180. Your Appetite Isn't The Problem... This Is (Alchemize Emotional Eating, Binge Eating & Low Self Worth)
180. Your Appetite Isn't The Problem... This Is (Alchemize Emotional Eating, Binge Eating & Low Self Worth)
Struggling with emotional eating, bingeing, or feeling “too much”? Discover how shame—not your appetite—is the real problem, and how to reclaim your hunger as a source of creative power.
You’re not broken. You’re just hungry for a bigger life.
If you’ve ever felt like your appetite makes you a bad person…
If you’ve ever spiraled in shame after eating something “you shouldn’t have”...
If you’ve ever hidden your dreams, your pleasures, your true cravings…
This post—and the podcast episode it’s drawn from—is for you.
Because what if your appetite wasn’t the problem at all?
What if the real issue is the shame you’ve been taught to attach to it?
Appetite as Power Portal
Inside Episode 180 of the Embodied Writing Warrior podcast, I explore how shame—not hunger—is what keeps us stuck in the binge-restrict cycle. And I share the personal stories that helped me come home to my hunger and reclaim it as a source of creative, emotional, and spiritual fuel.
From a ridiculous popcorn binge on a road trip…
To the mysterious disappearance of my engagement ring during a shame spiral about dream-based attraction (yes, really)…
To an Eminem fanfic quote that has lived rent-free in my head for two decades…
This episode unpacks the big, beautiful truth that you’re not wrong for wanting more. You’re just ready to stop repressing the parts of you that want to come alive.
4 Things Food Often Symbolizes (That You Might Be Hungry For Instead)
Nervous System Regulation
Food can mimic safety, stillness, and comfort when your body is dysregulated.
Joy + Pleasure
When your life feels all work and no play, food becomes the shortcut to feeling good.
Creativity + Drama
Bored? Starved of passion? You might be using food as a substitute for the theatre your soul craves.
Love + Belonging
If food was how you received love as a child, it might still be your most familiar way to “receive.”
How to Reclaim Your Appetite (Without Shame)
The solution isn’t restriction. It’s reclamation.
When you own your appetite and alchemize it—whether it’s for food, sex, success, or sacred self-expression—you free yourself from the shame cycle. You become a creative, sovereign woman with full access to her power.
This is the work I do in my private mentorship, ReWrite Me.
It’s intimate, deep, and completely transformational.
If you’re ready to turn your hunger into healing and your shame into sacred fuel, book your free Call to Adventure here.
And don’t forget to grab my free masterclass, The Power Portal, which expands on this exact concept and will help you shift your relationship to hunger, desire, and self-worth in 60 minutes or less.
🎁 Get it free here: embodiedwritingwarrior.com/gift
Journal Prompts
Where do I carry shame around my appetite?
→ For food? Pleasure? Success? Sex? Power? Where do I still make myself wrong for wanting what I want?How has shame—not my hunger—been the real problem?
→ What has shame made me believe about myself? How has it shaped my behavior?What are the creative responses to my appetite—and what are the destructive responses?
→ How do I want to choose creativity over compulsion, presence over numbing?What might my current cravings actually be a symbolic substitute for?
→ Am I really hungry for food… or am I hungry for safety, joy, drama, or connection?What would it look like to honor my appetite as sacred and powerful—not shameful?
→ What new story do I want to write about being a hungry woman?
Transcript
Welcome to another episode of Embodied Writing Warrior. Now, so much of this show in its new iteration is about reclaiming narrative power. It's about creative agency, and it's really about telling these new stories to replace the ones that once kept you small.
So this episode is here to help you break free from the limiting stories you tell about your appetite. By the end of the episode, my intention is that you no longer see your hunger as a detriment, ~a roadblock. ~Instead, it's going to become a power portal for transformation. You'll be able to use it to create breakthroughs like you've never had before.
At least that's been the case for me. So we're doing powerful work today, and this episode is inspired by my masterclass, the power portal. If you didn't have a chance to watch it live, it's now an evergreen program that you can purchase anytime. So you can do that for $97, or if you head over to embodied writing warrior.com/gift, you can get it for free lifetime access.
I'll pop the links into the show notes and episode description as always, all right, so let's get started.
This episode is for you if, number one, you demonize your appetite, whether it's for food, sex, money, power, pleasure, or all of the above. And for most women, it's usually all of them. Number two, you worry about your goals or ambitions being too much. Number three, you eat in secret or feel guilty about wanting to experience more pleasure in your life.
