Freedom from Toxic Trying

When your client’s relationship with food is broken, they are convinced it’s because they lack motivation, willpower and grit. Or you might even think they are broken or somehow a “bad” or “unworthy” person.

Eating, however, isn’t anything to do with motivation, willpower or grit. So, struggling with food isn’t anything to do with them as a person. They haven’t done or not done anything to cause the problems with eating. Nor is their character flawed or lacking in any way.

You see, eating isn’t meant to be controlled by any conscious thoughts, let alone motivation, willpower and grit. Eating should be under the control of our instinct. But when you think about eating like when “dieting”, “trying to lose weight” or “eating healthily” you are treating it as a behaviour not as the instinct it truly is.

When you don’t treat eating as an instinct, the instinct is erased over time.

This is a problem, because the eating instinct quite literally is the only thing that will make a person not want to overeat.

So, from then on, they are fighting their urges to overeat. All through no fault of their own. They were simply following all the advice to put some effort into dieting, trying and lose weight and eating healthily.

This means is they think all the more about your eating and how to control it. With all this going on in their head, you can never get their eating instinct to protect them from overeating because the prospect of stopping trying to control it is too frightening.

Controlling eating with willpower, motivation and grit is impossible and all the trying is making their appetite grow more, is exhausting and very damaging to their physical and mental health.

Try Freedom is a programme teaching people how to stop all this toxic trying and, in the process, they not only regain the eating instinct to protect them from overeating, but they also heal their physical and mental health too.

I’m not going to lie, instinct restoration is not easy, but the results mean they never have to try with their eating again. All the effort comes from the instinct. Leaving then free to use all that willpower, motivation and grit to live their life (or to decide not use it and have a well-earned rest!).

If any of the above rings any bells with you for your clients (or yourself), please get in touch for a free, without-obligation consultation.

Love,

Alison

Alison Hall is an Intuitive Eating counsellor and founder of Try Freedom

There are now over 150 studies on Intuitive Eating showing benefit.

There is also a plethora of evidence of the wider topics of Interoceptive Awareness, Food Restriction/Dieting/Binge Eating/Inefficacy Harm from Weight Loss / Reactance Theory. Click below to see the science:

• Appetite Effects of Restricted Eating Restricting the eating leads to appetite increase.
• Inefficacy And Harm From Weight Loss Interventions Weight loss programmes fail and cause harm.
• Interoceptive Awareness Being aware and responding automatically to your body’s signals.
• Intuitive Eating There are now over 150 studies on Intuitive Eating showing benefit.
• Reactance Theory Restricting the eating leads to discomfort which drives the eating.