Episode 171: This week's episode is an interview with somatic nutrition therapist/dietitian, Tracy Brown. We spend most of the conversation chatting about the autonomic nervous system and Polyvagal Theory, and how this can impact sensations of hunger and fullness, or someone’s ability to decide what they want to eat.
Tracy Brown, RD, LD/N is a somatic nutrition therapist/dietitian, attuned eating coach, and counselling skills teacher. She helps people come home to themselves through their bodies by healing their relationship with food and weight as well as feel safer and less stressed in their bodies.
Since 2006, she has guided people one on one and in groups in healing from disordered eating and chronic dieting, many of which also have other stress-related conditions at www.tracybrownrd.com and https://www.tracybrownrd.com/intuitive-quiz/
She provides trauma-informed training and supervision to health professionals as well at www.embodieddietitian.com
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 171 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/171.
Welcome to Real Health Radio: Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. Here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast. This is the final time I’m going to make this announcement; as I’ve talked about in the last two podcast episodes, Seven Health is hiring. We’re looking for another nutrition practitioner to start working with us. There is a job spec up on the site, which you can see at www.seven-health.com/jobs. Then there’s also Episode 169 of the show, where I go into a lot more detail about what we’re looking for. That episode is also linked on the job spec page.
Applications for the position close on Friday the 8th of November, so a day after this episode will be released. But if you’re listening to this in time and you’re a practitioner and have experience helping people with disordered eating and eating disorders and overcoming dieting, then please check out the job spec and get in contact if you’re interested in the position.
If you’ve worked with a practitioner and you think they may be interested, then please forward over the job spec to them. If you follow someone on Instagram or on Facebook or listen to someone’s podcast and you like the content they’re putting out and think they could be interested, then DM them or email them or get in contact with them. And if you’re a member of a Facebook group and you think there may be people in there who’d be interested in hearing about it, then please post a message about it.
Thank you in advance for whatever help you can offer, and as I said, applications close on the 8th of November
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On this week’s show, it’s a guest interview, and I’m chatting with Tracy Brown. Tracy is a somatic nutrition therapist/dietitian, attuned eating coach and counseling skills teacher. She helps people come home to themselves through their bodies by healing their relationship with food and weight as well as feel safer and less stressed in their bodies.
Since 2006, she has guided people one-on-one and in groups in healing from disordered eating and chronic dieting, many of which have also had other stress-related conditions, and she provides trauma-informed training and supervision to health professionals as well. You can find the info for both of those on https://tracybrownrd.com and https://embodieddietitian.com.
I’d been aware of Tracy’s work for a number of years. She’s a member in a number of the groups that I’m in, and she regularly posts video content that is really helpful. I also saw that she’s done training around Polyvagal theory, and this is something that I’ve been reading more about recently, so I thought she would be a great person to come on and talk about the topic.
As part of the conversation, we talk about Tracy’s background, her own struggles with an eating disorder, and how this was connected to being a highly sensitive person – and when I say highly sensitive, I’m referring to the work of Elaine Aron. We actually talk about this and how helpful it was for Tracy to discover this concept. We talk about Tracy’s training as a dietitian and how this didn’t match up with what she thought it would be like.
We then spend the bulk of the time talking about Polyvagal theory and how this approach can be helpful when working with clients. If you’ve never heard the term Polyvagal theory, please don’t be put off. We cover what it is and a lot of practical ideas around it. So this isn’t just going to be useful for practitioners to hear about, but really for anyone interested, this will be highly applicable and really useful.
Tracy is a really great guest, and I personally found this conversation really helpful. There’s stuff that I’ve started to incorporate in what I do with clients because of the things that Tracy mentioned during this conversation, so I hope you get out of it as much as I have.
With this intro out of the way, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Tracy Brown.
Hey, Tracy. Thanks for joining me on the show today.
Tracy Brown: Hey, Chris. Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be on your show, and I’m just grateful to be part of all the years you’ve been contributing to helping folks get free from food and body image worry. So I’m happy to be here.
Chris Sandel: Thank you for those kind words at the start. There’s a couple of areas that I’m hoping we can touch on today. I’m not sure how long we’ll spend on each of them and what other places we’ll go as part of this, but I definitely want to talk about Polyvagal theory, what it is, how you use it as a Polyvagal approach when working with clients – and this can be around food, it can be around attunement, it could be around trauma and trauma recovery.
I also want to talk about the hunger and fullness side of this and the dysregulation that people can experience here, and how that can be connecting with the Polyvagal piece, but also with body image struggles, for example.
Tracy Brown: Excellent. Yeah, there’s a lot of good stuff there to cover, so I’m excited to dive in.
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Chris Sandel: Perfect. I guess to start with, do you want to give listeners a bit of background on yourself, so a bio of sorts? Who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that sort of thing?
Tracy Brown: Sure, yeah. These are always hard to do because it’s like “tell the story of your life” a little. Not hard in a bad way, it’s just what people really care about and what we don’t.
I’m a registered dietitian in the United States, but really title myself as a somatic nutrition therapist and attuned eating and body image expert. I’ll say why all of that in a little bit.
My background started like a lot of people’s who probably are in the helping field now. I recovered, luckily and gratefully, from anorexia and binge eating disorder and exercise compulsion back in my late teens, early twenties. At the time of this recording, it’s late 2019, so we’re pushing over 20 years now. I did actually have a lot of treatment trauma at the beginning, and the one really amazing bright spot in my recovery time was working with a dietitian.
Back then there weren’t any intuitive eating or Health at Every Size or non-diet dietitians, but this woman somehow miraculously, in the little town of 900 people that I grew up near, had a dietitian around. She was familiar with Ellyn Satter and introduced me to some other pioneers of some of the early non-diet work, and it just blew me away. Like, oh, I get choice, and I can have some body autonomy. Even though I have a lot of fear, that can be worked through, and you can actually be more normal than the average normal bear with food. I’m like, cool, this is what dietitians do. Awesome.
Then I go to school to do this, thinking I’m going to help people – maybe with disordered eating, maybe not. I don’t know. But the relationship built is what helped me so much. It was just this really respectful, compassionate, coregulatory, “What do you think? What do you need?” kind of experience.
I go to school and find out that’s not how it rolls. [laughs] That’s not how it works. It’s like, “Here’s some facts and here’s the right way and the wrong way to look and eat.” I’m not dissing it all; it was not all bad. But by the end, I was like, “I’m going to have to learn a new way. I’m going to learn how to do it the way I experienced this or I’m going to have to find a new profession. I really just can’t put people on diets, because that’s the thing I came out of, and I can’t make people feel bad for inherently just naturally being a certain way. I’ve been there, done that of trying to make my body something that I want it to be.”
So that was the long journey of working with some great mentorship and doing thousands of hours of supervision to learn how to – and by that time, we’re talking into the late ’90s and going into the 2000s. There’s a book called Intuitive Eating now, and all those things are coming up and slowly growing in some momentum. Just learning how to not only help people come back home to themselves and trust their body’s signals of hunger and fullness and use the body as a resource. How people are using food and what they’re feeling inside and outside about their bodies has a lot to say about basically what’s feeling too much and what was missing or what hasn’t been enough.
You’re teaching people how to decode that. Instead of saying “I feel fat,” we learn how to say, “What’s feeling uncomfortable? What’s feeling too much? What do we not have enough resource for to navigate that?” What we’re taught is when you feel bad, it must be your body. Your body’s too big. You’re too much, versus actually what’s internally sensing, feeling too much.
Anyway, that’s been the heart of my work. I saw my very first client I think February 1st, 2007 for eating disorders and disordered eating and diet trauma and everything under the sun. We’ll talk about a little bit maybe later how I trauma-integrated that work, but that’s kind of where I’m at.
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Chris Sandel: Nice. There’s a lot that I want to go back through with that piece. Let’s start with you before you became a dietitian, so you as a kid. What was food like in your household?
Tracy Brown: I was very, super fortunate. I got to use these experiences to help me get well. There was other pieces that were the barriers. I actually grew up on a farm, so I learned where food came from and how it works for the most part, and how to get it and where to get it. Eating and cooking, really what people would call pretty high-carb, high-fat, to be honest.
But again, I had good signals of hunger and fullness available to me. There wasn’t a lot of food shame because I grew up mostly in the ’70s and ’80s, where there wasn’t really a lot of different macronutrient restriction. So my influences with diet culture were, unfortunately, my grandmother and my mother. They both had a lot of their own internalized body self-hatred that came out externally. So it would be this weird world of “you eat, do your thing; don’t pay attention to us over here doing cabbage soup diets and SlimFast” and all the things. I just thought they were stupid, to be honest. [laughs]
But as I started to grow up – and it really was before puberty, where it was just some of these subtle things of I wasn’t changing yet, but people around me were changing and people would comment about that. I’m like, “Oh, so I need to worry about those things.” Okay, mental note at eight years old. But I didn’t worry about it. I let it go.
But as the years go by, you just get more influences and more people talking about each other’s bodies. I think the intensity ratcheted up with the women in my family, too, about how often they were dieting as they were aging as well. It just got to the point where it’s like, “I’m not going to be like them. If having a bigger body means you have to hate yourself, I’m not in. That’s not going to happen.” Mental note at 14.
But it took a relationship breakup trauma to really pretty quickly guide me to “Oh, this is what people do that seem like they’ve got it together and are cool and popular and have boyfriends, so I will just go on a diet.” It wasn’t because I hated my body, but the restriction triggered this for me, essentially.
I’m saying that because at the same time, all these things where it doesn’t sound like my body image and my relationship with food were very bad – they weren’t. But on the flip side, there’s all the other things that you can look back at your life and say, oh, I was a really pretty anxious kid, pretty obsessive-compulsive kid. But nobody made it like it was a problem. They would just tell me not to be so sensitive and suck it up and “you’re fine.”
