Unburdened Eating: An Internal Family Systems Approach to Healing Your Relationships with Food and Your Body

From the time we are born, we are inundated with messages about our bodies--what we should eat, how we should look, and how we should move to achieve certain standards. The pressure to conform is higher for those who don’t fit into what society values: youth, thinness, whiteness, fitness, health, and able-bodiedness.

But what if you could let go of the chronic shame, judgment, and self-loathing you hold about food and your body? What if you no longer needed the latest diet, cleanse, or wellness plan to feel better about yourself? What if you could free yourself of all these burdens?

These are the answers you will find inside Unburdened Eating. Written through the lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS), this book offers a sustainable path to heal your relationships with food and your body. Based on Dr. Jeanne Catanzaro’s 25+ years working with trauma and eating issues, and informed by the insights of leading voices in the growing field of body liberation, this book will allow you to:

• Heal the critical and diet-minded parts of yourself
• Stop trying to fix parts of yourself and your body that are ＂unacceptable＂ or ＂less desirable＂
• Trust yourself to connect to your body with compassion and care
• Become more resistant to societal messages about what it means to be healthy and attractive

It is possible to accept yourself as you are and relax into a more compassionate, trusting relationship with food and your body. And that healing resource lies within you.

Jeanne Catanzaro, PhD, is a clinical psychologist who has specialized in treating eating disorders and trauma for the past twenty-five years. She trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing(R), and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) before discovering the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model. An approved IFS consultant, she served as the director of a day treatment program for eating disorders for two years. She has written three chapters on using IFS to treat eating disorders, one in Innovations and Elaborations in Internal Family Systems Therapy (2016), another in Trauma-Informed Approaches to Eating Disorders (2018), and a third in Internal Family Systems Therapy Supervision and Consultation (2022). For the past ten years, she’s been focused on healing eating issues across the spectrum. This book is an outgrowth of her interest in helping people heal the cultural legacy burdens that disrupt their Self-led relationships with their bodies.