Hello love,
Today I want to share with you why diets or diet mentality doesn’t work for emotional eaters. I wanted to dive into this because when we are emotional eaters, we think, “okay, I have the right diet now to deal with my emotional eating”.
When I was going through my own emotional eating journey, I was trying all the diets, the plans and more. They would work for a short amount of time because I could will power my way through and then I would end up in an emotional eating binge.
What I didn’t realize was that the diets, the diet mentality and the rules I had around food were also triggering my emotional eating.
You might think you have the perfect way of eating – you have your macros, your calories and your plan, but if it’s not deeply connected to your needs and your body’s needs for nourishment, then it’s going to also trigger you into binging or emotional eating.
The Diet Mentality, what is it?
I’m going to give you my definition of the diet mentality. Diet mentality is centred around specific rigid rules with food that feel restrictive. So each diet has specific rules around food, how you eat, the time of day you eat, etc.
Even if you’ve never gone on a specific diet, we are surrounded by these “food and diet rules” in our society. I’m sure your grandma says “I should eat on a smaller plate, or my stomach is too big, I’m eating too much, or I shouldn’t eat after 5, or I shouldn’t do this”.
There are all of these external rules. Sometimes they can work for us but they are not based on true connection to our body. When we are in our bodies, when we are in touch with our true needs, then those specifics for us fall into place. We don’t have to force them or push them as we connect back to our body step by step.
We need a new way…
Because I work with emotional eaters, I’ve created the specific way to learn to nourish yourself. I call this “True Nourishment and Strategic Digestion”. I created this based on my personal experience, all the trial and error and my background in nutrition understanding digestion. This is what I guide my clients through – a structure that they can flow from.
But this is not a rigid diet. It is an experimental process to learn what works for you using nutritional principles and understanding the emotional eating pattern.
If we’re looking at all of these external rules and for example we didn’t have breakfast at 09:00 a.m., or we didn’t have breakfast at all. We feel like something is wrong with us because we didn’t follow the “rule”.
This is because we don’t have a deeper sense of our body. We are not looking at the overall picture of what’s been going on for us. Maybe you had a big dinner so you are not hungry for breakfast, or that you naturally get hungrier later on in the morning.
What is missing
These are some of the factors that I take into consideration when I work with clients in this holistic way to help them resolve their emotional eating. I don’t think there is a diet out there that really looks at the whole person. It’s like here’s the food, here’s the macros, here’s the calories that tends to be the tenants + avoid these foods, or restrict these foods.
That’s doesn’t set you up to connect to your body, what you need and how you digest. When I work with clients, there’s a specific way that we work together to reconnect them back to their body and to truly nourish their body.
This is just one layer of the other layers that are needed to fully resolve this emotional eating pattern. When we are in a diet mentality, what tends to happen is we have a mentality with a set of restrictive rules. And we punish ourselves if we don’t follow those rules.
That punishment and negative thoughts create stress in the body. This pushes us further and further away from our goals, because stress will trigger our emotional eating.
Restriction around food also creates this obsession around food, which creates stress, which pushes us into our emotional eating. Stress also impacts our digestion on these deeper levels. When our digestion is off, our mood is off because our gut and our brain are connected and we produce a lot of neurotransmitters in our gut.
So our mood is off, and that triggers emotional eating.
Then if we don’t know how to discern true from emotional hunger, then we feel hungry all the time and out of control.
We need an approach that looks at all of you…
When I work with clients, we are looking at all of these things holistically. We’re looking at
How are they nourishing their bodies?
Do they feel satisfied with their meals?
Do they know when they’re truly hungry?
Are they still sort of punishing themselves or following these really rigid rules?
Because that’s what really derails us and pulls us away from our body. Diet mentality, diet culture and our society in general tells us something is wrong with our body. We need to fix it.
The message we get is that we were born with a stomach that’s too big or we were born somehow broken. And that’s not true. Our stomach was created for a reason. When we eat in alignment with that, we digest better. We’re going to feel more satisfied with meals, we’re going to eat the amount we need to eat and our body will get to it’s healthy.
True Nourishment is important but other steps are needed…
Again, I’m going to emphasize this is one layer of resolving and dissolving the emotional eating pattern. The other steps are body acceptance and emotional wellness. This is how our body gets to it’s healthy.
I always say this, if you are fighting yourself, you are losing. One part of you can’t win and one part of you loses, you lose. So when you come back to connecting to your body and the foods that you’re eating and you have these strategies that are connecting you back to your biology, your body is going to shift to where it’s meant to be.
We are trying so hard to manipulate our body to fit into a certain box, to fit into a certain size, to lose the weight. Yes, sometimes it’s for medical reasons and it’s for these other reasons, but how did we get there in the first place?
There were all of these layers stacked on each other to end up where we are today. We need to get into the root to resolve this issue and to have that sustainable change. Because the quick diet and the pills and the plans, they don’t last forever. That means that our body is not going to be at its healthy. We’re going to be constantly in this negative loop.
I want to emphasize here that there is a different way of nourishing your body, there’s a different way of connecting with food.
And it doesn’t mean that you won’t reach your health goals. It just means that you’re going to give yourself more time and patience to getting to those goals to allow your body to get to it’s healthy.
The paradox
When I was on this journey, that was a big leap of faith I had to take into just nourishing my body and seeing where I would end up. I had no reference, I had nothing to tell me what my body was meant to look or be like. Maybe I could have gained weight, I could have lost weight, I had no clue. Honestly, I was willing to try because I was in so much mental anguish. I was sick of trying to force myself into a certain size so that I could feel accepted, loved or validated.
I wanted to feel that way and see where my body ended up. The paradox is that when you nourish your body and take care of it, it ends up closer to “your goal” without so much stress and willpower. But you need to honour your body and not expect it to change.
You wouldn’t want to force your child into something and punish them to become something that’s not authentic to them. We want to get you back to where your body feels good.
And that’s going to come from you being in touch with your body. Every time we think if we reach a certain size or look a certain way, we’re putting our power into something external to us. We’re saying that that’s the only time we’ll be lovable, okay and acceptable.
This is not to say that you just stay where you’re at in your body. You’ve gotten to the point by punishing your body, by saying those negative things to your body, by not nourishing your body. This body you’re in is a result of all of those actions.
So who’s to say that when you take different steps, your body will not change along with that? A little bit of food for thought.
Invitation
If this is resonating for you and you desire guidance, support and a step by step methodology, I’d love to invite you to find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program HERE. It’s the program that I created through my own experience and working with clients and with my education in order to help women resolve their emotional eating from the root so they can get back to feeling good in their body and around food.
To True Nourishment,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert
