Recovering from a Lifetime of Diets

Think about how long you've been sold a story about your own body. Since childhood, most of us absorbed messages about our size, our height, our weight, who we resemble and who we don't, and the quiet verdict underneath all of it: you are not quite acceptable as you are. The diet industry pulls in billions of dollars every year, and it keeps growing because we believed the campaigns and handed over our money and our trust.

Each time we starved ourselves or forced our shape to change with some drastic plan, we came away with problems. Usually more than we realized, and they ran deeper than the number on the scale. We were actually interfering with intelligent systems inside the body. You can fool those systems for a little while. Push the body through a big change too fast, though, and it starts to resist.

What does resistance look like? No more weight loss, no matter what you try. On top of that, bloating and trouble with elimination. You might ask how that happened if you did lose weight. The weight came off too quickly and you cut off nutrients the body needs to run. Your body is a smart system, and it responded accordingly.

So what now? Recovery can move fast, sometimes within a week, and sometimes it stretches across a few months. Patience matters, because you're working with that same smart system. Start by taking stock of what you've actually been doing with food over the past several months. Where do you stand with your eating? Do you even have a plan, or are you dodging meals and then bingeing late at night? What is really going on? Write it down so there's something concrete to work with, something you can adjust to help the body find its normal balance again.

Record the time you eat, what you eat, and the portion. Assume for now you'll stick to reasonable portions. You already know that three cups of spinach is too much. Two cups, roughly what fits in your two cupped hands, is closer. Give each meal or snack twenty minutes, then stop. If food is left, don't rush to finish; put it away for next time. Stay calm and slow. Set the utensils down between bites. Don't wash food down with liquid.

Note the first thing you put in your body each day. I'd suggest that be fresh-squeezed lemon juice. Then write out breakfast and what it was, your mid-morning snack, your mid-afternoon snack, the evening meal, and the time you finished eating for the day. Begin exactly where you are.

Whatever you do or don't do, finish this record. It isn't about being perfect. It's about seeing what you're doing right now. There is no perfect version. There is only doing.

Pay attention to the resistance that comes up. Write down what you feel. Go through the whole drama, beat yourself up over it, threaten me if you need to; all of it is fine. Just keep writing. Deal with the frustration, the impatience, the anger, whatever surfaces, and do the task anyway. "But I have my family, and a wedding, and then another party" are distractions from this work, and you know it, because you already know what you do around food.

Once this first level of recovery is in place, we'll bring in bowel function and the rest of how the body works. For now, this is the step. Let's do it.

Kathy Welter is the author of "Chasing Hunger" and uses NLP and hypnotherapy to help people recover from a lifetime of disordered eating.