Tiny Buddha

Author: Roni Davis

  • When Trying to Be “Good” with Food Makes Us Sick

    When Trying to Be “Good” with Food Makes Us Sick

    I was around five the first time I remember getting in trouble. It was nearing Christmas, and I wasn’t buying into the whole Santa story anymore. A magic man spends all year making toys, then drops down chimneys and delivers them all in one night? Nope. I may have only been five, but I was insulted that people expected me to buy that ridiculous story.

    Feeling rather proud of myself for figuring it out, I demanded that my mom tell me the truth. And when she finally admitted Santa wasn’t real, I felt vindicated. But that wasn’t enough. I needed my younger cousins to know the truth, too, so I ran next door and told them.

    I don’t remember what I said, but I remember what happened when my aunt found out. I can still picture it. I was sitting on the step between the hallway and my bedroom, cowering against the wall, my aunt kneeling in front of me, furious. “Just because your Christmas is ruined doesn’t mean you have to ruin theirs!” she yelled.

    My heart pounded, my face burned, and my belly was sick. I felt like I’d done something unforgivable and like she hated me.

    That moment taught me that feeling loved, accepted, and safe meant being good. Because to my body and brain, goodness was the solution to protect me from ever getting in trouble again. If I could just be good enough, maybe I’d never feel that kind of shame, fear, and rejection again.

    And once that connection was wired in, it shaped everything. I absorbed what was expected, spoken or unspoken, and adapted myself around it. Safety, it seemed, came from getting everything right. From fitting into someone else’s idea of what it meant to be good.

    The fear of being wrong or bad slowly worked its way into every corner of my life: my choices, my words, how I looked, what I ate, what I weighed.

    In a society that equates both food choices and thinness with health, and moralizes all of it, the number on the scale wasn’t just about weight. It was about virtue. Worth. Safety.

    So, like always, I responded the only way I knew how: I tried as hard as I could. Control became my safety strategy. I micromanaged everything—my body, my food intake, my words… I even attempted to manage other people’s opinions of me—anything to avoid the shame of doing something wrong, or worse, being someone bad.

    I tried following every rule: carbs are evil, sugar is poison, ‘clean eating’ is holy. When I slipped, the punishment came from within. Even the smallest misstep triggered the inner voice: What’s wrong with you? Loser. How could you screw up again?

    The mirror, the scale, even every food choice measured whether or not I was good, and I felt the verdict deep in my bones.

    But safety built on obedience is impossible to sustain, especially when the rules are impossible to follow. Rules I didn’t choose. Handed down by culture, family, coaches, textbooks—rules I was trained to follow, and even trained to teach as a fitness and nutrition expert for many years.

    I built a life, a career, an entire identity around those rules. I genuinely believed they were the key to health, success, and self-worth. And I believed discipline and control would earn me health, love, respect, and the freedom from ever being made to feel like that little girl on the steps again.

    But treating foods—or entire food groups—as ‘bad’ or ‘off-limits’ is unnatural, unsustainable, and ultimately harmful. All my efforts to ‘be good’ only fed cravings and obsessions that led to restriction, rebellion, overeating, and eventually, binge eating and bulimia.

    Even when I looked like the “picture of health,” I was unraveling in every conceivable way. The harder I clung to control, the more I binged. The more I binged, the more ashamed I felt.

    Now I know it was never about discipline or failure; it was about survival. A nervous system stuck in overdrive, doing the only thing it knew how to do: escape.

    Food was my relief, my rebellion, and my deepest shame all at once. For almost thirty years, I lived at war with food, my body, and myself, and nearly every day ended in feelings of defeat.

    By the end of it, my health (physical, mental, and emotional) was an absolute mess. I knew I couldn’t keep it up. And honestly? I didn’t even want to. It wasn’t one dramatic epiphany, just thousands of quiet, desperate moments of I cannot keep living like this.

    Eventually, that slow, steady drip of desperation led to the recognition that I had to start doing something differently if I ever wanted to change anything. So I did.

    I stopped trying to be good, stopped trying to control everything, and started being present, connected, curious, and intentionally kind instead.

    I started asking questions and exploring my inner world with compassion and non-judgment whenever I caught myself spiraling, grasping for control, or staring into a mirror, wishing I could disappear.

    What is really happening here? How did I get here? Why do I believe these things? Why do I think I have to earn my worth, or my health, through my food choices or my body? Is any of this even helping? Or is it harming? What do I actually need right now?

    It took me a long time to see it, but I wasn’t ever even really chasing health. Of course, I wanted to be healthy. But what I truly needed was to feel safe in my body, and in my life. I needed to feel loved and accepted exactly as I was. And I was trying to protect myself from feeling what that little girl felt on that step when she was made to feel so very bad.

    And maybe that’s the cruelest part.

    All those years we’ve spent trying to be ‘good’—controlling food, weight, health, everything—are supposed to make us feel better. Safer. More in control. More worthy. But instead, way too often they make us sicker.

    And more out of control. More disconnected. More ashamed. More dysregulated.

    Because when being ‘good’ means following rules you didn’t write, chasing standards you never agreed to, and punishing yourself every time you fall short, what kind of life does that even leave you with?

    Not a healthy one. Not a free one.

    Trying so hard to be ‘good’ is what’s keeping us trapped in cycles of shame, disconnection, and dysfunction. Control and obedience aren’t recipes for thriving. They’re oppressive traps.

    If any of this feels familiar, if you have your own version of that little girl on the step and you recognize yourself trapped in this exhausting loop, here’s something to try:

    The next time you feel like you’ve ‘messed up’ with food or judge yourself for not being the ‘right’ weight, pause. Try placing your hands on your heart and taking three steady breaths. Notice what’s happening in your body.

    Maybe your breath is shallow, your chest is tight and heavy, or your shoulders are creeping up. Don’t try to fix the sensations, just notice them. They don’t need judgment; they’re signals that need your attention.

    Ask:

    • What story am I telling myself about what this means?
    • What does it mean to be good?
    • Who gave me that definition?
    • Am I actually even trying to be good… or am I trying to be safe?

    That’s where it begins, with asking. Let the questions make space for something new.

    We were never meant to live in fear of getting it wrong, especially with food and our bodies. We were never meant to confuse obedience and control with health and safety.

    It’s not about trying harder. It’s about finally feeling safe being a perfectly imperfect human.

    That’s enough for now.

  • How Toast Changed My Life and Helped Me Stop Bingeing

    How Toast Changed My Life and Helped Me Stop Bingeing

    One day, toast changed my life.

    It was many years ago, when I was working as a personal trainer and nutrition and wellness coach.

    I spent my days helping people “get fit” and “eat healthy,” so of course I was always preaching about lifestyle changes, “healthy” eating, and “whole, clean, nutritious” food, while demonizing “processed” foods, as most others in those worlds do.

    Toast, at the time, was a big no-no. Especially toast made with white bread.

    That’s basically blasphemy in the “healthy eating” world, with two strikes against it. First, bread has carbs, which I learned, from Atkins in the nineties, were trying to kill me and making me gain weight. Second, it’s processed, and I learned from the “clean eating” world that processed food was also trying to kill me and making me gain weight.

    So I wasn’t allowed to eat toast for breakfast. Toast was bad. Especially if I paired it with butter and didn’t at least have protein with it.

    And there I was on this particular morning, standing at the counter buttering two pieces of *gasp, shock, horror* white bread toast for breakfast. With no protein.

    Because despite vowing to “get back on track” that day, a mere hour earlier when I woke up, I had already decided I’d start the next day instead because I didn’t want to eat what was on “the plan.” I wanted to have toast instead.

    You see, like many in the fitness and nutrition world, while I was preaching about clean, healthy, balanced meals to my clients, and trying so hard to stick to those rules myself, I was also a raging bulimic/binge eater.

    In fact, within four days of my first attempt at “clean eating,” I was a full-on bulimic.

    It got so bad that I was once hospitalized for a week and often went to bed feeling like I might die in my sleep because I’d eaten so much.

    I lived in what I call “on track” vs “off track” mode for many years. Many, many years.

    When I was “on track,” I ate meticulously “clean” and healthy.

    When I was “off track” I was bingeing and completely out of control around food.

    I could easily have concluded that I’d fallen “off track” that morning with the toast.

    But at that point, I had started working on understanding how my thoughts were contributing to my suffering, so I was in the very beginning stages of awareness.

    And there I was, standing at the counter, buttering toast and listening to my thoughts as I did so.

    They were horribly abusive, judgmental, and berating.

    “What kind of loser eats bread for breakfast? And white bread, even. It’s so bad. You’re such a screw-up. What’s the matter with you? You’re gonna be so bloated and gross. This isn’t going to build any muscle. You trained hard yesterday; you should be eating protein. God, you’re an idiot. You just promised you were going to be good today, and you’re screwing up again already. All you ever do is screw up.”

    Then the voice started planning a trip to the grocery store for all the things we would buy to binge on the rest of the day—yanno, because “I’m such a stupid screw up already; may as well just eat everything today because I won’t be able to have any of it when I get back on track tomorrow.”

    The voice had our entire day of bingeing planned out, and then it started getting all judgy again.

    “You’re supposed to be having oats, eggs, and six blueberries. That’s a good breakfast. You’re never going to be able to stick to anything. Loser. Why are you broken? You’re going to get fat. What’s everyone going to think of you then?”

    (Yes, I used to actually have meal plans from my own coach with six blueberries in a meal—this is me rolling my eyes into oblivion.)

    Then, like magic, something switched in my brain, and another voice came charging in like a knight on a white horse and said, in a lighter, more compassionate tone, “Uhhm, dude. It’s just toast.”

    The first voice stopped in its tracks and was like… “Wait, what did you just say?”

    White knight voice: “I mean, it’s just f*cking toast. You don’t want oats and eggs this morning. You just want a couple of pieces of toast. Normal people eat toast for breakfast sometimes. Why have you decided you’re a horrible human just because you feel like a couple of pieces of toast for breakfast? That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

    It was like someone in my head threw me a life raft of sanity.

    The first voice was a little taken aback for a second and needed to sit with that information before replying, ”Holy sh*t, you’re right!!”

    Instantly, all abusive thoughts were gone. And all thoughts about bingeing during the rest of the day were gone.

    I ate and enjoyed my two pieces of toast and went about my day in peace.

    A few hours later it was lunchtime. I realized I was starting to get hungry, which made me realize that not only had I not thought about food since breakfast, but I had forgotten that before breakfast I had been planning to go to buy binge foods.

    I forgot to binge.

    What?! How did I do that!?!

    It felt like a miracle. Normally, I was consumed with thoughts of food non-stop, and nothing in the world could stop a binge.

    So I wondered, hmm… can I use this new skill of just having what I want for lunch too? *Gasp.* Dare I?

    I asked myself what I wanted and felt like a sandwich.

    *Gasp again.* But that would be bread… twice …in one day. *The horror.*

    The white knight rolled in with the reminder: It’s okay to eat what you feel like eating.

    So I had and enjoyed a sandwich.

    A few hours later, the same thing—I noticed I was getting hungry and, again, I hadn’t thought about food since lunchtime.

    I don’t remember what I had for supper that night, but I just ate something normal, went to bed feeling fine, and contemplated the fact that I hadn’t wanted to binge after all.

    What was almost another day of bingeing on things that made me feel like garbage turned into a normal day of eating in peace and enjoying food.

    Because I took my power back.

    I shut down the voice in my head that had been programmed by our insane diet and healthy eating cultures. I reconnected with myself, trusted myself to decide what I wanted to eat, and allowed myself to eat whatever it was without shame or fear.

    That was the beginning of freedom, peace, and getting my sanity back.

    It was the beginning of healing not only my relationships with food and my body, but also with myself.

    It was the beginning of healing and creating truly healthy eating habits—habits that are rooted in love and trust rather than fear and restrictions.

    Before I’d be scared to buy bread because I didn’t trust myself with it.

    “Don’t keep the bad food in your house,” right?

    Back then, if I did have bread in the house, I’d eat the entire loaf in a day.

    Now, I can’t remember the last time I bought a loaf of bread, not because I’m scared of it, but because I simply don’t care about eating it anymore. The last couple of times I bought bread, I threw it away because it got moldy before I could eat it all.

    Obviously, complete recovery required more work than the one day with the toast, but it was definitely a pivotal moment.

    Because from that moment on, I stopped fearing and trying to control my food intake.

    Instead, I practiced connecting with myself, recognizing what I wanted to eat and, more importantly, understanding why I wanted it.

    If I was about to make a choice that I knew wasn’t in my best interest, I’d ask myself, why? Why was I making the self-destructive choices I was making?

