In my years of working with people around eating disorders and disordered eating, I can’t tell you the number of times someone describes feeling out of control with chocolate chips and peanut butter. At face value it may seem innocent enough: chocolate and peanut butter are two delicious items, duh. And sure, they are delicious! But for all the unique people with unique and individual tastes I’ve seen, I find it hard to believe so many favor a spoonful of peanut butter with chocolate chips thrown on top as their treat of choice.
Read MoreFor as many ways as yoga can be helpful and healing, under less thoughtful conditions it can be a hinderance and painful. Yoga offers one option for a safe way to be present in your brain and body, but is not the only way. At times yoga is framed as a way to seek out not only a certain aesthetic but also how one can attain the vague and inspirational marker of ‘wellness’. Which is just.not.very.helpful.
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One principle of Intuitive Eating is Honor Your Hunger. While it may seem simple (ringing up past moments of diet-y advice to ‘just eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full!’), we know it’s more than that. After decades of being told that your hunger is something to be controlled, revered, or ignored, honoring it feels scary and somewhat impossible.
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“I get it (intuitive eating, health at every size, food freedom), but I don’t get it”. Translation: “intellectually I understand the concept, but experientially I’m at a loss.” This feels SO hard. So hard because we can know and understand the evidence that supports Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size, but feel clueless as to how to make it feel true and put the concepts into practice.
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Okay, so we’re post-Thanksgiving and middle-holiday season. A normal response (that we’ve been conditioned to believe is a bad way our body responds to evil food) is to sometimes get bloated. It can trigger a reaction in us that induces guilt, pushes us to start planning how we’re going to adjust our eating to ‘fix’ it, and makes us feel like we did something wrong. Our heads can be scary places after (what are normal) experiences of eating past fullness.
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It’s officially November. Halloween has passed, the days are shorter, and Christmas decorations seem to be coming out in full force. Between now and December 31st, we will be surrounded by foods we’re told to simultaneously make/bake/enjoy while also told (implicitly and explicitly) to abstain from. A real mind-f**k.
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It’s the day after Halloween. You wake up feeling a mix of guilt and fear. Guilt because you ate all the candy that didn’t get passed out (candy that isn’t even a kind you particularly enjoy, which you did on purpose), wrappers in a heap on the table that you quickly smushed together and disposed of, angry with yourself and unable to tolerate seeing the ‘evidence’. Along comes fear. Fear that you’re not going to be able to pass up the leftover candy everyone is bringing in to the office today. Or maybe you feel resolve, confident you can pass it up because you are so disgusted with yourself you just know you’ll be able to be strong.
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I often think of this phrase as I see people begin to heal their relationship with food. When we’re stuck in the painful, endless cycle of binge/shame/restrict, our joie de vivre is squashed. There is very limited ability to delight in the joy of being alive when your mind is endlessly screaming at you about eating (either for being ‘bad’ or screaming to keep it together and eat perfectly), not having it (your body) together, and generally feeling a sense of unease.
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Healing your relationship with food and your body means being willing to grieve. It means grieving the time you may feel you’ve lost to hating your body and obsessing about food. It may mean grieving the body you’ve always wished you had to make compassionate space for the body you have right now. Or it may be grieving the idea of waking up one day and loving your body in order to give way for the the not-always-fast road to respecting your body.
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You’re overwhelmed…deadlines are due, your partner is starting to get annoyed that you’re not around as much (and when you are, you’re not really there), your home is a mess, you forgot your friend’s birthday and there is just.not.enough.time. The demands are crushing and you’re left feeling like things are slipping through the cracks at an alarming rate. Enter the newest “clean” eating plan/cleanse/re-set/diet and exercise plan.
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