How an Early Lack of Nurturance Impacts Your Relationship with Food, with Colleen West
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
Release Date: 04/14/2024
The Power of IFS: Kali and Amanda's Stories
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
It's episode 100 of the Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast--I can't even believe it! And to celebrate, I thought I'd invite two amazing women who I've had the honor of working with come into the show and share their experience with IFS. Kali and Amanda are two former clients who graciously agreed to talk about their struggles with food and their bodies and how IFS and Intuitive Eating have helped them to heal. They have very different histories and backgrounds, different body types, and different experiences, and I have no doubt that you will...
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Let's Talk About...Food Rituals
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that at some point in your life, you've tried to change what you're eating. Perhaps because you started a diet. Or you were trying to "eat healthier." Or maybe you were trying to move toward a more Self-led or Intuitive Eating approach to food (where you're really tuning into your body and feeding your body in ways that work well for it). Regardless of why you were trying to change what you were eating, it probably wasn't all that easy. There may have been foods that you tried to cut out but...
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Let's Talk About...Episode 98: Let's Talk About...Connecting to Your Body’s Hunger and Fullness Cues
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
On the last podcast, we talked about "blocking parts." And by blocking, I meant parts that tend to come up when you’re trying to get to know another part. Like when you’re headed for the kitchen and a part of you says, "I should get to know the part that’s leading me to the kitchen right now" but another part comes up and says, "Nope! I don’t want to get to know that part. I’ll do it next time." I hope that the episode was helpful and that you noticed more of those parts over the past couple of weeks. This week, I thought it would be helpful to focus on another...
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Let's Talk About...Blocking Parts
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
Let me ask you this: have you ever noticed yourself heading for the kitchen to get some food, knowing you aren't hungry, and when you start to check in with the part who's leading you there, you hear something like, "Oh don't do that crazy IFS stuff--just eat the food." Or, "Ugh--who cares why we're heading to food--just eat it!" Or even, "Life is so stressful right now--just eat! We deserve it!" These are parts that I call "blocking parts." They jump in and block us from getting curious about the parts of us that lead us to food. And I think sometimes we...
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Let's Talk About...Emotional Eating
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
Here we are, in the middle of the holiday season, and I thought it might be helpful to go back to the basics of the Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast and talk about, you guessed it, emotional eating. Yep, it's been 94 episodes since we've focused on this topic. Well, that's not exactly true. We've focused on specific aspects of emotional eating, but we haven't discussed it in broad terms like we did in the second episode of this podcast. And I don't know about you, but I know my emotional eating parts have been more active lately. Due to the...
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Unburdened Eating, with Jeanne Catanzaro
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
This week's episode features , who's a bit of an IFS rockstar. Jeanne has been one of the strongest voices in the IFS community in regard to food and body concerns, and I'm so thrilled to have her on the podcast! Just a little about her: Jeanne is a clinical psychologist who has specialized in the treatment of disordered eating and trauma for over twenty-five years. She trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing®, and eye movement-desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) before discovering the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model. Jeanne is known for...
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Let's Talk About...Healing Body Shame
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
Well, it's fall here in New England, which means cooler weather, absolutely beautiful trees, and apple cider! (And for those of you who love it, pumpkin spice!) It also means lots and lots of raking is in my future! And it also means sweater weather!!!! Yay!!! So many of my parts love sweater weather. Throwing on a big cable-knit sweater just feels so cozy. And I just love fall colors (especially forest green--I can't tell you how many forest green sweaters I have). But do you know another reason why some of my...
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Understanding Binge Eating Disorder, with Amy Pershing
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
On today's episode, I'm so excited to be joined by Amy Pershing to talk about Binge Eating Disorder (BED). Amy is essentially THE expert on treating BED with IFS, and I'm so thankful that she's sharing her wisdom with us! We've been trying for months to record an episode, and we finally did it! Just a little about her, Amy Pershing, LMSW, ACSW, CCTP-II, is the Founding Director of Bodywise, the first BED-specific treatment program in the United States, and President of the Board of the Center for Eating Disorders in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is the founder of...
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Let's Talk About...Creating a Parts Check-in Practice
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
If you're someone who's done your own IFS work, you were likely encouraged to check in with a part that you met during your session on your own regularly throughout the week. And you may have thought, how in the world do I do that? Hopefully, the therapist or coach you're working with helped you with that process. But if they didn't, you're in luck! It's the topic of this week's podcast! While checking in with parts that you meet during session is incredibly important, so is checking in with parts in general. And one of the things that I've been focusing on...
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Let's Talk About...Anxiety (and why our parts eat when we're anxious)
The Emotional Eating (and Everything Else) Podcast
On this week's podcast episode we're talking about anxiety, one of the most common things that lead our parts to food. Very often, parts in our system use food to calm our anxious parts. I think this happens for a couple of reasons. First, food can be a great distraction when we're feeling anxious. And second, food actually calms us down. Research has shown that food (especially carbs) elevates serotonin levels, which can decrease depression and anxiety. So if you're someone who tends to eat when you're anxious, there's a reason for that. It...
info_outlineI have a question for you. What do you know about your early years? Like from birth to age two? And what do you know about your mom's pregnancy with you?
If you're like me, not a whole lot.
Turns out, though, this is really good information to have. According to this week's podcast guest, Colleen West, these early years and your experiences within have an incredible influence on the development of your relationship with food.
Especially when it comes to the nurturance and attunement given to you by your caretakers. I'll let Colleen explain it herself:
"For babies that don’t get tended to reliably, they end up with more need to autoregulate, to soothe from the outside. And that often gets linked with food. And it begins a whole lot of other behaviors and deep burdens that last long into your life, unless those young parts get cared for."
Did that just resonate with a lot of your parts? I know it did with mine.
Preverbal parts are Colleen's specialty, and I'm thrilled to have her back on the show to take a much deeper dive than we did in our first conversation (catch that episode here). Colleen is all about creating connection: between you and your parts, between you and your loved ones, between you, your community, and the wider world. She is unabashedly optimistic about the human capacity to heal, to tap into the wellspring of compassion that is Self. Her professional focus is healing preverbal attachment trauma.
As a Marriage and Family Therapist and IFS Consultant, she devotes herself to training and mentoring psychotherapists, and writing. Thanks to Zoom, she is training therapists all over the world. She is author of We All Have Parts: An Illustrated Guide to Healing Trauma with Internal Family Systems (2021) and The IFS Flip Chart (2023). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and the fabulous dog Sky. In her leisure, she likes spending time in nature and preparing feasts for family and friends. More at www.colleenwest.com and www.smarttherapytools.com.
On this week's podcast, Colleen and I talk about how those early years are so important, and how a lack of nurturance and attunement by parents (with even the best of intentions) can lead to the use of food--or the restriction of food--as a soothing mechanism. In the episode, we discuss:
- Why hunger can lead to feelings of panic
- How a lack of nurturance in infancy leads to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and fear, and how all of that can impact our relationship with food
- How our early experiences can lead us to disconnect from our bodies and their experiences of hunger
- The behavioral cues that indicate a lack of nurturance in infancy
- How IFS can help to heal the exiles that weren't cared for
Colleen also leaves us with three important points:
- If you're currently a parent of young children, do your best to be present with them;
- If you're in therapy, slow down and notice your parts and your bodily sensations, and focus on your preverbal years; and
- Your own Self-Energy can heal your parts.
This was truly a wonderful, aha-inducing episode that I know will resonate with your parts. Take a listen!
You can find Colleen at:
Where to find me:
And if you'd like to take a deep dive into your own relationship with food, considering joining one of my Food and Body Freedom groups for therapists/practitioners and for non-therapists.