Recovery

What you’re told to do vs. What you need to do

March 1, 2018

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A Certified Eating Disorders Registered Dietitian (CEDRD) with a master's degree in dietetics & nutrition. My passion is helping you find peace with food - and within yourself.

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No one has ever tried more diligently to solve a problem than the chronic dieter…

…The way you’ve been told to deal with your problem – through control – puts you face-to-face with an impossible dilemma.  You have been told not to do exactly what you need to do.  — Jane Hirschmann and Carol Munter, Overcoming Overeating

 

Anyone who has ever tried to diet or control their eating knows how much work it is.  The counting, measuring, monitoring – it all makes you feel productive and in control.

Until the inevitable happens and you lose control or break one of your rules.

The defeat.

The sense of failure.

But the truth is, you’re not lazy or a failure.  You have demonstrated incredible determination through your repeated attempts to control your eating and weight.

The glitch is the faulty assumption you’ve made – that the food and your weight are the “problem” to be solved through control.  And you’ve tried so many ways to exert control over yourself, only to have it backfire every time.

 

But what if you were to redefine the problem?  

The problem is that you feel inadequate at your core.  And that you are using food (and control over food) to cope with all of your emotions.

By viewing the problem this way, the solution becomes something much different than dieting.

As Jane and Carol said in the quote above, “You’ve been told not to do exactly what you need to do.”  By that they mean that you’ve been told not to trust your body, not to trust your appetite, not to trust your emotions, not to trust your needs.

Healing will happen when you learn to trust your appetite, and when you learn to trust that your emotions and needs are valid and deserve to be met.

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