Tis the season for toxic messages about food and body to abound, leaving us feeling high anxiety around every meal, snack, and gathering. And meal or holiday snacking comes with a heavy side of guilt.
We feel obligated to start planning for how we will atone for existing in a body that is not photoshop perfect.
If you feel exhausted by the constant battle to meet unrealistic food and body standards, know that you are not alone. The constant bombardment of messages telling us why we do not measure up leads to body hatred, fear around food and eating, and a pretty disordered relationship with food.
What if you could finally stop fighting with your body and find peace with your food? While it may feel radical and even counter-culture, it is possible to heal that relationship without restriction, guilt, or shame.
The Diet – Binge Cycle
The Diet
Diets seem so inviting at first. You have clear guidelines and a nice set of rules of “dos” and “don’ts.” Each time you start a new diet you feel like this will be the time that you finally fix everything that is wrong with you and your life (the lie and promise that once we achieve the “perfect body” everything will automatically be amazing and easy).
The diet feels great for a while, but eventually you can’t keep up with all of the rules. It’s too restrictive and time consuming. The more diets you go on the shorter this part of the cycle becomes. You used to be able to diet for months, but now you’re lucky if you can stick with it for even a few weeks.
The Binge
What do you do now that you’ve fallen off the wagon? Well, first you blame yourself. Then you go eat everything you couldn’t eat while on the diet. And not just a little, you eat a lot of those restricted foods. Meanwhile, you blame and loathe yourself.
Here’s the deal though. If diets worked you would have only ever needed 1 diet. All the diets are essentially the same. All of them are restrictive in some way. All of them trigger our inner rebel that says, “you can’t tell me what to do.”
Diets promise to fix all our problems, but what they actually do is give us a long list of unwanted consequences such as:
- Disconnection from our innate body cues for hunger/fullness and even emotional awareness (that’s a post for another day).
- Create self-loathing and disgust with our perfectly normal bodies.
- Compromise your heart health and create worsening health outcomes over time (Tylka, 2014).
- Destroy our relationship with food so that every meal or snack leaves us with an intense internal battle that often leads to guilt and shame every time we eat.
- Leaves us feeling like we are never enough – even when we do drop weight we always want more and for some reason all our problems are still there but accompanied by a sense of more self-loathing, weird.
- 1 out of 4 dieters will go on to develop a full blown eating disorder (Brooks, 2022). Many of the rest will struggle with disordered eating for years.
- “Disordered eating sits on a spectrum between normal eating and an eating disorder and may include symptoms and behaviors of eating disorders, but at a lesser frequency or lower level of severity. Disordered eating may include restrictive eating, compulsive eating, or irregular or inflexible eating patterns. Dieting is one of the most common forms of disordered eating.” (NEDC.com) ~NEDC.com
- Create a pendulum pattern where you sometimes eat “perfect” but eventually swing back into a binge-type eating pattern.
- Activates your sympathetic nervous system (aka the Fight or Flight system) and leaves you in a state of chronic stress which will increase inflammation in the body over time.
- Cause your muscles to shrink. When we diet there is usually not enough energy to go around, but it has to come from somewhere, so the body cannibalizes your muscles to get that energy.
- Reduces your energy levels. In addition to consuming muscles, your body will slow your metabolism way down. Which means you are tired! Your body thinks there is a famine. Therefore, to ensure that you survive this famine your body will make it harder and harder to move and think so that you don’t burn through everything too fast. Your body is looking out for your long-term survival. The more often you diet the faster your body puts these life-saving mechanisms in place.
What Does it Look Like to Heal Your Relationship with Food?
There is an alternative to the New Year, New You diet garbage. You can heal your relationship with food. This road requires us to do more of the deep work. However, once you start down this road and do the work, you find that life is so much better.
If you spend significant amounts of time each day thinking of food, worrying about food, feeling guilty about food, etc. Imagine being able to stop that constant barrage of thoughts and instead having all that brain power back to go live your life. This is what it looks like to really heal your relationship with food.
There are tools out there like Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size that help us navigate our way back to a healthy relationship with food and body. You truly can have peace. Let’s talk about a few steps you can take right now to achieve this new relationship with food and body.
How do you Change Your Relationship with Food?
1. Stop Dieting – Right Now.
We’ve already highlighted some of the incredibly damaging effects of dieting. It’s time to stop dieting.
2. Reject the “Diet Mentality”
This creeps into everything from the way we talk and think about food to the way we judge others for their food choices.
