning but feel intolerant or even panicked at the idea of deviating from that breakfast. Perhaps it has something to do with what the behavior is doing for someone, and how much authority it has over them. Or how adequately they are nourished…how flexible they can be without suffering…and how it impacts the rest of their life.

Suffering seems especially relevant, although Javert complicates that, too. I don’t imagine him suffering because of his rules; I think the rules would soothe him. In chronic restriction, this is actually quite common: rules are regulation.

So if Javert was adequately nourished, physically well, able to carry out his life, and not distressed by the way he ate, what exactly would make it disordered? The harm would have to show up somewhere.

For this reason, I don’t think Javert would ever call himself disordered. He would not experience the familiar conflict of “my rules keep me safe, but I am suffering for them.” Or perhaps the suffering would exist in a form he wouldn’t recognize as suffering.

Restriction becomes problematic when it starts limiting or colliding with other parts of a person’s life, or starts compromising their values. It becomes hard to travel. Someone suggests pancakes. You fall in love with someone who cooks with butter (and does not measure it). You become exhausted trying to accommodate your rules with the natural rhythms of living.

But Javert has built a life that supports restriction. His work takes up all of his time and focus. His social life appears irrelevant, and he does not seem like one to seek intimacy. I don’t think he would experience a rigid way of eating as a sacrifice of social connection or a barrier to another life he wanted.

An eating disorder can remain stable for a long time when someone has built a life that enables it, and avoids everything that might challenge it. The missing parts of life — like friendships, traveling, romance, an ice cream cone on a hot summer day — are easy to disregard precisely because they don’t come up. So there is nothing to long for, nothing to miss, nothing to present the question: am I sacrificing too much in the name of keeping order?

Javert would probably see that as a virtue.

However, the story shows the eventual cost of this arrangement. Jean Valjean interrupts the control sequence by presenting Javert with information he cannot reconcile. Javert first knows him as a convict, then encounters him as a respected mayor; he sees Valjean protect Fantine, save Cosette, and sacrifice his own freedom rather than allow an innocent man to be punished in his place. Years later, Valjean spares Javert’s life at the barricade, and then, in that one hopeful scene, Javert returns the mercy by letting Valjean go to carry Marius to safety.

For a moment, we hold our breath. Something in Javert appears to be changing. Every encounter with Valjean has given him another opportunity to revise what he believes, and now he is standing at the edge of that revision — fractured by it, but considering.

But no. He cannot revise it.

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His rules are more than just preferences or habits. They have overridden his ability to integrate experience. They are so fixed that new information can no longer change him. He has built his safety inside the categories, and contradiction threatens the structure holding them all together. We tolerate contradiction by learning something from it. But Javert cannot. He can’t wonder. He can’t be uncertain.

He can’t grow.

This may be the point at which recovery would become relevant for him, although I still do not think he would pursue it.

I have worked with people whose lives had become similarly rigid until the rules reached far beyond food and determined how much life could be lived around them. But I have never met anyone who felt no cost. Even when the rules brought relief, they could feel something in themselves wanting more room. They knew, however faintly, that they wanted something more, even if they were terrified of it.

That awareness is where change begins because it means experience is still getting through. A person can notice that the rules no longer account for everything they want, and begin the work of revising them. Another story must begin.

Javert is one of my favorite characters in the show for the tension he provides against experience and evolution. Every time I watch him, I feel his conflict rise and I wonder if it might end differently this time. I know, of course, that it doesn’t, but in that suspension of disbelief, I hope. For a few minutes there, he might let himself be changed.

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Hi, I’m Stefanie Michele. I’m a coach and writer who helps people understand their relationship with food and body image through nervous-system and psychology-based approaches. I write about the places where food, body image, culture, anxiety, shame, and safety intersect.

Full But Not Finished Podcast on YouTube and Apple/Spotify.

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In conversations about food, one of the concepts we refer to most is morality. We describe foods as good or bad: we think of days in terms of a good eating day or a bad eating day, and eventually think of ourselves as good or bad for eating how we eat, or weighing what we weigh. When we move away from diet culture, a lot of the work centers around food and body neutrality, where we actively try not to think about food or our bodies in terms of good or bad. It’s just food. It’s just a body.

I don’t think this is wrong. It is, on the contrary, quite relevant for many people. I have listened to enough clients over the years to know that there are people who very much suffer from the belief that what they eat or how much they weigh reflects something about their actual moral fiber. In many cases, it is truly a measure of being “good” enough. Of being on the right side of the law.

I was writing a post for Instagram the other day and caught myself using the good/bad language to describe how we think through food. I was talking about removing morality from the equation, but as I wrote it, I realized that I never actually ate to be good.

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My 9-year-old daughter discovered her voice last night.

In 2024, after watching the Eras Tour, she decided she wanted to be a singer. She started writing lyrics in a notebook at night before bed, and occasionally performs them for us in the morning when she is particularly proud of her work.

I am not musical myself, but I think she has a natural talent for mixing up the melodies and key changes in a way that keeps the listener interested. I find her songs catchy in a way that may or may not have to do with the fact that I’m her mother.

But last night, she came into the kitchen in tears.

“I’m not going to be a singer anymore,” she cried.

“Why? What happened?” I asked her.

“I heard myself singing. I sound so bad. I’m not a good singer.”

Intrigued, I asked her to explain. She’s been hearing herself sing for years now, and I couldn’t understand what changed.

Apparently, she’d been playing with her sister’s Apple Watch and the playback was more than she could bear. She demonstrated the effect — she sang a few lines into the watch right then and there, and played it back.

“Does that sound like me?”

I replied honestly — “well, yes, but it’s a little bit different. Recordings aren’t as clear as it sounds in real life.”

“But does it basically sound like me?”

Ugh. It did.

“I think so,” I told her.

She moans, and I understand that what she is feeling is devastating, because some spell has been broken. She believed her voice sounded different than it does.

But then again. Listening to the playback, I detected a tremble in her throat, a slight weakness there. Which I can hear it in real time, too, when I think about it. But there must be a difference, because I noticed it in the audio — whereas in person I technically hear it, but don’t notice it. There’s a difference.

I tell her this, in 9-year-old language.

“It does sound like you, but listening to the recording feels different to me than listening to you in person.” It’s the same sound — which is what she was asking — but it reads slightly differently.

