You've decided you're done. Done with the tracking, the rules, the constant second-guessing around food. So the obvious next move is to just... stop, right?

Not so fast.

In this episode I'm breaking down why "just stop dieting" is some of the worst advice you can give someone who's spent years - maybe decades - relying on diets to keep them on the straight and narrow.

I share what happened when I gave up dieting for good six years ago (it wasn't pretty), why the fear of letting go isn't irrational, and why your body might genuinely be unable to "just listen to it's hunger" right now.

Plus: the one thing I coach every client to build before they ditch a single rule, and why that's exactly what we're doing inside Ditch the Diets, starting 6th October.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ditch the Diets - doors open now, starts 6th October → book your space here
• 🎧 Bonus mini-episode: exactly what happens inside Ditch the Diets → listen here

Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to Wellbeing.

I'm your host, Alex, and I'm here for every single one of you who's nailing so much in your life and is so busy looking after everybody else's well being while your own, well, it often ends up getting put on the back burner.

Here's where we fix that.

Today I'm talking about one of the very first pieces of advice I often give to clients who come to me wanting to get off the diet roller coaster, which weirdly is do not stop dieting.

Sounds weird, but there is method in the madness.

Let's get into it, Right?

So you have decided that you just cannot keep putting yourself through diets.

You've been doing it for decades and not only do you still not have the result that you want, but it has become a bit of an energy vampire and it feels like it's all you can think about and you're just ready to feel more relaxed around food.

And more than that, you're ready to feel like you can actually trust yourself to make better decisions around food as well.

And believe me, I have been that.

I gave up diets about six years ago now, around the time of COVID I was sitting there, I was planning my next diet.

I was thinking, right, come on, you've got to get yourself sorted out.

I think it was maybe after the summer holidays or the Christmas holidays, something like that.

And I was thinking, right, time to sort yourself out, love.

You've, you know, you've, you've had a nice time and everything, but the jeans are starting to get a little bit too tight.

Let's get sorted.

And I just, as I was doing it, this thought came to me of I can't do it.

I just cannot do it.

Because I'd been dieting for the last 15, 18 years and I just was so sick of thinking about it all the time.

I was sick of the brain space that it was taking up.

I was sick of saying no to myself all the time.

I was sick of tracking everything.

It just was too much.

And so this thought came to me, I just can't do this anymore.

And I'm going to be honest, what followed was a little bit chaotic.

It's not what I would recommend to everybody, but I learned a lot in that time and I've really brought that together into the way that I work with other women who are ready to do the exact same thing.

Because something that I come up against time and time again is women will come to me saying, God, I'M so sick of this.

Like, I just don't want to do this to myself anymore.

But I'm also scared about what happens when I do let go of it.

Because when you've been doing this for decades, which often a lot of the women that I work with have been, it's not as simple as just saying, right, I'm just going to stop doing that now.

Sure, that was something that I did, but it felt pretty uncomfortable at times, I'm not gonna lie.

And I had to figure out a lot of that stuff by myself.

And so when we're in that place and we just really feel like we can't do it to ourselves anymore, we want to find a way to do it, that sort of feels safe, that sort of feels like it has a little bit of structure around it.

And so when I am working with the women that I work with, what I really do is, yes, I draw on my therapeutic coaching background.

I draw the background that I have of literally a decade and a half of working with women on their fitness, their wellbeing, their nutrition, and all of the things that they say to me.

And I bring that together with my own personal experience and the things that I had to go through and the thoughts that I had going on in my head and the worries that I had going on in my head around what was going to happen when I finally let go of this, to actually inform the way that I work with women.

And that's why I've come to the conclusion that for the vast majority of us, the last thing that we should do when we want to give up diets is actually stop dieting.

And I'm going to talk you through exactly why that is today.

And I think, as I've already touched on, the thing is that giving up diets is not easy because we are giving up something that feels like it's kept us on the straight and narrow for a really, really long time.

I get women saying to me things like, I have to weigh myself, because it's the only thing that keeps me honest.

Because they feel like if I weigh myself and if I know what the real situation is, I can't get around it.

I have got to do something about it if I know what.

What is going on there.

And likewise with tracking, it's that.

That idea that I can't really trust myself to make the right choices.

But if I track everything or if I follow a particular diet or a particular plan, then that is going to keep me on the straight and narrow.

And that's the Thing, this isn't just about diets per se.

This is about anything that you have been doing over the years to in qu notes keep you on track.

So the weighing, the measuring the points that you might have tracked on Weight Watchers, the.

