Can You Heal Your Relationship with Food?

A common question among women is can you heal your relationship with food? Yes, it is possible and the benefits to healing your relationship with food extend beyond losing weight.

For decades, women have been told their weight is a personal failing, the result of laziness or lack of willpower. Yet despite working harder than ever, dieting more than ever, and being more health-conscious than ever, obesity rates continue to climb.

The truth is, the problem is not you, it’s the broken system of dieting, unrealistic expectations, and quick-fix solutions that have left generations of women discouraged and disconnected from their bodies.

The good news? You can use your weight journey as an opportunity to heal not just your body, but your relationship with yourself.

Losing weight or even deciding to maintain your current weight is an opportunity to heal in so many ways including and beyond the physical benefits. 

So often, women are told they need to lose weight, which comes as a surprise, to absolutely no one, who has been told this.

Our excess weight is framed as something we are doing wrong in life or that we are just too lazy to eat less or exercise more.

But have you ever stopped to think why, smart and hard-working women cannot lose weight?

Can it really be that we are all lazy gluttonous women?

The answer is NO. An emphatic NO. Your weight is not because there is something wrong with you.

Obesity and related diseases, have over the past 45 years gone up to at all-time highs now. The problem is much bigger than your habits.

According to the National Institute of Health

• Nearly 1 in 3 adults (30.7%) are overweight
• More than 2 in 5 adults (42.4%) have obesity
• About 1 in 11 adults (9.2%) have severe obesity

If willpower were the solution, we wouldn’t be facing a crisis. Yet today, nearly half of all adults in the U.S. are living with obesity and more women are struggling with their weight than ever before.”

The Problem with Weight Loss for Women

Briefly here are the problems I see:

Low fat and low calorie diets that have been promoted since the fifties have resulted in the greatest increase of weight gain and related diseases. Fat was never the problem but the increase in processed easy-to-eat fast and convenience foods that we snack on all day is a problem.

Grown women are expected to have the bodies of teenagers. We hold ourselves to this vision. Those that are successful at staying very thin, develop their own set of health problems including bone loss and increased cancer diagnosis. Those that continually diet and fail, end up gaining more weight every year.

Dieting is a business and making money is the real goal, not helping women be healthy. Thin does not equal health. You can be thin and very unhealthy, even though you get compliments about your body. But the diet industry doesn’t even really get many of you thin.

We’ve forgotten that we deserve to eat and eat food we like. We’ve been conditioned to think we need to eat too little of low-calorie foods that don’t even taste good. We are completely out of touch with our hunger cues and when our body feels full.

Finally, since all of the above has created a couple of generations of overweight women, I see doctors giving up and prescribing GLP1’s to many women whether it is medically called for or not.

These issues lead to women doing the opposite of healing themselves. While you may believe that being thin will fix everything; it just doesn’t. However, I do understand your desire to lose weight and the frustration that comes when that doesn’t happen.

What I want you to know is that you can use your weight loss journey to heal many parts of yourself that have been ignored or pushed away over the years as well as eating better, understanding your body better, and feeling better.

What Can You Heal?

You can heal the struggling parts of yourself and learn to love all of you maybe for the first time ever.

What do I mean by the struggling parts? All of us have parts of our personality that we approve of. And we also have the parts that we wish would never see the light of day.

The problem with this is that the parts you approve of and let run the show for the most parts, are stuck in a protector mode and is always holding you back in some way.

The parts you’ve pushed away are running things behind the scenes. You may not even be conscious of their influence but they are also trying to keep you safe in their own way.

For example, the part of you that you are conscious of, says, You need to lose weight. Makes sense, of course you do. And yet, it just doesn’t happen despite your best efforts.

An Example of Healing an Eating Pattern

One time I had a client who couldn’t figure out why she ate chocolate every night. Her solution was to have her husband hide it. (You’d be surprised by how many women have people hide food from them.)

We did some work and next thing we knew, she was eating popcorn in the evening. She stopped the popcorn, again by having her husband remove it. And then it was a sudden desire for ice-cream every night.

Can you see how the actual food was not the problem? We had removed hunger as the reason. We removed the idea that certain foods were addictive for her. That left just the time period—evening.

Once we knew there was something about the evening time that needed soothing with food, we could focus on the real problem, which we discovered was that she couldn’t relax in the evening without food.

There was a part of her that believed that stopping, resting, and watching television was dangerous.

It wasn’t actually dangerous but this part of her, believed it was to the extent that to quiet that part, she ate every night just to sooth herself enough that she could sit and enjoy time with her husband.
Maybe for you it’s chips after work, or a nightly glass of wine. For her, it was chocolate. The food itself wasn’t the problem; it was what she needed it to quiet.

The healing came from acknowledging these parts of herself. The part that thought she needed to work 24/7 to feel safe. And the part that wanted to lose weight but didn’t know how. And the part that was trying to hold it all together.

Often, because productivity is considered good and women become successful because of their productivity, they don’t realize how much this idea runs their lives.

Why This is Different Than a Diet

Diets do not heal anything, not even the body. The word diet can simply mean what you eat on a daily basis, but it has also come to mean a period of deprivation of food for the purpose of losing weight.

To lose weight, you do have to make some changes. However, the changes I recommend are rooted in taking care of yourself and loving yourself. Instead of deprivation, I usually recommend eating more at times

The types of food you eat and when you eat is important and makes the whole process easier. Instead of using willpower, I teach women to understand what makes them overeat at times and how to eat more naturally.

My clients love the freedom from worrying about every bit they put into their mouths whether at home or when going out.

As you learn to eat, you heal your body from the inside out. I’m not a doctor or nutritionist but I know a lot about eating and food in general. For the most part though, my clients who do see a knowledgeable doctor or nutritionist, get the same kind of advice about what to eat.

I’m an expert in helping you follow through on the kind of eating that is right for you. I help dissolve problem eating patterns and give you a great foundation for managing your weight forever.

Instead of dieting imagine:

• eating full meals of food you actually enjoy, without guilt.
• dissolving old eating patterns for good, not just for a few weeks.
• trusting your body and yourself more than you ever thought possible

Diets don’t offer a forever solution (you aren’t the problem but you may have habits that are.) but I do and it feels great to finally have the ability to enjoy food again without worrying that it’s going to ruin everything.

Your Next Step

If you’re ready to step off the dieting treadmill and start creating lasting change, I’d love to help. In a free Zoom consultation, we’ll uncover what’s really holding you back and explore how you can heal your eating patterns for good. You don’t have to keep fighting with your body, let’s find a way forward that feels like freedom. Schedule your free zoom consult here.