495-The Link Between Work, Burnout and Food Behaviors with Sabrina Magnan

Is there a connection between burnout and disordered eating?

Yes. Burnout and disordered eating often share the same underlying driver: a belief that your worth depends on performance, control or how your body looks. When that belief is active, food and work become two arenas for the same cycle. Restriction or overwork, a push toward a goal, a crash, shame, and a renewed promise to try harder. In cognitive behavior coaching this is captured in a simple principle: how we do one thing is how we do everything.

From a nervous system perspective, both patterns are survival responses. When the stakes feel high, decisions are driven by anxiety and guilt rather than by care. Behaviors like perfectionism, overworking, restricting and overeating function as protective strategies. They help a person avoid uncomfortable emotions or a deeper sense of not being enough. They are not self-sabotage, and they are not a lack of discipline.

This is why more strategy, more willpower or more self-improvement rarely resolves either pattern. Criticizing protective behaviors adds threat and keeps the body in survival mode. What tends to help is building the capacity to feel emotions as physical sensations without immediately analyzing or escaping them. Then testing small, doable changes that show the nervous system a new behavior is safe.

In a weight-neutral, non-diet approach, the goal isn’t to control food or productivity more effectively. It’s to change the belief and the energy behind the choices. A regulated choice is flexible and doesn’t threaten a person’s sense of worth when plans change. Episode 495 of It’s Beyond The Food, with relationship with food coach Sabrina Magnan, looks at this connection through her experience as a former high-level athlete and business owner.

Transcript

[00:00:05] Stephanie: Welcome to It’s Beyond the Food podcast, my sister.

[00:00:07] Stephanie: I’m Stephanie Dodier, your host, and today we have a guest on the podcast. Her name is Sabrina. Welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:14] Sabrina: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

[00:00:16] Stephanie: I’m excited to talk about your specialty today, because we’re gonna talk about the correlation between the relationship to food, work, burnout, anxiety, and I’m excited to have this conversation.

[00:00:29] Stephanie: Let me introduce you to the guest. I have a short bio here for you I’m gonna read, and then we’re gonna drop right into your story. So Sabrina is a woman’s relationship with food coach and the host of the Live Unrestricted podcast. She’s been doing this work for six years, and she is the founder also of the Food Freedom Academy.

[00:00:49] Stephanie: Did I read this right?

[00:00:51] Sabrina: Yes.

[00:00:52] Stephanie: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Okay. So I’m always curious on the origin story of my guests. How did you came to do this work? Because our work is not mainstream, so how did you get to this work, Sabrina?

[00:01:06] Sabrina: Yeah, so I was a synchronized swimmer at a high level for over eight years growing up, so from 8 to 16.

[00:01:17] Sabrina: And I also grew up in a family of very high achievers, very high standards. And synchronized swimming, for anyone who’s not familiar with the sport, is highly focused on perfection, looking a certain way, having a lot of structure. I was training over 20 hours a week, and so that’s all I knew. That was my growing up.

[00:01:45] Sabrina: And when I retired from the sport at 16, I was so terrified of gaining weight, because so much of my life had been around achievement and around looking a certain way. And so the thought of gaining weight was like losing everything, losing my identity, losing my sense of worth. And so I did what most people do at that age, I started dieting.

[00:02:12] Sabrina: I started counting calories, um, MyFitnessPal, spending two hours on the treadmill, and turning everything that I loved about food into control and trying to eat as little as possible. And for years, my relationship with food just got worse and worse and worse, and it was the very classic cycle of I would try to control and be so strict during the week or during the day, and then I would completely lose control at night or on the weekends.

[00:02:49] Sabrina: And the more out of control I felt, the more I tried to double down on restricting and rules and rigidity, and it felt like this- like the Chinese finger trap where the, the more you try to take yourself out of it, the deeper in it you get. And when I went to university and I was for the first time living away from home and my every sense of being grounded or being safe or being taken care of was taken away from me, and so then my disordered eating morphed into orthorexia, where I was counting every single calorie that I was burning on my fitness tracker, and then counting every calorie in MyFitnessPal.

[00:03:38] Sabrina: And it became this, almost this competition with myself of seeing that I was able to lose weight, I was able to control my body, and that felt so intoxicating and I thought once I hit a certain weight, then I will feel I don’t even know what I thought I would feel. It’s like you kind of just get caught up in this idea that once you lose weight, your life is gonna be better.

[00:04:02] Sabrina: You’re gonna be more loved. You’re gonna feel better. You’re gonna be happier. You’re gonna be more confident. And I’ll never forget at my sister’s baby shower, it was the first time I was becoming an aunt, and I was supposed to… It was supposed to be such a joyous day celebrating my family, and I just spent the entire day at the buffet table feeling completely out of control, going back for seconds and thirds and fourths, and going from the table to the bathroom to the table.

