A Diet Is Temporary, Recovery Is A Lifestyle

If you have spent years dieting, you probably know what it feels like to believe that the next plan is finally going to be “the one” that changes everything. Maybe you have started out on a Monday morning or the first of the month, with a brand new determination, cleaned out your kitchen, bought the foods you were supposed to eat, and promised yourself that this time you would stick with it. Maybe you have counted calories, measured portions, eliminated entire food groups, followed meal plans, joined programs, and spent more time thinking about food than you ever wanted to admit. Then, somewhere along the way, the plan became exhausting, overwhelming, life happened, the restrictions became harder to maintain, and you eventually found yourself eating in the same ways that had caused you to start dieting in the first place.

If you have lived through that cycle, I want you to know that you are not alone. And I especially want you to know that your inability to make a diet last does not necessarily mean that you lacked discipline or willpower.

For may of us who struggle with food addiction, the problem was never simply that we needed a better diet or that we needed to try harder. The problem was that we were trying to use a temporary solution to address something that required a completely different way of living.

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A Diet Is Temporary; Recovery Is A Way Of Life

When we go on a diet, there is usually an ending in our minds, even if we don’t say it out loud. We might be dieting until we lose twenty pounds, until summer arrives, until the wedding is over, until we fit into our favorite jeans, or until we finally reach that arbitrary “goal weight” number that will magically make us happy. The plan has a beginning, a set of rules to follow, and an imagined finish line where we believe we will be able to relax, and return to our “normal”.

The problem is that our “normal” is often the very place that got us into trouble to begin with.

When the diet ends, most of us return to the old habits, thinking, and behaviors that existed before the diet began, because the diet may have changed what we were eating, without changing our relationship with food. We may have lost weight, but we haven’t necessarily learned what to do with the emotions, loneliness, stress, disappointment, celebration, boredom, resentment, exhaustion, pain, or the endless food thoughts that made eating feel so complicated in the first place.

That cycle can continue for years, sometimes decades, because the diet was never intended to become a way of life.

Recovery is different because there is no finish line where we get to say, “I’ve completed recovery so now I can go back to the way I used to live“. Recovery becomes part of the way we live our lives, and the goal isn’t simply to get through a period of restriction until we can return to old behaviors. The goal is to build a life in which those old behaviors no longer have the same place or power.

When we begin to understand recovery as a lifestyle rather than a temporary project, the question changes from “How long do I have to do this?” to “What would it be like for me to live this way today?” That shift can bring an enormous amount of relief because we are no longer waiting for permission to return to the life that wasn’t working.

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Diet Culture Is Built Around Restriction And Control

Diet culture has taught many of us to believe that the solution to our struggles with food is more control. If we can just eat fewer calories, eliminate certain foods, shrink our portions, follow the rules better, or become disciplined enough, we believe we will finally be able to control ourselves around food.

But, what if I told you that mindset was completely backwards?

For someone with food addiction, that constant focus on control becomes another form of obsession because even when we are following the rules, food can still be taking up enormous amounts of space in our heads. We can spend hours thinking about what we are allowed to eat, what we aren’t allowed to eat, what we wish we could eat, what we will eat when the diet ends, and how we will make up for what we ate yesterday.

The food may not be in our mouths, but it can still be running the show. Food noise is a very real thing.

Recovery takes us somewhere different because the goal isn’t to become better at controlling food. The goal is to find freedom from the obsession and behaviors that have controlled us. That can involve a food plan, boundaries, structure, and decisions about what we eat. The purpose is not to make our world smaller or to punish ourselves for being unable to control food. The purpose is to create enough stability and safety that we can begin living without constantly negotiating with the foods and behaviors that caused us harm.

There is a profound difference between telling ourselves, “I can’t have that, and I am miserable about it,” and being able to say, “That doesn’t work for me anymore, and I am choosing the life that comes from leaving it behind.”

The first experience feels like deprivation, while the second begins to feel like freedom.

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Recovery Is Not About Proving That You Can Control Yourself

One of the most painful messages in diet culture is the idea that people who struggle with food simply aren’t trying hard enough. We are told that successful people have discipline, while people who regain weight or struggle with compulsive eating must somehow lack the character required to stay on track.

After enough years of hearing that message, it can become incredibly easy to turn every struggle into evidence against ourselves.

Recovery offers us another way to understand what is happening. Recovery begins with honesty around the fact that we cannot solve this problem with willpower alone. There is humility in admitting that we need help, but there is also tremendous freedom in finally letting go of the exhausting belief that we have to figure everything out by ourselves.

In recovery, instead of hiding when things become difficult, we learn to reach out. Instead of allowing our thoughts to spiral in isolation and shame, we learn to talk to someone who understands. Instead of waiting until everything has fallen apart, we learn to bring our struggles into the light while we still have the opportunity to receive support.

This is one area where recovery becomes so much more than a food plan. Recovery teaches us how to live in relationship with other people, rather than trying to manage everything alone.

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Addiction Wants Isolation; Recovery Gives Us Community

Food addiction can become incredibly lonely because shame and guild convince us that nobody could possibly understand what is really happening behind closed doors. We can become experts at hiding what we eat, hiding how much we eat, hiding how much we often think about food, and hiding the things we do when no one is watching. The longer we hide, the more convincing our distorted thinking can become because there is nobody outside of our own minds helping us to see what is actually happening.

Community interrupts that isolation cycle.

When we sit with people who understand food addiction and compulsive eating, something changes. We no longer have to spend so much energy pretending that everything is fine. We can talk about the thoughts that scare us, the behaviors that embarrass us, the days when we struggle, and the moments when the food addiction starts telling us that we are somehow different from everyone else.

