Starting your intuitive eating journey can lead to feeling different fears. You may feel the fear of failure, the fear of losing control, the fear of weight gain, and so on. This blog post is the first of a two part series, in which I’m going to help you overcome the fears holding you back. The cornerstone of being able to let go of these fears is learning how to tune into your body and build trust again.
I posted an Instagram Story that asked our followers what their biggest fears holding them back from finding food freedom and making peace with their body & movement were. We got hundreds and hundreds of responses. While there were so many different responses, there were general themes that stuck out to me.
The main emotion these themes focused on? Fear.
So, how do you overcome your fears? The most common responses about fear that I read surrounded the fear of failure, the fear of weight gain, the fear of what others will think of you along your journey, and the fear of finding the right professionals to work with.
If any of these fears are something you have experienced or are currently experiencing, know that so many others can relate to the fear you feel and have felt. Sometimes on a journey with a disordered relationship with food or negative body image, we can feel like we are the only person that feels that way. But, 65% of women ages 25 to 45 have disordered eating, and an additional 10% have a clinically diagnosed eating disorder. That’s 75% of women. And, that’s not counting the people who are misdiagnosed or do not seek treatment. These feelings are widespread. You are not alone if you have experienced any of these fears.
A lot of people start their intuitive eating journey with the desire to lose weight, even though that’s not the goal of intuitive eating. I want you to know that it is completely normal to be scared when starting your journey or to still have the desire to lose weight. The goal of this blog post is to challenge your belief systems. Our belief systems are the result from the interactions, conversations, media, and more that we have been exposed to since we were a child. By this, I mean that we were not born into the world thinking you do not deserve food or you should feel guilty for eating certain things. We were taught by family, social media, teachers, coaches, or anyone else you can identify as having been influential to your relationship with food & your body.
I am here to walk alongside you. I’m not here to bark an authoritative message to you. You are the expert of your body. And, as an intuitive eating professional, I help people along their journey by walking alongside them, not telling them what they have to do. I don’t know your body, only you do.
The first fear I wanted to dive into is fear of change. This fear can be rooted in fear of letting go or fear of failing. First, I want to validate this fear. This fear holds a lot of people back from starting their intuitive eating journey. Before diving into why this is so common, reflect on the following…
How many years have you been dieting? How many years have you been stuck in a cycle of, “healthy eating,” restriction and bingeing, followed by feeling out of control?
Take a deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth. The important reason I asked this question is because it relates to the fear of failure and letting go. Think about your answer to, “how long have you been dieting?”
It is likely that you’ve been dieting or influenced by diet culture for many years; this is a shared experience among many of our community members. Because of the years you’ve spent in diet culture, you’ve grown experienced with dieting.
Imagine that you had a lot of experience in salsa dancing. Say you’ve been dieting for 5 years. Now, think if you’d been salsa dancing for 5 years. Or, 10, 20, 40+ years—whatever portrays your experience with dieting. If you had all those years spent salsa dancing, you’d probably be really good! Depending on the amount of years you’ve been in diet culture, you could be considered professional, expert, advanced, proficient, etc.
You have experience counting calories, macros, limiting your portion size, or trying different fad diets. The experience you have within diet culture is ingrained in the neural pathways in your brain. So, talking about switching from years of dieting to starting intuitive eating is a really scary thought to work through.
You’ve had X years of strict dieting that made you feel like you were in control. It makes sense to feel like it would be a failure to walk away. First, because there may be a part of you that believes you haven’t “solved” it yet or you haven’t found the diet that works for you. Second, because you may feel like you failed because you never achieved what the diet has promised you.
In reality, the diet failed you. Diets are unsustainable and not meant to be a forever “fix.” Research tells us that ⅔ of dieters will gain back more weight than originally lost. If you can relate to that statistic, know that this is your body working properly. This loops back to metabolism and how our body functions on a physiologic level. Dieting makes our brain and body interpret our eating patterns as a period of starvation. Coming off of a diet, it is normal to binge, feel out of control around food, and believe that you have failed (at an impossible task to begin with). That entire process is a product of the diet.
