From Diet Hell to Trusting Your Body

“I’m in diet hell…. I binge on food when people aren’t around. I eat because I’m unhappy and I’m unhappy because I eat so much”. This is the type of client enquiry I hear a lot. The reliance of dieting and starvation creates a disconnect between mind and body and no matter how hard you try to make your body lose weight, it’s purely trying to keep you alive.

Can you relate to this diet-binge-guilt-shame cycle? Dieting, restricting, overeating or bingeing then starting all over again! I lived it for over two decades and I’m so thankful the days of trusting the diet are well and truly over.

It’s quite a common behaviour to comfort or punish ourselves with food when emotions are high and mood is low and our emotional attachments to food are confusing what we really need. Our self-esteem gets tied up in the way we look and lack of confidence in our ability to step off the diet roller-coaster keeps us stuck.

This destructive cycle consumes many people striving to feel healthier or become happier. Their weight, size and shape become the focus on finally feeling comfortable in their body, although their mindset and beliefs may not have changed.

They can’t understand when they’ve been doing EVERYTHING “right” why their body isn’t doing what they want it to.

When you turn to food and dieting to change the way you feel, your body can stop trusting that you’re giving it what it needs.

It’s an interesting concept that most people don’t even consider – that your body might lose trust with you even though you’re trying to make it ‘better’. The thing is most of these efforts are done without consulting the body.

Instead of turning inward, asking and listening to your body’s inner wisdom and naturally occurring hunger and satiety cues, we follow the diet of this way or that way, eat at this time or that time, eat this amount or that amount. The body isn’t even consulted.

Continuing to feed, or not feed, yourself in this way encourages black and white thinking and decreases your body’s ability to do what you want it to, in favour of doing what it’s programmed to do.

When you’re over eating because you’re so hungry and miserable following a diet plan or way that doesn’t honour or respect your unique bio-individuality, you’re effectively telling your body that you’re not to be trusted, which encourages your natural survival instinct to kick in and do what is necessary to protect you and keep everything functioning. This is based on fear of starvation.

In some cases, the translation your body receives is, “keep the weight on”. This is how what we want without consulting our body can lead us to what we don’t actually want.