She doesn’t care. She’s too busy canceling her singing career.

There is a phenomenon for this called Voice Confrontation. Research shows that nearly 60% of people cringe to hear their own voice.

I can’t help but think about the parallels here between sound and vision.

It feels an awful lot like the impact of a mirror, or a photograph.

Because how many times have you seen your own reflection and thought: that’s not what I thought I looked like?

The assumption is usually that the image has corrected our mistake. We are quick to think that whatever we believed about ourselves before was a subjective inaccuracy, and now we are confronting something more objectively truthful.

In other words: I thought I looked okay, but I really don’t.

But I question this.

Our perception of ourselves is built from far more information than a photograph or a recording can capture. The brain is constantly combining what we see and hear with memory, prediction, emotion, sensation and familiarity. There are complex systems in the nervous system that are involved in interpreting what we technically “see”.

A recording or photograph can reorganize some of that.

Changing the conduit of perception can make certain details harder or easier to notice.

I heard the tremble in my daughter’s recorded voice more acutely because there was nothing else competing with it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the recording was a more accurate representation of her voice. In person, I was also experiencing the context of her performance and feeling the energy she brought into the room. Those things were not distractions from the sound, they were part of how the sound was received to me as a human being with my own intricate network of meaning-making.

No perception is free from interpretation. No perception is an objective reality.

The discomfort may come from being shown ourselves through a form we do not usually inhabit. The image is recognizable, but it has been separated from the context through which we typically interpret ourselves.

At a certain time in my life, I would have taken this information and thought: well, all of that doesn’t matter. The truth is different from my interpretation.

If I hear my daughter’s voice and think it’s good because I love her and therefore add those layers to my understanding of her voice, it doesn’t mean her voice is good. It means I’m biased.

I have modified this a bit.

1. Bias is part of all interpretation, and there is no truth without interpretation for any human being on this planet. Including those who look at you.

2. The bias we are talking about is not changing any relative truth so drastically that it’s out of touch with reality. Acknowledging subjective interpretations is not saying we can kid ourselves about what is really there. But that baseline truth does not tell us what it means.

Nothing exists in human perception as an isolated fact. The brain is always deciding what to emphasize, how much weight to give it and how it relates to everything else that is there.

That’s why the same task can feel manageable one day and insurmountable the next without the task itself changing one little bit. One perspective has not discovered a truth that the other has avoided. It’s just that the objective information was organized differently.

My daughter heard something objective in her voice recording. And yes, there may be places where her voice sounds different than she imagined. I don’t need to convince her that she is wrong for hearing what she hears.

But the recording is not telling her what has to happen next.

She can quit if she wants to. I hope she doesn’t, but she can. If what she heard makes her feel like there is nothing left there to work with, she is allowed to decide that.

She can also keep singing to learn what else is true.

Hi, I’m Stefanie Michele. I’m a coach and writer who helps people understand their relationship with food and body image through nervous-system and psychology-based approaches. I write about the places where food, body image, culture, anxiety, shame, and safety intersect.

Full But Not Finished Podcast on YouTube and Apple/Spotify.

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This might sound like a contradiction, but I’m a body image coach and I don’t “wear the shorts.”

As in: who cares about your cellulite saturated thighs? It’s hot out! Just wear the damn shorts! As in diet culture recovery, body neutral, anti-weight stigma, agency rebellion reclaim take up space. And yes to all of that.

And yet, I don’t.

I don’t wear the shorts.

But the reason I don’t wear them isn’t because I’m ashamed of my legs or my cellulite, and it’s not because I feel like it deserves to be hidden.

It’s because I don’t want to summon that feeling.

Let me explain…

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My legs began as a source of insecurity around puberty.

I remember being thirteen years old and walking out of a bathroom just in time to overhear a friend say to another friend that “Stef has a kinda big butt and thighs.” She didn’t know I was there and I don’t think she was saying it to be a mean girl. I think it was just an honest observation.

It wasn’t a surprise, though. I had been tying long-sleeved shirts and sweatshirts around my waist for years for that exact reason. I understood my lower body as the wrong part of me. But there is a difference between suspecting that the world sees it versus hearing it confirmed out loud.

A few years later, I developed a restrictive eating disorder. My thighs got smaller, but they were still a vulnerability. It didn’t feel like they had become safe; it felt like I was somehow getting away with keeping the unruly part of me under control. Like they could come back at any time. I was just getting away with it for the time being. Tick tock tick tock.

When restriction turned into bingeing and my body changed again, my legs came back in their breadth. This time, they grew cellulite. And I do not mean a light sprinkling of it that I’ve seen people post when they are trying to normalize it. I belong to a long line of genetic code of lumps and bumps with high commitment to their cause. My legs have topography.

There was never a question of whether or not I would cover them.

There was, unequivocally, not a chance.

I never felt resentful about it, though. Summer after summer, in humid northeast 90-something-degree weather, I wore pants. Shorts were simply not an option. It did not feel like deprivation or being put out or something I was missing access to. I didn’t wake up every summer day and get dressed thinking: I must make this painful choice again! No, it was just the way things were. To me, it was as unremarkable as the paint on the ceiling.

When you spend over twenty years living inside of a habit that feels like the safest and most obvious thing, it isn’t hard. It just is.

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The other day, I saw a post on Instagram by that reads:

I used to believe joy was something I’d eventually feel once everything was resolved. Once I made a certain amount of money, once I healed enough, once I completed all my goals, once life calmed down. But over time I’ve realized that joy was never meant to be the reward; it’s the vehicle. It’s what carries us through the stress, the grief, the heartbreak, the uncertainty. Joy isn’t what happens after life gets better. It’s one of the things that makes life better. Joy is the medicine for now, not later.

The reason this post lands (and landed for so many) is because it contradicts the instinct to wait until we have x to access y.

I had a friend who used to collect candles. Every year, I gave her a new batch for Christmas (remember those Yankee candle stores where you could pick 12 different scents and put them in that cute little tray as a gift?)

One year, she revealed that she had the previous three years of candles still saved in the tray, untouched. Not because she didn’t want them, but because she was saving them for “the right time,” a theoretical moment that felt special enough to really enjoy them.

Sometimes in our attempt to curate access, we lose the access.

It’s not just joy, though.

