Intuitive eating & being on an emotional rollercoaster

The last two weeks have not been the best. My emotions have been all over the place for different reasons, I won’t bore you with all the details but there has been quite a lot going on. The only way I can describe it (and I’ve used this expression before because it just describes me perfectly) is I have been on an emotional roller coaster. My poor family, honestly I don’t know how they put up with me. Anyway I am not sure if it’s because I have been up and down in general but over the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed the old negative thoughts about my body have been creeping in.

Out of nowhere I found myself questioning am I really happy with the way I look? There were days when I would be getting dressed, I would look in the mirror and I wouldn’t like what I was seeing again. I was doing that thing where I criticise every part of my body. Other times I could be doing something completely unrelated to anything eating or dieting, just day to day stuff and randomly the maybe I could just do one more diet and then go back to Intuitive Eating thought would be there. There was even one time I actually thought, I wonder if this person I am currently talking to is looking at me criticising me for the way I look. I cared if they were going to like me or not!

I have been in such a good place with my body confidence, the happiest I have ever been in fact and I have always said I would never go back to dieting and I won’t, so these thoughts were ultimately just making me frustrated with myself but for a split second I was actually caught up in them. And then that made me even more angry! Not only with myself but with diet culture for being such a strong force!

I was so cross that I had allowed these thoughts to creep back in and even worse I was actually letting myself consider them. As you all know I am very anti diet so how could I let myself be so weak? Did this mean I was failing at everything I had worked so hard for? Did it mean I would never really stop caring what others think or that I would never really be happy with my body?

With everything else going on this was just another problem to add to my list and it got to me for days. I could feel myself spiralling back and even reading my books and listening to podcasts wasn’t doing much to help, where it would have done normally. I’ve wrote about this happening before in a previous post but I wasn’t as far along in my journey then and was sort of expecting the self doubt to creep back but I wasn’t expecting it now, not at this point.

It was starting to get to me and I was getting worried that I might not actually be able to stop myself spiralling further and finding myself back to square one. A couple of times I noticed I was comfort eating which was just adding to it.

I was proper panicking, then I noticed that as the things I was dealing with personally started to be resolved, I was in a better place and these thoughts were getting less and less again. I had been way to hard on myself, been putting added stress on myself which at the time I really hadn’t needed and it was all unnecessary.

It dawned on me that as happy and as confident as I have become I still have things I need to work on and even then there is likely to always be moments where I have doubt and it will probably happen when I am generally struggling with whatever is going on in life at the time and this is ok. Its not easy to deal with everything all at once and I shouldn’t expect myself to be able to, it doesn’t mean I failed.

This was all really brought home to me when I saw someone’s Instagram post stating they had been dealing with the same doubts as me and they had been an Intuitive eater a lot longer than I have. It was a comfort that others further along still have these doubts but it also makes me cross because it’s truly not fair! Why are we the minority that are constantly battling with not only ourselves but diet culture, not to mention others opinions because most of society really knows no better, through no fault of their own I must add.

I will never get my head round how much of a powerful force diet culture truly is or why it gets to set all the rules but its not setting my rules anymore, no matter how much of an emotional roller coaster I find myself on.

Thank you for reading, stay safe and happy eatin.