Number four, you downplay your desires, your ambition, both to yourself and to others. 'cause you don't wanna be seen as crazy or greedy. And number five, you reach for food as a symbolic substitute when deep down, you know you're hungry for something else altogether. So I'm going to share four key areas where food can become a symbolic substitute.
And as I go through them, I want you to think about which one resonates most for you, and then you wanna start thinking about creative ways you can give yourself what you actually desire. So today I'm going to make a powerful case for owning and even celebrating your appetite. You're gonna change the story of what it means to be a hungry woman.
You're going to connect to your inner she wolf and set her free because this archetype, this hungry, devouring, fierce, primal part of you, she's actually majestic. She's powerful, and the more you repress and resist her, the less conscious power you have. And that is when you run into the binge eating, the doom scrolling or the over drinking or whatever other habit you have that happens in excess, a habit you really prefer to get rid of.
And I'm also going to share why your appetite isn't the problem and what the real problem actually is. You're gonna wanna keep listening and let this part land because this is a paradigm shift and then some. I'm also going to break down why reclaiming and alchemizing and healing this root cause. So the actual problem can help heal your relationship with binge and emotional eating once and for all.
It can also heal any other habits of excess. I still talk a lot about food specifically because this is the one I know most intimately, and I know many women come here for help getting free from these food struggles. And while I'm shifting towards talking more about creativity and somatic healing and spiritual growth, food is often still the stage where this plays out.
So you won't be getting the traditional Health Cofi podcast episodes about meal planning or macros anymore? But if you still struggle with food and wanna use creativity and magic to transform it in a way that actually feels good and lands on a body, mind, and soul level, I've got you.
Okay. So if your appetite isn't the problem, what is the real problem? It's your shame about it. Let me break this down by sharing something I first learned from Carolyn Elliot. And interesting side note, I am currently working with someone who's also worked quite closely with Carolyn Elliott, and she literally echoed this same line to me.
As I was getting ready for this podcast episode, so this is a synchronicity listen up. Carolyn Elliott, the author of Existential Kink, writes about how shame is the magic killer. I have never forgotten this one line, and I've seen it to be true time and time again. I've learned that wherever I feel the most shame.
Around food, around my body, around how much I want. That's exactly where I'm accidentally damning up my magic. And it's probably where you are too. Shame cuts off the current, it disconnects us from our creative power, our inner wisdom, and our capacity to choose something different. 'cause we're in such a shame spiral, we're probably numbing out disassociating with food or some other distracting habit, right?
So appetite isn't the problem. Shame is, and the moment you give yourself full permission to want what you want without flinching, without apology, is the moment things start to shift. So that's when the deeper parts of you start speaking up. That's when you stop chasing food and start listening to the ache below the surface, and that's when your life stops being a binge restrict cycle and starts becoming a love story.
Because when you stop making yourself wrong, you stop recreating situations that prove you're wrong. I'm going to give you two stories, personal stories from my own life to share what this looks like in practice. And yeah, one of them is low key, embarrassing and might raise some eyebrows, but as Brene Brown says, shame loves secrecy, and we are shame slayers from here on out.
While I share these, I'm also gonna share the real reason I stopped writing for the last four plus years. And why I am refusing to abandon this beautiful healing practice ever again. Here's why. Shame is the real problem. You aren't wrong for being hungry and it doesn't matter what you're hungry for. The more you give yourself permission to have desires to basically be a normal human being on planet Earth, who wants things?
'cause how dare you? The more you reclaim your power. So it's not the hunger that's the problem until you shame yourself for being a bad person, for having the hunger until you make your appetite mean. Oh, because I have this hunger, I'm a bad person. And then you contract all these feelings of low self-worth and self-judgment, start creeping in.
The other tricky thing here is that whatever you're resisting persists, the more you fight against something, the more you're focused on it, the more intense the craving becomes. And when you finally give in and eat the thing or drink the thing, or whatever it might be, you probably gave in not because of your initial appetite, but because of the shame you had for having the hunger in the first place.
When you're feeling shame, contraction, worthlessness, ~that ~you are going to want to do whatever you can to escape those feelings. And often this takes the form of food or alcohol or something to numb out. Then you often feel more shame about giving into your cravings and the whole cycle begins to perpetuate.
But there is another way. I'm gonna break down the alternative in the next two stories I share. Story number one is about popcorn, and not just any popcorn, but double hit kernel's. Popcorn, which is half double butter and half creamy caramel. It's probably the most decadent, high sugar, high fat option you can get at any popcorn stand.
