Choosing to Stay After Infidelity and Betrayal Podcast

How Betrayal Trauma Affects Your Relationship with Food — And What to Do About It

This post is adapted from my conversation on the Choosing to Stay Podcast with Hallie Roderick, where we explored the intersection of betrayal trauma, addiction recovery, and why nutrition is one of the most overlooked — yet most accessible — tools for healing.

The Legacy That Lives in Your Body

When people go through betrayal trauma — whether it’s infidelity, broken trust in a primary relationship, or the discovery of a partner’s addictive behaviors — the conversation usually centers on the emotional and relational damage. But there’s a physical dimension that gets overlooked: what’s happening in the body, the gut, the immune system, and the brain.

My mother has Alzheimer’s dementia and started her decline at age 67. That experience made me deeply attuned to the caregiver journey and the ways that generational trauma leaves a biological legacy. The stress and adversity carried by parents and grandparents don’t just live in family stories — they get embedded in the immune system and other biological systems. Science is only beginning to understand what we call the biological embedding of adversity and the transgenerational risk that comes with it.

In recovery circles, there’s a phrase people use: spiritual malady. It describes a hole in the soul — a feeling of moving through life as if something’s off, a restlessness that doesn’t quite have a name. I sometimes refer to it as a tormented soul. And I’ve come to conclude that for many people, that feeling is really the effect of generational trauma or generational alcoholism. You don’t always have to know your grandparents’ full history to recognize it. The way some of us move through life — the hypervigilance, the anxiety, the difficulty settling — it’s apparent to those of us who do this work.

Why Nutrition Feels Overwhelming During Crisis

When someone is navigating betrayal trauma, life often feels chaotic and out of control. In that state, nutrition can feel like one more thing you’re failing at. Some people lose their appetite entirely under distress. Others use food to cope. And the idea of “eating better” on top of everything else can feel like an impossible addition to an already overwhelming situation.

Here’s what I’ve found: for most people, the challenge isn’t a lack of information about healthy eating. In this information era, most people can identify what healthy food looks like — it’s colorful, it’s identifiable, it comes from nature. The real challenge is applying that information. People have baggage around food, conflict about their bodies, and deep histories with eating that trace back to childhood. What was the dinner table like when you were six? When you were thirteen? Were there family dynamics playing out in the kitchen? Nutrition is loaded, and we all carry a history there.

But here’s what’s often missing from the conversation: most people understand that nutrition matters for body weight or cardiovascular health. There’s still a huge gap in understanding the link between food and mood. The mechanisms connecting what we eat to how we feel mentally have only been elucidated in recent years. Most of the published research in nutritional psychiatry is from the last decade, and it hasn’t reached the mainstream yet.

The interesting thing is that the recommendations for eating for mental health or trauma recovery aren’t wildly different from the recommendations for cardiovascular health. It’s a lot of the same principles — eating real foods over ultra-processed foods, getting variety, eating the colors of the rainbow, choosing fats from whole foods and olive oil over refined industrial oils that are pro-inflammatory. But for some people, understanding the why behind these recommendations — specifically, why they matter for their brain and recovery — creates a much higher level of motivation.

Inflammation, ACEs, and the Case for Anti-Inflammatory Eating

When I work with someone who has a high ACE score — adverse childhood experiences — and a history of significant stressors, I can often explain to them: the data we have on the biological embedding of adversity suggests a pro-inflammatory phenotype. This means the immune system was activated early in life, and there are elevations across a wide range of biomarkers. In research, we often refer to this as the allostatic load — it’s an index of different markers that might not individually be alarming, but collectively tell a story of a system working overtime to manage perceived threats from the past.

When someone understands — and maybe we do some lab work to confirm — that there’s a low-grade, systemic inflammatory process happening, the kind that mainstream medicine might not even pick up on, it can create an impetus to move toward anti-inflammatory eating. Not for the sake of a number on a scale, but for resilience. For reducing inflammation in the gut and the brain. For giving the nervous system a better foundation to work from.

People are sometimes genuinely excited about using nutrition to improve resilience and mood. But even then, the changes are hard. And the main reason nutrition-related behavior change is so difficult is that the food environment is saturated with ultra-processed foods engineered to hijack the brain’s reward circuitry. Refined grains, added sugars, salts, refined oils, plus the sensory properties — the crunch, the smooth, the creamy — all of it conditions the brain to expect a certain dopamine response from food.

So when someone tries to make healthier changes and sits down with a Mediterranean plate of salmon and asparagus, the neurochemical response is lower than what they’d get from a more palatable restaurant or convenience foods. For the person who has stress, trauma, and adversity — whose brain is expecting a certain neurochemical payoff from food — when that goes down, it feels like a bummer. It can actually feel like a threat to survival, because the brain associates the dopamine response with survival-promoting activity. The mind then builds a case: I should just eat something else; today was a rough day. That narrative supports the brain’s physiological demands, and that’s the real work of nutrition counseling — helping people understand the difference between the brain and the mind, and the stories the mind constructs to justify the hedonic process.

Start with When, Not What

When people ask me where to begin — especially people in crisis who can barely manage daily functioning — I don’t start with food lists or elimination protocols. In my program through the Wise Mind Nutrition app, I start with when to eat before even talking about what to eat.

A lot of people dealing with betrayal trauma and adversity have erratic behavior patterns and circadian dysfunction. They may not go to sleep or wake up at consistent times. Intervening on sleep, wake, and meal timing before getting into the nuances of specific foods is critical. Creating some consistency with patterns is a powerful place to start.

