Secure one of just 5 spaces this month inside my brand new 1:1 space - The Food Freedom Intensive - find out more here

You’ve spent years tracking, restricting and dieting - only to find yourself exhausted, still not feeling good enough and right back at square one. Well…same! At least until I decided to tackle my diet mindset, get honest about my all or nothing mentality, lean into body acceptance and finally find food freedom.

In this episode I’m sharing my own 18-year journey through diet culture - from the Bridget Jones moment that made me question everything, to the moment in lockdown when I finally realised “I can’t do this any more”.

This isn’t a quick fix or 3-step formula. It’s an honest look at why so many of us stay stuck in the binge restrict cycle, why dumping the diet mindset isn’t about food at all and how to stop dieting without the drama (and rediscover your confidence and self esteem).

We’ll talk about:

• How your relationship with food is a direct mirror or your relationship with yourself
• Why food freedom isn’t the same as chaos and how to make healthier, more intuitive choices without the guilt, obsession or all or nothing mindset
• Breaking the diet cycle one step at a time

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Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to Wellbeing, the podcast for women who are done with the hustle and are ready to feel at home in their own skin.

I'm your host, Alex 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 shoulds, and find new ways to live and move that actually feel like you.

Hello there.

Welcome back to the Busy Woman's Guide to well Being.

This week and I have created just a very mini little two part series this week and next week around food Freedom.

I'm going to share this week a little bit about my story, my background in this, what I went through, how I found food freedom after many years of dieting.

Because I think that those personal stories can be really, really helpful.

We all relate, don't we, to other people's stories and to what other people have experienced and gone through.

And so I think that's really useful and also share some of the things that I did on that journey.

And then next week I'm going to go into more of a overview, I suppose of food freedom, what that looks like and how you might get that yourself.

And this really is perfect for anybody who is in that space at the moment of knowing that they don't want to necessarily carry on with what they have been doing, which might be dieting, restricting, tracking calories, weighing themselves all the time, doing all of those things.

And you've got to a place where you feel like, I just, I don't really want to do this anymore.

I know that it's not particularly healthy for me.

I know it's not actually helping me to achieve my goals.

And I think that particularly is the thing that in our 20s, for example, we can do those kind of things and they work for us very quickly and they don't take as much effort.

But as we, we progress through life, we can find that those things just are not as effective for us anymore.

They don't work so well anymore.

They're not doing the job that they used to do.

And so we can end up in a place that just feels really frustrating but also feels very confusing because we kind of know what we want to get to.

We know that we don't want food and our weight and our body and all of that to be taking up quite so much brain space, to feel quite so emotionally charged, I suppose.

But we also feel like what's on the other side might feel a bit Chaotic.

We don't feel like we're in control of things on the other side of that.

And so we can stay a little bit stuck in this no man's land where we don't know quite where to turn.

So I'm really hoping that this week and next week I can help you to start navigating your way through that.

And this is not a quick overnight fix.

This is not a.

Do these three things and you'll wake up tomorrow and you'll be completely free.

That's not quite how this works, but certainly there are steps that we can all be taking right here and right now to help us to move into that in a way that feels safe for us, that doesn't feel so scary, that doesn't feel so chaotic.

And so that's really what I want to share.

And like I say, I. I'm going to start by sharing a little bit around my journey.

Some of you may have heard this before, some of you may not, but I think it's always useful to re.

Listen to these things anyway because there's always new bits that pop up and, you know, really, I lived with dieting for most of my adult life.

I did it for probably 18 years.

I sat down and tried to figure out how long was it exactly.

And really, yeah, it was from my early to mid-20s, particularly into my early 40s, that I did that, and I went through that.

So it was a really long time where that was kind of all that I ever knew as an adult.

It was the only way that I knew to control my weight, to feel confident about myself, to make sure that I was fitting into the jeans that I wanted to fit into and all of that.

It was.

It was all I knew.

But really what I've moved into now is just having so much more ease and peace around food.

You know, I do things like, I eat chocolate pretty much every day.

I always leave a bit of space for that, which is something that the me of 10 years ago couldn't have even fathomed, because chocolate was something that you only ate at weekends and you only had it when you knew that you'd been really good for the rest of the day.

And so you'd earned that chocolate.

Whereas now it just.

It's something that I really enjoy.

It's something I look forward to.

It's something that I have every day.

And I remember as well going through phases where I would really try to not have that sweet treat after lunch, for example.

