How do you feel at the start of each New Year? Or a birthday? Or a Monday?
Many people see this as a time to re-set, refresh, or become more intentional. It's also a time to be sure to not lose track of your intentions and let another diet or wellness plan dictate what's best for you.
If some of your intentions have something to do with your eating patterns and relationship with food, I wanted to lay out a few possible categories to help you identify where you think you might land.
Are you a binge eater? Compulsive overeater? Chronic dieter? Food restrictor? Always compensating in some way for what you just ate?
Below you will find a very brief description of these eating patterns that set them apart from each other. But it's important to remember they have much overlap in many cases. You may find yourself in more than one category, or having experienced different eating patterns throughout your life.
What they all have in common is they often lead to or are launched from feelings of shame. They also indicate some form of Disordered Eating.
Here's a very quick guideline to consider:
Binge eating
Eating large portions of food in a small period of time to the point of feeling uncomfortable or even painfully full. A feeling of no control.
Compulsive overeating
Eating with a feeling of no control, randomly throughout the day, often to the point of uncomfortable fullness.
Chronic dieting
Doing diet after diet only to lose and gain back the same or more weight. Often begin diets with big hopes and optimism and then stopping them from a feeling of failure followed by shame.
Food restricting
Always at the root of binge eating, compulsive eating and other eating disorders. Food restricting can look like limiting certain food types or macros, it can look like "clean eating," it can be limiting food intake to a certain calorie goal, and it can spiral down to anorexia or backlash to binge eating.
Compensating
Any kind of "compensatory" behavior which would undo or make up for the food just eaten. This could be restricting food, overexercise, vomiting, or laxatives.
If you find yourself caught up in any of these patterns of eating, you are probably feeling trapped in an unhealthy relationship with food and your body. You are probably craving freedom from these entrenched patterns and a release of the shame that comes with them.
Please consider taking a look at where you find yourself and make a commitment this year to break free from those patterns. Here are a few of my previous blog posts you may find helpful for you in the process:
Releasing Shame to Heal Your Relationship with Food & Body Image
Healing the True Hungers Beneath Emotional Eating
I'd love to help. Please reach out if you'd like some support along the way.
You may also be interested in my new and updated guide, Finding Peace with Food and Your Body which is now available.
I'm really excited to offer you help to find your freedom from eating concerns, weight, and body shame, and finally get out of the vicious cycle of reaching for new diet and wellness plans.
The only way out of this is to find your own unique path to transforming your relationship with food and your body -- finding out what keeps you in the vicious circle first so that you are free to make your own decisions about what is uniquely right for you.
I've updated and expanded my original Deep Dive Guide to provide you with a step by step system to get unstuck and have a plan for moving forward.