Can you heal your relationship with food and lose weight?

Healing from emotional and binge eating is tough if you are focusing on weight loss.

Why?

1. If you are focusing on weight loss, you will try to do all the right things to get to the goal. Everything becomes about reaching that goal. This behaviour however (just like any diet) doesn’t help you to understand your hunger and satiety. It also doesn’t help you to learn what you actually want to eat and how much of it.

2. If you are doing everything right, you will feel amazing. However, the moment you slip a bit, guilt and shame will take over. Feeling ashamed leads always to more restriction because we want to feel better and more successful at this dieting business.

3. You will avoid hunger cues because in order to lose weight most people take drastic measures to get to the end goal. That will lead eventually to more binging.

4. With dieting, you are either on or off a diet. You are either being good or bad depending how strictly you are following the diet. That all brings us to even more intense feelings that if you slip, you did something bad and in order to rectify it the usual response is even more restriction.

If you want to lose weight you first need to heal your relationship with food and no, you don’t have to go to extremes or miss out on all your favourite foods to do so.

The question for you is: has intentional weight loss helped you to heal with your emotional and binge eating, or made it worse?
How many times have you tired and ended up gaining all the weight you lost and some more on top? Why do you think that is?