You Are NOT Broken: A Dive into the Truth about Willpower, Intuitive Eating, and Body Image

Are you trapped in the vicious cycle of obsessive thoughts about food and body image? Do you feel like your relationship with food and body has turned into a full-time job? We understand the struggle, and this episode is dedicated to helping you break free from these chains. Let's embark on a journey to tackle the root issues and dispel the misconceptions about willpower and body image. We tear down the facade of diet culture, exposing it as the root cause of most diet failures. In this pursuit of freedom, we assure you, full recovery from disordered eating and body image distress is not just a possibility, but a reality waiting to be embraced.

Longing for food and body image freedom? Feel stuck, confused, or in need of guidance? We got you covered. In this episode, we challenge distorted eating thoughts, re-educate ourselves, and navigate through the path to food freedom. We discuss how to fit all foods into your life while maintaining a healthy relationship with your body and food. Also, we provide a mini course on food and body, shedding light on the importance of recognizing thoughts and feelings. Join us as we pave the way to your freedom and leave behind the tormenting cycle of obsessive thoughts about food and body image. Share this knowledge far and wide, because freedom is meant to be shared!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to yet another episode of Bites and Body Love.

Speaker 1: 0:04

I am so glad you are here. Without further ado, let's dive into something I love to encourage people with and something I just love telling people and and helping them to realize, which is you are not broken, you are not flawed, you are not doomed to failure with your relationship with food and body. You just aren't doing the right thing, and hey, it's not your fault. It's very hard to do the right thing because oftentimes we don't know what that is and we are being promoted the exact opposite of what we want to be doing in order to heal our relationship with food and body. So let's dive into the episode about how you are just not broken. So are you finding yourself in this place, where you're in this relentless cycle of obsessive thoughts with food and body image? And if you are, you are not alone. Are you also feeling like you cannot figure out how to get out of it? My heart really empathizes with your struggle and I want to invite you to explore this episode with me so that it can help you to break a little more free from your struggle, and I hope today you can come out of this episode with more awareness around the fact that you are not broken. What's happening is you're just doing all the wrong things, and it might be a different variation of the same wrong thing a new diet, a new way of restrictive eating, a new way to listen to external things and external rules rather than look internally. And again, that is such a common struggle that people find themselves in. You are not broken and you are not alone. However, let's talk first about these signs that you may recognize that may tell you that you are caught up in this cycle and you've been in this cycle for a while. Okay, so signs you may recognize are number one, these persistent thoughts, these thoughts about food in your body that just dominate your waking hours, just infiltrating even the most mundane moments of your day. You're just thinking of food and body and you have this desire to stop obsessing. You really want to break free. You really want to break free. You're done with it, you're over it and you are eager to liberate your mind from the ceaseless cycle of thoughts and really, you're seeing that you have this readiness for change. If you just knew how to do it, you would do it.

Speaker 1: 2:47

Another sign you may recognize that you're caught in the cycle ready to get out is that you have it feels like you have this full-time job mentality when it comes to food and body and bettering food and body and the pursuit of a better body image and pursuit of just finding that ideal quote-unquote way of eating has felt like it transformed into like full-time job now and you really want to quit that full-time job. You may be in this place where you are endlessly researching. Your time is consumed by extensive research into the next diet or miracle solution, and it's fueled by the hope of uncovering the key to lasting food and body confidence. And yet you have not found the right research, you have not found the right diet, you have not found the right miracle solution, because you're here listening to the podcast, figuring out what is the next best thing, because this is not working.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Another symptom, another sign, is lack of trust in food and body. Trust in both food and your body may feel like this just unattainable goal, leaving you in this state of perpetual uncertainty and unease you just don't have. You just don't trust your body, you don't trust food and you don't know how the heck to eat or feel about your body. You may also be, of course, experiencing a lot of frustration with all these failed attempts because, despite throwing every available resource at gaining this body, confidence and food, freedom and understanding how to eat, this sense of hopelessness creeps in with each failure. And again, naming this failure is not your fault. Another sign is you're postponing your life plans. Your life, your plans, your goals. They remain suspended, awaiting this attainment of your quote, unquote ideal body, and you're just yearning to break free and start living with more ease and more freedom. You're just ready. You're ready, and that's a big part too. You are ready. You're feeling like you need something different and you may just not know what it is. You don't have to be a prisoner to the cycle. You don't. The journey to full freedom with food and body and stress, and full recovery from disordered eating or chronic dieting, disordered eating it is not only possible, but it's here for you and it's liberating and it can change your life. It involves really doing things differently and getting uncomfortable. It involves breaking free from these external rules, embracing self-compassion and reframing your relationship with food and body.