We also see this with things like: self-acceptance. Body peace. Self-trust. Permission to eat. Connection, confidence, self-compassion.

We believe there are prerequisites for all of them, or a time when they’ll feel more available.

• We will finally start accepting ourselves once we fix what’s broken.

• We will finally speak kindly to our bodies once our bodies look the way we want them to.

• We will finally trust ourselves to eat more freely once we stop eating so much.

• We will finally make connections once we feel worthy enough of connecting.

• And, as Alexis points out, we will finally enjoy life once we clear the obstacles in the way of enjoying it.

But the irony is that having conditions of access are actually preventing access.

Let’s take confidence, for example.

In my mind’s eye, there was a version of me that could be confident. Despite my insecurities, I sensed that if I had a smaller body then I would have better social skills, and could then overcome my introversion to be a relatively self-assured woman.

But the reason I was not a confident woman was precisely because I had specific and inflexible conditions for that self-assurance. I never once entertained the possibility of confidence through introversion or through my here-and-now body. I did not offer myself a template for confidence in any other way than the qualifications I saw fit to deserve it.

Confidence, in my experience, does not come from overcoming who we are but by accepting who we are. If we cannot be confident unless xyz, then we are not actually confident — we are obedient.

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In the end, I had to practice confidence before I could feel confidence. And I had to practice it without waiting to possess the qualities I thought it should require.

• I made myself visible before I felt sufficient to be visible.

• I spoke up before I felt sure my voice would be heard or taken seriously.

• I initiated connection before I felt sure I wouldn’t be rejected.

• I let myself be quiet before I understood that “outgoing” is not the only way to be safe.

More ironically, I found that allowing myself to show up before I felt confident was actually a more direct line to the things I thought I needed to get me there. I actually started feeling a bit more outgoing. Showing up gave me some of the social skills that I assumed I could only have in a smaller body. And it created a stronger sense of self-assurance because I wasn’t attached a prerequisite of deserving.

If we don’t give ourselves permission to experience the feeling now, we only reinforce to ourselves that we must earn it, that it’s not free, that we don’t have access as we are.

And that kind of scarcity breeds dysregulation.

In dysregulation, it’s much more difficult to experience things like confidence, peace, self-trust, food freedom, or joy.

And so the hamster wheel turns.

I don’t want to oversimplify the decision to “choose confidence!” or “just trust yourself!” or “eat the food and watch the binges fall away!

That is not how nervous systems work.

Instead, ask: what are your access terms?

• Do you only let yourself go shopping or wear clothes you like when you are smaller?

• Do you only eat pleasurable foods after you lose weight?

• Do you only let yourself rest when everything else is done?

• Do you only move your body when there are calories to burn?

• Do you only feel proud of yourself when the outcome is visible to others?

• Do you try to ensure satisfaction for later by not letting yourself have it now?

If we pair access with conditions, we perpetuate the rigidity of access with conditions. Try mixing them up a little bit. Give yourself the opportunity to engage in something you typically only associate with a prerequisite. Blend associations. That blending is what deconstructs black and white thinking, and leads to the flexibility that actually creates change.

Hi, I’m Stefanie Michele. I’m a coach and writer who helps people understand their relationship with food and body image through nervous-system and psychology-based approaches. I write about the places where food, body image, culture, anxiety, shame, and safety intersect.

Full But Not Finished Podcast on YouTube and Apple/Spotify.

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“Acceptance” of most things — but especially of our bodies — has the unfortunate connotation of being a passive, lay-down-and-die, throw-in-the-towel experience.

As in: if I stop trying to lose weight and accept my body, I’m giving up.

We associate acceptance with surrender of agency and admission of defeat. Like we tried, but we lost. We were too weak to change. To accept is to turn around and face the crowd, confronting the awkward truth of our failure like being caught onstage in our underwear. It is the ultimate discomfort because no one will say anything, but we will know they know. The eyes will whisper it, because no one has to verbalize what already sits in the collective social agreement: “she really let herself go.”

No one wants to be the one who let herself go. Even when we must sacrifice our mental health to do it, there is no one who hasn’t pushed Self aside to make room for the social demand to never let that tragedy happen. And maybe that’s why it’s so embarrassing. Everyone knows you must have tried, and tried, and tried again. And still, you couldn’t do it. To accept oneself must mean that you had no other recourse. You didn’t actually choose it.

Pathetic.

Or so we are told.

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I used to work for a magazine in NYC. Many nights, along my walk from the subway station back to my apartment seven blocks away, I would inevitably remember that I needed to pick up gum, or razors, or fruit for my lunch the next day.

It wasn’t not true. I did have a real need or desire for those things. So I told myself: I’ll be walking by the store anyway, might as well grab it.

But as I’d walk through the aisles, I’d pass the cookies, the ice cream, the cereal. Suddenly I didn’t care as much about the razors — I mean, the gum — I mean the fruit? And by the time I left, I’d have a mini-binge in my bag, as if it came out of nowhere.

This phenomenon is called an apparently irrelevant behavior.

An apparently irrelevant behavior (AIB) is a behavior that looks unrelated to a consequence, but may not be. The stop at the store may have been legitimate, but it also conveniently created an opportunity to move closer to the thing I already wanted to happen, even if I had not consciously admitted that to myself yet.

Because in truth, I had grown to dislike that office and evening binges were the only thing that brought me a sense of calm.

In fact, another apparently irrelevant behavior was the binge itself — I ended up quitting that job precisely because of my binge episodes. Eventually, they became too frequent and too intense to hold down a career that demanded so much of my time and energy (and aesthetic compliance), so I “had to leave.” My eating then became the reason for quitting rather than admitting I was wildly insecure and overwhelmed at that particular magazine. Maybe those binges were not so irrelevant. Maybe they were the very behaviors I needed to make a choice I was not consciously willing to choose.

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It’s Memorial Day weekend, and I’m visiting my parents' house at the Jersey shore, per usual.

Ten years ago, in fact, I was here, sitting in this very spot.

I remember looking at the clock, wanting to get out early. I would go for a run along the water on the trail that extends to the tip of the pier. It’s beautiful there — I still often stop to take pictures, and then notice how pictures never seem to do it right.

But that run was part of a fantasy I had built in my mind. I imagined that one year, I might come here alone. No one would be here, somehow. In the fantasy, it was as if my family didn’t exist.

