Healing the Whole Body: Stories and Practices for Healing Food and Body Shame—An Internal Family Systems Approach

Freeing Self: IFS Beyond the Therapy Room showcases how the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model is being used in settings beyond the therapy room. The stories include Chapter 5. From Diet Mind to Dietitian to IFS Nutrition Therapist: The Journey of a Wounded Healer, written by Diana Dugan Richards. The book relates to the impact of IFS when working with a multiplicity of issues: decision-making, gender and sexual identity, money concerns, and beliefs that led to personal, collective, legacy, cultural, and unattached burdens. Chapter 5 relates to Diana’s movement from the talons of diet culture as a young tween through early adulthood to providing counseling to those who hold body tensions and struggles around food and their body. All the contributors detail their unique experiences of combining IFS with their passion or purpose in life, and of sharing the model with professional colleagues.

This book provides hope and vision for those trained in IFS with or without a prior therapy training who may at times feel invisible, othered, or alienated by the historical dominance of therapy culture within IFS Institute trainings.

Healing the Whole Body offers a compassionate, paradigm-shifting approach to healing our relationship with food, body, and self. Written by Diana Dugan Richards, an Internal Family Systems (IFS)-trained nutrition therapist, this book gives us practical tools and integrated frameworks to shed the deeply ingrained belief that our bodies—not diet culture, not systemic forces—are the problem.

Diana uses an IFS lens to help us discover and explore the inner “parts” of us that each hold their own wounds, shames, fears, and deeply held beliefs about our bodies—and our worth. These parts also represent facets of our identities, life stories, and experiences. Together, they carry important wisdom for reconnecting to our bodies and advancing recovery.

Through personal narrative, client stories, practical exercises, and IFS insight, Diana guides us to:

• Reframe disordered eating as a protective, adaptive response—not a personal failure
• Recognize and relate to the inner voices that drive patterns like calorie restriction, bingeing, and body control
• Identify and understand our internal parts and their protective roles
• Work with inner conflicts and judgments with curiosity instead of control
• Release inherited beliefs about body, worth, and scarcity
• Use practical tools like parts-mapping and the 6 Fs

This book also helps us understand the roots of body shame, expanding beyond individual blame, shame, and behavioral patterns to explore how diet culture, medical weight bias, racism, and intergenerational legacy burdens disrupt our healing and wholeness.

Freeing Self: IFS Beyond the Therapy Room

Freeing Self: IFS Beyond the Therapy Room showcases how the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model is being used in settings beyond the therapy room. The stories include Chapter 5. From Diet Mind to Dietitian to IFS Nutrition Therapist: The Journey of a Wounded Healer, written by Diana Dugan Richards. The book relates to the impact of IFS when working with a multiplicity of issues: decision-making, gender and sexual identity, money concerns, and beliefs that led to personal, collective, legacy, cultural, and unattached burdens. Chapter 5 relates to Diana’s movement from the talons of diet culture as a young tween through early adulthood to providing counseling to those who hold body tensions and struggles around food and their body. All the contributors detail their unique experiences of combining IFS with their passion or purpose in life, and of sharing the model with professional colleagues.

This book provides hope and vision for those trained in IFS with or without a prior therapy training who may at times feel invisible, othered, or alienated by the historical dominance of therapy culture within IFS Institute trainings.