What actually happens when you start to heal your relationship with food
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How long have you had a dysfunctional relationship with food? 5, 10, 15, 30+ years? When you have been ‘in it’ for so long, it can feel impossible to imagine a life without stress, anxiety, and battle with food. If you think about the journey required to actually get there, damn. That can feel like a mountain that’s a constant uphill battle to climb.
In this post, I am going to dive into what actually happens when you begin healing your relationship with food and your body and what you can expect: what it looks like, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the fear of spiralling out of control.
The fear of spiralling out of control
I know this fear to my core. To my soul.
It's actually like having two competing fears:
Being absolutely terrified of gaining weight, while:
Absolutely hating the fact that you're stuck in these cycles of binge and emotional compulsive overeating.
You just want to get out.
A lot of questions can come up. If I pursue this journey to heal my relationship with food, what could happen? Am I going to lose all motivation for my health and fitness journey? Am I just going to keep eating and never stop? For me, anytime I used to ease off the gas of my dieting and relax, I would tell myself I could enjoy food for a weekend, just pump the brakes and say it's okay to indulge a little…I would spiral out of control.
I felt terrible. I feared on Monday, I feared the weight gain, I feared the ramifications of what was going to happen because I completely let loose that weekend. And I felt discouraged. Anytime I would come to this big resolve that I am going to have a better relationship with food and find balance, I would lose control.
Self doubt
Once you’ve been through this resolve that you’ll fix things and you end up completely off the wagon time and time again, you get to this point where your self belief just diminishes.
For me, my belief in my ability to ever stop bingeing, feeling this way with food, find balance with food, feel comfortable and and dare I say confident in my own skin had deteriorated so much. I had no self belief. It was exhausting- it wasn't for lack of effort that I was failing, but it seemed like every time I tried to heal my relationship with food, the struggle got worse.
I started to associate trying to stop feeling obsessed with food with just making things worse. So why even try?
Learning to understand your internal environment
What needs to happen to really start this process is to understand your internal environment and your internal world. This allows you to work in sync with it and to reprogram the brain and your behaviours so that you never even have to feel the impulse to binge, overeat, or compulsively emotionally eat again. Balance becomes the default mode and the thing that you do when you're not trying; that's what true freedom is. It starts by understanding what the drivers are behind your compulsive and impulsive tendencies and behaviours with food.
The way I explain it to my clients when they're first getting started is if you look at your internal environment as a bottle of a carbonated drink with the lid screwed on really tight. Anytime you engage in certain behaviours or certain thought patterns, it's as if you shake up that bottle, and it gets more and more pressurized. The more pressurized it becomes, eventually you start to fatigue and you wear out.
Those are the moments where you're like, screw it. You throw up your hands, you untwist that bottle top and boom. All that carbonation that's been building up over time just sprays everywhere. That's when you binge and over indulge. You have that moment of temporary relief- that feeling of, “oh, I'm just gonna let myself do whatever, and I'll make up for it later.”
When the internal pressure becomes too much, that's when we binge, over eat, indulge, just say screw it, and release this white knuckle grip of control. But it's always met with the guilt and the shame and the fear of gaining all this weight and spiralling out of control.
Going back to what’s familiar
Since we don't know what to do, we go back to what's familiar. That's what the brain does. In that fear, the only thing that we know to do that actually feels safe is to white knuckle it. So we grab that bottle top, we twist it back on tight and then we feel safe. We feel a sense of security because suddenly we're back in control- but that bottle top is now screwed on tight again.
Although we don't feel the pressure immediately, that pressure starts to build again over time as we engage in certain thought and behaviour patterns as we do similar things that created that internal pressure before. Eventually, we we blow again and we start bingeing and it's like these cycles continue to repeat themselves.
You might be able to go months and months with this white knuckle grip of control on your food. For some of you, you might be able to only a couple of weeks or days before that pressure becomes too much and you end up binging.
Preventing the pressure buildup
In order to prevent this continuous buildup of pressure that is propelling these compulsive tendencies with food, we have to understand what's contributing to that. That's one of the very first things I do with my clients in my coaching program- we map out the biiiiig picture of everything and determine the precise things that are contributing to the buildup of internal pressure that is propelling these behaviours into motion. When you understand that, suddenly it's like the clouds part. You're able to see blue sky for the first time. You suddenly understand why you're engaging in these behaviours. It makes so much sense.
