PODCAST · health
Full But Not Finished
by Stefanie Michele
Full But Not Finished is for anyone who's tried to "just stop eating when you're full" and realized it's never that simple. Hosted by Somatic and Intuitive Eating counselor and coach Stefanie Michele, this podcast dives into the ongoing work of recovery -- where fullness doesn't always mean satisfaction, and where food, body image, and nervous system work is never finished.Each episode unpacks the psychology, nervous system patterns, and cultural conditioning that shape eating behaviors, showing why willpower alone doesn't work and what real regulation looks like. If you've lived the binge–restrict cycle, felt trapped in body image spirals, or wondered why "normal eating" feels out of reach, this is where we make sense of it — not with rules, but with integration, somatic tools, and a more human way forward.
Episodes
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52. If I Don't Like How I Look, My Whole Day Is Ruined (snack size episode)
How much power have you given your body image to determine whether you're going to have a good day? If your pants fit comfortably, your eating feels under control, or the scale says what you want it to say, maybe everything else feels a little easier to handle. But when those things don't go your...
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51. Why Is Dinner Harder Than Breakfast? 5 Reasons We Struggle With Night Eating
Why does dinner feel so much harder than breakfast when it comes to binge eating, overeating, or feeling out of control with food? Maybe you can eat breakfast without much thought, but by dinner you're picking at food while cooking, struggling to feel satisfied, or experiencing a level of urgency...
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50. I Feel Ugly, Irritable, and Impulsive With Food: The Capacity Connection
If you've been feeling more impulsive with food, more critical of your body, or unusually impatient with everyone and everything, you may be dealing with a capacity problem. After unexpectedly stepping away from Instagram for a couple of weeks, I noticed some surprising changes: more patience…
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49. When Fullness Feels Unsafe: Sexual Trauma and Binge Restrict Cycles with Becca Robinson
Therapist and binge eating recovery coach Becca Robinson joins me to talk about the ways sexual trauma changed her relationship with food, her body, and herself. For Becca, bingeing, purging, and restriction became much more intense after her assault. Fullness could feel physically overwhelming…
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48. Can Hypnotherapy Help You Stop Binge Eating?
If you've ever thought, I know why I binge. I know what triggers it. I know what I'm supposed to do instead. So why am I still doing it? I wanted to talk with clinical hypnotherapist Emelia Armstrong-Crews about this. Can hypnosis be useful when talking and insight have only gotten you so far? We...
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47. Eckhart Tolle on Body Image: Do We Pay Too Much Attention to How We Look?
Eckhart Tolle says a dog doesn't have body image issues because a dog doesn't have an image of itself. My first reaction was basically: okay, but we're not dogs. We know what we look like. Other people see us. Our bodies exist in a world that assigns meaning to appearance. We can't just opt out…
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46. Why Diet Talk Makes You Want to Eat More: The Rebel Response
A listener wrote in about something I know a lot of people experience in recovery: hearing someone talk about cutting sugar, seeing a weight-loss commercial, or coming across an article demonizing certain foods, and then feeling almost compelled to do the opposite. Not because you suddenly want…
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45. Binge Recovery, "Healthy Eating," and a Kidney Cancer Diagnosis: Suanne's story
In this episode, I'm joined by Suanne to talk about a recovery story that began in a fairly textbook way: regular meals, consistency, and learning to stop bingeing. But stopping the binges didn't automatically resolve everything underneath them. Food choices could still be shaped by ideas about...
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44. The Cookie Paradox: Mental Restriction in Reverse
Still having food noise even though you've stopped dieting? Mental restriction can keep binge eating and overeating going long after you've stopped counting calories or labeling foods "good" and "bad." In this episode, I share a client story that explains mental restriction a little differently...
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43. Why Travel Days and Transitions Can Trigger Binge Urges
Why does a travel day, a Sunday night, or the first day back after being away sometimes make you want to graze, overeat, or binge? Transitions can do strange things to our relationship with food, especially in the hours when one routine has ended and the next one hasn't quite begun. More free...
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42. I Wanted My Roommate's Diet to Fail: and other stories I was too ashamed to tell anyone.
In this episode of Full But Not Satisfied, Stefanie shares four hidden behaviors from her 25 years with disordered eating and an eating disorder — things she assumed were evidence of bad character, but were actually nervous system threat responses. From neglecting hygiene and hoping for a…
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41. Why Listening to Your Body Is So Confusing
Why is listening to your body so confusing? You might be trying to follow your hunger and fullness cues but still have no idea whether you're feeling hunger, anxiety, habit, adrenaline, an emotion, or the pressure of paying far too much attention. In this episode, I talk through five reasons body...
