Disordered eating is often seen as a cognitive issue—something to fix with reframed thoughts or behavior change. But what if the body has been speaking all along? In this post, Angel Jones reframes disordered eating as an embodied survival strategy. Blending research, personal insight, and the Somatic Integration and Processing (SIP) model, she explores how listening to the body can unlock deeper, more lasting healing.
When the Body Speaks: Desire, Fear, and the Roots of Disordered Eating
By Angel Jones
“I was 13 when I first tried binding my body. I wanted to be wanted.”
“By 9, I already fantasized about cutting parts of myself away.”
“Food became my quiet companion… predictable, comforting.”
These kinds of embodied truths don’t often make it into clinical manuals, but they live in the therapy room. They live in the nervous system. They live in the posture, the breath, the ache behind someone’s eyes when they say, “I just don’t know why I can’t stop.”
My research began as an academic exploration and evolved into a deeply personal reckoning: What if the way we treat disordered eating has been missing the point? What if beneath the food behaviors, control patterns, and body shame lies something more ancient, more human?
Reframing Disordered Eating as Survival
Traditional treatment models like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Family Therapy offer important tools. But despite decades of research, nearly half of the clients don’t experience lasting recovery. Why?
Because thoughts don’t just live in the brain. They live in the body.
Perfectionism, low self-worth, and emotional numbing; these aren’t just cognitive distortions. They’re strategies. Adaptations. They’re the body’s attempt to stay safe in environments that weren’t.
In my review of literature, I was struck by the language we use: “maladaptive behaviors,” “distorted thoughts,” “symptom relief.” But when we zoom in on the lived experience, we notice tight chests, racing hearts, shrinking postures, and avoidance patterns. An opportunity to see that disordered eating is not a brokenness to fix but a story to listen to.
The Duality of Desire and Fear
One study (Rodgers et al., 2021) separated two often conflated experiences: the desire for thinness and the fear of fatness. They are not opposites; they are different nervous system states. One rooted in approach, reward, and longing. The other in avoidance, threat, and shame.
I saw this again and again: desire and fear wrapped around each other, tangled like roots under the soil. The longing to be seen, to be chosen, to take up space, and the terror of what that might cost.
The body remembers.
The Gap Between Knowing and Feeling
Therapies like CBT and even Interpersonal Psychotherapy often focus on behavior change or relational insight, but rarely do they invite the body into the process. We talk about embodiment, but we don’t practice it.
What happens when we actually do?
That’s where models like Somatic Integration and Processing (SIP) come in. SIP doesn’t treat the body as a symptom. It treats it as a storyteller. A guide. A protector. It helps us recognize that bingeing, restricting, disappearing are not dysfunctions. They are intelligent responses to unmet needs, disrupted attachments, and survival-driven shame.
SIP allows the body to come back into relationship. Not just with food, but with itself.
Honoring the Body’s Wisdom
To heal from disordered eating, we have to be brave enough to ask different questions.
What if healing doesn’t start with reframing thoughts, but with reconnecting to sensation?
What if we honored the nervous system’s intelligence even when it seems contradictory?
What if therapy became a place where all of us was welcome.. our hunger, our fear, our longing?
Because this work is not about fixing people. It’s about witnessing them. It’s about helping the body feel safe enough to relinquish the protective strategies it’s clung to for so long.
This is Personal.
My research was rooted in evidence, but it’s also rooted in story. My own and the counrless stories of so many who feel like they are too much or not enough.
To those bodies: I see you. I honor the ways you’ve kept yourself safe, even when it hurt.
Let us stop silencing symptoms.
Let us start listening.
Let us go to the roots.
- Cooper, M., Fairburn, C. G., & Shafran, R. (2003).
Cognitive behavior therapy for eating disorders: A “transdiagnostic” theory and treatment. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12711261/
- Rodgers, R. F., et al. (2021).
Desire for thinness vs. fear of fatness: A dual pathway model in eating disorders.
DOI: 10.1002/eat.23460
- Schuman-Olivier, Z., et al. (2020).
Mindfulness and behavior change.
NIH Public Access: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6981238/
- Zaitsoff, S., Pullmer, R., Cyr, M., & Aime, H. (2015).
The role of the therapeutic alliance in eating disorder treatment outcomes: a systematic review. https://doi.org/10.1080/10640266.2014.964623
- Somatic Integration and Processing