Speaker 1: 5:37

This conventional approach of dieting is a vicious cycle. We know it. It promises these things, but it has inevitable disappointment. Research consistently, consistently shows that over 95% of diets fail, leading to not only regaining the lost weight but detrimental impacts on your relationship with food and body and on your physical and mental health and wellbeing overall. And diet culture really thrives on these disappointments. It creates this cycle that capitalizes on your shame and this perpetual search for these quick fixes.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Additionally, many individuals find themselves kind of caught in this state of like pseudo recovery from diets and disordered eating and body is just stressed, and they attempt these diets and programs that miss the mark in addressing root problems. So if you feel like you tried some different things other than dieting, but you're not quite there, first of all I commend you for doing something different and doing something uncomfortable. But you may be stuck in this pseudo recovery place where it feels a little bit better than when you were really dieting a little bit more hardcore before you started bringing back some foods in and doing some things differently. But you still haven't gone all the way to the finish line where you have addressed all the underlying problems, all the root problems, all the different pieces of body image and food, and so you're missing things that will bring you to a place where you really wanna be, which is full freedom. That is really the thing that helps you to truly leave these distressing food and body image distress behind.

Speaker 1: 7:22

So being here does not mean you are broken Absolutely not. You're actually in good company with a lot of people who are on the same struggle bus trying to figure out why the heck they keep coming to the same place where they're unable to find food and body image freedom. You are so not alone. You are so not alone. It's just very easy to get here because we live in this world of diet culture. So you are absolutely not broken. You are just doing the wrong thing, and there are a lot of myths and misconceptions that can lead you to believe you are on the right path. Now. It also leads you to now.

Speaker 1: 8:10

There are several myths and misconceptions when it comes to body image work, and this often keeps people stuck as well, because these perpetuate the cycle of feeling like diets are the way to go and changing your body is the way to go when it comes to food and body obsession. And one of these misconceptions is this idea that changing their body is going to automatically change your body image, and this is just incorrect. I want you to ask yourself about your own experience when you have changed your body. How has body confidence and body respect and food freedom have you gotten there with changing your body? Because, most likely, your body changed because of a diet that you were on or some kind of restrictive rules that you gave yourself and therefore you were led to this false sense of, in short lived, body confidence, where you maybe feel or felt very uneasy about straying from this diet and very nervous and feeling like you needed more weight loss or you needed to restrict more or diet harder in order to maintain this confidence. Because it was built on this false sense of confidence, it was built on the way, like your weight, which is not where true grounding freedom comes from when it comes to relationship with food and body. Because what happens when you can't sustain this restriction? You can't sustain these rules, or these rules are making you miserable, because you can no longer go out with your friends or your partner or your loved ones because you are not allowed those certain types of foods and you are still constantly jumping on the scale right. And so, even with this confidence that you may have gotten from some weight loss or body changes, you still have a very distressing relationship with food and body. You still feel very uneasy and very just not trusting, and this is not sustainable. This is not what it is built on.

Speaker 1: 10:13

Similarly, another misconception is that this notion of willpower, this pure, sheer willpower that's gonna help you control food, is also incorrect. It does not have to do with your willpower, because if that were the case, I mean we would be there right. Why would we be constantly failing our diets? Why would everyone be constantly failing their diets? Why would 95 plus percent of people be failing their diets and gaining the weight back? That's because willpower is Not the problem, and focusing on willpower is just going to lead you more and more down that cycle of distrust and distress.

