If you want to improve your relationship with food you have to stop dieting every time you feel uncomfortable. Another diet is never the answer.
Recognizing that you want a more healthy relationship with food is a big step and very difficult. The desire to change is often in direct conflict with the voice that’s been telling you to be smaller for decades. So when we begin to work on that relationship it can be easy to turn that into alternative behaviors.
You might find yourself applying new food rules or cutting out food groups or just skipping meals altogether in the name of “eating healthier”. In reality you’ve just shifted behaviors and continued the narrative that you can’t be trusted with food.
How would you feel about any other relationship if the other person couldn’t be trusted? How do you think that would go? So why do you think you’ll improve your relationship with food or yourself if you won’t trust yourself?
So you go from decades of diets to a period of “healthy eating” that actually isn’t healthy at all. And when you start to realize that you decide that you want a return to normalcy.
The solution? Another diet!
Because that’s always been the solution. But unfortunately you know it’s actually the problem.
If you’ve constantly tried to “fix” your life with another diet, maybe try working on that relationship with your self and with food as a whole. Take a break from the voice that tells you the only path to happiness is through being smaller. Tell it you don’t need it’s help right now and that it’s free to work on something else.
At some point we have to acknowledge that what we’ve done over and over isn’t working. If we want to move forward we must let go of the guardians of our past and let our true self be heard.