    One of the biggest reasons I was stuck in those patterns with food was because I kept trying to “be good.”

    The fear and restrictions I’d learned were required to “eat healthy” were, in large part, causing the bingeing and feeling out of control around food.

    That’s why after I simply allowed myself to eat and enjoy the toast for breakfast, I didn’t binge and wasn’t consumed with thoughts of food the rest of the day.

    Here’s the thing: I’m not here to argue about what’s the healthiest or the best way for you or anyone else to eat (anymore).

    Because I know very well what a sh*tshow the world of nutrition science is, and I also know that our beautiful bodies are natural healers and communicators. They know what they need to feel their best, and they know how to communicate those needs to us.

    We just get so disconnected from them that we cannot hear (or trust) them anymore.

    And it doesn’t matter how perfectly healthy and “clean” you think you’re eating part of the time if the rest of the time is a complete train wreck—because you’ve been trying so hard to “be good” that you end up falling “off track” and start eating everything you can’t have when you start “being good” again.

    And carrying fear, shame, self-judgment, and criticism over the way you eat is a lot less healthy than just having a cookie or two when you feel like it.

    It’s incredibly harmful and unhealthy, in fact.

    Especially because when you start allowing yourself the cookies while working on uncovering why you want them in the first place, you eventually naturally stop caring about the cookies so much, in the same way I have with bread.

    The healthiest way for you to eat is whatever way best nurtures and supports not only your unique body, but also your mental and emotional health and your relationships with yourself, your body, and food. Nobody knows what that looks like for you better than you and your own body.

    And you can be trusted to decide.

    There is no binary, one-size fits all answer to “healthy” eating, and it’s not rooted in rules and restrictions.

    It’s rooted in love. Trust. And wholehearted being—being fully grounded in the knowledge of our own worthiness exactly as we are, while also being present, connected, curious, and intentional about our choices.

  • How Restrictive Diets Mess with Our Brains and Lead to Bingeing

    How Restrictive Diets Mess with Our Brains and Lead to Bingeing

    “Your body is precious. It is your vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.” ~Buddha

    When I went on my first diet in my teens (low-carb, it was back in the Atkins days), I wasn’t even overweight. I weighed less than 120 pounds, but my jeans had started to get a little tight, so I thought I needed to lose five pounds or so. At the time, I didn’t have a bad relationship with food; I just ate like a typical teenager—not the best choices.

    About two hours in, I remember starting to obsess over the things I couldn’t eat and being desperate to be skinny ASAP so I could eat them again.

    By mid day, I “failed.”

    I caved and ate…. *gasp, shock, horror*… carbs.

    And something weird happened. Instantly, I felt like I was bad.

    It’s not just that I thought I had made a bad choice.

    I thought, “You idiot, you can’t do anything right. Look at you, one meal in and you screwed up already. You may as well just eat whatever you want the rest of the day and start again tomorrow.”

    I think I gained about five pounds from that attempt.

    And I continued slowly gaining more and more weight every year after that—and feeling guiltier and guiltier every time I ate something “bad.”

    Atkins low-carb miracle cure had failed me horribly and began a decades-long battle with food and my weight.

    See, it wasn’t that I thought my choice was bad and then I just made a better choice next time; it was that I felt like I, as a person, was bad.

    And what happens when we’re bad?

    We get punished.

    I didn’t realize until many years later, but those degrading thoughts and overeating the rest of the day were, in part, my way of punishing myself for being bad and eating the bad things.

    The harder I tried to control what was going in, the worse it got and the more out of control I felt.

    In my thirties I hit bottom, as they say, as a result of trying to follow a “clean eating meal plan.”

    Four days into my first attempt to “eat clean” and strictly adhere to what someone else told me I should eat, I had my first-ever binge.

    Prior to that, I had some minor food issues. I ate kind of crummy, had slowly been gaining weight, and felt guilty when I ate carbs (thanks, Atkins).

    But a few days into “clean eating,” I was in the middle of a full-blown eating disorder.

    The clean eating miracle craze may have made me look and feel amazing, but emotionally, it failed me horribly and began my years-long battle to recover from bulimia and binge eating.

    But I thought it was just me. I was such a screw up, why couldn’t I just eat like a normal person?

    I saw how much better I looked and felt when I was managing to “be good” and “eat clean,” but within a few days or weeks of “being good,” no matter how great I felt from eating that way, I always caved and ended up bingeing again.

    And every time, I thought it was me. I told myself I was broken and weak and pathetic.

    Even later, when I started training other people, my message was “If it’s not on your plan, it doesn’t go in your mouth” and “You can’t expect to get the body you want by eating the things that gave you the body you have.”

    I wanted clients to feel amazing and get the best results possible, so I gave them what I knew would accomplish those two things.

    But, at the time, I didn’t know that it was actually those messages and rules that had created all my own issues with food, and I most definitely didn’t know they would have that affect on anyone else.

    I thought everyone else was “normal.” I was just broken and weak and stupid—that’s why I struggled so hard to just “be good” and “stop screwing up.”  Normal people would see how much better they felt when they ate that way, and they’d automatically change and live happily ever after.

    Ha. No.

    The more people I trained, the more I became acutely aware that food is the thing most people struggle with the most, and I started recognizing the exact same thoughts and behaviors I’d experienced, in the majority of my clients.

    And almost every single one of them also had a looong history of failed diets.

    Hmmm. Maybe it wasn’t just me.

    Not everyone goes to the extreme of bulimia, but the more I spoke with other people about their struggles with food and shared my own with them, the more I realized how shockingly pervasive disordered eating and eating disorders have become.

    Binge eating is an eating disorder—one that more people struggle with than I ever imagined. Though, most people are horrified to admit it, and many may not even be willing to admit to themselves that they do.

    I get that because it’s associated with lack of self-control and gluttony, and there’s a great deal of shame related to both of those things. But it actually has little to do with either, and you can’t change anything until you admit you’re struggling.

    And disordered eating in general is even more pervasive.

    Feeling guilt after eating is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Restricting entire food groups is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Severely restricting food in general in not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Beating yourself up for eating something “bad” is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Starting and stopping a new diet every few weeks or months is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Diet culture has us so screwed up that we spend most of our lives doing these things without ever realizing they’re not normal. And they’re negatively affecting our whole lives.

    As I was working on my own recovery, I dove into hundreds of hours of research into dieting, habits, motivation, and disordered eating—anything I could get my hands on to help not only myself but my clients better stick to their plans.

    It’s so easy, I used to think; there must be some trick to make us just eat what we’re supposed to eat!

    But I learned the exact opposite.

    I learned that trying to “stick to the plan” was actually the problem.

    The solution wasn’t in finding some magic trick to help people follow their meal plans; the solution lay in not telling people what to eat in the first place.

    There are many reasons behind why we eat what we eat, when we eat, and even the quantities we choose to eat; it just doesn’t work to tell someone to stop everything they know and just eat this much of this at this time of day, because at some later date it’ll make them skinny and happy.

    Our brains don’t work that way.

    Our brains actually work exactly the opposite.

    As soon as we place restrictions on what we’re allowed or not allowed to eat, our brains start creating compulsions and obsessive thoughts that drive us to “cave.”

    Have you ever noticed that as soon as you “can’t” have something, you automatically want it even more?

    That’s a survival instinct that’s literally been hard-wired into our brains since the beginning of time.

    In November 1944, post-WW II, physiologist Ancel Keys, PhD and psychologist Josef Brozek PhD began a nearly yearlong experiment on the psychological and physiological effects of starvation on thirty-six mentally and physically healthy young men.

    The men were expected to lose one-quarter of their body weight. They spent the first three months eating a normal diet of 3,200 calories a day followed by six months of semi-starvation at approximately 1,600 calories a day (though 1,600 calories isn’t even all that low). The semi-starvation period was followed by three months of rehabilitation (2,000-3,200 calories a day) and finally an eight-week period of unrestricted rehabilitation, during which time there was no limitations on caloric intake.

    Researchers closely monitored the physiological and psychological changes brought on by calorie restriction.

    During the most restricted phase the changes were dramatic. Physically, the men became gaunt in appearance, and there were significant decreases in their strength, stamina, body temperature, heart rate, and even sex drive.

    Psychologically, the effects were even more dramatic and mirror those almost anyone with any history of dieting can relate to.

    They became obsessed with food. Any chance they had to get access to more food resulted in the men binge eating thousands of calories in a sitting.

    Before the restriction period, the men were a lively bunch, discussing politics, current events, and more. During the restriction period, this quickly changed. They dreamt, read, fantasized, and talked about food all the time.

    They became withdrawn, irritable, fatigued, and apathic. Depression, anxiety, and obsessive thinking (especially about food) were also observed.

    For some men, the study proved too difficult—they were excluded as a result of breaking the diet or not meeting their weight loss goals.

    We don’t struggle to follow diets and food rules because we lack willpower. It’s literally the way our brains are wired.

    Why? Because from an evolutionary standpoint, we’re not designed to restrict food. Coded into our DNA is the overwhelming urge to survive, so when food (either over-all calories or food groups) is restricted, our brains begin to create urgency, compulsions, and strong desires that force us to fill its needs—and often, even more than its needs (binges).

    We cave because our brains are hardwired to. Then the act of caving actually gets wired into our brains as a habit that we continue to repeat on autopilot every time we restrict food or food groups.

    And it triggers the punish mode that I spoke of earlier, which only compounds the problem and slowly degrades our self-worth.

    So every year millions of people are spending tens of billions of dollars on diets that are making the majority of us heavier, depressed, anxious, food-obsessed binge eaters, and destroying our self-worth.

    Now I know all that sounds pretty bleak, but there is a way out. I know because I’ve found it.

    It sounds like the opposite of what we should do, but it saved my life.

    I gave myself permission to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and stopped trying to restrict. The scarier that sounds, the more you need to do it.

    As soon as nothing is off limits, we can begin to slowly move away from the scarcity mindset and break the habits and obsessions created by dieting.

    When we give ourselves unconditional permission to eat whatever we want, without guilt or judgment, we give ourselves the space to get mindful about our choices.

    We give ourselves the opportunity to explore why we’re making the choices we’re making and the power to freely make different ones because we begin to value ourselves again.

    When we remove the guilt and judgment, start to value ourselves again, and work on being mindful, we can begin to notice how the foods we’re eating make us feel and make choices from a place of love and kindness rather than fear, guilt, and punishment.

    It sounds too simple to work, but it saved my life.

    Rather than telling people what they should and shouldn’t eat, or trying to listen to someone who’s telling us what we should or shouldn’t eat, we have to build a connection with our bodies.

    We have to learn to listen to them, to learn to distinguish the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger. To stop eating when we’re not physically hungry, and to start feeling emotions instead of feeding them.

    We have to break the habits that drive autopilot eating. We have to be mindful, trust the wisdom of our own bodies, and make choices based on how they make our bodies feel rather than what some diet tells us is the answer to happiness and being skinny.

    UPDATE: Making the choice to not eat meat for ethical reasons and avoiding certain foods for allergy/medical purposes are not the same as restricting food groups for a diet. If you’re happy and feel great with whatever you’re currently doing, carry on! This is meant for people who are struggling with repeated diet attempts and overeating/bingeing, who feel out of control because they can never seem to “stay on track.”

  • How I Got Healthy & Overcame My Food/Body Issues by Ignoring Conventional Advice

    How I Got Healthy & Overcame My Food/Body Issues by Ignoring Conventional Advice

    I was an award-winning personal trainer and nutrition and wellness coach for over eight years.

    I also spent close to three decades struggling with my own weight and food issues—trying to “stick to” diets and/or healthy eating and lifestyle goals. And many years struggling with binge eating, bulimia, and (what I thought at the time was) an uncontrollable sugar addiction.

    During the years I was working in the fitness and nutrition industry, whenever I’d get new clients, I’d find out what their health and fitness goals were, and I’d give them the perfect plan to help them get there.

    And I made sure to remind them, it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.

    I did that because it’s what I learned to do. It’s what everyone does.

    Because that’s what we’re taught—that eating, living, or being healthy requires us to make choices that others have told us are healthy and not do the things they’ve told us are unhealthy.

    You know… the perfect healthy lifestyle that constantly reminds you to:

    • Eat this, not that… or you’ll get sick, disease-ridden, and die early.
    • Weigh this amount and not more…. or you’ll get sick, disease-ridden, and die early.
    • Move this amount each day, in these ways… or you’ll get sick, disease-ridden, and die early.
    • And… you’re not dieting. You’re just eating healthy. You’re creating a healthy lifestyle.