ACTION STEP: Write down your Food Rules. These can be sneaky, but if you have any rules around food write them down. Then spend time challenging these rules. Are they true (really really true)? Are they helpful? Are they kind? Do you want this noise in your head?
3. Reconnect with Your Body
Dieting destroys our interoceptive awareness which is our ability to hear and understand the various cues your body gives you. Our bodies are so wise and far more sophisticated than we give them credit for. Interoceptive awareness includes everything from your hunger/fullness cues to being able to identify our various emotions and how those show up in our bodies. Your body cues are neither good nor bad. It’s just information.
ACTION STEP: Can you feel your hunger/fullness when it is not screaming at you? Those subtle signs of hunger or fullness are easy to ignore and they vary widely from person to person. To start regaining your interoceptive awareness try checking in throughout the day to see if you can spot those subtle hunger or fullness cues. This is a great gateway into more and more body awareness.
4. Rebuild Body Trust
Step 4 is how you start to regain trust in your body, but your body also needs to regain trust in you! Your body has experienced a lot of restriction throughout its life. To your body, any restriction is dangerous – remember above? Over the years your body has had to keep you alive and it doesn’t know when the next famine will be, so it is on constant high alert for any restriction and ready to jump in to save you despite yourself.
ACTION STEP: To help your body calm down all those fight or flight responses, you need to eat regular and consistent meals and snacks. Everyday. You have to signal to your body that food is plentiful. This not only calms down that sympathetic nervous system, but it also balances your blood sugars and helps your body do its job.
5. Make Peace with Food
The second you are told to stop eating a specific food or food group the only thing you can think about is that food or food group. We humans are not big fans of being told what not to do so we eventually rebel and usually in spectacular fashion (anyone ever eat an entire pan of brownies in one sitting). We label foods as good or bad which sets us up to be either good or bad when we eat those foods. Guess what? Foods don’t actually have any moral value. None. There is room for all foods to be part of your normal healthy diet. Unless you have a scary food allergy there is no need to cut foods out of your diet.
ACTION STEP: Call out food labeling. Every time you or others around you call a food or food group “good,” “bad,” “healthy,” “unhealthy,” “junk,” etc. call it out. Use a lot of curiosity here, not judgement. Notice how often this is happening and how does that feel? Stay curious, the more you notice the more you’ll start to interrupt these patterns and to heal that relationship with your food.
6. Focus on How You Feel
Rather than measuring our body and food by external measurements, turn the focus inward. How do you feel? Does this workout feel good for your body today? Do you need to eat more or get more sleep? Does this outfit feel comfortable for the activity you are about to do? We spend so much time focusing on the aesthetics of our body that we forget to actually experience life in those bodies. Your body is not for the pleasure or consumption of others. Your body is for your own pleasure for you to live and do all the things YOU want to do in life.
ACTION STEP: Bring more curiosity to your habits and foods. If you think a particular food doesn’t agree with you, can you widen the lens and look at if the food was to blame or maybe it was the fact that you ate it while running late to that really big important meeting. So many things impact how we feel or react to food. So stay curious and check in with what your body likes and wants. If you prefer yoga or hiking to CrossFit or running then honor that. Find joy in your movement, foods, and body.
7. Seek Support
If all of this feels impossible or if you feel you are “too far gone” now is the time to seek help. There are a lot of amazing professionals out there helping people to work towards a better relationship with food.
ACTION STEP: Sign up for a 20 minute free consultation or check out our resources page.
Live Your Best Life
I often hear people say that this is all well and good, but for them they will lose control and never get it back if they stop dieting. I hear you. I once lived there myself convinced I was addicted to food and could never master intuitive eating or be trusted around food.
I see you and understand those fears. The work to become an intuitive eater is a journey, but I assure you, you can do this. I did, and my clients do. Every little step we take to heal is worth it and those steps add up. While it takes time, it is completely achievable and worth the effort.
Life on the other side of dieting is amazing. To wake up and not obsess and worry about food every day, all day, is freedom. Healing your relationship with food and your body is when you get to start really, fully living your best life.
Resources:
Brooks S, Severson A. How to Raise an Intuitive Eater. New York, NY, St. Martin’s Essentials, 2022.
Tylka, Tracy L et al. “The weight-inclusive versus weight-normative approach to health: evaluating the evidence for prioritizing well-being over weight loss.” Journal of obesity vol. 2014 (2014): 983495. doi:10.1155/2014/983495
