In 2018, I did something I deemed impossible for most of my adult life.
I shed 100lbs and fought off my binge eating disorder, which had been the devil on my shoulder since my early teens.
As a society, we’re taught from a very early age that our ultimate goal in life should be to lose weight. In fact, if we don’t have a preoccupation with thinness, dieting, and calories, we’re accused of not taking proper care of our “health”.
(I say “health” because what’s healthy about obsessing over every little morsel we put into our mouths; forming a negative relationship with our bodies; and never truly allowing ourselves to live?)
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In my disordered mind – the very same mind that had caused me to diet chronically since the age of about 10 and starve myself for days on end after a binge – I had finally found the secret to weight loss. I had achieved the right weight loss mindset!
I had discovered the KEY to weight loss! I was never going to binge again!
Or so I thought.
I was wrong.
After nine months of extreme dieting, my Binge Eating Disorder returned with a vengeance. Just like it always did after depriving myself.
And so did my self-loathing, shame, and hatred for my own body.
The only difference this time is that I had gone nine months without binge eating – the longest I’d ever gone since I started dieting. I hadn’t recovered. My disorder had just been laying dormant.
#1. REASSESS YOUR DEFINITION OF “HEALTH”
I stopped viewing the number on the scale as the be all, end all.
In fact, I stopped weighing myself; I can’t remember the last time I did.
I honestly have NO CLUE how much I weigh and I feel bloody fantastic.
I started realizing that health and happiness were my two real goals. And trying to lose weight wasn’t helping me reach either of these.
I realized that if I was constantly striving to be thin because I was conditioned to think that thin = better/healthier, I would always ultimately fail (just like 95% of people who go on diets).
Dieting has been proven to directly cause binge eating, as well as low self-esteem. So, as long as I continued to slip back into restrictive eating habits (a.k.a. dieting), I would always end up bingeing.
I would never be happy with my body or accept it for what it is.
That binge eating would always lead to guilt, shame, and poor body image, which would lead to me dieting, which would lead to me binge eating, which would lead back to shame… AND SO ON.
I was SICK of being trapped in this cycle. I had to stop the wheel from spinning somehow.
However, I was still convinced that if I didn’t lose weight, I was unhealthy.
I was still deluded enough to believe that dieting and binge eating was somehow healthier for me than just stopping both altogether because, again, I was still convinced that I should be striving for thinness.
That was until I did a little research…
I realized that we’re fed a LOT of misinformation regarding weight and health. Being fat doesn’t automatically mean you’re unhealthy, just like being thin doesn’t automatically mean you’re healthy.
It’s our lifestyle that reflects our health, not our outward appearance.
Changing my perspective of what “healthy” actually means was instrumental to beating binge eating and learning to accept my body because it helped me quit dieting. I finally realised that health wasn’t calorie counting, over-exercising, and restriction…
It’s NOURISHING our bodies and eating food that not only fuels us but takes care of our MENTAL health as well. Life is pretty miserable without yummy food.
I adjusted my goals to focus on intuitive eating, body acceptance, and self-love.
I wanted to repair my relationship with food and enjoy eating again.
For the first time in over 20 years of dieting, I didn’t fail.
I learned to love myself and heal my relationship with food and my body.
I basically go over the steps and methods I used to escape 20 years trapped in the diet/binge/self-hatred cycle.
#2. DITCH WEIGHT LOSS GOALS
For me, weight loss used to be my biggest goal.
I was obsessed calories, dieting, and my weight.
I would weigh myself several times a day, weigh out my food (even lettuce), and count how calories I burned through exercise RELIGIOUSLY.
No matter what weight I actually was, it was never small enough and that number on the scale always terrified me.
Even after losing 100lbs, I wasn’t satisfied.
If that sounds disordered to you, that’s because it WAS. And I’m willing to bet that you’ve harbored similar thoughts at least once over the years… otherwise, you wouldn’t be here, reading this blog post.
In order to recover and heal your relationship with food, you HAVE to start looking at weight loss differently.
In fact, you have to take weight loss goals off the table in order to truly recover.
Because all the time you’re fixated on weighing less, you’re still caught up in a negative, weight loss mindset and not repairing your relationship with food and yourself.