Without the burden of anyone else, I would spend almost the entire day running. I would start early, as the sun rose. I’d make it out to the donut shop, and walk back, bag in hand. It wasn’t far, but kind of far. I’d eat the donuts for breakfast — glazed, coconut flaked, textured. I would be so hungry from the running that the donuts wouldn’t sit heavy in my stomach; they’d be welcome in my system, still sweating. I’d deserve them.

I’d run some more, at lunchtime making my way to Miss Mindy’s Ice Cream Shoppe, the best in the county. There would be no limit to what I couldn’t have — it would be some form of a giant sundae, piles of chocolate chip mint, any toppings my heart desired. Later I would walk more, run more, make the whole day look like a girl who just loved the outdoors and loved to eat, nobody noticing the math happening underneath it.

At the time, this felt like freedom.

The problem with disordered fantasies is that they use features you actually do crave, which makes them harder to interrogate. I do love that trail. I do love to sweat in the sun. I do love donuts and ice cream. I still love the idea of a whole day to myself by the water with nowhere else to be, no one looking for me.

But underneath all of that, I was trying to build a day where I would be safe from guilt. That was the real fantasy.

I knew no other way to eat things like donuts or ice cream without feeling anxious afterward. If I wanted the food without the stress, the whole day would have to be arranged around it. I would have to exercise so much that there would be no question of earning it, and I would have to be alone enough so that there would be no one to point out the dysfunction.

And when food guilt is dominant, simple pleasure isn’t enough. It’s got to be excessive. You need to feel like your access is limitless, not moderate. Moderation is a form of torture to those who have created bottomless wells of wanting.

But you can never actually reach the fantasy of “guilt-free” if guilt is relevant to the conversation in the first place.

The buffer will never be big enough.

Because if I had already run far, I could run farther. If I was going to eat what I wanted, I could try to find a cleaner option. If I was thisclose to feeling guilt-free, maybe I could just do a little more to get even closer.

The goalpost will keep moving because safety is not actually there.

That realization may have been the beginning of the end for me. I started to understand that the ideals were upholding my exhaustion, and I’d never be safe from the guilt. The woman in the mental image was also a fantasy — in reality, this kind of day would never be able to exist. The whole system would have come with me.

Confronting yourself in recovery is realizing that if you keep living with the same rules, there will be no day where the math stops mathing. No amount of running that disqualifies the threat of wanting. No amount of solitude that will make loneliness feel like peace.

Fantasies let you imagine that somewhere, under the right conditions, we can still have access to everything we want without having to challenge the rules we built in front of it.

So in order to get to where I was trying to go, I had to dismantle the guilt instead of pretending there was a way around it.

For me, the food rules were protecting an image of myself I thought I was supposed to become. Visibly fit and thin, yes, but not just that. Also strong and confident, energetic, alpha-level determined, admirable, less emotional.

Food guilt will exist when you are trying to use food to become someone you are not.

I am introverted. I am midsize, not thin. I get angry. I am not demure. I am slower to warm up than feels socially acceptable. I worry that I’m boring. I worry that I’m doing things wrong. I think a lot and can’t always organize it. I procrastinate. I need to retreat and get space more than others. I leave parties early if I go at all. I have emotional realities that do not match the carefree woman I have made up in my head.

The rules were a way I kept telling those truths to stay down. The thinner me was the socially acceptable woman that I imagined I could be. So when food started to feel bottomless, I thought that was proof that I was out of control. But it was the appropriate response to being pushed down for so long. Of course my appetite surged when I opened the door. Of course it did not regulate itself politely or intuitively. Intuitive, at that point, was assertion. It was the advocacy of not being told no again. It was fighting not to be forced back into the shape of a good woman.

Tolerating food guilt meant tolerating my actual self.

Ten years later, I am no perfect woman. But I can eat an ice cream cone in the real world, and that’s been even better.

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Hi, I’m Stefanie Michele. I’m a coach and writer who helps people understand their relationship with food and body image through nervous-system and psychology-based approaches. I write about the places where food, body image, culture, anxiety, shame, and safety intersect.

Full But Not Finished Podcast on YouTube and Apple/Spotify.

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This week, I recorded a podcast episode with my husband, Mike. Over the years, I’ve gotten questions about our relationship (how did he learn you had an eating disorder? how did he support you? how did he react when your body changed?) so I finally asked him if he’d be willing to sit down and answer some of those questions on air.

He agreed, but asked f…

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1. Feeling judged does not mean you are being judged.

2. If a room requires you to betray yourself to feel acceptable, the problem may be the room.

3. People’s judgments are often filtered through their own insecurities and fears.

4. Most people are preoccupied with how they are being perceived; that’s where most of their attention is focused at any given time.

5. The intensity of your self-consciousness is happening inside your nervous system; other people are not having an equally intense reaction.

6. When you feel exposed, your brain may confuse visibility with danger. That does not mean danger is actually present.

7. Being judged by someone does not automatically make their judgment accurate or worth paying attention to.

8. People feel your availability more than they analyze your body (even if they don’t realize it).

9. The goal is not to control what people think; it is to stop abandoning yourself when you imagine what they might think.

10. Your nervous system may be responding to old experiences, not what is happening right now.

11. The fear may be less about your body and more about what you think your body means.

12. Body image often feels intense because it is tied to belonging, rejection, status, and social safety — not because you are vain.

13. Other people’s judgments are shaped by their conditioning, insecurity, family history, fear, and bias.

14. A judgmental person can’t be trusted to see you accurately.

15. Checking, adjusting, scanning, and replaying are attempts to control uncertainty and will actually increase dysregulation. Moving your attention away from your body (including the perceived judgment) is the actually most successful long term strategy to increase your self-confidence.

    The Body Image Workshop

16. Body neutrality means that even if you are being judged, your body does not have to be the most important thing about the moment.

17. Your body is allowed to be seen because you are allowed to take up space.

18. You are allowed to be a person in public, not a body on display.

19. You owe them nothing.

20. Food does not need to become damage control after you feel judged; that reinforces a loop that disempowers you.

21. Your body is allowed to change and theirs will too.

22. Your brain may be trying to prevent judgment before any judgment has actually happened.

23. You may be telling yourself a story.

24. Your appearance is only one part of how people experience you.

25. You can stay loyal to your body even when you do not like how it looks.

26. You can feel insecure and still act according to your values.

27. Not apologizing for your body is self-advocacy.

28. Feeling inferior beside someone does not mean they have taken something from you; it means you are telling yourself a story about something.

