Truce with Food with Ali Shapiro, MSOD, CHHC

You can know exactly what to do and still find yourself repeating the same behavior. You make the plan, feel motivated, and get going, only to hit that point where the novelty wears off and the old pattern comes right back. Then the question becomes whether you need more discipline, a better tool, or someone else to finally tell you what you’re missing.
That confusion is the messy middle of change, and it’s where both clients and coaches can start to lose the plot. What gets you started isn’t always what gets you through this part, especially when shame, identity, and old protective patterns get involved. It’s also where coaches can start wondering if they don’t know enough, if the client isn’t ready, or if they should be doing more to fix what’s happening.
In this episode of Truce with Food, I sit down with Christen Conly, a yoga teacher, holistic health and embodiment coach, and graduate of my Truce Coaching Certification, to talk about what changed when she stopped relying on more tips and tools. We get into why falling off track can make sense, how the urge to fix clients creates its own problems, and what becomes possible when change is treated as a process to navigate rather than something to eradicate.
6:34 – What led Christen Conly to Truce Coaching Certification
12:48 – Why starting and stopping behaviors require different coaching skills
16:17 – The client Christen wishes she could support with what she knows now
17:58 – When helping clients becomes entangled with approval
20:20 – Reframing self-sabotage as a protective response
23:10 – Shame-based motivation versus sustainable motivation
27:12 – Letting go of the responsibility to fix clients
32:21 – How Truce Coaching Certification helped Christen coach with more confidence
37:04 – The difference between mindset, identity, and story
39:26 – Technical versus adaptive change and creating safety to experiment
41:41 – How Christen’s coaching changed after certification
44:45 – Using the emotional immune system with clients

Mentioned In When Tips and Tools Aren’t Enough to Create Lasting Change with Christen Conly
Christen Conly | Instagram
Get Clients Unstuck and Why Another Tool Isn’t the Answer
Truce Coaching Certification
Find Your Food Stage Quiz
Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents. 
Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change. 
Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

You find yourself standing in front of the kitchen counter, not knowing why you’re there. Or you’re out at a work event already thinking about when you’ll be able to get home and be alone with food. You’re not actually hungry, but you feel pulled there anyway. It’s urgent, buzzy, and hard to talk yourself out of, even when some part of you knows this isn’t really about the food.
What we often call emotional eating is usually a message from your nervous system. Food can soothe. It can give you the almost-feeling of being comforted, supported, and cared for. But as Dr. Deborah MacNamara says, “There’s nothing as addictive as something that almost works.” When the deeper need is safety or belonging, managing the behavior without understanding what it’s protecting only keeps you stuck in the same loop.
In this episode of the Truce with Food podcast, I’m sharing my conversation with dietitian Tara Schmidt from Mayo Clinic’s On Nutrition podcast to walk through the first step of my Truce with Food framework and what it reveals about emotional eating. We talk about why food noise can feel so urgent, the patterns that keep people from getting their needs met, what our food memories reveal about belonging, and how to begin breaking the cycle without turning it into another perfectionist project.
4:00 – How Ali’s interview on Tara’s podcast came together, and why I wanted to re-air it on Truce with Food
10:07 – The next best step you can take after listening to this episode
14:03 – What inspired Ali to specialize in helping people heal their relationship with food
17:15 – Four main triggers (and the unmet needs within) behind emotional eating
22:11 – How your physiology and psychology can influence each other due to the tiredness trigger
23:41 – The types of food emotional eaters go to, and the relationship between food noise and emotional eating
30:02 – Three behavioral patterns of comfort eating and how they serve as protection strategies 
35:25 – Those who don’t eat based on their emotions, and why some people mindlessly overeat
37:36 – How to support someone who you think struggles with emotional eating without making them feel uncomfortable
39:28 – How to pause the reflex of emotional eating (and the one time you shouldn’t)
42:37 – How one client went from decades on medication to selling her business and feeling at home in her own body by ending her emotional eating cycle

Mentioned In Mayo Clinic on Nutrition: The Four Triggers Behind Emotional Eating
A Holistic Approach to GLP-1s with Mayo Clinic Dietitian Tara Schmidt
Mayo Clinic on Nutrition Podcast with Tara Schmidt, RDN
Institute for Integrative Nutrition | Dr. Mark Hyman
Dr. Deborah MacNamara | Nourished: Connection, Food, and Caring for Our Kids (And Everyone Else We Love) by Dr. Deborah MacNamara
Find Your Food Stage Quiz
Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents. 
Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change. 
Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