And we don't have a kernels in my hometown, but they had one in Prince George, so that's the town we're getting ready to move to. We were there in May and they had a kernel stand at the mall and not realizing how big a medium bag was, we bought two bags. One for myself, one for my husband. This popcorn was delicious.
I ate way more than I needed to eat. I've always had a sweet tooth, and when you add in two, seven plus hour drives over the course of two days, which I hate. I hate driving. I hate being in a car. I was also looking for comfort or a way to alleviate the boredom and discomfort of sitting still for that long ~now, ~I could have shamed myself for having a sweet tooth and overindulging
i've done that plenty of times, and because I've done it enough times, I know what happens. Shaming myself, beating myself up, creating an excess amount of negative drama. It creates the exact conditions of discomfort that make me want to continue numbing out with food, and I'm going to guess that you can relate.
When I got home, I decided to do something different. I decided to diffuse the drama. I owned the appetite I had. I owned the indulgence, and I said to myself, so I ate too much popcorn this weekend, and I didn't let it mean that I was corrupt or bad or a moral failure. It is popcorn, not some wild street drug.
And yes, I ate enough of it to make my body feel sluggish and foggy the next day, but I wasn't robbing banks or kicking puppies, so I decided that shame was unnecessary. And more recently, I've started to just work on playfully owning my big appetite for food and the fact that, yeah, I like to overindulge.
Sometimes I'll say to myself, yeah, sometimes I eat enough food to fuel an entire football team running a two a day practice. And the more you can diffuse the old drama and the old shame. The less intense the subsequent cravings are. And when you do this, this also frees you up to realize that 90% of the time you're not actually hungry for food.
And then you can start to figure out how is food acting as a symbolic substitute and act accordingly. I'm going to list the potential symbolic substitutes after one more story, this one is a little harder to talk about. You'll see why, but also, I don't think I'm the only one who's ever been in a situation like this, and I believe sharing it will make some other loving, dedicated partner feel a little less alone.
So I have a pretty rich dream life, and I go through periods where I'll dream about the same people or person repeatedly off and on. Sometimes for months on end, sometimes it's my sister, sometimes it's an old boss, and I eventually figure out what this person represents. It's usually a virtue I need to embody or an aspect of my own psyche, a block that's showing up in a personified human form. And once I get it, these dreams tend to stop. So back in fall of 2024, I started having these dreams about someone in my personal life and they were romantic dreams. For the longest time, I acted completely puzzled and annoyed. I was even having these dreams.
I tried to come up with every spiritual and mystical and shadow integration reason why I was having them, but they persisted at the time. I had a lot of shame about these dreams. Because I am completely head over heels in love with my husband, so I felt like I was bad, like I was this terrible wife. I worked myself into such a shame spiral over this.
There was even at one point where I lost my engagement ring during the most freak accident, like it fell on the living room floor. And the wedding ring was there, but the engagement ring gone and we looked in the fireplace. We took apart the heating pipes where the vents were nearby. We still haven't found it.
So your drama queen over here decided that the universe was punishing me for having these dreams. Dreams. My conscious self had no control over. I even tried avoiding that person as penant, which given the circumstances, was difficult to do and made things weird.
It was pretty ridiculous, especially when my husband was not even concerned. I tell this guy everything, so my husband knew about these dreams and he just teased me about them. So if he wasn't worried, why was I beating myself up and losing my mind over this situation? I had to do a lot of deep thinking and reflecting to finally realize a few things.
Number one, it was the shame and resistance that created the suffering, not the dreams themselves. And two. At one point, I decided to use the same approach on these dreams as I did my tendencies to overeat. I just played with the idea that, what if I did find this individual attractive? Did this attraction make me a bad person, or did it just make me a human being with eyes and a higher than normal libido?
And I also returned to one of my favorite books on relationships of all times when I was wrestling with this. It's called Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel. And I will link it in the episode description for you. If you are in a long-term relationship, this book is medicine, please go read it.
She talks about how we're in an age now where fantasy is actually a natural component of healthy adult sexuality. So she writes this. The ability to go anywhere in our imagination is a pure expression of individual freedom. It's a creative force that helps us transcend reality by giving us an occasional escape from relationship.
Simply put, love and tenderness are enriched by the spice of the imagination. Fantasies, sexual and otherwise also have nearly magical powers to heal and renew. Through fantasy, we repair, compensate, and transform. I appreciate the shrewdness of fantasy.
