I’ve Got Control Issues…

I’ve got control issues 😳🙅🏻‍♀️

For those of you who know me, this statement does NOT come as a surprise…I know. 😂 I can laugh about it now, but earlier on in my life it became a huge problem.

I never really had the best relationship with food, through all of my own doing.  We had healthy balanced meals growing up, a trend I’ve integrated into my now adult life, which has helped me so much in my journey to get healthier! 🥦💁🏻‍♀️

But, once I left home at 18 and could start to make my own food and was in charge of my own nutrition…I crashed and burned.  I KNEW how to be healthy, but food was also my coping mechanism for everything: stress, strong emotions, avoidance, boredom, being social, etc.

Worse, though, food also became the thing I fixated on that I could control when everything in my life starting spinning out of control and falling apart…

One thing lead to another and that need for control spiraled into an eating disorder – for longer than I care to think about during college, I struggled with bulimia.  I couldn’t NOT eat, it was a compulsion, and I wanted the foods that made me HAPPY in the moment, but then after I would panic and HATE MYSELF with a gnawing, terrible, burning passion (that went just so much deeper than food related, but I didn’t know it then) and unfortunately turned to an unhealthy response to “feel better”…and then all of a sudden I felt it. Hot damn, I had control.  I could eat what I want AND not feel terrible!? What!? YES PLEASE.

Quickly, however, it consumed me. I was so desperate to feel in control that I leapt at the first tickle of it. I became obsessed with food, what I would eat and when, how to hide it so no one would know what I was doing because “they just wouldn’t understand”. I was in control, I GOT THIS, I was totally fine…

…except, obviously, I wasn’t 🤦🏻‍♀️

Longer than I care to admit into this sickness, the feelings/issues that had pushed me to that edge had finally gotten too unmanageable. Even my “control” over food and my body couldn’t mask what was really going on.  So, I finally went against everything in me and reached out for some help.

I spent so long crawling uphill desperate to find a healthier space…even when I had the bulimia under control, I still struggled with emotional eating (and still do off and on to this day…I’m a work in progress, and love myself through the struggle!).  

I can say confidently these days that I am 100% in a healthier place! I have a healthy relationship with food because I learned to master my MINDSET and my THOUGHTS about food, but also the thoughts and feelings that were behind it all about myself. You hear me say all the time “our thoughts create our reality” – because our thoughts REALLY ARE that powerful!

Having a healthy relationship with food doesn’t mean jumping from diet to diet. I’ll flat out tell you “I don’t diet” and I MEAN it…because that doesn’t work for me.  To be honest, diets don’t work for many many people! Super restrictive things not only make me feel frustrated, upset and deprived, but any sort of “diet” I take to an extreme out of control, and then sabotage myself on PURPOSE so I won’t go down any road that looks like the one I walked down so many years ago. All around, just not healthy. 🙅🏻‍♀️

After years and years, gaining weight and losing weight and no matter what I did feeling ungodly unhealthy, I’ve finally found a healthy way to think about food, and I’ll never look back 🙂

It’s about learning what works for YOU and YOUR BODY! No one’s ideal foods will look the same, because everyone is different – so why on earth would one diet, one set of foods, one example work for everyone!? It just doesn’t.

If you’re struggling, with an eating disorder, or food or nutrition or your self-image or anything in there, don’t wait one more day to reach out to SOMEONE for help. It doesn’t have to be the way that it’s become…I swear. Please know, even if we don’t talk, even if we’ve never spoken, I love you and want to help you…I am always available to talk, never hesitate to reach out 💜