All of that repression and denial was a buildup. That was already happening in the background, and I can look back now with some of this Polyvagal theory stuff and epigenetics, and looking at un-cleaned-up trauma from your ancestors, somebody was going to get it. It had to be somebody, and I guess it was me that was a walking time bomb of all this repressed “we don’t talk about things” stuff going on generationally.
So for me, I look back like, what caused this for me? It was all that stuff. And just being in a hypercritical, workaholic environment. Restriction was the last straw that caused the eating disorder, really. I already had a lot of issues with self-esteem and “I don’t think anybody likes me” and “I’m not very connected, I’m very disembodied.” All that was going on, and restriction just took it down the tubes, essentially.
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Chris Sandel: Right. I know on your site, you describe yourself as a child as like “I notice too much, I feel too much.” Have you come across the work of Elaine Aron, when she talks about Highly Sensitive Persons? Do you identify with that?
Tracy Brown: Absolutely. I knew what people were thinking and feeling when I was five years old. [laughs] And I knew when there was a difference between what you’re saying and what you really mean.
A lot of times though, again, if you look at a lot of research on trauma – which I do believe I have developmental trauma that I’m recovered from, just accidentally over the years, plus now that I’m diving deeper into it – I think people can come in just wired more sensitively. And then when stuff happens, when there’s misattunements, then you get more empathic, I think, because you become hyper-vigilant of trying to be right, do right. Just to avoid danger, essentially. It’s like a survival response. So yeah, I would identify with that, and I imagine a lot of your audience would too.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I don’t know how much I’ve talked about this before on the podcast. Is this something you know a bit about, that you’re happy to talk about for a bit?
Tracy Brown: Yeah, I’d love to talk about it. That was kind of my first foray, a long time ago, probably 10 years ago, into like “oh, I was that.” I read the book and I’m like, “Oh, I’m not a freak. Something’s not wrong with me.” A certain percentage of people are wired sensitively, and I am the only more highly sensitive person in my family. None of those things really bother people that I notice. Like, okay, I’m not screwed up. That’s just my wiring – at least part of my wiring.
So yeah, I can talk about it. I teach a lot of clients about it, too. I think most people who show eating issues have some level on the spectrum of this as well. I don’t know if you have any questions about it. I’m happy to answer what my observations are or what I’ve seen people experience.
Chris Sandel: For people who are listening who haven’t come across this before, there’s a thing called Highly Sensitive Person. Elaine Aron wrote a book on the topic. Maybe I’m mispronouncing her name. I think in the book, she estimates it’s somewhere around 20% of the population. On her site, there’s a test that you can do where it asks certain questions to give you a bit of an idea if that applies to you. If you just search “highly sensitive persons test,” it will come up.
The thing for me that you also just mentioned is, while she says it’s 20% of the population, if I think of the clients that I work with and when I bring this up, it’s got to be 70%, maybe 80% of the people that I work with who would identify as this. Or if not completely identify with it, they’re like, “I think I’m an edge case” as part of this.
Tracy Brown: Yeah. Chris, I would say probably 90% of my clients would identify that way. I know in the book it talks a lot more about the sensory part of things, like clothes or music or whatever. And it can be some of that sensory processing stuff, but sometimes it’s just the relational sensitivity that’s the main issue.
If you take that test and you recognize it’s not really the sensory, like hearing, sight, touch – if that doesn’t seem overwhelming, it’s just the emotional/energetic. Like I go in a room and I can sense in my body, “Okay, here are people who are more hiding away and here are the people who have the power,” and they can sense that kind of stuff.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. What she talks about is that if that’s identified early on and you’re in an environment where you have parents who really nurture that and are able to be supportive to that, how much of a real superpower that can be.
Tracy Brown: Right. It would be a gift to know. You learn how to build better boundaries and less internalized hurt, if that makes sense. That’s not really about you. You just sense it. It doesn’t mean that it’s at you, though.
Chris Sandel: Exactly. But the reason or the point where it’s more of a problem, which is how you talked about it, if you are then growing up in an environment where there is that sensitivity to being able to talk about your emotions or for someone to be quieter or for someone to take longer to process things and that be seen as a negative, that then becomes quite internalized. What could be a real boon for someone becomes their real weakness.
Tracy Brown: Yes. You’ll see as we talk about some of the food and the neuroception of eating that that all gets put away. Not like “my emotions are too much” and “I’m too much for people.” It’s like “I’m too much,” and then it becomes this equal sign of “I am bad” or “something is wrong with me.” That shame looping is pretty hard. When you go back to eat and eat enough, you’re going to start to feel all that stuff. That’s where people I think when they struggle with recovery or are on and off diets, this is the dilemma I think a lot of people are struggling with.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, because I think there’s a certain neutrality to the fact that I feel more than other people. Just “I recognize that I’m more sensitive in certain situations, I can pick up things, I’m more empathic, I take on more of what is going on in the room,” and that can be just neutral in terms of “I just do this differently to other people.”
But it becomes a problem when that is pointed out as “this is something bad, you can’t be doing this,” and then you have this extra layer of emotion on top of this that is like “I shouldn’t be feeling so intensely here.” You’re then trying to battle against what is really just your body’s way of regulating.
Tracy Brown: That’s right. That’s where you start to see, when we start to talk about the window of tolerance here in a little while or Polyvagal, if you’re so filled up with “I’ve got to contain all this,” that’s extremely – it costs a lot of energy to do all that, to be a certain way, but inside be a certain way. It’s got to come out somewhere. For me, it came out through an eating disorder. For other people it comes out through somewhere else. But it becomes this faux window. We’ll talk about it later, but this adaptive strategy, really, to the “too much.”
Chris Sandel: Definitely, and I’ve heard other people then talk about it. It’s then when you’re able to restrict – and as you described, it’s not even coming from a body image place; it’s often coming from an anxiety place – suddenly there’s this numbness, or this pause or turning down of those emotions, and that can feel very freeing when it’s just felt so overwhelming.
Tracy Brown: That’s right. For me personally – and I think other people – it works until it doesn’t. Numbness works for a while because physiologically, you’ve had some nutrition status on board for X amount of years in your life, hopefully, so it works for a while. That numbness is great. The first time it’s like, “Oh, I don’t care. This is great.” But it makes your life so small that you don’t realize what you’re missing until you’re too deep in and like, “Oh, now I’m going to hold it. This is going to be hard.”
I think we have this anticipatory like “this is going to be a lot.” It’s not always cognitive or language, but there’s this knowing, like “I’ve got to go back through all that again and deal with that? Ugh, I don’t wanna.” So it takes a lot to take that first step a lot of times, to go back into the feeling zone.
00:22:50
Chris Sandel: Definitely. For you, when did you start the restriction, and how quickly was it before you were in what people would describe as an eating disorder?
Tracy Brown: Gosh, let me think back. This is like 24, 25 years. At 16 I started restricting, and it was this slow – my thing was just calorie counting. I never had any other – some fat restriction, too. But calorie counting and just trying to look as normal as possible, because I got the numb effect pretty quickly. It’s like, “ooh, how can I eat as little as possible to not care?” Just not care about life, basically. It came on pretty fast.
So it was this year process of restricting, restricting, before people were like, “This isn’t you.” Because I started getting side effects within 6 months. I was starting to lose my personality, and of course, lose menstrual function and all that kind of stuff pretty fast. I don’t want to be triggering, but I cut back pretty quickly, and it lasted for a while until I sought treatment about into the second year of restriction.
It was one of those things that things happened pretty fast and dramatically for me. By midway through my senior year of high school, I was starting to recover. I had just started restricting the summer before I went to my junior year, so I would’ve been 17, and by the time I had just turned 18 – I’m trying to think how old. I guess it was 16-½ I started restricting, and I started the process of recovery at 18.
I don’t know how many details you want to know about that, because I don’t want to be triggering. It’s quite dramatic, because I didn’t have the greatest experiences. It was really a battle of wills of “I can’t go back to that misery because if this is what treatment is like, I don’t want to do it.” [laughs] “So I’m going to get better.”
Chris Sandel: You talked about when you were restricting, there was that numbness that was obviously beneficial in the very short term. Was there other benefits that came with that that made you keep doing it? Were you complimented from other people on your willpower, or was there any of that that came with it?
Tracy Brown: A little bit at the beginning. There’s always a pro and con to things. The con of having an eating disorder in a small area is that everybody knows you and knows what you’re normally like. My affect outweighed the initial compliment, so I didn’t really get a lot of positive feedback for this. It was all either disgust or concern from people, mostly. And a lot of “Why are you doing this to yourself?” So I got met with a lot of hostility, unfortunately, which made me dig in more, like “Well then, get out of my life,” basically.
So no, not a lot of positive. Initially at the beginning, like, “Oh, you have so much willpower. You’re so great.” I’m like, if you only knew the misery this is. But at this time, the numbness was outweighing the benefit. The numbness more than I cared about what I looked like.
Chris Sandel: I don’t think hostility is ever a great thing or a motivator, but was there any benefit to that in the long haul? Considering you sought treatment pretty early on. I know from other clients, they’re like “but everyone was telling me I was doing so well for so long and people were so proud of me when I was able to lose weight,” etc., and they’re now having to come up against all of that. Whereas for you, it sounds like you never really had any of those positive, supportive comments of people telling you about what your eating disorder was doing.
Tracy Brown: My experience with the recovery was everybody pretended like it wasn’t happening. “I’m not really that sick,” and as I got better, it was just like “let’s everybody pretend like that’s not happening either.” Until you gain a certain amount of weight and they’re like, “You’re healthy now.” I’m like, did you have any idea what’s going on in my head? It’s one of those situations where you look normal now, but you’re still working through all the emotional upheaval and getting to know who you are again and leaving the identity of an eating disorder behind. That’s the work.
