My weight struggle started in puberty. Then, in high school my mother started taking me with her to Weight Watchers. My first diet taught me to weigh food and count calories. It taught me to skip eating for 2 days to make my weigh-in goal. And it taught me to constantly think about food.
Over the years, I tried all the other diets: low-fat, low-carb, Zone, vegan, back to WW, intuitive eating. After a month or two on each diet, I would inevitably hit a bad day and fall off. It just wouldn’t feel worth it to keep going. Life was missing the sparkle, so why was I even doing this?
Tell me if any of this resonates:
- I would start the day strong and then after dinner (or even during dinner!), find myself searching the refrigerator for something else
- In the evening I would keep going back to the kitchen for (low-calorie, high-protein, high-volume) food, but never feel truly satisfied
- I would eat until I was uncomfortably stuffed, and only then call myself “full” (but even then I could still eat!)
I became a dietitian. I got a degree in nutritional biochemistry. I studied the research and tried supplements. In 2018, a picture from my cousins wedding was my rock bottom. At that point, I had been a nutrition expert for 20 years. And I was 100 pounds overweight, size 22. The biggest I had ever been… but I said that every year. My joints hurt, I was irritable and not sleeping. I was on medication for depression and anxiety. I was a high level nutrition expert working in supplements and supposed to be a health expert. It was so embarrassing.
I didn’t have any other answers, so I signed up for a hypnosis program that put you on a low-carb diet. I was hypnotized in July with about 60 other people. And she told us if we cheated, the hypnosis would go away. So I’m going along doing well, lots of energy and losing weight. And then 3 months later, my husband leaves me. Normally I would eat, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to lose the hypnosis. So for the first time in my life I had to feel without leaning on food.
I started journaling, and did workshops, and hired a coach. I did yoga and reconnected with my body that I had checked out of a long time ago. And through this, I discovered all these blind spots I had about why I was eating.
I had fears of not being good enough, of not being loveable. And this kept me pushing so hard that I was completely worn out. And then I would eat because I was exhausted. And I would eat because I was miserable even though I didn’t know it. Because the eating kept me from feeling my feelings.
Diets are designed for failure
Diets don’t work because they rely on willpower. And willpower runs out. Each day you wake up with a set amount of willpower. This means that hard days can take more than you have. So diets force you to fight against yourself while losing the very support food was giving you. This is why you feel deprived. You have to go deeper.
How you eat is how you live
Once I healed my hungers, I created Craving Alchemy to help “2018-Juniper” and others like her heal their own. It has been a divinely-led soul-purpose mission to help women break free from their struggles with food and overeating. Because underneath the food is a deeper hunger for something else. And instead of restrictive diets and inherent failure, actually feeding those hungers reconnects women with their self-love, joy, and personal power. In this way, we heal the world.
Food cravings are signals to your healing path. Each time you have a craving, you have a chance for healing, wisdom and guidance. And with all the resources and love available to you now, in your older and wiser self, you are finally fully resourced to heal this legacy:
- Survival strategies your body encoded to survive for most of human history that are now outdated in our modern world of abundance
- Ancestral fears of tribal rejection or food shortages “finish your plate” mentality
- Generational tolerance for emotions and food eating patterns
- Beliefs and habits learned in childhood for comfort and support
And through healing and meeting the physical and emotional hunger needs underneath, food is no longer a struggle:
- You finish your dinner and feel satisfied. Done. No thinking about food. Just space!
- You feel energized but not stuffed. So you still have energy for playing with your kids and grandkids… or planning a trip… or taking a dance class… or changing the world!
- You like getting dressed up again because you love the way you look. And in this way we bring back feminine divine beauty as it was always meant to be!
- And you know it will last, because its not hard!
The 7 main drivers of hunger
We think of hunger as primarily physical, but we can hunger for many things. And most of them are NOT food, even though we have learned to use it as a poor substitute:
- Feeling loved/comfort. This is about feeling loved, happy food memories, and using food for comfort. Healing our need for love and comfort is about learning more ways to give yourself love and making sure there are quality connections with people in your life.
- Ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions. This is a big blind spot for many, so you might not even be aware of it (at least I wasn’t!). When you are little, if you learned from the people around you that emotions are too scary to handle, your subconscious gets the message that feelings must be something to FEAR AND AVOID. So to protect you, it keeps you ‘busy’ and ‘eating’. It distracts you and your body, by keeping it focused on digestion. The best way to check this one is to look at how you handle bad days, and the intensity of your cravings (emotional avoidance feels like an intense need to eat, while real hunger is mild).
- Feeling overwhelmed or uncomfortably stressed. Your body interprets stress as either starvation or emergency, and both of which change your metabolism in different ways. So letting go of perfection and our need to juggle ALL the things is important. Doing this makes space for what we actually want to do (and then we can do THIS better!), as well as building inner and outer support.
- Joy & Play. People often tell me that food is their joy (and it was mine too!). But are you really savoring your food with full attention or are you eating mindlessly? Because when you truly enjoy something, ENJOY IT FULLY! And make sure your life is rich with activities you enjoy. Because boredom is a feeling that can trigger eating (see ability to tolerate emotions above!).
- Cellular energy. Our food has dramatically changed since the 1950s, resulting in less nutrition for a variety of reasons. At the same time, food manufacturers have designed food to be addictive. Do you know the combination of fat + sugar + salt doesn’t even exist in nature? Our primal bodies are wired to crave these tastes because they used to be scarce, so they could store calories for the regularly occurring lean times. That’s what your fat is for! Now we have constant abundance, and your body doesn’t get a chance to use this stored energy. When you focus on protein, vegetable variety, spices, and a little healthy fat at most meals, you remove addictive foods to quiet your cravings and feed your cellular hunger and microbiome.
- Grounding/Anxiety. This can come as 2 flavors: 1)Some people spend a lot of time worrying about the future 2) Some people get disconnected from their body and use food for grounding. In both scenarios, its about getting present and finding ways to reconnect with your body.
- Exhaustion. If you find yourself collapsing in the afternoon or evening needing food as a pick-me-up, it is often due overgiving/overworking in an attempt to prove your value to those around you. So this one is about improving self-worth, rest quality, and stress (both burden and coping skills).
When you slow down and reconnect with your bodies, hunger needs, and feelings, the irresistible cravings go away. Food becomes ‘just food’. And life is better.
If this resonated, Join me April 8th for a live 90-minute preview class ($20) and experience Craving Alchemy for yourself. Grab your spot HERE
Not the right time? The free 7 Drivers of Hunger guide is a great place to begin
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