I don't know why, for me, it's always Lunch rather than dinner, where I feel that need for the sweet treat.

But I always thought, gosh, this is really bad, I've got to get out of this.

I've got to cold turkey my way out of eating something sweet after lunch.

Now I'm like, if I want something sweet after lunch, I'll have something sweet after lunch.

It's not gonna suddenly make me really unhealthy.

It's not gonna suddenly make me pile on a load of weight and I'm gonna enjoy it.

So things like that, having, having much more ease and peace around food.

Also just feeling more at home in my own body.

You know, my body is something that I have always almost fought against.

I always wanted it to be smaller.

Even if even at my smallest, I still felt like it wasn't enough.

I still felt like, okay, well I've reached that goal.

But what if I lost another seven pounds?

That'd feel even more amazing.

So I just feel more at home in my own body now.

It's not that I love my body every single day.

I don't look in the mirror and go, oh my God, you look so amazing.

But sometimes I do do that.

Sometimes I do look in the mirror and go, damn, you look good.

Other days I'm like that bit of cellulite, right?

I'm a normal person, but generally I feel happy in my body exactly as it is.

It doesn't mean I will never change it, it doesn't mean I am not allowed to change it.

It just means that I am okay as I am and if I was to stay like that for the rest of my life, I'd be perfectly happy and that would be okay with me.

And I think the other thing that has come out of this is that I am actually able to make much healthier choices for myself.

Not just in terms of my physical health, not just in terms of what I eat day to day and making sure that I'm having that full range of nut.

Also my mental and emotional well being as well.

Because it, for me, this is all tied up together.

All of this stuff comes in one package and we can't ignore one in expense at the expense of another one.

You know, we have to look at all of these things together.

So yeah, just making healthier choices around my own mental and emotional well being as well.

Because again, for many years I was so tied up in that world of I must weigh less, I must do more, I must try harder, I must eat less.

It wasn't good for me, you know, it did not feel good I had the occasional moment of feeling good in my body, but the rest of the time was worry and panic and thinking about it all the time.

And that's not a very nice place to be.

So, yeah, being able to make much healthier choices for myself.

And I really wanted to share this today because I want you to know I'm somebody who's been there, if you're in that place.

I am somebody who's been there, who has arrived at this new, better place.

From somebody who did used to be obsessed over the scales, from somebody who did used to weigh themselves pretty much every single day, who did used to let that number on the scales dictate how they felt about themselves.

And I particularly remember probably in my 20s, actually, when this all started.

I remember watching Bridget Jones's Diary and you know how she, she writes about weighing nine and a half stone.

And there's a bit where she, she says she's nine and a half stone.

And it's a terrifying slide into obesity.

And I remember at the time I weighed just over 10 stone myself.

Now, 10 stone was hard, hard work for me.

It's not where my body is supposed to be.

It just isn't.

That is not an easy place for me to get to.

It takes a huge amount of work.

It takes a huge amount of discipline.

It takes a huge amount of restriction for me to get to that place.

And so there was me thinking, oh, my God, I'm at my thinnest.

I'm having tried to try so, so, so hard to be here.

And yet here she is talking about a weight that's half a stone less than where I am and about how that is chubby.

So what does that make me?

And I even remember at the time going online a few times to try and search for what various celebrities weighed because I just, I desperately wanted to feel like I was comparable to at least one of them.

And of course, I never was.

They always were eight stone, eight and a half stone, nine stone.

And it made me feel like even at my smallest, even when it was effort, every single day, even when it was an obsession with the scales, an obsession with what I was eating, it still did not feel like enough.

So that is the place that I'm coming from.

That is a place that I am sure many of you are going to be familiar with.

And really, my journey to this started, I think, probably in my teens a little bit, but.

But really it kicked in my mid-20s, I think I'd put some weight on.

Towards the end of university, I started to go to a gym near work.

And I gradually started losing that weight.

And actually, I think at the time I was doing it, I'm going to say relatively healthily, probably looking back, it wasn't that healthy, but it felt it at the time, it felt like a gradual weight loss.

It wasn't an overnight change.

It wasn't suddenly dropping a stone in a month or anything like that.

And I gradually sort of started losing that weight.

And I really loved how it felt when I was losing the weight.

When I was going out, I was buying smaller clothes, but I really then spiraled into go being at the gym several times a week.

I was cutting fat back from my diet as much as possible.

It was low fat, everything.

