Why Willpower and Dieting Don’t Heal Overeating

Most diet, weight loss, and nutrition books have honest, practical advice on how to eat less, move more, and lose weight. You read them and think, “Great. Now I know how to lose weight and stop overeating.”

And then you get slip up. So you apply more will power. You read more health books. You keep doing what you’re doing – only you try harder. You try to be more disciplined.

This works. For a while.

But then you sabotage yourself – again.

Have you heard that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result? We’ve all been there. Particularly with food and weight loss.

I’m going to suggest a different tactic. The only way you can heal overeating at the root is by gently and lovingly turning towards the pain that keeps you stuck.

One of the primary reasons we continue to overeat is that we don’t love ourselves. You’ve probably heard this before. You may or may not believe it. That doesn’t matter. What matters is how this shows up in your life.

Let’s say that you resolve to lose your extra weight and tame your eating habits. You make an honest effort to go the gym, to eat differently, to eat less.

But over time, you find yourself resisting doing the work. You find it harder and harder. Your momentum slips and fades. You find yourself feeling angry that you have to watch what you eat, that you have to exercise. You start fighting against yourself.

Your good side says, “Eat the veggies. Put away the ice cream. Put away the second helping. Go for a walk.”

Your bad side says, “Forget it! I don’t care. I want to eat whatever the heck I want. I’m tired of working so hard.”

You battle back and forth – often in the same day, in the same meal. This becomes so exhausting that you give up. You reconcile yourself to the fact that you will never have freedom from food, that you will always be fat and overeating. And you feel hopeless.

How do you find freedom without killing yourself? How do you stop the battle?

Sweetheart, the answer is not in another diet, in more willpower, in more discipline. That’s insanity.

The answer is in the heart. The answer is in love.

Why are you trying to stop overeating? Is it because you love yourself and you don’t want to add to the suffering in your life? Or is it because you can’t stand your fat, overeating, out of control self, and you want to” tame” this ugly, sinful, bad, wrong, uncontrollable aspect of you?

We tend to use the latter. And then we wonder why we don’t respond with motivation, eagerness and joy to its directives to eat less and put away the leftovers.

It would be like yelling at a child and screaming at her and telling her that you won’t love her until she shapes up and gets her stuff together – and then wondering why she rebels and resists your every effort to change her. And worse – blaming her for it!

Beloved, it’s impossible to be torn in two and find wholeness. It’s impossible to fight against yourself and change.

Whenever we feel that someone is controlling us or is trying to get us to change, our counterwill rears it head. It’s as if we say, “You can’t make me. Just watch!” and we do the opposite of what they say or want. We do this with ourselves, too. As soon as we say, “You can’t overeat,” another part of ourselves so, “Just watch me!”

No one wants to feel controlled, because control is a lack of trust – and love. We feel this lack of love that comes along with the control, with the willpower and discipline, and we bolt. Rightly so. We all want to be loved. Every single part of us – especially those parts of us that most need our love; especially those parts of us who want to binge and overeat.

As long as our motivation to change is coming from fear, a lack of trust, and control, we will resist it. We will fight against it and ourselves. We will sabotage our progress.

How do you stop the sabotage? How do you stop fighting yourself?

With your heart.

By trusting yourself. By loving yourself. By loving those parts of you that you most dislike – like your fat, out of control, overeating self.

Conditional love – “I will only love you if; I will only love you when…” – hurts. Terribly. A huge giant split in our soul. It hurts so much that we will do the opposite, we will sabotage ourselves, we will continue to be fat and overeat, until we love ourselves just as we are.

I did this to myself. I hated my chubby, overeating, out of control self. As long as I hated her, as long as I hated a part of myself, as long as I tried to “cut” this person out of my life as quickly as I could by dieting, counting calories, losing weight, I hadn’t accepted her. I was split. I was fighting amongst myself. I had to turn towards this part of me – I had to love and accept the fat, overeating me – in order to quell the behavior.

I know it sounds counterintuitive. And I also know that you can’t create lasting change from a place of hatred and fear. You have to love yourself into change. You have to love yourself as you are, while you also use love as a way to release the overeating behaviors.

This journey out of food really is about self love and self acceptance, the deeper issues that underlie your weight and eating habits. The deeper you go in your journey, the more you may realize how much you have loved yourself conditionally – and how much you have hated your bumbling human self who binges and screws up and does all the wrong things. And how much this has kept you stuck, right where you are.

You will stay stuck until you realize that what is keeping you stuck is you – namely, all the false beliefs you carry around about how you have to be good to be lovable. How the only parts of you that are worthy of love are those good parts – and so you’d better hide and tame and control those bad parts, lest they creep out of their dark closets and reveal themselves.

The question I am asking you today:  How deeply into compassion are you willing to go to find peace?

Love your dark closets. Love your dark humanity alongside your light. Love it and it won’t feel a need to act out in your life to gain your love and acceptance. Love it and you’ll find that need to overeat, to binge, to sabotage fades, softens, dissipates in the warmth of unconditional love.

Want more? Consider these kinds of support from First Ourselves to help with overeating and end to the diet/weight loss/binge cycle:

1. The in-depth Heal Overeating: Untangled support program can transform your relationship with food.
2. Listen to free audio blogs on how to unplug from food:  Trusting your needs, navigating transitions without food, help for “I can’t handle this!” moments, removing the barriers to love, and trusting in the growth you may not see.
3. Learn about our 6 practices to heal food suffering, growing human(kind)ness.
4. Purchase books and workbooks for growing human(kind)ness.

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