Have you ever thought, “I know dieting isn’t the answer, but I still want to lose weight”? Or “I know I shouldn’t obsess over food, but I can’t seem to stop.” Maybe even, “I want to feel comfortable in my body, but I don’t know how to get there.”

If so, you’re definitely not alone. And you don’t need to have a diagnosed eating disorder for these struggles to affect your life.

Diet culture has a way of making us question our bodies, distrust our hunger, feel guilty about what we eat, and believe that life will finally be better once we lose weight. You can spend years caught up in these patterns without ever meeting the criteria for a clinical eating disorder.

That’s one of the reasons I was SO excited to sit down with Carolyn Costin for an episode of Rebuilding Trust With Your Body.

Carolyn is a pioneering eating disorder therapist, author, speaker, and advocate who has spent decades helping people recover. After recovering from her own eating disorder, she dedicated her career to helping others heal and founded Monte Nido, an eating disorder treatment organization.

In our conversation, we explored what decades of eating disorder treatment have taught us about recovery, what helps people heal, and what doesn’t. We also talk about the cultural forces that contribute to eating disorders, the differences and similarities between binge eating disorder, anorexia, and bulimia, and why recovery involves so much more than changing eating behaviors.

One of the topics we explore is Carolyn’s concept of “soul healing”, the idea that healing goes deeper than what you eat or how you behave around food.

And we get into a question that I know so many women are wrestling with: How do you make peace with food and your body when you still want to be thinner, or you’ve been told that you need to lose weight to be healthy?

Let’s talk about what we can learn from eating disorder recovery, even if you’ve never been diagnosed with an eating disorder.

You Don’t Have to Have an Eating Disorder to Be Hurt by Diet Culture

When people hear the term “eating disorder recovery,” they might assume the conversation doesn’t apply to them.

Maybe you’ve never been diagnosed with anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder. Maybe you don’t believe your relationship with food is “bad enough” to deserve attention. Or perhaps you’ve spent so long comparing your struggles with someone else’s that you’ve convinced yourself you’re doing just fine.

But here’s something important to understand: you don’t have to have an eating disorder to be negatively affected by diet culture.

Diet culture teaches us that certain body sizes are better than others, that weight loss is a worthy goal regardless of the cost, and that controlling our food and bodies is a sign of discipline or success.

Those messages can influence how we eat, how we feel about ourselves, and how we make decisions about our health.

You might recognize some of these patterns in your own life:

• Feeling guilty after eating foods you’ve labeled as unhealthy or off-limits.
• Worrying about what the scale will say after a weekend, vacation, or holiday.
• Feeling uncomfortable eating around other people because you’re worried they’ll judge your choices.
• Believing you need to lose weight before you can wear certain clothes, go to the beach, or feel confident.
• Trying to eat perfectly during the day, only to feel out of control around food later.
• Spending so much mental energy thinking about food and your body that it’s difficult to be present in the rest of your life.

These experiences can be exhausting, even when they don’t meet the criteria for an eating disorder.

You don’t have to wait until your struggles become more severe before you start addressing them.

This is one reason the field of eating disorder recovery has so much to teach us. The work of healing can offer insight into patterns that show up on a spectrum, from a complicated relationship with food and body image to a clinically diagnosed eating disorder.

You deserve support with your relationship with food now, not just if things get worse.

What Does Eating Disorder Recovery Teach Us About Healing?

In our conversation, I asked Carolyn what we’ve learned about what helps people recover from eating disorders and what doesn’t.

This is such an important question because there are a lot of assumptions about what recovery should look like.

It’s easy to think that recovery is primarily about changing eating behaviors. Eat the right foods. Follow a meal plan. Stop engaging in certain behaviors. Get to a point where food is no longer a problem.

Of course, eating behaviors can be an important part of treatment. But changing behavior doesn’t necessarily mean someone has healed their relationship with food, their body, or themselves.

You can change what you eat and still be terrified of gaining weight. You can stop following a formal diet and still judge yourself according to diet culture’s rules. You can make progress with food while continuing to believe that your body needs to look different before you’re allowed to feel good about yourself.

And you can follow all the rules someone gives you while still feeling disconnected from your own needs.

That’s why recovery needs to be about more than the behaviors other people can see. It also involves understanding the thoughts, fears, beliefs, and cultural messages that influence those behaviors.

For someone who struggles with food but doesn’t have an eating disorder, this distinction matters, too.

Maybe you’ve stopped counting calories, but you’re still mentally calculating whether you’ve eaten too much. Maybe you’ve learned about intuitive eating, but you still feel anxious when you eat something you consider indulgent. Or perhaps you’ve given up dieting, only to find yourself creating a new set of rules under the label of “healthy eating.”

The outward behavior may have changed, but the pressure and fear are still there.

Healing means being willing to look at what’s underneath those patterns, not simply finding a different set of rules to follow.