[00:04:35] Sabrina: And that night, I just had this rock bottom moment where I felt so physically horrible, mentally horrible, and I had this flash in my mind of, “What are you doing all of this for? You thought that once you hit a certain weight, you’re gonna feel different.” And I was 30 pounds underweight at that time, and I was the most anxious, most miserable.

[00:05:04] Sabrina: I had… I felt like I had dug myself a hole that I didn’t know how to take myself out of. And so long story short, I ended up going to Italy that summer, and it was so terrifying. I was so scared to gain weight, to be taken out of my routine, to be forced to eat foods that I was so not used to eating. But it ended up being such a blessing because I got to experience what ease and peace and connection with food looked like.

[00:05:33] Sabrina: People there don’t talk about calories. They’re not talking about burning off their gelatos or going to the gym. It’s a place where you slow down, you connect, you really revere the food that’s in front of you, and that was not something that I was used to. Like, my whole life had been about control and achievement and a means to an end.

[00:05:54] Sabrina: And so that really planted a seed that there was a different way of approaching food, and when I came back, that led me on a multi-year journey of just diving deep into disordered eating and eating disorders and body image and why do we do the things that we do. And I knew I’ve, I’ve always been obsessed with, like, psychology and behavior, and I knew that it was so much more than just diets and control and willpower.

[00:06:22] Sabrina: And so that led me to become a coach and to start doing this in my own business, and, um, that came with its own set of challenges and, um, paralleling my disordered eating, but in my relationship with work. And I know that’s something that you wanna talk about today, so I’m more than happy to talk about how the challenges that I had with food started showing up in my business and in my work.

[00:06:50] Stephanie: Yeah, and what, what I found fascinating when you pitched me for the interview, and by the way, that’s a compliment because very few pitches make it to an actual interview, was the angle, because there’s something I say in cognitive behavior coaching is how we do one thing is how we do everything.

[00:07:10] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:11] Stephanie: ‘Cause in my world, we work at the belief level, and when we have the belief that whatever it is for you, and we’ll discover it as I’m, as we’re developing this story. But the- most of my clients, their belief is a variation of, “I’m not good enough.”

[00:07:27] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:28] Stephanie: And we start unpacking with food, and then as the layer peel, we realize it’s with relationship, it’s with work, it’s with this.

[00:07:36] Stephanie: And it’s like this belief, what, what they’re realizing is this belief is not only with food. So I’m wondering how this came to be with you. Yeah. How did you discover the connection?

[00:07:48] Sabrina: Yeah, and that, that belief of I’m not enough is definitely, is definitely the driver. Um, because I, I started doing this, um, this work s- over six years ago, and uh, the first few years were relatively, w- went relatively well.

[00:08:08] Sabrina: It was during COVID, and things were different, and I was innocent. I didn’t have any baggage and failures under my belt. But I was also so used to overworking. Like, for me, overworking 12 hours a day was just normal. I didn’t question it. And as time went on and I started doing different projects and launches, um, you fail in business.

[00:08:33] Sabrina: You fail a lot, and it’s like you fail 10 times and you succeed once out of those 10 times. And, um, each failure destroyed me. It would, it would create anxiety, shame, embarrassment, guilt, and it was like I would notice how I would feel around a launch, and I went into complete survival mode, complete fight or flight.

[00:09:02] Sabrina: And every ability to tap into my creativity and my logical thinking, like, went out the door, and it was all about survival. And- I would have these launches, sometimes they would not go as I wanted them to, and then it would take me out for like a week or two, and I would be so burnt out because leading up to a launch I would start overworking and overdoing and trying to prove.

[00:09:32] Sabrina: And, and then I would burn out and, and then to get back into work and to bring yourself back into doing this thing was difficult. And as the years went on, it just… I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t really get to what was going on underneath it. It was just, I just gotta work harder. I just have to do more, learn more, more strategy, more, more, more, until eventually it was like my body just wouldn’t let me do more anymore.

[00:10:03] Sabrina: And you get to a point where it’s like you’re at a crossroads where your business is creating a lot of pain in your life. And I love what I do. I love… Like, I… This is my purpose. This is my mission. I know that I’m such a good coach, but the actual business aspect of it was creating so much pain that it’s like you have two decisions: either you stop doing this, or you have to address why you keep falling into the same cycles, what beliefs you have about yourself that are driving you to behave in this way

[00:10:39] Stephanie: And, and for the listener, I wanna open up the, I wanna broaden the scope to say it’s not just business.

