Freedom From Dieting
Enjoying delicious food can be one of the most pleasurable parts of being human. However, oftentimes the enjoyment of food becomes complicated by the way we use it to cope with painful emotions. Using food to handle difficult feelings can lead to an endless cycle of weight gain, yo-yo dieting, and an overall challenging relationship with food. However, it is possible have a positive relationship with food and to let go of dieting once and for all.
To understand how and why this is possible, it’s important to know that the body is self-healing, and as such, is always working towards staying in balance. For example, when you get a cut, the innate wisdom of your body knows exactly what to do so that you will heal. You don’t have to tell your blood vessels to contract to slow the bleeding or instruct the white blood cells to accumulate at the site of the cut. The body has a similar wisdom with food. It knows what to eat and how much to eat to maintain a healthy weight. You don’t need to count calories, exercise excessively, or deprive yourself of the foods you enjoy. Your body knows what foods to eat to keep you healthy and at a balanced weight, just like it knows how to heal from a cut. The foods that taste good to you are the ones that your body needs to stay balanced, and you will know how much you need to eat by noticing when you feel full.
However, when there are parts of us who are hurting, this pain understandably overrides the innate wisdom of our body. In this place of suffering, we use food to get relief and feel better in the moment. When using food to feel better, people often experience weight gain and then turn to a diet with the hope that it will help them lose weight; however, when food is being used to provide relief from painful emotions, no diet or weight loss program will provide long-term results. From what I have seen, people eventually go back to using food to feel better and the weight comes back unless the part of the person who is hurting is seen, understood, and supported.
Extra weight is a padding that acts as a protective barrier to help people feel safe, which is why it is so common for people who have experienced trauma to struggle with overeating. Even for those individuals who have not experienced trauma, holding extra weight is a way to create a sense of safety in the body.
When working with clients who desire a healthy relationship with food and a balanced body weight without dieting, the first place we start is cultivating compassion for the part of them that uses food to feel better. Often, the part of us that overeats is not the wise adult who knows that it will make them feel uncomfortable. Instead, it is often a different (usually younger) part of us that is using the best coping skill it has to get relief. This part doesn’t know what else to do to feel better. From this perspective, by overeating this hurting part of us is doing a skillful job at getting relief and deserves our care and understanding. Seeing this part with compassion helps to break the cycle of blame and shame that often drives overeating and yo-yo dieting.
Another important step is cultivating more body awareness, both while eating and at other times during the day. This helps to strengthen the connection between the innate wisdom of the body and the conscious mind, so that we can better listen to what we really need. Sometimes we think we need ice cream, when we really need to cry, talk to a friend, or get a hug. A great resource that speaks to the importance of body awareness, self-love, and mindfulness in healing one’s relationship with food is the book “Women, Food, and God” by Geneen Roth.
By using these tools and others, a person can release the need to overeat and can be freed from the cycle of weight gain and loss, and the resulting shame and blame that ensues. Doing this work helps to heal our relationship with food and reconnects us to our innate body wisdom, which guides us to the foods, food quantities, and types of movement that will allows us to maintain a healthy body weight naturally.