Its energy, its efficiency, its healing qualities, and its psychological force. Again, that's from Esther Perel Mating in Captivity. I share this because I truly hope it gives you the permission slip to stop blaming yourself for being a human who's maybe wrestled with similar situations. You aren't a bad person for being attracted to other people out in the world.
You're normal. And what if, instead of shaming yourself or your appetites or fantasies, what if you embraced them? What if they became the key to you being more awake and alive, which in turn created more heat in your committed relationship? So I read this quote in a fan fiction story once, yes, we're nerding out on fan fiction again, please get used to it.
And it was an Eminem Fanfic. Yeah. Marshall Mathers, the angry white rapper. So this took place before He was like a big rapper in his like gritty Detroit days. And yeah, he was a stripper and he just finished giving some girl at a club, a lap dance. So, yeah, if you've listened to the last few episodes, you've learned something about me.
I like Fanfic. About male strippers. Sorry, not sorry. So in this fanfic, Eminem had this internal monologue about how he needed to go home and take out the sexual heat created from this lap dance out on his wife. And he told himself, doesn't matter where you get your appetite as long as you eat at home.
I think I was 15, 16, maybe 14. And I still remember it. And I think it's so relevant here because it doesn't matter where you get your appetite from as long as you eat at home. And I don't just wanna say this with respect to relationships, though, it can apply there for sure. But I think to give this a more broad application for any appetite you have, it doesn't matter what you're hungry for, it matters how you channel that hunger and that desire.
'cause these things can be destructive. They can cause chaos and harm and betrayal and unwanted consequences. However, I think this is most likely to happen when you're repressing the hunger, ignoring it, shoving it so deep into your unconscious that you don't have any power over it. But what if you consciously owned the desire and stopped shaming yourself for it?
What if you allowed the hunger to be a force for creativity? For conscious, intentional, magical creation. If you're into tarot at all, there's a beautiful concept in Rachel Pollock's book, 78 Degrees of Freedom, and it's about the devil card.
So anything for you, my friend. This card, the Devil Card, talks about how sexual energy, spiritual energy, and creative energy are more similar than they might seem at first glance. So it was only after I stopped shaming myself for the images showing up in my subconscious that my creativity really came back Suddenly, all these inspired downloads started coming through and I felt like I was coming home to who I really am.
So the creative, the writer, the dr, the drama field love artist, I was able to take all that damned up energy and turn it into some magical things. And it has done a lot to shift my life circumstances quickly and in ways that inspire a lot of awe. Like how did some of this stuff happen? So these dreams.
My potential attraction, my appetites for food, none of that was the problem. It was how I shamed myself for having them, and this includes my real reason for not finishing my Pacific Heat Trilogy. So I abandoned great white shadows, and that's the final book in my shark shifter series. And it features the best couple in the entire trilogy.
Like I've been seeding in their tension and their longing over the last two books, and they're my favorite. And yes, one of these characters is actually potentially linked to a certain dream character I finally stopped running from. But that's a story for another podcast. I had to ask myself, why did I stop writing?
Why did I abandon this book in the first place? And then I remembered. During this time, I was going through a breakup with my female partner, a mutual person in our lives, read a lot of the same books I did, so stuff like JR Ward Black Dagger Brotherhood, the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series, and these books are very s muddy.
And this person had also read most of my books, which if you've read my books, yeah. They've got those scenes as well. And this mutual person in our lives during the breakup said about me. It's no wonder she's confused writing and reading the books she does. I still remember how much shame I felt. And that was when I stopped writing.
I wrote one more nonfiction book, but I didn't write any more fiction. I even stopped reading those types of books, I didn't wanna be a bad wife, but now I realize that person who called me confused, she was wrong. I was not confused. I was in the wrong relationship at that time, and it wasn't about gender.
It was about resonance and long-term compatibility. And for this person to shame me for the books that I read and wrote, that was about her, not me. I am no longer hiding the writer who writes erotic romance novels. I'm no longer pretending that my wild imagination and my love of a good mm slash story is a character defects.
When you own your appetites, all of them, it heals the habits of excess, the overeating, the binge eating, the excessive drinking, or scrolling, because here's what these habits have in common. First, there're probably a way for you to numb out from the shame and repression you're piling onto your psyche. I don't know if there's any worse emotion than shame that feeling like you're bad, wrong, flawed too much, so of course you're gonna wanna distract from that emotion.
When you drop the shame, 90% of these compulsions disappear as well. And second, these tendencies towards excess often happen because they're acting as a symbolic substitute for what you're really hungry for. You just haven't given yourself permission to want what you actually want. So here are the four areas where food might be acting as a symbolic substitute in your own life.