What is it?

Sins.

I hate that.

I absolutely hate that about Slimming World.

Sins, it's awful.

But you might have been tracking your sins on.

On something like Slimming World.

You might have just been restricted.

You might just have certain rules that you have around food, around what you're allowed to eat, when you're allowed to eat it, and things like that.

So anything like that, I sort of put under this umbrella of diets.

And it's essentially anything that you are doing to keep you on the straight and narrow, because without it, you don't really trust yourself.

So that's one of the reasons that giving up dieting isn't easy.

I think the other thing is having diets or whatever it looks like in your life is that feeling of always having something to fall back on.

So even if you do fall off the wagon, even if you do go on that holiday and overindulge, even if you do put some weight on over Christmas, you've always got in the back of your head the idea of, it's okay because I can back to my diet, I've got a solution to this.

So we always have that in the background for ourselves.

It's given us structure when we don't know what to do for the best.

And again, it's this vicious circle with dieting in that we start it to get a particular result around weight loss, and then it becomes this thing that gives us structure because we have started to lose trust in ourselves.

And that's something I'm going to talk about a little bit later, is that the more that we do this, the more we erode trust in ourselves to know what to do for the best.

And so even though we might be sitting there saying, I don't want to do this anymore, I just.

I hate how I feel when I'm on a diet.

It can be very hard to let go of because over time that trust has eroded and we're like, yeah, but I don't trust myself without it.

I feel like it's going to give me permission to eat all things and I'm going to end up in a much, much worse place.

And so the fear holds us back.

And I think the final reason, I mean, there might be others for you as well, but the final reason I often see is why giving up Diets is so hard is that it has given you results and that means that you will go back to it.

Because you keep saying to yourself, that diet worked for me before.

So if I go back to that, I have this certainty that I will lose that weight and I will feel better about myself.

And over time, over the years, what's probably happened is when you're on a diet, you lose weight.

When you're not on a diet, you likely gain it again.

And so you've come to the conclusion that the only way that you can achieve what you want to achieve, the only way that you can feel better about yourself, is by being on a diet or in some sort of restrictive situation.

So all of that sort of sits behind this thing that holds you back from making that change, even though you really want it, even though you don't want to keep doing this to yourself.

You've got all of these little bits underneath it.

All of these little lessons over the years that have said, yeah, but it keeps you on the straight and narrow.

Yeah, but it gives you structure.

Yeah, but you can't trust yourself without it.

Yeah, but the only time you ever lose weight is when you're on a diet.

And so of course, you end up in this, this.

Or feeling trapped in this place of, I want that thing, I can see what it is I want, but I'm too scared to go there.

I'm too scared about what will happen.

And we end up in that binary situation.

Either I'm on diets and I'm tracking, or I'm totally out of control.

And of course, we have the proof to back that up as well, don't we?

Because if you think about what happened the last time you got off a diet, you'd been being good for a really long time and then something happened, or you went on a holiday, or you just decided you didn't want to do it anymore for a while.

You probably went a bit mad before you then reined it back in again, Right?

So we're in this binary situation and then we just keep looking back at the proof.

We're like, you see, every time I do it, this is what happens.

Every time I do it, I go mad.

I can't be trusted.

And so that's why I don't advise women to just give up diets or to listen to their bodies and hope for the best.

Because that fear is going to ricochet you back into that all or nothing thinking.

It's going to ricochet you back into that diet loop and it's going to be another piece of proof that it doesn't work for you.

I think the second thing is that what happens is if you do come off years of restricted, it's pretty likely your body's no longer very good at deciphering signals.

So listening to your body is impossible.

It's impossible.

It doesn't register or trust hunger because your body has been taught to override it time and time again.

It doesn't recognize the difference between hunger and emotion.

And so what happens is it can feel very out of control.

And while you're feeling out of control, while you're feeling fearful, your nervous system is upregulated.

And when your nervous system is upregulated, that makes change or success, certainly successful change, much, much, much harder.

We need to be able to work with our nervous system to make meaningful change.

We need to work with our nervous system to start recognizing hunger, to start recognizing emotions properly.

We need to work with our nervous system to start responding to the emotions appropriately.

So we need our nervous system to be on board.

We need to be in a place where we feel safe to try out, to experiment.

We need to be able to create a bit of space around all of this, around all of the noise that likely comes with diets, food and our bodies.

And so when you go into this just throwing diets in the bin and going, right, come on, let's do this, it can feel like a lot of pressure.