Those are the things that were just totally – and I understand, people don’t know what any of this is like unless you’ve been through it or you’ve educated yourself about it. So I was a pretty lone wolf in my own journey, to be honest, for a long time. It was so uncomfortable for so many people, what I’d gone through. I think it was such a mirror for a lot of people, like “what part did we have in this?” It was just too much for people. It was kind of, for me, a recapitulation of like “You’re still too much. You’re sick, you’re not sick – you’re still too much.”
That was one of those things that made it hard for me to fully let go and do body acceptance. This wasn’t really a word back then, but it was like just to let myself be, let my body be where it needs to be, fully eat normally or do attuned eating. It’s like, okay, I’m doing all this hard work and I look normal, but I still feel so out of control internally.
The only time I felt in control, a.k.a. really what was numb and not feeling so much, and having any positive anything – I didn’t really want people’s concern. I just wanted acknowledgment of being a human and you have feelings, which is all I was really after. Didn’t get that. So I started to go back to restricting. It’s like, “I can’t be really thin because that’s disastrous, so maybe I’ll be really fit.”
That actually triggered the exercise compulsion and the binge eating that I experienced in the 19 to 22-ish range, basically. That was the darkest times, really, that I had in my life. Nobody knew, you look normal, you’re doing all these socially acceptable cultural things by exercising a lot and eating normal in public. But nobody knew when you’re not around and restricting, I’m just binging my brains out. One, because of deprivation, and two, because of just all of the emotional – like I don’t have a container for this. I don’t have a way to express it, because every time I tried to, I got shut down.
Again, here we are. I’m here. But it’s one of those things that I think these are just the layers and the nuances that, unless we unpack, usually within safe company, it takes a long time to understand these things. That’s why I’m so adamant about the kind of work that you do and I do. We need safe company. We need somebody who’s like, “I don’t have to get it, but I can listen.”
00:30:10
Chris Sandel: Definitely. When you were going through this, was the message that you were getting that full recovery is possible? Or was it “this is something that’s going to be a lifelong struggle”? How was the recovery journey sold to you?
Tracy Brown: Again, this will be interesting for people to hear who have all these different, wonderful messages now. For me back then it was like, “gain weight.” The implicit, unspoken message was “…and don’t be a problem.” Gain weight and you’re fine.
So I did that, but I knew that that wasn’t true. I think I just had this will in me like “I want to be normal.” Now that I’m recovered – it kind of messes your brain up around food a little bit. Again, there’s still a diet culture. Even though it wasn’t a super, super overtly strong fatphobia message growing up – looking back, it was; it’s just that it wasn’t as intense as maybe things are now. You weighed more, you’ve still got to fix that.
Going back to that message that I received when I was younger, I still had that in the back of my brain, “weighing more is a problem.” So I never got a chance to normally develop and accept different stages of development. I went from a teenager who skipped some years of development and growing into an adult body to overshooting because of recovery. I didn’t know how to accept that, and again, I didn’t have messages of “it’s okay, you’re okay.”
I kind of just had to figure it out. I had a hard time accepting the idea that you can’t fully be done with this, because I really wanted to be fully done with this. I said, “I don’t know how long it’s going to take me. I don’t know how much weight on my body I have to accept to be fully done, but I guess that’s the journey.” That’s the message I had. It was my own just “there’s nothing here for me to guide me and lead me, so what do I want?”, essentially. “What do I want my life to look like?” There weren’t any strong messages.
The only books I had read at that point were I think Geneen Roth, Recovery from Emotional Eating, and I read Susan Conow’s – which is a really, really great book – it’s a green book cover, and it talked about set point. I’m like, okay, this makes some sense.
Because there was a time in my life I was sane around food and body, and I just accepted that I was a really short person, and there was a 50/50 shot that I was going to be short and wiry like my dad or short and round like my mom. I don’t know, probably one of those two options. I did accept that. I didn’t know what it was going to be, because my brain was still spinning around using food and exercise and binging as emotion regulation, more so than even – but I thought it was about body and body image.
Anyway, I’m speaking all around because that’s how confusing it is until you start to recognize, okay, we have to deal with the cultural piece of like, yeah, it is easier to recover in a culturally acceptable body, and there’s privilege in that. And then over here, it’s like, but you still have to, no matter what you’re going to be, ultimately when you eat normatively, and if all systems are working well in your body, the only way to fully recover is to be good with what you’re given or your circumstances. There’s some acceptance that has to happen for full recovery.
Then the other piece is learning how to feel happy, mad, sad, and afraid, and being able to navigate that. Those are the two pieces that – well, there’s a bunch of other pieces, but if you had to really distill it down, that’s it. And I didn’t know that those two things needed to be worked on. [laughs] So it was a long journey of messing around and figuring out and making lots of mistakes.
I did go back to that dietitian at some point and unpack and go through some of that stuff, and had some more supportive normative eating. But I never really fully got the emotion regulation piece until I started to get out of my own house, get out of my own environment, and go to college and work and meet some different people. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know how to communicate emotionally very well. I see that being around other people.”
Basically, being in relationship with good people helped me so much to learn. I didn’t really get that until I joined therapy later in my twenties and all those kind of things. By then, I’d read enough books – I can’t remember all the books – to be like, oh, emotions are just a normal part of life. They aren’t some bad thing that you don’t do. [laughs] You’re supposed to feel these things. It’s okay. How we respond to them is what matters.
But these were foreign things to me. I didn’t know. I thought my job growing up, what I was supposed to be, is “work hard, don’t be too much and feel too much of anything, and certainly don’t express it; otherwise, you’re going to make me uncomfortable, so don’t do it.” That’s all implicit, but when you didn’t do that, you were met very quickly with looks and possible punishment.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. The piece you talked about there with recovery being the food-based thing and the physiology side, but then there is the emotional piece to it. I think that’s, for me, what is often missing with recovery. There is just so much of a focus on if we just get the food in, if someone “weight-restores,” then everything will be okay.
Tracy Brown: The truth is that I struggled the most when I was weight-restored. That edge of “okay, your body functions well now,” and it’s like these tidal waves of everything that was making more sense from my childhood, making more sense from how I function in the world – it’s like, oh my goodness. I don’t know how to do any of this without restriction or without over-exercising, without binging. No wonder it was so hard to let that go. It wasn’t even a matter of letting it go. It was like, how much did I have to lean on that to get through something?
That’s why so much of my work is like, yeah, normative eating is super important. Like yours too, Chris. It’s just I think if we’re not doing this parallel process, if people don’t have the right pieces in place as you do recovery – we do pieces of it and then we feel stuck and we’re searching, searching, searching.
That’s why I warn people within the first – it’s a loving disclaimer, like when you start eating more, you’re going to start feeling more, and that’s going to make you want to run back to whatever it is you’ve been doing. Of course it’s helped you. But we’re going to start naming that stuff right off the bat, so you know that it’s hard and it’s uncomfortable, but it’s not threatening. You’ve got a space here. We’re going to build a container here that’s relatively safe enough to start to tiptoe here. And to keep the food going as well and working on those pieces.
Chris Sandel: And that that is normal.
Tracy Brown: Yes, so normal.
Chris Sandel: I’m trying when I work with people to be like, I want to give you a reality of what this is meant to be like, not to scare you, but so that you’re not thinking “everyone else’s recovery journey is different” or “if I’m doing this and I’m having these intense feelings, I must be doing something wrong and I need to find some other alternative way of doing it.” It’s like, no, this is what it’s like. I know it’s uncomfortable and I know it sucks, but we’re going to navigate our way through this. This isn’t demonstrating you’re doing something wrong.
Tracy Brown: Yeah. It’s like linking arms. “Okay, let’s go through the muck together, because it’s going to be there.” It’s, like I said, reminding people that – and this is part of some of the Polyvagal stuff – when we’ve had so much need to protect ourselves, as time goes by we start to inaccurately neurocept, which is basically noticing inside that the sensations of let’s say hunger and fullness or the sensations of emotion mean threat.
It’s like, no, right now, in 2019, that’s uncomfortable. But it’s not the same thing as right now you’re going to get in trouble or right now something bad is going to happen. I need you to join me right now in here, because it’s not the same thing anymore.
00:39:10
Chris Sandel: I want to go through the Polyvagal piece in a moment, but I want to just come back to your recovery. How long after you recovered did you then think, “hey, I want to do dietetics”?
Tracy Brown: It’s really interesting. I had this – I don’t know what kind of spiritual moment you want to call it – when I was first in recovery of, “if I get this, then maybe I can help people someday.” I was like 18, and that was a thought of like, pfft, no, I’m not going there. [laughs] I didn’t really have that strong intent. It was just I want to have a life. I want to be who I am. I just went off living and getting more normative.
I don’t want people to think “oh, she recovered fully on her own.” I didn’t. I had some professional help on and off, and those pieces were integral. But a lot of it was I was just really blessed.
I didn’t share this piece, which was part of – at 22, I was in a really abusive relationship. Of course. I get into a relationship as soon as I get out of town, still in anorexia, and date the first person I meet that was really narcissistic, of course. That’s what people do, right? They were really abusive. I’m not making a joke, but it’s just a little bit cliché.
So I got out of that relationship, and immediately my symptoms reduced probably 50-75%, because I knew enough now about restricting/binging cycle just from my own observation of like, oh, when I don’t eat carbs in the morning, what do I eat all night? Carbs and fat.
I started to notice these things. I’m like, okay, Trace, I’m scared crapless to eat more carbs, but if I don’t want to eat a whole roll of cookie dough at night, maybe I should try to eat some of that food in the morning. Let’s see what happens. Within a couple days, that started working. I was shocked. Couldn’t believe it. Imagine that.
