Food Freedom Means Giving up on Yourself

I said what I said...

Listen up for a hard truth bomb.

You may not think you have disordered eating patterns, but they include things like:

• Binge/over eating one day/meal then restricting the next and continuing the cycle.
• Purposefully under-eating/overeating with severe anxiety around your next meal or snack.
• Eating more or less for punishment for what you ate the day/meal before.
• Ignoring and disowning your body's signals when it tells you it needs more/less food.
• Fearing certain foods like carbs, sugars or fats.
• Frequent dieting, hopping from one nutrition plan to the next because they aren't working fast enough.
• Chronic weight fluctuations based on your current eating habits.
• Battered body image.
• Never feeling good enough around your body or food.
• In constant comparison mode to the bodies of others
• Focusing on the scale rather than the feelings you're experiencing.
• Thinking self-confidence and happiness are in losing weight.
• Exercising only for the number on the scale or to erase what you ate the night before.
• Anxiety around food or how your body looks.
• Constantly being in fix-it-mode around your body.
• Consistent meal plan/diet hopping.
• Glorifying certain foods.
• Over exercising because you ate too much the day/meal before.
• The all or nothing mentality (if I can’t get a full workout in then I won’t workout at all).
• Never taking rest days or taking too many rest days because you don't feel like you are good enough.
• Overachievers/perfectionists/people pleasers re-routing their insecurities on the food they eat and their body image.
• Black or white thinking, "I ate a cookie with my salad so today is wasted, I might as well binge on all foods today and start again on Monday."

All of these plus many more are signs of disordered eating patterns and they grow stronger and get worse with each diet you go on. Your authentic magic inside of you slowly declines as you start departing from the trust within yourself. You lose who you are and eventually lose your powers of authenticity to become the mold of what you think your body SHOULD look like. And as each food gets put up on its glorified pedestal while dieting, your fear takes over and you suddenly can’t trust yourself around food without a certain diet or wellness plan in your life.

But in the words of Elsa from Frozen II, “It’s not magic that can't be trusted. Fear is what can't be trusted.” Sorry, I've been watching a lot of Frozen lately.

Your world doesn’t have to be this way. You can heal your relationship with food and bring that authentic magic back to you! It’s still inside of you, you just have to “do the next right thing” and walk into the unknown. (Sooo much Frozen).

It’s my theory that you cannot achieve a successful and sustainable physical transformation of the body until you first heal your relationship with food. If you are going into another diet, wellness plan, or lifestyle change with the same, scarcity-driven mindset around carbs and fear of pizza night; then you will end up in the same vicious cycle you've always been in.

The goal isn’t weight loss anymore, it’s freeing yourself from decades of diet rules and discovering that this is what has been holding you back from experiencing your life the entire time.

During the mental transformation you experience while working from the inside out rather than from the outside in, is when you will finally find your true health and authentic, ideal body. Don't you want to find your body's natural balance when you are feeding it and moving it for self-care rather than self-control? Wouldn't it be great to go out to eat and actually enjoy the company you're with rather than becoming the severe anxiety, guilt, shame and fear that come with the bread basket? 

So yes, you will give up on yourself when you walk into the Food Freedom world. But you will give up on YOUR OLD SELF. You will give up on the self-defeating, manipulating, perfectionist you've been trying to shed but never could. The only way to do that is to walk into some discomfort and try something totally off the wall and new. Healing your self-confidence and self-respect comes from healing your relationship with food first.