Eating for eatings sake!

That's what my mother used to say to me when I was a teenager. She was right! Now I am very old and she's still right. Between then and now I have lost and gained fat with awful regularity. To prove my point I'm munching cashew nuts as I type. I'm not sure which is the more important, my health or my self respect. I have never really looked at my gluttony from any other aspect than my greed and weakness before but I do take Citalopram daily for depression, of which I have had bouts for the last forty-odd years. As late in my life as this, can I be helped please?

The struggle with food is real. We are faced with it daily – so when you suffer with the relationship you have with food, all that means is you are struggling with the relationship you have with yourself. Being preoccupied with an unhealthy obsession restricts our ability to live with vitality. The more we obsess over food, the more control it has over us.

A need to be skinny results in a need for love. We associate being skinny, with being loved – which means if we are overweight, we are unloveable.

I’ve been there – I was a constant yo-yo dieter. I thought I had an issue with ‘food’ I can recall myself saying ‘I just can’t trust myself around food’ or ‘food stresses me out’ when in fact, looking back on it, it had nothing to do with food and everything to do with the fact I was unhappy in my own skin. I was using food no different than an alcoholic uses wine. I was masking the feelings, I was distracting myself with something I knew made me temporarily happy. The link I was missing was that this all was because I was unhappy with my body, unhappy with my level of self love.

I had to ask myself ‘What am I actually hungry for?’

The answer was self-love.

My lack of self love was perpetuating my binge eating. Binge eating was perpetuating guilt and shame, guilt and shame perpetuated a vicious diet cycle…

That was the moment it all clicked, it all came together. It had nothing to do with food, and had everything to do with my lack of self love. That’s when I knew I had to get to work, in a big way.

Massive love and huge hugs,
Samantha xo