What if your relationship with food and your body isn’t a failure of willpower — but a response to trauma?
In this episode of Once Upon a Binge, I’m joined by psychotherapist, professor and body liberation activist Paula D Atkinson to explore a concept that may completely change the way you understand binge eating, dieting and body image: diet culture trauma.
We talk about how dieting and restriction can affect the brain and nervous system, why binge eating can continue even when you don’t think you’re restricting, and how shame and self-abandonment can keep the binge cycle going.
We also explore something I found particularly powerful: the idea that disordered eating can sometimes become a way of reclaiming ownership of your body after years of feeling that your body belongs to everyone else.
And if you’ve ever thought, “But I’m not restricting — I just binge,” this conversation may give you a very different, trauma-informed way of understanding what’s happening.
In this episode, we discuss:
- 1:46 - Paula’s personal journey from childhood body shame and anorexia to becoming a therapist and body liberation activist
- 10:22 - What “diet culture trauma” actually means
- 10:54 - The trauma of starvation and what the Minnesota Starvation Experiment can teach us about restriction
- 11:18 -Why your body may respond to dieting as though it is experiencing a threat to survival
- 12:18 - Why you can still be affected by restriction years after your first diet
- 12:51 - How diet culture can create body obsession and disordered eating
- 13:00 - Self-abandonment, body abandonment and internalising other people’s opinions about your body
- 17:16 - What diet culture trauma might look like if you binge but don’t believe you restrict
- 19:18 - Why food can be a way of regulating the nervous system
- 20:56 - Mental restriction, food rules and the “famine tomorrow” that can keep binge eating going
- 24:05 - How shame after a binge can actually reinforce the binge cycle
- 28:08 - Whether diet culture trauma affects people in thin/straight-sized bodies differently from people in larger bodies
- 25:12 - How diet culture can teach us to distrust our own bodies and instincts
- 28:41 - Why fatphobia harms people of all body sizes
- 32:15 - Acute, chronic, complex and vicarious trauma — and where diet culture trauma fits
- 34:07 - The connection between body comments, objectification, sexual trauma and disordered eating
- 35:06 - How food and eating behaviours can become a way of reclaiming ownership and control of your body
- 40:16 -What it means to stop abandoning your body and begin seeing your body as being on your side
- 42:29 - How curiosity can help you begin questioning the beliefs you’ve inherited about your body
- 44:03 - Paula’s experience appearing on Jubilee’s Surrounded with Jillian Michaels — and what really happened behind the scenes
If you’re struggling with binge eating, emotional eating, food guilt, body hatred or the feeling that you’re constantly fighting against your body, I hope this conversation gives you a different perspective.
You don’t have to learn how to control your body better. What if the work is learning how to stop fighting it?
💬 Have you ever thought about your relationship with food or your body through a trauma lens? Let me know in the comments — I’d love to hear your thoughts.
💜
Connect with the podcast:
- Instagram - @onceuponabingepodcast
- Email - podcast.onceuponabinge@gmail.com
Connect with Becca:
- Instagram – @bingefreeandbeautiful
- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/beccarobinson/
- Email - bingefreeandbeautiful@gmail.com
Connect with Paula:
- Email – pauladatkinson@gmail.com
- Instagram - @pauladatkinson
- Website - https://www.pauladatkinson.com/