[00:10:45] Stephanie: It could be a corporate career. It could be as a clinician, like pursuing, like moving from insurance-based to private care. Like, this applies to everything. And I just wanna make the parallel again of how similar it is with weight, right? From one launch system, from one diet to the next, from one launch to the next, right?

[00:11:08] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:09] Stephanie: Like, working hard, hard, hard, restricting, restricting, getting there, not getting the result that you want, falling into shame cycle, until the next again and then… Like, it’s the parallel.

[00:11:20] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:20] Stephanie: But when we’re in it, we don’t see it. It takes somebody from the outside, and that’s what the whole coaching, counseling industry is for, is for the outsider to see those pattern- Mm-hmm

[00:11:33] Stephanie: and to show them to you. So what did you recognize when you were able to see this?

[00:11:40] Sabrina: So I just wanna say also on top of that is that you know this. Uh, it’s, it’s often the most self-aware people who get caught in these cycles, right? Like, we often… W- there’s this belief that, like, it’s about weakness or discipline, but I was trying so hard to figure out what was going on, and I was reading the books, and I was listening to the podcast.

[00:12:03] Sabrina: And that parallel of each launch and each diet gets heavier to do. It, it’s like you, you start, you start become so protective of yourself that you’re like, “I don’t, I don’t wanna do this again.” Like, your nervous system, like, we’re gonna pump the brakes because we’ve associated so much pain with doing this thing, and the failure and the shame and the disappointment.

[00:12:28] Sabrina: And so that’s why whenever I’m, I’m talking to my clients about the, the, the pain and the shame, I’m like, “I get it,” because I’ve been there, and it shows up in every area of your life. And so I have worked with so many coaches throughout the years, and, um, what really started to make a difference a couple of years ago is when I started learning about the nervous system.

[00:12:52] Sabrina: And I started realizing how so much of what we do is just trying to protect us, that we are not self-sabotaging, that there isn’t this, like, negative force working against us, that so many of our behaviors, whether it’s with food or dieting or, in my job, perfectionism, inner critic, like overworking, those are all…

[00:13:19] Sabrina: There’s a reason why we develop these behaviors, and they are functional. In their own way, they have their own reason for being there. And what does not work is getting angry at those parts of yourself and trying to push them down, and trying to change them by bullying yourself or critiquing yourself.

[00:13:43] Sabrina: Because then you’re just putting yourself into more of a survival state, more dysregulation, ’cause you’re, you’re engaging in these protective mechanisms, but then you’re mad at yourself for engaging in these protective mechanisms, so then you get stressed out about that. And then that’s why it starts to feel like this negative spiral.

[00:14:03] Sabrina: And so I started learning about the nervous system and making some changes to my life in terms of having boundaries of when I was, when I was working and when I wasn’t, and that made a difference, for sure. But it was only once I started embodying the sensations of dysregulation, anxiety, worthlessness.

[00:14:29] Sabrina: Like, where do I f- where do I feel the pressure in my body? I was never taught how to feel emotions growing up. My dad’s an accountant, so, um, I’ve never heard him say the words, “I feel,” ever. And so I was… I’ve been taught to live in my head. It feels safer to live in my head, with the strategy and the learnings and the knowledge, and cognitively and intellectually understanding my problems.

[00:14:58] Sabrina: And I think a lot of people who listen to your podcasts probably feel the same way, where it feels safer to live by the rules. And like, I can write a book on my problems. But I started thinking about this question where if you ask someone, “How do you know that you’re anxious?” Like, when someone says, “I feel anxious,” and you say, “How do you know?”

[00:15:22] Sabrina: It’s like, “Well, I feel anxious.” But it’s like, but how do you know that you feel anxious? And having that embodied experience of your protective mechanisms and how it feels, and instead of running away from it, being present and giving attention to it, was something that was so foreign to me

[00:15:46] Stephanie: How did you get to the place of being able to feel?

[00:15:51] Stephanie: ‘Cause that’s the, that’s the biggest gap. And I just wanna highlight, before we get into this, I wanna highlight this whole self-awareness thing because I wanna… Yes, people recognize themself as highly self-aware, but they’re self-aware from a place of wanting to fix themselves. That’s why we fall into pattern of reading books and taking courses, because we are willing to be self-aware so that it can result in fixing ourselves.

[00:16:18] Stephanie: Now, the part we’re about to work right now through and talk about is being self-aware not to fix yourself, and that’s the bridge that provides the healing, that provides the change in behavior. But it’s scary

[00:16:35] Sabrina: Especially when so much of your life is about achieving, trying to get to some place. And I just got to a point where it was, I just wanna feel better.

