Isabel Foxen Duke returns! We discuss the #1 reason why people engage in emotional eating and bingeing, why reclaiming your right to eat emotionally might be a key to healing your relationship with food, why recommendations for weight loss are scientifically unsound, how the effort to control our food can transfer to other areas of life after eating disorder recovery, why meditation and spiritual practice is lifelong work, and lots more!

Isabel Foxen Duke helps women stop fighting food. After struggling with binge-eating for most of her life, and trying to overcome emotional eating and binge-eating through various approaches to food—Isabel finally discovered that these attempts to control her food and her body, were at the root of the problem itself. She now teaches women struggling with binge-eating how to do the very thing they're most afraid of, and the very thing they need to do to recover: let go. Grab her free video training series, Stop Fighting Food, to learn more about her work.

We Discuss:

• Why the concept of “emotional eating” is misleading, and why we really need to be focusing on diet culture instead

• How moralizing food feeds into the diet mentality

• The differences between binge eating and emotional eating

• The role of fatphobia in food policing

• Why we need to include body autonomy in our body positivity

• How to shift making our choices from a place of self-control to making our choices from a place of self-care

• Recognizing binge eating as a response to deprivation

• Why deprivation isn’t always about the amount of food being eaten

• An explanation of the “Last Supper Mentality,” and why it contributes to binge eating

• The pervasive nature of diet culture, and why letting go of the diet mentality is so difficult in this diet culture

• How we can reclaim the term “emotional eating,” and the importance of regarding it as a neutral coping strategy rather than moralizing it

• The current research and theories on why we turn to food as a coping mechanism

• Why “food addiction” and “emotional eating” wouldn’t exist without dieting

• The value in giving up control for overall mental health

• The ways in which food control has become the new religion

• How obsession can transfer to different areas of our life, and why surrendering to the chaos and engaging in the spiritual process is continuous work

• The power of saying no and setting your boundaries, and how our work around food bleeds into other aspects of our lives

• The role of radical acceptance in recovery from disordered eating

• The problem with the “Self-Compassion Diet” and the “Love-Yourself-Skinny Diet”

• Why the desire to lose weight isn’t a problem, but the promise of weight loss is

• How unethical promising weight loss is, and the need for evidence-based medicine in the health field

• Isabel’s personal experience in in-patient recovery, and the multiple stages of recovery

• Why body image work, body positivity, and body acceptance are essential to healing from eating disorders and chronic dieting

• The truth that shame isn’t motivating, and the healing that can be found when we let go of body shame

• How important it is to surround yourself with body-positive culture in the healing process

• The different levels of body-image work

• Refinery29’s new 67% Project, and why representation of plus-size women in mainstream media is profoundly important

Resources Mentioned

Some of the links below are affiliate links. Affiliates or not, we only recommend products and services that align with our values.

• Isabel’s first Food Psych Podcast episode

• My online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals, which includes monthly listener Q&A podcasts and access to my private Facebook support group

• Intuitive Eating, 3rd ed. by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

• Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon

• Tara Brach’s work

• Food Psych Podcast episode with Amie Roe ("Intuitive Eating, Intuitive Everything")

• Geneen Roth (CW: Much of Geneen’s newer work still adheres to the thin ideal and diet mentality. Take what works for you from her work, and ignore anything diet-y that may come up if you venture into her content!)

• Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant, founders of Be Nourished

• Virgie Tovar

• Refinery29s 67% Project

• Kelsey Miller’s first Food Psych Podcast episode, and her episode about the 67% Project