    The perfect healthy eating and living plans constantly remind you that you must always be fighting, resisting, ignoring, and controlling yourself, your body, your hunger, and your cravings.

    And always doing more, working harder, being disciplined, having motivation, building willpower, etc.

    There’s a predictable formula for this supposedly “healthy” eating and living culture.

    The formula insists that we conform to a socially acceptable, mythical, perfect body size and shape.

    The formula treats our health as though it’s a future goal or accomplishment that we can only achieve later if we’re “good” now.

    The formula must be followed with no excuses. When it’s not, the problem is you and your obedience, willpower, discipline, motivation, and commitment.

    The formula is primarily concerned with optics rather than actual health. As long as we portray the “picture of health” and the behaviors we’re engaging in appear healthy, it doesn’t matter if the pressure, fear, and shame created by trying to stick to them are actually destroying us behind the scenes.

    The formula requires us to trust the rules and advice of others over our own bodies.

    It’s a mass-marketed, templated, “easy” model that allows no room for our own inner knowing, logic, self-trust, or personal power.

    It’s easy to sell because it preys on fear and always sounds so shiny and tempting.

    And this is what we’re taught it takes to eat and live healthy lives.

    Multi-billion-dollar-a-year industries have taught us how to “get healthy.”

    “Lose weight, feel great. Gain confidence. Get fit. Be healthy and happy. Live your best life.” But the unspoken truth is that it’s only “…as long as you follow our rules.”

    But you’re not going to be able to stick to this plan, and when you can’t, you’re going to waste your entire life at war with yourself, promising to “get back on track.”

    “On track,” of course, meaning doing all the things they say you’re supposed to.

    It’s a paradigm that promotes constant fear and oppressive attempts to control ourselves and our bodies in order to follow one-size-fits-all, arbitrary prescriptions.

    Nothing proves this more than how we’ve become so completely conned into believing the lie that healthy eating is hard work that requires willpower, discipline, commitment, and constant vigilance.

    That’s horrible and not a healthy way to live at all!

    We’ve been sold this message because it’s highly profitable for us to believe that we cannot trust ourselves and our own bodies and we must rely on others to tell us what to do.

    And we’ve bought it—hook, line, and sinker.

    But it forces us to go through life literally fighting with ourselves and our bodies, trying to follow their rules.

    It forces us to live disembodied, detached, disconnected from, distrusting, and fully ignoring the wisdom of our own bodies and our own inner knowing.

    Living in all that fear, disconnection, and distrust is so harmful.

    For me, it resulted in bulimia, binge eating, anxiety disorder, panic attacks, chronic clinical depression, self-loathing, crippling shame, and what I was fully convinced was a sugar/food addiction so severe that I often went to bed at night afraid I would die in my sleep because I’d eaten so much.

    I lived in a constant state of being completely consumed by not only the number on my scale but also fear and shame every time I “screwed up” and ate something “bad.” For decades of my life.

    Eventually, my mental, emotional, and physical health deteriorated so badly that I recognized my only choice was to learn how to heal because I couldn’t keep living that way—it was killing me.

    I finally recognized that my suffering was in large part the result of everything I was taught to do to maintain this supposedly healthy eating and lifestyle plan.

    And all I really wanted was peace.

    So I turned my back on it all.

    I stopped exercising every day and started a little light, mindful walking and mobility work instead— whatever helped my body heal.

    I released the need for my body to look a certain way or be a certain size and worked on healing my relationship with it instead of fighting to shrink, change, or control it.

    I stopped trying to make myself “eat healthy” and allowed myself to not only eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, but I even allowed myself to binge. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s truly the first step that helped me stop binge eating.

    I shut out every single message I’d ever gotten in my life about what it takes to eat or live “healthy,” and I started reconnecting with myself so I could figure out what actually helped me best support my overall well-being, right now, in this moment.

    I even eventually quit being a trainer and (traditional) nutrition and wellness coach.

    I tuned out everything I knew about what “healthy” eating and living looks like, and instead I turned inward and started connecting with myself. I started getting to know myself, understanding the patterns that were driving all those unhealthy choices in the first place and learning to change those.

    I started asking, how do I feel right now? How do I want to feel? What do I need (mentally, emotionally, or physically) in order to bridge the gap between the two, if there is one?

    It’s changed everything in the most glorious ways.

    I haven’t binged in many years. That’s a pattern that simply no longer exists in me.

    I’m not scared of and don’t feel addicted to or out of control around sugar (or any food) anymore.

    Food no longer controls me… not even sugar.

    I crave things that help me feel my best, including water, which I never used to drink before.

    I treat (and speak to) myself and my body with love and kindness.

    All of the “unhealthy” choices we make, all the unhealthy things we do to ourselves—even binge eating and supposed “sugar addictions”—it’s all merely the result of our conditioning. The stuff going on inside us.

    My external world, my lifestyle, my unhealthy choices, they were all symptoms of what was going on inside me—all the self-abuse I heaped on myself, ironically, because I couldn’t “stick to” a healthy living plan.

    When I changed that, when I stopped focusing on what I was doing and started changing my inner world, who I was being, my outer world (and the choices I was making for myself and my body) naturally changed.

    Healthy eating and living should never be the goal; they’re the result of how we’re being.

    Because here’s the thing: your body doesn’t care about the “health” goals you hope to meet in the future.

    It only knows what it needs right now, in this moment, and whether you’re making choices that help support that or not.

    If you’re trying to make yourself be consistent with some plan that’s supposed to help you reach some goal at a later date, you are, by definition, disconnected from your body and what it’s trying to tell you it actually needs right now.

    That’s a recipe for not making healthy choices and ignoring your body’s cues and messages.

    Supporting our health requires supporting our overall well-being, and we can only do that when we’re deeply connected to ourselves through what I call wholehearted being: being present, connected, curious, and intentional about our unique moment-to-moment needs and loving ourselves and our bodies enough to want to honor them.

    When you do that, making choices that best support yourself and your body right now becomes the natural result.

    Not some arbitrary goal that you can’t ever stay consistent enough to reach.

    If you’re reading this and can relate to any parts of my struggles with weight, overeating, binge eating, and sugar addiction, I want you to know that you, at your core, instinctively know what you and your body need to feel and live your best.

    You’ve just been conditioned out of that inner knowing after a lifetime of learning from everyone else that the only way to be healthy is to control yourself and your body and follow their advice instead of trusting your own inner knowing.

    With wholehearted being, I’ve gone from binge eating, bulimia, obsessive and compulsive thoughts and patterns around food and exercise, self and body hate and distrust…

    …to kindness, compassion, self and body love and trust, and learning to genuinely want to eat in ways that best support and nurture me.

    A New Path to Healthy Eating and Living

    Healthy eating and living through wholehearted being helps you build a foundation rooted firmly in your own self-love, trust, and worthiness because how we feel about ourselves impacts every aspect of our lives, including how we treat ourselves and our bodies.

    From there, you learn to make choices for yourself and your body through four main pillars of being:

    Present in this moment and in your body so you can break the conditioning that drives unhealthy behaviors

    Connected to your inner world—your thoughts, feelings, and communication from your body about what you need

    Curious about your inner experiences in this moment, with gentle awareness, self-compassion, and non-judgment

    Intentional with your thoughts, behaviors, and responses—intentionally choosing from kindness, gratitude, and love

    This process is incredibly powerful because it does two things that are required for lasting change:

    1.It helps you learn to love, trust, and value yourself enough to care how you treat your body.

    2. It allows you to put space between your triggers and the conditioned, autopilot behaviors that drive unhealthy choices in the first place. This allows you to get to know yourself, your patterns, and your needs and learn new tools and practices that better support your overall well-being. Tools and practices that also help you learn to better understand and nurture, not only your physical needs, but your mental and emotional needs as well. And that’s vital because our thoughts and emotions are major components of our overall well-being. They drive the choices we make.

    It’s a powerful and simple process but not an easy one. It takes courage to relearn to trust yourself with food, to learn new ways of being, and it takes a lot of practice, repetition, and support, but it’s so very worth it.

    After eight years in the fitness, nutrition, and wellness industry (and almost thirty years of dieting), I finally got healthy and broke my sugar addiction by choosing to start focusing on my life instead of my weight or food choices.

    By learning to tune out the external messages trying to tell me what I “should” eat or do and turn inward to start making choices for myself that best nurture my whole being, moment to moment—choices that are grounded in love, self and body trust, connection, and kindness.

    And it’s changed everything.

  • How to Protect Our Kids from a Lifetime of Food, Weight, and Body Image Issues

    How to Protect Our Kids from a Lifetime of Food, Weight, and Body Image Issues

    I went on my first diet when I was around fourteen or so because, as they often do in growing teens, my jeans started getting tight.

    And because I grew up in the same anti-fat culture we all have, I hated myself for it.

    Around the same time, an adult in my life who was always obsessed with “eating healthy” gave me a copy of the new book she was reading outlining the healthiest way to eat.

    It was a book on the Atkins/low-carb diet.

    The author spent the bulk of the book demonizing carbs, explaining in convincing-sounding detail all the science he supposedly had about not only how harmful carbs were but how they were the cause of weight gain.

    Three things happened from reading that book.

    1. I became scared of eating carbs and started trying to eliminate them because, while of course I wanted to be healthy, I was terrified of gaining weight.

    2. Instead of losing the five pounds or so that I wanted to lose, I gained about five pounds and a slow progression of weight gain continued for years. Because the harder I tried to eliminate the carbs, the more I craved and obsessed over them; always eventually caving, eating them, and then hating myself for it and promising to start “being good tomorrow.

    Eventually the caving led to overeating them because “as long as I was being bad anyway, I may as well eat them all and get them out of the house so I won’t be tempted when I start being good again.”

    3. An almost three-decades-long war with my weight, my body, myself, and food began. A war that resulted in a hospitalization in my early thirties, after my first foray into the world of “it’s not a diet; it’s clean, healthy eating,” for bulimia so severe I often felt like I was going to eat myself to death.

    And the whole time, I blamed myself for it. I believed I was stupid, weak, pathetic, a pig who needed to try harder to control myself.

    So I kept trying. For more than half my life I tried, and it almost killed me.

    I’ve been working with women around the whole weight and food thing in one form or another for over fifteen years now. I started sharing my story because after listening to other women describe their histories with food and weight, I realized that my story is not unique.

    Varying degrees of my story are the norm, and they all start in basically the same seemingly innocent ways.

    We want to lose weight or “eat healthier,” so we do what we’re taught we’re supposed to.

    We start a diet or “healthy eating plan” of some sort that tells us what we “should” and “shouldn’t be” eating. This leads to a lifetime of trying to control our intake and our bodies, which results in disordered eating patterns, weight cycling, and self-loathing.

    I regularly hear from women in their seventies or eighties who have spent their entire lives fighting this losing battle with themselves to “eat right” and lose weight.

    In one survey of US women a few years ago, 75% reported disordered eating behaviors or symptoms consistent with eating disorders.

    My recovery didn’t start until I realized a few basic truths.

    First, if I had any hope of healing, I had to figure out what was causing my eating issues. Ultimately, it came down to my conditioning: patterns of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that had developed over the course of my life as a result of many different things, not the least of which being:

    1. The stories I had learned to believe about bodies and the people in them: Big ones are bad, unhealthy, undisciplined, and lazy. Small ones are good, healthy, and disciplined, and they work hard.

    These misguided beliefs taught me not only to live in fear of weight gain and the harsh judgment of others if I gained weight, but also to judge myself and my body harshly when I did so. This contributed to not only the decades of weight gain and disordered eating but ultimately the eating disorder.

    2. The stories I’d learned about food: These are the good foods, the healthy foods, the foods you should be eating, and those are the bad foods, the unhealthy ones, the ones that cause all manner of disease, poor health, and weight gain. Those are the foods you have to give up forever, or only allow in moderation.

    These misguided beliefs taught me to live in fear of food and my body becoming unhealthy or fat if I dared to eat the “wrong” thing. This created the never-ending pattern of promising myself I was going to “be good” only to end up craving, caving, hating myself, and starting over that I felt trapped in for so many years.

    3. Disconnection with myself, my body, and my own needs: As long as I was trying to make myself eat or do the things I thought I “should” do in order to control my body and my food intake, I was stuck in my head. Stuck in fear. Disconnected from myself, my body, and even the decision-making part of my brain. Ruminating, promising, obsessing, hating.

    In that state, I had no ability to understand the messages my body was constantly sending me about what it needed, nor did I have any concept that my body was something that could be trusted to tell me that. I saw it as an enemy to be ruled over, controlled, and beaten into submission… rather than the ally, healer, and communicator that it is.