So doing some of those experiments and doing some things by myself – and I started to remember back when I was a kid. I’m really lucky that I had three meals a day and snacks. There was no good or bad food. It was separate. It was like, here’s food, and then here’s the diet craziness that they did. But it was hardly eating, so it didn’t almost count. I had a sense of a plate with all the food on it, and I could do that.
So once I started not restricting carbs, got out of that relationship, and I met my now-husband, forever ago, it was just another experience. It was like I was really seen for the first time in my whole life. Like, “You’re weird and goofy and really sensitive and really intense about things and really care about everything, and that’s cool.” I’m like, “What? Really?” That was the lynchpin that started turning everything. I was 22 when I met him. Then friendship turned to dating, and then we got married. That was 2003 when we got married.
2003 was the last time ever I had a thought of, before the getting married thing, “I haven’t restricted in forever. Maybe it wouldn’t be that big a deal to do it for my wedding because of pictures,” blah, blah, blah. I got two weeks in, started being obsessive and binging again. I’m like, nope. Never can go back to this ever again. So that was the last time. I did a whole video on this, like “my last diet ever.” I lasted two weeks. [laughs] I’m like, I’m over this. I’m gone, done. I just realized it.
Anyway, I had done my internship 2003-2004 year, and by the end of that I recognized, I can’t be a regular dietitian. I’ve got this license now, and the only thing I enjoyed was doing these rotations where I did counseling. I am just not afraid of intensity. Everything else is a little boring to me, to be honest. [laughs]
So I got a clinical job as a dialysis dietitian, and I just started searching out in the area I lived in, is there anybody who treats eating disorders? I thought “I’ve got to do this.” It was just like, “you’ve got to do this, you can do this.” I’m like, okay, guess I’m going to do it.
Found a person and worked under mentorship with her for years and years and years. I worked for her for like 9 years. I was so lucky, because who she was and who all her – she was a person who ran with Carolyn Costin and Anita Johnston and all these folks, and their style of counseling of really unpacking and relationship-building and decoding the nuanced stuff when you say “I feel fat.”
When you look at the whole picture of what they’re feeling and look at the food and what’s happening around the food, it’s like, “Oh, you were telling me a story. I really want to hear what’s going on with this story here of ‘I feel fat.’” You get so much good stuff from just reviewing a whole day of food without it being about the nutrients – which that is important. Eventually, non-diet people do get around to meal planning if they need it, and nutrition changes if they need it. But it’s really about, what are we saying through eating or not eating? What are we saying through how we see our bodies, and if that’s accurate or not, or what we think people think of it or not?
Anyway, I learned that style before there were other things. That’s all I knew, so I just jumped in the deep end. Started seeing people of all kinds, shapes, and sizes. Since 2006-2007. That’s when all that started.
It was just one of those things. I had a clinical job for a couple years just to pay the bills, and then work for this person’s private practice and eventually transition out of a real job, basically. I haven’t had a real job since. [laughs]
00:45:10
Chris Sandel: Was there any apprehension with you getting into eating disorders? I know you said your last diet was two weeks before your wedding and you’re like, “I’m done with this.” But was there any fear maybe this could be potentially triggering, or “being in that environment, maybe I’m not going to know how to set proper boundaries,” or “there’s just going to be so much emotion coming up”? Was there any of that?
Tracy Brown: No, I wasn’t worried. I had burned that bridge, Chris. I don’t know where that is. All of us, it eventually just clicks and you switch and you’re like, “Nope, done.” I know that’s not everybody’s story, so I’m not minimizing that sometimes it’s a little bit more of a slower unfolding and new pieces coming.
The only thing I worried about at the beginning is I didn’t want to personally say the wrong thing to hurt somebody. That mattered to me so much. I know my mentor was pretty blunt. She was like, “Why are you doing this? This is hard work.” [laughs] I said, “I just love people, and I don’t want people to suffer alone as long as I did, because it was a living hell.”
So for me, every person that came in that I wasn’t quite sure exactly how to navigate a situation or what they needed, I was just adamant like, “I just need to learn some more skills. I need to practice this. Let’s do it. Who does that really well? I’m going to go search them out and I’m going to learn.” So that’s just been my mentality.
It’s not that I didn’t have fear. The first two years I did this work, I was shaky and vomity all day long – I can compartmentalize it – because I didn’t want to screw them up, because I knew. I’ve been there. I’ve been where clinicians, when they haven’t done their own work, they’re not educated enough, say the wrong thing. It can be devastating. Or misattuned to something.
I cared about that so deeply that it was kind of overboard, to be honest, looking back. That was my boundary-crossing. I try not to work harder than anybody who came to see me, but that was the thing that I really cared. I really cared about your freedom. That would cause me suffering, basically. Like taking things home and thinking about it a lot. That was my main struggle.
And frankly, learning – yeah, with the highly sensitive thing, it did take me a while to have these emotional energetic boundaries of not feeling totally drained by the end of the day. It wasn’t because anybody else did anything wrong; it was because I was just taking on, emotionally, a lot of stuff.
I didn’t understand all that highly sensitive stuff yet because I hadn’t named it. I knew I was sensitive, but didn’t know that – it was just stuff that I knew. I could come in and I could know how they were doing, even if they said fine. If they’re like, “Oh no, I’m fine, I’m fine,” I’m like, “But you’re not fine. I can feel your sadness.” So being able to know how to ask the right questions to help people get to that without saying “I know that you’re sad,” because that’s not appropriate. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: And also, from what you’re describing, having the other flip side of that, which is you knowing how to do the self-care piece to look after yourself because of having that superpower, there is a drawback.
Tracy Brown: That’s right. If you don’t have a self-care piece – and I was still learning. I started this work when I was 27, 28. I had only been a really settled, solid intuitive eater 4 or 5 years. A good bit of time before I started to work, but not forever.
And I had reentered – when I started this work, I’m like, there are going to be experiences that I know that I don’t have. I don’t have everybody’s experience of being a different size, different color, different whatever. So let’s get in therapy and just learn how to look for my blind spots, and when people bring this up, what that means for me and about me, what I want to say about it, blah, blah, blah. So I did a lot of that, and that started teaching me the self-care I needed to really, really be in it, if that makes any sense.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, definitely. The other thing that’s coming up, considering the path that you went so quickly after studying, if you had your time over, would you have studied psychology instead of becoming a dietitian?
Tracy Brown: I think if I would’ve had a good experience in therapy when I was young, I would have. Looking back, I always ask that question. At this point, I don’t want to be a therapist because I get to do so much good, more body-based regulation work now. I don’t have to be. I can let the therapists do their job and be in my lane, and it’s good, because I can work with the body.
But probably I would have, if I would’ve had a really good therapy experience. This whole conversation – and you’re probably feeling the same way, Chris – is not knocking therapists. There’s so many good ones. They help so many people. It’s just the luck of the draw I got a pretty rough one that didn’t understand and didn’t really try to understand. It was just very analytic, and I’m not a super analytic person. I need a relationship, and I didn’t get it.
Chris Sandel: I’ve had conversations with people who had terrible dietitians but had really good therapists, so you got one out of that.
Tracy Brown: The thing is, she was my third. The first one was – I was being a really petulant teenager. I’m like, “Lady, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know who you’re talking. I know more.” [laughs] I was a brat. But she was telling me to add this or that to make shakes. I’m like, are you kidding me? I don’t even drink yogurt, let alone put a yogurt in a smoothie with a bunch of other stuff. You’re jumping way too far ahead. But I understood.
And the second one, when you come to your dietitian with a three-page, front and back, list of questions about nutrition, you kind of scare people off. [laughs]
So my third one ended up being the good one. I say “good one” – I mean knew how to hold space for all that fear and give me choice of how this was going to go. Once that happened, my whole body settled, and I could feel like, she’s not scared off by me. I’m not too much. I’m okay here. And that’s all I needed. I flourished, just in that little bit.
Chris Sandel: Obviously she had to have the right skills to be able to do that, but there is something that needs to be said about how important the practitioner-client relationship is, and that accounts for so much of what is the good that comes out of it in terms of someone’s ability to make changes or someone’s ability to follow through or someone’s willingness to reach out when they’re in a struggle and trust that they’re going to be able to, as you say, hold space or be able to just guide them through that place.
Tracy Brown: Yeah. We’re humans. I know we need food and water and oxygen and shelter and sleep. If we don’t have those things, we’re going to die in a short period of time. But above that, we do need a connection. We’re mammals. We need connection. We’re social creatures.
I don’t see too many people that fully recover all on their own, don’t have any connection with anybody who’s safe and good and affirming and can lovingly hold you accountable to where your distortions are or where you’re trying to have it both ways and it doesn’t quite work that way. We need that container.
I call it containment. I need help with my food in the containment of I can make mistakes, I can challenge things, I can not want to do something, but I’m not going to get in trouble for it, but eventually get there anyway.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think for me, that’s been one of the things that I’ve learnt through doing this for over a decade. Originally, so much of my focus was “I’ve got to learn more about physiology or how the body works or this technique” or whatever, and so much more now is around how to be in the room properly with someone and how to sit with someone. I’ve noticed that that side of things has helped so much more, and a lot of my nutritional knowledge has probably atrophied because I’m just not spending the time there. But I don’t need to in so many of the situations.
Tracy Brown: Chris, I love you’re saying this, because I always disclaim when I’m working with new dietitians and coaches, “Nutrition is important, but you’re going to use it at the very end, maybe.” Being able to be your own nutrition expert, you don’t need a degree and you don’t need a ton of knowledge. You need a lot of body wisdom and you need to know how to be with yourself. Our job is to help them learn how to be with themselves.
