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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Quite often people come to me in my free group, as prospective clients or even in my DMs feeling stuck in their recovery from disordered eating or eating disorders and feeling lost as to what to do next!

Often they have begun to lose hope that things can get any better, instead feeling resigned to being stuck in quasi recovery and stuck with the food guilt, anxiety and all the other rubbish that comes with it! And I am here to tell you that full recovery is so possible for all of us as well as giving you some cues as to where you can look next to kick start that next stage of your journey. 

Am I stuck?

But first, it is probably important to look at what being stuck means.

Being stuck is different from taking time to integrate and create space to let us new behaviours become our new default, which is such a normal part of our healing journeys. When we are integrating, embodying learnings it feels motivated, generally calm and we feel like we know where we are going. Getting stuck feels very different. 

When we are stuck we can start to feel frustrated with where we are at, knowing what we need to do next but feeling blocked as to how to get there or afraid of that next leap. We may even start to let some of our new behaviours fall to the wayside and maybe seeing some old behaviours kick back in.  
 
It is important to remember that getting stuck is not a problem or something to be ashamed of. It happens to all of us at some point in our journeys. But once we realise we are stuck, we have a choice. A choice to stay stuck which so often results in a relapse of some form or we choose to see this as an opportunity to keep learning, growing and heal even deeper. 
 
So let’s look at some ways you can take action to get unstuck! 

How do I get unstuck?

We are so often very food and behaviour focused in our approach to recovery. And yet in focusing on behaviour change we are missing a huge part of the puzzle, the root causes of why we ended up developing disordered eating and if we don’t tackle them we never truly can heal.  

And I believe this is why we can feel so lost when we get stuck, because we are telling ourselves ‘I know what to bloody do, why can’t I just do it’. The inner work is the answer! 
 
Here is a little inner work inventory to checklist of the key reasons we get stuck in recovery: 

Motivation 

Hopefully unsurprisingly motivation is key to behaviour change and maintenance, but so few of us realise that there are two parts to motivation. One, raising the pain of the rubbish we want to move away from – we are usually pretty good at this one. Two, getting clear on where we are going – this is the one we aren’t so great at!  

If we don’t know where we are going, we don’t know why we are doing this and our brains being built to help us survive not thrive will rather us feel stuck than venture into the unknown. The pain points aren’t enough, we are so much better motivated by the carrot approach than the stick! 
 
And getting the carrot is pretty easy, you don’t have to know exactly how it will feel or look like but letting yourself dream and imagine will go a long way to give your brain some sense of certainty to help you take the next step. 
 
Suggested activity: Do a vision board for all the things you look forward to in recovery. 

Needs 

We all have five human needs that we need to meet: safety, uncertainty, love, connection and signficiance. If we don’t meet these intentionally our disordered eating may be stepping in to do it for us! 
 
You can learn more about these human needs as well as getting an action plan together to meet them in a healthier way here.  

I actually have a free training to teach you how to meet your own needs in a way that serves you better – you can get access here. 

Beliefs  

Beliefs are one of the major reasons we get stuck! They sit in the subconscious part of our brain, filtering everything we see, hear and do and also filter everything we think and feel internally too!  

Our beliefs are the driving factor behind so much of our behaviours. And if our beliefs are not in alignment with what we are working towards we will nuke it! So we get to shift the beliefs that are preventing our progress to beliefs that better serve us and unlock that next level! 

Identity 

Many of us will question who we truly are, and in recovery so often we ask ourselves who will we be without this. And this is another area where if we don’t have clarity we would rather stay stuck! 

So some good questions to ask yourself to see if your lack of sense of self is holding you back are: 
 
Do I know who I will be without my disordered eating?  

Will recovery leave gaps in my life that I don’t know who I am going to feel? 

Inner Child/Parts Work 

Now a lot of people will look at this and think this is very ‘out there’ or ‘woo’, but in fact we have known that inner child work or what is sometimes called parts work to be integral to psychological healing since the late 1800s!  

 
As I explain in my blog about ‘Why we develop with disordered eating’, the the tools we are taught or not taught and the trauma we may have experienced play a big part in why we developed disordered eating in the first place. 
 
We get to work through our past experiences, especially during the foundational years in our psychological development of 0-8 years old to truly heal. 

Hopefully I have given you some things to think about if you are feeling stuck in your recovery and some things to work on yourself too. 
 
If you are ready to take your own healing journey to the next level and get unstuck, you might want to check out my Food Freedom Breakthrough Programme where I will show you exactly how to shift the beliefs that no longer serve you, find your identity without your disordered eating and work with those inner child parts to unlock that next part of your journey! 

As a Food Freedom Coach I specialise in working helping people heal disordered eating and all that that entails for my clients. But so many people don’t understand why they struggle with disordered eating in the first place. How can we truly heal something when we don’t know why we have it?

