One Body to Love with Dr. Meredith MacKenzie

You eat well. You move your body. You are, by most external measures, one of the healthier people in your circle. And yet your energy is gone, your sleep is broken, your performance is sliding backwards, and somewhere along the way your period quietly stopped showing up. Maybe someone told you that was normal for active women. Maybe nobody said anything at all.

This week I'm joined by Dr. Katrina Allison, a naturopathic doctor in North Vancouver who specialises in hormonal health for active women and female athletes. Katrina is also a long-distance runner who lost her own period for three to four years while performing at a university level, and spent that entire time being seen by knowledgeable professionals who never quite told her how serious it was.

That experience shapes how she practises now, and it shows up in this conversation in a way I found genuinely moving.

We get into the biology of what happens when energy in doesn't match energy out, why losing your period is a late warning sign rather than an early one, and what relative energy deficiency in sport actually is. But the part of this conversation I keep coming back to is the gap Katrina names between the prescription and the doing. A clinician can tell you to increase your intake in about eleven seconds. Going home and actually doing it, against everything your mind has to say about it, is another matter entirely. Katrina understands that from the inside, and she talks about it with real precision.

We also talk about the rigidity that endurance sport rewards, why the personality traits that make someone excellent at running can make them deeply resistant to changing anything, and what shifted for Katrina when she became a mother and raced postpartum with no plan and no expectations.

If you're not an athlete, please don't skip this one. The hormonal picture Katrina describes is, in her words, agnostic of how active you are. Years of restriction do the same thing to a body whether or not that body is training for something.

Find Katrina here: 

Website: www.drkatrinaallisonnd.com 

Instagram: @drkatrinaallison_nd 

The Period Recovery Project: linked at www.drkatrinaallisonnd.com

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

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You know you're not hungry. You eats anyway. And the shame that follows feels heavier every time.

In this episode, Dr. Meredith MacKenzie offers the most compassionate reframe in the series: emotional eating is not weakness, and it's not a bad habit. It's a coping mechanism that developed for real reasons — and understanding what it's actually doing is the only way to build a genuinely different relationship with it. This episode names the specific emotions that most commonly drive emotional eating, challenges the "just find other coping strategies" advice that never quite lands, and introduces a practical tool for beginning to create space between the urge and the response.

Key takeaways:

• Why emotional eating is a coping mechanism, not a character flaw
• What emotional eating is actually doing neurologically and emotionally
• The specific emotions most commonly underneath the pattern: boredom, loneliness, stress, anxiety, overwhelm
• Why "go for a walk instead" misses the point — and what real alternative coping looks like
• The shame loop: how shame about emotional eating drives more emotional eating
• The 10-15 minute pause: what it is, what it isn't, and how it creates space without restriction

This week's reflection prompt:

The next time you notice the urge to eat when you're not physically hungry — what if you got curious? What emotion is present? What need is underneath it?

Final reminder: Code SUMMER10 at meredithmackenzie.ca/summer — $10 off Food Freedom in a Weekend. Last week of the series next week.

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

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You start every week with resolve. And end most of them in the same place you started.

In this episode, Dr. Meredith MacKenzie names the "I was so good all week" spiral — one of the most common, most demoralising patterns in her clinical work — and explains exactly why it keeps happening. This isn't a discipline problem. It's a structural one. The controlled week and the chaotic weekend are two sides of the same coin, and understanding why the control creates the blowout is the shift that makes a different approach possible.

Key takeaways:

• Why the "good week / bad weekend" rhythm is a cycle, not a failure pattern
• How describing eating as "good" creates the conditions for the Diet Rebel
• What the meal prep week that slides is actually telling you — and why it's not a food problem
• The all-or-nothing thinking pattern: how one "off" choice becomes a lost week
• What flexible structure actually looks like: planning easy meals and fun meals with equal legitimacy

This week's reflection prompt:

What does the beginning of your week look like with food? What does the end look like? And what does the gap between them tell you — not about your discipline, but about the approach itself?

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

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You've tried everything. You keep trying. And the cycle is still running.

