Tapping into somatic wisdom

The quest to cultivate body awareness feels like a never-ending process but also the most crucial aspect of intuitive eating.

Welcome to Almost Sated, where I talk about what it’s really like to detox from diet culture while living in a world obsessed with thinness. I am not a nutritionist or a therapist, just a 40-something woman trying to make peace with my body after years of believing my weight determined my self-worth. Here, you'll find honest stories and insights from my journey toward intuitive eating and body acceptance. This space is for anyone who's ever felt trapped by diet culture, who's searching for freedom from weight stigma, and who believes in the radical idea that all bodies are good bodies. Welcome to a community where we explore the messy, challenging, and liberating process of learning to listen to and trust our bodies again.

My work over the last 20 months has been about healing my body and recovering from dieting, but along the way, I’ve had to take a hard look at myself and the negative internal beliefs I’ve carried through the years. Most of us cannot transition to intuitive eating without doing deeper therapeutic and somatic body work. This is because so many of us have traumatic wounds intertwined with our relationship with food and our bodies. Many of us have spent years using food as a coping or controlling mechanism, a means of distracting ourselves from overwhelming feelings or emotions. So, much of the work of transitioning to intuitive eating is about uncovering the negative beliefs and behaviors that have driven our relationship with food.

And let’s not forget that diet culture, with its relentless pressure to be thin and demands that we restrict our natural eating patterns, has contributed to this overall dysregulation.

We’re taught from our earliest ages to ignore or push through the physical sensations of hunger, and cravings, or thoughts of food, which are also signals of hunger. We’re told to fill ourselves only with the “right” foods instead of those that might actually be the very nutrients our bodies need in those moments. We’re warned to never eat to satisfaction and are made to feel there is something broken or even morally wrong for doing so.

By banning and denying ourselves the pleasure of eating, we’ve starved ourselves emotionally and physically. And we’ve created a dynamic causing periods of extreme eating to make up for our body’s real or perceived starvation. And because of the thin-obsessed society we live in, this reaction creates feelings of deep shame.

So, it’s no surprise that so many of us have become quite disconnected from our bodies, unable to sense within ourselves what we feel physically and emotionally. 

Much of my early work in intuitive eating was about reconnecting to my body, and I worked closely with my intuitive eating-certified therapist to work through years of trauma and negative beliefs to re-establish a connection with my body. I can’t say that I’m still where I’d like to be with this, or that it comes naturally to me even now, but I am in a much better place. I am much kinder to myself, and I am listening more.

My sister is on a similar personal growth quest, not to heal her relationship with food, but to heal from her own negative narratives and limiting beliefs, stemming from learning disabilities and other issues. A few months ago, she suggested I get tested for autism, and then just a few weeks ago, she brought up alexithymia, a neuropsychological condition to describe someone who has difficulty expressing, identifying, and expressing emotions.

The reason?

All my life, I’ve felt different. I get absorbed in the things I am passionate about, often to the exclusion of everyone and everything else around me. I’m happiest in my own little world, and sometimes completely unaware of how my words and actions come across to others. Not only have I spent most of my life not in touch with my own feelings, but I have trouble reading others, who also have trouble reading and understanding me. By my 30s and early 40s, I was told semi-regularly that I am hard to read and don’t give visual indications of my feelings or emotions. A client of mine calls it “low affect.” Poker face. During Culture Index leadership training at work several years ago, I scored a 10 out of 10 on the logic scale. “Spock” is the word the trainer announced aloud to the roomful of colleagues when he glanced down at my profile. He wasn’t far off.

Most of you aren’t going to suddenly discover you’re from the planet Vulcan, but you may not be as connected to your emotions or bodily sensations as you could be. Because of body image issues, trauma, abuse, shame, self-worth, intrinsic value, some of us see our body size as a deep personal failure rather than natural hard-wiring.

Healing isn’t as simple as just following the principles of intuitive eating: rejecting diet mentality, making peace with food, challenging the food police. For most of us, it requires undoing what created these issues. And the ability to feel our hunger and fullness is where it gets hard, or even impossible. Some of us can’t feel our fullness or hunger. Some of us are quite uncomfortable feeling fullness because it brings up intense feelings of shame.

So how do we untangle our deep-seated feelings of shame around our bodies and our eating? In my mind, it begins with acknowledgment and acceptance. 

For those of us who have spent our lives stuffing down feelings, acknowledgment and acceptance can be a quite radical concept.

So what I would just propose for us today is that we take a moment and check in with ourselves.

How are you feeling? How are you really feeling? What’s the real feeling, or sensation, inside you right at this very moment?

Can you close your eyes and take 10 seconds to scan within your body? What comes up for you? It doesn’t have to be logical or make sense. Just note it. Now, can you sense where it’s coming from within your body? Again, it doesn’t have to make sense. Simply check in and note it.

While it sounds so easy, this simple body scan can be quite difficult for those not used to feeling. When I first did it with my therapist, I would often struggle. Is this the right feeling? Is this the right place? Why am I feeling this? I don’t understand, this makes little sense. Now, I simply check in and allow what’s inside to come. I love Tara Brach’s free meditations on her podcast, because she often guides listeners through these body scans.

This is the first part of tapping into your somatic awareness—simply acknowledging feelings or sensations, and accepting them. The importance of this in intuitive eating cannot be overstated, because we’re working to rebuild trust—and connection—within ourselves. These small check-ins seem so insignificant, but they are so helpful in getting grounded in the present and within your presence. You are here. You are alive. You are feeling inside your body. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s one small step toward healing. 

How are you feeling in your body or life today?