Women are hearing a lot right now about eating more, building muscle, healing their metabolism, and using GLP-1s for weight loss. But so much of the conversation still skips over what actually matters for women’s bodies, especially in perimenopause and menopause. If you’ve ever tried to nourish yourself more and immediately watched the scale go up, it can feel like your body is broken. It’s not, but your metabolism may need repair before it’s ready for fat loss.
That’s why I wanted to talk with Ashley Fillmore, founder and president of Metabolic Fix. Ashley is a leading expert in sustainable weight and fat loss with over 20 years of experience helping women heal their metabolism, balance their hormones, and change their body composition without staying stuck in chronic dieting. She also brings something I always appreciate, real client data, real lived experience, and a clear-eyed take on the online muscle-building and GLP-1 claims that don’t match what actually happens in women’s bodies.
In this episode of the Truce with Food podcast, I sit down with Ashley to talk about how to use GLP-1s without losing the muscle you need, and why they can support weight loss but can’t replace metabolic repair. We get into her Repair, Rebuild, Results framework, why eating more can feel so scary when your body has adapted to under-eating, and what sustainable fat loss actually requires if you want results that last.
6:27 – Defining metabolism, what the repair phase does, and the impact of hormones on your metabolic health 
12:57 – Why you might be stuck even if you’re doing many of the right things
17:25 – How the reverse diet in the repair phase helps your metabolism safely adapt to more calories
25:28 – How long the repair phase lasts, and why Ashley’s took longer than average
32:03 – What happens during the rebuild stage, and why it’s crucial before entering fat loss
36:19 – Debunking media claims and setting realistic expectations about muscle gain
47:02 – Why lean muscle is the body’s currency for longevity, not just an aesthetic bodily upgrade
50:06 – Why GLP-1s should be a supplement, not your primary weight loss strategy
53:22 – The importance of careful GLP-1 microdosing usage and greater metabolic health knowledge among doctors
1:03:19 – Why not all weight loss is a good thing, and the problem with overfocusing on protein alone in your diet
1:06:25 – Ashley’s free tool for estimating a healthy calorie target based on your weight loss goals
Mentioned In How to Use GLP-1s Without Losing the Muscle You Need with Ashley Fillmore
Dr. Stacy Sims 
Dr. Gabrielle Lyon
Metabolic Fix | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter/X | YouTube
Metabolic Fix Weight Loss Calculator 
Cheers to Your Success Podcast
Find Your Food Stage Quiz
Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents. 
Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change. 
Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

"What's wrong with me?" You've probably asked yourself this after another night of eating when you weren't hungry, scrolling when you meant to go to bed, or saying yes to something you had no energy for. The late-night sugar, the people-pleasing, the crashing after weeks of overdoing everything. You're not lazy and you're not broken, but you are asking the wrong question.
The real question is what's happening in your body because so much of what we chalk up to bad habits or weak willpower is actually driven by biology. Your nervous system is keeping you in familiar patterns because familiar feels safe, even when it's not working. Your cortisol is spiking your hunger and blunting your fullness signals, and if you're in perimenopause, all of it hits harder because the hormonal buffer you used to have is disappearing.
In this episode of Truce with Food, I sit down with Amber Romaniuk, an expert in emotional eating, digestive health, and hormonal balance with over 12 years of clinical and lived experience, to discuss the biology behind the behaviors we call self-sabotage. We get into how chronic stress and cortisol reshape your hunger and cravings, why everything from sugar to people-pleasing hits differently in perimenopause, and what it actually looks like to stop fighting your body and start understanding what it's telling you.
7:16 – Why mindset work fails when you ignore your body's role in behavior
9:27 – Why your nervous system keeps you stuck in familiar patterns even when you want to change
15:22 – How cortisol changes your hunger, cravings, and capacity to handle stress
21:55 – Why everything from sugar to stress hits differently in perimenopause and menopause
28:34 – How low progesterone drives people-pleasing, overworking, and chasing the next accomplishment
34:19 – Getting off the addiction to intensity and what to do instead of chasing cheap dopamine
41:17 – Amber's cortisol test recommendations and what to actually do with the results
48:19 – What guilt does to your amygdala and why it keeps you from prioritizing yourself
Mentioned In Your Sugar Cravings Make Sense When You Understand Your Hormones with Amber Romaniuk
Amber Approved | TikTok | YouTube | Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn
Book a Body Freedom Consultation with Amber
Hormone Imbalance Quiz
No Sugarcoating Podcast
Find Your Food Stage Quiz
Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents. 
Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change. 
Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

For many of us, the body has long felt like an inconvenient, separate entity. Our intellect does the heavy lifting while our physical selves get relegated to the background. You know how to think your way through problems, build a career, figure things out. But when it comes to looking down and asking your body what it actually needs, there's a tight ball of feelings most of us would rather not touch.
My dear friend and developmental coach Sas Petherick used to live that way. Over the past year, through a process she describes as one of the most vulnerable experiences of her life, Sas has gone through a complete identity shift in how she relates to her body, her marriage, and herself. She's lost 52 pounds and built her most developed muscle mass as an adult. But what surprised her most wasn't the physical change. It was that figuring out her body stuff required more growing up than changing careers, getting sober, or losing a parent.
Sas returns to close out a year-long conversation about what it actually takes to change your relationship with your body. We get into why body image lives in the brain and not the mirror, how the padding she carried was protection against vulnerability she wasn't ready to feel, and what it means when your insides finally match your outsides. This is what it looks like to move from self-monitoring to true self-awareness and become more fully yourself.
7:21 – Why Sas ranks this body journey alongside sobriety, grief, and career change as one of the most identity-altering experiences of her life
13:00 – Difficulties of the journey and how much Sas’s relationship with her body has impacted her nearly 20-year-old relationship with her partner
19:08 – Highlights of the journey and what Sas noticed while watching a stranger at dinner that revealed just how far she's come
32:50 – Why maintenance (which everyone says is the hardest part of this journey) has actually become easier for Sas
46:23 – Why Sas’s relationship with food is more difficult than her relationship with exercise, and how she’s learning to work through it
50:11 – Why body dysmorphia might have a root emotion that doesn't get talked about enough
1:00:07 – Defining body image, embracing the body positivity movement, and why grief isn’t just about loss
1:02:37 – Sas's honest take on GLP-1s: what’s missing from the conversation, what she'd do if she were taking them, and what everyone should be asking before they decide
1:09:12 – How exploring her relationships with food, movement, and her body are no longer tied to the scale for Sas
How to Lose Weight and Love Yourself (because you can do both!)
“We’re the Brave Ones” – Discipline vs Devotion, Macros & Being Sporty
Emotions & Embodiment for Sustainable Weight Loss
How to Hold Your Weight Loss Goals Loosely (for better results)
How to Finally Stop White-Knuckling Your Weight-Loss Journey
Sas Petherick 
Find Your Food Stage Quiz
Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents. 
Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change. 
Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.