In this episode, Dr. Meredith MacKenzie goes into the biology and psychology of why — and why "trying harder" was never going to be the answer. Drawing on the foundational work of Tribole and Resch, this episode explains what restriction actually does to the body at a hormonal and neurological level, names the three phases of the restrict-binge cycle in specific, recognisable terms, and addresses the woman who says "I don't diet" — because mental restriction is enough to keep the cycle going.

Key takeaways:

• The three phases of the restrict-binge cycle: restriction, binge, aftermath — named and normalised
• The biology of restriction: what your body is doing and why it's not a character flaw
• The breathing analogy: why the binge is a predictable outcome, not a personal failure
• Mental restriction: the quiet, internal version of dieting that keeps the cycle running without a formal plan
• Why both biology and emotion drive the cycle — and why both need to be addressed

This week's reflection prompt:

Where in the cycle do you tend to find yourself most often? What does your version of restriction look like — formal or informal?

Use code SUMMER10 at meredithmackenzie.ca/summer for $10 off Food Freedom in a Weekend.

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

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Website - www.meredithmackenzie.ca
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You understand the cycle. You've done the reading. You might even agree, in theory, with intuitive eating. And you're still stuck.

In this episode, Dr. Meredith MacKenzie names the three internal voices that keep the restrict-binge cycle running — even in women who know better. The Food Police, the Nutrition Informant, and the Diet Rebel aren't random thoughts. They're patterns, installed over years of living inside diet culture. And naming them as distinct from your own voice is one of the most disarming things you can do.

Key takeaways:

• Why the "knowing-doing gap" isn't a willpower problem — something is operating underneath
• The Food Police: what it is, where it came from, and why it gets louder with every diet
• The Nutrition Informant: the sneakier voice that sounds like wellness but functions like restriction
• The Diet Rebel: why she exists, why she's not the problem, and what she's responding to
• The Intuitive Eater: the voice that was there before all of it — and how to start hearing her again

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

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Website - www.meredithmackenzie.ca
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You've started over more times than you can count. Not because you lack discipline — but because every fresh start has been aimed at the surface of the problem, not the root of it.

In this episode, Dr. Meredith MacKenzie opens The Food Freedom Files — a six-episode summer series on what's really going on underneath your relationship with food. Episode 1 introduces the iceberg: the history, the emotional patterns, and the deeply personal chapters that shaped the way you eat today. Because understanding where you came from is the only place any of this actually begins.

Key takeaways:

• Why the restrict-binge cycle isn't a willpower problem — and what it actually is
• The iceberg concept: what's above the surface vs. what's really driving the pattern
• The "I don't have an eating disorder, but..." moment and why it matters
• The food journey map: how tracing your food history creates the compassion the cycle has been blocking
• Why "of course you're here" is the reframe that changes everything

This week's reflection prompt:

What is the most challenging part of your relationship with food right now? And if things could magically be different — what would be different?

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

💻 Book a Connection Call

Website - www.meredithmackenzie.ca
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In this episode, Dr. Meredith MacKenzie sits down with Sky Corbett-Methot, a yoga teacher, holistic nutritionist, and community creator whose prenatal, baby and me, and mama-centric classes have shaped Dr. MacKenzie's own relationship with movement. Sky shares her history as a high-performance gymnast and competitive diver, the abuse and injury that ended her athletic career, and how motherhood became the catalyst for building movement spaces rooted in community rather than competition. This is a conversation about what happens when movement stops being something done to the body and becomes something done with it.

Key takeaways

• Sky's years as a high-performance gymnast involved 35+ hours of training a week, coaching abuse, and a culture where pain and bodily signals were routinely overridden — patterns she has spent years unlearning
• A devastating injury, paired with the loss of her closest teammates, marked the breaking point that ended her gymnastics career at fifteen
• The phrase "do what feels good" is an intentional invitation, not a vague platitude — it's permission to check in with the body rather than push through it
• Sky describes her classes as "circular communities," spaces where women move through prenatal, baby and me, and mama-centric seasons together, supported the whole way
  Movement can be both healing and energizing, but the same movement pushed past its limit can become depleting — the difference lies in whether it's goal-oriented or attuned to the body

Guest bio

Sky Corbett-Methot is a yoga teacher, holistic nutritionist, and community creator based in the Vancouver area. She holds a 500-hour Tantric Hatha Yoga and Meditation certification and additional training in prenatal, baby and me, mobility, and children's yoga. Her academic background spans anthropology and psychology. Sky will be joining the One Body to Love Day Retreat as a panellist this year.

www.skyyogawellness.ca / www.instagram.com/skyyogawellness

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

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In this episode, Dr. Meredith MacKenzie reflects on what 14 years of working with women in group settings and her first One Body to Love Day Retreat has taught her about how healing actually happens. This episode is for any woman who has tried to work through her relationship with food in private, and wondered why it felt so hard to get it to stick.

