If you have been struggling with food, your body image, chronic dieting and meal plans in an effort to finally get it right when it comes to eating well and sticking to your diet goals, this blog is for you.
If you are tired of being in an internal tug-of-war with yourself, feeling shame around your perceived failed attempts of promising yourself to finally “be good” and have willpower around food, read on.
Part of my healing and transformation journey has included working through disordered eating patterns.
While I have never been what is considered to be overweight, this area of my life has created much suffering in so many other ways. {If you are struggling with weight loss resistance be sure to listen to episode 15 of the podcast where I cover 5 reasons you may be struggling to lose weight}.
Beginning in my teens, I went though cycles of food and calorie restricting, eventually strict meal plans, and clinging to the next fad diet as though it was the answer to the happiness I was desperately seeking, only to be left feeling like a failure when I veered off the plan.
My preoccupation with food, calories, exercise, and what I was going to eat next, consumed a great deal of my mental space for a long time.
I would vow to finally get it right, and eat perfectly, and only end up in this cycle of restricting, and feeling full of shame when I ate something that was ‘bad’.
I know I am not alone in this, and that many women are out there struggling with this in silence. My hope is that if this is you, that this inspires you to take action to heal this part of your life.
In my holistic counseling practice, I have helped many women through these issues.
I have helped women with severe binge eating disorder, and women who, like me, have a perfectionist tendency and use food as the battle ground to feel in control of their life.
I have helped women who stress eat, get up in the middle of the night to binge eat, and use food as their drug to numb their emotions.
While I didn’t experience all of the many ways that my clients were experiencing it, the underlying core issues are the same.
Beginning in February 2017 I will be adding Nutritional Therapy to my work with clients, and will be offering nutritional programs based on the principles I teach my clients.
Because of the struggles I experienced with dieting, and all or nothing mindset when it comes to food, I have made it my mission to move away from the typical weight loss movement.
The last thing we need is an other nutrition expert telling us we are bad or wrong for eating certain foods, or feeling food shame when we indulge in occasional treats!
As with anything, we need to move away from the all or nothing mentality
and aim for balance.
I have been unclear as to how I would guide women in this, since being overweight is not the only indicator of disordered eating and unhealthy relationship to food.
I have struggled with how to educate about health, and how fat (especially around the belly) is a breeding ground for disease, and that the weight is only an outward sign of an inward condition.
It’s a symptom of something deeper going on, and the cause is multidimensional.
Food addiction, stress, emotional suppression, hormone imbalance, adrenal fatigue, thyroid dysfunction, the types of food we eat, sugar, inflammation, digestive disturbances and food sensitivities are some of the main underlying causes for weight gain, and weight loss resistance.
According to Dr. Mark Hyman, functional medicine practitioner, sugar is one of the main culprits behind fat accumulation, especially around the belly (abdominal obesity), and weight loss resistance.
He also points out that not all calories are created equal, which dispels the myth that calories in calories out (diet and exercise) is the way to lose weight.
Although this approach and mathematical formula may work for some, if any of the above underlying issues are present, this will not lead to the desired result.
Sugar is highly addictive, and removing it, or reducing it significantly is one critical place to begin turning your health around, and shedding unhealthy belly fat. For more on sugar, read this blog.
A body in balance will be naturally slim.
Emotional balance, healthy mindset, a combination of rest, relaxation and movement, spiritual connection, human connection and an intuitive, self awareness of our body are essential components to life long vitality, disease prevention, and weight loss.
How you do anything is how you do everything. How you do food, and your relationship to it and your body is how you do life.
A place to begin with this inner landscape, is to start becoming more self aware.
Do you have a dysfunctional relationship to food?
Here are some signs that point toward deeper issues going on:
- You spend a great deal of time of time preoccupied by food. Either trying to avoid going for the cookies in the cupboard, or the candy on your co-workers desk, or the cake on the buffet table, or planning how you are going to get your next ‘fix’.
- You feel out of control around food, and have difficulty stopping once you start eating
- You feel intense guilt and shame after eating foods in larger quantities (binge eating)
- You hide your eating behaviors from others. (After I spoke at a conference about this topic, a woman came up to me to share that she hides the fact that she eats all the ice cream from her husband by going out to buy another carton, and scooping out the exact amount that was missing so he wouldn’t know). This was shared through tear filled eyes, and a sense of relief she could tell someone this secret she felt a lot of shame around.
- You count calories and fat grams like it’s your full time job and find yourself constantly looking for ways to restrict them even more – this also takes up a lot of your mental focus during the day
Ponder the following questions:
Do you stuff your emotions? (Leave things unsaid and use food or sugar to medicate your feelings?)
Do you deprive yourself of emotional and spiritual nourishment? (Restrict and deny yourself certain foods?)
Do you feel you need to be perfect in all that you do, leaving no room for error? (This may show up in all or nothing, black and white thinking around food).
How is your relationship to food mirroring your relationship to yourself, and your life in other ways?
Who would you be without this struggle? (what would you be doing differently right now in your life if you weren’t obsessing over food, and feeling insecure about your body?)
Pondering these questions is a way to begin the prices of uncovering the underlying emotional connection to food and weight loss struggles.
If you would like to free yourself from these issues, I work with a select number of 1:1 clients on an intensive basis, over a 30 day period in my Sacred Self Discovery Deep Dive program.
You can be free from the issues you are facing with the right guidance from someone who has been where you are, and I can help. Book your free 30 minute discovery call to find out if working with me is right for you.