29. Your nervous system may prefer self-criticism because it feels like preparation, and preparation feels like safety.

30. You can redirect attention from “How am I being seen?” to “What am I here for?”

31. You may be trying to solve a belonging wound through appearance.

32. “They might judge me” is not the same as “I need to center my emotions around their judgment.”

33. The fantasy of escaping judgment usually keeps you more anxious than accepting that judgment exists.

34. Your life is meant to be experienced from the inside out — not the outside in.

35. No matter what, you will feel safe again.

    Full But Not Finished : by Stefanie Michele is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hi, I’m Stefanie Michele. I’m a coach and writer who helps people understand their relationship with food and body image through nervous-system and psychology-based approaches. Six years recovered.

The Body Image Workshop starts Monday May 4th

Full But Not Finished Podcast on YouTube and Apple/Spotify.

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Any content creator will tell you that if you want to increase views, sales, or engagement, you focus on the pain points.

You name the problem. You describe the problem. You appeal to the problem. The problem the problem the problem.

This is because problems are where the urgency is. Threats are going to gather more attention than safety because that’s how our nervous systems are designed. It’s why we are more likely to beeline towards the one bad review than the hundred good ones.

As a content creator and a consumer, I get it. I understand the value of helping someone with a problem and I personally desire solutions to my own. (By the way, if anyone reading this is an expert in funnel emails, please contact me, it’s a huge problem.)

But as a somatic practitioner, I also understand the value of paying attention to the safe-already. The what’s good. The that which does not need fixing. Because that’s where we build capacity. It is the unsung hero of healing.

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When body positivity (often understood as yay! I love my body!) feels out of reach, the concept of body neutrality is proposed as an alternative — like you don’t have to love how you look, you can just feel neutral about it.

But the goal to become some serene, unbothered woman who has transcended mirrors and social conditioning is, to me, equally unattainable and perfectionistic.

Contrary to popular belief, body neutrality does not mean feeling neutral about your body.

Body neutrality is actually about developing a more neutral relationship to the fact that you do care. It is about reducing the dominance of the meaning of body image altogether, so that caring about your appearance stops taking up a disproportionate amount of space.

I think about it like a gumball machine. If one giant gumball exists in the middle of the sphere, there’s no room for anything else.

So instead of expecting ourselves to get rid of the gumball itself, what if we just reduce how much space it takes up? What if “not liking my body” could be one gumball among many?

For me, this has been a more realistic approach. I can still feel my feelings, but there is room for other feelings. Instead of letting a tough day at the mirror corrupt the rest of my day, I can just say: “yeah, it’s a tough day at the mirror.”

Does that sound like the same thing? It’s not.

Here’s an example.

In the past, I would put on “real clothes” after days of yoga pants (yes the millennial is strong in that one) and feel out of sorts. I’d notice how jeans don’t fit me right, how my proportions don’t match the way it seems clothes are made, how style looks so different on my body than it does on “everyone else.”

Affirmations didn’t always help. Telling myself that clothes should be made to fit the body, not the body fit the clothes just didn’t make me feel better. Sometimes, my frustrations are bigger than the positivity spin.

So what were my options? I couldn’t find peace, so I’d just stay in a bad mood.

Body neutrality taught me a third way. It said:

Keep your frustration. Have it. You don’t need to talk yourself out of it. Because with decreased resistance, you can actually shrink the amount of brain space that frustration is taking up.

Stop resisting, just reduce the proportion of the gumball.

Meaning: I can accept that I feel this frustration. I don’t have to fix it, nor do I have to be hijacked by it. I can be more neutral about the fact that the frustration exists.

From there, I can have a tough body image day and still stay present with the other gumballs of my life. Still go to dinner. Still answer my emails. Still laugh at a meme. Still register that the sky looks beautiful or that my daughter is telling me a story or that my friend is in pain and I care about it. That I might still feel frustrated even as all of that is happening. The body gumball has not vanished. It is just no longer swallowing everything else.

Like two things are true.

Because when body image takes up all the space, it starts to distort reality. We end up paying so much attention to it that we can't pay attention to anything else.

Neutrality creates perspective. It puts body image back into proportion. You still care, maybe a lot, but the caring itself stops carrying so much authority.

There is something deeply liberating about letting body image become smaller without demanding that it disappear.

If you are interested in learning more concepts like this, The Body Image Workshop begins on Monday, May 4th. You can learn more about it right here.

Hi, I’m Stefanie Michele. I’m a coach and writer who helps people understand their relationship with food and body image through nervous-system and psychology-based approaches.

Want to work with me? Learn more at www.iamstefaniemichele.com

Full But Not Finished Podcast on YouTube and Apple/Spotify.

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A new client of mine sat on the other side of the Zoom screen, registering the words that had just come out of his mouth.

“I know it’s illogical, but I don’t want to feel better. I don’t know who I am if I’m not suffering.”

It’s one of those realizations that comes to life only once spoken out loud. When you hear it audibly — I depend on my suffering — it stops flying under the radar as a truth.

But here’s the twist:

this essay isn’t the one that’s going to tell you that bringing a belief to consciousness is the path to eradicating it and setting yourself free. Those essays exist, and I’ve written a few like it.

But for this particular belief, I’m going to pose a new idea:

What if you don’t have to get rid of your inner sufferer to heal?

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I turn 47 this year and my body is participating in all sorts of cellular changes outside of my consent, which is fun. The change du jour is my arms. Even my elbow crease is becoming less bound up with collagen, and starting to sit differently. My inner thighs are bloop bloop-ing. It’s giving… well, old.

Demonizing aging is as problematic as demonizing weight, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a personal reaction to the lived impact of it, the signs from my body that it is, in fact, getting older, and I am mortal. (I always knew that but it’s different to know it.)

But the other day it kind of swept me up as I got out of the shower and I was like, gahhhh my arms.

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I left my bathroom and entered my office to get ready for a call. I’m not in the practice of staying stuck at the mirror anymore — the lure of checking checking and checking again is a fool’s errand, and moving away from that oppressive pattern has been a commitment for the past many years.