There is something deeply healing about being known without being shamed.

Recovery reminds us that we are not meant to do this alone, and sometimes the phone call we don’t want to make is the very thing that keeps a difficult moment from becoming a trip down the old road. A meeting, a conversation, a message to someone in recovery, or simply allowing another person to know what is happening can create the very connection that our addiction wants us to avoid.

The opposite of isolation is not simply being around other people. The opposite of isolation is being known, seen, and involved in community.

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Diet Culture Focuses On Deprivation; Recovery Is About Abundance

At first glance, this can feel confusing because recovery may involve choosing not to eat certain foods, and anyone who has spent significant time dieting may wonder how that could possibly be different from restriction.

The difference becomes clearer when we look at what we are actually trying to create.

Diet culture demands us to focus on everything we cannot have, and that can leave us feeling as though our lives are getting smaller with every new rule. Recovery invites us to look at what becomes possible when food no longer consumes so much of our attention, because the space that food addiction has occupied can eventually become available for something else.

We can begin filling that space with relationships that nourish us, conversations that matter, spiritual practices that ground us, hobbies that make us feel alive, movement that feels good, creativity that has been waiting for our attention, and experiences that we once missed because we were too consumed by food and the shame surrounding it.

That is the abundance of recovery.

Abundance doesn’t mean having more food. Abundance means having more life.

Abundance can mean having enough peace to enjoy a morning without immediately thinking about what we are going to eat. It can mean being present during dinner with people we love instead of secretly planning what we will eat later. It can mean having the emotional and mental space to pursue something that has nothing to do with our weight, our body, or our next meal.

When food beings to take it’s proper place in our lives, life itself has more room to grow and blossom.

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Recovery Is About Learning To Live In Peace With Food

I don’t believe anyone who struggles with food addiction is actually looking for another set of food rules.

Honestly, most of us are just looking for peace.

We want to stop thinking about food all day. We want to stop making promises to ourselves that we can’t keep. We want to stop hiding what we are doing. We want to stop waking up with regret and going to sleep with guilt and shame. We want to stop feeling as though every meal is another opportunity to either prove that we are good or confirm that we are failures.

More that anything, we just want food to stop being so powerful and all-consuming.

Recovery can give us a path toward peace because it isn’t asking us to become perfect around food. It is asking us to become honest about what food and food behaviors have been doing in our lives and to become willing to live differently.

Peace may not mean that every food becomes something we can eat without consequences. Peace will not make us into people who can suddenly casually eat anything we want. For someone with food addiction, peace comes from actually no longer having to negotiate with food and the food behaviors that repeatedly lead us back to the same painful cycles again and again.

There is incredible freedom in knowing what works for us and no longer needing to debate that decision every single day.

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Recovery Gives Us Back More Than Food Ever Gave Us

When we first consider recovery, we can become very focused on what we believe we are giving up, especially if food has been our comfort, our reward, our celebration, our escape, or the thing we reach for when life becomes difficult. It can feel scary to imagine what life will look like without those familiar behaviors because we may not yet know what will take their place.

Recovery isn’t asking us to create an empty space where the food addiction used to be. Recovery gives us opportunities to fill that space with something real. Something better.

We can begin learning how to sit with difficult emotions without immediately trying to escape them. We can discover we are capable of experiencing disappointment, loneliness, anger, boredom, and grief without automatically turning to food. We can develop relationships that aren’t built around eating, find ways to celebrate that don’t require a food reward, and begin discovering parts of ourselves that were buried beneath years of obsession.

The more we recover, the more we may realize that what we thought we were giving up was actually costing us far more than we realized or understood.

We weren’t giving up our happiness. We were really giving up the things that were standing between us and happiness.

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You Don’t Need Another Diet

If you have been dieting for years and you are exhausted from starting over, I hope you will give yourself permission to consider that you may not have failed at dieting as much as dieting failed to address what you were really struggling with.

You don’t need yet another temporary plan with yet another finish line and another promise that this time you’ll finally be able to control yourself. What you need is the opportunity to explore recovery and discover what it means to build a life where food is no longer at the center of everything.

Recovery doesn’t promise that every day will be easy, and it certainly doesn’t require us to become perfect. What recovery offers is something much more meaningful than another diet ever could. Recovery is a way to live with honesty, connection, structure, support, and peace while learning how to respond to life without allowing food addiction to run the show.

Recovery is not about giving up your life. Recovery is about getting your life and your peace back.

Recovery is about waking up and having somewhere for our thoughts to go besides food. It’s about having people we can call when life gets “lifey”. It’s about discovering that we can experience joy without eating our way into it, and it’s about realizing that our lives can become abundant in ways that have nothing to do with what is on our plates.

A diet demands that we hold on until we reach the end, restricting and controlling along the way. And then we stop and go right back to the dysfunction of “normal” that brought us to the diet in the first place.

Recovery invites us to build a life we don’t want to stop, or escape from. Recovery invites us to build a new normal. And when we begin to experience that kind of life, the question isn’t how long we have to stay in recovery. Because recovery is no longer something standing between us and the life we want.

Recovery becomes the life we wanted all along.

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Food For Thought

• When you think about your history with food or dieting, what patterns do you notice?
  What have you been hoping a diet would give you that food itself never could?
• How much of your relationship with food has been about control?
• What does “peace with food” mean to you?
• Where do you experience abundance in your life that has nothing to do with food?
• What has food addiction or compulsive eating taken up space that you would like to reclaim?
• Are you trying to return to a life that wasn’t actually working for you?
• If recovery became a way of life rather than something you were simply doing, what might change?
• Are you trying to build a life where you can eventually go back to the way you used to live, or are you building a life you genuinely don’t want to escape from?

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