Diets Don’t Work: Food, Feelings and Finding Freedom

If you are confused about how to find peace with food, your weight and body image, you are not alone. This is a pervasive, frustrating and complicated issue with many, many layers.

I know this because I’ve been there. Food, and my flawed relationship with my body, ran my life for many, many years. This journey took me down roads of deprivation, binging, purging. You name it, I tried it. While my relationship with food was clearly destructive, what was worse was my relationship with myself; the fear, despair, hatred, judgment and loneliness I felt in my own skin. What started as a simple diet and way to gain “control” somehow became my whole identity.  My discipline turned to tyranny. My betterment turned to perfection.

Hitting bottom tends to wake us up, and my crash did just that. It was only then my longing for freedom eclipsed my longing for control.  I needed help, and I got it; lots of it. My path of recovery spurred me to help others on their own journey, and I have spent the greater part of the last 15 years doing just that.  I was fortunate to work as the head nutritional counselor at an intensive outpatient recovery center for many years, as well as in private practice. This work, along with my own, allowed me to go deeper into the cause behind our flawed relationship with food, weight and our bodies.

What I have discovered:

• Diets don’t work and are actually part of the problem.

The truth is diets have a failure rate of 95-98 %. Physically, psychologically and spiritually, diets are counterproductive to healing the food, weight and body image equation. We cannot solve this issue by solely controlling, manipulating or altering what is eaten. It may seem to “work” for a while, but unless we get to the root of the problem, it is like trying to put out a fire by turning off the fire alarm.  Diets do not work because they do not address the issue of “why”. 

• End the war.

Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. There is absolutely no way to embody peace and freedom by walking a path laid with stones of deprivation, restriction, judgment and resentment. We must learn what it means to practice acceptance, compassion and really loving, not conditionally loving, ourselves. The end of the journey is the journey; the means is the end. We will never find peace with food or our bodies, by continuing to declare war on it.

• Reconnect to intuitive eating.

Your body holds immense wisdom for you. It knows exactly what foods work best for your system and in what amounts. You have been gifted with the best nutritionist there is. YOU. Healing relationships with food and our bodies means getting out of our heads and getting back in touch with this innate knowing. It means letting go of confining food rules and labeling food as “good” and “bad”. It means allowing ourselves to honor and trust our hunger and really experience food. It means finding freedom. 

• Go deep.

Food, weight or body image issues actually have very little to do at all with food.  We are so much more than mere anatomy, biology or physiology. This means what we eat is only half of the diet, weight, body image and health equation. It means who we are when we are eating and how we eat is just as important. Why do we eat the way we do in the first place? Why do we gain the weight back or fall back into destructive cycles?  To really clear the food issue from our lives, we have to look at the deeper causes. We must unearth all the emptiness food fills for us other than true hunger. We must find what we are really starving for.

I see our food issue not as a huge problem to solve, or a broken part of us that needs fixing, but as a doorway to self-discovery. When we actually pay attention to what our behavior with food is trying to tell us, we hear the long buried echoes of our deeply buried selves. Then we become the archaeologists of our own psyche, reveling in the artifacts we have long since buried. We embrace that food is our way in to finding our way out.