Because of course that was.

That was the thing, wasn't it, in the early noughties was cut back the fat.

That is the evil thing.

I was being careful with the food that I was eating all the time, even though I was out drinking lots.

I was in my 20s, I was working in London, so of course I was out a lot.

And eventually I joined Weight Watchers Online after I had my daughter 17 years ago.

So what started as a relatively healthy journey to actually getting fit and strong and losing a little bit of weight and doing it in a way that was gradual and healthy slowly sort of spiraled into it just being a little bit more obsessive.

And the thing is, at the time, it didn't feel unusual, right?

Everybody's doing it.

Everybody is doing the same thing.

So the things that I was doing did not feel obsessive.

But when I look back at it, I realize.

I realize exactly how obsessive it was because I was tracking everything I ate.

I was eating as little as possible at breakfast and lunch because then I could save myself for dinner.

I could have a couple of glasses of wine.

In the evening, I could have that weekend blowout.

It was literally all week long.

I'd be calculating, right, how can I save up my points so that I can have the blowout at the weekend?

So that was the way that food was for me.

I was also snacking a lot throughout the day because I never felt full.

But of course, I was looking for the lowest calorie options so I could stay within my points.

And I was just always hungry.

So I was like thinking all day about, well, what can I eat now?

And thinking, no, I can't have that because that's too many calories.

Calories.

But I can have that because that's going to keep my calories really low.

So there Was a lot of that going on.

And like I say, even at my smallest, took tons and tons and tons of work and discipline to get there.

And once I was there, I'd spend my time panicking about putting it back on again or thinking, hey, maybe another half a stone would be great actually.

And I think for me, when I became a PT, so I became a PT, gosh, before I had my daughter.

So probably about 20 odd years ago, I qualified and I started working with women.

I think it made it even worse for me because I started to feel like I've got a particular image that I need to keep up.

People are not going to believe in me, they're not going to trust in me as a good PT if I am not thin.

And I basically stayed like that for 18 years doing that, going through that cycle over and over and over again, putting a bit of weight on, losing a bit of weight, putting a bit of weight on, losing a bit of weight and basically being obsessed with the scale, obsessed with the clothes that I was fitting into, obsessed with staying small all the time.

It was hard.

It was really, really, really hard work.

Now I'd normalized it enough to think that this was just the way that it was, but really, when I look back, it was not.

It was not a healthy way to exist.

It was not a healthy way emotionally, mentally or physically actually as well.

And then there was the moment where it stopped.

And I was thinking back to when this actually happened.

And I think it was around about the first lockdown in 20, 20, maybe a little bit later.

And I remember thinking to myself, right, come on, you know, you've got to get yourself sorted.

You've got to get your act together.

In fact, I think it might have been, you know, that very first lockdown, cast your mind back where everybody went a little bit mental for a while.

Like, we started having a takeaway every Friday night, which is not something that we'd done previously.

It was almost that end of the week treat that we would look forward to all week long because obviously there was nothing else to look forward to.

We couldn't go anywhere or do anything.

So we'd start having these end of the week takeaways.

I remember a couple of times sitting there at lunchtime on like a Wednesday and having a glass of wine because I could, right, and the weather was amazing.

And so I sat out in the garden and so a lot of these habits crept in and I think I sort of got to the end of that first lockdown.

I remember thinking to myself, right, you've got to pull yourself together, sort yourself out.

We're coming out of lockdown now.

We're going to go back into real life.

You can't be doing all these things anymore.

And I just had this very clear voice that just said, I can't.

I can't do it anymore.

I was in the middle of trying to plan, right, what am I going to do?

Shall I join Weight Watchers online again?

And I just thought, I can't do it.

And so began a process of me starting to unpick all those years of diets one step at a time.

And I did not have a roadmap for that.

I just had that clear decision, that gut feeling that it was finally time to step away from something that, yes, I recognize as being destructive.

But it really was just that feeling of like, I just can't do it.

I can't do it to myself anymore.

And the thing is that as I started to do that, I started to realize that the need that I had to control food, to control my body, did not exist in isolation.

It actually existed in the world where I was being a perfectionist.

And I was doing it in all areas of my life, particularly in my business.

For example, I consistently had these ideas that I didn't do anything with because I thought, yeah, but then I've got to do it like this and this and this and this and this and this.

And if I don't do it like that, then it won't be perfect and there's no point in doing it.

And I.