So yeah, you’re describing it beautifully. I always look at, how did our relationship with food and body get screwed up? It’s all relationship. Relationship with our culture, our environment, how much we’re seen and heard for who we are. That is going to either positively or negatively impact how we take in something so intimate as food. I think the relationship screws things up, while maybe a really good one will heal.
Chris Sandel: Or the other one that screws it up or that comes to mind when I’m thinking about this is delving into wanting more nutritional knowledge. Like the idea that “more knowledge in this realm is going to be the thing that saves me,” which often just leads to more confusion and more disconnect from being able to listen to your body because you now have all of these ideas in your head about what should be right and what you should be doing that just pushes you further away.
Tracy Brown: We call that bypass. It’s like, I’m going to bypass my body and be in my head and get out in front of it. That’s a very sympathetic nervous system response. You can feel the energetic “if I know enough, then I can feel better.” But you’re not using any body wisdom to help yourself feel better. It’s all intellectual knowledge. That’s great, and you can use it to make some choices, but those choices still have to be based on what your body is asking for.
00:56:15
Chris Sandel: At the top of this you talked about being a somatic nutrition therapist, so let’s focus on the somatic part of that. What does that term mean?
Tracy Brown: Somatic just means of the body. I use that because there are so many modalities that are body-based. All kinds of body-based psychotherapy techniques and schools, whether it’s somatic experiencing or sensorimotor psychotherapy. Oh my gosh, there’s so many. You and I together can make a list for people if they want to explore some stuff.
But I wanted to use the body more. The reason I did this – this goes back to my work with clients – is that there were so many people that I felt like I was helping. We would make sure you were getting well-nourished enough to where you can have accurate signals of hunger and fullness and unpack “I feel fat” moments. Not actual food allergies or whatever, but food avoidances and emotional eating experiences, what all that stuff means. Just really directly with the food and the body image stuff. I’m doing all this work.
For a big majority of people, that’s enough. They’re working with me and probably a therapist too, and we’re doing this good work, and they graduate and move on. It’s awesome.
Then there were a set of people that I knew they had a trauma history, because they usually shared that with me pretty soon, like in the first session or two. But I wasn’t getting the connection that trauma is in the body. It’s not just a set of thinking and memories and feelings, maybe, that are driving feelings. It’s in the body. It’s a body experience, like a normal escape response that didn’t get to happen from the bad stuff, so it’s stuck in the body and the nervous system. I didn’t know that at the time. This was like 2011.
It’s not a coincidence – my daughter was born, and something clicked in me, like oh my gosh, these clients that are really struggling with – they know some stuff. But then I’m noticing that something will happen, or maybe something won’t happen and it just feels out of the blue, and there’s this major disconnect from everything they know. It’s like this other thing that shifts in place where they’re back in this white-knuckling with trying to restrict, or there’s graze eating happening or binging happening, and it hadn’t in weeks or months. We’re like, what is going on? Something’s different here with durability to keep going with what they know works.
I had a colleague mention the word “somatic experiencing.” (I’ll bring my daughter into it in a second, why this is relevant.) She mentioned the word “somatic experience,” and I don’t know why – it’s one of those moments where it’s like, that’s it. You’ve got to know about this, because that’s what’s missing here. I felt it was the missing piece in recovery work for people. Some people need a lot more than others.
This was 2011. I just started reading all the books, and then I found my first mentor and worked with him for a couple months. His name is Rafael Kushner. He’s not even a licensed person; he was just somebody who’s studied it too, but long before I did, and had these techniques to help people feel the flinch and learn how to ride the waves.
So I started learning that and read all the Peter Levine books and had taken lots of courses and studied all kinds of different people over the years.
00:59:50
I think it’s one of those things – as you know, we start teaching what we need to heal. After my daughter was born, I started having all these body experiences, like being really revved up, and then I would shut down.
I was like two parts of me. There was this part of me that was really competent, doing work, and the whole time I’m feeling like I’m revved up and my chest is full of – I wouldn’t even label it as anxiety. I would label it as whatever hot lava adrenaline feels like or might look like in my body, from my ribcage up, all the time. It was constantly there.
I was having all these body experiences, and I started reading all this work around how our bodies have all this stuff, and I would have different experiences based on different times of development with my daughter. From zero to three was my really difficult time with my own self-care and being revved up, and then I would be so tired I couldn’t get out of bed, and I could just work, take care of her, and go back to bed. This was my life for 3 years.
I started reading about what is hyperarousal, being locked up in your sympathetic, and what is hypoarousal, which is being functionally frozen. I started to put the pieces together with implicit memory, which is our body remembers stuff that you might not have stories for, and I’m like, “Oh, this is what this is. I’ve got a lot of this probably in these ages my daughter is going through right now, and my body remembers.” I didn’t remember.
And I didn’t really experience that directly until I had this life trigger, which I think is what triggers a lot of people’s eating disorders, or what I think triggers a lot of people’s relapses. It’s all this un-metabolized stuff.
I went into trauma therapy. I was 32; I’m 41 now. Just basically worked with a whole lot of somatic experience practitioners, people who have had different kinds of trainings as well, and just learned how to integrate this stuff. What needed to be integrated, integrated, and what needed to be done with, be done with. It’s an unfolding process of growing your window tolerance. We can talk about what that means in a second.
But anyway, I started with everything I’d learned personally, of course, and all the trainings. I started talking. I’ve probably worked with a half a dozen different professionals that some people might know of, some people don’t know of, in just these year spurts of, all right, this is what I’m noticing in my own body. This is what I’m noticing in clients’ bodies. Let’s role-play this. Let’s work through what’s happening in the physiology and what is it speaking to, and then what can I do as a nutrition part of the puzzle, and then being able to be like, “here, therapist, here you go.” [laughs] What’s coming up through all the food stuff, what the food is saying, what it means when we don’t know what we want.
This is some of the work of Rachel Lewis and Paula Scatoloni of the Embodied Recovery Institute. They’re in North Carolina, and they really work on an action cycle of when we’re struggling with knowing what we need to eat or how much we need, from reaching for it, from being able to ingest it, and then rest and digest, essentially. All of those different phases can have barriers.
I started looking at where people were struggling. They knew everything in the world about intuitive eating, they knew everything in the world about Health at Every Size. They believed in it. But I was starting to help people with, okay, your mind knows better, but your body’s like “I’m not there yet. I need to keep this part of things and this part of my life for survival purposes, please and thank you. Leave me alone.” [laughs]
Basically everything we’ve talked about today is about bringing that container and starting to work with the body to feel a little more safe or a little less scared. Sometimes we can’t find safety yet, but we can feel a little less scared.
So helping people who have developmental trauma and other kinds of things that they know about it, but not quite understanding quite how much is still stuck in the body and how that is impacting hunger and fullness is how I got here today, talking to you and helping people understand that knowing is really important, but without safety, it’s going to be hard for all this stuff to really stick. That’s what I want to help you with.
01:04:20
Chris Sandel: What you’re describing there as well seems to touch on the Polyvagal theory. I mentioned it at the top and then we briefly touched on it. Why don’t we just spend a bit of time focusing on this? What does the word “polyvagal” mean? And then we can go from there.
Tracy Brown: “Poly” is many, and our vagus nerve is just this giant nerve that innervates from our brain down through the whole of the back of your neck and it goes all the way down. It innervates pretty much everything. It’s a part of our survival system.
I’m not a Polyvagal theory expert. Please, anybody, go look up Stephen Porges, because he’s the guy. Like you, Chris, I know enough to explain it, but there’s so much that I don’t understand. I don’t want to pretend.
But I think what’s helpful for us to talk about the little I do know is that basically, polyvagal means that in our survival system, we can over-couple normal experiences as either being good or being threatening. When you’ve been in too many experiences like – oh gosh, let’s just use diet trauma.
If you’re a kid and you constantly go to the doctor and he says, “You’d better watch out, and don’t drink this and don’t do that,” and you’re like, “But I don’t overeat,” you keep telling the doctor he’s wrong – one, you’re going to start to have a really uncomfortable, scary, “I don’t want to be criticized” reaction to doctors in general. That’s going to start to be wired in your system from a young age. But it’s also this belief that these certain foods are dangerous, because I might get criticized. I might be unacceptable if I do those things. Or if my body gets bigger, that means I’m not okay.
It was somebody’s real experience, so it was a threat then when we were 5 or 10 or 16 or 20 or whatever, but as adults, we have different resources than we do as kids to survive and to get through. It’s a whole lot easier to blame yourself for being wrong versus the adult. If you don’t have adults, you’re probably screwed. You have to have adults to survive when you’re a kid, so you have to align with them and basically deny yourself. Deny your autonomy, what you want to eat, deny maybe who you are and feel good about that, and you have to make yourself wrong to get along.
How that goes with Polyvagal theory is that these thoughts and feelings then become, in your nervous system, your foundation. When you start to learn about let’s say Health at Every Size or intuitive eating, it’s like, yeah, that’s right. That makes so much sense. We’re born to have these bodies that eat and get hungry and get full and we satisfy that, and then our bodies assimilate and digest and eliminate, and that’s normal. That should be a normal process, because we did that as babies and infants, hopefully, normally.
But the experience of eating what you wanted was also a threat, because if your body gets too big, you might get in trouble, or you might get criticized, or you might not feel loved. So eating maybe is a threatening thing. You do it because you have to, but not too much. You start to distance yourself from what you really want, what you really need.
Or you might eat, but you can’t – I call it yield. I’m eating, but I’m standing, running around as I’m eating, because I don’t want to fully have the awareness that I’m eating, because that would be too painful. Because then all those bad things might happen again.
Chris Sandel: The way that I’ve conceptualized it with the term “neuroception” is we have a nervous system that detects things within our environment, and it does this outside of our conscious control and at a much quicker rate. The easy thing that most people have experienced is walking along some track somewhere, and instantly jumping because out of the corner of their eye they saw a stick that they instantly thought was a snake – and then on closer inspection, it was a stick. But they’ve already had that reaction.
