Okay,

You’re here because, more often than you’d like, you eat more than you physically need to.

Maybe you even find yourself sticking to certain rules or guidelines for what and how much to eat, during the day, and then for some reason just losing your grip and undoing all that hard work at night.

Maybe you think you’re just someone who loves food; or someone who can’t control themselves. Someone who has no will power or must not care about themselves much because they keep doing the same thing, day in, day out…

You may have weight to lose, or you may keep your weight ‘stable’ with lots of exercise or even purging or a chronic cycle of dieting…

Whatever your current relationship with food looks like, you’re here because you want it to be different.

I used to struggle in all these ways and more with food.

And I can tell you that I’ve completely side-stepped this struggle and for over 20 years:

I have not weighed myself,

I have not dieted,

I have not binged,

I have not stressed about my weight or body image or food, and

I have eaten pretty much whatever I want, when I want.

My season clothes fit me every year I pull them out and put them on.

and…I have not set one toe inside a gym!

By blood sugars and blood pressure are super healthy (according to my gp at my last physical).

My cardiovascular health is good.

Food is simply not an issue for me anymore.

But it sure as hell was for many years. It consumed me. My every waking moment was spent thinking about what I had eaten, what I was or wasn’t going to eat, how much I weighed and what I should weigh.

Everything that happened to me was interpreted through the lens of ‘If I weren’t so fat…’ and my weight became the central focus of my life.

I come by this honestly…I used food to cope as child in an abusive home. I was put on diets from the age of 9. Our society is rampant with powerful messages about women’s looks = their worth, and it was even worse 40+ years ago.

By the time I was a grown up (at least chronologically…) I had spent more time ignoring my hunger and fullness cues and hating my body and any fat on it than I had feeling comfortable in my own skin.

I was now hard wired to mistrust my body and desperately looking outside myself for the solution to what I saw then as my shameful lack of willpower…

I don’t know you, and I don’t know your story. But if you’re here - you have been turned against your body too. You have somehow learned not to trust yourself, at least not around food…and yet, my friend, you have to eat. You have to make peace with this stuff or it will rob you of all the goodness in life.

How hard is it for you to really be present and enjoy a meal out with friends or family right now?

How stressful is it?