KEY TAKEAWAY: For many of us, our relationship with food, eating, weight, and bodies can feel like a draining tug-of-war. It was for me, and to get free from it, I had to first change not how I ate but how I lived. Scroll down to read the full article and to get the TAKE ACTION steps for this week.

Last week, I wrote about how I was able to inject greater peace into my life with the practice of SDASU (Sit Down and Shut Up), otherwise known as meditation. This week, I want to write about another area of my life where I was finally able to find greater peace—peace that has also been essential to my well-being and quality of life—and that is my relationship with food.

Of course, it’s not just about food.

Probably anyone with whom the words “relationship with food” touched a chord knows that. It’s more than just food. It was the relationship with myself, my body, and more. But I will use the word “food” to encompass all the things that were connected and intersected when it came to that draining relationship in my life.

My struggle with food was not an obvious one; it played out mostly inside of me.

While my body was the physical battleground, the scars of that war showed themselves mostly on my insides. It wasn’t something I talked about or revealed to others, and it wasn’t something that was revealed to them in how I acted or looked. In other words, no one knew.

Case in point, my husband said last week, “It wasn’t that bad.”

We were with a friend, and I was talking about my dysfunctional relationship with “food,” something I do talk about now. In fact, I talk about it in detail in my book, The Personal Power Program—of which one-third was about achieving greater well-being in Body—because now I can. I can look at it in the rearview mirror, so not only is it something that I don’t have to navigate or hide, but by sharing it and how I recovered, I hope it will help others who struggle, too.

So, for my husband, “it wasn’t that bad” because he didn’t know. He didn’t know because I didn’t tell him. He wasn’t privy to the mental noise around my body, weight, the constant caloric calculations, and my food acrobatics to maintain my weight. He didn’t know. The world didn’t know. But I did, and, for me, it was bad enough.

It could have been worse.

While I went so far as to dabble with diuretics, laxatives, and a finger down my throat a couple of times—as if doing those things just to achieve a certain number on the scale would convey the feeling I wanted—my methods were mainly limited to calorie restriction. So, while my dieting habits did my health no favors, they haven’t seemed to have caused any damage either.

It could have been worse, too, because I was able to fight my battle privately.

Pregnancies aside, beyond a few extra pounds I have carried from time to time, thanks to my ongoing food acrobatics to maintain my weight and a metabolism that, while not supercharged—according to 23andMe, my genes predispose me to weigh about 5% more than average—isn’t sluggish either, I have maintained a small appearance. So, I have not had the added burden of having my struggle be visible to all—something aired in public that people feel compelled to judge or comment on, often insensitively, if not cruelly. I cannot begin to know what that is like.

I cannot begin to know what that is like and cannot pretend to. As with everything we experience, only we can know how we feel. Only we can know what it is to walk in our own shoes. So, while there is so much I cannot know about others’ experiences, I do know how my own struggle impacted how I felt and lived. And I know the tremendous relief and freedom from being out from under its burden, which is what I want to share today.

MY STORY

From age 12 to my mid-thirties, I was a chronic dieter tied to the scale. You might ask why that is when I wasn’t overweight.

What happened at age 12?

It’s a good question, and all I can say is that when I hit puberty, and my body began to change, I compared myself to other women—to models I saw in the magazines, actresses I saw onscreen, and other females around me—and they looked more the way I wanted to look. I didn’t like my naturally softer body and fuller legs. I wanted to be thinner and leaner.

And so I started to diet to lose weight.

The start of my dieting was the start of cultivating a dysfunctional relationship with food and what I call the “living to eat” vicious cycle—when food stops being just a pleasurable means to fuel our bodies and meet our nutritional needs and starts being the focal point around which much of our lives orbit.

Every morning when I woke up, I had two immediate thoughts:

1: What did I weigh?

2: What would I eat that day?

I would jump out of bed to weigh myself, and my mood would be determined by what that little metal box on the floor said, and so would my diet strategy for the day.

However, I had a special diet strategy.

I grew up in a household where a diet often guided the menu and available food choices. Therefore, I associated any nutritious, healthy food with diet food, which I considered boring and not worth wasting calories on. So, instead of eating healthy (a.k.a. distasteful) food, I would eat one meal of some food I liked—chocolate chip cookies, cookie dough, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, or similar typically sweet food—and then eat very little else the rest of the day or drink Slim Fast meal replacement shakes.