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40. Bored, Restless, and Looking for Food: Emotional Eating and the Nervous System
Why do we eat when we're bored, even when we know we aren't hungry? In this episode, I look at boredom eating through a nervous system lens and question the assumption that boredom simply means we cannot tolerate being alone with ourselves. Stillness can leave us with a mind that is anything but...
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39. GLP-1s, Body Acceptance, and the Pressure to Choose
Can you work toward body acceptance while considering a GLP-1 medication? In this unscripted collaboration, body image coaches Kristina Bruce of Unlearning Beautiful and Stefanie Michele of Full But Not Finished talk about what happens when you have spent years stepping away from dieting while…
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38. I Lost Decades to my ED and I'm Okay With That — and Is Body Image Just A First World Problem?
In this Q&A episode, I'm answering two questions about eating disorder recovery. The first is about how to make peace with the years an eating disorder took — the grief of looking back and realizing how much of life was shaped by food, body image, fear, and survival, without blaming yourself for...
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37. A Different Way to Be Strong: with Guest Marcus Kain
In this episode, I'm joined by Marcus Kain Murray of Strong Not Starving for a conversation about strength training that goes beyond reps, programming, and pushing harder. We talk about what changes when training becomes something you practice instead of something you perform for approval. Marcus...
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36. Can You Have Food Freedom With Food Restrictions?
More from Stef: Binge Eating to Intuitive Eating (BE2IE) Self-Study Course iamstefaniemichele.com/iamstefaniemichelecourse.com What happens when a food restriction is not coming from diet culture, but from an actual health need? In this episode of Full But Not Finished, I'm answering a listener...
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35. Not Recovered, But Not Ashamed: a listener's story
In this episode, I'm joined by Minea for a conversation about food recovery, body image, control, and what happens when you understand the concepts but still don't feel safe enough to let go. This is not a neat success story, and that is exactly why I wanted to share it. Minea talks about growing...
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34. When You Can't Stop Exercising
Last week, I talked about resistance to exercise and how movement can become safer when it is no longer tied to weight loss, punishment, or proving yourself. This week is the other side of the coin: what happens when exercise becomes compulsive and rest starts to feel threatening. Movement can be...
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33. How to Rebuild Your Relationship with Exercise (after diet culture)
Exercise can be hard to separate from weight loss, calorie burning, food compensation, discipline, and body control. In this episode, I'm talking about how to rebuild your relationship with movement after dieting, binge eating, restriction, or years of using exercise as a way to change your body....
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32. Supporting a Partner Through Binge Eating Recovery (a conversation with my actual husband)
In this episode, Stef talks with her husband, Mike, about what it was like to support her through years of binge eating, restriction, body shame, and recovery. They talk about what he noticed in the early years of their relationship, what he misunderstood, what helped him understand binge eating...
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31. Hilary Duff, "Strong Not Small," and Body Diversity in Wellness
Hilary Duff's "Strong Not Small" campaign has brought up a bigger conversation about wellness culture, diet culture, fitness ideals, and the way bodies are still expected to show up. On the surface, "strong not small" sounds like progress, especially for millennial women who grew up in the early...
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30. When Body Image Meets Aging: a conversation with Deb Benfield
Aging is natural, but women are rarely allowed to experience it that way. In this episode, I talk with Deb Benfield, author of Unapologetic Aging, about the pressure women face to keep defying the evidence. This conversation is really about the promise underneath anti-aging culture: that if we…
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29. Gentle Nutrition After Diet Culture: How To Make It Simple
Nutrition is a complicated, sometimes scary word after ED recovery or dropping out of diet culture. You may want more energy, steadier meals, better digestion, or a way of eating that supports your body more consistently. But the second nutrition enters the conversation, it can start to feel...
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28. Life After Dieting with Guest Allison: Food Freedom, Body Image, and Motherhood
In this episode of Full but Not Finished, I'm talking with Alison about finding food freedom as a mom after weight gain, years of dieting, and years of living in the binge/restrict cycle. The Body Image Workshop is open! Allison grew up in peak 90s diet culture, with cottage cheese, "Can't…
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27. 5 Real-Time Tools for a Bad Body Image Day
Bad body image day? I'm sharing five things I use in real time to interrupt the spiral, work with nervous system dysregulation, and get through a trigger without letting it take over the whole day. We talk about body neutrality, somatic tools, movement, distraction, and what to do when you're too...