    4. Self-loathing: I didn’t like, love, trust, or value myself, so my entire self-worth and relationship with myself relied on what my body looked like and my need to control how others saw me.

    The second truth I had to realize: if I had any hope of recovering and making peace with myself, my body, and food, I had to change the things that were causing the war.

    That meant giving up the obsession with my weight and eating or looking perfect.

    I had to recognize those things for what they were—distractions that kept me from dealing with the issues that were causing the problems in the first place and were making matters worse.

    So I put all my energy into changing the causes.

    It didn’t happen overnight, but one day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d engaged in compensatory behaviors. The binges were getting fewer and farther between.

    And then I couldn’t remember the last time I binged or even overate, and I couldn’t even imagine ever doing it again.

    It’s been many years since those things were my daily reality, and I’m thrilled to say they simply don’t exist in me anymore because I changed the conditioning that was causing them. I learned to reconnect with and trust my body when it tells me what it needs or wants, and I learned to value myself enough that I cannot imagine treating myself or my body poorly anymore.

    Recovery and peace are blessings that I don’t take for granted for a second and I’m still grateful for every minute of the day.

    But disordered eating and eating disorder recovery are unbelievably difficult, prone to multiple relapses, and many aren’t so lucky.

    This brings me to my main points because the simplest solution to disordered eating or eating disorder recovery is to prevent those things from ever starting in the first place.

    That’s my dream, to save future generations from growing up with the disordered eating patterns/eating disorders and horrible body/self-images that ours has grown up with.

    It starts with us, as parents.

    What I Wish Parents Understood

    Living with disordered eating patterns or an eating disorder is a special kind of hell that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

    It’s like living with the meanest, most self-destructive monster in your head one can imagine.

    You know the things you’re thinking and the choices you’re making are harming you, you know they’re making you miserable, you’re desperate to stop, and yet… no matter how hard you try, you can’t.

    You feel powerless. Hopeless. Helpless. Trapped.

    Recovery was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life—and I’ve not had an easy life, so that says a lot.

    Given this, it’s my view that in addition to helping those struggling recover, prevention at an early age needs to be a top priority.

    And parents, I’m not trying to place blame, but after fifteen years of hearing women talk about their struggles, I’ve come to realize that we are often a big part of the cause, although not purposely of course.

    We all have our kids’ best interests in mind.

    We want our kids to be the healthiest, most confident versions of themselves, and we’re all doing the best we can to help them get there.

    We want them to maintain healthy bodies and eat nutritious foods. Nobody doubts that we all want the best for our children and are doing our best.

    But the way we’re approaching it is almost guaranteeing that our kids are going to struggle with the same food issues, eating disorders, or a lifetime of disordered eating and failed diet attempts that so many in our generation have.

    They’re learning to fight the same wars we have in the same ways we learned to fight them.

    All the things we typically do to try to help encourage health (restricting “bad” foods, teaching them that some are “good” and some are “bad,” encouraging them to lose weight or even acknowledging their weight) are among the worst things we can do for the health of our children.

    It’s difficult to overstate the damage that weight and food shame does to adults, and that damage is worse in children.

    We also have to remember that they learn from us. If your kids watch you struggle with food and your weight, if they see you tie your mood and your self-worth to your scale, they are going to be at a significantly higher risk for developing an eating disorder or living with those same struggles themselves.

    So this is what I want parents everywhere to know: encouraging weight loss, labeling or restricting their food intake (good vs bad, allowed vs not allowed), discussing weight, restricting foods, and dieting yourself—all of those things that millions of us are doing every single day that diet and healthy eating cultures have taught us is expected or accepted—they’re putting our children at risk.

    Research has shown that the younger girls are when they go on their first diet, the more likely they are to engage in extreme weight control behaviors like vomiting and laxatives (that’s an eating disorder), abusing drugs and alcohol, and becoming overweight by the time they reach their thirties.

    One out of four dieters will develop some type of eating disorder. That’s a number that’s doubled in the last twenty years. And the majority of the rest develop very disordered eating patterns.

    Eating disorders are widely recognized to have the highest mortality rate of all mental illness, while also being among the most underdiagnosed and under/poorly treated.

    Not even to mention the levels of anxiety, depression, and self-loathing that typically come from years of living with disordered eating and battling with our weight.

    There is a better way.

    Encouraging Healthy Choices Without the Risk

    DON’Ts

    Don’t discuss weight, size, or bodies—not yours, not theirs, not anyone else’s.

    Don’t let other people discuss their weight in front of them—not their doctor, not relatives, no one.

    Don’t label foods—no good, no bad, no healthy, no unhealthy… no food labels. At all. Binary food labels can cause shame, create self-punishing behaviors, destroy our relationship with food, and contribute to overeat/binge/restrict cycles that can take years to heal.

    Don’t tell them they are what they eat—our food choices don’t determine our worth.

    Don’t restrict foods—let them eat what they want. Restriction leads to guilt, shame, overeating, or bingeing and fuels disconnection.

    Don’t force exercise or “burning off calories”—encouraging exercise as a means of weight loss is setting them up for trouble.

    DOs

    Do encourage them to consider how their food choices make their body feel. How does that big mac and fries make their body feel when they’re done eating? What about the candy for breakfast? Do they feel good when they’re done eating? Or do they feel sick? Would they rather feel good, or sick? How does skipping a meal make their body feel? Do they want to feel that way? Do they really want to ignore their body’s most basic human needs with restriction? Why?

    Do encourage them to consider why they’re eating. Are they physically hungry? No? Are they emotionally hungry? Teach them the difference and help them learn to accept, honor, and express the emotions they’re trying to feed or soothe rather than ignore or numb them.

    Do teach them the value of understanding the why behind the choices they’re making and how their choices are often a result of their relationship with themselves.

    Do teach them that the relationships they have with themselves, food, and their bodies are the most important relationships they’ll ever have in their lives and to protect and nurture them.

    Do lift them up, teach them to value themselves exactly as they are, for who they are, not what they look like, weigh, or how they eat. Teach them to value and respect others, no matter what size they are.

    Do teach them about self-acceptance, kindness, authenticity, self-compassion, and the power of mindful living.

    Do teach them to appreciate the wonder and magic of their bodies, no matter what size they are. Teach them how to stay present in the moment and in their bodies, so they learn to listen to and trust their own bodies.

    Do teach them humans come in all shapes and sizes—and that no one shape or size is any better than another.

    Teach them that they are enough, exactly as they are, and that neither their bodies nor their food choices define their worth.

    And that will all be way easier if you learn it for yourself first.

  • How Weight and Food Obsessions Disconnect Us and Why This Is So Harmful

    How Weight and Food Obsessions Disconnect Us and Why This Is So Harmful

    “We are hard-wired to connect with others, it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it, there is suffering.” ~Brené Brown

    I was inducted into diet culture in my early teens and then into the health and fitness industry in my early thirties, when my “fitness journey” had finally really taken off, and I ultimately became a personal trainer and nutrition and wellness coach.

    Once we’ve given enough years of our life to diet culture, many of us begin to recognize the ways that it’s harming us and all the things it’s stealing from us.

    Peace of mind. Self-worth and self-trust. Mental, emotional, and physical health and well-being.

    My grandmother’s cookies.

    The ability to just eat and enjoy food without fear.

    Self-respect.

    Body trust.

    But we don’t notice all the ways “health and fitness” are promoted in our culture and how they do the same thing. And there are so many other things it steals from us that we often don’t think about or notice.

    One of the biggest examples of this for me, and the women I work with, was connection.

    Connection with myself and connection with others.

    I didn’t start losing my ability to connect because of my induction into diet culture. That started earlier as a result of growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father.

    But those industries preyed on it, fueled it, flamed it, and then ran away with it for decades.

    Feeling connected is a core human need. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, love and belonging are right up there after things like food, water, and safety.

    We are hardwired to connect.

    Recent research has suggested that the brain processes the pain of feeling disconnected or rejected the same way it processes physical pain. Nearly every aspect of our health and well-being relies on connection.

    And while it may seem like we’re constantly connected, especially now through things like social media or video calls, it’s not actually the case.

    Loneliness has been on the rise, worldwide.

    Chatting about what food we should or shouldn’t eat; commiserating over how much we hate our bodies, how much weight we gained, the latest diet attempt we just failed; bragging about how we did in the gym, how much weight we lost, how many steps we took, or how “clean” we’re eating—this isn’t connection. It’s not connecting with others, and it’s definitely not connecting with ourselves.

    In fact, those things keep us from being able to connect with ourselves because we’re so focused on controlling external “shoulds.”

    We may form friendships around those things, but they aren’t based on genuine connections.

    Curating the picture-perfect Instagram feed, gathering around mutually hated or demonized “others,” and sharing memes or videos of the latest TikTok trend are also not the same as real, genuine human connections.

    It’s all just filling space with mindless, external distractions.

    It’s not truly allowing ourselves to be raw, real, and vulnerable. To be seen, heard, and valued for who we uniquely are as individuals—not just the perfectly curated image we present to the world but the messy, raw, and real parts we try so hard to hide.

    The parts we fear make us most undeserving of love and belonging.

    I certainly hid behind many of those things. I used them as a cover, as a tool to hide behind. A mask. A role I played, behind which I could feel (somewhat) safely tucked away and protected.

    My “passion for health and fitness” allowed me to play the badass.

    (In reality, I was scared all the time.)

    It allowed me to play the inspirational “success” story.

    (In reality, I was terrified of putting an ounce of weight back on because I desperately craved the praise and validation I was receiving. And it was destroying my mental, emotional, and physical health and well-being).

    The strong, fearless, confident “fitness freak” that could do anything she put her mind to.

    (Which, in reality, hid the fact that I was so scared and emotionally fragile and felt so broken that I needed the physical strength I could build through exercise just to get through the day.)

    I was good at these roles. I loved these roles, at least in the early years.

    Just be what people expected. Be what I’d seen get celebrated in others. Easy, right? Sure, until it isn’t.

    The longer I wore the mask, the more it started to hurt.

    The harder I worked to keep up those appearances, to maintain that external image of perfection through my body and what I was eating, the more damage it was doing.

    Externally, I was doing everything “right.”

    In reality? I ended up a binge eater, bulimic, clinically depressed, and living with generalized anxiety disorder and panic attacks. For many reasons, not the least of which because I was completely disconnected—from myself, my body, and from others.

    I was so focused on trying to be something I thought I was supposed to be, so I’d be liked, admired, impressive, that I lost who I was and what I needed.

    I lost what truly mattered to me and in life.

    I lost the ability to trust myself, to trust others, to let them in and truly see me.

    In fact, I was terrified of being really seen.

    Because I didn’t like myself and I didn’t believe anyone else would either if they knew the real me.

    So I hid behind what my body looked like. My external strength. The image I built.

    Holy cow, it got exhausting. And soul-crushing.

    You simply cannot simultaneously spend your life worried about what other people think about you (or your body), trying to micro-manage and control the image you project, and also be truly connected to yourself and others in any meaningful way. 

    Because in order to keep up those appearances, you have to actively work to hide parts of yourself—large parts of yourself that you’re terrified will be seen if you dare take off the mask.

    If you’re actively hiding parts of yourself, you’re not able to truly feel seen, heard, and valued… because you are hidden away. Locked in some dark, dusty corner of your inner world, and in my case, stuffed down with food.

    After a while, I didn’t even remember who I was. My identity became so wrapped up in who I thought I was (a worthless failure who was completely undeserving of love or acceptance) and who I was trying to be (the perfect, badass inspiration) to hide it, that I was lost.

    And completely disconnected. From myself and others.

    What I wanted or needed didn’t matter because my entire existence was being driven by fear and the disconnection that causes.

    Fear of rejection and abandonment if I stopped playing the role.

    Fear of weight gain and not looking “good enough.” Fear of not being good enough. Fear of what the binge eating was doing to my health. Fear of what would happen if I stopped micro-managing every morsel of food I ate and just trusted myself with food.

    Fear of judgment.

    And every time I turned around, there were diet, “health and wellness” cultures swooping in and stoking those fears.

    Eventually, I recognized that I couldn’t keep it up. I couldn’t keep playing the role. I was too tired, and it had completely broken me. I couldn’t keep caring about trying to be impressive or accepted. I had to start caring about being healthy and at peace with myself.

    In order to do that, I needed to find my way back to myself. I needed to shut out the garbage that was keeping me disconnected and learn how to connect.