The reframe I offer is this: assume that it almost doesn’t matter what you eat for the first week. Just eat on a schedule and see if that kicks off a cascade of changes that make next steps more accessible. Betrayal trauma is characterized by disruptions in regularity — in trust, in routine, in safety. Reestablishing some rhythm with eating and sleeping can be a stabilizing anchor when everything else feels chaotic.

And here’s what makes this especially powerful: in betrayal trauma, so much of life feels out of control. Nutrition is something you can control. You can control what you put into your mouth and how you fuel your body. That sense of agency, especially when other parts of your life are in turmoil, can be profoundly motivating.

The Two Divergent Pathways: Addiction and Restriction

One of the things worth understanding is that the relationship between trauma and disordered eating can diverge along two different pathways — and a lot of people embody characteristics of both.

The restrictive pathway involves classic eating disorder symptoms: undereating, compulsions around body image, the internalization of weight stigma, often associated with OCD symptoms and perfectionism. It tends to involve the serotonin system.

The addictive pathway is more of a reward dysfunction — more impulsive, involving the dopamine neurocircuitry, and overlapping with substance-related and behavioral addictions.

I’ve met a lot of people who feel like they have to choose between two camps: either a very inclusive, “all foods are good foods,” food-positive, body-positive model of eating, or a much more deliberate and intentional avoidance of certain foods. People feel pressured to fall into one school of thought.

A better reframe is to think about eating pathology on a continuum. Each of us is somewhat unique in our orientation along these dimensions. Some people are clearly on the trauma-addiction end — there are cross-addictions, substance use disorders, and behavioral addictions. For others, it’s more along the restrictive eating pathway. But for many, there are characteristics of both. That’s when it gets muddy, and people get caught in a restrict-binge cycle without understanding why.

Those presentations of disordered eating are not all the same. They are unique to each person. And in order to truly understand how it’s playing out, I encourage people to make a food and body timeline: start with your early life experiences and relationship with food, note times you gained or lost weight, breakups, trauma, betrayal, cross-addictions. Put the medical stuff and the therapeutic stuff on the timeline, too. When you can see how it’s all connected across the lifespan, the path forward becomes much clearer.

Sleep, Intrusive Thoughts, and My Own Experience

Sleep disruption is one of the most common and damaging effects of betrayal trauma. Your mind is racing, intrusive thoughts take over, and the ability to get restorative sleep evaporates. I’ve lived this.

During my PhD program, I was working full-time and paying my own way, even though the program didn’t want me working. I clashed with professors and departmental co-chairs. My research interests in nutrition and mental health weren’t well-received. At the same time, there was construction next door — they built an apartment complex and were supposed to start at seven, but started at six. And this was probably when my mom started to decline, and we were looking for care facilities. All of it was profoundly disruptive to my sleep.

I had been weight-stable for about 12 years. Just the sleep disruption alone — without significant changes in eating or movement — caused me to gain five pounds. I tried everything to sleep: melatonin, prescriptions, combinations of supplements. But what I found most helpful was breathwork and stretching in the evening. As a yogi, the Ujjayi breath — a very slow nasal inhale, very slow nasal exhale — allowed me to sit and breathe for 30 to 40 minutes. It was profoundly calming and allowed me to sleep when I didn’t think I could.

I also went eight months without caffeine during that period, which was one of my biggest wins. I’ve always struggled with caffeine dependency, and I reached a point where I knew I was torturing myself. To get no sleep, do no caffeine, and still push through the day was a massive challenge. But it was part of the healing.

Functional Medicine: The Comprehensive Approach

In my current practice, I do a lot of specialty lab testing. I’m at a point in my career where, if possible, I want blood, urine, stool, and saliva — the whole comprehensive picture, leaving no stone unturned. I analyze results simultaneously rather than in isolation. That’s the future of functional medicine. It’s not “we did a test, here are your eight supplements.” It’s looking at everything comprehensively to figure out priorities and develop phased protocols.

I typically break down interventions into three phases over about four to five months. We hone in on certain systems first — usually starting with the gut, because that’s where food is absorbed — and then move to the next steps involving the liver, immune system, and eventually the brain. Actual brain repair — shifting cell membrane composition from industrial seed oils and trans fats to monounsaturated fats from olives and nuts and omega-3s from seafood — is a much longer, slower process.

That’s why I like to remind people that nutrition is more of a lifespan conversation than most think. The reason to eat healthier today isn’t that one day of eating will be significant. It’s because it’s going to predict your ability to do that tomorrow. And that’s going to predict next week, next month, next year. That’s when the real avalanche of change happens.

Some people are rapid responders. I’ve had patients where all we did was switch from artificially sweetened beverages to water and add breakfast before coffee, and within a week, their whole world opened up. Others take much longer. I had a patient who wasn’t able to make many changes but kept showing up. After eight months, a window opened, and everything became accessible. Everyone has their own unique biology and their own timeline.

Key Takeaways

Betrayal trauma doesn’t just affect your emotions and relationships — it has real, measurable effects on your body, gut, immune system, and brain that nutrition can help address.

The link between food and mood is well-supported by recent science, but most people still don’t understand how deeply what they eat affects their mental health and capacity for recovery.

Start with when you eat, not what you eat. Establishing consistent meal timing and sleep-wake patterns is one of the most stabilizing first steps during a crisis.

Trauma and disordered eating diverge along two pathways — addictive and restrictive — and many people have characteristics of both. A food and body timeline can help you understand how your unique history connects to your current eating patterns.

Functional medicine testing can reveal the low-grade inflammation and biological dysregulation that mainstream medicine often misses, especially in people with high ACE scores and significant life adversity.

Nutrition is a lifespan conversation, not a daily calorie calculation. What you eat today matters most because it predicts your ability to keep showing up tomorrow.