Holding Two Truths: When Eating Disorder Care Both Helps and Harms with Dr Tanya Frances

Holding Two Truths: When Eating Disorder Care Both Helps and Harms with Dr Tanya Frances

From The Full of Beans Podcast by Hannah Hickinbotham

July 6, 2026 · 46 min · Season 1 · Episode 277

About this episode

This episode discusses the complexities of eating disorder care with insights from Dr. Tanya Frances, highlighting the potential harms of treatment systems and the importance of humanizing care.

Have you ever sat in a treatment room and felt like the real you was completely invisible, like the system was so focused on your weight, your behaviours, your diagnosis, that it forgot there was a whole person underneath? This episode is for you. This week on the Full of Beans Podcast, I'm joined by Tanya Francis, a research psychologist, lecturer at the Open University, and psychotherapist in private practice, who also brings her own lived experience of an eating disorder to this conversation. Tanya's background is in domestic violence research and gender-based violence, and the more she looked at how systems respond when someone is harmed, the more she saw uncomfortable parallels with eating disorder care. In this episode, we explore: What iatrogenic harm means and why care systems can sometimes cause harm The role of BMI and weight in treatment, How rigid care centralising numbers can reinforce eating disorder logic How weight stigma in healthcare shuts people out before they've even begun The culture of mistrust around eating disorders and the damage it does Why people pleasing in treatment can look like recovery but lead straight back to relapse Moral injury and what…

People in this episode

Host: Hannah Hickinbotham

Guest: Dr Tanya Frances

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Open University

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