Binge Eating Disorder, Anorexia, and Bulimia: What Can We Learn From Their Similarities and Differences?

One of the topics we explore in this episode is binge eating disorder (BED) and how recovery may be similar to or different from recovery from anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN).

These are distinct eating disorders, and it’s important not to treat them as interchangeable. People can have different symptoms, experiences, needs, and challenges during recovery.

At the same time, conversations about eating disorder recovery can help us question some of the assumptions we make about food and body image.

For example, our culture often treats restrictive eating and weight loss as signs of health or willpower. Meanwhile, people who experience binge eating may feel ashamed, blame themselves for their eating, or believe that they simply need more discipline.

When food choices and body size are constantly judged through a cultural lens of thinness and control, it can become harder to understand what’s actually happening in someone’s relationship with food.

This is why it’s so important to look beyond appearances.

You cannot determine someone’s relationship with food simply by looking at their body. And someone doesn’t need to look a certain way to deserve compassionate, appropriate care.

If you’ve struggled with binge eating, restrictive eating, or feeling out of control around food, you may have spent a lot of time blaming yourself.

You might have told yourself that you just need to try harder, be more disciplined, or finally get your eating under control.

But shame isn’t the same thing as healing. And judging yourself more harshly doesn’t automatically give you the tools you need to recover.

The goal isn’t to compare your struggles with someone else’s or decide whose experience is more serious. It’s to understand your own experience and get the support that fits your needs.

Diet Culture Is More Than a Personal Problem

One of the things Carolyn has spoken about throughout her career is the cultural contribution to eating disorders.

She has made the point that, even when people consider this topic old news, it remains important until we actually address it.

I couldn’t agree more.

We live in a culture that sends us conflicting messages about food and bodies all the time.

• We’re told to love ourselves, but we’re also told that our bodies need to be improved.

• We’re encouraged to enjoy food, but we’re warned about the consequences of eating the “wrong” things.

• We’re told to prioritize health, yet weight is often treated as though it tells the whole story about a person’s health.

• We’re encouraged to be confident, but we’re constantly shown products, programs, and strategies that promise to make us smaller.

It’s difficult to escape these messages because they’re woven into so many parts of everyday life, from advertising and social media to conversations with friends, family members, and even healthcare professionals.

When you’ve heard these messages for years, they can start to feel like facts rather than cultural beliefs.

You might assume that wanting to lose weight is simply a personal preference, without recognizing how much you’ve been taught to associate thinness with happiness, attractiveness, success, or health.

You might believe that you need to control your food because you’ve been told that eating intuitively is irresponsible.

You might interpret discomfort with your body as evidence that something is wrong with it, rather than recognizing the influence of years of body judgment.

This doesn’t mean every struggle with food or body image can be explained by diet culture alone. Eating disorders are complex, and people deserve individualized care.

But acknowledging the cultural environment matters. If we focus only on individual behavior while ignoring the messages people are surrounded by, we’re missing a significant part of the picture.

You can’t always solve a problem by asking an individual to change while leaving the pressures contributing to that problem untouched.

Part of healing involves learning to recognize those pressures and questioning whether the rules you’ve internalized actually serve you.

You can start asking yourself:

• Where did I learn that my body needs to look a certain way?

• Why do I believe some foods make me good and others make me bad?

• What am I afraid would happen if I stopped trying to control my weight?

• Am I making this choice because it supports my well-being, or because I’m afraid of what will happen if I don’t?

• What would I do differently if I weren’t constantly trying to earn approval through my appearance?

These questions aren’t about blaming yourself for believing diet culture’s messages. They’re about creating room to consider a different way of living.

What Is “Soul Healing,” and Why Does It Matter?

One of the things I was especially excited to discuss with Carolyn was a concept she calls “soul healing.”

Why? Because I think it gets at something so many people miss when they’re trying to improve their relationship with food.

You can spend years working on what you eat, how much you eat, or how you feel about your weight. But if your entire sense of worth is still tied to your body, food can continue to carry an enormous amount of emotional weight.

Imagine believing that you can finally relax once you lose weight.

You might tell yourself that you’ll wear the clothes you love when your body is smaller. You’ll feel more confident when the scale reaches a certain number. You’ll stop worrying about food when you finally learn how to control your appetite.

But what happens when your happiness is always postponed until you meet the next condition?

Even if you reach one goal, there may be another one waiting. The rules can change, the standards can become stricter, and the finish line can keep moving.

This is why changing your eating habits alone may not be enough to bring you the peace you’re looking for.

You also need room to explore your beliefs about worth, identity, confidence, and what makes a life meaningful.

• Who are you beyond your weight?

• What matters to you beyond how your body looks?

• What have you been putting off because you don’t feel comfortable enough in your body yet?

• What would it mean to treat yourself as someone who deserves care and respect right now, rather than someone who has to earn those things?

These are bigger questions than what you should eat for lunch, but they can be deeply relevant to your relationship with food.

