If you've tried intuitive eating, nervous system work, or mindful eating to fix your relationship with food and found it just didn't stick — this episode is for you. This week we're getting into why these approaches, as brilliant as they are, so often fall flat for women who've spent years in diet culture, dealing with emotional eating, and cycling through the stop dieting / start again loop.
In this episode:
Intuitive eating and nervous system work aren't wrong - they’re just missing a foundation. React to Respond builds that foundation first, so that food freedom becomes something you move towards gradually and safely, rather than something you fall into and hope for the best.
Join me for Ditch the Diets — the 3-day Telegram coaching experience where I’ll walk you through the full React to Respond method, with personalised daily coaching to help you move out of the on/off diet cycle and into a calmer, more consistent relationship with food.
Starting 23rd June.
£33.
Find out more and secure your space at lifeeditcoaching.com/ditchthediets
Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to Wellbeing, the podcast women who are done with the hustle and are ready to feel at home in their own skin. I'm your host, Alix Life, therapeutic and fitness coach for busy women who want to do less, live more, and feel good from the inside out.
Every week, I'm going to help you to cut through the noise, challenge the should, and find new ways to live and move that actually feel like you. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast.
This week and today, we're going to be answering a bit of a question that you might have around why listening to your body when it comes to food has not worked for you. And this is something that I have lots of conversations about, because I have lots of women who come to me and say, I've tried intuitive eating.
I've tried being more mindful with food. I've tried nervous system work.
I understand that these are going to be brilliant ways to help me to fix that relationship with food, to get out of this diet cycle, to learn to tune into what my body needs more. But it feels like it just doesn't work for me. And I think a lot of us do this.
A lot of us try this, because if you're anything like the women that I work with, then you know what healthy eating looks like. You know, the nervous system has a part to play.
You've done your research, and you want to figure out ultimately what is the best and healthiest approach for me, what is going to be healthiest for me, both physically, but also mentally and emotionally as well. And so a lot of the women that I work with have explored these avenues.
They've either thought about doing them or they've actually tried them, but they've either felt very difficult to step into because they have felt a little bit chaotic, or they've tried them and they've stepped into the chaos and they don't like it. They don't like how it feels. They find it very hard to actually connect to what their body is telling them.
And so oftentimes, this idea of learning to listen to your body, it really backfires. Now, one of my key things, or a key learning that I help my clients with is learning to listen to their body.
But I think that there is often a slightly different approach to this, which helps us to do it in a way that feels a bit safer, that feels a little bit more controlled, maybe, and that feels like you have a bit of a system in place. You have a little bit of structure in place to help you to do this. And so that's what I really want to talk about today.
So I'll talk a little bit about that later on. But I also want to talk about why these things might not have worked for you. What is it that's really going on on here?
That means that things like intuitive eating, things like mindfulness aren't quite hitting the spot for you.
Because I think that if you're asking that question, you've probably reached a stage in your life where you know that dieting isn't serving you anymore. You want to be able to make decisions about food in a more neutral way, in a more healthy way, in a less chaotic way.
You want food to stop being something you think about. So flipping much of your life, right? You want a bit of peace in your brain. You want a bit of peace back for other things.
You don't want to constantly be thinking about food. You don't want to constantly be cycling from this on it phase to off it phase and back again all the time.
You want to be tuned into what your body needs because you know that ultimately that is the thing that's going to help you to make healthier choices and make those choices more consistently. So if you're looking for that, then intuitive eating mindfulness is amazing. It's a fantastic way of doing those things.
But it can often feel like you are literally just stepping off the edge, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. So how do we make sure that that doesn't happen? How do we make sure that you don't end up feeling out of control?
How do we make sure that you don't end up in a place where you just go, I can't listen to my body. I don't know what it's saying to me. I don't understand how to do this.
How do we get you into a place where, or keep you out of a place, should we say, where you feel like maybe you're just starting to put a load of weight on? It feels like the opposite of what you wanted to achieve in that situation. Well, we're going to talk about that today.
We're going to talk about how you can approach these things with a bit more confidence, how you can approach these things with a better foundation for actually being able to do those things and to make those things really, really work for you. So I just want to start off, I think, by talking a little bit about why these things might not have worked for you before.
So let's start with intuitive eating. We're going to talk about intuitive Eating, we're going to talk about nervous system work and mindfulness as well. So I think the intuitive eating.
An awful lot of women that I work with have tried that. They've tried it once, maybe twice, maybe three times. And every time they try it, they feel like it just. It doesn't work for them.
They feel like they're thrown into a world that they don't understand anymore. They don't have that connection with their body. And while that connection with your body is really important, it's one of the.