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26. Body Image and Perfectionism: Why It Never Feels Like Enough (A Conversation with Kristina Bruce)
What happens when two body image coaches start talking "off the record"? (also: Join The Body Image Workshop this May for more of this type of conversation) In this special joint episode, Stefanie Michele - a Binge Eating Recovery Coach and Kristina Bruce, a Body Peace Coach share a raw, unedited...
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25. Why Am I Always Thinking About Food? (Mental Hunger vs Appetite Explained)
If you feel like you think about food more than other people, or your appetite just seems… bigger — this episode is going to matter. This episode is about appetite and mental hunger, and why both are so often misunderstood in binge eating recovery. A lot of people assume that thinking about food…
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24. Why Body Image Gets Harder on Vacation | Q&A
Why does body image get so much harder when you go away, even when you thought you were doing pretty well? You're out of your routine, around other people more, dealing with different clothes, different food, different plans, different mirrors, and less of what normally helps you feel like...
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23. Body Image on Vacation: Triggers, Comparison, Aging, and Tools To Help
After a recent trip to the beach with friends, I found myself thinking: body image doesn't ever "finish" or resolve in a permanent way. It shifts, it resurfaces, and certain environments bring it right back to the surface. In this episode, I talk through what came up for me on this trip and why...
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22. The Link Between Body Image, Shame, and Feeling Your Anger
Anger is one of the most important emotions in recovery, and one of the hardest for people to let themselves feel. In this episode, I talk about why anger gets such a bad reputation, why so many of us are afraid of it, and why I think it is deeply connected to body image, shame, binge eating,...
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21. Intuitive Eating Q&A: Saying No, Brunch Planning, and "Food Isn't Exciting Anymore"
In this Intuitive Eating Q&A episode, we're unpacking three nuanced questions that often come up in recovery and food freedom work: ✨ How to say no to food without slipping back into restriction ✨ Whether eating lighter before a brunch or event can still be intuitive ✨ Why food can feel less...
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20. Are Ultra-Processed Foods Bad? A Non-Diet, Intuitive Eating Perspective
Processed foods are having a cultural moment, and the way they're discussed online is so extreme that it's hard to know what to trust without feeling stressed or guilty. In this episode, I'm talking about why the fear-based language around ultra-processed foods is such a red flag, and why I don't...
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19. I Need Help! Five Things I Needed to Help Me Recover from Decades of Food Noise and Body Image Anxiety
If you're in recovery and you keep hitting the same walls, you might need more help than you want to admit. In this episode, I'm talking about what it looked like for me to recruit support during my all-in recovery from years of binge eating + restriction, and why it can feel so loaded to say, "I...
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18. From Burnout to Wintering: When Your Nervous System Is Afraid to Slow Down
Many of us live in a nervous system state where movement, productivity, and momentum feel like safety. Slowing down doesn't feel restful — it feels threatening. And when the body starts asking for less, the mind often panics and tries to think, plan, or "fix" its way out. This episode explores…
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17. Perimenopause + Body Image: Can You "Prevent" Menopause Weight Gain? (Q&A)
*]:pointer-events-auto scroll-mt-[calc(var(--header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]" dir="auto" tabindex="-1" data-turn-id= "39bccc61-ca95-45a2-a4d3-fc20b519f985" data-testid= "conversation-turn-8" data-scroll-anchor="true" data-turn= "assistant"> In this Q&A episode, I answer three listener...
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16. The 4 Types of Restriction That Drive Binge Eating
Restriction doesn't only mean "eating less." It can also mean living with food rules in your head, shutting down emotions you don't know how to hold, or staying stuck in a stress state without relief. Any of those experiences can create a scarcity of safety, and scarcity is one of the biggest...
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15. When Your Clothes Don't Fit... and You Want to Binge?
Ever feel bad about your body and go straight to food? That moment feels confusing, self-defeating, and impossible to explain to anyone who hasn't lived it. This episode is about that moment — why it happens, what's actually driving it, and why the reaction makes far more sense than you've been...
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14. Why Restriction Feels Calming: Nervous System Dysregulation + Food Control
For years I have talked about binge eating, compulsive eating, and the binge & restrict cycle — and how chaotic and dysregulated those patterns feel in the body. But what if restriction itself is also a form of nervous system dysregulation? In this episode, I break down how food restriction shows...