When you have this clear picture of what is actually contributing to and driving the compulsive tendencies with food, this level of awareness brings so much peace. Finally, you don't feel so crazy- it makes sense.
For so long, I thought what was actually driving my compulsive tendencies with food were things that were triggering these behaviours into motion. Things like stress, overwhelm, boredom, and past traumas. But what I started to realize was, okay, maybe those things did contribute to an unhealthy relationship with food, but why do I still feel the impulse to binge when things are relatively good? Like when I'm feeling accomplished, or when I just want to wind down from a tough day, or when I'm feeling happy- I want to do it with food.
Going layers deeper
I spent so much time tackling this list of triggers. That was not the thing that was helpful for me- it was actually going layers deeper and mapping out and developing this level of awareness of what I'm doing and what I'm thinking on a day to day basis, that are actually contributing to these compulsive tendencies with food.
Once you understand what's actually propelling the compulsive tendency with food into motion, it suddenly feels like you've gotten off the all or nothing roller coaster. You're at the base of the mountain and you know you have a mountain to climb to reach this place of balance with food, peace with food, and confidence in your own body, but it's like you can finally see the trail.
For the first time, you have a map.
Messiness….but it brings peace
If you're struggling in these cycles, the pressure is already there. You're already housing pressure that you shouldn't be- and so the process that I take my clients through is this slow untwisting of this bottle top so that you can release pressure without it feeling like you're spiralling out of control with pressure spraying everywhere.
We want to release it in a way that feels brave. The reality is, part of this process is removing all these physical, mental and emotional restrictions that you’ve had around body and food for so long. That process without a plan can feel very scary.
But when you have a plan, and you release that internal pressure without going back to screwing on that bottle top when things feel scary, guess what happens?
The carbonation and the pressure finally settles and you're left with peace. You're left with balance. This allure towards food, this longing towards going crazy on food, starts to diminish.
Part of that process in getting that impulsive drive towards food to dissipate, is giving ourselves permission to go through the releasing phase, which might look a little messy. It might not look like this perfectly well balanced relationship with food. Over eating is completely normal in the journey to food freedom. Having a craving for more highly palatable foods is also completely normal. And where most people stop in this journey to pursuing healing their relationship with food is at this point where you're releasing the pressure and it gets a little messy and maybe you overeat. Maybe you feel like all you’re craving is junk food- so most people get very afraid and feel like they're spiralling out of control.
So they go back to white knuckling it, screwing that pop bottle top on tight and allowing the pressure to build. But if you understand that it’s actually part of the process, it feels far less scary to keep letting that pressure out and to avoid going back to white knuckling it. You might overeat for a little bit, you might have more of a drive to eat more highly palatable foods and you feel like, “man, am I ever going to have balanced be my default mode?”
Yes, you'll get to that place. But the truth of the matter is you have to go through the phase of releasing internal pressure. In that phase, while I help my clients navigate that in balance, it can also look a little messy, and that's okay. And when you're when you have a system for releasing that pressure, slowly without it spraying everywhere and feeling very chaotic and messy. It's relieving. It allows you to have the courage to continue to take the next step forward. But the only time that phase is scary, is when you don't have guidance, you don't have support, and you don't have accountability.
The last supper mentality
Another piece that typically happens at the beginning of healing your relationship with food is the last supper mentality.
It’s the thought process of, “I'm getting on track with my relationship with food, so I'm never going to be able to indulge in binge eating again. So I might as well just have one last hurrah and just go crazy on food because I know I'm never gonna get to do this again.”
That's typically the first thing that happens- the last supper mentality kicks in because you're starting to pursue this journey, but you haven't been given the tools or know the route yet.
Making a plan
The next part of the process now that things are making sense, is actually tackling the behaviour patterns, the thought cycles and the things that have just become automatic and are driving these cycles more deeply. So the next part after you develop that awareness is then developing a game plan for what to do before, during and after a binge or a period of anxious overeating.
What do you do to prevent getting to that place?
What do you do prior to being in the heat of the moment?
What activities can you engage in to reprogram your brain and retrain it?