The key foundations of the work that I do with women. I also know it's incredibly difficult because you might have spent years and years and years overriding those signals body is giving you.
So to suddenly expect your body to kick in overnight and for you to start understanding and deciphering those, it's like deciphering hieroglyphics, right? We don't know what's going on. We don't know what our body is feeling because we're not tuned into that.
So it can feel like a really difficult and a really confusing way to go about things. And I think, first of all, it feels like that because of the expectations we have around intuitive eating.
I think a lot of us want it to be a magic bullet. We want it to suddenly control our urges. We want it to take away the noise around food.
But the thing is, intuitive eating in its purest form is actually asking us to accept that in the first stage, it's gonna be chaos. You might gain weight. There might be a lot of difficult feelings that come with that.
And it's not inherently about helping you to control your weight in a different way.
And I think that is part of the issue when it comes to intuitive eating, because a lot of women approach it as well, if I do this, it's gonna help me to control my ur. Intuitive eating is the opposite of that.
It's you admitting that right now you don't have control around those urges, and you are going to fully let go of control.
So the thing about intuitive eating is it is something for somebody who has decided they want to step out of diet culture altogether, they are fully committed to stepping out of diet culture. It's not about helping you to just control your weight in a different way. And not everybody wants that. Some women do. And that's amazing.
And if that is you and you're there going, do you know what? What? I'm so bloody sick of this. I'm so sick of feeling like this.
I'm so sick of food taking up so much of my brain space that I just want to step out of this altogether. I just want to let it go then. Brilliant.
But the truth is that most, certainly most women I work with, and I think most women in general, they don't want to lose that level of control. Now, the reasons for that are a completely different conversation, right?
But for the purposes of this, I think it's having the understanding of really what intuitive eating is. Intuitive eating is about just allowing it to happen.
Allowing yourself to eat that full packet of biscuits if you so wish, allowing yourself to not eat a single vegetable for five days in a row if you so wish, allowing your body to put weight on, if that is what it needs to do in the here and the now.
Now, the idea is that in the long term, you will get to a place where you will start to regulate that, you will start to learn what your body is saying to you. But you have to kind of allow the chaos before you get to that stage where things start to feel more relaxed.
You start to feel more, not more in control of what you're doing, but you start to, like it says on the tin, feel more intuitive around food. But that doesn't come overnight.
That doesn't come because you have decided, well, I'm going to give intuitive eating and go, and I'm just going to listen to my body. Because in the beginning, you don't know what your body is saying to you.
You've spent decades overriding hunger signals, overriding fullness signals, treating your body like it's a problem. It's very hard to switch that off overnight. And so intuitive eating asks you to just give in to all of that, to just give in to all of that.
And that being a way to build that brain body connection. Because you are stepping, you are specifically stepping out of restriction, out of diets, and so you are allowing yourself to reconnect.
And that can take a really, really, really long time to learn. When you do it through intuitive eating, it can take months. And there has to be a level of allowing that to happen for you.
And the fact is, for a lot of women, it's basically a very, very, very scary way to undo all of the things that they've spent years learning. For many women, it does not feel liberating, it feels super scary. And so that may be why intuitive eating hasn't worked for you.
Because you've gone in there, think, help me to control my urges. Whereas actually, for intuitive eating to work, you have to let go of control entirely in so, so many different ways.
And so you need to be very prepared for that on an emotional. An emotional level, on a mental level, all of those kind of things.
If that feels like it's for you, if what I'm describing to you, like, yeah, I want that, then great. There are some great books that I've got. You can always DM me. I've got a couple of books that I can recommend that can help you with that.
But I think for most of us, I think we probably would admit to ourselves, we don't quite want that level of chaos, we don't quite want that level of letting go of all of the rules.
So if you have tried it, if you have struggled with it, if you have found that it didn't quite work to help you to reconnect with your body and its messages, then that could well be why.
So have a think about, if you've tried intuitive eating before, what is the mindset that you've gone in with and how did it make you feel when you were in it? If it just felt super scary, it didn't feel liberating at all, then it might not have been quite the right thing for you.
And so if it didn't work for you, honestly don't feel bad about it, because it asks an awful lot of you. Intuitive eating, it really, really does. It's not for everybody.
So if you have tried that before, what I really would like you to think about is what really is your goal around it?
Is it undo years of conditioning around diet culture because that's what that will do, or is it find a way to eat that feels more intuitive and that helps you to tune into your body better? Because those are two very different things and they take two different approaches. If it's the first one, great.
Just be prepared for the chaos and everything that comes with it. Be mentally prepared for that journey.
