In this episode, I’m joined by Frances Gunn — Australian carnivore lifestyle enthusiast and the voice behind the Instagram account Lady and Her Steak. Frances spent nine years inside an eating disorder that took her through anorexia, two hospital admissions, binge eating, purging, and a long stretch of alcohol-fueled cycles before she found her way to a way of eating that — by her own account — quieted her hunger signals within a week and, eighteen months later, has restored her menstrual cycle and her sense of stability around food.

What makes this conversation rare isn’t the diet itself. It’s the framing Frances brings to her own history — a willingness to revisit the standard story of anorexia and ask whether, for her, it was actually a story about something else entirely. She doesn’t speak as someone selling a protocol. She speaks as someone who lived inside the disorder for nearly a decade, who came through the standard care pathway and felt worse for it, and who has spent the last year and a half rebuilding her relationship with food on terms that look almost nothing like what the textbooks recommend.

Here’s what we explore in this episode:

The boarding school years — and the food environment that lit the fuse

Frances’s story begins at thirteen, when she was sent from Hong Kong to a boarding school in Australia. The food there was mass-produced and nutrient-poor — low in red meat, heavy on chicken, processed snacks, and dessert — and the pantry was full of chocolate, Milo, ice cream, and the kind of high-carbohydrate filler that never quite satisfies. Without parental supervision and without any framework for what nourishment actually meant, she developed what she now calls a sugar addiction long before the eating disorder ever had a name. The restriction came later — not because she was preoccupied with thinness in the way anorexia is usually described, but because she didn’t know how else to handle an appetite she couldn’t control.

Why she believes anorexia, for many people, is downstream of sugar addiction

This is the reframe at the heart of the episode. Frances hypothesizes — carefully, from her own experience — that for a meaningful subset of people with anorexia, the disorder doesn’t start with body image. It starts with a hunger that won’t quiet, a food environment that can’t satisfy it, and a young person reaching for the only lever they can find: eat less. She acknowledges she hasn’t met many anorexics who speak about it this way, partly because so few people get far enough into healing to look back with this kind of clarity. But she suspects the story is more common than the literature reflects.

The hospital experience — and why she came out worse than she went in

Frances had two inpatient admissions, one for a week and one for a month. She describes being fed through a tube on her first admission with what she calls a concoction of sugar and seed oil, and during her stays receiving food that mirrored the boarding school diet that had created the problem in the first place — high carbohydrate, low red meat, six to eight feedings a day. For someone with an underlying sugar addiction, she argues, this was the opposite of healing. She left the hospital with the binge–restrict cycle fully formed: starving herself all week, bingeing the day before weigh-ins, eventually tricking the system into believing she was recovered. Her analogy is direct — if a patient is an alcoholic, we don’t treat them by giving them alcohol. So why is the standard of care for a population with a sugar addiction built around sugar?

The alcohol chapter, and the book that changed everything

For years after hospital, the cycle expanded to include alcohol — starving through the week, bingeing on drinks at clubs on the weekend, then bingeing on food while hungover the next day. Quitting drinking turned out to be the first real domino. Frances credits Allan Carr’s The Easy Way to Quit Drinking — not for using willpower, but for reframing how she saw alcohol entirely. Once drinking was out, her mood stabilized, her food choices became more deliberate, and the next layer of healing became possible.

The Kelly Brogan mindset shift — from victim to author

Around the same time, Frances encountered the work of holistic psychiatrist Kelly Brogan, whose central premise is the opposite of what Frances had been told in hospital: that mental illness isn’t a fixed, unchangeable brain disease, and that the person experiencing it has both the capacity and the responsibility to heal. This wasn’t a small shift. For someone who had been told for years that she had a random condition she couldn’t influence, hearing that her patterns were her own to change unlocked a different kind of agency — one that she carried into both quitting alcohol and, later, fully changing how she ate.

Why carnivore — and why it worked when nothing else had

Frances came to the carnivore diet through her mother, who was using it to manage menopausal symptoms. She entered it skeptically, mainly hoping it might restore the period she’d been without for nine years. What she didn’t expect was the speed of the change. Her hunger signals quieted within a week. Within three months she felt she had fully healed her relationship with food. By a year in, she was naturally eating less, two meals a day, with no preoccupation and no cravings. She frames the mechanism in plain terms: when you eat genuinely nutrient-dense food and let yourself eat to true satiety, the soul-level hunger that drove the disorder finally has somewhere to land.

Keto vs. carnivore — and the underrated problem of decision fatigue

Keto, Frances argues, leaves too much creative surface area — keto desserts, keto breads, keto recreations of every comfort food — and for someone wired toward food as entertainment or coping mechanism, that surface area becomes its own trap. Carnivore, by contrast, offers almost no decisions to make. A steak is a steak. The food becomes fuel rather than identity, and the mental space that used to be consumed by food gets quietly handed back. (Kristina’s side note: it depends on what type of keto we talk about! Dirty keto could fit in this categorization, while a strict therapeutically ketotic meal plan will likely not welcome artificial sweeteners and funky low carb powders.

The holistic stack around the food

Frances is careful to point out that her recovery isn’t just about what’s on her plate. She’s in bed by 8pm, awake early, and protective of her mornings — gym, coffee with friends, a walk — before the workday begins. She drinks spring water rather than tap, watches what she puts on her skin, and is increasingly intentional about her time on social media after five years of being entirely off it. None of these are dramatic. Stacked together, they form the kind of life infrastructure that makes the food piece sustainable rather than precarious.

Where she’d tell someone to start

For anyone listening who recognizes the sugar addiction pattern in their own story, Frances is measured. She doesn’t recommend jumping from a standard diet straight to carnivore — the shock to the body is too much. Her suggestion is a few months of low-carbohydrate keto first, and then, if the sugar pull is still there, three months of carnivore as a reset. And she’s clear that nothing about this is permanent or one-size-fits-all. People change. Bodies change. The point isn’t the protocol — it’s the willingness to actually experiment with your own physiology rather than accepting that the way you feel now is the way you have to feel forever.

If you’ve ever felt like the standard recovery narrative didn’t quite map onto your experience — like the foods you were told to make peace with were the ones that kept pulling you under — Frances’s story will give you language for something that’s rarely spoken out loud in eating disorder spaces. Her experience isn’t a prescription. It’s a data point. And it’s a data point told with the kind of honesty that’s hard to find in conversations about food.

Recovery doesn’t always look the way we’re told it will. Sometimes the missing piece is a therapist. Sometimes it’s a mindset shift. And sometimes — as Frances’s story suggests — it’s a willingness to question the food itself.

Watch the full episode on the Beyond Binge Eating YouTube channel, and don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe for more conversations about recovery, holistic health, and life beyond binge eating.