[00:16:48] Sabrina: I wanna feel more whole. I wanna be kinder to myself. I don’t wanna have this experience of life. And I had this, this level of burnout where my body would not let me work. I would sit behind my computer, and it was just complete brain fog. And I would, I would push, and I would push, and then eventually I was like, well, I’m wasting my time sitting behind my computer doing nothing.

[00:17:19] Sabrina: And so let me do something really uncomfortable, which is I’m gonna start by taking a week off, and I’m just gonna do the bare minimum in my business and not try to create anything new, and we’ll see after a week. And after a week, it was, “I am not ready to go back.” So one week turned into over a month, and that was super uncomfortable and super foreign to me because I had not really taken any breaks in my business other than going on personal development retreats and va- vacations.

[00:17:57] Sabrina: Um, and so during that time, I, I really just knew that I needed to go inwards and, and figure out what’s driving these behaviors. And I had already learned about internal family systems therapy a couple of years ago, and it had resonated with me so much when I first started doing the work. And then I kind of got taken away from it, and it came back into my life.

[00:18:31] Sabrina: I had like i- the universe I think is always just kind of placing things in your path, and it got placed back in my path. And I was like, okay, yes, I wanna get back into internal family systems. And, um, do you want me to kind of just shortly explain? Yeah, yeah. Yeah?

[00:18:46] Stephanie: For people who don’t know what- ‘Cause it’s not something we talk a lot on the podcast about.

[00:18:51] Sabrina: Yeah.

[00:18:52] Stephanie: So please explain t- what is internal family system and how it helped you.

[00:18:56] Sabrina: Yeah. So internal family systems therapy is this idea that we are not just this one-dimensional person, that we are made up of a bunch of different parts. And you often will hear people say, like, “A part of me wants this, wants success, but another part of me does not want me to be successful.”

[00:19:13] Sabrina: And this is a very real internal dynamic that we have where we have parts that are meant to protect us. Those are the perfectionist, the overworker, the dieter, the restrictor, and those are called protectors. And then you have other parts that are called exiles, and the exiles are often much younger versions of us that- carry pain and carry emotional wounds.

[00:19:43] Sabrina: And so it could be you were abandoned when you were younger, or you didn’t get your emotional needs met, uh, you weren’t seen, you were shamed, you were embarrassed, you, you have this belief that there’s something wrong with me. And when you have this exile that carries this belief that there’s something wrong with me, our protectors don’t want us to feel the pain of that exile.

[00:20:11] Sabrina: And so they are responsible for managing our life or coming into our lives when we are triggered, so we have these parts that we’ll overeat. If you start feeling like, “Oh my God, I’m feeling these emotions,” nope, the overeater part will come in and be like, “I got you. You don’t have to feel these things.

[00:20:30] Sabrina: I’m just gonna have you disconnect from your body for a little bit so you don’t have to feel this.” Or you pick up your phone. “Ah, this doesn’t feel good.” Just pick up your phone. You don’t… You can escape your body while doing this. And when you start doing internal family systems, you… I would say at first for me, it was a little frustrating because you actually start paying attention to what’s going on in this inner world that you have.

[00:20:58] Sabrina: And you start feeling like, “How have I not been paying attention to this?” Because we just get really good at pushing these things down. And imagine that you have a kid who is deeply needing your attention, like they are in pain, and they have unmet needs. But instead of getting down on two knees and being like, “Tell me,” like, “I’m here to listen.

[00:21:23] Sabrina: Tell me what’s going on. What do you need?” Instead you just push them into a corner and you’re like, “Can you just stop talking? Stop being so needy. Stop being so sensitive. I’ve got things to do.” Well, they’re just gonna become more hurt and more extreme and more dysregulated, and that’s often what we do with our internal world.

[00:21:44] Sabrina: And so we end up being driven by these emotional patterns. They control our behaviors, but we don’t know how to stop ’cause we don’t have a relationship with them.

[00:21:57] Stephanie: Hmm. So it’s about sur- because you talked about that earlier, survival energy- Mm-hmm … which is the part where we’re just trying to keep going and achieve our goal, right?

[00:22:10] Stephanie: And that’s the protector. And then there’s the regulated energy. Mm. Talk about this. Like, that’s the other side of it, I’m assuming, right?

[00:22:18] Sabrina: Yeah. So healing my relationship with food has been a great teacher because I know the difference between approaching food from a place of survival versus from a place of regulation.

[00:22:32] Sabrina: Yeah. Where you’re approaching food from a place of survival or you’re approaching work or your relationships, everything feels high stakes. Like, if you make a mistake, something bad is gonna happen. You’re gonna gain weight. You’re gonna overeat. You’re gonna lose control. Someone’s gonna reject you. And so there’s so much anxiety that’s driving your decisions.

