Have you ever felt like you know what to do to improve your relationship with food, but something still isn’t clicking?

You’ve done everything you’re supposed to: learned about intuitive eating, realized dieting isn’t the answer, worked on stopping restriction and other food rules. You’ve got a whole toolbox of coping skills at your disposal. And yet…you’re still struggling.

You might feel better than you did years ago, but you aren’t where you want to be. Your relationship with food is less chaotic, but your body image still feels painful. Or you’ve stopped dieting, but you still feel disconnected from your body.

If that sounds familiar, it may be worth looking beneath the surface.

In a recent episode of Rebuilding Trust with Your Body, I sat down with Jennifer Lancaster, LCSW-S, PATP, RYT, a trauma and eating disorder therapist and founder of Houston Healing Collective. Jennifer specializes in the intersection of trauma and eating disorders and uses approaches including EMDR, ketamine-assisted therapy, psychedelic therapy integration, and trauma-informed yoga.

Our conversation explored a question I think is incredibly important: What if your struggles with food or your body aren’t actually about food or your body?

When the skills aren’t enough

Jennifer shared something she noticed during her earlier work in inpatient psychiatric and residential settings: people would get better, develop coping skills, and then come back.

That doesn’t mean those higher levels of care weren’t helpful. They absolutely can be necessary and beneficial. But sometimes, skills only take you so far.

You can learn how to recognize triggers, challenge unhelpful thoughts, and soothe yourself when you’re overwhelmed. Those skills can provide real relief. But when life gets hard, the deeper issues can resurface.

Jennifer described this using an analogy that really resonated with me: Imagine you have a cut. Your coping skills are like cleaning the wound, changing the bandage, and watching it to make sure it’s healing.

But what if there’s still dirt buried deep inside the wound? You can keep changing the bandage, but the wound may never fully heal. Sometimes you have to go deeper.

This can be true with food and body image struggles, too. You can learn the principles of intuitive eating and practice making peace with food, but if you never explore why food became such an important coping mechanism in the first place, you may continue to feel stuck.

What does trauma have to do with food?

When most people hear the word trauma, they picture something obviously catastrophic: a serious accident, combat, assault, or another major event. But Jennifer offered a broader way of understanding trauma.

She described trauma as something that overwhelms your nervous system and your ability to cope in that moment. That can happen through experiences that don’t fit the stereotypical definition of trauma.

For example, growing up without consistent safety, security, predictability, emotional support, or having your needs and emotions dismissed can affect the way you learn to navigate the world.

And importantly, trauma isn’t only about what happened. It’s also about what happened afterward.

Two people can experience something difficult and walk away with very different beliefs about themselves and the world depending on whether they had support, care, and connection afterward.

One person might learn, “I can get through hard things. I can ask for help. People will care for me.”

Another might learn, “I’m on my own. The world isn’t safe. I can’t trust people.”

Those beliefs can follow us into adulthood, and sometimes they show up in our relationships with food and our bodies.

Food and dieting can serve a purpose

One of the most important ideas from this conversation was that Jennifer rarely views food behaviors as simply a “food issue.” Instead, she wants to understand what the behavior is doing for someone.

For example, imagine someone believes they have to be thinner to be loved or accepted. Rather than immediately focusing on how to change their eating or body, Jennifer might explore where that belief came from.

• When in your life did you learn that you weren’t enough?
• When did you learn that being accepted depended on how you looked, performed, or behaved?
• When did you learn that you had to be perfect for someone to care about you?

Those beliefs can develop in childhood, romantic relationships, the workplace, or other important relationships. 

And sometimes dieting becomes a way of managing those beliefs or even a distraction from painful emotions.

If you’re constantly tracking, counting, restricting, exercising, or thinking about food, there isn’t much room left for feelings like shame, emptiness, grief, regret, or sadness to surface.

In that sense, the behavior may be serving a purpose. Your brain and body may have learned that this behavior helps you cope.

What happens when you take away the coping strategy?

There is a pattern I see frequently in eating disorder recovery and in the process of healing a difficult relationship with food.

You stop restricting, dieting, and using food to numb your emotions (a.k.a., your coping strategies). Then, suddenly, it feels like a volcano erupts. All the feelings you’ve been avoiding come rushing in.

Jennifer explained that those behaviors may have been protecting you from painful emotions. Once you no longer have that strategy available, those emotions can become much harder to avoid.

This is where coping skills matter.

