If you feel like you’ve tried every hormone balancing diet, explored all the different exercise regimens and implemented all the right lifestyle changes, but still haven’t seen any relief from symptoms like fatigue, bloating and fertility issues, then it’s time to look at your relationship with food

How Your Relationship with Food is Tanking Your Hormonal Health

For so many of us women, one of the most complex relationships we will ever have in our life is our relationship with food. Many of us turn to addressing our problems through food at some point in our lives, whether that’s weight gain, low energy, fertility challenges, acne, you name it. And making dietary changes can certainly be a powerful tool in finding more balance with all of these issues, but sometimes we lose sight of the bigger picture when we zoom in too close on making manipulations to our diet.

 

Your inner world impacts your outer world TREMENDOUSLY.  How we think about our body, food, our beliefs about “what works” and “what doesn’t” influences our daily diet, lifestyle choices, mindset and behaviors. And these behaviors are often so deeply rooted that they are engrained in our consciousness that we don’t even realize that they could be causing us more harm than food. 

 

For example, consider how your family used to talk about food when you were a child. Did your parents ever tell you that you can’t leave the table until you finish your plate? Or on the other hand, to re-think your third helping at dinner? How did your mom speak about her own body in front of you? Was she constantly nit-picking her appearance in the mirror? And we all remember those magazines – Cosmo, Teen Vogue, Shape and Health certainly didn’t help build us up in the early 2000’s. 

 

Diet culture goes deeper than the What I Eat in a Day videos we see on TikTok these days. Many of us have grown up in diet culture and simply don’t know life outside of it, so it’s no wonder that so many of us struggle with our relationship with food, oftentimes without even realizing it. 

 

For many of my clients a big part of our work is navigating the web of past beliefs that influences the behaviors they practice today. This allows us to build new beliefs, new rhythms and new routines that support health and hormone optimization overall.

How to Know if You’re Under Eating

We’ve all been surrounded by a web of diet culture, and each of our webs are woven with different strands and influences. But there is one common thread that seems to run through – undereating. Whether you’ve been actively dieting your whole life, or have just embarked on a new way of eating in an attempt to heal a new issue, we’ve all likely been tempted to undereat at some point or another. And this is NOT always intentional! You may be thinking to yourself, “well I’ve never gone on a diet or cut any foods out of my diet,” but that doesn’t mean diet culture hasn’t played a role in how you’re engaging with food. This could look like avoiding packaged foods at all costs, opting for skim or plant-based milks because whole milk is too fatty, feeling like eating too many carbs will make you fat or being hard on yourself for ordering the burger for dinner at girls night when everyone else got a salad. 

 

We need to unweave these webs strand by strand if we really want to develop a relationship with food and our bodies that feels sustainable and supportive. I can teach you all the steps to eat enough for your body to support your hormones, metabolism, and fertility – but if you are still holding onto these beliefs and not “bought in” to a different approach you are going to be hell-bent to make real changes.

 

So how do we know if we have been undereating unintentionally? We need to tune in a little deeper. 

• Chronic fatigue – If we’re consistently underfueling, our body will not have the energy to allow us to feel our best.
• Brittle hair and nails – If we’re not taking in enough calories, this often means we’re often not meeting our nutrient needs, including zinc, iron and b vitamins, which can lead to weak hair and nails. 
• Hyper-fixation on food – Our bodies are so wise. If we’re not taking in enough nutrients, the physical sensations of hunger will send the message to your brain that you need food, and if you continue to ignore these signals, they’ll become stronger and feel incessant. 
• Irregular periods – Our metabolism and thyroid health has direct interplay with our menstrual cycle and the balance of our sex hormones, so if we’re regularly restricting our intake, our metabolism will slow and your body will start to cut corners to save energy, oftentimes downregulating our sex hormone health.
• Bloating – Underfueling can be linked with slow, inefficient digestion, which can lead to annoying symptoms like bloating. 
• Hormone imbalances – Undereating is a stressor for our body. This can lead to a cascade of effects that include dysregulation of our cortisol levels, insulin response, thyroid health and sex hormone balance.
• Poor circulation – Your body slows everything down when there isn’t enough energy to go around, and this can include blood flow. 
• Cold hands and feet – The decreased blood flow we just talked about above can make you feel like you constantly have cold hands and feet.
• Weight gain – This one feels counterintuitive, but if we’re not eating enough, our metabolism eventually slows down, which can actually lead to weight gain. This can be particularly frustrating if we’re finally trying to eat more and feeling like we’re gaining weight.
• Negative thought patterns – It is not normal or healthy to be constantly thinking about food or our bodies. If you cannot enjoy a meal out at a restaurant, go on vacation or have a dessert without thinking twice about it, it may be a sign that we need to dig in on our relationship with food.
• Chronic constipation – Too few calories often means too little fiber, which can slow down our motility and impair our digestion.
• Infertility – We don’t build a baby from nothing. We need to be fueling our bodies properly in order to support a pregnancy. If you’ve been trying to conceive and every month ends in disappointment, it may be time to take a look at your relationship with food.