All so that when you get to a triggering event or situation or circumstance, your body and brain’s automatic response is balance, not the rising urge to binge or overeat.
You will undoubtedly find yourself in the middle of feeling these impulses and these urges as you pursue healing your relationship with food. You need to have a game plan for what exactly to do in the heat of the moment. What I teach my clients is that you will likely not think your way out of binge eating. Because in the moment, that impulse is very, very strong. If you're in the middle of it, it's very hard to think your way into stopping.
When we get to those moments, we need to figure out how to change our physical state and change what's happening on a bodily level. And that can be accomplished in a number of different ways that can be accomplished through changing the sensation in your body by actually moving your body in certain ways, that can be accomplished by changing your body's temperature, if it's cold outside, go outside and allow your body to change temperature, jump in a cold shower, allow your physical state to change. And what happens is, it's a much more effective path to changing your mental state when you're actually in the heat of the moment by starting with changing your physical state. And so there's a number of different techniques that I share with my clients that are effective in helping navigate what's going on in the middle of a binge in the heat of the moment.
Make a post-binge game plan
Inevitably throughout recovery, binges will still happen. So in getting to the other side of engaging in a behaviour that you don't want to with food, what do you do? Instead of your typical guilt, shame and fear- because those emotions continue to propel binge eating into motion and cause this internal pressure to build.
So when you’re through a binge, you have to take a deeper look at what's going on internally. Recognize our emotions, what's going on mentally, what’s happening physically, so that we can actually learn from that experience and then take that into our preparation phase. This helps plan what activities to do before we even get to the next impulse or heat of the moment so that we can begin preventing those impulses from even happening.
Then it starts to get really good
Once you get really, really good at navigating those impulses, you’ll eventually stop engaging in the behaviour altogether.
You get to the point where you're no longer responding to these impulses- and the impulses start to fade. You no longer are feeling these urges like you once did. That is a very, very exciting experience.
And then after you get to this place where it's incredible when you start to feel the impulse to binge or overeat or eat emotionally start to dissipate. And it literally feels amazing. And that's what real recovery is all about. It's not: “how do I manage this impulse? How do I white knuckle it? How do I develop better discipline or get on the right plan?” No, it's when you no longer even feel the urge to binge and you don't think about food and body worries all the time.
The reflection period
Once you’ve been through the fear, doubt, and worry, you move to excitement, motivation and thrill. Then the last supper mentality kicks in, you develop some tools and awareness, and then the ability to utilize these tools and techniques to navigate the before, during and after a binge.
And then when you start to regain your mental space, because you're no longer thinking about food and body all the time, what happens is you begin to enter this next phase of the process that I call the reflection period. This is the period where suddenly you're gaining so much more mental freedom and mental energy back, that you have the energy and mental space to start reflecting on other things in your life. This can be exciting, but it can also be challenging. It's a period of renewal that you will undoubtedly go through when you've cleared your mind of this impulsive tendency with food that becomes all consuming and when you start to reflect. Sometimes, my clients will see areas of their life that they've neglected.
That can feel very heavy because you can you start to realize how much you missed out on and how much time you wasted. This period of reflection can be challenging, but it's so incredible. I love getting to go through this process with my clients because it is literally as if a rebirth is happening. You're closing one chapter saying goodbye to the obsessive compulsive tendencies with food and body, and hello to whatever's next for you. While that can feel intimidating, when you're guided through that process it is an incredible experience. The self belief that you start to rebuild is like it's like nothing I've ever experienced before- you've been given your entire life back and when you're at that point in your journey, whatever goals you set for yourself, whatever dreams you have, they all say suddenly start to feel so much more possible and within reach.
The reason I am so passionate about sharing this message with you, because I know what it feels like to sit in this self imposed prison and feel like there's no way out. And so in sharing kind of what happens before you begin pursuing healing your relationship with food, what happens at the beginning, what to expect in the middle, what kind of happens at the end, and how this whole evolution works. My hope is that it brings you the courage and the confidence that this is available for you too.
Until next time,
Britt
Join me for The Food Freedom For Life coaching program! This program is for those who know they want to improve their relationship with food and their body, but are afraid of spiralling out-of-control and want a proven, step-by-step system to go from feeling crazy around food to normal again. Book a free consult to learn more.