Speaker 1: 11:00

And the last misconception I want to talk about is this belief that the ideal relationship with food and body is unattainable, that where you are is where you're going to be, and we just have to accept that. Absolutely not. There's just not a lot of resources out there that are helping people to achieve body image and food freedom in the correct ways. There's not a lot out there, and so they're hard to find. And also, in a world where we live in diet culture, you're going to see more people with a negative relationship with food and body than positive, those with positive relationship with food and body, untouched by diets and disorderly eating. And so it can often look like this is just the world that you're doomed to live in. This is just your reality, but I can tell you that that is false. I can shatter this misconception by all my experience working with clients and my personal experience as well.

Speaker 1: 12:00

You can absolutely achieve full food and body image freedom. I have seen it many, many times and is there for you. You don't have to remain in this like suit or recovery. You don't have to remain in the cycle. Full recovery from binge eating, restrictive eating, food distress, body image distress is not only possible, but it's full recovery from binge eating, restrictive eating, food distress, body image distress. It's absolutely there for you. You are not broken and it is meant for you. If you're here, listening and you're still trying. You're not giving up. Keep going. It is there for you. Do something different.

Speaker 1: 12:39

It really requires addressing root causes, getting support, challenging those distorted eating and body image distress thoughts, challenging social norms, reeducating yourself, letting go of diet culture, pursuing food freedom and working to make all foods fit again in your life, addressing body image All huge, huge things, and those are there for you and I can probably assume if you're in this cycle of disordered eating and chronic dieting, then you may not have tried these things. And if you have, I want to challenge you and say well, for how long, how long have you have you tried working on body image? How long have you tried bringing all foods in? How long have you tried to quit dieting? I mean, it's probably short lived, because if you continue down that path and it's going to take time because you've been in diet culture and disordered eating for a long time but it's absolutely there for you. You just have to keep going. You have to get the right support. You have to make sure you leave no stone unturned when you are healing your relationship with food and body. So there it is. You are not broken. You are just doing the wrong thing and you're not alone. You are not alone, it's so common. But stop telling yourself you're broken.

Speaker 1: 13:59

You're absolutely not thinking of a metaphor here. Let's, let's say we have this, this wonderful car that we love and we really want to drive in it, we really want to be able to use it, but it's not working and we keep bringing it to the same dealership that sends us off with the same fix under a different shiny name and we continue to pursue fixing our car at this one dealership even though we keep seeing that it's not working. It breaks down again. Right, you need to bring it to a new mechanic Mechanic, not dealership. I crushed myself. So we need to bring it to a new mechanic and this new mechanic may have all these different tools. They have different insight. Where it will, where you are able to get that car to a place where it is your dream car and you can Use that car how you wish. So hopefully, that medical metaphor was a little bit helpful, but anyways, we just need a new mechanic here. The car is not broken. It's not doomed to fail. You are not doomed to fail. We just have to go to a new mechanic. We have to get a different kind of support. We have to try something new.

Speaker 1: 15:17

So don't let confusion, don't let societal pressures, don't let shame keep you from breaking free of this cycle. Full recovery is within reach. It offers a life of freedom, ease and joy. You deserve to be empowered to break free from these chains of food and body obsession and get on the path of self-discovery, acceptance, food and body image freedom that is lasting, sustainable and one you'll never look back to diet diets again. You deserve a life unburdened by these constraints of societal expectations, of these diets and body image distress. So I want to encourage you, as we end here today, to move forward confidently and stop telling yourself we're broken, because freedom is waiting for you at the finish line.

Speaker 1: 16:05

Now, if you feel ready and you are serious about healing your relationship with food and body and you want to do something different, I want to invite you to my signature program, full Food and Body Image Freedom for Everybody, where you can dive into all of this and get an immense amount of support to get out of it and never need anything like this again, to have full trust with food and body, to feel confident and to break these chains and to live a life you deserve.

Speaker 1: 16:32

So if you're interested, go ahead and DM me at JamieRD underscore and I will send you a few free mini courses on how to ditch dieting, how to get to full food and body image freedom, and those are completely free. So I look forward to seeing you there. So, if you found this helpful, go ahead and rate this podcast, please, and share it, too, with anyone who might benefit. Thank you so much. I'm cheering you on from here. I am so proud of you just for tuning into this podcast. That is a wonderful step. Okay, until next time, stay radiant, and we will chat soon.