A lot of stuff in my life was built around this image that I had of myself as a perfectionist, this image that I had to uphold of myself, and that was bleeding over into my relationship with food as well.

I also had this all or nothing mindset.

Either I have to go all in and do all of the things, or I'm just going to have the blowout.

It's why I would go on holiday and I would just keep eating and eating and eating, even when I wasn't hungry, just because it was there, just because I had to make the most of it while I could.

So I was always veering between those two things.

I realized that I really asked way too much of myself all the time.

I expected so much of myself.

I expected so much productivity.

I expected myself to be a great mom.

I expected myself to do it all in business to accommodate every single client that came through the door.

And it was really, really stressful.

And I struggled to rest.

I struggled to allow myself any real compassion or grace.

And I operated from this place of never feeling like I was good enough.

So I'm basically the cliched, classic firstborn only girl, right?

Quiet, obedient.

I was intelligent, but always in the middle of the class.

I always had to work really hard for my grades, and I was always looking for ways to be seen because most of my life, I just.

Because I was good and because I got on with things, I just flew under the radar.

I achieved as expected.

I did not stand out in my life.

And that's what drove me.

It gave me this drive to prove myself all the time.

And it showed in how I did everything in my life, including my body.

And it's when I started to realize this, that these things were all connected, that they were all part of the same thing, the same drive that I had that I was able to start unpicking that.

And I think that's a really important thing that we often miss in this journey.

We think it's about discipline or it's about willpower, it's about trying harder, or it's about having a better program or a better plan or all of those kind of things, but it's really not.

The relationship that we have with food is the relationship we have with ourselves.

And when we start to look at our wider life and we start to go, God, yeah, I do like to be in control.

I wonder why I like to be in control.

That translates into how we deal with food.

When we think about ourselves as being a perfectionist, that translates into how we deal with food.

When we think about ourselves as somebody who is always pushing themselves to do more, and they never feel like they're quite good enough, that translates into how we deal with food.

And so it was when I started to really deal with.

With all of that, when I started to allow myself to look at all of that, finally, after many years of not looking at that, that things started to change.

Not just in my relationship with food, but in how I dealt with everything, how I lived within my life.

I started to realize that all of those things, the ways that I was operating and judging myself, they were not serving me.

They weren't serving me in meaningful ways.

Judging myself, my dress size, judging myself, my level of discipline, judging myself on what I could take off the to do list, none of it was helping me.

I wasn't feeling better about myself.

I was just using it as a way to control myself.

And so this journey that I went on to, saying no to dieting, actually was the start of a journey that saw me Say no to many other things as well.

That helped me to look at my entire life.

And I think that's the thing.

We can't do this stuff in isolation.

We can't get ourselves out of that 18 years, 20 years, 25 years of control that we've tried to have just by having a few better ways of planning our meals, for example.

It's not going to work like that.

We need to like look at where is this actually coming from and realizing that the way that we do life is manifesting in the way that we do food, the way that we do our body as well.

And so what I really started to do for myself was one, get a handle on my stress.

We can't really change and we can't feel comfortable with change if we are very stressed.

Because our body, our brain is going to try and keep us where we are.

It's going to try and keep us going down those well worn paths.

So getting a handle on my stress was important.

Learning to judge myself by other measures was also a big thing as well.

For example, in my business I used to judge myself on how many clients I could get through the door.

But actually it was just creating so much stress and so much pressure that I started to look at other ways that I could measure myself there.

Judging my success with my body by other measures as well.

Am I getting stronger, for example?

Am I learning to accept myself as I am?

All those kind of things were really important.

I actually started making friends with my body for the first time in years.

So rather than me berating it all the time being annoyed with it all the time being frustrated that it wasn't doing what I wanted it to do, I started actually making friends with my body.

And in doing that, it meant that I could connect with it more easily.

I could connect with my needs, I could connect with my desires, I could connect with the things that, that it needed me to do for it.

And that was a really important part of it.

And this is, this is all about the deeper relationship you have with yourself, with success, with stress, with all of those other things.

And it's why when I work with women on this, it's never about the strategies and the practical solutions, at least not to start with.

But it's about where is this coming from?

Why are you feeling the need to control everything?

Why is it that your self worth is hanging off this?

Why is it that you're trying to prove yourself yourself?

And how is this manifesting in your body?

How is this manifesting in your relationship with food?

And with yourself, because I know that all of those things were definitely manifesting in that way for me.