So in this blog I wanted to talk about some of the reasons why we may struggle with disordered eating.

Diet Culture – The fuel for the fire

Now, we can’t talk about disordered eating without talking about diet culture. In so many ways diet industry and the culture that has been bred from it is the fuel for the fire for so many when it comes to their disordered relationship with food. 

Diet culture has led us to have such a warped perception of health and looking after ourselves. So much of what we see health and wellness to be is weight loss and being in a smaller body.

We see looking after ourselves as restriction, ‘making healthy choices’ and keeping their weight down. And yet in reality true health is about more than weight. It is our physical health, mental health, our social wellbeing, our happiness, joy, resilience and so much more! Health and weight loss are so far from the same thing. 
 
The other thing that diet culture has really warped for so many of us is the idea that a smaller body is the answer to all our problems problems.

We are told that having a smaller body will give us more confidence, will help us feel more worthy.

We are told that having a smaller body will make us more loveable, attractive and wealthy.

These messages aren’t always transferred consciously, but they are prevelant in films, in advertising, in the office kitchen talk and so much more.  

Maybe you have heard people say: ‘Oh don’t you look great, have you lost weight?’,  ‘You’re not fat, you’re beautiful’ or ‘should you really be eating that?’.

All these phrases that imply that being in a smaller body and restricting makes people better and being in a larger body makes people lesser than.

Maybe you’ve noticed that people in larger bodies play very different roles in TV dramas and films, than people in smaller bodies too. That is all diet culture, and all the time we are being submitted to more messages like this! 

So no wonder we want to do what we can to fit the diet culture mould, to be in a body that will make us ‘better’ even though our body shape or weight has nothing to do with our worth.

And I know this might be quite shocking to so many of you, but it actually has very little do with our physical health either (you can learn more about the Health at Every Size movement here). 

Diet culture alone is toxic but there are other aspects that are worth exploring here too. 

Were you taught to feel all the feels?

Another aspect that I see in all the clients I work with is difficulties in processing their emotionality.

So many of us who have or do struggle with disordered eating or eating disorders are empaths or Highly Sensitive People (HSPs), that means they feel more intensely.

Empaths and HSPs are the people who cry at films, that feel other people’s pain as they hear their stories and usually the go to agony aunt for all their friends. But whether we are empaths or HSPs or not, learning to feel is so integral to our development as children. 

However, so many cultures around the world see emotionality as weakness, as a vulnerability that needs to be shoved down and ignored. We are taught from a young age to shove our feelings down, to self-medicate with alcohol, to hide our feelings and in some cases even be ashamed of them.

Again not all of this will be that obvious, but a mum pouring a glass of wine as she says ‘mummy has had a bad day’ is teaching us that when we feel bad we use alcohol and when we see a parent or care giver hiding to have a cry we learn that sadness is something that we should hide.  

This isn’t about blaming our parents. After all they did the best they could with the tools they had and likely didn’t know any better. But hopefully it helps you see how many messages there are telling the children of this world that they aren’t supposed to feel and if they do they should do something to numb it, avoid it or distract from it! 

Children don’t have access to alcohol and so many of the other coping tools adults do, but one thing they do have access to and control of is food. So we often find children using food, whether that be restricting, comfort eating or both, to soothe emotionality they don’t know what else to do with.

Trauma with or without the capital T 

On top of that, if we have experienced traumatic or life-changing into the mix without the tools or support to process it, we have a real cooking pot for unhealthy coping tools and disordered eating.

Now it is important to note that trauma isn’t necessarily those life-changing horrendous (Trauma with the capital T) events we so often think about. Trauma is anything our brains deem to be traumatic.

That could be being made to feel ashamed in front of a class or your grandparent taking away your favourite toy without explaining why (trauma with a lower case t).

Whatever our experience is, if our brain has boxed things up as trauma, it will have an effect on how we see the world and how we behave. And if not dealt with, people who have experienced trauma have a propensity towards unhealthy coping mechanisms such as disordered eating and other issues as ways to cope.

Obviously, we are all unique and our healing journeys may all be different as a result. But challenging the beliefs that diet culture internalises, learning to feel our feelings and healing trauma are so often the cornerstones to so many of our journeys to true food freedom. 

Intuitive Eating 101 & why diets don’t work?

Intuitive eating is quite a buzzword at the moment, but from what I am seeing it is being used in all sorts of ways that just are wrong!

I am so passionate about intuitive eating and letting go of diet culture, because doing so didn’t just change my relationship with food but also with my body and my life! And now I help clients do the same. So, I am really excited to tell you all about intuitive eating in this post!

How intuitive eating came about?

Two dieticains, Tribole and Resch, set out to understand why there was a growing obesity problem whilst diet industry was becoming more and more prevalent.

What they noticed was that with a weight centric approach to health and wellness, people were yo-yoing from diet to binge and in doing so their weight was increasing overall. And this is a phenomenon that has been observed in many research studies since.

