Your Past With Food Does Not Have to Become Your Future

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Episode Description

A familiar thought does not mean you are failing.

A familiar feeling does not mean you are headed back down the same path.

In this episode, I talk about why one of the most important parts of getting the upper hand on food noise is learning not to decide too quickly that something is going wrong.

A lot of us have a story we tell ourselves about our past. Maybe you remember your highest weight. Maybe you remember a period where you felt physically or emotionally awful. Maybe you look back at choices you made around food and use those experiences as evidence that you cannot trust yourself.

But your past does not have to become your future.

When an old thought or feeling shows up, you now have something incredibly valuable that you may not have had before.

Awareness.

You can recognize the familiar path and decide whether you want to keep going in that direction or redirect yourself somewhere else.

The first time you do that, you start creating evidence that you can trust yourself differently.

Sometimes you will redirect quickly. Sometimes you will notice what is happening after you have already gone pretty far down the old path. Sometimes you may decide to stay there for a while.

That does not mean you failed.

You can own the choice you made and make another choice when the next opportunity comes.

I also talk about why the new direction can feel uncomfortable simply because it is unfamiliar. We often trust the old path because we know where it goes, even when we do not like the destination. Building self trust means practicing a different response enough times that the new direction starts becoming familiar too.

Food is also more than fuel. We enjoy it. We connect memories, emotions, preferences, and experiences to it. The goal is not to eliminate any of that. It is learning how food fits into your life in a way that feels like yours.

You are allowed to make the rules.

And if you feel like you have gone several steps backward, you can still take the next step forward.

You are not starting from nothing. You are continuing to learn how to trust yourself.