When I was really struggling with food, I knew my struggles weren’t about food. I knew this deep inside of me, but I didn’t have words to describe it.
And my inner knowing didn’t stop me from making it about food. I would still try to cut back on sugar, or take gluten out of my diet (with no diagnosed gluten sensitivity), or stop eating certain kinds of foods like nightshades or yogurt or coffee. :(.
I can see now that diet culture offers us so many solutions that are ALL about food. This is how weight loss companies and coaches make their money.
But there is something that happens when we try to solve a challenge by just addressing the symptom.
If you are like me, you know the symptom was feeling out of control around certain foods. Worrying that you’d overeat trigger foods. And even believing you have a food addiction.
When you consider these symptoms, it’s easier to look at a food with sugar and believe that if you could get rid of sugar then all of your food struggles would go away.
Trying to take sugar out of my diet only made me fight with sugar more. And therefore fight with myself. Making it about sugar only distracted me from what was really going on. But it also reaffirmed my problem as a real problem. Essentially, it kept the struggle in place.
If you’ve been struggling with food and making it about food, it’s time for a step back.
You can’t diet your way through your food struggles.
You can’t restrict your way to feeling more in control around food.
The part of me that made it about food was the part of me that wanted to keep my weight down. I was hoping that If I could eat the right foods, I wouldn’t gain weight.
Which is why getting to the root of the struggle is so important. It’s not about food, it’s about body shame.
We’ve been driven to dieting to fix our bodies. We’ve been told there is something wrong with our bodies and then we internalized body shame. No one has to tell you that your body is wrong or bad, that belief system lives inside of you. You tell yourself that all of the time.
If you didn’t need to fix your body, you wouldn’t need to diet. If you didn’t need to diet, you wouldn’t need to struggle with food.
Body shame is at the root of food struggles.
I guide my clients to understand how their body image and patterns with food work together. If you’d like to explore more support around this, book a Clarity Call with me here. https://bookme.name/tarawhitney/lite/clarity-call