Did you know that 94% of people return to their starting weight or higher within six years of a diet¹ AND one third regained weight after one year².

But this is not just something we just see in research studie and articles, we see it again and again in real life.

You know your friend that went to Weight Watchers lost a tonne of weight only to have put it all on (and more) a few years later). And maybe you have gone from fad diet to fad diet yoyo dieting too? That is exactly what we are talking about here!

What really makes me really angry about all of this is that diet industry sells us products and services again and again, knowing that they are NOT sustainable, knowing that their customers will gain the weight back and more.  And worse than that they tell you that you weren’t motivated enough, didn’t have enough willpower etc. so you buy from them again when actually these diets are physiologically not supposed to work.

I know, how fucking screwed up is that!!

The benefits of intuitive eating

What we see from a weight neutral, health focused approach is that people actually become a tonne happier and healthier for lots of reasons.

By making food just food and releasing the pressure on their body shape and weight, they can make healthier more balanced choices and free themselves from the diet-binge cycle that keeps their set point weight slowly creeping up.

But it doesn’t stop there, here are just some of the other amazing benefits of intuitive eating:

• Higher self-esteem
• Set for life – adaptation of hunger & fullness to different requirements
• Better body image
• Healthier coping
• Lower rates of emotional and disordered eating
• Intuitive eating leading to intuitive living

All of which I think are pretty fucking cool!!

How do I eat intuitively?

So now you might be thinking: ‘Chloe, this all sounds great, but how on earth do I eat intuitively’. And I promise you, you won’t be alone in thinking that this is some fairytale.

But we were all born intuitive, crying when we were hungry, stopping when we were full, moving when we had energy, sleeping when we are tired. It is the diet culture we live in that screwed that up for us. But it can be undone.

It is so simple once we get past our diet programming and learn to see food as just food, but when our brains are so muddled with diet culture it can be harder said than done, so here are the 10 principles of intuitive eating, I have also popped a hunger and fullness scale below to help you:

Reject Diet Mentality

Notice when you or someone else celebrates themselves for skipping a meal, having lost weight, moaning about going up a dress size. You may even notice that in films the heroine is normally stick thin and fits all the cultural beauty ideals yet the fat friend is left alone and sad – that is diet culture engrained in our media.

Honour Your Hunger

Before we even think about looking at fullness we get to learn to honour our hunger and ditch the guilt we have around it. Hunger isn’t your body tricking you, it is your body telling you it needs more food. Simple!

Make Peace with Food

In intuitive eating we celebrate all food being just food, and in doing so we neutralise it. By seeing ice cream, chocolate and cakes as having the same moral value as kale, broccoli and lentils, we lesson emotional eating and we help ourselves tap into what our body really wants!

Challenge the Food Police

Fuck what people say about your food, if someone comments on your lunch, tries to sell you a fad diet, challenge them. Do your research on intuitive eating, the benefits of it and ask them for their actual proof that their diets are sustainable (newsflash – they aren’t)

Discover the Satisfaction Factor

When we tap into knowing what the body wants, what flavours, textures, temperatures of food we want, we can start to discover real food satisfaction. If you want a slice of cake, have a slice of cake, 10 chocolate Special K bars just won’t cut it (I can tell you that from experience).

Feel Your Fullness

Once you have mastered all of the above you can learn to feel your fullness!

Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Emotional eating isn’t a problem with willpower, eating disorders aren’t about the fucking food, obsessive exercise has nothing to do with moving our bodies at all. They are all coping mechanisms, and unless we learn to deal with our emotions properly we will never truly be free!

Respect for Your Body

We spend so much time seeing our body as an ornament, something that should be ‘slim’, ‘attractive’, ‘toned’ etc. that we forget how amazing our bodies are. Your body manages your oxygen levels, digestion, constantly grows new cells, lets you move around, talk to people and so much more!

Movement – Feel the Difference

With intuitive eating comes intuitive exercise, move because you want to, not because you feel you ‘should’ (I so hate that word). Just as our body knows what, when and how much fuel it needs, it can do the same with exercise.

Honour Your Health – Gentle Nutrition

With intuitive eating, we want you to feel your best! So once you have got all the other principles down we can start to look at gentle nutrition, with small changes to help you get the most out of the fuel you put in your body. This is nutrition in a way that promotes supporting your body, not starving it. I know this step can look so alluring in the ‘health’ obsessed world we live in, but this is the last step, so don’t skip ahead to this one. It is this late in the process for a reason, promise!

As you can probably tell, I have a lot to say about intuitive eating and the shitty diet culture taking over our world but I will leave it there for now and save some more for another blog!

But if you want to get started with healing your relationship with food and body, I have a fab free training to help you get the ball rolling! All you need to do is register below.

¹ Sarlio-Lahteenkorva et al, 2000

² Wadden et al, 2004