Somatic Healing for Eating Disorder Recovery: An Embodied Approach
If you have been in eating disorder recovery—or supported someone who has—you may know the frustration of doing everything "right" in treatment and still feeling like a stranger in your own body. Talking helps. Nutritional support helps. And for many of us, something is still missing: the body itself.
This post explores an embodied, bottom-up approach to eating disorder recovery: one that treats the body not as the problem to be managed, but as a resource for healing and an important voice in the recovery process. It draws on my many years of training with The Embodied Recovery Institute (since 2021), on somatic healing frameworks, and on my own recovery.
A gentle note before we begin: eating disorders are serious, and this way of working is a companion to professional care, not a replacement for it. If you are in the thick of it, please stay connected to a treatment team who knows you—a doctor, therapist, or dietitian. The somatic lens I'm sharing here can sit alongside that support and, in my experience, deepen it.
My Own Recovery Asked for More Than Talking
My own eating disorder recovery journey began very traditionally as a top-down, cognitive approach. Over time, I found that talking was not enough; I was still afraid of my own body. Slowly, without really realizing what I was doing, I found myself engaging in embodiment practices as a way to get to know my body and how it communicates—but without much support from anyone who was eating disorder-sensitive.
When I found the Embodied Recovery Institute's training, I could not believe my luck. I have since completed my Level 1 and 2 trainings in Embodied Recovery for Eating Disorders (ERED), and this way of working now informs how I hold my 1:1 coaching and my own ongoing relationship with my body.
It Was Never Just About the Food
We all have a relationship with food and our bodies, and at some points in our lives, we may have used food and/or our body to cope. For some of us, it lasts for a phase, and for some of us (like me), the coping strategies that the eating disorder provides bring so much comfort and release that it takes over and soon has a feeling like it will never, ever, go away.
It can be frustrating and triggering to be told to just "eat normally." In my experience, it was never really about the food. Food and over-focus on body image are tools to cope, manage, and regulate. The body responds to these coping strategies, showing us where the dysregulation is happening.
What Traditional Eating Disorder Treatment Includes — and What It Misses
A typical eating disorder treatment process follows what ERED calls a bio-psycho-social model:
Bio: pharmacology, re-feeding, nutritional rehabilitation, and movement practices like yoga
Psycho: education about emotions, CBT-style therapies, and practices that aim to change one's thoughts in order to change behaviour
Social: family dynamics, one's sense of belonging in the world, in the culture, and in the family
There is usually a treatment team—a dietitian, psychiatrist, physician, family therapist, and others. This approach emphasizes getting someone to eat a prescribed amount of food, reach a target weight, eat in a "normal" way, and change or stop behaviours. These are important and often life-saving foundations.
But something can still be missing.
Traditional treatment often doesn't look closely at how the body expresses and communicates. We have become so focused on the mind that we can forget: if we listen to how the body is responding, we can see how it is expressing dysregulation through eating disorder behaviours themselves.
What an Embodied, Bottom-Up Approach Looks Like
From an ERED perspective, we work with the body rather than against it—bringing it into the conversation and into relationship. We learn how to resource the body rather than viewing it as an obstacle.
When we work with the body first, the body can support us in our relationship with food. From this model, anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, movement, and posture are all included. The body collaborates with us at the physiological level to support the infrastructures that underlie emotional regulation, memory, and sustained healing. This is what a bottom-up approach means.
From this lens, recovery is the practice of embodiment, not behaviour change. It is about adding—not further restricting and subtracting. It is about restoring body trust.
Embodiment grows as we enhance two kinds of awareness: awareness of what is around us through our distance and contact senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch), and awareness of our own inner body through interoception, proprioception, and the vestibular sense. Embodiment is the intersection of our own awareness and our physical container; it is where our consciousness and physical body intersect. An eating disorder shows us where and how we are not yet fully embodied.
(Interoception—the felt sense of what's happening inside us—is central here. If this is new territory, my post on stress and interoception is a good companion read.)
Three Ways We Can Experience Disembodiment
ERED describes three systems through which we may lose connection with the body: the sensory integration system, the attachment system, and the defense system.