Soul healing, as a topic in our conversation, invites us to look at recovery as something that reaches beyond eating behaviors. It’s about the person living inside the body – not simply the body itself.

And this is relevant whether you’re recovering from an eating disorder, working through years of dieting, or trying to feel more at ease with food and your body.

You are a whole person. Your life is about more than what you eat, how much you weigh, or whether you meet a cultural ideal.

What If You Want to Make Peace With Food but Still Want to Be Thinner?

You know dieting hasn’t given you the freedom you want. You may understand that weight loss isn’t a guarantee of happiness or health. You might even be tired of thinking about food and your body all the time.

And yet, you still want to be thinner.

Maybe you don’t like how your body looks. Maybe you worry about gaining weight. Maybe someone has told you that you need to lose weight to be healthy, and now you’re not sure how to take care of yourself without trying to change your body.

If this is where you are, I want you to know that you don’t have to pretend those feelings aren’t there.

You don’t need to convince yourself that you love every part of your body before you can work toward a more peaceful relationship with food.

And you don’t have to wait until all your fears about weight disappear before you start making changes.

Sometimes, people get stuck because they believe they need to choose between two options: diet and try to control their bodies, or give up completely on caring for themselves.

But those aren’t your only options.

You can care about your health without making weight loss the central goal of your life. You can make food choices that support your well-being without dividing food into moral categories. You can acknowledge that you feel uncomfortable in your body without treating that discomfort as proof that your body needs to change.

And you can work toward body acceptance even if body love feels completely out of reach right now.

One place to start is by separating the feeling from the conclusion you draw from it.

For example, you might feel anxious about gaining weight. That anxiety is real, and you don’t have to shame yourself for experiencing it. But feeling anxious doesn’t automatically mean weight gain is something you must prevent at all costs.

You might feel uncomfortable in your body. That feeling deserves compassion, too. But it doesn’t mean you need to postpone living your life until your body looks different.

You might worry about your health. Rather than assuming weight loss is the only answer, you can explore what taking care of yourself actually means in your individual circumstances.

This is especially important if you’ve received messages about your weight from healthcare professionals. You deserve care that considers your overall health and individual needs, not an approach that reduces your well-being to a number on the scale.

The work isn’t necessarily about making every uncomfortable feeling disappear. It’s about learning that those feelings don’t have to make all your decisions for you. And you don’t have to figure it all out overnight.

You Deserve a Life That’s Bigger Than Food and Body Image

If you’ve spent years dieting, you know how much mental space it can take up.

You might start the day thinking about what you should eat. You might spend the afternoon negotiating with yourself about whether you deserve a snack. You might end the day replaying everything you ate and promising to do better tomorrow.

Even when you’re not actively following a diet, the rules can stay in your head.

You may feel like you’re always monitoring yourself, checking your hunger, judging your choices, worrying about your weight, and wondering whether you’re doing enough to be healthy.

That’s a lot to carry.

And it’s one reason I believe the lessons from eating disorder recovery can be so valuable for people who are struggling with food and body image more broadly.

The goal isn’t simply to get to a place where you eat differently. It’s to create a life in which food and your body don’t have to take up so much of your attention.

Imagine being able to eat a meal without mentally reviewing whether you made the “right” choices or  going out with friends without planning how you’ll compensate for the food you’ll eat.

You don’t have to achieve perfect body confidence to start moving toward that kind of life. You can begin by noticing where diet culture is influencing your decisions. You can question a food rule that leaves you feeling anxious or deprived. You can practice responding to yourself with compassion instead of criticism.

And if you’re dealing with an eating disorder or persistent eating difficulties, you can seek qualified support rather than trying to manage everything on your own.

Healing doesn’t mean you’ll never have a difficult thought about food or your body again. It means you’re learning to relate to those thoughts differently and build a life that isn’t controlled by them.

Listen to the Full Conversation With Carolyn Costin

I hope this episode reminds you that your struggles with food and body image deserve attention and compassion, even if you’ve never been diagnosed with an eating disorder.

Carolyn Costin has spent decades working in eating disorder recovery, and her perspective offers so much to consider, not only for people recovering from eating disorders, but also for those of us trying to untangle years of diet culture messaging.

In this episode, we discuss:

• What eating disorder treatment has taught us about recovery.

• How those lessons can help people who struggle with food and body image without having a diagnosed eating disorder.

• The similarities and differences between binge eating disorder, anorexia, and bulimia.

• The ongoing cultural contribution to eating disorders and why it matters.

• What Carolyn means by “soul healing.”

• How to work toward peace with food and your body when you still want to be thinner or have concerns about your health.

If you’re tired of feeling like your body is a problem to solve, or you know dieting isn’t the answer but aren’t sure what comes next, I encourage you to listen.

You don’t have to have an eating disorder to benefit from the wisdom of eating disorder recovery.

You deserve support, compassion, and a life that isn’t consumed by trying to change your body. You are enough already..

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