ONE-TO-ONE PRIVATE PRACTICE
Three months of private, one-to-one somatic work, for you if you're fed up, exhausted, and ready to deal with what's actually driving your binging pattern, so it stops running your life.
With Alex Bottomley · The Food Freedom Therapist
If you're here, some of this is probably true
You're capable and successful in almost every area of your life. But this is the one place you still feel stuck and it costs you more than anyone realises. It costs you presence. The freedom to eat out, travel, socialise, and rest without food taking up space in the background. It's exhausting to keep managing it alone.
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE BODY
Your nervous system is carrying more than it can hold. Until there is somewhere else for that pressure to go, food will remain the most reliable way your body knows how to come back down.
Sometimes you wake up clear and decided. Sometimes you wake up already anxious, running through the rules, the plan, the things you have to get 'right' before the day has even begun. Either way, the day starts with food on your mind.
You go about your day and you get things done. People rely on you, and nobody would guess. But while you're operating, thoughts about your body and food are running quietly in the background. Checking, comparing, negotiating, planning what comes next.
You've held it together all day. You've followed the plan, kept up the performance. Then something shifts. Maybe it's on the way home from work. Maybe it's the moment you walk through the door. Maybe it already happened at your desk. The control you've been gripping loosens, and something else takes over.
For a moment there's relief and comfort from the food. Then the realisation comes that you've done it again. The frustration, guilt and shame kick in, and by this point you think 'screw it' .' So you keep going... until you're uncomfortably full. The rules come back into your awareness and you promise yourself that tomorrow you'll get back on track and be good.
If you read that and it speaks to something within you, you're in the right place. Nothing about you is unusual here. This is the pattern I work with every single day and you don't have to carry it alone anymore.
What's really happening
Your body learned, very intelligently, to use food to manage overwhelm and emotional load when there was not enough other support in place. It was very successful in doing so, which is why it's stayed for so long and why it's been so hard to stop.
Strategies built on control, such as dieting and restricting, asks your body to override a pattern that once kept you safe, without approaching the underlying cause beneath it. So the relief never lasts, and the pattern comes back, because the conditions that created it are still there.
This work goes to those conditions. We work with your nervous system and your felt experience, in direct relationship with what your body is experiencing, so that food no longer has to be the thing that you depend on for safety and relief.
KNOWLEDGE & UNDERSTANDING ISN'T ENOUGH:
Knowing the binge-restrict cycle lives in your nervous system is something you can read in a book, and you probably already have. But knowing what to do with what's actually happening in your body, for your specific history and your unique nervous system, in the moment it shows up, is what changes the pattern. And that's the support you'll get in this space, from me.
My methodology
This isn't a set of phases, and it isn't a programme you move through month by month. It's three conditions that have to be present for food and body freedom to become possible and they run through every session, in whatever order your body needs them, for as long as it needs them.
Two people can do this work and it will look completely different from the outside. That's not a lack of structure. That's the structure.
Nothing is forced, nothing is pathologised.
We work with the root cause rather than the eating behaviour, and we do it without shame or blame. Your history is treated as intelligent adaptation, not malfunction. Consent, choice and pacing sit underneath every single thing we do.
Learning the language your body has been speaking all along.
Most of this pattern happens below thought. So we slow down enough for you to notice sensation, name it, and stay with it for longer than you could before. That growing capacity to be with what you feel is what makes food stop being the only way through it.
You never build capacity without building support alongside it.
Before and while we go anywhere difficult, we find what already steadies you and we build what isn't there yet. Somatics of safety, regulation you can actually access in real life, and enough internal resource that your system doesn't have to reach for food to cope.
WHERE THE THREE MEET:
When all three conditions are held together over time, something changes that no single one of them produces on its own.
Not controlling food. Trusting yourself around it.
The self-attack quietens, because it is no longer doing a job.
Eating that moves with your life instead of dictating it.
The work
A three-month, one-to-one somatic programme.
Private, paced to your nervous system, and built for depth and long lasting results from binge eating.
Three 60-minute sessions with me each month over Zoom. Nine sessions across the three months, held at a pace your nervous system and body can keep up with.
A dedicated Slack space for messaging and voice notes, so you are not holding it alone in the gaps between our sessions.
Access to an online library of somatic practices, teaching and resources, to work with outside of sessions, to support your journey.
Binge eating survival patterns shaped over years do not settle in a fortnight. A nervous system learns safety through repeated experience over time, and this is long enough to begin that in earnest, with the door open to continue.
Apply to work with AlexWhy this is different
You'd know by now if more information was going to fix this. You're not missing knowledge, discipline or insight. What you've never had is somebody working with the part of you that actually runs the pattern, slowly, privately, and with your specific history in the room.
Almost everything you've tried worked on what you eat or what you think. We work with what your nervous system is doing underneath both, in real time, in session, in your actual body. That is the layer nothing else has reached, and it is why the results hold.
I don't take a history and file it away. What happened to you, what you carried, what you had to become. That is what we work with directly. Your pattern is specific to your life, so the work is built around your life, not a protocol.
I trained through The Focalizing Institute, and the whole craft is pacing. Going faster than your system can hold is exactly how change fails to stick. We move at the speed your body can actually integrate, which is why this doesn't collapse the moment life gets hard.
I'm not an expert positioned above you. I know this pattern from the inside, and I'll be honest with you about what I see, what I don't know, and what I can't promise. You get a real person with real training, not a polished method delivered at you.
