We evolved to live in a world where there were no fridges or freezers, no Tesco down the road. We evolved to deal with times where crops failed, there were less animals to hunt and eat, where there was real food scarcity. And the way our bodies deal with this is by kicking in the feast-famine cycle. 

Whilst this mechanism is built into all of us, most of us don’t know about it and I think not knowing about it is one of the biggest reasons we worry that we can’t be trusted around food, that we are ‘just greedy’ when actually that is a sign our bodies are doing exactly what they are meant to do.

Your body doesn’t know the difference between you not getting enough food in because you are on a diet or not getting enough food in because there isn’t enough food around. It sees both situations as famine and so your body is going to respond in the same way, wanting you to feast as soon as you can!  

When I first read about this in Tabitha Farrar’s Rehabilitate Rewire Recover it just made so much sense, gave me so much reassurance that I wasn’t weird or greedy. So I hope that this helps you too!

Here’s some of the things our bodies do that are part of the feast-famine cycle (and nothing to do with being greedy!)…

Wanting to eat all the high-energy foods

Evolution has wired our brains to seek out high-energy foods after a period of famine. This is why those biscuits, ice cream, cake… all call your name, and why you drool over food TV or whilst baking for your office colleagues. 

And whether we call it feasting or, as it is better known by, binge eating, it actually isn’t a bad thing or anything to be ashamed of. It is exactly what your body wants you to do! It wants you to feast/binge so it can build up energy reserves while it can so it can tap into them during the next famine (aka diet!). 

Our metabolism adapts

During famines/diets, the body’s metabolism becomes more efficient, conserving energy and slowing down to reduce energy expenditure. This allowed our ancestors to survive on fewer calories and make the most of their stored fat reserves. 

This is why the more you diet/restrict, the harder it is to lose weight and why it feels like you can ‘get away with’ eating less and less calories. Your body isn’t broken, it is adapting to keep you alive! 

We can feel really on edge

During a ‘famine period’ we experience way more anxiety and become way more risk averse. This is because historically we needed to conserve the energy we had for when we needed it, for example to run away from a lion or wooly mammoth.

So all of these things that we beat ourselves up for because diet culture tells us we should ‘do better’ are actually just your body doing what it is meant to….

• Yo-yo dieting (essentially the feast-famine cycle on repeat)
• Cravings 
• Binge eating
• Feeling out of control around food

I know it can take a while to wrap your head around especially with diet culture being so prevalent and persistent but it makes so much sense doesn’t it?!

Please remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the way we eat or move our bodies.  If we all ate the same and exercised the same, we’d still all look and feel different, your body is the only thing that can truly tell you what you need and I hope reading this and understanding the feast famine cycle helps you on your journey to trusting your body again and breaking the cycle for good. 

Want to know more… Episode 1 of my “It’s Not About The Fucking Food” delves into this subject more and explains why it is one of very few times when it actually IS about the fucking food. 

🎧 Listen to this podcast episode here: Apple Podcasts / Spotify

🎥 Watch on Youtube

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As I write this my house is half-packed up in boxes, pregnant, have a list 5 pages long of address updates I need to put through, whilst also serving a full roster of beautiful clients.

All beautiful things that I am very excited for but I am getting some practise at handling overwhelm!!

So, I thought I would remind myself of the tools in my toolbox for dealing with overwhelm whilst also sharing it with you lovely people too.

What is overwhelm?

I like to think of overwhelm as feeling like you have too many tabs open in our heads or trying to keep too many plates spinning.

And when this happens, we can find ourselves getting into quite a pickle! We can find ourselves struggling to focus on any one task, not being able to switch off to rest and maybe resorting to old patterns such as anxious thoughts, procrastination, avoidance or full on hustle mode.

It can leave us exhausted, cranky and as this state sits well and truly in the fight/flight/freeze path it is stressful for ourselves and our bodies. This is when I tend to get things like mouth ulcers or thrush (sorry if that is TMI lol), basically my body’s signals to tell me that it has had enough.

