The debate about following food and eating plans or not following a plan is strong.
Some say if you’ve been a compulsive overeater, you’ll always be one. You can’t take “one bite” kinda like an alcoholic can’t take one drink.
So you need to follow a plan that’s given to you by someone else. Because left to your own devices, you’re a mess and you’ll screw it up. You need boundaries given to you.
Others notice greater anxiety WITH a food plan. They feel boxed in, rebellious, or sad, and like they’re missing an important journey in restoring a sense of self-trust.
I think there are two key questions you might contemplate around your relationship with eating;
1) What’s your ultimate goal, feeling, purpose in balancing your relationship with eating? Is your goal to be thin or at a certain weight? Do you want to quit binge-eating, quit dieting, and stop any sort of eating that’s whacky or unnatural? Or do you want inner peace, beyond this predicament of eating or even thinking about food or your weight?
2) What is the most kind and gentle thing you can do for yourself right now in your relationship with food, eating or your body? This may seem like an obvious or trick question (doesn’t anyone want kindness?)…but it’s not.
In the past, I thought change occurred through control or discipline, not love. Without rules telling me what was “good” I felt really lost because my self-esteem was shot to hell. If this is the case for you, it’s OK to have an eating and food plan that you follow for awhile.
Very early on in my wonderings about eating, weight, and food….I knew I wanted to understand ultimately why I was doing what I did.
I wanted to address the compulsion at the root.
I knew I wasn’t born with something missing. I was born a full human being, capable of eating normally. I could feel this was true. I knew something was going on that led me to eat wildly, then starve myself, then stuff myself again, then look for diets endlessly.
It wasn’t really about food.
But since this is a healing process, that takes time, there may be some ways you can have your hand held before walking on alone.
Under compulsive eating or an urge to engage in any addictive process, if you want to call it that, is something that’s upset, troubled, unresolved, off-balance.
Feelings. Beliefs. Memories. Mind. Thinking.
To get to the bottom of it, you’ll have to deal with messy, chaotic things like emotions. You may have to refuse to keep eating when you aren’t hungry and wonder why it feels so hard.
You may have to see how you look at the world, and life, at a very deep core level….
….your attitude towards being here on planet earth….
….and question it.
Much love,
Grace