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Taking Your Power Back

Feb 13, 2021
man standing in sunrise

Struggling with binge-eating can make you feel powerless. You feel like you can’t control yourself around food - you can’t have certain foods in the kitchen otherwise you know you’ll binge on them. You feel like you just can’t stick to a diet plan no matter how hard you try. You feel like nothing you do helps you lose weight long-term. 

 

Even externally, you feel powerless to outside influences like what your friends and family eat around you, or what food is on offer at the school canteen. Or your work colleagues offering you biscuits and cake. Or the endless onslaught of social events and birthday parties where there’s always food to resist. Or the fact that, unlike other addictions, food isn’t something you can cut out - it’s something that has to be consumed daily so you can’t even block it out.

 

From all sides, you feel powerless! Binge-eating is your life and you just don’t know how you’ll ever feel in control again. I often felt like maybe I would just be stuck like this for the rest of my life.

 

But this is NOT the case! You have 100% power to make change and improve your life. Today, I want to teach you 3 ways you’re giving up your power currently, and how to take it back. So let’s jump right in!

 

1. RELYING ON SOMEONE ELSE TO EMPOWER YOU

You're waiting for someone else to give your truth, to tell you what to do, to make you feel better. But you have the ability to unlock everything you need within yourself. I can hold up a mirror and show you "Here’s a mirror. Now THIS is how powerful you actually are. Now go find it within yourself”. 

So many of us have co-dependent relationships. We think only someone else can give us something we can’t find on our own. But the truth is you are SO powerful. You just don't know it yet!

Examples of this in binge-eating can be:

  • Relying on help from a friend or family member to help you succeed at dieting. I used to visit my mum during the holidays at university and rely on her help to lose weight. It worked short-term but then when I’d leave and go back home I’d go back into my old ways. And then I’d almost give up because I knew I couldn’t do it without her. I needed her. So I’d go downhill for a few months, half trying to get better but waiting until the next holiday home.

  • Relying on a romantic relationship to make you feel worthy of love, or feel attractive. We know binge-eating can really affect your body image, so sometimes we rely on others for love and validation. And if we don’t get that attention, we feel even worse. You don’t need someone else for that! And you shouldn’t expect it from anyone - no one owes you that. But YOU owe yourself that.

  • Relying on an authoritative person to help you. I know you’re here reading my content (amazing! And thank you!) but I don’t want you to be relying on it to empower you. It shouldn’t be a case of ‘I’m going to read this blog / follow her content to push me to recovery. Without it, I’ll just continue bingeing’. That’s not the case at all! You have everything within you already to heal. I’m just holding up the mirror and showing you what’s already there. All we’re doing is doing inner work - that’s all you! I can only do so much 😊

 

2. BLAMING OTHERS

Stop blaming others for your current situation. It’s so easy to blame friends or family who are ‘bad’ influences on our eating habits, or our upbringing for instilling certain eating behaviours in us, or the biggest villain of them all - diet culture - for making us think we have to be a certain weight to be loved and can only do that through restrictive means. It is always easier to do this than take a look within. But blaming others takes away your power. Your power to change to change a situation yourself. Your power to manage, shift and heal energy. It’s not taking ownership over your experience by directing energy elsewhere.

So who are you blaming? How can you take ownership back? Take it back by figuring out who you’re blaming:

“I am the way I am because of ____”

And then transform this blame statement:

“I am making a freaking change now. I don’t care about anything else. I am doing this immediately”

 

3. LETTING GO OF CONTROL

To feel like we have power, we often try to control a situation. Trying to enforce control is a display of not trusting ourselves.

We often want to live in a place of certainty. We want to know exactly what we will eat this week to reach our goal weight, we want to control what food is in the kitchen, we want to control which restaurant we eat out at. We think this level of control will help us reach our destination, but if often backfires.

Pushing and forcing something to happen consumes so much mental space. It derails you from your true nature and true self. Ultimately we don’t have full control over anything. We can create and implement through thoughts which become actions.

Taking back power is recognising it’s OK to not be in control. It’s OK to live in a place of uncertainty, of not knowing where you’re going next, what you’re eating next, how you’re going to lose weight. Because one of the greatest sources of suffering is being in a place where you have an expectation of how something should be but that’s not what’s happening.

 

“I should be skinny by now”

“I should be eating only low-carb this week”

“I should be going to the gym every day”


We feel awful and powerless when there’s a gap between our idea of what should be and what is. When they don’t match, we’re not happy.

 

PRACTICE IN ACTION

Take your power back today by trying out these steps:

Let go of reliance on others to empower you

  • Who are you relying on for empowerment?

  • What are you relying on them for? What feeling or need do they help you with?

  • How can you internally resource that for yourself? (What unmet needs does your inner child have that you’re trying to soothe through external sources?)

Let go of blame on others for your current situation

  • Write down who you are blaming

  • How can you take back the power and ownership yourself?

Let go of excessive control

  • Choose just ONE thing you control for in your diet or body (e.g. weighing yourself every day or counting calories) - let it go for the next week.

  • Remind yourself that you are safe without the controls in place

 

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