Repeat to yourself… There is nothing wrong with my body. Write this down on a sticky note to stick on your bathroom mirror, your laptop, in your car, or wherever you would feel good to find yourself reading that affirmation.
Diet culture makes you feel like there is something wrong with you and/or your body. This idea can be ingrained into our brains and neural pathways. Everything that has contributed to our thought processes around food and body has been external. What I mean by this is, you have not been able to turn inward to try to gain trust in yourself and your body. When on a diet, you are not turning inward and asking questions such as… What do I want? What sounds good? Am I hungry? Am I full? We were trusting external factors to tell us what we needed. Our bodies do not work that way! The more we trust external factors, the less we trust ourselves. Your experience with dieting has taught you to not trust your body and has influenced just about every decision to make about food, body, body image, movement, and more.
I want to validate that if you have felt a fear of failure, of letting go, of losing control, just know that is very normal. The reason is because you have so much experience in dieting. To flip the switch and say that you’re going to do intuitive eating is probably going to feel scary. For others, it may feel relieving. When you go to this other world of intuitive eating, where weight loss is not the goal, it is scary!
I want to challenge your belief systems. So, reflect on the following… How many more years do you want to spend in diet culture? Think of adding on as many years as you’ve already spent in it.
It is not my job to tell people they cannot or should not diet. You have your own body autonomy and can make your own decisions. But, I can promise you one thing all of our clients share, from teenagers to almost 80-year-olds, is that they wish they had started intuitive eating earlier. No matter their age, they wished they had started intuitive eating earlier. Let that sink in and reflect on it. Whereas this is something all of our clients wish to change from their past, this is something you can control for your future. You are able to choose to continue dieting or to walk a new path.
This is where intuitive eating comes in. Intuitive eating is an evidence-based structured form of self-care eating that has ten principles. These ten principles work together to help you learn how to trust your body again by making peace with food and learning how to tune into the internal cues from your body.
Next, I want to discuss fear of weight gain. This also deters people from pursuing food freedom and starting intuitive eating. This makes total sense when thinking of this fear in conjunction with the first fear we just broke down. After dieting for X years and stopping, you may say “f**k it” and want to eat all of the foods you were not allowed to eat on diets. One way I explain this is with a bow & arrow. Let’s use the “no carbs” food rule for this example. When you’re on a diet, an arrow is being pulled so tightly in a bow—think of this as when you are restricting carbs. At some time, there will be a breaking point where the arrow flies from the bow in the opposite direction it was being pulled—think of this as breaking a restriction and bingeing on the food(s) that was/were cut out. This can create feelings of shame, guilt, and loss of control. You may think that the bingeing you experienced is a reason to continue dieting, because you feel like you cannot be in control coming off of the diet.
But, we know from research that restriction fuels bingeing. Coming off of a diet, there is such a strong urgency to eat all the foods that you could not have. Our brain is genuinely convinced we are never going to eat those foods again. So, you continue to eat more and more of the food, until you probably feel physically uncomfortable. And then negative thoughts creep in. You may have felt afraid of losing the “progress” from dieting.
Now, to challenge your belief system… What is progress? If progress is only measured by weight gain or weight loss, that is not progress. Bodies are supposed to change. Our hunger levels are supposed to change day to day. Progress cannot be tied to a number that is not reliable, nor truly indicative of who you are as a whole being. Has your “progress” meant not being able to go to social events because of the food being served? Was it thinking about food for 5+ hours every day? Or, spending time counting, weighing, and measuring food? Has “progress” made you feel performative?
If you are only looking at weight loss as progress, you are missing all the different things that are happening to your mental and emotional health. I would not consider this progress. A big part of intuitive eating is being able to talk about weight. There is so much science investigating how the body works that models the fact that weight is predetermined by your genetics. Your body prefers a certain range.
Take back your power and re-define progress.
I am so grateful to help you overcome some of the fears holding you back. Look out for Pt. 2 next week! If this blog post resonated with you, you can hear more by listening to our podcast episode talking about fears holding you back from starting your intuitive eating journey. Click here to tune into the episode! You can listen to our Find Food Freedom podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music.
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