    First with myself, because how could I ever truly connect with others if I didn’t even know who I was when I wasn’t playing the role?

    And how could I heal all that weight and food stuff if I stayed in the fear and obsession that kept me so disconnected from myself?

    I couldn’t.

    So I started working on being present with myself, not an easy feat when you don’t much like yourself. But required, nonetheless.

    I started getting curious and practiced connecting with my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my needs… my inner world.

    Who was I, really?

    What really mattered to me in life?

    Forget what I thought I should eat or do… what did I need?

    Was I really put here to spend my life hating myself, obsessing over these things that are destroying me, distrusting myself, and fearing real, meaningful connection with others?

    What if I could find a way to unconditionally accept myself and my body? How would that change the way I treated it and showed up in the world?

    What did I want to eat? Forget what I was “supposed to” eat; what did I want? How were the foods I was eating making me feel? How did I want to feel in my body?

    Forget what it was supposed to look like or weigh; how did I want it to feel to live in? How were my thoughts and conditioned patterns with food and exercise impacting that? Were they helping or harming? How could I learn to change them if they weren’t?

    And I started practicing being more intentional with my thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Intentionally making choices that were loving and kind, that helped me feel better, in general and about myself. Anything that wasn’t helping me live or feel better, and more connected with myself, could have no place in my world anymore.

    Once I started feeling deeply connected with myself and my body, I slowly started working on learning to connect with others.

    That’s still something I find difficult and am learning to do, but I’m still practicing. In baby steps.

    Because what I learned when I started reconnecting with myself was how much living with an alcoholic father impacted me as an adult.

    It taught me that not only is the world scary, but people are. They’re scary and unpredictable. It also created abandonment issues, and it’s where the fear of not being good enough, and the feeling that I needed to play a role to be loved or accepted, had actually begun. No wonder I had so much trouble connecting.

    I share this story because I’ve come to realize that most of us have an underlying fear around not being good enough that started in childhood for one reason or another. And those predatory industries sneak into every corner of our world, capitalizing on our fear with broken promises that do nothing but make things worse.

    The weight and food obsessions are a diversion.

    A socially acceptable, surface-level distraction that keeps us so externally focused and consumed that we spend most of our adult lives not even knowing that we’re disconnected—or that we’re living in fear and we’re just trying to “fix it” by making ourselves feel more socially acceptable.

    All while disconnecting us more and more. From ourselves and others.

    Because we’re hiding behind diversions and masks.

    Well, my mask is finally off.

    Under it, I have belly rolls. I have wrinkles. I have gray hair. I dye it because I prefer dark hair, but sometimes I put it off and rock a solid skunk stripe of gray down the middle of my head.

    Like all bodies, mine changes.

    None of that means I let myself go. It means I let myself just be.

    I’ve overcome a lot of things in my life, but still struggle with some others.

    I screw up a lot, even fail sometimes. Often, actually.

    I’m exceptionally good at some things and full-on suck at even more.

    I can’t do everything myself. Sometimes I need help and support. I’m still not very good at asking for it, but I’m working on it.

    All of that simply means that like you, I’m human. And I cannot connect with myself or anyone else if I’m trying so hard to be impressive that I’m not being real.

    So I don’t anymore.

  • The Surprising Strategy I Used to Stop Bingeing (and Why It Worked)

    The Surprising Strategy I Used to Stop Bingeing (and Why It Worked)

    “Sometimes the thing you’re most afraid of doing, is the very thing that will set you free.” ~Robert Tew

    I recovered from binge eating and bulimia by giving myself permission to binge. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

    My decades-long weight and food war started in my teens, immediately after reading my first diet book, about Atkins, to be exact. I spent the following two decades trying to lose weight (only to keep gaining) and struggling with food.

    By my early thirties, I’d finally managed to lose weight, but it hadn’t end the war, it had just started a new one. The war to try to keep the weight off and transform my body even further.

    Thus began the decade of my “fitness journey.” I became an award-winning personal trainer and nutrition wellness coach and even a nationally qualified, champion figure athlete.

    The weight and food war continued through it all.

    I was introduced to clean eating by a trainer I hired before I became one myself. Four days into my first attempt at clean eating, I was bulimic—bingeing out of control then starving myself and over-exercising to try to compensate. Within eight months, I was officially diagnosed.

    Bingeing to the point of feeling like I may die in my sleep became common, and I realized I had two choices: potentially eat myself to death or heal. I chose the latter.

    I sensed that understanding what was driving those behaviors was the key to learning to change it all, so I decided to get busy learning just that.

    And I recognized that meant I had to stop obsessing over (and hating myself for) my food choices. They were not the problem; they were the symptom of whatever was going on in me that was driving those behaviors.

    So I gave myself full permission to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.

    I even gave myself permission to binge as much as I wanted.

    And I slowly started bingeing less and less. Now it’s been years since I have—the drive is just completely gone.

    I know permission to binge sounds crazy, but has trying to force yourself not to binge or eat “bad things” been working? Is trying to judge, control, criticize, restrict, and shame your way to “eating right” and/or health and happiness working?

    If so, carry on. But if what you’ve been doing hasn’t been working, stay with me while I explain two reasons why permission is so vital, and the helpful versus unhelpful way to practice it.

    Why Is Permission So Vital?

    Permission to eat whatever we want helps reverse two of the biggest reasons we eat self-destructively: restrictions and self-punishment.

    Food restriction (the rules around what we think we should or shouldn’t be eating) caused my cravings, overeating, and even bingeing.

    Science has shown that food scarcity/restriction activates a millennia’s old survival instinct in our brains that triggers cravings, compulsions, and even food obsessions until we “cave.”

    Self-punishment contributes to bingeing because we treat ourselves how we believe we deserve to be treated.

    We’ve been taught that certain foods are good and create “good” bodies, and that certain foods are bad and create “bad” ones. We’re taught that we are what we eat, and to judge weight gain or eating “bad” things as failure, that we are good or bad depending on what we eat and what size we are.

    We punish ourselves by trying to restrict even more, or we go in the other direction and overeat the things we keep telling ourselves we’re not supposed to have, which fuels the cycle.

    How can you want to make nurturing or nourishing choices for yourself when you’re hating, judging, shaming, and criticizing yourself? You can’t.

    That thought, “Oh well, you already screwed up, you may as well eat the rest and start again tomorrow”—that all or nothing thinking, the bingeing, the self-sabotaging—it’s being driven in large part by those two things: restriction and self-punishment.

    Full permission, even to binge, helps start to shift both.

    It stops the feelings of scarcity around certain foods (so they lose their allure), and it helps improve the relationship you have with yourself (so you’re no longer judging and berating yourself for eating “bad things”).

    Now, you may be thinking, but Roni, eating whatever I want got me into this mess. I can’t be trusted to just eat whatever I want.

    Here’s where the biggest lie of all has steered us in such a toxic direction: the idea that our natural compulsion is to “be bad” and eat all that bad stuff is bull.

    We’re not born into bodies that naturally want to eat in ways that make them feel like garbage. We’re not even born into bodies that are “too lazy to exercise.” I call bull on all that too.

    We’re born into bodies that know how to eat and naturally want to move. We’re born into bodies that want to feel good and are actively working to try to keep us healthy 24/7.

    But we’re actively taught to ignore or disconnect from them, and we get so good at ignoring and disconnecting from our bodies’ natural cues that we can’t even hear them anymore.

    We learn patterns of thinking and behaving that get programmed into our brains and end up driving our choices, rather than the natural instincts we were born with.

    It’s not your natural instinct to chow down on a whole bag of potato chips just because they’re there. Nor is it your natural instinct to ignore your body’s cry for some movement. Those are learned behaviors.

    By the time we get to adulthood, the ways we eat, think, and live just become learned patterns of behavior—that can be changed when you stop trying to follow other people’s rules and start understanding how you got where you are.

    When you spend your life stuck in that “on track” versus “off track” cycle you’re completely disconnected from yourself, your body, and what you actually want and need.

    The two things that are driving you and your choices when you live in that place are either:

    1) learned patterns of thoughts and behaviors from old programming (when you’re “off track”)

    or

    2) fear and other people’s rules about what you think you should be doing (when you’re “on track”)

    Neither have anything to do with you—with what you, at your core, actually need or want.

    By giving yourself full permission to eat what you want, when you want (yes, even permission to binge) you’re given space to reconnect with yourself and what’s best for you.

    What You Think Permission Is Vs. What It Actually Is

    There are two ways to do this whole permission thing: the way you think you’re doing it when you’re “off track” and the helpful way.

    Typically, when we “fall off track” or binge, we start “allowing ourselves” all the foods we can’t have when we’re on track, but the whole time we keep telling ourselves it’s okay because when we get back on track, we won’t have it anymore. Then we feel bad and guilty the whole time.

    That’s not permission, it’s a clear example of the food restriction/self-punishment cycle that fuels feeling out of control around food/overeating or bingeing.

    How? It’s restrictive and punishing. We know at some point we won’t be “allowed” to have it anymore—ya know, when we start “being good”—and since we’re already “being bad” we may as well just eat all of it, then we end up not feeling great.

    That’s a food restriction/punishment fueled diet mindset that perpetuates those old patterns.

    True permission means losing all the food rules and judgments. I know it sounds scary and wrong, but it really is key to learning to want to eat in ways that serve you and hearing your body when it tells you what makes you feel your best.

    Begin noticing the things you’re saying to yourself around your food choices and start noticing how the foods you’re eating make you feel after you eat them.

    Do you feel energetic and good when you eat that thing, or do you feel bloaty, lethargic, and sick? How do you want to feel?

    If you’re eating lots of things that are making you feel the latter, just notice that, get curious about why, and most importantly, extend yourself compassion and kindness.

    The next time you’re about to eat something that you know makes you feel terrible, remember how it made you feel last time and ask yourself, do you really want to feel that way right now?

    If you think, I don’t care, ask why? Why do you not care about treating yourself and your body well? Don’t you want to feel good? If you keep hearing, I don’t care, that’s a sign more digging is likely required, but permission is still where you start.

    Notice how often through the day you judge yourself for eating something you think you shouldn’t. How does that judgment affect the choices you make next?

    Remind yourself that what you eat doesn’t determine your worth, and you’re an adult. You’re allowed to eat whatever you want.

    Giving myself permission to eat whatever I wanted, even to binge, was the first step toward a binge-free life because it helped me learn to change the biggest reasons I was bingeing in the first place: destructive thoughts, habits, and behaviors that were caused by food restriction and self-punishment.

    It’s how you start learning to end the food war, to trust yourself and your body, to stop feeling out of control around food, and to start making choices that make you feel your best, because you deserve to feel your best.

  • Do You Remember When You Didn’t Worry About Your Weight?

    Do You Remember When You Didn’t Worry About Your Weight?

    “We need to start focusing on what matters—on how we feel, and how we feel about ourselves.” ~Michelle Obama

    Do you remember the little girl (or boy) in you? The kid who ran, jumped, danced, laughed anywhere and everywhere they felt like it—before someone told them to shush, that they were too big, too loud, too much.

    The kid who didn’t even know what a scale was before someone told them their size was wrong.

    The kid who just ate—before someone gave them a mile-long list of “bad” foods and made them scared of food and distrusting of themselves.

    After over two decades of fighting with food and my body, I’ve spent the last four years reconnecting with and relearning to trust the little girl in me. And it’s been glorious. The little girl in me, before she was taught to suck in her stomach, lift her boobs, hide her flaws, ignore rumblings of hunger in her belly,  or endure the excruciating pain of the perfect heels because beauty is pain and only skinny matters.

    We were born into bodies that we loved. Bodies that fascinated us. We learned to run, jump, dance, with no thought of how we looked while we were doing it.

    Our relationship with food and our bodies was easy, joyful, and magical.

    We’re born into bodies that know how to eat. They know what they need, when they need it. They know what makes them feel their best and what doesn’t, and they instinctively want to move and feel good.

    They also come with all kinds of built-in functions designed to communicate with us so we hear their signals.

    But slowly, it all changes. We hear people making jokes about weight gain. We hear those around us talking about being fat, needing to lose weight, or otherwise being self-critical. We’re warned against “bad” foods—“Careful, you’ll get fat if you eat that,” as though it’s something we should be afraid of.

    And we’re told we are what we eat, as though we’re good or bad based on what food we choose to consume on any given day.

    We start looking at ourselves and our bodies critically. We start learning that food comforts and we start learning to numb—to ignore the messages we get from our bodies.

    The little kids in us get pushed aside. They get quieter and quieter. We stop trusting them and eventually we forget all about them.

