Episode
Binge Eating Is a Nervous System Response, Not a Willpower Problem | Stephanie Mara Fox
- Podcast
- Beyond Binge Eating
- Published
- Jul 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3811
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- http://www.BeyondBingeEating.com
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Summary
In this episode, I sit down with Stephanie Mara Fox — somatic nutritional counselor, mentor, PhD student, and the creator of Somatic Eating, a body-oriented, sensation-focused approach to healing the relationship with food. With a master's in somatic psychology and over a decade of practice, Stephanie has guided women coaches and wellness professionals around the world out of binge eating, emotional eating, chronic dieting, and body image struggles. She brings a perspective rarely voiced in recovery spaces: that binge eating was never really a food problem — it's a survival response, and the body, far from being the enemy, was always on your team, trying to do something on your behalf. Here's what we cover in the episode: Why the body communicates like a baby — through sensations, urges, and impulses rather than language — and what it means to keep showing up for it with curiosity instead of judgment Stephanie's path from severe digestive issues and an IBS diagnosis in her early 20s to discovering, in her somatic psychology master's, that the binge-restrict cycle was a trauma response her talk therapy could name but never shift Why binge eating doesn't have just one intention — sometimes it's there to numb and contain, but sometimes it's the body's way of mobilizing out of collapse, depression, and freeze The session that changed everything — lying on the floor, breathing into the ground — and the under-discussed truth that safety often has to come from outside us (co-regulation) before we can ever offer it to ourselves Why so many somatic tools from social media fail — they're all self-regulation — and how food itself often acts as a co-regulator the body genuinely relies on Why recovery isn't linear: how Stephanie's binge eating actually returned during her training,…