Oh yes, and I was told to add in the exercise. Just, “eat less and exercise more”. It just didn’t seem this easy to me, and never seemed to get easier. Essentially, the message I received back then and continued to receive throughout my life was that I lacked self-control and needed to change my body (i.e. lose weight) in order to be a better and more acceptable person.

Looking back, the problem was not my body, it was how I was taught to think about and treat it, and misunderstanding how it was affected by the processed foods I was eating.

Hating and punishing yourself into losing weight has not worked thus far and so my practice focuses on learning how to look after yourself, treat yourself better and make more nourishing choices – both physically and mentally.

I am well versed in the story of emotional eating, binge eating and using food for comfort. It actually makes a lot of sense that you might use food to manage these uncomfortable emotions. Food is a very effective (although short-term) way to sooth, distract and numb unwanted emotions. However we can sometimes develop addictive tendencies because of the high sugar content of certain processed foods (developed to make us addicted) and therefore it makes it really hard to stop eating them.