    All of a sudden, the wonder and joy with which we used to look in the mirror is replaced with feelings of disgust, distrust, and shame. We feel frustrated, discouraged, stuck…

    Rather than carrying the joy and wonder for our bodies that we’re born with, we waste decades stuck in the never-ending trance of self- (and body-) criticism, chasing external fixes to make it all go away. 

    Because we’re taught to. The sickest part of all is that it’s usually in the name of “health.”

    Like you, I grew up in a society where I learned that certain ways to look, eat, live, and be are good, and everything else is bad.

    Those messages first became destructive for me in my teens, when I read my first diet book and started my first attempt to lose weight, get fit, and eat healthier.

    I was already fairly small, but every time I looked in the mirror, I saw a reflection I hated because no matter how small I was, I was never small enough.

    There was my life before that awful Atkins book and my life after. Before the book, I just ate.

    After the book, every time I ate my favorite chocolate bar or even just a piece of toast, I felt bad and worried about getting bigger.

    Over time, as I continued to try to “stick to” someone else’s rules about what I should be eating to “be good,” only to keep failing and gaining weight, the guilt turned into shame and judgment every time I ate almost anything.

    My inner world was consumed with one ever present concern: I have to get my act together and get healthy. I have to get this weight under control.

    I’d start and stop a new “weight loss” or “fitness journey” every other month. Vowing that this time would be different because this time, I had the perfect plan, the perfect goals. This time I’d be strict. This time, I’d be good. This time, I was motivated enough to stick with it and I was going to work extra hard.

    It never lasted very long. I’d always “screw up,” lose motivation, “fall off the wagon” only to end up feeling even worse.

    We pray for the day we’ll finally lose weight and all our problems will be over, the day we’ll finally be able to stand in front of the mirror and feel the way we used to feel—before the world told us our bodies were a problem we needed to solve and gave us a thousand different “solutions” that only end up making things worse.

    And we’re taught the solutions to getting there lie in hitting goals. They lie in achievement. They lie in restriction. Deprivation. Suffering. Harder work. More discipline. More motivation.

    If we just hit those weight, food, water, lift, run time/distance, step goals (and stick to them), then we’ll be happy and healthy. Then we’ll be living the “good” lifestyle.

    So we try. Most of us have spent our entire lives trying, failing, and trying again.

    What part of any of that is healthy?

    Exactly none.

    But it’s how our population has been programmed to chase health and happiness. Through this warped need to achieve—to reach goals or see visible progress via the mirror or the scale or whatever.

    But human health and well-being has never been about achievement or goal-setting. It’s not the result of how much you can restrict or deprive yourself, how much you suffer, or how hard you work.

    It’s a moment-to-moment measure of our mental and physical condition, and it’s constantly changing based on a ton of different factors—only some of which have to do with our choices and none of which have anything to do with whether or not we have a thigh gap or what the scale says.

    Yet, those things can make or break our mood, our inner peace, the way we feel about ourselves, and what we think we’re capable of or worth as humans.

    We ride or die based on whether or not external measurements of success make us feel like we’re doing something right.

    Forget about how we feel and what we need—just be good. Be successful. Follow the rules, hit the goals, look good on the outside.

    Less than 5% of people will ever be “successful” at the whole “weight loss/fitness journey” thing, and since I was eventually one of them, I have to ask: How do you define success? We’re “successful” at what cost? 

    Yes, I failed for years, but I was also “successful” for years. I finally had what everyone spends their life chasing through all the diets, lifestyle change, fitness journey attempts, etc.

    Was I happier? A better person? Healthier? No.

    Sure, I looked it. I was celebrated for how amazing I looked, how hard I worked, how inspiring my “discipline” and “self-control” were. My Instagram account was peppered with #fitspo and before and afters. I regularly had comments like #bodygoals and questions from desperate followers asking how they too could achieve the same “success.”

    But in reality? It destroyed me mentally and physically.

    Even after I lost the weight, my life still revolved around the internal war I felt between what I thought I wanted to eat versus what I was “supposed” to eat to “be good” or “make progress” or hell, even just try to maintain the progress I had made. Because by that time, I used food as a coping mechanism for everything. And because reaching goals, forcing “lifestyle changes,” and even weight loss success doesn’t magically solve those kinds of food issues or self-destructive, self-sabotaging behavior patterns.

    I ended up with bulimia and binge eating so severe that many nights I went to bed afraid I may die in my sleep because I’d be so sick from what I’d eaten.

    But at least I was being celebrated every day for my “weight loss success.” At least I looked good. Right?

    It’s all so toxic.

    Because we’ve been taught to demonize certain bodies.

    Because instead of self-trust, kindness, and compassion, we’ve been taught rules and restrictions, hard work, self-control, and “success at any cost,” while ignoring the underlying causes of weight and food struggles.

    Forget about how we feel. Forget about what we need. Forget about the cues we’re getting from our bodies when they’re trying to communicate. Don’t listen to those.

    Just behave and do what everyone else tells us we’re supposed to do.

    We get so caught in this trance of obsessing over it all that we don’t even realize how miserable it’s making us, how much of our life it’s consumed, or how much damage that obsession and all those messages is doing to our health, happiness, and peace of mind.

    We waste decades not only distrusting and disconnected from our bodies, but full on rejecting and fighting them.

    Why? For health? Happiness? To feel good about ourselves? Because it’s just what everyone does so we think it’s what we’re supposed to do?

    We wonder why we struggle so much while being completely disconnected from, and even at war with, not only ourselves but our our bodies.

    No matter what it weighs, your body can and should feel like home. It should feel safe, loving, calm, and centered. But it’s very difficult to ever get there if you’re always fighting with it.

    Taking care of ourselves and our bodies should never have become associated with work, punishment, suffering, or something that required motivation, discipline, or even lifestyle changes.

    What do you suppose determines your lifestyle? Your daily choices.

    And what determines your daily choices? Your programming.

    That is, your thoughts, beliefs, and patterns of behavior. The vast majority of which have developed and been wired into your brain over the course of your life so completely that they run on autopilot.

    That’s why they’re so hard to change and it can feel like we have no control over them—because until we actively work to change those things, we kinda don’t have control over them.

    We just go through life in a trance being driven to repeat the same thoughts and behaviors day after day. If we’re not happy where we are for whatever reason, that’s all that needs to change. Change what’s going on inside and the outside falls into place.

    The greatest tragedy of all is that all the outside noise has made us stop trusting ourselves, our ability to decide what we should eat, and follow through, and often, even our worth as humans. 

    All of which affects our choices because we treat ourselves the way we believe we deserve to be treated.

    Really, all most of us want is to feel better, am I right? We want to feel healthy, happy, good in our skin, comfortable in our clothes, at peace and fulfilled.

    Stop trying to punish and suffer your way there.

    Healthy living shouldn’t make life harder. It should all make life easier, better, and make us feel better about ourselves.

    It’s time to ditch the healthy living goals, the lifestyle change attempts, and hopping on and off the fitness journey wagon every few months. It’s not working.

    Ditch the food rules and restrictions.

    Ditch the plans and goals and to-do lists.

    Ditch deprivation, suffering, and struggle.

    Ditch the fear and distrust.

    Trade them in for love. For self-acceptance. Self-kindness. Self-compassion. Awareness.

    Get to know yourself so you can start understanding what’s going on inside that’s keeping you stuck in patterns that aren’t serving you. That’s where the power is.

    Start finding your way back to that little kid, the one who felt like a superhero before the world taught her (or him) to fear, doubt, and live for achievements and goals.

    Forget all the things you think you “should be” doing and start reconnecting with yourself and your body.

    Pause and notice. Emotionally and physically—what do you feel? Where do you feel it? What is it trying to tell you?

    Try putting your hands over your heart and just breathing.

    Ask yourself, “What do I really want right now? What do I need?”

    Tell yourself and your body, “I love you and I’m listening.”

    Pay close attention to how you feel, physically and mentally, before and after you eat. Before you reach for that thing that you know is going to make you feel terrible ask yourself, “Why do I want it?” Is your body physically hungry, or is it a mindless, learned behavior?

    Ask yourself, “Do I really want to feel the way that’s going to make me feel if I eat it?” If you notice yourself answering, “I don’t care” ask yourself why. Why are you purposely eating something that makes you feel terrible?

    When I started asking myself those questions, I realized I was doing it to myself on purpose because I didn’t believe I deserved to feel good. That was super helpful information because then I could start practicing compassion and figuring out what I was punishing myself for, and ultimately stop.

    We’re born instinctively knowing how to eat, but by the time we reach adulthood, most of the ways we eat and live are learned behaviors.

    The beautiful thing about learned behaviors is that we can learn to change them if they’re not serving us, but it starts with awareness and kindness, not goals and restrictions.

    The more you love and honor yourself and your body, the more at home and connected you’ll feel. The more at home and connected you feel, the more you’ll be able to hear your body when it tells you what it wants and needs. 

    You’ll recognize and trust hunger and fullness cues. You’ll recognize emotions and manage them more easily, without always needing to numb or stuff them. You’ll naturally start feeling compelled to move in ways that make your body feel better because you’ll hear your body when it asks for it.

    The more you live from this place of love, trust, and connection, the more at peace you’ll be, and the better you will naturally start treating your body.

    That’s when health and happiness really have a chance to thrive.

    You don’t need another weight loss or fitness journey; you need a journey back to the place in you that is just love and trust.

    That little kid I spoke of earlier? That kid loves you, trusts you, and knows what you’re worth and capable of.

    That kid is still in you and you need each other.

  • I Used to Be Hungry All the Time

    I Used to Be Hungry All the Time

    I mean, hungry allll the time. Basically, if I was awake, I was ready to eat.

    I’d mindlessly pick at whatever was available.

    I’d wander the kitchen feeling “snacky” all the time.

    I’d be completely consumed with thoughts of what I was going to eat next from the minute I woke up til the minute I went to bed. And behind all the desires to eat were always the arguments—what I wanted to eat versus what I thought I was “supposed” to eat.

    No matter how much I had just eaten, I could literally always still eat. I lived in a constant state of fear of putting on more weight and felt guilty and horrible about myself for all of it.

    “No thanks, I’m not hungry” wasn’t a sentence that existed in my vocabulary.

    If there was food around, I was eating it. If there wasn’t food around, I was going to get it.

    (An interesting point to make here, and something for you to think about in your own history with food and dieting, is that I was never like that until I started dieting. The harder I tried to restrict certain foods, the worse it seemed to get, but I digress…)

    Dieting and food rules were a big part of the cause, but they weren’t the only cause.

    For many years, I thought I was a pig. I thought I was just someone who loved food. I thought I was a pig with no self-control. For quite a while I even thought I was addicted to food (and more specifically, sugar).

    That was the problem, I thought. The solution then, of course, was to just try keep trying to “be good.” I had to want it more, shame myself more, and try harder to stop eating things I shouldn’t eat.

    I thought the way I felt about my body (hatred, of course) was my fault because I was too much of a pig to stop eating and I kept making myself fatter and fatter (I thought).

    I knew there were things in my past that could have been considered “issues” I’d never dealt with, but as far as I was concerned, they were in the past. I was over them. Besides, I was strong and nothing bothered me (I thought).

    That’s what I honestly believed.

    But wow, was I wrong.

    Here’s what I’ve learned in the years since I’ve “awakened” (as they say) to the truth.

    First, our thoughts are not our truth, but if we repeat the same ones to ourselves for long enough, we believe them to be true.

    What stories are you running on autoplay in your head everyday about yourself, about food, about your body, about food?

    Second, our thoughts are only the surface level chattering of a very complex computer, and that computer is constantly running (mostly) unconscious programs in the background, all day, every day.

    Beneath those thoughts, what subconscious beliefs are lingering and driving them?

    Those programs not only store our beliefs about ourselves and the world around us, but they drive a lot of our choices as a result of those beliefs.

    Our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs drive a lot of the choices we make—like, a whole lot of them.

    I thought I’d share some of the unconscious beliefs I had below the surface, because, I’m also beginning to notice that a lot of us have a lot of the same ones; and if any of this resonates with you, you may recognize some of them or it may give some things to think about it your own history.

    Belief: At my core, I am bad.

    I am darkness. I am worthless. I am a loser. This is more a general theme of beliefs, I suppose, and thankfully it’s been shifting a lot in the last few years. It does, however, still have some roots that I’m working on.

    This came from childhood, an alcoholic parent, but a number of other things as well; weight gain and food struggles contributed to it. What surprised me when I was digging into this was how many other things contributed to it as well, things that, as an adult, seem rather silly and innocent.

