I tried to diet so many times.

I must have started and stopped hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times. Often multiple times in one day. My mind would go from little miss iron will power to f*ck all of this, imma just quit life starting with this diet within seconds.

Cue emotional eating, bingeing, cripplingly low moods and a feeling that things would simply NEVER EVER get better.

Let me tell you right now. Things do get better. MUCH BETTER. But in quitting dieting and emotional eating there is a big, some might say monstrous, feeling that awaits when attempting to move through this.

It’s the reason most of us get lulled back into the cycle and the reason that destructive emotional eating remains our key coping mechanism/best friend.

In fact, I used to justify my “mini daily binges” as healthy intuitive eating because of this very thing.

A little thing known as ‘overwhelm’.

Overwhelm is that feeling where anything becomes ‘too much’. Your to-do list is perpetually too long, you will never have enough time, there are too many things and everything is a priority.

Battling on in this way is living in a state of crisis.

That is not an exaggeration. We put our bodies into crisis mode when we live like this. Where the mountain of things we need to do, should do or would like to do is so massive that anything we have accomplished feels pointless or worthless in comparison.

Feeling overwhelmed often leads us back to emotional eating. If we are eating as a way to escape the feeling of overwhelm then something is not right.

Overwhelm shouldn’t be our default setting.

The problem is that most of us don’t even realise we are living in a state of overwhelm because of our reliance on dieting, bingeing, overexercise to get us through.

So when we try to stop these behaviours, what happens?

The overwhelm sets in ten times stronger than ever before because we have pulled the rug out from under our own feet.

Our destructive relationship with food was acting as a support system, a barrier between us and the things we really didn’t want to deal with. If we simply try and stop with no other helpful support system in between we get left with complete and utter overwhelm.

And guess what?

We slip back into our old coping mechanisms. For me it started with one chocolate bar in an afternoon when I was feeling tired but also knew that I had ‘too much’ to do to warrant taking a break. It was a ‘treat’ to help me get through. Of course, the overwhelm dissipated. I felt competent again.

But my old patterns around food very slowly started seeping back in. Before I knew it I was avoiding my to-do list and just heading to the shop every afternoon. Life was unravelling. Again.

The only way out of this pattern is to recognise the overwhelm for what it is and give ourselves a break.

Rather than moving from overwhelm to coping mechanism we need to stop and take a look at why the overwhelm has appeared in our lives and whether there are things we can change about our overall lifestyle to reduce it.

Removing the coping mechanism, i.e. the food/exercise problems, only reveals the underlying problem. We need to be prepared to face what is underneath if we are going to truly change the way we feel about food.

This takes courage, time and patience. A lot of it. It also takes support and persistence. If you are feeling constantly overwhelmed and using food to cope know that it doesn’t always need to feel this way.

My email is always open – let me know now – what is the one thing in your life that is causing you the most overwhelm right now? Tell me right here and let’s see if we can change that.