If it's the second, if it's actually I just want to be able to tell what my body wants from me, then I think that we need to be careful about just dumping the diet rules and hoping for the best. We need something that gives us maybe a bit more structure.
And I'd say probably the majority of women I work with, they still want a bit of structure. And I'll talk a little bit about foundations we can put into place which are going to help us to tune into our body better.
But before we do that, let's talk about nervous system work.
So this is another one that a lot of women do try and add into their lives because they understand that their Nervous system has a really big role to play in our relationship with food. So it feels very obvious that we will do some nervous system work. And you know what? I could not agree more.
I think that, again, it's one of the foundations of what I do with my clients. We work on the nervous system, we work on how we're actually going to manage the nervous system better or make it more resilient, should I say?
But yeah, putting more resilience into your nervous system so that you're able to deal with your emotions in a different and potentially better way.
Because for many of us, what we do is we use food as a way to regulate ourselves, to feel better, to feel calmer, to feel more relaxed, all of those things. So it absolutely makes sense that working on our nervous system is going to really help us because it helps with the emotional regulation.
So therefore, it's gonna help with things like comfort eating and emotional eating. Something that I know that a lot of women that I work with do struggle with.
It helps you to tune into your body like we talked about before, so you can read its signals better. Because you become more mindful when you do things like meditation, for example. It doesn't ask you to stay in the head.
It asks you to sink into the body. It asks you to feel what you're feeling in your body. And so it can help with that as well.
And it helps you to become more mindful, generally, which we can then translate into how we deal with food. Many things as many other things as well, but also how we deal with food. But again, it's something that a lot of women do.
And then they're like, why is this not translating into day to day life? Why is this not translating into the way that I deal with food?
So they can feel really calm in the moment when they're actually doing that practice, when they're doing that meditation, they're thinking, yeah, this feels great. I feel calm. I feel like my brain has quietened down. That's amazing. And that in and of itself is really, really helpful, useful.
So if you are doing that, keep doing it, it all helps. You know, meditation has been shown to change the brain in really positive ways. So don't stop doing that.
But what often happens is we can feel really calm in those moments, but it falls apart as soon as real life happens. And so you start to wonder, you're thinking, well, I'm doing all this nervous system work. Why is it not making me feel better day to day?
And I was talking to somebody about this the other Day, actually, I'd worked with somebody else who'd given them these really great tools for dealing with emotions in the moment.
But she was really struggling to put it into practice because by the time the moment arrived, she wasn't in the right headspace to put it into practice.
Because when you're in a moment of lots of stress, or you're feeling very anxious about something, or you're feeling pissed off about something, the last thing you want to do is stop and go, right, I'm going to take some deep breaths and I'm going to take a couple of minutes, right? You're already in overdrive, you're already reacting to the situation.
So that for me is the biggest gap when it comes sometimes to nervous system work and mindfulness work. And again, don't get me wrong, they are amazing, amazing, amazing things to do and we all should be doing them.
And they will definitely help with your relationship around food. But we need to put stuff underneath that as well.
Because sometimes this nervous system work, this mindfulness work, it becomes a bit of a sticking plaster sometimes, which trying to put on top it on top of stuff that we maybe haven't dealt with.
And so those regulation tools, they're working on the symptom, they're working on the activated state, but they're not actually addressing the belief systems underneath. In other words, what is the thing, what is the belief, what is the thought, what is the emotion that creates that activated state in the first place?
So let's give you an example. You have a tough day at work, you're pissed off, somebody has really stressed you out because they've had a go at you about something.
You come home, you inhale a packet of biscuits, you dive into the wine, whatever it is, that's your, your poison. And you don't do that just because your nervous system was activated. You do it because the situation at work activated you.
Your nervous system was activated by this situation at work. It could be a belief about your worthiness.
It could be something which speaks to a deeper fear you have about yourself or a deeper wound that you have within yourself.
So if you're not looking at that stuff, the same things are going to keep triggering you over and over again, and you're going to still keep having the same reactions over and over again. Even if you are doing the nervous system work, of course it's going to help.
But let's look at this layer underneath where you're going, okay, well, my nervous system was still activated at work today because somebody pissed me off. Why did they piss you off? What was it that. That made you feel about yourself? Because that's usually the thing it comes down to more often than not.
A belief about our own worthiness, a belief about what is possible for us, a belief about who we are, a belief about how likable we are, all of those kind of things. We have those deeper wounds within us, and if we don't look at those as part of this work, then we're going to keep getting activated.