So it can be a stand in for nervous system regulation. Food can provide this temporary comfort and feeling of safety, and for people with overthinking brains who don't know how to shut it off. Guilty. If you eat enough food, your body has no choice but to drop into your rest and digest or your parasympathetic nervous system response.
It has to in order to digest large quantities of food, and there is nothing wrong with wanting safety and a regulated nervous system that is a core human need. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, other than physiological needs, so food, shelter, whatever, safety is the next level. It's a top priority.
Food can also be a stand in for joy and pleasure 'cause food tastes good, sugar, carbohydrates, processed foods, they're created to taste amazing and give us pleasure. And again, an appetite for pleasure is nothing to be ashamed of. Every single human is wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. And I think as women sometimes we feel like our pleasure has to come last.
It's this afterthought, like, first we have to make sure everyone else feels good, and then we have to finish our to-do list. And then maybe we'll do something that feels good. But we often wait so long we end up reaching for the pint of ice cream or ordering an entire pizza as a knee jerk response. What would happen if you owned your desire for pleasure and got conscious about how you wanted to experience it?
You'd probably realize that cuddling up with a coffee and your favorite book is way more pleasurable than the excess food anyways. Now the third place where food might be acting as a symbolic substitute is with creativity and dramatic expression. What if you keep turning to food and getting stuck in a restrict, binge, restrict, repent cycle?
What if it's because you're bored? What if you're actually looking to stir the pot to make yourself feel alive? And a dramatic relationship with food is an easy way to do it, but it's not the most fun. So if you're a creative or a writer, I challenge you to prioritize your creativity and channel all that hunger and aliveness and theater into a project.
I promise you the shifts you'll experience in your relationship with food will be next level. And finally, food can be a symbolic substitute for love and belonging. If you're feeling alone or unloved, food is always there. This is part comfort, part numbing from loneliness and part just predictability of knowing that even if there's no one in life you feel like you can rely on, you still have food.
There are some people who grew up. Around family members where they were given food as an act of love. And if this happened during childhood, many people will come to associate Food with love and it can become one of the only ways they let themselves receive this feeling. And this can be a tough one, especially if it stems from loneliness.
But again, that hunger for belonging and community can be destructive. It can lead to you numbing out with food or other unhelpful habits. But what if you let it be creative? What if you owned your desire for more aligned friendships and took action? And I get it. It's not easy as an adult to make new friends, but it is possible.
So I personally am in a season where I would love to call in some aligned friendships or connections. So I've actually been reaching out to other writers or just really cool people I found to see if they wanna be on my show. And I've also joined communities intentionally because I wanted to meet new people and see where it leads.
And I have met some awesome people, so it's more difficult as an adult, but if you set the intention and get creative about it. It is so possible. Okay. Your Embodied Writing Warrior activation is to journal about your own appetite.
Or even better go download the power portal. I'm actually working on a diagnostic test you can take with the power portal, where you can a figure out how much untapped power you have in your current life, and then also you can figure out which of the five power portals is holding you back the most so you can free up that power.
10/10 would recommend or just journal about your appetites. So where do you carry shame about your appetite and how is the shame and the shames after effects the true problem, not the appetite themself.
And I'd also love for you to brainstorm creative responses to your appetites. Whether these appetites are for food, pleasure, sex versus the destructive responses. And this alone is powerful because it reminds you that appetite can be a tool, not an obstacle. And you have the power to choose creativity over destruction.
And finally, maybe you wanna think about this idea of symbolic substitutes. What is it you're really hungry for? Okay. I hope these prompts and this new perspective on appetite has been as transformative for you as it has been for me. And if you wanna continue doing deep work to change your story about your appetite, your relationship with food body, and basically rewrite your entire identity so you're no longer the chronic dieter or the binge eater, but instead be powerfully creative magician you are deep down.
I have a few spots open in my rewrite. Rewrite me one-on-one private experience. This work will change your life, and I would love to go on this journey with you. So I'll put the link for a complimentary call to adventure in the episode description. And this is not gonna be some pushy sales call. It's gonna be us just talking about where you are, what might be in the way, and even if you decide it's not a good fit to work together.
My intention for all of these calls is that I give you. Some kind of a reframe or a perspective shift that you can take and put into embodied action. So either way, it's going to be a powerful call for you. Okay? Until next time, keep writing the story you wanna tell and I'll see you in a future episode.
