Healing Trauma & Food Habits with Jessica Setnick (Part 1)

Healing Trauma & Food Habits with Jessica Setnick (Part 1)

How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety and healing when food becomes part of the struggle? This conversation on *Retrieving Sanity* brings together addiction recovery and eating disorder work through the sharp, compassionate lens of registered dietitian Jessica Setnick.

Jessica starts by smashing a big stereotype: “The idea that eating disorders have a look… I believe that everyone who eats can have an eating problem and I will die on that hill.” She explains why body size, weight and even BMI are terrible ways to judge who’s “sick enough”, drawing a clear link to how alcohol and other addictions are so often misunderstood and mislabelled.

You’ll hear how her background in anthropology and nutrition turned her into what the host jokingly calls an “anthropologist of the human soul”. Jessica treats food behaviours as symptoms, not the core problem. Undereating, overeating or purging are just the visible tip of the iceberg; the real story lies beneath in biology, trauma, stress, family patterns and learned beliefs.

Her model of “origins of dysfunctional eating behaviour” pulls these threads together into four broad roots: biological, addiction-related, stress and trauma, and environmental or learned patterns. Through vivid examples – from Dust Bowl scarcity to 1980s Lunchables and “clean your plate” rules – she shows how ancestral hardship and family history quietly shape our current relationship with food.

There’s also a powerful advocacy story: Jessica describes how BMI-based severity rules in official diagnosis guidelines harmed people’s access to care, and how she pushed for change until they were replaced with criteria that actually look at real-life impact. For anyone in recovery who’s wondered, “Is my eating a problem too?” this episode offers language, context and a lot of relief. Could your food habits be carrying family stories you never knew you’d inherited?