But the problem with this is when you come to, you look at that stick and you still see a snake. You’re not able to then be able to “okay, cool, I made an error there.” You’re still stuck in this place where what is essentially something that is non-harmful is still seen as a threat.
Tracy Brown: That’s right. To explain it a little more – and just so people know what the physiology is, we’ve got different branches of this autonomic nervous system, which is the vagus nerve. You’ve got your sympathetic. We’ve all heard of fight or flight. Well, there’s more to it.
Your fight or flight is your sympathetic response, and we need that. Like Chris said, if you’re walking in the forest, your body is naturally going to keep its head on a swivel, without you knowing about it. If I’m in bear country, I know in the back of my mind it’s there, so I’m a little more attuned. It has our senses ready to either run or fight, and that’s a good thing. We don’t want not to have that.
The problem is, in our culture of being hyper-vigilant about our weight or what people think about us, is that that’s always on, and that’s not the greatest place physiologically to be. Basically, it’s going to wear us out.
So we have our sympathetic, and we have our parasympathetic, and people think that’s all there is. That’s rest and digest. Well, it is, but there’s two branches to it. We have our ventral vagal. Imagine our higher functioning, which is our problem-solving and our emotional regulation and our social engagement system, like I’m connecting with you. That innervates our face and our ears, eyes, heart, lungs.
Then below the diaphragm is something called the dorsal vagal, and that’s part of the shutdown that we’re all familiar with. If you spend too much time at some point in your life in sympathetic, eventually you’re going to shut down, which is that feeling of just checked out. If it’s more intense, it’s dissociation, or it could be that feeling of you’re driving home but you don’t know how you got there. There’s a little bit of that going on. Like “I’ve been up so much all day,” I go to the car, and you miss this window of alertness – which I’ll talk about what that means in a second.
So basically, you’ve got three main parts that are running the show. It’s not like an “on” or “off.” They’re all feedback loops and they’re all running at the same time, but when you’ve got too much variability is when you find those symptoms of I’m really, really anxious and my brain is spinning and I can’t shut that off. That might be food rules or obsessive-compulsive stuff or just anxiety about eating. The part at the bottom is where it’s like I’m overriding fullness. I never really notice I’m full until I get over-full. Or maybe I’m eating to feel something or I’m eating to juice myself up, essentially, when I’m not hungry. All those things would belie that we’re in dorsal.
But the ventral vagal, basically if you’re like, “what does all this stuff mean?” It really just means the more we’re in a safe relationship – which is why it’s a good idea that you listen to these podcasts and see Chris or see me. You build a most robust ventral vagal window of tolerance, which is I can be present and calm and alert. That’s where really clear signals of hunger and fullness are. They really aren’t up when we’re in fight or flight or when we’re shut down.
When I work with clients, it’s really trying to teach them there’s a difference inside yourself when we’re really up or really down versus in that middle zone. In that middle zone, it doesn’t mean like “I never have any problems or I don’t feel emotions.” It’s that we have capacity, like “I notice I’m really angry and my hunger/fullness signals are relatively still pretty clear.” We have more room to hold all this, essentially, versus if something feels out of our capacity to deal with, then we go into our survival responses – either I rev up or I shut down.
That’s what happens. I don’t know if that was helpful to explain.
Chris Sandel: It was one of the things I wanted to chat about, so yeah. I might just say it again, just so people understand. There are three different options. There’s the safe place where you’re sociable, where you’re calm, where you want to be spending the majority of your life.
And then when there is danger, it can either go into danger fight and flight, or it can go “this is so life-threateningly dangerous, I’m going to just go into the freeze/immobilize response,” which is what we see with certain animals in the wild when they’re being hunted down, and it’s also what we see in certain situations around trauma. If we’re looking at extreme examples where people are like, “Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you run away?” and someone is just completely immobilized because of their nervous system and how they perceive that threat.
Tracy Brown: Right. I want to also add that it’s not always that we shut down. We can go into these feigned responses too, like people-pleasing. I think that shame lives down here too. It’s almost like you don’t even have to know the science to know what this feels like. We know what anger, really rage-y and anxious feelings feel like. It feels really up and big, or it’s really mobilizing, and you want to act.
When we’re down, we’re in this potential like “nothing else works” response. There’s a lot of chronic shame there, and there’s also people-pleasing there too. It feels heavy, like “I don’t really want to do this but I’ve got to do it.” It feels kind of anxious, but it’s almost like an acquiescence place. “I’ve just got to do this thing.”
That’s why sometimes you see people bopping up and down so much. That was my experience growing up. I never stopped being productive and doing stuff, and at the same time had a lot of this inner self-hatred. I can look back and be like, yeah, I didn’t have a really big window. I was up and down, up and down. Physiologically, that’s exhausting.
01:16:00
Chris Sandel: With the work that you’re doing with clients, are you talking through this piece so that they know there are these three different places, and then getting them to understand when they are in those different places and what maybe triggers them to go up from a fight and flight type place to more of a social safe place, or from a fight and flight place down to a collapsed place? Is that some of the stuff you talk about?
Tracy Brown: I do. It’s probably not the first two or three sessions, but I do mention that we want to bring more safety into the body. As that comes up at the right time – and the work together is basically right off the bat describing, even more short than we just did, that we’ve got these three options. But there’s sub-options within the options, of course.
I’m already blanking, which is making me really sad, about – Stephen Porges is Polyvagal theory, but – oh gosh, my brain is not going to work. A really great book to learn more about window of tolerance is the book Nurturing Resilience by Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell. I’ve gotten so much from that book in the last couple years about helping people track that.
Also, the book that you know I’ve talked about, Chris, which is from Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. It’s very user-friendly. There’s lots of really great worksheets in there that people can start to track their own nervous system. There’s a lot of things within recovery. Some things trigger some people and some things don’t, that you’d think would be really triggering, and it’s because there’s not this over-coupling. It doesn’t drive them into feeling like this is a threat response.
I first just have people, if they’re able to do hunger/fullness work, if their bodies are well-nourished enough to do it and there’s some food stability and there’s been some containment, there’s not so much chaos, once we start doing that – actually, if you’re having a lot of chaos, I start doing some of this regulation work right off the bat.
But if they’re starting to notice sometimes their signals are really accurate, and sometimes I’ll look at people’s food like, “I wonder where your hunger was, because it’s been a long while. I’m just really curious what was happening.” They start to explore their experience, and they were just super revved up, so of course their hunger was a little numbed out.
When you’re in sympathetic, the body’s drive is for mobilization, not for digestion. So you’re not going to have as accurate signals. You might have a faint idea that you’re kind of hungry, but your heart rate might be going so much, you’re so mentally focused on the thing because “this thing’s got to be turned in in two seconds,” there’s so much energy mobilized for the outward doing that inwardly, it’s happening; our energy is just displaced. We’re not noticing it as much.
This information is really important, so you can see, oh, when I’m in these circumstances, I get revved up. What do I need in general life to help my body feel safer, even when things are challenging, so I’m not quite as revved up, and maybe my hunger/fullness is just a little more accurate? Or at least I know that this is a trigger for me.
And honestly, maybe in 6 months to a year, it’s less of a trigger, and then less of a trigger, and before long you’ve got a really big window of tolerance where it’s like, “yeah, I’ve got to turn that thing on in two seconds, but I trust myself and my own competence.” If your window is bigger, you have more access to a bunch more information, like intellectual, experiential, to where you can lean on those resources versus it’s all or nothing.
Chris Sandel: For me, I will do hunger and fullness with people as soon as I can, but with the caveat of your ability to hear and notice things may be off, and part of the reason is you’re in more of a stress response, or you’ve been undereating for so long and ignoring your hunger for so long, your body just doesn’t want to produce the chemicals to make you hungry because it doesn’t think you’re going to listen and it’s just a waste of calories.
Tracy Brown: That’s right, yeah.
Chris Sandel: So it’s not that I shouldn’t start there with someone; it’s just like this is probably going to be a little bit fallible. Let’s look at, when are you getting better feedback and when are you not? What are the patterns that you start to notice through this?
Tracy Brown: Beautiful.
Chris Sandel: As opposed to it being the sole determiner of when someone can and can’t eat, it’s just a helpful tool. It’s one of the things you can pay attention to.
Tracy Brown: That’s right. I’m thinking of a client in particular that really struggled, very habitually at certain times of the day, and food would be going well – and this would be a person like you’re describing, long history of restriction, but doing really darn well even though there’s still some re-nourishment that needs to keep happening.
She happened to be a person where her signals were accurate; there just was still some denial of fully getting needs met regardless. But we noticed the body would really get revved up at night, so we did a lot of work on – also, mostly hers was sympathetic, so basically if you’re going to fight or you’re afraid, what does the body need? What is it saying? If I’m afraid, what do we usually want? We need some comfort or we need some relief or we need a solution.
So just trying to give the body those circumstances to get really in the current moment of the circumstance. If it is safe, great. Can you orient to that and then bring whatever physicality to your senses you need, whether it’s a weighted blanket on your lap during the meal – the list goes on and on of some things that we could do in terms of taking more time.
Maybe you need some movement to burn off some of that adrenaline. Not exercise, but it could be as simple as jumping on a little trampoline or doing 10 jumping jacks to burn off some of that adrenaline to get here and re-remembering, “Oh, that’s right, dinnertime with my family isn’t a threat.” The body’s not quite there yet of consistently knowing that’s true. We just have to help it.
Chris Sandel: This then comes back into the work around neuroplasticity and neural rewiring. Just because you’ve, for a long time, identified something as a threat, doesn’t mean that that’s how it’s going to be now and forevermore. The more you can do that and demonstrate to your body that the sky didn’t fall in, “I was able to survive this situation,” the more the body is then able to learn this isn’t a threat, or this is no longer a threat.