Your weight is a bi-product of your environment, lifestyle, and genetics. Objectively, it’s how much space you take up. Unfortunately, we live in a society where taking up less space is seem as more worthy of respect.
If you agree with this outlook, like I used to, we have to change this.
No one is worthy of more of less respect because of how much room they take up or how much their body weighs. That’s a ridiculous notion, which most of us realize when we reflect on it objectively.
#3. BECOME WISE TO DIET CULTURE
I went on countless weight plans – Weight Watchers, Slimming World, CICO, the lot. But none worked for me. In fact, only 5% of diets ‘work’ long-term full-stop.
Every single weight loss plan is just a diet dressed up in clever marketing. And diets have been proven to cause binge eating and self-esteem problems.
Actively seeking weight loss alone is enough to harm your mental health. It CAUSES binge eating.
In order to regain my health, I had to stop dieting. And, to do that, I had to educate myself on the dangers of diet culture.
One of the big problems is, however, that many diet plans now dress themselves up as “lifestyle changes”. In fact, the tagline for a lot of well-known weight loss plans is “a lifestyle, not a diet”.
This feeds into the desire to lose weight that we’re all told we should be constantly striving for, but also soothes our worries over being on a “diet”, since many of us are now growing wise to the fact that diets don’t work long-term and they actually even harm our mental and physical health.
When you break it down though, no matter how you dress up these weight loss plans and market them as lifestyle changes, they all boil down to eating in a calorie deficit, which is what you need to lose weight.
You’re still having to eat less than your body needs.
Just because they don’t say the c-word (calorie) out loud and instead refer to “points” and “syns”, they still mean the same thing.
You’re still going to binge. Whether that’s in a week’s time or next year. This has been proven time and time again.
#4. CHANGE YOUR MINDSET WHEN IT COMES TO FOOD
In order to really change your mindset when it comes to weight loss and improve the way you see your weight and body, you have to change your mindset when it comes to food.
We’ve been conditioned to see any food that’s not a non-starchy vegetable as the devil. Food makes you fat and being fat is bad so food must be the enemy… right?
WRONG.
We need food to not only live but to enjoy life.
Food’s not only there to nourish us – although that’s pretty bloody important – it’s there to LOVE.
People bond over food. We use it to celebrate, to connect, to pay our respects. We use it to sooth us in times of stress (which, contrary to popular belief, is actually fine once in a while).
It’s part of life.
When we’re not eating it, or only eating foods we think we should because #health, then what’s the point? Life’s pretty boring without it.
With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why being on a diet is so depressing!
Learn how to get your dream body – it’s honestly life-changing.
Eating intuitively is exactly what it sounds like – and we’ve done it since we were children.
When you’re a kid, you eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. But, somewhere along the way, diet culture and societal standards infiltrate our thought processes and we start ignoring hunger signals and binge eating past the point of normal fullness.
Getting back in touch with these cues is amazing for our bodies and minds because we start nourishing ourselves again. We THRIVE. You’ll notice your energy sky-rocket; you’ll want to exercise for FUN, and you’ll sleep like a baby!
Your mental health will improve, as will your relationship with your body and food.
You’ll experience food freedom, be able to go out for meals without starving yourself all day and studying the menu first; and be more impulsive with your decisions – in the best way possible.
Food will no longer be a commodity or bargaining chip. It’ll just be part of your life.
Instead of fixating on calorie counting and step tracking, you can spend your energy in better places, such as with your partner or family, or business, or a new hobby.
When intuitively eating, if I lose weight, that is just a bi-product of not binge eating hundreds of thousands of calories a week and actually leaving my house after repairing my mental health.
NOT restricting and depriving myself.
#5. RECOGNISE THE DIET/BINGE/SELF-HATRED CYCLE
Weight loss is no longer the GOAL.
Desperate, I read a book called Brain Over Binge by Kathryn Hansen and it basically changed my life. It completely changed how I viewed my binge eating and made me realize that I was in control of it. I wasn’t helpless or broken or unfixable. Quite the opposite.
It also made me realize that the culprit for my binge eating and bad body image was dieting, which I had been engaging in since childhood.
Now I don’t think twice about what food I eat; I never binge; I no longer hate my body; and I exercise for health and because I love myself, not because I hate my body.
CLICK HERE TO GET MY RECOMMENDED WEIGHT LOSS SECRET!
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