Or let's say maybe you've built a life that depends on your. Your constant labor and your lack of rest. And I don't think there are very many women out there who have not built a life which depends on that.
All of those things give us our sense of worth. And then food becomes the only outlet, because it's a really quick and easy outlet for those things. And so, again, nervous system work can help.
But until you deal with the fundamental reason why you believe that you can't rest, then the outcomes are never gonna change that much, because you're still gonna need an outlet. You're still gonna need a way to let off steam, so to speak. And food is still that thing for you.
And that's why the work that I do with my clients is so powerful, because we're not just dealing with the symptom. We're actually getting to grips with what's making that happen in the first place.
And when we do that, that is gonna allow us to become more mindful in all sorts of spaces in our lives, including food. So what do we do about all of this?
If we have tried these things, if we're like, we're going, yeah, I. I've done all this meditation and stuff, but actually I still get activated regularly. Or we've tried intuitive eating, and we've gone, no, it feels too chaotic. What are we going to do about this?
Is the only way to get these things to work better, delving into your deepest, darkest fears? Luckily not. There is another way that we can become more mindful about food.
And we can help our nervous system to do that in a way that really impacts us in the times that we need it. And I call it react to respond. So, for example, where intuitive eating says, right, throw away the rule book and start learning to trust your body.
React to response says, right, here's actually how you build that trust one moment at a time, starting from a place that you actually feel safe.
And where nervous system work says, regulate the reaction, reactor response says, understand what's triggering that reaction in the first place and change your relationship to that trigger. So we're not stripping away structure, we're not taking away rules, we're not removing the things that are making you feel safe right now.
But what we're doing is we're adding awareness alongside that so that the rules start to fall away naturally. You don't need the rules so much when you are able to regulate yourself better, when you're able to understand where that reaction keeps coming from.
So an example of when you are in reaction mode is you feel stressed, you're pissed off, whatever it is. You get home, you eat the whole packet of biscuits. You were only gonna eat two, but you ate the whole packet because it's.
It was making you feel better. Then you have the guilt, you decide, I knew it, I can't bloody be trusted around biscuits. Why did I have these in the house, for God's sake?
I'm so stupid. So that even reduces more your ability to regulate yourself. And then you respond by trying to become even more disciplined. Right, that's it.
I'm not having biscuits in the house anymore. Enough is enough.
And so what we're doing in that situation is rather than saying, hang on a minute, why did I let that situation make me feel like that in the first place, we're going, the problem is obviously me. The problem is the packet of biscuits. And so if I get rid of the packet of biscuits, then all of a sudden that fixes everything. But it doesn't.
Of course it doesn't.
Because until you understand why that stress hit you in that way in the first place, why you have that reaction in the first place, you're just going to find a different avenue for that to come out. You'll find the bottle of wine, you'll find the stash of leftover Easter chocolate, you'll find something else. You will find something else.
So that's what's happening when you're in reaction mode. It's almost like this cascade of consequences that happen as a result of that initial feeling, a cascade of things that we cannot stop.
It's like this flood that comes in and we can't stop feeling the guilt, feeling annoyed with ourselves, saying, I knew it, I can't be trusted around this food. And then, like I say, responding by trying to become even more disciplined.
Instead, what happens in response mode, which is the one that we want to get you to, is you might still have the trigger, you might still feel stressed, you might even still eat the bloody biscuits. Right?
Those things might still happen initially, in the early stages but either during or after that event, you start to learn to be able to take a step back. You actually learn to ask yourself the right questions. This is what I do with my clients. I do offer advice, but that's not really what I'm there for.
What I'm there for is to ask the right questions, to ask the questions that help you to understand yourself better, ask the questions that help you to understand your reactions better.
So that instead of I'm bad because I did that thing that I told myself I wasn't going to do, you start asking yourself questions about, I wonder why I reacted like that, that what was it about the situation that made me feel that way?
And the more you start to do that, the earlier in the process, you can start to catch yourself and you can start asking the right questions instead of just jumping to the same reactive conclusions all the time. You know, what did I actually need? What was really going on for me there? Why did that situation make me feel like that?
We're starting to ask the right questions. And it doesn't mean you have to delve into all the deepest part of yourself for this, but it's just allowing yourself to become a detective, right?
To observe with a bit more distance, to build a picture of what that pattern is that you've created, why that pattern exists.
Because then when you can do that, you allow yourself to respond with, to yourself with more compassion, kindness, understanding, rather than just always reacting in the heat of the moment, which just creates more of the same.
If you think about when you're dealing with a small child, for example, if they're throwing a wobbler, then being more strict, reacting with anger, it very rarely works out. It usually makes the situation a lot, lot worse. Often holding space for that reaction they're having.
