The Self Led Woman Podcast: emotional eating and nervous system healing for self-leadership
Jun 28, 2026 · 17 min · 9 segments
There's a question I come back to again and again in sessions with clients. Is this actually your belief, or is it something you inherited? So much of what women carry around food, their bodies…
Megan DarnellHost
There's a question that I come back to again and again in sessions with clients, and it tends to land a little differently every time I ask it.
But this question of, is this actually your belief or is this something you inherited? Is this something that's been passed down to you? So I want you to sit with that for a moment.
Most of us move through our lives assuming that the way we think and feel about our bodies is just ours.
When I sit with women and we start to slow things down and actually look underneath the surface, What becomes really clear is that so much of what feels so deeply personal, like the self-criticism, the monitoring, the constant negotiation with food, all the rules, but they were never really theirs to begin with.
It was handed to them, sometimes directly, sometimes silently, sometimes so far back that they can't trace where it started.
Like not necessarily parents, it can be coming from grandparents, great-grandparents, even further back.
When we talk about diet culture, we almost always keep the conversation at the level of behavior, like willpower, discipline, consistency, control.
And we talk about food and weight and routines and plans, and occasionally we'll acknowledge it's more than just food and that emotions are actually involved.
that stress might play a role and that it's complicated, but we rarely slow down enough to ask the deeper question.
So like, what does this actually mean emotionally and internally when a woman feels the need to make herself smaller? Not just physically, but energetically, emotionally, relationally, in how much space she takes up, in how loudly she speaks, in how many needs she allows herself to have.
Because the desire to be smaller, to reduce and shrink and take up less room, it didn't come from nowhere.
Many of the women I sit with are carrying beliefs that were never consciously chosen.
Over time in childhood, in family systems, in quiet moments that maybe just didn't even seem that significant at the time.
Like a mother standing in front of the mirror criticizing her body, an auntie making a comment about weight at a family gathering, a grandmother equating thinness with worth, with desirability, with discipline.
There's a question that I come back to again and again in sessions with clients, and it tends to land a little differently every time I ask it.
But this question of, is this actually your belief or is this something you inherited? Is this something that's been passed down to you? So I want you to sit with that for a moment.
Most of us move through our lives assuming that the way we think and feel about our bodies is just ours.
When I sit with women and we start to slow things down and actually look underneath the surface, What becomes really clear is that so much of what feels so deeply personal, like the self-criticism, the monitoring, the constant negotiation with food, all the rules, but they were never really theirs to begin with.
It was handed to them, sometimes directly, sometimes silently, sometimes so far back that they can't trace where it started.
Like not necessarily parents, it can be coming from grandparents, great-grandparents, even further back.
When we talk about diet culture, we almost always keep the conversation at the level of behavior, like willpower, discipline, consistency, control.
And we talk about food and weight and routines and plans, and occasionally we'll acknowledge it's more than just food and that emotions are actually involved.
that stress might play a role and that it's complicated, but we rarely slow down enough to ask the deeper question.
So like, what does this actually mean emotionally and internally when a woman feels the need to make herself smaller? Not just physically, but energetically, emotionally, relationally, in how much space she takes up, in how loudly she speaks, in how many needs she allows herself to have.
Because the desire to be smaller, to reduce and shrink and take up less room, it didn't come from nowhere.
Many of the women I sit with are carrying beliefs that were never consciously chosen.
Over time in childhood, in family systems, in quiet moments that maybe just didn't even seem that significant at the time.
Like a mother standing in front of the mirror criticizing her body, an auntie making a comment about weight at a family gathering, a grandmother equating thinness with worth, with desirability, with discipline.
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