Exhausted from trying to get eating "right"?

Dried roses representing exhaustion.

If you’re here, I suspect it maybe because you’re feeling exhausted trying to get this eating thing “right” with only fleeting moments of success if at all? If that’s you, I want to assure you that you are definitely not alone AND there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken, you don’t need to be mended, your plan for how to eat… or how you think you should eat… has simply failed you.

Today I want to share a little bit of my ‘before’ picture. I’ve been at the point of exhaustion too. I not only felt like a failure, but an imposter as well. As a dietitian, I would listen closely to my clients as they shared their struggles with nutrition. In return, I’d invite them to try all the best strategies to inspire change from within (or what I knew at the time). They told me they felt confident leaving my office but I never blamed them when they came back a few weeks later sharing the same old struggle. I knew what they were likely going through. I was in fact carrying around the same old food struggles myself for decades. I thought if I knew all the nutrition science and behaviour change psychology for food and eating, I could surely make it all work – for my clients and myself. Wrong. I was exhausted because I couldn’t make it work myself AND I thought I must’ve been in the wrong profession. Yet, I still tried to wear the mask that with some effort, I was doing it “right”. I could actually fake it pretty darn good. My body was naturally on the smaller end of the spectrum and people made assumptions that I was “doing things right” because of my size. I brought packed lunches and “indulged” only “in moderation” in front of everyone else. But there was always an internal battle that would ebb and flow daily. It wasn’t until I realized there was a flaw in the model that it all made sense. We don’t need to just try harder, we just need a new model! As it turns out, the control model (otherwise known as the weight loss for health model) works only for small segment of us at best and is harmful to so many of us at worst. So I’m here to remind you again - you’re not broken and you can step into peace around food and eating even if you’ve felt at odds for decades. When I started practicing presence, acceptance, self compassion and had my ‘aha moment’ of the flawed system that has us believing it’s all a game of strategy and outsmarting the body, that’s when eating for vitality and humanness (flaws and all) arrived with ease. I stopped hustling. I could stop hiding.

So... if you’re feeling exhausted from the hustle, I want to leave you with a few things to ponder and explore…

If instead of efforts to shrink your appetite, you used that energy to choose the things that give you more vitality and presence now, not at some future date, what would eating be like? What would life be like? Less fight, more flow?

Take a moment to think about all the things you dream of doing if you freed up all that energy that you use currently to try and control your eating. In the eloquent words of Mary Oliver, I ask you perhaps the best question to get excited about: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Wishing you all great blessings,

Alida <3

PS - If you liked this post and don’t want to miss powerful Intuitive Eating trainings, special offers and loads of encouragement, I'd love for you to Join My Circle for FREE right HERE.

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Catch the video I made: Are you exhausted from trying to eat right?. Pardon the pixels, it was live!