It is not somewhere we want to stay for very long.

But how do we get out of it?

I am overwhelmed, what do I do now?

So I have a few tricks up my sleeve for dealing with overwhelm and I want to share some of them with you. So here goes…

1) Make a master to do list.

When we try to rely on our brains to remember all the things we need to do, it creates a tonne of anxiety that just isn’t necessary. So get it out of your head and onto paper.

Whatever it is taking up headspace, write it down.

You may also find talking about it can help you create more headspace.

2) Create smaller lists for each day.

Once you have your to-do list, create some time and create smaller lists that help you get moving through it. This will really help dial down the overwhelm.

But don’t forget to keep it manageable! If you don’t your coping mechanisms will kick in and it won’t be pretty, self-sabotage is a pain, I have been there promise.

There is no better feeling in my opinion that ticking things off your to-do list!

3) Create space to switch into rest & digest mode.

Whatever it is that chills you out, it is time to get those tools out of your toolbox.

It is really important we start getting your body back into rest and digest mode so that we can take the pressure of the fight/flight/freeze nervous system, after all it is only meant to be used for life threatening emergencies like being chased by a tiger!

There are lots of different ways we can help ourselves find our zen again, but some of favourites are: meditation, breathwork, bubble baths and curling up with a rom com novel!

Need a bigger toolbox, here’s a gift for you…

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For many people this has been a really tough year. With lockdowns, time apart from family, anxiety and uncertainty taking over our daily life.

I specialise in helping people heal disordered eating but also have clients who are  coaches doing therapeutic work.

It feels very scary and vulnerable to share what I know is going to be such a personal post here and I feel quite vulnerable doing so. I wanted to share in case it is helpful for others to read.

I think that lots of people think that being a coach means having ‘fixed your shit’, being happy and dare I say ‘high vibe’ all the time.

The reality is that all of us, even coaches, are always learning, always healing, always growing.

And whilst we have hopefully done a shit tonne of work to get to where we are, we aren’t perfect. We are still humans having an imperfect human experience.

And I really do believe that our commitment to continuing our own healing and our own growth is vital to being a good coach and therapist.

But, having said that, we are very lucky to have a much better toolbox of tools than the general public.

So, when lockdown originally hit, after a fantastic holiday skiing in the Alps, I genuinely had very few concerns about how we would cope. Thinking it would take a few weeks and it would all sort itself out.

Well, as we all know, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In the first few weeks of the pandemic, my mum and dad had COVID. My dad ended up going into hospital with sepsis and pneumonia and we weren’t sure whether he would come out.

With him being in and out of consciousness, I waited each day for a call from my mum having spoken to the nurses to say he had made it through the night.

All the while I was showing up for my clients, doing weekly workshops/masterclasses and coping with the new lockdown in a studio flat.

Yoga classes, meeting friends and family went out of the window. My partner and I also moved home to Devon which left me more isolated. The only social interaction that I had was being online with clients, people on social media or catching up with family on FaceTime.

And with each month that has gone by, as it has for most of us, got more and more draining.

Before the pandemic I had between five and seven intensive one-to-one coaching clients at any one time.

As a coach the effect of COVID on the mental health of all of us is really evident. I now have 15 clients and a growing waiting list!

I came into coaching after having suffered my own battles and wanting to help others doing the same. Knowing that there is so much pain out in this world right now hurts me on the deepest of levels.

A part of me does feel guilty about not being able to serve everyone who has reached out for my help. But, I also know that I am already seeing more clients than I would do in an ideal world without the same access to things to help top up my cup and keep myself well.  Even with the tools in my toolbox it isn’t enough.

A part of me feels horrendous that my free weekly workshops have gone out of the window because I just don’t have the capacity or energy to do them.

And then imposter syndrome kicks in. I think to myself, ‘who am I to coach people when I am not loving life right now?’

But I know that I am not alone and I know that above any other labels or roles I have in this life, I am human.