• 00:00 — Why Meredith no longer sees herself as the magic ingredient to her clients' change
• 02:16 — How early career group work shaped her understanding of relational healing
• 03:30 — Recapping the first One Body to Love Day Retreat and what surprised her most
• 06:59 — The clinical case for healing in community: attachment, trauma, and the nervous system
• 09:17 — What attendees said, and what Meredith wants every woman to carry out of the room
• 11:37 — About the upcoming June 21 retreat and who it's for

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

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Most women who are working on their relationship with food are doing it alone.

Not because no one cares — but because the spaces around them weren't built to hold this kind of conversation. Friends are still deep inside diet culture. Therapy offers real support, but it's still just you and one other person. Social media communities exist, but the scroll is not the same as being in the room.

In this episode, Dr. Meredith MacKenzie explores what changes when you finally find a space that was built differently. One where you don't have to manage what you share or scan someone's face to see if you've said too much. One where the acceptance is real and the nervous system — for the first time in a long time — can actually rest.

Meredith walks through three things that happen in that kind of community that information on its own can't replicate: the moment of recognition that dissolves shame in a way no book can, witnessing a real person embody what you've only read about, and the nervous system experience of being genuinely safe.

This episode is also a direct conversation for the woman who has done all the reading, understands the psychology, and still feels stuck — and what that actually means.

In This Episode You'll Hear

• Why the isolation around this struggle isn't random — and the real structural reasons it's so hard to talk about food and bodies [2:08]
• Why being in a room with women who "get it" does something to shame that nothing else quite replicates [4:31]
• The difference between reading a testimonial and witnessing a real woman embody change — and why one reaches the part of you that still doesn't believe it yet [6:55]
• The nervous system piece: what it actually means to be in a genuinely safe space, and why that isn't just emotional comfort [7:30]
• A direct message for the woman who knows it all intellectually and still feels stuck [8:30]
• Why information changes what you think, and experience changes what you feel — and which one this kind of healing lives in [9:04]
• Details about the One Body to Love Day Retreat and what past attendees have said about what shifted [11:00]

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

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If food has always felt louder for you than it seems to for everyone else — more urgent, harder to reason with, almost impossible to just leave alone — you have probably been given a lot of advice that doesn't actually work.

Not because you weren't trying. Because the advice was never designed for the way your brain works.

 In this episode, Dr. Meredith MacKenzie gets into the neurological explanation for why food feels the way it does for women with ADHD (or those who suspect they might have it). This isn't a willpower conversation. It's a dopamine conversation — and understanding the difference changes everything.

In this episode you'll hear:

•       [00:00] When food takes up the whole room

•       [02:18] ADHD as a dopamine regulation issue — and what that has to do with food

•       [03:50] Sensory hunger and why certain foods feel almost magnetic

•       [05:20] The executive functioning gaps that make standard advice fall apart

•       [05:30] Emotional dysregulation and why emotional eating makes sense in this context

•       [07:30] Why mindful eating, meal planning, and trigger-tracking often miss the mark for ADHD

•       [10:07] 'You are not failing the approach. The approach has been failing you.'

•       [11:40] Five directions that actually work with an ADHD brain

•       [14:29] Why naming the mechanism is often the thing that shifts the relationship with it

Resources Mentioned

•       Food Freedom Rewind (free private podcast): meredithmackenzie.ca/rewind

•       One Body to Love Retreat waitlist: meredithmackenzie.ca/retreat

If this episode was the first time food and ADHD were ever named in the same sentence for you — that matters. There is a framework that fits. You just haven't found it yet.

One Body to Love 10-Week Intuitive Eating Program

💻 Book a Connection Call

Website - www.meredithmackenzie.ca
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