This episode was inspired by a quiet morning that quickly became emotionally charged after Michelle encountered a long-time friend’s post about yet another weight-loss attempt. What once would have felt familiar or even inviting now landed as unsettling and activating, prompting reflection on why seeing others engage in diet culture can feel so destabilizing when you’re doing healing work around food and body.
Michelle explores the idea that there is a particular phase of healing where diet culture becomes louder—not because it has intensified in the world, but because your awareness has changed. Using the familiar “fishbowl” metaphor, she explains how stepping even one toe outside of diet culture can feel disorienting and lonely, especially when everyone around you still seems fully immersed. From a neuroscience perspective, she discusses how the brain constantly scans for cues of safety and familiarity, and how patterns that once felt “normal” can begin to register as unsafe once your internal operating system has shifted.
The conversation then moves into what’s often underneath these triggers: grief. Grief for years spent trapped in the same patterns, grief for the ways diet culture eroded joy and self-trust, grief for the loss of shared language with people you care about, and grief for the fact that once you see the harm, you can’t unsee it. Michelle also names the anger that arises when a harmful system is still praised as health and wellness, and why that anger is a healthy, human response rather than a personal failing.
Michelle outlines a few common traps people fall into when encountering diet culture in others, including the urge to educate or rescue, slipping into comparison, and self-abandonment in the name of being “able to handle it.” She explains why these responses make sense, but often leave us more dysregulated and disconnected from ourselves.
Finally, the episode offers a compassionate way forward—one rooted in nervous system safety rather than endurance. Michelle talks about the importance of curating your environment without guilt, differentiating someone else’s choices from your own truth, grounding back into the body when activated, and creating at least one space where diet culture doesn’t dominate. She closes with a powerful reframe: being triggered isn’t a failure—it’s attunement. Your body now knows what safety feels like, and it notices when it’s missing.
In this episode, Michelle covers:
- Why being triggered by diet culture is often a sign of growth, not weakness
- How the nervous system and brain respond to familiar but harmful patterns
- The grief and anger that often sit beneath food and body triggers
- Common traps like rescuing, comparison, and self-abandonment
- Practical ways to protect your nervous system while staying compassionate
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