I am not sharing this because I want sympathy or think coaches have been harder hit than others, because I really don’t want people to walk away from this blog thinking either of those things.

But hopefully coaches reading this will feel less broken or alone for not having ‘coped as well as they think they should have’ and give themselves a break! We weren’t trained for a pandemic. No one was.

For non-coaches, I hope you will realise from reading this that if people with so many more tools than the average person are struggling then you should give yourself a break too.

I also ask that if you are working with a therapist or coach at the moment then remember they are also human and not pandemic trained. They might take longer to reply because their cup is empty. They might be setting firmer boundaries to protect their energy. They might not feel as ‘high vibe’ because they are just as bloody knackered as the rest of us.

This ‘new normal’ is something we are all learning to cope with together and I do hope it will all be over soon!

In this post I am going to explain why leaving lockdown may be creating a lot of anxiety for you and how you can help yourself now!

Well, what a ride the last year has been and for a lot of us the uncertainty only seems to have gotten stronger over the last few weeks.

We have gone from stressing about being locked in, without access to gyms, not being able to see our families and friends to being told we are going to be released into the wild. For so many of us that has been a much scarier idea than we realised it would be, especially for those with disordered eating and anxiety.

We are supposed to be excited, aren’t we?

As a very tactile person I can’t wait to see my parents, my sister and Cai’s family and give them the biggest hugs. I also am super excited to be able to go out for date nights and do things like go to the cinema, have a coffee in a coffee shop and speak to people without feeling that they are getting too close.

But I also feel worried. Unsure how it will feel to be around people again after being stuck in my office and house for most of this year so far and I find myself thinking things like ‘will I know how to talk to people still’, ‘will they laugh at me if I get super awkward’ and I know that for many people who aren’t as far in their healing journeys that this will be a source of much greater anxiety.

You might find yourself worried about being seen again, being judged for real or perceived changes in your shape or weight, anxious about people bringing food into work, being asked out for dinner and so much more.

What disordered eating and anxiety do for us and why they are kicking up now

Disordered eating and anxiety are both things that are created in the mind and that are fed by fear. And I think this has been a time where the world has been filled with more real fear than most of us will ever have lived through, when a ‘Pandemic’ was a really twisted film rather than a reality.

In reality, we are stepping back into a world where we really get to thrive and not just live in fear, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like that. A lot of us may have found that in lockdown we crawled further into the perceived comfort of our disordered relationship with food, exercise and/or anxiety. Allowing it to take up more of your life and letting go of that ground, can feel really scary.

Here’s what you can do to help yourself

However, there are lots of things we can do now to start preparing ourselves so that when the time comes it isn’t such a leap from our current lives to a post-pandemic world. But the key is, that we have to start now. Nothing huge or scary, just tiny steps that will help you gain some ground back from the disordered eating/anxiety and give you more confidence that you can do this, because you really can.

So, I thought I would share some of the ideas I have to help you feel more confident and less afraid of what lies ahead:

Start stepping outside your comfort zone a little bit at a time

Use this time now to stretch your comfort zone, one thing a week or more would be fab. This could be asking your partner to cook a meal without you being there, buying something from the bakery rather than something in a packet or going to the supermarket rather than doing a click & collect so you can be around people.

Let yourself be seen

With being able to hide for so long behind a webcam or even without a camera on at all we may be anxious about being seen again. Let yourself be a little uncomfy now so you can adjust, whether that be turning your webcam on for a video call, showing up without make up on, showing more of your body or actually leaving the house. Stretch it a little more each week and you will be surprised what a difference it will make long term.

Create more safety in your body

This is beyond important for those of us with disordered eating and anxiety. We feel anxious and crave control because we think we need it to feel safe and that is what creates those horrible feelings. But we don’t need control to feel safe, we can have it within ourselves by simply knowing that whatever happens we will work it out. Sounds crazy I know! That’s why I have created a free training series on safety and the other human needs which also includes my most popular meditation to show you how to do just that, register below 😊.