I became distracted by work, but during a break it tapped me on the shoulder again, like hey remember your arms?

And I was like “OH RIGHT, MY ARMS!”

and the very fact that it interrupted my regular routine (via thought) signaled to my nervous system that there seemed to be some kind of emergency here because we’ve been rerouted twice now, and we might want to pay attention to this distressing piece of information that keeps circling back into our awareness.

So without my consent (again), I’m caught up in the idea that my arms look a certain way now and it’s almost springtime and short-sleeves gonna short-sleeve, and people will see my arms sans collagen, including my sister.

My sister??

Yes! She’s going to see! We’ll be together this summer and she’ll notice that you are aging. For that matter, your brother, too. Stef, YOUR BROTHER AND SISTER ARE GOING TO SEE.

Crap, you’re right!

And you are going to be standing in the kitchen wearing a tank top — it will be white — and they’re going to notice you from the side and you won’t even see them see it but they are going to see it outside of your awareness and they will pity-judge you, but not so explicitly that you can defend yourself, you will just be relegated to a lesser level in their minds, they’ll think you’re kind of weak and you just let this happen because you don’t try hard enough like they do.

But that’s not what arms mean.

ps. also mom and dad.

In this moment my Real Stef (authentic self, Self, core Self, however you like to think of it) notices this emergency situation developing and is like: wait, your “projected audience” is showing up (the Audience Technique is something we’ll talk about it in the Body Image Workshop this summer). You’re in a trap, get out.

And it’s here that I remember: This is not actually an emergency.

I’ve built up an entire story in my head, complete with imagery (the white tank top is one I can’t find anywhere except in my imagination but I think it’s from Madewell), and I’ve become convinced that arms are the symbol of respect and power and belonging, and everything is on the line.

But it’s not. It’s really not.

Because even though you can argue that arms are culturally relevant status symbols, the space they actually take up in day to day life is not all that. It’s there but it’s not all there is. There is room to zoom out, life is about more than the size of our arms.

And with that comes an out-breath, my shoulders drop, my jaw releases. I don’t have to believe this is an emergency. Even if they did judge my arms, it’s still not an emergency.

Because I’m still going to show up as myself, and I’m going to stay aware of my own values even among people who have different ones. As long as I have that, nothing is an emergency.

No one will dictate to me how I feel about myself.

I can allow other people to value toned arms without fawning to those values.

I am just as valid in mine.

Real life doesn’t actually center around toned bodies; we talk about it a lot and project a lot onto it, but real life happens in relationships and experiences and being present and connected.

When you teach your nervous system that the situation is frustrating but not an emergency, you see a bigger picture.

And that bigger picture keeps the problem in proportion.

I know it’s just words — we all can say “it’s not an emergency” but it may still feel like one.

The nervous system cares about what happens next.

When I remember to tell myself that this is not an emergency, it helps me loosen my grip enough to return to the bigger picture — to my work calls, my daily routines, other thoughts in my head.

This part is not separate from the nervous system piece, it is the nervous system piece.

Because each time I come back to my actual life instead of confirming back to myself that I have a big problem here, I am giving my body another experience of the thought showing up without dominating.

“This isn’t an emergency” helps me return, and returning helps teach my body that this isn’t an emergency.

Those two things build on each other. The thought pulls me in, I come back out.

It taps me on the shoulder again, I return again.

These are, essentially, how boundaries keep us safe.

And over time, the body begins to register that even though distress is present, the thoughts are persistent, the cultural meaning is relevant — nothing catastrophic is actually happening.

The authority of the emergency hands off to the authority of reality, which is much safer than our predictions.

We need to keep coming back to that. Don’t give up on the repetitions — they matter.

Coaching Corner: De-Escalate the Escalation

1. Catch the moment it goes from “observation” to “story.”
Noticing something (and even reacting to it) is normal. But watch for where you start imagining a future moment, a person witnessing it, what they’ll conclude, what this means about you, and how you lose power/status/belonging/agency.

2. Name the story so you can see it plainly.
Say it specifically.

• I’m imagining my sister seeing my arms and reading that as me letting myself go.

• I’m imagining that I will be left out or left behind while others around me have status or elevation.

• I’m imagining that I am alone and that people can’t see anything beyond how I look.

3. Bring your body into the present.
Let your shoulders drop 1/8”. Exhale a little bit longer than normal. Orient to the room you are actually in and notice the sounds of “normal life” happening around you, mundane and predictable.

4. Zoom out.
We tend to react to our thoughts like they are imminent threats magnified beyond their actual size.

Widen out: What else is true beyond this point of focus?

• My relationships are still intact.

• My life is not actually changing.

• I am proud of my evolving values.

• Even if x is true, it might not be as big of a deal as I think it is.

• That white tank top is out there somewhere.

5. Practice allowing de-escalation to be the wiser move.
The old pattern will often present itself as vigilance, preparation, self-protection. It poses as “self-awareness” and “important to pay attention to.” Almost like it’s irresponsible not to keep ruminating on it.

De-escalation can feel too complacent by comparison. But that does not mean it is wrong.

The growth edge = letting yourself step away from the emergency. It is not giving up, giving in, or letting yourself go or get away with something. It’s self-growth, agency, and power in its own right.

Hi, I’m Stefanie Michele. I’m a coach and writer who helps people understand their relationship with food and body image through nervous-system and psychology-based approaches.

Want to work with me? Learn more at www.iamstefaniemichele.com

Full But Not Finished Podcast on YouTube and Apple/Spotify.

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The other day I saw a video about a hyperscale AI data center campus currently being built in Texas. After watching it all the way through, the algorithm started feeding me videos about data centers closer to home (in NJ where I live), and my “AI-will-go-away-shhhh” denial bubble has been burst.

My favorite business coach has deconstructed her entire course suite (which I loved) to make room for her new point of focus: AI-All Stars.

I receive emails on the daily that say “quietly” and “and that matters” and “here’s the thing;” choppy sentence structures, three examples, em-dashes galore (I mourn these last handful most deeply because I loved this style and now I somehow feel like a cheap AI copycat); and almost every Instagram post I read has the scent of ChatGPT on it, somewhere.