The Sensory Integration System
This system can be influenced by conception, birth trauma, premature birth, trauma and generational trauma, and innate sensitivity.
If we are sensitive, the vagal system can become overloaded and overwhelmed, and begins to shut down. We then move into sympathetic or dorsal states, which do not support effective ingestion, digestion, and elimination. When this system is affected, we might experience sensory processing challenges—which can, in turn, influence our ability to take in nourishment.
For eating disorders, we gently feed the senses to support ventral vagal engagement, resourcing the sensory integration system to help manage the information coming in. Restrictive eating may function as a coping strategy to avoid feeling the overload (sensory avoidant). Binge eating may serve as a strategy to seek sensory input (sensory seeking). Both are accommodations—intelligent attempts to regulate challenging sensory information.
From this perspective, eating disorder behaviours are pointing us toward where there is dysregulation: a window into where we are not yet fully embodied.
The Attachment System
How we relate to food corresponds to our relational dynamics. How we move through the world—seeking connection or disconnection—relates to our attachment system.
We have basic developmental movement patterns (yield, push, reach, grasp, and pull) that have either been allowed full expression or been truncated through our early attachment relationships.
Take yielding: the ability to rest, to just be, to allow support to meet our body, to lean in and receive. It correlates with the type of attachment and nurturance we were given as babies—and it is crucial for ingestion. Knowing how to yield means we also know when to stop without jumping straight into the next thing. Yielding means we know when to take in food, allow for the whole swallow, finish our food, know when enough is enough, and know when to take in food again.
Being able to yield comes with the beliefs "I am enough," "there is enough for me," and "I belong in the world." When yield is not embodied, it can lead to beliefs of not being enough—manifesting as perfectionist pursuits, overeating, not eating at all, chronic dieting, or being unable to stop exercising.
From a treatment perspective, "yield" means something distinct to the dietitian, the bodyworker, and the therapist—so each member of the recovery team can address it within their own field as part of a truly integrated approach.
The Defense System
If we have not been able to complete a defensive action, the nervous system can remain dysregulated in ways that don't support nourishing, responsive eating. Digestion is significantly impaired when we are stuck in a dysregulated state. This is why trauma matters at such a foundational level: it can truncate both the attachment impulses that bring us into connection and towards nourishment, keeping us separate and stuck in hyper- or hypoarousal.
The Nervous System Lens: Polyvagal Theory and the Window of Tolerance
ERED draws on Polyvagal Theory and the concept of the window of tolerance. (It's worth naming that some of Polyvagal Theory's specific neurophysiological claims are debated in the scientific literature; I hold it as a clinically useful map of nervous system states rather than settled science.)
When we have a robust window of tolerance, we can identify hunger and fullness, sense our physiological and emotional state, connect with others, and move between sympathetic and parasympathetic states with awareness and ease. When the window is disrupted and narrowed through trauma and chronic stress, we develop accommodations and strategies to regulate. Through this lens, eating disorder behaviours can be understood as attempts to stay inside a window of optimal arousal—what ERED calls a "faux window." The regulation it offers is an illusion, but the impulse underneath it—the longing to feel okay when underneath things are not—is real and worthy of compassion.
Eating disorder behaviours show us where and how we are dysregulated: the state of our ventral vagal system, our relationships, our physiology.
Letting the Body Speak
With all of this in mind: can we allow the body to have the space to speak? Can I speak from my body?
This is the heart of the work for me—training the nervous system to do what it did not get to do in the early years of life. Practicing what it means to feel safe, physiologically and neurobiologically. Building somatic scaffolding, gently, at the body's pace. And acknowledging honestly the impact that our society and culture have on our sense of safety in our bodies.
If your recovery has felt like it's missing the body—if you've done the talking and something in you is still bracing—this is the work I hold space for in 1:1 somatic coaching. We go slowly, at the pace of your nervous system, alongside whatever other support you have in place.
With gratitude,
Francesca 🌹
Continue Your Journey
Read: Stress, Interoception, and Why Eating Gets Hard
Read:The Original Meaning of an Eating Disorder Diagnosis
Join: EARTH — a free monthly eating disorder recovery support group
Download: Free somatic resources
Work with me: 1:1 Coaching
