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.

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