But Jennifer made an important distinction: The goal isn’t necessarily to make uncomfortable emotions disappear. Instead, part of healing is learning that you can experience an emotion without having to immediately escape it.

You can pause, breathe, and ground yourself so you can simply notice what you’re feeling. You can learn to listen to the message the emotion may be trying to communicate, and that the emotion will eventually pass without you having to do something to make it go away. 

Rebuilding trust with your body takes time

If you’ve spent years treating your body like the enemy, it’s understandable that trusting it again won’t happen overnight. 

Jennifer described rebuilding body trust as a relationship that goes both ways. We have to rebuild our trust in our bodies. And our bodies may also need to learn that they can trust us again after years of chronic dieting, restriction, punishment, or overriding their signals.

That takes time.

One approach Jennifer uses is yoga – not as another form of exercise or another thing to be “good” at, but as a way of reconnecting with your body.

Trauma-informed yoga can be slower and more focused on noticing what’s happening inside your body.

Can you notice your breath? Tension? What feels comfortable?

Can you respond to your body’s cues without immediately trying to control, punish, or override them?

That’s very different from approaching movement with the mindset of, “How hard can I push myself?”

Sometimes healing means practicing not giving 110%. It means learning that you can listen to your body’s limits instead of constantly overriding them.

A closer look at EMDR and psychedelic-assisted therapy

Jennifer also shared about some of the therapies she uses with clients who are working through trauma and eating disorder concerns.

EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, uses bilateral stimulation (traditionally eye movements, although other forms such as tapping or alternating tones can also be used) while working with difficult memories, emotions, body sensations, and beliefs.

The goal isn’t to erase a memory. Instead, Jennifer explained that people often describe the memory as still being there, but feeling farther away and less emotionally charged.

For some people, this can be a way of working with experiences that haven’t shifted through talking about them alone.

Jennifer also discussed psychedelic-assisted therapy, including ketamine-assisted therapy. She emphasized that this isn’t about taking a substance on your own or recreating a recreational experience. These treatments involve medical evaluation, preparation, trained support, and integration.

One of the things Jennifer finds meaningful about this work is the possibility of experiencing a shift that isn’t just intellectual.

You may already know that you should have compassion for your body, but sometimes knowing something isn’t the same as actually feeling it.

The goal of this deeper work, when appropriate, is to help people access experiences and perspectives in a way that can feel more embodied and meaningful.

You don’t have to have a “big enough” trauma

One of my favorite parts of our conversation was Jennifer’s reminder that you don’t have to compare your experiences to someone else’s in order to deserve support.

You don’t have to say,

• “Other people have been through worse.”
• “What happened to me wasn’t that bad.”
• “I shouldn’t need help.”

We’re all human.

And being human means experiencing pain, loss, disappointment, difficult relationships, change, and countless other experiences that shape us.

You can simply recognize that something isn’t working for you and decide that you want help understanding it…no “earning support” necessary.

Try this simple body-trust practice

Jennifer offered a simple practice that you can do for just a few minutes a day to build body-trust: 

1. Pause and scan your body. Start at your head and slowly move your attention down through your body.
2. Notice what’s happening. Is there tension somewhere? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Do you need to use the bathroom or take a nap? Is there any part of your body that’s asking for your attention?

Don’t judge or try to fix anything; just practice listening.

3. When you notice a need, practice responding to it with patience and compassion. 

Try spending five minutes a day checking in with your body every day. As Jennifer mentions, consistency over one occasional long practice is much more effective. Because every time you pause, listen, and respond to your body instead of overriding it, you’re sending yourself a new message: I hear you. I care about you. You can trust me.

Body trust is rebuilt one small interaction at a time.

What if your food struggles are about something deeper?

If you’ve been working on your relationship with food or your body and feel like you’ve gotten partway there but are still stuck, it may be worth getting curious about what’s underneath the behaviors.

• What beliefs are driving the struggle?
• What emotions are you trying not to feel?
• What experiences shaped the way you see yourself?
• What have you learned about your worth, your body, or your need to be accepted?

You don’t have to diagnose yourself with trauma or decide that your experience “counts.” You can simply get curious. Because sometimes the path toward food freedom isn’t about learning another rule or strategy. Sometimes it’s about going deeper, understanding yourself with more compassion, and rebuilding the relationship you have with your body from the inside out.

And in case no one’s told you today, you are worthy, exactly as you are.

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Search for Ep.263 (Transcript): What If Your Struggles With Food Aren’t Actually About Food? With Jennifer Lancaster

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