 

How our Emotions Impact our Relationship with Food

 

Sometimes we get stuck in the diet spiral because of how emotional our relationship with our bodies and food can be. And as soon as the emotions become deep-seeded, it can be really challenging to course correct. 

 

For example, maybe you are pregnant and watching your body change every day, excited for this new chapter while also mourning the loss of your body as you’ve known it. Perhaps you’re newly postpartum, trying to create a new home within yourself while also adjusting to the demands of parenthood. You may be on a healing journey, feeling uncomfortable in your body and feeling frustrated because none of the changes you’ve made have allowed you to achieve any alleviation of your symptoms. Or maybe you’re seeing your weight or your body shape change for the first time and you’re confused because you feel like you haven’t changed anything about your diet or exercise habits. 

 

Frustration, excitement, motivation, discouragement, empowerment, exhaustion, anger, distrust. These are all strong emotions – positive and negative. We can feel proud of what our bodies are capable of, while also struggling without body image. We can feel motivated to make a change while also feeling frustrated when those changes don’t yield results. With these pushes and pulls of contrasting emotions, it can feel that much easier to get stuck in a diet cycle.

 

We’ve all been there. It’s Monday. We’ve meal-prepped, we’ve scheduled out our workout classes and we’re feeling motivated. But by the time Friday comes around, we’ve put so much emotional effort and energy into being ‘perfect’ that we’re burnt out. So we have a ‘cheat weekend’. Now we’re feeling guilty, frustrated and like we’ve ‘failed’. Now Monday rolls around and the cycle repeats. 

 

These strong, deeply embedded emotions that are so interwoven with our relationship with our bodies are powerful, and they can make it really hard to unlearn some of our disordered behaviors and patterns. But healing is possible. And when we finally get to the root of the emotions that are keeping us stuck, we can build a TRULY healthy relationship with food, our bodies and ourselves.

Signs Your Relationship with Your Body and Food Could Use Some Support

I want you to sit down, take a deep breath and commit to taking a moment to get really comfortable and honest with yourself. Have you ever felt like any of the below rings true for you?

• Restricting food, when clothes feel tight or switches to eating “super clean” for a while
• Being highly preoccupied with food or avoiding thinking about food as much as possible
• Excessive restriction of food portions, categories, or “bad’ foods
• Intense cravings and feelings of being out of control
• Quick to blame food and “bad eating” for body composition changes
• Getting overly hungry or overly full and feeling guilty
• Always looking for a next quick fix to support body composition or a symptom (like bloat or constipation)
• Using exercise as a punishment to burn off the calories from big weekend, vacay, or night out
• Comparing yourself to others motivates seeking diet and exercise changes
• Eating what you “think” you should, but then still feeling hungry after, and ignoring it (or grazing all day on snacks..)
• Eating “indulgently” on the weekend only to “clean eat” starting Monday
• Living by what the current hot influencer has told you to do, such as cycling from being vegan, to paleo, to gluten-free, to carnivore

 

If you feel like any of these resonate, it’s time to seek out assistance. Know these thoughts don’t have to own you, you get to choose how you want to feel. You have the option to fight yourself OR move into a place of partnership, compassion, and love. 

Simple Practices to Feel More At Home in Your Body

Diving in head-first and being all-in with healing can feel empowering, but oftentimes it ends up being exhausting and unsustainable. If you’re not sure where to start making changes in a way that feels lasting, I recommend starting with one or two mini-actions to promote self-love. This could look like:

 

• Practice self care – Do what feels GOOD for you and your soul. This could be taking a bath, baking, going on a walk, doing arts and crafts or reading a good book.
• Breathwork – Explore heart centered breathing and diaphragmatic belly breath, get IN to your body
• Gentle movement – Self massage, tapping or stretching as a way to slow down and self connect
• Meditation – Visualize sending love to the parts of your body that are triggering you or making you feel uncomfortable. How can you give these living breathing parts of you compassion in this moment?
• Nourishment – Provide your body with whole foods and food that truly sounds good. Fuel with love vs reactivity or restriction. Our meal inspiration guide is a great place to start with 7 full days of recipes if you need ideas.
• Nature – Move your body in nature, walk outside or spend time doing an activity outdoors to connect to your environment and ground in your surroundings
• Journal – Take some time to process, release, and reframe thoughts that are coming up about you and your body – let the noise come to the surface and explore the opportunity to create a new conversation

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If you’re ready to move forward with a deeper level of support, I would love to meet with you to speak about what 1:1 coaching could look like so we can build your unique, individualized path forward feeling more at-home within your body.