The older I got and the more I was in control of my diet, the poorer my “diet” habits became. I remember once when I wanted to lose weight quickly, I drank only Slim Fast shakes for two weeks. (Of course, the weight never stayed away for long, returning quickly when I stopped.)

On top of my unhealthy “dieting,” I intensely disliked exercise, at least what I defined as exercise, such as running or working out in the gym. I played on the tennis team in high school, but tennis aside, I was not very active, and the older I got, the more inactive I became.

Fast-forward and the result of my eating/dieting habits and lack of exercise meant that I reached my mid-30s at a normal weight but in poor shape fitness-wise and physically pretty soft around the edges. I was also worn out inside. I was tired of the draining mental and physical tug-of-war with food and my weight.

It’s difficult to convey how much my dysfunctional relationship with “food” was threaded through the fabric of my life—how much it was embedded in my thoughts and feelings and colored how I experienced life. Those who are in that same dysfunctional relationship, however, know. I remember looking at other people who seemed to have a normal relationship with “food” and wonder what it felt like.

Now, after being freed from that dysfunctional, exhausting, vicious cycle, I can tell you how it feels:

AMAZING.

Being free from that toxic orbit around food, the constant mental calculations, and judging myself by “good” and “bad” food days and what the scale said has been a large burden lifted from me. I cannot describe how incredibly liberating it is to not worry about what I weigh or eat and, instead, be able to do what I call “eat to live”—to enjoy eating for the pleasurable means it is to satisfy my body’s nutritional needs and focus on living my life.

THE TWO CHANGES THAT CHANGED MY STORY

There were two pivotal changes I made that broke me from the vicious “live to eat” cycle and got me to the virtuous and infinitely more peaceful “eat to live” lifestyle.

CHANGE #1: I STARTED EXERCISING TO THRIVE.

It isn’t enough to say I started exercising. I didn’t just start exercising; I started exercising to feel better. I had reached an uncomfortable point where I could no longer repeat the same things. I couldn’t keep doing what did not make me feel how I wanted to feel. So, I started to exercise to feel better.

And then an amazing thing happened: I started to feel better!

When I started feeling and seeing the benefits of my physical activity, I was amazed. I had no idea how much better I could feel or how empowering, confidence-boosting, or kick-ass feeling getting fitter would be. And the better I felt, the more I wanted that good, kick-ass feeling. So, I continued exercising to thrive and to expand my activity repertoire.

The better I felt, the more I reconnected with my body.

I started feeling my body, and, as part of that, I felt more the kick-in-the-ass effects of my still-atrocious eating or rather “dieting” habits. Slowly, over time, how I ate changed because I wanted to feel more kick-ass and less of the kick-in-the-ass from my poor diet.

I didn’t want to keep beating my head against the proverbial brick wall that was my terrible eating habits. I wanted to do more of what made me feel good and helped me live better, and I did it slowly and gradually. (In Wednesday’s post for members who want more support, I share the baby steps I took in food that gradually transformed how I eat. Get access by going here.)

There was another gift that came from reconnecting with my body: Acceptance.

I started to recognize how amazing this body of mine was—this body that had put up with so much abuse from me. I was grateful not for how it looked but for what it could do and was doing for me: Running. Swimming. Lifting. Biking. And more. In accepting it more for what it could do, I cared less about trying to make it conform to some image I had of what it should be. Instead, I wanted to do more to support it and less of what did not.

Of course, as I exercised, I didn’t just feel better; my body began to change on the outside, too.

By exercising to thrive—including doing enough cardio and strength training activities—the leaner, stronger body I had always strived to achieve through losing weight started to emerge. However, although that is wonderful—and is something that I never had in my twenties or early thirties—what is most important to me is not how my body looks but how it feels—how it supports me to engage in life fully. That makes all of me feel good. That is beautiful for me. And that is why I want to continue doing all I can to support my body: So it can continue to support me.  