    For example, money was always an issue when I was growing up. That’s a fairly common issue for most families that I never would have thought contributed to so much pain in my adult years—yet it did. It contributed to the “not good enough” and “loser” stories I believed about myself. Also, something I never would have guessed in a million years.

    The takeaway point is that it doesn’t take big obvious childhood traumas to create these destructive “not good enough” beliefs.

    Belief: I am unsafe. The world is unsafe. People are unsafe.

    This one is still in there for me. It’s one of the more recent ones I’ve uncovered, so I haven’t completely cleared it yet. I frequently still feel it as a heavy ache in the center of my chest. It came mostly from having an abusive, alcoholic parent, although other things contributed to that one, as well.

    Belief: Nobody cares what I have to say and even if someone does, I don’t say the right thing anyway.

    This is one that I’ve fairly recently discovered, and it’s another one that came from what now seems like the silliest place. I used to hear, “Shhh, don’t say that! Little girls shouldn’t say things like that” and “Girls are meant to be seen and not heard” all the time from the adults around me when I was growing up. I mean, I probably said that to my own kid when she was little. It seems like such a normal, adult thing to say, yet it’s a message that affected me most of my life.

    Belief: If I gain weight, I am worth less, I am a failure.

    This one is unbelievably common because fat = bad is a message we’re programmed with from the time we’re little.

    Those are a few examples to help you start thinking about some of yours.

    I lived with and from those beliefs my entire life and had no idea they were even there.

    What do I mean I lived from them? I mean, they drove the choices I made for myself.

    Because that’s how it works.

    Every belief that stemmed from the underlying, “I’m not worthy, I’m not good enough, I’m bad” theme prompted me to treat myself and my body accordingly.

    Those beliefs fueled overly restrictive diets, starvation, over-exercise to the point of it being corporal punishment, but they also fueled the non-stop feeling of hunger. They fueled emotional eating, over-eating, and bingeing.

    The more weight I’d gain, the more it would fuel those beliefs and the more I’d try to restrict to “be good” and “make up for it,” which would result in more bingeing. It was an endless cycle.

    The other beliefs created uncomfortable feelings in my body that I not only wanted to avoid but learned to mistake for physical hunger. That’s why I was always hungry. I was always trying to numb everything I was feeling—and I didn’t even know it.

    That gnawing, non-stop hunger feeling was never physical hunger. It was an aching hole in my chest that needed to be filled with feelings of safety and my own love and acceptance, but that I instead tried to fill with food simply because I didn’t know it. I didn’t recognize my own unwillingness to simply allow emotions to exist.

    And the whole time, I thought I was just someone who had no self-control with potato chips.

    Ha. Nope. That’s not it. And that’s the good news because once you recognize that, you can start doing something about it.

    Food numbs and soothes. It just does. Constant hunger or “snacking” comes from a program in your brain running in the background that’s usually attached to the need to soothe or numb something uncomfortable—fear, pain, boredom, annoyance, etc.

    It’s also reward and punishment. It took me years to realize that sometimes, I was feeling driven to eat, not because I was physically hungry but because I felt so worthless, I was actively trying to punish myself.

    And the side effects of trying to control food intake tend to create more self-destructive habits of over-eating and bingeing (aka, feeling “hungry” all the time).

    Constant hunger, feeling like there’s a hole that just can never be filled, isn’t physical hunger. That’s why it feels like it’s a need that’s never satisfied. It’s simply misinterpreting signals and responding with the wrong fix.

    Something else I’ve learned: Our bodies are unbelievably smart. They don’t want to overeat to the point of being uncomfortably full; we’ve just unlearned how to connect with and listen to them.

    If you can relate to those feelings of always wanting to eat, start by simply pausing before you eat to ask yourself, am I physically hungry? Do a quick inventory of how you’re feeling. What sensations do you feel in your body? Where do you feel them? Emotionally, how do you feel? What were you just thinking about? What were you just doing? 

    Just pause for a second and check in with yourself. What do you really need right now? Is food the answer? (Because I know sometimes it can be hard to make yourself stop for a second when you get that urge to eat something, you can alternatively start practicing this while you’re eating)

    Awareness and body-connection are where you start. From there, learning to recognize, manage, accept, and allow emotions makes a world of difference.

    You don’t have to have all your unconscious beliefs uncovered and changed before you stop feeling hungry all the time.

    Once you start recognizing when you’re being driven by your thoughts, beliefs, and emotions rather than physical hunger, and are better able to determine how to manage those emotions or when to just accept and allow them, the constant hunger begins to fade and things begin to shift.

  • If You Hate Your Body and Think You Need to Fix It…

    If You Hate Your Body and Think You Need to Fix It…

    “That girl was fat, and I hate her.”

    One of my clients said this the other day—about herself. Well, her little girl self. And my heart broke.

    One of the very first things I do with clients is encourage them to practice self-compassion and kindness—just extending themselves the same basic human compassion and kindness that they would anyone else.

    Very much the opposite of what most people who struggle with weight and food are used to. After all, when it comes to our weight and food, we’re programmed with messages like “You just have to want it more, be motivated, build your willpower muscle, try harder, work harder, be better…”

    Perhaps to some, it may sound easy or silly, and it’s hard to understand what the hell kindness and compassion have to do with weight and food struggles when we’re so programmed to believe the opposite.

    Just extending yourself some basic human kindness and compassion really does end up being one of the most important things to do when you’ve struggled with weight and food for a long time. It’s also the hardest, and some struggle more than others with this simple concept.

    Personally, I struggled hard with it when I first started trying.

    I hated myself. I hated and was ashamed of every single thing about me, and didn’t think I deserved any kindness or compassion. But I knew that if I ever wanted to change the way I felt about myself, I had to figure out how to find some.

    So, I started picturing a little girl version of myself when I felt like I needed kindness and compassion. If I couldn’t give it to myself, I’d pull up a mental image of her and direct it that way.

    It worked, and it’s a trick I’ve also been using with clients since.

    But the other day, this woman (like many others) said, “Little girl me was fat… and… I… hate her. How am I supposed to give it to her when I hate her too?”

    It broke my heart, but it didn’t surprise me, and as I think about it, it makes me angry. It makes me angry because this beautiful lady wasn’t born hating herself for a little belly roll. She learned to from our stupidly broken society and has carried that belief around with her every single day since.

    From the time we’re old enough to make any kind of sense out of the world around us, we’re taught that fat is the enemy.

    Mothers have been taking their kids to Weight Watchers meetings with them to get publicly shamed for the number on a scale since they were seven or eight. We’ve been warned “Better not eat that, you don’t want to get fat, do you?” as though it was a fate worse than death, while simultaneously being taught that food fixes everything.

    “What’s wrong honey, you’re sad? Here, have a cookie.”

    “Sore throat? Here, have some ice cream.”

    We’ve watched as weight loss, at any cost, has been rewarded. Those who lose it are treated like royalty—showered with praise, attention, and acceptance, while we watch those who gain get whispered about behind their backs for “letting themselves go.” Or worse, they get openly teased and made fun of to their face—often even by friends and family who supposedly love them and claim to do it out of love and concern.

    Our society has programmed us to believe that fat is the enemy and thin people are somehow better than those who are bigger, through millions of micro (and macro) aggressions over the course of our entire lives.

    And here’s what’s happened as a result:

    Tens of millions of people (big and small) are wasting literally their entire lives desperately trying to “fix” their “fat” problem so they feel more acceptable to the current narrative that size and shape determine human worth.

    And when they put on a pound, they hate themselves.

    It’s all so unbelievably toxic, damaging, and counterproductive, and it fuels the exact “problem” our population is obsessed with trying to “fix.” Because the individuals behind the war we’ve waged on fat, go through their entire life hating and rejecting themselves.

    The stories they tell themselves about themselves end up looking a whole lot like this:

    I’m worthless and unlovable if I’m not skinny.
    I’m a failure if I gain weight.
    I’m useless and stupid.
    I ate bad, so I’m bad.
    I’m such an idiot because I let myself go.
    I’m disgusting and don’t deserve to feel good or be treated well (by myself or others).

    You may be thinking, “Good, how else are they going to get motivated to get their shit together and lose the weight!” You may even follow that thought with the typical “I’m just worried about their health” tripe. (If you still believe that weight loss obsessions are in the “best interest” of public health, pop over here and read this piece).

    Think about those words for a moment and consider how they make you feel. Now think about the impact of hearing them running through your head on autoplay, both consciously and unconsciously, tens of thousands of times a day, every single day, for years or even decades.

    We believe the things we tell ourselves. And if we’re telling ourselves that we’re worthless and unlovable and failures because of extra body fat, we believe those things to be true of who we are at our core, what we’re worth, and more importantly, what we deserve in life.

    And we treat ourselves accordingly.

    That woman I spoke of a minute ago? Like tens of millions of us, she struggles to feel anything but hatred for a little girl who she thought was fat. The little girl who doesn’t even physically exist anymore but is built into the fabric of who she is now and how she feels about herself because she carried those stories, feelings, and beliefs into adulthood.

    So did I. And I’d be willing to bet, so have you. Because we all do.

    So, she doesn’t prioritize herself. She does everything for everyone else, while ignoring what her mind and body need until she has no physical or emotional energy left to do anything. And then, when she can’t seem to muster the energy or willpower to force herself into following someone else’s stupid food rules to “fix” her “weight problem,” she hates and berates herself even more, and the cycle just keeps feeding off itself literally forever.

    No one in the history of mankind has ever thought, “I’m such a worthless failure, I think I’ll do something really nurturing and kind for myself and my body today.”

    That’s not how those stories work. That’s not how the shame they create works because we treat ourselves how we believe we deserve to be treated.

    When we associate our happiness and worth with our weight, weight gain makes us feel less worthy. The less worthy we feel, the less health-promoting behaviors we engage in.

    We don’t move our bodies (unless we decide to “lose weight”) because we don’t prioritize their health. We only care about the things we think we have to do as punishment for weight gain and to “whip them back into shape.” Corporal punishment is literally built right into the way we talk about it. But because we’re treating it as punishment, we can’t stick to it.

    We eat and overeat things that make us feel like garbage (and gain weight) on autopilot, as habit, as punishment, as reward, to numb and soothe, to celebrate, to mourn whether our bodies need or want those things—who cares what our bodies want, anyway, right? We’ve spent decades hating, berating, and learning to not trust those.

    That’s why stories matter. That’s what they have to do with weight. That’s why the entire weight loss industry has become such a friggen joke.

    We have got to stop demonizing and prioritizing weight. We have to.

    Instead, we have to shower ourselves with kindness and compassion. If we hate ourselves too much to consider that, we have to shower a younger version of ourselves with it (just keep going to the youngest version you need to, in order to find a version of you feel compassion for). 

    Kindness and compassion are so heavily built into this process because we cannot change self-punishing behaviors until we stop believing we deserve to be punished.

    If you want to change your weight, health, or the relationship you have with your body or food, you have to change the way you feel about yourself, and you cannot do that while berating yourself with stories of being worthless because of what you ate or what the scale says.

    It’ll just never happen.

    We have to stop rejecting parts of ourselves, since rejection writes those stories in the first place, and start working with the way our brains are wired (changing the thoughts and stories that create the beliefs that drive self-destructive habits and behaviors). And we have to tune into our thoughts and the wisdom of our own bodies with kindness and compassion.

    When we stop focusing on weight and weight loss and instead focus on shedding the stories (and beliefs that cause self-destructive choices), then, and only then, are we able to forever shed physical, and more importantly emotional weight they may have created. It eventually just becomes an effortless side effect.

  • What You Need to Know If You Obsess About Weight Loss

    What You Need to Know If You Obsess About Weight Loss

    “By choosing healthy over skinny you are choosing self-love over self-judgment.” ~Steve Maraboli

    If we actually care about health, in 2020, we have to stop trying to lose weight.

    I know, that’s the opposite of what we’ve been taught to believe, but stay with me while I explain why I say that.

    Dieting and weight loss obsessions are actually causing weight gain and poorer overall health outcomes in our population.

    Our culture has been obsessed with weight loss for generations. We’ve been constantly bombarded with ridiculous “lose fat fast” claims by more and more supposedly miraculous diets. It’s been going on for hundreds of years.

    So, with all that obsessing, how’s it all working for us? Is our population getting smaller and healthier? Hardly. The opposite is true.

    Sure, we think dieting works because often when we jump on another new plan, initial weight loss happens fairly easily. We get excited and tell everyone who will listen about the new miracle diet we found and how great we feel.

    And when we gain the weight back? Well, that’s our fault, right?

