Are Eating Disorders Physiological or Psychological?

Are Eating Disorders Physiological or Psychological? The Answer Changes Everything

This is a solo episode that shifts how you understand your eating disorder entirely.

I'm diving deep into Tabitha Farrar's work on the migration response and exploring the question that everyone asks: is it biological or is it psychological? The honest answer is it's both. And understanding why changes how you recover.

This episode is for you if:

• You've wondered if your eating disorder is "real" because you don't have anorexia

• You thought restriction should be easier and it wasn't (or it was, and then suddenly it wasn't)

• You've struggled with the binge eating that came after restriction

• You're stuck in restriction but your body won't cooperate anymore

• You've done all the therapy and still can't stop the behaviours

• You want to know why willpower doesn't work and what actually does

• You're trying to understand if you just need to eat more or if you need psychological work too

In this episode, we cover:

✨ The migration response — why some people's bodies make restriction feel easy

✨ The hibernation response — a different genetic physiological response to restriction

✨ Why your metabolism might speed up or slow down when you restrict (it's genetic)

✨ How the same person can find restriction easy, then nearly impossible (my personal story)

✨ Why some people achieve extreme weight loss easily and others don't, even with severe restriction

✨ The vicious feedback loop between biology and psychology in eating disorders

✨ What eating disorders are really about beneath the desire to be thin

✨ Why you restrict: acceptance, safety, validation, control, identity (it's always deeper)

✨ Why therapy alone won't fix an eating disorder (and why weight restriction alone won't either)

✨ Weight restoration isn't recovery — it's just the beginning

✨ How your nervous system learns to treat weight gain as danger

✨ Why you can't think your way out of what your body is experiencing

✨ The neuro pathways that need to be rewired

✨ Meeting the actual psychological needs your eating disorder was serving

✨ Why somatic work (body work) is absolutely essential for recovery

✨ The whole-picture approach: biology + psychology + nervous system + history

Powerful quotes from the episode:

💬 "Restriction wasn't hard, it felt right. It was nothing to do with willpower. It was genetics."

💬 "You can have all the insights in the world about why you developed your eating disorder and still be stuck in the behaviours."

💬 "Your nervous system has learned that weight gain equates to danger. Your brain has built neuro pathways that treat food as a threat."

💬 "Eating disorders are both physiological and psychological. They're usually not one or the other."

💬 "You deserve recovery that honours the full truth of your experience, not the simplified version that fits into a diagnosis box."

If you're confused about why eating more isn't enough, why willpower fails, why you can't just think your way out — this episode will make sense of all of it. Recovery works when you address the whole picture.

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