Not allowing yourself to get dragged into the river every time. Was it, one of my tutors would say, when I was doing my therapeutic coaching course, you've got to learn to not jump in the river with them.
Because as soon as you jump in the river, you're just in those raging torrents yourself. So this is with a toddler. You don't want to jump in the river with them. That's never, ever going to work. You want to be able to take a step back.
You want to be able to show a bit of compassion for that. And when you are able to do that, I mean, I don't know about you, but I couldn't always do that when my kids were really little.
But when you can do that, you know that it Helps the situation so much more. You feel better about your, your response to that situation, and you're just learning to do that for yourself here.
You're not trying to be perfect, but it's about creating this deeper understanding of who are you, why are you reacting the way that you do, and therefore what other options do you have to respond in this situation. And I'm not saying it happens overnight.
It takes a little bit of practice, but it's amazing the difference that you can start to feel and actually quite a short time of practicing this, putting this level of awareness into your life.
And if you do want to learn how to put that into practice, by the way, when it comes to food particularly, then come and join me for Ditch the Diets, which is starting very, very shortly. Because what I do inside that is I actually take you through this full react to respond method.
So teaching you how to apply it into situations in your life where keep sabotaging yourself. You're bouncing between the on it and off it phases with food. You're finding yourself using food in a very reactive way.
And what we'll do is we'll, we'll take you from the reactive state to actually starting to respond in a more mindful way so you can make more mindful decisions about food. You can put yourself back in the driver's seat again. And what we'll be doing really is, is building that trust with yourself one moment at a time.
You'll do that with my support as well. So each and every one of you will get one to one coaching within that space. And we do it all inside the messaging app Telegram.
So what essentially happens in that is that each morning I drop a voice note and coaching prompts into the group for that day, taking you through that react to respond method. And then you will reflect on that. You'll come back to me with an answer to that.
You'll come back to me with your thoughts on that particular coaching prompt for the day. And then I come back and I respond to each one of your messages. I do voice notes personally. You don't have to do voice notes if you don't want to.
You can just type it out into the group. So whatever way work best for you.
And essentially what it means is that for each of the three days, you get coached every single day on helping you to apply this method to your life. So you can move away from that dieting mindset.
You can move into a relationship with food that feels a bit more consistent, that feels less pressured, and that ultimately allows you to make healthier choices to support your goals as well. So I make it really, really easy. You don't have to be available at specific times. You catch up as and when you want to each day.
You respond as and when you want to each day. And I will get back to you back to your mess each afternoon or the following morning.
Everybody gets their own space inside the group as well, so that it's really easy to see your coaching messages, really easy to keep track of everything for yourself. But because we do it as a group as well, you're also going to get the benefit of that sense of everybody being in it together as well.
So I think that's a really special part of it too. So if you do want to join me for that, then we start on Tuesday 23rd June. I've got a few spaces left and I would love for you to join me.
So if you head to lifeeditcoaching.com forward/dishthesio ditch the diets. Not ditch the diets, ditch the diets. You can find out more and secure your space.
I'll put the link in the show notes as well, but hopefully you are now beginning to understand, okay, I've tried these things before. I've tried letting go of the rules. Didn't feel like it particularly worked. Hopefully this has given you a sense of, oh, okay, right.
I'm beginning to understand why that might not have worked. Maybe my expectations around intuitive eating were very different from what it actually is.
Maybe I'm doing all this mindfulness work, but really it's putting a sticking plaster on top of everything. I'm using it to try and control my urges and to control myself.
Whereas actually this should be about me understanding myself better, asking better questions, asking the right questions so that I get a different response, I get a more helpful response out of this. And that's really what this is all about.
It's about moving from that reactive state, which happens automatically, which is this cascade that you cannot seem to stop, and moving into the responsive state where you are able to respond differently, you are able to respond better. And so hopefully that has helped you to see why that might not have worked for you.
Hopefully to see a better way for yourself where you can maybe not have to let go of the rules quite yet, but you can do this work. And then honestly, what tends to happen is that that as you do that work, the rules just naturally start to fall away.
You don't need them as much anymore. They start to become less necessary in your life because you're starting to understand yourself better, connect your body better and respond better.
So I'd love to hear your feedback as always on this episode. So do come and find me over on Instagram lifeeditwithalex. But otherwise I'm gonna love you and leave you. I'll see you back here again next time.
Thank you as always for joining. If this episode has hit home, share it with another woman who needs to hear it.
And come connect with me on Instagram at Life Edit with Alix for more real talk, mindset shifts and daily inspiration.