I’m not condemning the use of AI entirely, because I get it. There have been days when, like everyone else, I wake up in the morning with a shit ton of work to do and realize that I can submit a lengthy post I wrote in 2023 into AI and ask it to repurpose it for me in what normally would have taken an hour to do. And sometimes, I do that. Damn it, sometimes I do that.

The scary part is that in five or ten years, what will we have to repurpose? Only the recycled AI-recycling itself, at which point our original voices and thoughts will be so diluted they won’t actually be ours anymore. This is the existential dread I have for this machine — but that’s another essay. (Also, that was my em-dash.)

Because just like everything else this world has decided must be “optimized” (that word is also a ChatGPT heavy-hand, by the way), once you can, you probably will. That’s how our brains work in a society overrun by more more more and do do do and higher and higher and higher expectations. You run out of bandwidth to keep all of your balls in the air, because the new baseline juggler is outputting at an Olympic-level.

I am making a conscious effort to keep my life away from AI, but I can see how hard that is going to be. G-mail now suggests automated replies, Google gives me the AI-summary of whatever I search at the top of the page. The default is no longer the opt-out; I now have to expend energy to keep my choice away from AI.

Human psychology dictates that as long as the environment nudges me towards the shiny object, I will eventually become so tired or vulnerable that I’ll succumb at least once, and from there it just gets easier and easier.

It’s not different from food systems, or Beauty™ or Diet™ or Anti-Aging™ or Wellness,™ capitalism and all of the systems that place their agendas in front of us and eventually make it impossible for us to choose differently.

I admittedly meander when I write (something AI would never do), so let me explain why this topic ended up in a Substack essay about eating disorder recovery, body image, and nervous system regulation:

It’s all connected.

The same conditions that make a person vulnerable to outsourcing intuition, independent thought, and self-trust (all of which are necessary for healing) are the very conditions that AI is built upon.

The way AI is folding into our society may actually be strengthening the eating disorder environment itself.

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Anger, generally, has a bad reputation.

The last time I did a podcast episode on this topic (#162 on the Life After Diets podcast that I hosted with my friend Sarah Dosanjh, which is over two hundred episodes deep into conversations about recovery), I had people reach out afterwards to say they couldn’t listen to that particular episode. They felt uncomfortable even being around the idea of anger, let alone the presence of it. (That episode wasn’t just a discussion about anger; we dissected frustration we were feeling towards one another in real time.)

And I get it. Anger is one of the most vulnerable emotions people have, one of the least explored, but also one of the most necessary to understand on any healing journey.

So I want to talk about it, again.

If you have followed my work for any length of time you probably know that fight is my go-to. I’m not a combative person, but my body houses a lot of energy and my instincts just go. Some of that might be nature, some might be nurture. I grew up in a house with a lot of unbridled, unregulated energy around me.

For me, that kind of environment made anger feel familiar, and familiarity can make an emotion easier to access.

For others, though, anger can end up feeling familiar and therefore unsafe, for a few reasons:

1. Either it was too present in the home, showing up as overwhelming volatility, aggression, or violence;

2. Or it wasn’t allowed at all, because being a good girl meant being “nice.”

In the first case, anger becomes associated with danger; in the second, with disapproval. But both experiences can teach us that anger is not an emotion we are supposed to have a relationship with. And if you do, the job is to stop it, to corral it. Shoo, shoo. Smile! Pretend, even to yourself. Anger who?

But anger is part of being human. We don’t get to opt out. The question isn’t really about having it or not; the question is about accepting it or not.

But if acceptance is off the table, we’ll figure out a different way to manage it. In the effort to get away from it, we’ll internalize it.

They say that anger turned inward becomes shame. And yes.

Before I recovered from my eating disorder and began to understand my body differently, I had enormous amounts of anger in my system.

Every time the world communicated back to me that my body was too big; that my appetite was too much; that I didn’t match the standard I was supposed to match; I became furious — but with myself.

When I look back now, though, I see what happened.

If you grew up in the nineties or early two-thousands, you remember. Us Weekly dissecting women’s bodies on every cover, circled in highlighter. No but actually. Reality shows built on humiliation and body shaming. Entire television franchises built on public weigh-ins, before-and-after photos, aesthetics and glamour and intolerance for models who breached a size 0.

At the time, we didn’t question these things. There was nothing to question. It wasn’t an “it.” It just was.

There were no public conversations pushing back on these oppressive standards. Social media hadn’t yet created spaces for people to compare notes, like “did you see Simon Cowell tell that girl that she’s too big…to sing? Did he just ask if they needed to get a bigger stage? On live television. What the actual…”

Global, celebrity media was the influence in charge.

No, when those standards oppressed us, we bypassed our “what-the-actual” energy because no one told us we could rage, and the infrastructure wasn’t there to support it. So we went straight to: something is wrong with me.

But anger is energy. It is momentum. When the body activates that energy, it needs somewhere to go. When it can’t move outward, it broils internally. This is the breeding ground for shame — but don’t mistake shame for a sullen, hum-drum, woe-is-me character. Shame is rage with a quieter name.

If we look at the nervous system through the lens of four protective responses—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—we can see that each one of those responses exists to help us cope. They either mobilize (fight or flight) or protect (freeze and fawn) the body when a threat is perceived. Each response can help us out and each one can cause trouble when it becomes the only tool we know how to use.

Anger is most closely associated with the fight response.

But women have historically been rewarded for fawning rather than fighting. Fawning means pleasing, accommodating, smoothing over, appeasing. It is the goal, for us. A good woman is one who puts aside her desire, her opinions, her hunger, her time, energy, and money in service of being appealing to others. The most valuable women are those who fawn most successfully.

We didn’t choose this, and most of the time we don’t even know we’re doing it. We do it because we are safer when we do. A beautiful, thin, smiling woman is granted the most advantages. Those who don’t comply — those who let themselves go — are labeled as the less desirable Other, even by other women.

But if you fawn, you can’t fight.

Because to fight is to say: no, I won’t fawn. And to not fawn is to give up access to safety. The system is rigged.

One of my clients once shared a phrase from her therapist that has stayed with me: anger illuminates the need for justice.

When something in your system registers that a line has been crossed, anger — maybe mild at first, but anger — is often the first signal.