Apply to work with AlexWHAT I WON'T DO:
I won't give you food rules, a plan to follow, or a promise with a date on it. I won't tell you that you're broken, and I won't treat you like you're fragile. I'll tell you the truth about what I see, we'll go at the pace your body can hold, and I'll stay with you in the parts of this you've never said out loud to anyone.
CLIENT EXPERIENCES
Janet's story
"I finally stopped fighting myself and started understanding what my body was actually asking for."
Catherine's story
"This is the first time I've felt like someone really got it, and knew what to do with it."
The women I work with
They are capable, established women who are trusted and relied on in the rest of their lives. From the outside, there is no sign of this at all. That is exactly the point. This pattern is very good at hiding inside a life that works.
Most of them arrive having already done a great deal: years of dieting, therapy that helped with other things but never this, a shelf of books they can quote back to me. They are not beginners. They're people who have run out of new things to try, and are quietly furious that this is still here.
If you've been telling yourself you're not "bad enough" for serious support, that's the sentence almost everyone says to me in their first session. It has never once been true.
She's the reliable one
Steady, competent, the person others lean on. Which is exactly why nobody has ever thought to ask how she's doing with this.
She's tried the serious things
Not just diets. Therapy, coaching, intuitive eating, the nervous-system work she's read about but never actually been guided through in her own body.
She keeps it entirely private
Often for a decade or more. Sometimes I'm the first person she has said the whole thing to out loud, in full, without editing it.
She's at a point of deciding
Something has made deferring this any longer feel worse than facing it. That's usually what brings her to the application form.
I've sat with hundreds of women in exactly this position. Not one of them turned out to be the exception they were afraid they were.
Who this is for
FROM THE INSIDE
It was the end of the road for me. I had exhausted all my options… then I came across you on instagram and i was like wait a minute, what she's saying is making sense to me. like you're folding in the trauma response in the eating and binge behaviour.
I can now go to parties without worrying that the food isn't enough.' I can actually hangout on the weekends, go on vacation or simply drive to and from work everyday without strategizing my next binge.
Alex's methodology is gentle, SLOW, safe and was the first place that I learned and felt that I was worthy of all the best things in life.
ABOUT ME
I'm a somatic practitioner who's supported hundreds of women in their struggles with the binge-restrict cycle. Before I am a therapist, I am a human who has been through the same struggle as you.
I know this work from the inside first. I was in Weight Watchers by the time I was 12, already trying to shrink a body that was never actually the problem. At 15, my dad died, and almost overnight I became the strong one, the responsible one, and food became the only way I knew how to hold what the grief left behind. The more I ate, the more ashamed I felt. The more ashamed I felt, the harder I tried to control it.
I tried almost everything before I found my way out, diets, talk therapy, meditation, more diets, and it wasn't until I finally found somatic work and started to understand my own nervous system that I realised what I was experiencing made sense. I wasn't broken, in fact, I was surviving.
My ongoing exploration, combined with my professional trainings, including The Focalizing Institute, is what allows me to support my clients so deeply.
I am not here to be the expert above you, but to be the witness you may never have had.
Investment
What's included
This isn't just access to sessions. It's a held, private space built to change the pattern at the level it actually lives.
Three 60-minute sessions a month with me, over Zoom. This is where the pattern is met in real time, in your actual body.
The work happens at the pace of your body.
A private Slack space for messages and voice notes, so you are not holding the hard moments alone until the next call.
Continuity is what stops the pattern from slipping back.
A library of somatic practices, teachings and resources to work with outside sessions, at the pace your body needs.
You build capacity in the gaps, not just on the calls.
We work with the root cause: your nervous system, your history, your felt sense, not just the eating behaviour.
You don't just manage the cycle. You stop needing it.
Nothing is forced. We move at the speed your body can actually integrate, which is slower than willpower and more lasting than control.
Slow becomes sustainable.
I only work with 6 clients at a time. That limit exists so I can actually show up for you, fully, personally, consistently.
You get a real relationship, not a programme dashboard.
Pay in full
£2,250
£750 per month, paid upfront
Payment plan
3 × £790
Total £2,370, adjusted to cover plan fees
Due to the depth of this work and the level of attention and support you receive from me, I only work with 6 clients at a time.
Apply to work with Alex
Before you apply
You are not too broken. This is one of the things I hear most often, and it's never once meant someone wasn't ready for this work. There is no history that's too much for this to hold. In fact, the longer something has been carried, the more this way of working tends to help, because it goes to where it's actually stored, rather than staying on the surface.
Because most of what you have tried worked on the behaviour or the thoughts. This works with the nervous system underneath them, in direct relationship with your body. That is the part almost nothing else has reached.
You do not have to be in crisis, or look a certain way, or have a diagnosis, to deserve support. If the cycle is taking up room in your life, that is enough. It has always been enough.
No, and I would not trust anyone who did. I do not promise recovery, or a finish line by a certain date. What I offer is careful, honest work at the pace your body can hold, and the same approach that has helped people who had tried everything else.
It is long enough to begin this properly, and many people choose to continue past it. Three months is the floor, not a cure. Most clients go on to work with me for 6 to 12 months.
Then we go slowly. You are never required to go beyond what you have capacity for. We start exactly where you are, and we stay at a pace you can hold. That includes not being ready. We work with exactly that.
The next step
If this is the work you are ready for, the next step is to complete a short application. It helps me understand where you are, and whether I am the right person to work with you. If I am, I'll share the next steps, and if not, I will tell you, and point you in another direction.
Take your time with it. There is no rush here. There never is.
Apply to work with AlexApplication
