What No One Ever Tells You About Eating Healthy And Losing Weight That Sabotages Your Progress. Part 1

Hello 🙂

I have two important things that I want to talk with you about. I am going to present one today, then I will talk about some tools you can use to work through the first one tomorrow. After that we will talk about the second item.

Today I want to talk about something that I feel is commonly experienced, but almost never talked about. I feel like this article needs to be written, not as an excuse but as a mode of clarity. I have seen countless people struggle with the issue we are going to look at today, and for a long time I could not figure out what exactly was going on with them. I even personally experienced this, and at the time also struggled to get a hold of what was going on within me.

Today and tomorrow,I want to talk about what really happens to you when you start to clean up your diet, or when you go on a diet on an emotional/psychological level.

For today:

Have you ever decided to go on a diet, or decided to start eating more whole foods like fruits, veggies, nuts and seeds in place of more processed foods, and had the following happen?

• All of a sudden life gets crazy. You all of a sudden notice how stressful your job is, how stressful your relationships are or just generally feel like the drama level in your life gets amped up.
• Things that never used to bother you all that much start to drive you nuts. People, traffic, inanimate objects, all are so much more annoying than they used to be.
• Your emotions feel totally out of control. You feel helpless, hopeless, sad, angry and everything in between on a much higher scale than ever before.
• You have intense food cravings that feel totally out of your power to control.

And/Or:

• Do you  considers yourself to be a yo-yo dieter? Someone who starts a healthy eating program and then ends up reverting back to your old way of eating - thinking you just have poor will power?
• Are you someone who knows that eating more whole foods and less processed foods would be beneficial for your health, but feel like you are 'addicted' to certain processed foods or negative food behaviours like binge eating?

If any, or a combination of the following things have occurred when you attempted to nourish your body in a healthier way, there is a good chance that you felt overwhelmed with trying to keep up your new healthy eating in the midst of everything else that was going on. You may have felt like life totally ramped up, or like you were going crazy with your emotions around the time you changed your diet and this may have lead you to return to the way you were eating before.

Perhaps you now consider yourself to have low will power - feeling like you just did not have enough discipline to keep up with your new diet. Or perhaps you felt like it was just poor timing, and that it would be better to wait for life to calm down again before you attempt to eat healthier again.

If you have tried over and over again to eat healthier and each time fallen 'off the wagon' so to speak, I want to tell you what I now understand that may shine a light on what is going on for you.

The real truth is, no one tells you how 'numbing' processed foods are for our emotions.

No one tells you that eating foods that contain ingredients that were manufactured in the lab, that are very high in processed fats and sugars, that are chemical rich and nothing like what you would make if you were making the same item in your home kitchen have the power to dull your emotions.

There was a time in my life - for about 7 years - where I struggled to eat a balanced, whole foods diet. I so badly wanted to nourish my body with the foods I knew were supportive of my health. I really wanted to lose weight and be thin. I wanted to get rid of my acne and stomach aches. I knew what to do, I knew how I 'should' be eating.

I would usually be able to sustain a healthy diet for about a week or two. Then, one day I would walk into the kitchen, stand in front of a loaf of banana bread with fork in hand and literally eat 1/2 of it. I would go into a sort of trance as I ate. I would then snap out of it and feel like a totally crazy, out of control person.

There were times when I was so sad, so hurt, so scared and all I could think to do to comfort myself was to sit on the couch and eat and entire box of cookies.

I used to believe that there was something really, seriously wrong with me. I thought that my body was totally against me, that it wanted to be overweight because I felt like every time I tried to eat healthier, the drive to over consume foods I knew were detrimental to my health would become overwhelming.

As I progressed along my journey, I started to get more of a 'handle' on my eating. I got better at controlling my urges to eat. Essentially I just bolstered my willpower.

I honestly felt like I was in a constant battle with food.

On the one hand I wanted to be thin and healthy and I enjoyed eating lots of fruits and veggies. On the other hand I felt like I could not stop eating heavier foods even though they made me feel poorly.

This forcing of my will not to eat heavy foods that made me feel terrible was exhausting.

As this was happening to me, I started to notice that others in my life had similar habits. I was working as a nutritionist at the time, and I noticed that every time I encouraged clients to eat more fruits and veggies, all of them would hit a wall. Each one of them would be able to eat their new healthy diet for a week or two, and then would come to me very angry, very upset and feeling totally miserable. They would either blame me and tell me that this way of eating was making them feel totally depressed and miserable or they would blame themselves for not having enough willpower to keep it up.

I would check to ensure that everyone was eating sufficient calories - as these types of reactions are common when you are in a 'starvation' type mode. Generally all of them were eating more than enough to meet their energy needs, but were still reacting in this way.

This was when it finally clicked. We were all experiencing an emotional upheaval. Without the processed or heavy foods in our lives, we were all having an experience where our emotional states were incredibly intensified.

For me, when I started to realize that I was eating to dull my emotions, it came through a total life unravelling.

I realized that I was working myself to the bone. I realized that I had no play, no fun, no joy in my life. Everything had a purpose. I was also a wiz at denying how I was feeling. I pretended not to be hurt by things. I pushed away all feelings of sadness, anger, depression and hopelessness. When I was eating healthfully, I felt all of these emotions bubble up - eventually they would get to an intensity that was too much for me to handle, and I would unconsciously run to food.

Essentially what I am saying is that you may not even be aware of how much food helps you to soften the edges on your life, and you may not even be aware of how much you use it to do so.

If you have found yourself going back and forth between eating healthy and needing to return to your previous diet, this is most likely the reason.

So consider this, right now you are using food as a tool. You are using it to help you feel a certain way. If you identify with this article, you are most likely using food to help you numb your negative emotions. When life feels like too much, you are turning to food to help you navigate emotional states you currently feel like you do not have the tools to navigate.

Now, Please DO NOT FEEL GUILTY ABOUT THIS.

So so so many people beat themselves up for eating emotionally. As though it is some major character flaw or weakness. It is not. It is simply a learned behaviour. We human always do what we perceive to the least painful thing we could do in any situation. And we always do the best we can with what we have. So right now eating to placate your emotions is simply the least painful option you feel you have at this moment. the only reason I would encourage you to look at this behaviour

Whole foods, as you have discovered without realizing it, cannot be used in the same way. I personally realized that it did not matter how many apples I tried to consume, eventually my apatite would turn off. I was not about to eat whole foods with the same trans-like effect. Everything I felt stayed super sharp and super clear. It was only the dense, heavy, more processed foods that would do the job.

When I finally realized how much I was doing this, and how scared I was to face my emotions I felt really overwhelmed. I was afraid that if I did take the time to stop and allow my emotions to surface that they would take me over. I was so scared that I would drown inside my negative emotions. I was also scared that if I looked at where they were coming from - all the things that I was upset about in my life - it would mean I would have to change everything in my life, and that felt really scary and overwhelming.

The truth was, my emotions were never as big and scary as I thought they were going to be.

The truth was I simply needed to make small, little tweaks to my life, one at a time.

The truth was my negative emotions were there to lead me to a much better, brighter life. I just needed to take the time to connect with them and allow them to guide me forward.

Does this resonate with you?

If so, I want you to take a deep breath, and just digest this for a little while. See if you can really tune into your patterns, to see if you feel like this is something you may want to deal with in yourself.

I am asking you to get really real with you and see if this is something you wish to address.

We will talk about solutions in the next post! For now, just take some time to reflect 🙂

<3