And what happens is straight away you get this evidence of, you see, I don't understand hunger.

I don't understand what my body is trying to tell me.

I don't understand what this emotion is.

And that's going to make it very, very, very hard to make those changes.

So, yes, ultimately my goal is to help you say goodbye to diets.

I want to get you to a place where you have built real trust with your body, where you are able to feel the difference between hunger and boredom and stress, where you're able to respond more appropriately, where you're able to make decisions around food without all the second guessing.

And more than that, to actually just feel peaceful around food so it's not taking up up so much of your brain space every day.

That is what I want for you.

I want you ultimately to not need to depend on diets.

I want you to have chocolate in the house and forget it's there.

I want you to stop saying things to yourself like, I only have to look at a slice of cake and I put three pounds on.

I want you to be able to think about food when you're hungry and not otherwise, right?

I want all of those things for you.

But in order to get there, you need to feel safe to do that.

You don't need to be in a place where you're constantly worried about what you are going to do because you're like, I don't trust myself.

I don't trust myself without this.

And so if you are thinking of ditching the diets at the moment, my advice would always be, don't start with ditching the diet.

Start with, how can I make this feel safe?

How can I give myself the necessary space to start listening to my body and ultimately to start responding to it differently?

And I think that really is the key that you have an end goal of.

I want to be in a place where I can be mindful around my choices.

I can trust myself around choices.

I don't need a shit ton of rules to keep me on track all the time.

We want to get to that place, but what we need to do is we need to create the foundations that are going to make this happen.

We don't jump from one thing to the next without actually creating a pathway.

It's kind of like jumping over a ravine.

Would you rather try jumping over the ravine and just hoping you kind of get to the other side, or are you going to go on the bridge?

Okay, so actually thinking about creating the bridge, which is safety, which is space, which is the comfort to try different things out, to see what might be going on, to understand what is happening in your body, that is going to help you to respond differently.

And what I tend to find is that then over time, as the more that we build that trust, the more we feel ready to let go of some of the rules, the more we start to let go of the tracking.

And, you know, it might be in small places at first.

So the first thing might be that you go, do you know what?

I'm gonna stop weighing myself every day.

I feel safe enough to let go of that now.

And then the next thing might be, okay, well, I'm gonna keep tracking my protein, but you know, I'm gonna stop tracking my calories for a little while.

I'm gonna just lean into listening to my hunger signals for a little while.

So you might do a little bit of that, but you might go, but I'm gonna.

I'm gonna help myself by.

By still tracking my protein, because that kind of feels safe.

So it's like thinking about what are the little steps I can take along the way that.

That I can trust enough to Give it a try, to have a little bit of an experiment with, without worrying that I'm gonna go completely off the rails.

And that's what I really want you to think about creating for yourself.

Now, this is the kind of thing that we're gonna actually be doing Inside Ditch the diets from 6 October, because it's all about helping you to take the first steps towards getting off that diet roller coaster, which is moving from the reaction to the response.

Now, in other words, that is deciphering what your body is trying to tell you so that instead of living in a more reactive mode.

So reactive mode is, for example, where you bounce from diet to freedom and back again because it feels scary, or where you tend to respond to your emotions with food all the time, or where you feel like you're stuck in this cycle that you just can't get out of, even though intellectually you know what to do.

So that's your reactive mode.

And we want to move you into a more responsive mode.

And what that really means is you open the door to other ways to make decisions around food, you're able to start trusting yourself to make the next decision.

So that's what we're going to be doing.

Inside Ditch the Diets is helping you to go from one to the next, but creating the bridge between it, creating the safety, creating the space that you need in order to do that for yourself.

And I'm going to be coaching you through those first essential steps, actual individual coaching, to relearn that trust.

And I would love for you to join me for that.

If you head to lifeeditcoaching.com ditch the diets, you can find out more and secure your space.

I'll put the links in the show notes as well.

And if you want to know a little bit more about exactly what the experience is going to look like, have a listen to the mini bonus episode that I've put for put together for you this week as well.

Again, I'll link it in the show notes as well, but that's going to give you a bit more detail about how it's going to look, how it's going to feel to be inside of it, and what's going to actually happen in there as well.

So if you're sitting there thinking, yeah, do you know what?

I feel like I really want to do this, this or I need to do this, then go have a listen to that as well, right?

That's where I'm going to love you and leave you for this week.

If you have enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend who needs it.

And of course, make sure you're following me over on Instagram at Life Edit with Alex, and I will see you back here again next time.