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13. The January Trap: Last-Supper Eating, Gym Diet Culture, and Food Gifts [Q&A]
If you're already thinking about how to "fix" your eating in 2026, listen to this first. This Q&A episode covers three of the biggest pressure points people hit at the end of December and the start of January: Last Supper eating, diet-culture talk in fitness spaces, and the anger that can come…
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12. Why Am I So Nostalgic? On being a highly sensitive person
Nostalgia, body image, and high sensitivity are connected—and this episode explains why. This is for highly sensitive people who experience nostalgia as a full-body emotional event. Do you notice that when the past gets stirred, food and body stuff gets louder? Songs, places, photos, endings, and...
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11. My All-In Recovery Story: The Process That Ended My Binge Eating for Good
In this episode, I explain my all-in recovery process and how it helped me stop binge eating after decades of battling food noise. I break down what "all in" actually means in practice, why unconditional permission to eat means (and doesn't mean), and how body image work played a central role in...
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10. Celebrity Weight Loss: are we allowed to say something?
Celebrity weight loss is back in the spotlight — in headlines, before-and-after photos, GLP-1 speculation, and nonstop commentary online. Alongside that has come a louder insistence that we "shouldn't talk about people's bodies" at all. But should we really keep quiet? This episode focuses on…
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A Meditation for When You Feel Full or Over-Full
In this guided meditation, I use pendulation to help you work with fullness without getting pulled into the usual fear or anxiety. You'll move between the sensation itself and calmer places in your body or environment, so your nervous system has room to settle in the here and now. This practice...
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8. Getting Through Thanksgiving Meal with a Steady Nervous System (and Food Regulation)
Thanksgiving can bring up a lot for people who are working on binge eating recovery, intuitive eating, or nervous-system regulation. Big meals on holidays have more stimulation, more exposure, more history, and more pressure to "be good" even though your nervous system is doing its own thing...
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7. The Reluctant Somatic: An Accessible Guide to Nervous System Regulation
In this episode of Full But Not Finished, Stefanie breaks down somatic work in a practical, accessible way for anyone who has ever felt confused, skeptical, or resistant to it. She shares her own path toward becoming a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and how body-based work shifted patterns…
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6. How to Break Food Habits Without Restricting | Intuitive Eating & Nervous System Explained
Are you eating out of habit or because your body actually needs something? In this episode of Full But Not Finished, I'm breaking down one of the most common recovery questions I get: how to know when it's a true habit versus a leftover pattern from restriction or stress eating. This isn't…
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5. My Eating Disorder Story: Binge Eating, Restriction, and Orthorexia -- and Recovery
In this episode, Stefanie Michele shares the full story of her ED — from early dieting and body image issues to decades of binging, restriction, and an obsession with healthy, clean eating. She explains how family dynamics, cultural pressure, and the physiology of restriction shaped her...
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4. Food and Family Triggers: A Parts Work Approach
When we're back around family, something ... regressive happens. Old dynamics resurface, our nervous systems fire, and parts of us we thought we'd outgrown suddenly take the wheel. In this episode of Full But Not Finished, I explore how family gatherings activate protective parts of the psyche…
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3. Why Upsizing Your Clothes Isn't a Failure: Body Image, Weight Gain & Self-Acceptance
Struggling with weight gain or needing to size up your clothes? In this episode of Full But Not Finished, Stefanie Michele explores the emotional and psychological side of upsizing — the moment you realize your clothes no longer fit the same, and what that stirs up in a culture obsessed with...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Full But Not Finished is for anyone who's tried to "just stop eating when you're full" and realized it's never that simple. Hosted by Somatic and Intuitive Eating counselor and coach Stefanie Michele, this podcast dives into the ongoing work of recovery -- where fullness doesn't always mean satisfaction, and where food, body image, and nervous system work is never finished.Each episode unpacks the psychology, nervous system patterns, and cultural conditioning that shape eating behaviors, showing why willpower alone doesn't work and what real regulation looks like. If you've lived the binge–restrict cycle, felt trapped in body image spirals, or wondered why "normal eating" feels out of reach, this is where we make sense of it — not with rules, but with integration, somatic tools, and a more human way forward.
HOSTED BY
Stefanie Michele
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Full But Not Finished have?
Full But Not Finished currently has 51 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Full But Not Finished about?
Full But Not Finished is for anyone who's tried to "just stop eating when you're full" and realized it's never that simple. Hosted by Somatic and Intuitive Eating counselor and coach Stefanie Michele, this podcast dives into the ongoing work of recovery -- where fullness doesn't always mean...
How often does Full But Not Finished release new episodes?
Full But Not Finished has 51 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Full But Not Finished?
You can listen to Full But Not Finished on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Full But Not Finished?
Full But Not Finished is created and hosted by Stefanie Michele.
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