    We only gain it back because we’re stupid and “fall off track,” right?

    That’s what the diet industry has cleverly programmed us to believe.

    We’ve been taught that any and all weight gain is bad, that not only is it a mortal failure but also a sign of sloth, gluttony, and no self-control. So we’ve also been taught to be ashamed of it.

    And weight loss? Well, that’s always the holy grail of winning at life, right? It’s an event worth celebrating!

    So we diet to “fix the problem.”

    But long-term diet studies show that dieting to lose weight makes most people gain even more weight over time.

    Our obsession with weight loss is creating weight gain.

    But we don’t even need studies to prove that—we know it already because we see it happening in real life, every single day.

    Not only that, it’s contributing to disordered eating and even killing us by creating eating disorders.

    We’re dying to be thin. Too often, literally.

    And again, I ask, how’s it working for us? How many years have you (or someone you know) been trying to lose weight?

    I routinely speak with women who started dieting in their teens (or younger), are now in their sixties and seventies, and have spent their entire lives desperately obsessed with losing weight—only to have never actually achieved lasting weight loss.

    In fact, that’s significantly more common than anyone actually losing weight, keeping it off, and living happily ever after.

    What’s really annoying is that we know this. The failure rate of weight loss attempts is so widely known that it’s become a joke. There are millions of memes and internet jokes floating around about it.

    If someone tries to lose weight, they’re expected to fail before they even get started.

    We know that weight loss efforts are not working for us, yet we soldier on… forever terrified of how much more we may gain if we ever give up the fight for weight control—without ever realizing it’s that very fight that’s causing a lot of problems.

    I like to use my friend, who we’ll call Mary, as an example because Mary was me. She’s you. She’s your sister, daughter, mother, friend, and co-worker.

    Mary loves food. Who doesn’t, am I right? But she often eats when she’s not physically hungry or keeps eating even when she’s well past full. After a while, it starts to create a little weight gain. Because she lives in a world that believes weight gain is a tragic fate she must avoid at all costs, she starts judging herself for it. Her body and her weight become problems that she must solve, at any and all costs.

    The fixation on dieting and weight loss has become an obsession for our society thanks in large part to the inescapable weight stigma that has associated weight loss, by any means necessary, with health.

    She becomes afraid of gaining more weight.

    Because her brain has learned the habit of relying on food to solve every “problem” or sooth every emotion, fear sends an autopilot “eat” signal.

    Because she starts a restrictive diet that eliminates a ton of food she’s used to eating (many of which her body actually needs to perform at its best), the survival instinct in her brain gets afraid of starvation and creates cravings and urges that cause her to “cave” on her diet. More “eat” signals.

    More fear. Fear that she’ll never stick to anything. Fear that she’s going to keep gaining. Fear of judgment from others because of her growing body.

    She feels guilt and shame for not being to get her weight or her eating habits “under control.”

    Shame makes her feel like she’s a bad person. She hates her body and struggles to love herself.

    She starts making more and more fear-based, unloving choices for her body because she’s stuck in that cycle, repeating the same self-sabotaging behaviors of “getting back on track” and “falling off track,” of dieting, losing weight, and regaining, over and over again.

    And that’s where she stays, for her whole life. In that place of obsessing over her weight without ever really changing it, except maybe to slowly just keep gaining.

    She stays stuck in that place of being “perfect” one week, meaning barely eating and cutting out a crap-ton of food only to “fall off track” and become a train wreck of self-destructive choices for weeks or months until she decides to “start again.”

    That’s the reality. For the majority of the population, that’s the outcome of our fixation on weight loss.

    It’s not making us skinnier and healthier; it’s making us heavier and destroying our mental and physical health.

    Which brings me to my point: If we actually care about health, we have to break that association and stop focusing on weight loss. It’s that very obsession and association that’s making our population heavier, and less healthy.

    If we actually care about health, we’ll stop focusing on weight loss and instead focus on how it feels to live in our bodies and how the choices we’re making that affects that.

    The choices you make today will not affect your weight today, but they will affect how it feels to live in your body today.

    When our focus is only on weight loss (as it so often is), we stay stuck in that self-destructive cycle I just spoke of and we don’t even try to make positive choices for ourselves unless we’re “on track” and trying to lose weight. The rest of the time, we ignore our health.

    When we focus on weight loss and associate weight with health, we think, I feel like crap because I’m overweight, and I won’t feel better until I lose the weight… and since I’m already fat and feel like crap, why bother doing anything good for my body?

    When the reality is, no matter what size we are, we can control the way it feels to live in our body today, and often it’s just one or two small choices away.

    If your body feels stiff and immobile, it’s less likely to be because of your weight and more likely to be because it just needs a little stretching—but as long as you’re stuck obsessing over the fact that you need to lose weight to feel better, you’re far less likely to just give it the few minutes of stretching it’s begging for with the joint stiffness.

    So, even if carrying extra body fat is unhealthy (I’m not saying it is because it’s absolutely not an automatic indicator of poor health any more than being underweight is), if we actually care about health, we’ll stop promoting weight loss.

    That obsession is not working and more importantly, it’s making us less healthy.

    Weight gain isn’t always bad. Sometimes, it’s the result of health and healing.

    Weight loss isn’t always good. Sometimes it’s the result of sickness.

    There isn’t one magic weight, or way to eat, that’s a guarantee of health for everyone, so we have to stop obsessing over those things.

    Healthy living isn’t just about the choices we make for our bodies, and it definitely isn’t about deprivation, restriction, perfection, or punishment.

    It’s not about the number on a scale or the size of our jeans. It’s not about step counters, detoxes, fat burning smoothies, or skinny Instagram models and their pretty pictures with recipes for organic, gluten-free, vegan, superfoods.

    If we stopped obsessing over what we weigh, or whether or not we’re going to “be good or bad with food today” or when the next diet starts, our brain would no longer be full of those non-stop, all-consuming thoughts and obsessions and we could start focusing on the things that really matter for our health like connection, compassion, and self-trust.

    Things like nurturing our bodies, our minds, our spirits, and our relationships (not just external but internal—our relationship with ourselves, with food, with our bodies).

    We can start accepting where we are, figuring out where we’re going, and getting comfortable with being a little uncomfortable while working to get there.

    We can start showing up for ourselves, day after day, one small choice at a time. We can focus on how we want to live, how we want to feel in our body, who we want to be, and the small daily choices required to get there.

    That’s how we actually improve our health.

  • How I Healed from an Eating Disorder and Stopped Hating Myself and My Body

    How I Healed from an Eating Disorder and Stopped Hating Myself and My Body

    “Quiet the voice telling you to do more and be more, and trust that in this moment, who you are, where you are at, and what you are doing is enough. You will get to where you need to be in your own time. Until then, breathe. Breathe and be patient with yourself and your process. You are doing the best you can to cope and survive amid your struggles, and that’s all you can ask of yourself. It’s enough. You are enough.” ~Daniell Koepke

    I remember looking at the nutrition information on the bag of jujubes I had just eaten and feeling utterly and completely disgusted with myself.

    That was my first binge. Little did I know how much worse it would get.

    It was four days in to the first official diet that I had somehow managed to stay on for more than one day.

    I had dieted on and off most of my life, but any time I tried a diet that told me what I was and wasn’t allowed to eat (Atkins was the first of many), I never managed to last longer than a day or two before I’d “blow it” and give up.

    Prior to the day of my first binge, I had actually lost a lot of weight on my own, simply by counting calories, but I hired a trainer because, while I reached my goal weight on my own, I still hated my body and wasn’t happy.

    So, I did the only thing I knew to do at the time—pay someone else to tell me what to eat so I could have a perfect body and finally be happy.

    Ha.

    I white knuckled my way through four whole days before I found myself at the grocery store feeling much like I’d imagine a junkie feels as their high begins to wear off. I needed a fix and was jonesing bad.

    The next day, I barely ate anything and ran for about two hours to punish myself for being such a pig the day prior.

    Within a few months, I was sitting in a therapist’s office hearing him call me bulimic while I bawled hysterically and begged him to tell me how to stop feeling so completely out of control with food.

    The harder I tried to control my intake, the more out of control I became.

    The more out of control I felt, the worse I felt about myself and treated my body.

    Depression, panic attacks, bingeing, and restricting/over exercising (those were my compensatory behaviors) took over my world.

    What was wrong with me? I wanted a perfect body so desperately; why couldn’t I just eat what I was supposed to eat?!

    I spent a lot of time with my therapist, and he never really gave me answer for what was wrong with me (beyond the eating disorder) or how to fix it.

    It just kept getting worse.

    My body would shake and I’d be so desperate to get into whatever food I had as fast as humanly possible that I’d usually end up eating an entire large bag of candy on the drive home before continuing to eat until I was sick once I got home.

    After awhile I started noticing that it literally felt like a hole in the center of my being that I was frantically trying to fill—unsuccessfully. No matter how much I stuffed in there, it just never ever felt full.

    What started with one small bag of candy turned into a monster inside me that I could not control. It morphed from a bag of candy to eating myself sick and ultimately feeling like I was killing myself with food. At my worst, there were nights when I had eaten so much I was legitimately scared I was going to have a heart attack in my sleep and wondered if I should go to ER.

    So I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I was desperate—desperate to not eat myself to death, but also desperate to find a way to stop so I could just have that perfect body and finally be happy.

    But as I read, I came to realize that my bingeing wasn’t about the food. The over exercising and starving myself to compensate for the bingeing, none of it was about the food or exercise.

    And my desperate need to have a perfect body, in order to be happy, wasn’t even about my body.

    It all had everything to do with how I felt about myself and my worth as a person.

    I hated myself and felt worthless.

    I didn’t think I was good enough for anything.

    And in that one moment of awakening, everything that was wrong in my life made complete sense.

    I finally knew why I was angry all the time—I was in pain.

    The starving, restricting, bingeing, and over exercising made sense—I was punishing myself.

    The obsessive ways I dove into everything, including food and exercise, were attempts to keep myself numb and not address the pain.

    I knew that if I ever had any hope of changing anything, I had to stop chasing the perfect body and start learning to love and value myself, which meant figuring out where the self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy were coming from.

    The first thing I had to do in my process of healing, recovery, and growth was to start learning to be forgiving of myself and treat myself with compassion. I had been living with excruciating emotional pain my entire life that I never allowed myself to even acknowledge, never mind deal with.

    My constant anger didn’t make me a b*tch or a horrible person; it was a symptom of someone who was hurting deeply.

    The initial weight problem that morphed into dieting/disordered eating and ultimately bulimia didn’t make me disgusting or weak; it was a symptom of someone who hated herself so badly she was punishing herself every day.

    Those realizations allowed me to start extending myself compassion for those things in me that I wasn’t proud of. They allowed me the space to start healing. Because you cannot change while you believe you deserve to be punished.

    I gave myself permission to eat whatever I wanted.

    I even gave myself permission to binge, and the weirdest thing happened—I began to do it less and less. Now I cannot remember the last time I binged. It’s been years.

    It sounds crazy, like the opposite of what we should do. Permission to binge?!

    But when I realized the purpose it was serving and stopped judging myself for it so I could work on actually healing the need it was filling, it all changed.

    You see, as long as we’re judging and hating ourselves, we’ll always feel like we’re bad and deserve to be punished. And as long as we believe we’re bad and deserve to be punished, we’ll never stop punishing ourselves.

    It came down to five basic mindset switches for me: permission, acceptance, compassion, kindness, and curiosity.

    Permission: It’s okay because I’m doing the best I can with what I know right now. When I learn how to better handle these feelings, I’ll make more loving choices for myself.

    Acceptance: It sucks pretty bad, but it’s my journey. For whatever reason, whatever I’m supposed to learn from this, this is the journey I’m supposed to be on.

    Compassion: How would I speak to a friend or client going through this? That’s how I started trying to speak to myself.

    Kindness: The worse I felt, the kinder I was to myself.

    Curiosity: I couldn’t just blindly give myself permission to binge forever without actively getting curious about why I was doing it. So, every time it would happen, I’d spend a lot of time asking myself why. How was I feeling? What feelings was I trying to keep myself from feeling? Was there a better way I could manage those feelings?

    Alongside making those changes I also worked on learning to love and value myself and change the stories I had been telling myself about who I was and what I was worth my whole life.

    So, dieting may have made me bulimic, but my obsession with finding happiness and self-acceptance by building a perfect body led me down a path of learning to love myself and create happiness from within.

    I am enough.

    And so are you. So give yourself permission, acceptance, compassion, and kindness, and get curious about why you do the things you do. Perhaps, like me, you’ll find this is the key to your healing.