In my work with women who are perfectly exhausted from trying to be perfect, I often end up teaching that it is a crazy notion that we have to feel bad about ourselves in order to do better.

Diets don’t work because they are based on the idea that we are bad, morally bad, because of the food we eat. With this underlying belief, we then go about trying to ignore our bodies’ signals of hunger in order to follow someone else’s guidelines about what we should eat.

Aside from the fact that these guidelines are often contradictory, they are also always changing. Think about the innocent egg, a villain one year, then good, but in limited quantity, then “the perfect protein package”.

Meanwhile we have learned to completely cut off our connection with our own body’s signals to us. Food becomes a preoccupation and an enemy.

Another thing about diets is that there is a pull to eat, when we anticipate future deprivation. So, when we make moral judgments about our food being “bad”, then judge ourselves as “bad”, we make plans to be “good” and do “better” and start planning this restricted or deprived future.

As human beings we are designed in such a way that, when a famine is approaching, we begin to store up. If you have dieted repeatedly, you know what I am talking about. In my family, I was invited to help finish up the Girl Scout cookies the night before we all went on a diet! For years, I blamed my parents for this crazy behavior. Now, I know that it was an instinctual drive to prepare for famine. They had been on diets before and they knew what was coming!

I recently read some interesting descriptions of the physiological effects of dieting behavior. Have you ever restricted your eating successfully over a period of time, and then found yourself standing in front of the fridge, hunting for food? Or making a late night trip to the grocery store in search of something to satisfy? Here’s what I learned about that.

Think back to cave days. You have stored up your food for the winter and survived almost until spring. You are a bit weak, tired and still pretty cold and the last thing you want to do is go out hunting for more food. But, your supplies are almost gone. The brilliant design of your body is such that your hypothalamus kicks in with a very strong urge to hunt for food. This urge has to be powerful enough to get your weak and sleepy body out of the warm cave. If you don’t, you could starve.

OK, now translate that same experience of famine to modern day. Only this time, you have been creating famine by putting yourself on starvation diets, restricting calories, restricting fats- whatever is your diet du jour. The hypothalamus still kicks in- “MUST FIND FOOD”- and there you are munching out of the fridge or wandering the aisles of Safeway.

Maybe we aren’t so crazy after all! And definitely not “bad”. So, what can we do about this? The short answer is to stop creating famine and give your body and mind a chance to catch up with the idea that there is no need to prepare for starvation.

But the first step is to stop making moral judgments about yourself, based on what you eat and how you look. Start listening to your body more. Learn to feel what hunger and satiation feel like. Your body may be confused at first. Be patient with it. Make a commitment to love yourself. To find healthy, to find strong and to give yourself back the time and energy that diets have been stealing from you.