[00:22:53] Sabrina: There’s guilt because you are doing these things in order to feel a certain way about yourself. If I lose weight, if I eat perfectly, then I will feel good about myself, then I will feel whole, then I will feel enough. And it’s survival energy because if you don’t do that thing, then it feels like something bad is gonna happen.

[00:23:18] Sabrina: Versus when I’m now making choices around food, it’s completely regulated. It means it’s take it or leave it. I wanna make healthy choices because it feels good for my body, but if there’s a day where I can’t or I’m traveling or things are off schedule, there’s no anxiety. There’s no rigidity. There’s flexibility because if I need to gain weight, if there’s something going on in my life, like, it doesn’t affect my sense of worth, or I, I, I feel enough regardless of my body.

[00:23:53] Sabrina: And so these two energies show up in so many of the decisions we make, and that’s why I often say, like, the intention and the energy behind your choice is so much more important than the choice you’re making itself.

[00:24:10] Stephanie: Yeah. The behavior is… So that’s what, in my world, the behavior is just simply an output.

[00:24:16] Stephanie: Mm-hmm. It has zero value or zero meaning. It only means something when you have your desired outcome to it, but the behavior is just an output of your feeling and your thinking.

[00:24:27] Sabrina: Yes.

[00:24:28] Stephanie: Right? And that’s where the, the… what you’re talking about, the intention comes in, is if you’re thinking it like, “My weight means I’m worthy,” and the output makes you gain weight, then there’s this, like, drama.

[00:24:41] Stephanie: Like, there’s this failure that comes along it. But if the output means nothing about your worth, then it doesn’t have that energy you’re talking about, that dysregulated energy behind it.

[00:24:52] Sabrina: Exactly. Right? Yeah.

[00:24:55] Stephanie: So how… I, I wanna come back to the question because I don’t think we’ve answered it for the listener You said that you had to feel, learn to feel

[00:25:05] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:06] Stephanie: Yeah That’s a big roadblock for people. First, there’s two way. People think they’re already feeling and don’t wanna feel what they’re feeling-

[00:25:13] Sabrina: Mm-hmm …

[00:25:13] Stephanie: right? Or they have no concept of what it means feeling. So can you help us understand what it means to feel?

[00:25:21] Sabrina: Yeah. Because I thought, I thought I was so connected with my body, ’cause I, I am an intuitive eater.

[00:25:28] Sabrina: Like, I very effortlessly eat. It’s not, it’s, I listen to my body, and so it’s like I am so connected with my body. Same with exercise. Um, and then I started working with a somatic coach, and she would have me spend just 10 minutes dropping into my body. And she would ask me, “Is any part of your body calling for your attention right now?”

[00:25:56] Sabrina: And, um, I live with chronic back pain, which is, um, I think a big motivator on top of everything to escape my body, because to be in my body is painful. But I also did not realize how much of my chronic back pain was actually protective tension. It’s these parts of us often will show up as tension in our bodies, right?

[00:26:23] Sabrina: It’s this idea that the body leaves the score, and so we have all of these emotional wounds and traumas and tension that gets stored in our muscles and in our fascia. And so I would tap into it, and I would just start really doing a body scan, and I had heard body scans before. Like, it’s a classic in mindfulness and meditation.

[00:26:47] Sabrina: But I would allow myself to stay with it, and I never thought that the information, the tension, the sensations in my body had information for me. Which is also so funny, because I know so much about the nervous system. I know that 80% of the information that is traveling through the human body is coming from the bottom up to your brain.

[00:27:10] Sabrina: And I would tap in, and she would ask me questions, “How does this feel?” And immediately, I would go into analyzing and into talking about, “Well, this feels like this because of things that have happened in my life.” She’d go, “But how does it feel? Like, is there a, is there a shape to it? Is there a color to it?

[00:27:33] Sabrina: Do you see anything? Is there, is there a sensation to it?” And it was like using a muscle I’ve never used before, because I had gone so used to and so good at just jumping right back into my head that I would even notice how much there was this up and down and up and down. I would always have to just come back into my body- And be with those sensations and not try to escape them, not try to make sense of them.

[00:28:05] Sabrina: It really felt for me as if… I’ll use the back pain, for example, ’cause I, I work often with tension in my shoulders and in my back. And I started paying attention to it, and it was the, the pressure, the pressure of constantly you have to do. You, you’re wasting time. You can’t rest. You have to do, do, do, do, do.

[00:28:28] Sabrina: And I just… It was this feeling that I was just sitting next to the pressure, so sitting next to the tension, and just being with it, not trying to change it, not trying to get anything out of it. I was just being with it. And it’s this idea in IFS of the Self, the capital S Self, this essence that we all have, this consciousness, this wholeness that we all have access to.