I say this without exaggeration: I would not be on this page if it were not for exercising to thrive. I don’t believe my story would have changed. I don’t believe I would have ever been freed from the vicious cycle of dieting and all the other physical, mental, and quality-of-life fallout from my toxic relationship with “food.” 

Exercising to thrive was step number one. There was another step that was also essential:

STEP TWO: I STARTED FEASTING ON LIFE.

The second thing that helped me to break the live-to-eat cycle was to start feasting on life. In other words, I started doing what nourished my whole self—what fulfilled me and made me feel better overall. As a result, I became less focused on food because I was more focused on living.

Food is such an easy thing to abuse and use for more than just a pleasurable way to meet our nutritional needs because it’s so convenient.

It’s so accessible, a source of great pleasure, and a handy way to have social contact and be entertained. We have plentiful opportunities to eat—even when we’re not hungry—because food is so often there. We have easy access to food, and the easier the access, the less healthy the food tends to be.

We don’t just have easy access to easy food, but we have access to a lot of food. We have so many choices of what to eat, and the portions we buy or are served are often BIG—more than we need. So, we don’t just have plentiful opportunities to eat, but we have plentiful opportunities to overeat.

It’s also easy to eat more than our nutritional needs when we find how good food can be to soothe ourselves. 

While there are other things we could do to find comfort or distract ourselves from what is bothering us or stressful in our lives, they generally require more time and effort than grabbing something good to eat. Food becomes a convenient and pleasurable way to assuage some of our non-food-related needs. 

Unfortunately, it’s a temporary band-aid because as wonderful as food is, it can’t satisfy needs that can’t be met by food.

The bottom line is that it isn’t just what we put in our mouths that matters; it’s what we put into our lives. And the more we put into our lives what fills us up mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, the less need we have to turn to food or other distractions to find fulfillment. We don’t need to.

So, if you think you may be using food to try to meet other needs that are going unsatisfied, then do some soul-searching. If you’re feeling less than how you want to feel—less fulfilled emotionally, mentally, or spiritually—consider what will add to your life. Think about how you want to feel and what would help you feel that way.

Because it makes a difference. To how you live and to how you fuel that living.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Here’s what I know for sure:

When I feel better—inside and out—I fuel my life with food better.
I also live better.

When I started to add to my life what made me feel good—positive physical things, like regular exercise and healthier food, as well as things that brought more joy, peace, and fulfillment—it supported positive changes in my whole life. It was a virtuous, self-perpetuating cycle because as I felt better, I naturally and gradually began to do less of what didn’t add to my life or make me feel good and added more of what did.

Exercising to thrive and feasting on life helped me break the cycle of “living to eat” and helped me embrace an eat-to-live lifestyle instead. It helped to free me from my dysfunctional relationship with “food” and the mental noise and toll on my body, psyche, and quality of life that came with it.

I cannot tell you if this will be the same for you. I also cannot speak to the semaglutide medications that are growing in availability. I cannot comment on them as I have no experience with them. As with all areas of your well-being, you need to find what fits you and get the medical or other appropriate professional guidance to support that.

What I can say is that to create lasting change, we need to make changes that last, and my focus here is on my relationship with “food” and what has supported lasting change for me in that—at least so far, two decades on. If you are struggling with your relationship with “food,” and if you aren’t exercising to thrive or feasting on life, then in addition to what other support options you may choose, you may also want to focus on those two things. You may find that by focusing on these things, you focus less on food and not only feel better but live better, including enjoying a more peaceful relationship with “food.” 

TAKE ACTION:

1. Exercise to Thrive: Embrace an exercise-to-thrive habit to support a strong connection with your body that naturally encourages an eat-to-live lifestyle that allows you to feel good and live fully. Ask yourself, what do I have to lose, and what could I stand to gain?
2. Feast on Life: Add to your life what meets your non-food needs and fulfills you, so you’ll be less likely to use food (or something else) to meet unsatisfied needs. Think about what area in your life you want greater fulfillment and what you can do more of, less of, or change to achieve how you want to feel. Ask yourself, how do I want to feel, and what would help me to feel that way? What do I need to change?

IMPORTANT: The information provided is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified professional with any questions you may have regarding the topics discussed here as the topics discussed are based on general principles and may not be applicable to every individual. 

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