Without access to that signal, the body still registers the injustice, but the interpretation becomes threatening. Instead of recognizing that something outside of you is not okay, the mind, in its quest for safety-not-anger, needs to locate a different explanation.

But if anger illuminates the need for justice, then the real function of anger is not aggression or violence or danger.

It’s setting (or noticing) a boundary.

And this is where the conflict shows up for women who have been trained to fawn.

If your safety has always depended on being accommodating or appealing, then the moment anger appears, it creates a problem. The signal threatens the strategy that has kept you safe.

Anger says that crossed a line, while fawning says smooth it over.

Anger says I don’t like this, while fawning says make yourself like it.

So instead of using anger to set the boundary, we reinterpret it. We tell ourselves we’re overreacting, being dramatic, making things bigger than they are. We tell ourselves that we’re taking up too much space. Almost like it’s been suggested to us somewhere before, but nonverbally, and chronically over time.

And so we choose the safety of approval over the clarity of anger.

But anger is useful precisely because it interrupts that reflex.

It gives the nervous system a chance to recognize that there might be another form of safety available — maybe not the safety of the socialized group, but the safety of the aligned self.

From there, the direction of the energy changes.

Instead of: how can I absorb this? It becomes: oh hell no.

And that hell no might be naming a boundary, or unsubscribing from a norm that doesn’t feel good, or even just taking that invitation towards shame and giving it back to culture that tried to hand it to you all cute-like, like you weren’t supposed to notice.

This is how we use anger to screw over shame.

But how do you start working with anger if you’ve never felt comfortable to go there before?

Sometimes it starts with just being able to say the words: I am angry.

That sentence is surprisingly difficult for many women to acknowledge.

I once worked with someone who could talk about anger conceptually but could not own those words about herself. The exercise we started with was to imagine the sentence written across the room. Just seeing the words—I am angry—without having to be too close to them.

Once you become more familiar with the words, then you might start to track the emotion in context by noticing how it actually feels in the body, and when.

At full intensity, anger is unmistakable. Sometimes it’s actually easier to register in its full blown glory because at that point there’s little you can do about it. It’s clearer.

It’s actually the earlier signals that can be the hardest to work with, because we still feel the potential to thwart them away, to turn them into something more agreeable.

Play with that. Invite your curiosity here. Think about those sensations as raw data in the nervous system, small muscle behaviors rather than “A Big Scary Emotion” with meaning and story tied to it.

You might notice some tightening in the jaw. A heart beating more clearly. Fingers gripping inward, the instinct to squeeze. Narrowing eyes, a bit of breath holding.

Those small signals are opportunities to practice staying with a boundary instead of pretending it never existed. Even if that boundary is a simple:

• I notice the role I’m supposed to play here, and I don’t want to.

• I notice how that media imagery almost just turned my mood without my consent.

• I notice that this “Wellness in the Workplace” challenge they put out every spring is really just a fatphobic hustle that I feel pressured to participate in because it’s been normalized as healthy social bonding.

The goal is not to stay in anger. Our systems aren’t designed for that, either, and we run the risk of hardening when anger is the only position we know.

But anger is often a doorway to process energy that rises in the body whether we like it or not, so that we might have choices on the other side.

When we allow anger to exist in the body without immediately judging it or running from it, the intensity of it eventually changes. Other things start to become accessible, like sadness or advocacy or clarity or even humor.

When anger is not allowed to run its natural course, it looks for somewhere else to land. For many women, it nests in the body. Then our appetite becomes the problem. Our noncompliant bodies, our genetic variations.

The body wasn’t the original source of the anger, it was just the safest place we were allowed to put it.

What if instead of “I’m angry at my body,” it has always more accurately been “I’m angry at a culture that made me angry at my body?”

Change the direction of the energy.

Shame is a lockdown of advocacy, and we don’t really have room for that anymore.

Share Full But Not Finished : by Stefanie Michele

Hi, I’m Stefanie Michele. I’m a coach and writer who helps people understand their relationship with food and body image through nervous-system and psychology-based approaches.

Want to work with me? Learn more at www.iamstefaniemichele.com

Full But Not Finished Podcast on YouTube and Apple/Spotify.

Instagram

The other day I saw an Instagram post about being “the biggest friend” on a beach vacation. The creator’s point was: so what? It didn’t ruin anything. She had an incredible trip and did bucket-list things, even though she was taught that being “bigger” is supposed to be limiting.

I liked the post. And then I remembered — I’m going on a trip with some girlfriends next month and I will also be the biggest friend in the group.

This isn’t a new position for me. As a midsize woman, I’ve not been a stranger to “the biggest one.” I went to Boston College, which had that cookie cutter vibe of “polished preppy sameness”, and worked in New York City at fashion magazines where being slim was standard expectation. In my mom groups, it varies—I’m not always the biggest, but I might be depending on the room. Either way, I don’t have the kind of privilege where I never have to think about it.

Yes, I know this vantage point well.

(I should also say that while I’ve spent much of my adult life in a midsize body, there was a period when I did live in a plus-size body. I don’t want to minimize any of my experience, but I also don’t want to pretend that my experience represented the same level of stigma all bigger bodies face.)

Still — the experience of being the “biggest one”, or one of the biggest ones, has mostly been the norm for me. And it will be the experience in a few weeks.

You can do all the body image work in the world and still have feelings when this comparison stares you in the face. It’s natural for people to compare themselves to one another, and we are culturally conditioned to look for body size as at least one basis of that comparison.

That Instagram post invited me back into that comparison, and I sat with it.

One of my friends has recently lost a significant amount of weight, which adds dimension to the case; another has been “tiny” her entire life and is just now expressing frustration that her formerly taut stomach (a genetic freebie, in her case) is subject to midlife physics.

So yeah, there are certainly feelings that come up when I think about it.

But when it comes down to it? I have to decide not think about it.

In Somatic Experiencing therapy, one of the core constructs of working with nervous system activation is knowing how and when to shift attention. Our negative bias likes to focus on what’s wrong instead of what’s not wrong — so much so, in fact, that even when invited towards “what’s not wrong,” it will decline the offer. It feels more compelling to stay with our stress once we are hooked into it, because to take your eyes off The Problem is counterintuitive to our defense mechanisms.

Rerouting attention is actually an art.

But how do you actually do that?

Here are five concepts that help me stay away from rumination so that I can be present where I am:

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