[00:29:01] Sabrina: When we’re not split into all of these protective parts, we have this ability to be curious, and kind, and compassionate, and connected. And so you tap into this energy and you’re just like, “I’m just gonna be present with this sensation.” And there is so much value in just listening. Like, there’s so many people in our lives that we can think of that just being a listening ear and not having to change anything, you create a different relationship with it.

[00:29:36] Sabrina: And so I started creating this different relationship with it of I don’t need to change it. I don’t need to get rid of it. I actually need to be present with it and listen to it. And it’s with this presence in our bodies, and s- it’s gonna show up for different people. It’s I have tension in my forehead.

[00:29:56] Sabrina: That’s a different part of me. I have weight on my chest. That’s a different part of me. And I had gotten so used to feeling it and then immediately being like, oh, no, no, like, just put it away. Put it away. Don’t think about that. And to pay attention to it has been so valuable

[00:30:17] Stephanie: One of the thing that I, I know for myself when I went through this journey of feeling my feeling and feeling my body, and I see that with most of my clients as well, this capacity to listen.

[00:30:33] Stephanie: Like, and you will notice when you jump to your mind, like the first time you go in your body, you takes 10 second, you go into your brain, right? Or you disconnect from the sensation. So I, I call it the capacity to feel. Mm-hmm. And I wanna be transparent with people, like you’re clearly towards a high capacity, but I’m assuming it didn’t start with a high capacity.

[00:30:57] Stephanie: Meaning, that it started with probably being able to be in your body for 10 seconds.

[00:31:01] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:02] Stephanie: Then 30 seconds, and is that correct? Yeah. Like, you build that capacity over time.

[00:31:07] Sabrina: Yeah, and what will often happen, too, is you’ll get distracted, and it’s this, it’s this other part of you, this other protective part of you that’s like, “Let me distract her.

[00:31:18] Sabrina: Let me- let’s think about something else.” Or you, you start to feel disconnected from it. And so it is this practice of even recognizing, like, okay, there’s a part of me that doesn’t feel safe being with this sensation, that wants to distract me, that wants to disconnect me. Let me even get curious about this part that doesn’t feel safe around it.

[00:31:40] Sabrina: What feels scary about being with the tension in my back? What are you afraid is gonna happen? What are you trying to accomplish by distracting me? So you’re really creating this relationship where you’re trying to understand everyone’s motives, and they have positive intents. Like, that is the biggest thing that made a difference, is recognizing that all of the parts of us have a positive intent in protecting us, even if it feels like it’s harmful, it’s not serving us.

[00:32:09] Sabrina: And so recognizing, okay, I’m distracted, I’m- I’m disconnected. That’s okay. Let me just gently feel safe around bringing my attention back to it.

[00:32:19] Stephanie: Yeah. And it’s the, when we talk about this ability to look at the different parts, it’s all about creating safety. Mm-hmm. So in a, if, if we go into the world of, um, addiction, right, we talk, we’re very commonly aware of drinking behavior, right?

[00:32:37] Stephanie: And mass media and soc- society says it’s bad, but there’s a purpose to that behavior is to keep the person safe from feeling the trauma.

[00:32:47] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:47] Stephanie: And it’s the same thing at the level of food behavior and body image behavior. It is safer for us to harm ourselves with food than it is to feel or live through the current experience of our life.

[00:33:03] Stephanie: Mm-hmm. So it’s all about distraction. They’re not good or bad, they’re just ways that our being, ourselves, has learned to create internal safety. Yeah. And it’s re- to me, it’s rewiring how you create internal safety.

[00:33:19] Sabrina: And I, I had a great childhood, and I never considered myself as having had trauma. And I think that that’s also something that trips people up is we have this idea that, like, these big things need to have happened to us for us to create these dysregulated behaviors or have these emotional wounds that get stuck in our bodies.

[00:33:46] Sabrina: But no one gets out of this life als- unscathed. We all have experiences, emotional attachments, things that happen that we cannot escape because when we’re young, we’re always making a meaning out of everything. And so I found that that was really helpful too, is to stop being, beating myself up for being like, “You shouldn’t feel this way.

[00:34:10] Sabrina: Like, you had a good childhood. You didn’t have experiences where people left you or abandoned you.” But we all will experience these things of lack of safety and creating certain behaviors in our life to try to feel safe and loved.

[00:34:27] Stephanie: Yeah. And I think it’s very important for people to hear that because, again, s- mass, I’ll call it mass media portrays that as always just the big trauma, big T, but there’s all the small trauma that are learned in a overall look good childhood, but you develop those pattern often because of socialization, right?