And it's not to say that the strategies, the practical solutions are not important.

There is a time and a place for that.

We do that too.

But that comes later.

We have to have that relationship on a much more stable footing first before we can do that.

So what that looks like for me now is really, you know, I'm not gonna pretend, like I said before, that I feel amazing about my body every day.

I'm human, I have my wobbles.

But I generally find that those days are way outnumbered by the days where I do look in the mirror and I actively like what I see.

Unless, of course, I'm in a changing room, because what the hell is wrong with that lighting in there, right?

We all hate that.

But I look at the mirror and I actively like what I see.

Those days that outnumbered, by getting to devote that mental space to other things, I don't sit there all morning thinking about food.

I sit there all morning thinking about my business, my family, my hopes, my dreams.

I get to be creative.

I get to do the things that I love doing.

They're outnumbered by getting to respond to what my body needs as well.

Recognizing when I'm overwhelmed and just needing to step away from things.

Because what do we do in those situations?

We feel overwhelmed, we push ourselves harder.

We then need the release of the cake or the biscuits or the chocolate or whatever, rather than actually going, do you know what?

I just maybe need to step away for 20 minutes.

That's going to really help me in this situation.

So recognizing what is it that my body needs rather than just reacting to it in the moment.

So that's definitely been something that I've learned.

Those days of feeling rubbish about myself are also outnumbered by getting to enjoy chocolate and cake and doing that without guilt, but also saying no sometimes, because I know those things aren't bad.

I'm allowed to eat them when I want to, but I'm allowed to eat them when I feel like it as well.

And sometimes I don't feel like it.

So it's being able to recognize that as well and being able to actually flipping well enjoy those things rather than them becoming a source of guilt.

And I get to think about food when I need to think about food.

It's no longer something I think about and obsess over all day, every day.

So what does that mean for you and how do you use this?

Because, like I say, I was sharing today's episode because, yes, I wanted to talk about what I've done, how that new relationship looks like for me.

But I also want you to be able to, I suppose, see yourself in some of this, to find parts of this familiar.

Because if you find parts of this familiar, then the stuff that has worked for me is going to be some of the stuff that works for you as well.

And like I said, I'm going to do a second episode next week where I'm going to talk about what free food freedom is really going to look like for you and how you can step closer to that if it's one of your goals.

But for now, I want you to think about a couple of things before you listen to the episode.

So what is it that you want food freedom to actually give you?

How is it that you actually want to feel?

How would your life change if you had real food freedom?

So, looking at the real positive aspects of this, how is it going to free up your energy for other things?

For example, and also thinking about who you would be and how you would show up as somebody who does feel free around food, how's that going to change your life?

How's that going to feel in your life?

How's that going to look like for you?

Who would you be?

So you can start stepping into that right now.

So.

So I'm going to leave you to have a think about that, but I just want to also share with you a brand new opportunity to work with me, which is going to address exactly this.

It's called the Food Freedom Intensive, and it's exactly what you need.

If you keep having this thought going around in your head that you're really ready to step away from the control, the restriction.

You really want to experience what it's like to feel more free around food, but you're just not quite sure what that looks like for you yet.

And inside this intensive, what we're going to help you to do is understand your current relationship with food.

The role it's playing in your life right now will help you to create clarity on how you want that relationship to look in the future and start to introduce you to who you are with that food freedom.

In other words, how you can start showing up as that person right now.

We're going to help you to plan that route from where you are now towards that new reality.

And you're also going to get some integration practices and sessions that are going to really help you embody that new relationship, tackle old patterns that are popping up and give you the confidence to, to really step into that Food Freedom.

So we do a one to one session together plus you're gonna get a set of pre session recordings to prime you for that and get ready to make the most of your time or our time together and some additional post session integration recordings that you can keep as well.

And basically I'm helping you to leapfrog all the work that I had to do and give you that proper roadmap to navigate through this so you can accelerate your way to Food Freedom with the benefit of my experience, my expert and make this as seamless as possible.

Now I am only offering five spaces this month for that so if you want to grab one of those just head to lifeeditcoaching.com foodfreedom I'll pop the link in the show notes as well, but in the meantime I'll see you back here next week.

But for now I'm gonna love you and leave you.

Thank you as always for joining me.

If this episode has hit home, share it with another woman who needs to hear it and come connect with me on Instagram Instagram at Life Edit with Alex for more real talk, mindset shifts and daily inspiration.