Tracy Brown: That’s right. We’re teaching the body. I always remind clients, because we get in this self-judge mode of “why don’t I get this faster?” It’s not your brain. When you’re with me, calm and alert, and we’re learning and we’re doing some good work here, I know your adult mind knows that. But there’s some point in time in your neurobiology that’s like, “family meals mean XYZ.” We’re just trying to teach your body that those times aren’t there more and more and more, to where your body is here. You might have a mental memory of stuff, but it being stuck in your nervous system as truth is no longer there.
That’s why I love this work, because it’s so hopeful that no matter what you’ve been through, it takes as long as it takes sometimes, but you can rebuild a whole new – not just relationship with food, but way of being in all kinds of situations that were once feeling really hard, and you thought it would be this way forever. That’s not necessarily true.
Chris Sandel: One of the things I have noticed with clients is one of the signs, or at least one of the times where it does seem to get better a little quicker, is once they can start to sleep properly. In the beginning, when someone’s been restricting for a long time or been over-exercising for a long time, clients are like, “I sleep terribly” or “I fall asleep instantly, but then I’m awake at 2:00 in the morning and then I can’t get back to sleep,” etc.
Sleep is when your body is doing so much of the repair work, physical repair work and also the mental repair work. It’s often that when clients get to a place that they’re sleeping better, it’s amazing how much their perception of the world starts to change. And I know this myself anyway, from having a small child and not getting sleep and knowing how much I see the world differently when that is the case.
But from a threat standpoint and the things that they used to be really fearful of and now are no longer, it can almost feel like they just start to vanish, where it’s like “I don’t understand why I feel differently about this. There’s no experience that I can connect this to or why this is now better; it just is.” When I look through, sleep is often the thing that connects that.
Tracy Brown: Thank you for mentioning that. Yeah, whichever mode of how they get to more sleep, whatever interventions we use or they come up with or whatever, there’s a level of the less threat response you have, the more likely you are to sleep. The better you sleep, the more you can repair a threat response. So it all goes together.
01:26:00
Chris Sandel: What are some of the ways that you help people build their resilience or their window or their ability to regulate? I know in the Deb Dana book, they talk about things that someone can do on their own and then things that people can do with others. Are there certain things that stand out for you that tend to work a lot with lots of clients?
Tracy Brown: I really try to keep it with the different realms of food and our personal relationship and movement and body image. The things that work, I think, consistently for all of us is this sense of something having our back.
For example, a really simple thing I have all my clients do sometimes – not at the beginning of every session, but most – is simply noticing the contact that our feet are making with the ground. Not just like “I feel my feet on the ground,” but really, here’s you and here’s the ground. What’s it like to have something hold you up?
Then the same thing with our seat. Where do they make contact, and what’s it like to have something, again, really be there for you?
Then lastly, their back. For me, the feet and the back are so powerful. If we just give a little push back in the back of our chair and notice that contact, where it’s like here’s my back and here’s the chair, and the different points we’re touching, what’s it like? Or even, how new is this for you to have something have your back?
Most of the time, for all of us, it’s like, whoa. Either that’s new, or I don’t get that enough, or this is nice. It starts as simple as that sometimes.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Sorry to interrupt, but even as you were doing that, it just forces you to slow down and pay attention. It’s the same way as if anyone ever mentions to me breath, or if I’m reading the word “breath” in a book. I notice how much more I take in a deep breath and I’m then focused on my breath. To be in that place is definitely moving you more towards the parasympathetic, and the better side of the parasympathetic, if we’re talking more of that safe, social place.
Tracy Brown: Yeah. And it gives us a starting point. If this feels good, wow, this is a resource. You can use this. You don’t need me for this. It’s nice to have that co-regulation of somebody helping you through it. But that even builds a body memory, so when you do it with me, then when you’re in your car on your way to drop the kids off or to a meeting, is this something you can do?
I think the more we make this a part of our life – I spend all day long regulating myself with clients, because I’m doing this, and I do it separately, and if I feel myself getting revved up or getting tired – it’s not too much anymore, because I’ve been working on this for like 8 years now, but it builds. Everything builds and builds and builds. It’s not like a thing you’re going to notice, “ooh, this is so great” over two weeks, but you’ll look back over months and years, and there are things that just don’t bother you that always habitually bothered you, that felt like too much.
Another thing I do is just talk about, if you’re in one of those up places, so your body is saying “there’s too much here” – or there’s not enough. Either not enough safety or resource, or “there’s just too much in my system and I need to get out of here, or I’ve got to fight my way out.” Sometimes it’s hard to get to the story of it or the intellect of it when we’re so revved up.
It’s got to go one of either two ways. It’s either we need comfort and containment. That might be – sounds kind of funny, but a pillow fort or the weighted products or warmth on your kidneys. If you don’t have a heating pad or a hot water bottle, you can simply put some rice in a sock and microwave it and put that on your kidneys or on your neck or somewhere you can feel it.
This helps in a couple ways. One, it’s hard to imagine feeling some soothing when you’re running from a tiger. You can’t do both. Either you’re running or you’re feeling the sensation. That’s enough of a signal to your body, like, “It’s okay. We can slow down.” Or like I said, it’s safe enough to slow down.
It’s that, or sometimes if you’re so revved up – I’ve had times in my life where I was so revved up that nothing worked except to just lie on the floor and let myself work through all that, let it flow through, or – it’s almost like if you’ve ever had a vehicle that was revving, revving, revving, revving, and nothing worked except if you just hit the gas.
What that would look like practically is do 10 jumping jacks or sprint from here to your mailbox. That’s 5 seconds, whatever that is. Enough to punch that sympathetic down a little, downshift a little, and then use your other tools – or hopefully, if you can do this with somebody else, it’s even more comforting and supportive.
But those are some simple things to actually be like, “Oh, I’m hungry now.” We knew it was there; that other piece was just so revved up or – not in the way, but just doing its thing to protect you, that eating would feel like white-knuckling at the time. And there’s only so long you can white-knuckle. Or not eating at the time could feel like white-knuckling.
Chris Sandel: This is fairly new for me, or at least new exploring in this level of detail, and for me reading the Deb Dana book. When you’re working with someone fairly early on and they’re struggling with an eating disorder and it’s maybe at the more extreme end of things, are they experiencing times where they’re getting out of that sympathetic fight and flight mode very much? Or it’s pretty much like that doesn’t happen till later on?
Tracy Brown: The more I just go for it and try things with people early on – some people wouldn’t have gotten out of their dysregulation – I think of a person I have, and all the worst traumas you could think of, and adding trauma to this is being in a higher weight body with anorexia. There’s nothing else I could do for her. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t keep food down. Her system was so dysregulated at the beginning that her only ways of feeling not up were self-harm, restricting, and purging to come down.
I had no choice. I had to do this with her to help food get in. Otherwise, she was going to be hospitalized any second from just malnutrition. Which was an option, but she didn’t want to do that. I’m like, “This is the work we’re going to have to do, then.” That started probably almost 3 years ago.
That much complex trauma, that much dysregulation, and I don’t think if I would’ve done things traditionally, like I had done in the past, that she would’ve been outpatient. She had a good trauma therapist too, and we had a really good team and had enough support. But I look back on that and I would not have had – without this, I would’ve done things differently with her than I would’ve done 14 years ago. I would’ve been like, “Here’s your meal plan. Let’s get more food in,” and really just relied on the relationship.
But now I have the relationship, educating her, and really learning how to track her nervous system to teach her how to do it, so she can notice when she was revving up and she could notice when dissociation was coming, and use something else to anchor her in now.
The results can be pretty amazing, and just consistently consistent, like week after week after week. That’s something that even with very – if you’re in a complex situation, this can be done.
01:34:30
Chris Sandel: You talked about something before, and I think you mentioned it when you did some course – I can’t remember which one you were talking about – and you said there’s different stages where people can get tripped up in terms of making food choices. One of them was being unsure when reaching for food or that indecision. That’s something that comes up a lot for clients, so what insights have you got on that?
Tracy Brown: I highly recommend if anybody ever gets a chance to train with Paula Scatoloni and Rachel Lewis – I was kind of putting the pieces together before I went to their training or started working with them about a year and a half ago, around just the really detailed, nuanced pieces of what’s happening. It’s not even just with the Polyvagal; it’s really just our developmental feeling, like we know how to know what we want.
Let’s say I don’t know what I want to eat. That’s saying that we don’t have enough push. We don’t have enough push within ourselves for me to be out there in the world. It’s almost like if it doesn’t feel safe to be out there with my needs and how I feel and what I want, there’s a level of – what we’ve learned to survive is, “Why try? Why even pay attention to what I want, because it’s not going to get met anyway?” or “What I want isn’t okay.”
Basically, that gets all scrambled up with food choices. When you’re first allowed to eat anything, let’s say with intuitive eating, it’s like, “I don’t really know what I like or I want because I’ve spent so much time eating what I needed to eat to be acceptable.” So food rules, macros, whatever programming – I call all diets “programming” – whatever programming you’ve been put through or put yourself through is all mental as an adaptive strategy to try to fit in, to try to be safe. That’s all it comes down to.
It’s hard to know “There’s no more rules? I can eat what I want? I’ve spent so much time not asserting myself, not knowing how to listen to what I want, it’s kind of atrophied.” A lot of a somatic approach to helping people with this is pushing. Literally, “I don’t know what I want to eat,” and you give them all kinds of options, and they still don’t know which one to choose. It’s like, “How about you get up and push against the wall? Let’s do a modified push, like a pushup position against the wall, and just give a little push. Then relax and do it again.”