[00:34:50] Stephanie: Mm-hmm. Women develop the pattern of wanting to be thin, not because of their family, ’cause of what they see everywhere. And I think it’s very interesting with you because I’ve worked with a number of athletes. They all have that same perfectionism pattern- Because in order to perform, you need to be perfect.

[00:35:10] Stephanie: Like, it’s just a pattern you learn. It’s not a trauma, it’s a pattern you learn in athletic. That in order to rank, you have to be perfectly swimming synchronetically with the entire team. So you just start thinking of life as this perfection will get me results.

[00:35:29] Sabrina: Mm-hmm. Yep. And it didn’t help that I was the youngest of five kids who, um, all did really well in school, and all did really well in sports.

[00:35:41] Sabrina: And so it… You really do just develop these patterns of thinking of, “If I just do really well, if I kill myself in school and in sports, then I will f- be seen. I will have attention. I will feel important.”

[00:35:58] Stephanie: Yeah. And it’s also, again, it’s not trauma, is that that’s how… And this is where internal family system, for me, is really good at getting people to understand their belief system.

[00:36:11] Sabrina: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:12] Stephanie: Right? It’s, it’s kind of an ex- It’s a framework to explore y- how you’ve learned to be you. But the question I have for you is there’s n- very little evidence in internal family system to change behavior because it’s more of an exploratory system. So I’m curious when you work with people, how do you bridge the gap from internal family system to actually behavior change?

[00:36:39] Stephanie: Yeah. What is the, what is the path there?

[00:36:42] Sabrina: Yeah. So the first piece, like you said, it is so helpful in understanding- Yeah … why you do the things that you do, where it come from, and where the motive is. And then the second layer of it is once you can recognize, ooh, okay, I’m this perfectionist in this area of my life because it is trying to lead me to do this, and to do this different behavior, to allow myself to just be imperfect or not rigid or inflexible, it feels uncomfortable because to my system it does not feel safe.

[00:37:21] Sabrina: And so it’s through these small little actions, um, which is called titration, right? You have this, and I know you know this. So you, you do these small little actions of, okay, what if… Can I show my system that doing something that I haven’t done before, in the context of food, for example, can I show my system that if I’m so used to skipping breakfast, maybe just eating like a small yogurt, that might feel really, really uncomfortable for me.

[00:37:54] Sabrina: I know why it feels uncomfortable for me. So we’re gonna do this small thing here where we’re gonna show our systems that it is safe, and by accumulating proof over time in these small doable steps, then you are actually… You’re, you’re being that adult self. You’re saying, “Okay, I know that you’re scared.

[00:38:16] Sabrina: I know that you’re trying to protect us,” and you are building trust to say, “Look at, look at what I’ve accomplished in my life.” Because oftentimes these parts of us think that we’re 15, 10 years old. They don’t trust you to make decisions. And so I find that when I go in and I’m like, “Man, look at, look at my support system now, look at what I’m capable of, look at things I’ve, I’ve achieved.

[00:38:42] Sabrina: Do you trust me to just start getting in the driver’s seat a little bit? And you can be in the passenger seat with me, and we can do this together.” But those protective parts, they don’t wanna let you just drive right away because they have been driving your entire life. The disordered eating, the dieting, the perfectionist, the inner critic, they have been protecting you their entire life.

[00:39:05] Sabrina: And so to then let go and be like, “Okay, you got this”- It’s like if you’ve never, if you’ve abandoned your kid or if you haven’t been with your kid for 10 years, you have to rebuild that trust to show, hey, I am here. I am capable. I am strong. I can lead us. And through these small little actions, you are building trust that you can be the leader, that you know what you’re doing

[00:39:36] Stephanie: And build internal safety.

[00:39:39] Stephanie: Exactly. So through small action, we relearn to do a new behavior and to make it safe. And you expressed that earlier in the podcast, I just wanna reflect that for you, when you were talking about business, and you took a week off, and then you took two weeks, and then you learned being safe in not working in your business, and how that can be safe.

[00:40:03] Stephanie: I’m curious now, what does your relationship to work, because we talk about relationship to food all the time, what does it look like now?

[00:40:11] Sabrina: So it is a work in progress. I will be so honest. It is a work in progress. And, um, one thing that I don’t think gets talked about enough when it comes to healing, it is how, um, obviously non-linear it is, but you go through these periods of expansion and then contraction.

[00:40:33] Sabrina: And so I will expand and I’ll have a day where I’m like, “This feels good, and I’m having fun, and I’m being myself, and I, I’m not overthinking.” And then there’s gonna be this moment the next day where it’s like, “Whoa. Let me, let me pull back. This was a lot. This was a lot of expansion.” And then those protective parts start to come back online.