Some people are like, “I still don’t know.” That’s okay. Let’s just do the best we can with what you remember you used to like. We’ll get there. It’s okay. Some people immediately are like, “Just being able to assert myself, like something’s there and I pushed, I know who I am now.”
It’s like a metaphor. If I know where my body is in the space, I can be more – how that reflects in the body is I can locate what I want, because I’m here, and I can push. The next day would be the reach. I know I want steak and potatoes. Some people, unless they know what they want, they’re like, “Yeah, I know what I want now,” and the next day just reach. They get it.
Sometimes what that will look like when we have trouble with the reaching is like, if somebody gives it to me, I can reach for it. But reaching with my own choice and volition feels really scary, like going to the grocery store or taking the package out of the refrigerator and putting it in the pan. I start to do it, and then I get in my head and the brain clicks in. That’s our survival strategy. “That’s too much fat or too much calories” or whatever, when really, it’s the body fear first, and the brain is trying to make meaning of why you’re so scared.
There’s a reach thing. We have to help people reach. A lot of times assisted meals really, really help with that. You’re reaching and I’m pushing it to you. Can you take it? Can you grab it now? If they have some good experiences of eating, where what they wanted was not criticized, not rejected, not told “you don’t really want that, you actually want this” – which is our culture. Everybody’s trying to tell us what we should eat and how much we should eat and how to do it.
It gets scary to reach, because if you go to reach for what you want, maybe somebody in your history made a comment about your food. Like, “Oh gosh, you got a second helping of that.” So you went to reach for that second helping and you stop wanting to reach because somebody’s going to notice it and then maybe make a comment.
We’re trying to help that reach be safe again, whether that’s self-care work or whether that’s just continued practice of reaching, nothing bad happens. Literally, if people are struggling to do it on their own, assisted meals really help the reach get better fast.
01:39:40
Chris Sandel: There are two things that come up for me with everything you said there. One is with that reach piece. The thing that can be difficult afterwards is if that food isn’t as enjoyable as someone imagines it’s going to be.
I think that can be a really difficult piece, especially if it is something that someone deems as a challenge food or a high-calorie food or whatever. There’s this feeling of “if I’m going to have that amount of energy come in, it’d better be the best thing I’ve ever eaten.” 99 times out of 100, that’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to be as exciting or amazing as you’ve imagined it’s going to be. I think that can be a challenge for people to get through.
Tracy Brown: This is less somatic, but it’s more just like, “yeah, disappointing, huh?” We’re teaching people how – it’s almost like, Chris, you and I, through a doorway of food and food experiences and body experiences, through that doorway, so much more gets learned about resilience. Like, yeah, disappointing. We get disappointed. What can we do with that?
The good news about the body is – it’s not a mistake, but sometimes if you get disappointed with how quickly you got full or that wasn’t as good as you thought, I’m so grateful bodies are so awesome, because we’re going to get hungry again in a couple hours, handful of hours, and we get to try again. What’s that like for you?
You’re really building some skills that they didn’t probably learn. Like, I didn’t learn how to deal with disappointment. I didn’t deal with that well, so I tried to be perfect. [laughs] Or I was used to everything being crappy emotionally, so what’s the point of getting excited about anything? That’s where you learn not to like anything. Why get excited about food and food being pleasurable? Who cares about pleasure? Just eat what you’ve got to eat. Who cares?
Chris Sandel: What you were saying, I definitely agree with. The other part to point out is when you’ve had food be so restricted for so long and be this big drama in your life, as you recover, it stops being that, and that can often feel like someone’s losing something. The novelty of eating just disappears.
Tracy Brown: Yeah, there’s a hole there. Like, this was my excitement. This was my friend, my pleasure, my excitement. It fills a hole of the thing that was missing, which is co-regulation. It’s like, I’m eating because something was missing.
Our job is to help them discover what’s missing through that experience with food. When you get sad, you’re not binging and you’re not getting really full or you’re not going to eat – I did all these things, so I’m giving my own experiences. Like, “Now what do I do? I’m full of cookies, but now I’m just still sad. This sucks.” [laughs] It takes some time to build inner self-soothing, essentially, for when we feel sad. We do that usually with good experience with people or learning how to ride the waves ourselves. It just takes time.
Chris Sandel: Then the other thing was just in terms of the unsure piece for reaching for food. I would differentiate between what you describe, which seems to be someone having the unsureness pretty much across the board at every opportunity to eat, versus it occurring at intermittent points.
Typically when it appears at intermittent points, when I investigate, I’m like, you’ve just got to a point of being too hungry, and that’s what’s gone on. haven’t had an eating disorder, but I’ve definitely had the experience of being so hungry that I’ve walked around a supermarket for 20 minutes, still not being able to just pick something.
Tracy Brown: Yeah, so maybe here’s the idea of “I don’t know what to eat.” It could be I’m too hungry, and the body doesn’t care anymore what you pick. Just pick something. High density, please. Sometimes it’s like, “I’ve been eating too repetitively.” Sometimes it’s like, “I’m not really connected truly.” Now that I’ve eaten all the foods, it’s not that special, so I’m just going through that grieving time of food isn’t this big, high-priority thing besides just to get my needs met anymore. That’s just new and weird and different.
I always call it now the real adulting begins, where it’s like I’ve got to do this thing where I make a grocery list and kinda sorta have an idea of what I’m going to make so I’m not just staring at the pantry like people who have an eating disorder, let’s say. Because planning doesn’t mean that you’re being restrictive or being obsessive; it just means you’ve got to bring food in the house. That’s maybe a new experience, doing it from a providing perspective versus depriving perspective.
Chris Sandel: That is definitely something I point out a lot with people because I think what can feel like a disordered behavior isn’t a disordered behavior because in the other context, it’s just planning, and it completely makes sense.
There’s nothing wrong with bringing snacks with you if you’re like “I’m going to be out and I want to have something to eat,” but there’s probably something wrong with the situation if you’re like “I have to bring this snack with me because there’s no food that I’m allowed to eat out in the rest of the environment because I only eat this handful of safe foods.”
Tracy Brown: That’s right.
01:45:20
Chris Sandel: The final thing I wanted to ask before we wrap this up – I see on your site that you run a study a handful of times a year where you teach the book When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies. This is a book I’ve never read before, so I just wanted to hear why you’ve picked this book, why it’s so important for you. Why do you think it’s so helpful when running those sessions to have that book as the backbone?
Tracy Brown: There’s so many good body image books now. So many good ones. But I always keep coming back to this book because it really gets into the metaphor of when you’re saying “my belly is too far out there,” what are we saying? When this book was written, it was basically the experiences of a therapist interviewing and working and unpacking with these women what these phrases actually meant from the inside out.
It’s easy to say “I don’t have the right belly because the culturally acceptable belly is smaller and flatter and tighter” and all that, but we’re saying so much more. “My belly is so big. It’s so out there.” I’m like, out there for what? In a really loving, exploratory way, like what’s in there that you’re saying it’s too much for?
You’ll get so much more information than just trying to start off with – it’s almost like if you understand what you’re actually trying to communicate with let’s say a body part that you’re trashing, you get to the heart of what is feeling so much, so uncomfortable. What feels like it’s not acceptable? It’s always an experience or a state or an emotion or something. That includes living in a fatphobic culture, but also just relationship with ourselves and with other people and how we’re going to do life.
It just goes through that over and over and over again, and there’s so many really, really good experiential exercises. I love it because it’s from the perspective of what most people look like, which isn’t thin. That’s really important to me, because most people aren’t going to recover in a thinner body. There’s going to be all kinds of bodies.
I just think that any body size would benefit from doing the exercises in this book, and just hearing the really raw experiences of going through what these things feel like. When you’re in this “I can’t stand this body and I want to get rid of it!” and learning how to really be in the rawness of that in this book is super powerful. People navigate this and have a healthy relationship with food without getting smaller. It’s pretty amazing.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I definitely need to check it out. I will add it to my Amazon list. I’ve got a pretty crazy stack of books at the moment.
Tracy Brown: I bet. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: But it will get read, and I’ll let you know my thoughts.
This has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where should people go if they want to be finding out more about you or connecting with you, like website, social media, that kind of thing?
Tracy Brown: Thanks for offering. My website is simple. It’s https://tracybrownrd.com. I do a lot of Facebook lives, three times a week, at Tracy Brown RD on Facebook. That’s where I’m mostly hanging out.
I have conversations with people like we did with you today here, Chris. Just picking one little topic and distilling one little piece of it down for 5 to 10 minutes, because I want people to have this growth edge of nuance beyond the intellectual. I want them to have this embodied experience, so I practice that with people in little nuggets.
That’s essentially what I do. I also do a lot of training for professionals. That’s over at https://embodieddietitian.com, where I teach counseling skills and body image unpacking stuff and trauma integrated work. That’s where I’m mostly hanging out.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I hope people go and check that out, because I really enjoyed this conversation today. This is a topic that I’m just starting to delve into, so it was nice to be able to speak to someone who’s been doing this for 8 years and get so much more color than I can see at the moment.
Tracy Brown: If you ever want to have me come back – I mean, I just scratched the surface. I bet if you talk to me in 2 years or 5 years I’ll be like, “Oh Chris, I so didn’t know what I was talking about. This is much better.” There’s more understanding. Anyway, I appreciate that.
Chris Sandel: Perfect.
Tracy Brown: Cool. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been an honor and a privilege and a pleasure, and I hope that somebody, even one person, is like, “Oh, that revved up feeling is what’s messing up my hunger/fullness” or “Oh, me feeling like I keep eating past fullness, there’s a function for that.” And I want to say yes, there is. It’s not because you’re trying to hurt yourself.
Chris Sandel: Thank you, and I will definitely speak to you again.
Tracy Brown: Thanks, Chris.
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