[00:40:51] Sabrina: And so I am practicing the most patience, the most kindness and compassion, because there are some days that are really difficult because especially when you start feeling, you start feeling more. And I was not expecting that. When I started really being in my body, I was like, “Ooh, I am anxious more. I’m stressed more.

[00:41:19] Sabrina: I feel this panic.” And it’s not that they were never there. It’s that I never allowed myself to feel them. And so they were driving my behaviors. They were creating this urgency, but I just pushed them down. And so I think that it’s really valuable for anyone who’s doing this work to have this expectation of like, it might feel worse before it gets better.

[00:41:46] Sabrina: Mm. Because you have to let those things come through and teach you what they need to teach you. And so I am feeling more. I am, um, more conscious and definitely more aware when I’m working of when I’m working from a place of wholeness and when I’m working from a place of protection, or if we go back to those terms, when I’m regulated or I’m in survival.

[00:42:14] Sabrina: And instead of just pushing through and, and working through it- I’m really just slowing down. I’m allowing myself to have space, to be in my body, to recognize what fears I’m feeling, and putting this sense of I need to get somewhere away, because it’s only created pain for me. So now it’s I see my business as the vehicle to my healing, as the vehicle to my expansion.

[00:42:50] Sabrina: And I don’t think that I would’ve been given this desire and this mission and this purpose for nothing. And I, I am so grateful, even though sometimes it is so hard, I am so grateful because I wouldn’t have done this work if I was in a 9:00 to 5:00 behind a desk where I wasn’t confronting my fears and my anxieties every single day.

[00:43:15] Sabrina: When you’re running a business, you would know. Like, you can’t hide from your shadows.

[00:43:20] Stephanie: Well, a business… For those of you who are thinking to jump into a business or have a business and you haven’t clicked on, business is the, the biggest self-development adventure.

[00:43:32] Sabrina: Oh, yes.

[00:43:33] Stephanie: It’s not about, I mean, oh, yeah, it’s about making money, but it’s about- Like developing and being confronted with the parts as you, as your, uh, lineage teach you, your part of yourself that you haven’t been confronted with that is protected by working for someone else.

[00:43:51] Stephanie: Mm-hmm. ‘Cause it’s never you that’s on the line, because you get your paycheck, you go to work. It’s somebody else’s business, somebody else’s money and income. You’re just a worker. When it’s you, your money, like you’re confronted with parts of you that you didn’t know existed.

[00:44:08] Sabrina: Yes.

[00:44:08] Stephanie: So the huge self-development.

[00:44:12] Stephanie: I wanna wrap us up to make sure y- we have time to cover this. Um, people are hearing you, they’re hearing your capacity to see, what I like to say, beyond the food. That’s where the name of my company comes from- Yeah … right? Uh, how do they connect with you and get to work with you?

[00:44:29] Sabrina: Um, they could find me at my podcast, which is called Live Unrestricted, where we talk about all of this stuff.

[00:44:37] Sabrina: They can also, if they wanna learn more about working with me in a group capacity or in one-on-one, they can go to, um, my website, sabrinamagnan.com. Um, my group program is called Food Freedom Academy. Um, and then on Instagram @sabrinamagnanhealth. Those are the best ways to connect with me.

[00:44:57] Stephanie: And if people are interested, because this new segment of your work, which is more about relationship to work and, like, at a higher…

[00:45:05] Stephanie: I don’t wanna say higher level, but broader level, that would be outside of the academy. That would be one-on-one with you. Is that correct?

[00:45:11] Sabrina: Yes. Yeah, exactly.

[00:45:13] Stephanie: Okay.

[00:45:13] Sabrina: Cool. Yeah.

[00:45:14] Stephanie: Thank you very much for having, uh, been transparent and allowing us to witness your journey and your journey in progress. It takes a lot of vulnerability, uh, and I really appreciate that.

[00:45:26] Stephanie: Thank you for your time with us today.

[00:45:28] Sabrina: Thank you so much for giving me the space to share, and I hope that it’s valuable for your listeners.

[00:45:35] Stephanie: Thank you.

[00:45:38] Stephanie: If you’re loving what you’re learning on the podcast, you have to come and check out Confident, my program on body acceptance and the confidence that grows from it. Come to our website to stephaniedodier.com/confident. This way you can take the concept that I teaching you on the podcast further into actual application in your life so you can feel confident, stop worrying about your weight, other people’s opinion, and care for your wellbeing without weight loss.

[00:46:12] Stephanie: Come and join me and other women learning how to reshape your confidence, not your body. I’ll see you there