Podcast Episode #52 - What If Your Relationship With Food Was Never The Problem?
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[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to yet another inspirational podcast episode brought to you by yours truly, Carina. I'm your truth speaker, truth seeker, truth keeper, and I am so glad that you're here with me today
What if your relationship with food makes more sense than you've ever allowed yourself to believe? Something I've been noticing through my work is that I tend to see two kinds of women. The woman who quietly finds herself standing in the pantry after holding [00:01:00] everything together all day, and the woman whose stomach knots itself so tightly with anxiety that food is the last thing on her mind.
On the surface, they couldn't look more different. One reaches for food, the other one pulls away from it. But I wonder, what if they're not as different as they first appear? What if neither woman has a food problem? What if food was never the problem at all?
I'm Carina Bull, trauma-aware facilitator and intuitive mentor. Every week, I invite you into the conversations I'm already having with the women I work with. Together, we'll gently explore the survival patterns and roles we've [00:02:00] mistaken for who we are, so you can reconnect with the woman beneath them.
Around here, we get curious, we question survival, and every now and then, I offer you another way of seeing it. So grab a cuppa, get comfortable, and let's begin.
Over the past few months, I've noticed the same pattern emerging again and again with the women I work with. Interestingly, it's not usually something they tell me. It's something I notice. Sometimes we're talking, sometimes I'm working intuitively during a Reiki session, and I'll become aware that when life becomes overwhelming, her relationship with food changes.
And I might say to her, "I'm really aware that when you're anxious or emotionally overwhelmed, you stop eating." And there's usually a moment of [00:03:00] silence and a look that says, "How could you possibly know that?" Before she quietly tells me, "Yeah, that's exactly what I do." And one woman recently said, "When I'm stressed, I don't eat.
I can go the whole day without even thinking about food." She told me there were days when she would barely eat anything at all. The only time she would force herself to eat was when her children started noticing. She would make sure she ate something in front of them, not because she suddenly felt hungry, but because she didn't want them worrying about her.
And I'll be the first to admit, hands up, when someone or something has annoyed me, my [00:04:00] brain doesn't think, "Carina, perhaps a nice glass of water would help." No, it says, "Pasta," preferably a hot, steaming bowl of it. And if there's garlic bread involved, well, you know, who's counting? On the surface, these women couldn't look more different.
One moves towards food, the other moves away from it, and yet when I sit with them, both eventually say some version of the same thing, "I don't understand why I do this." One thing I keep noticing is how quickly women turn these patterns into a judgment about who they are. I remember sitting with one woman after I reflected this back to her, and she went quiet for a moment and then said, "I [00:05:00] honestly thought I was just useless at looking after myself."
And that stayed with me because she hadn't simply noticed that she stopped eating when she was anxious. She had made it mean something about her, that she was careless, undisciplined, that she should know better. And I see the same thing on the other side, too. A woman reaches for food when she feels angry, rejected, or overwhelmed, and within minutes she's calling herself greedy, weak, out of control.
The behavior might look completely different, but the shame underneath it often sounds remarkably similar. I should be able to control this. I shouldn't be like this. What is wrong with me? And that's the part I find most painful. Not [00:06:00] simply that women are struggling with food, but that they've spent years using that struggle as evidence against themselves. So can I offer you another way of seeing this? What if your relationship with food isn't evidence that something is wrong with you? What if it's one of the ways survival learned to protect you?
Because when we only focus on the behavior, we miss the job the behavior may be doing. Take emotional eating. You've had an argument with your partner. You feel angry, dismissed, unheard. But perhaps you don't feel able to say what you really want to say, so you swallow it, and then you eat. Not necessarily because you're physically hungry, but because food gives your body something immediate. That bowl of pasta isn't judging you.
It [00:07:00] isn't criticizing you. It isn't asking you to explain why you're upset. It's warm, predictable, available, and for a few moments, you don't have to feel everything quite so intensely. And then there's the woman who stops eating. Her pattern looks completely different, but it may also make sense when you stop viewing it as failure. Sometimes anxiety becomes so consuming that hunger disappears underneath it.
Her stomach tightens. Her throat feels closed. The idea of food feels impossible. For another woman, restricting food may be one of the few places where she feels in control. She may not be able to control what is happening in her relationship, at work, inside her family, or inside her own emotional [00:08:00] world, but she can control this: what she eats, when she eats, how much she allows herself to have.
And sometimes that pattern has a history. Perhaps she grew up hearing comments about her body. "You're getting chubby. Do you really need that? You're fat. You'd be prettier if you'd lost some weight." Perhaps food was monitored, used as a reward, taken away, or controlled by an adult In more extreme circumstances, perhaps access to food itself was withheld.
So later in life, food is no longer simply food. It carries control, shame, safety, rebellion, punishment, comfort, all wrapped around something the body needs in order to survive. [00:09:00] This is why I don't think the woman standing in the pantry and the woman forcing herself to eat in front of her children are as different as they first appear.
Both may be trying to change what it feels like to be inside themselves. One finds relief through eating. The other finds relief, control, or protection through not eating. And neither woman needs more shame. She needs curiosity because when we stop asking what is wrong with me and begin asking what has this been doing for me, the behavior starts to look less like self-sabotage and more like a survival strategy that once made sense.
It doesn't mean it shouldn't be supported or gently changed, but you can't understand your relationship with food when you're still using it as [00:10:00] evidence against yourself. Perhaps food was never the problem. Perhaps it became the place where an unspoken emotion, um, an unmet need or an old survival pattern finally had somewhere to go Survival is not interested in whether a coping strategy looks healthy from the outside.
It's interested in one thing: Does this help me get through the moment? If eating brings comfort after conflict, your body remembers that. If not eating gives you a sense of control when everything else feels chaotic, your body remembers that too. Not as a conscious decision, not as something you sit down and choose, more like a quiet association.
This helps. This makes the feeling smaller. This gives me something I can control. This stops me feeling quite so exposed. And the more often the strategy works, even [00:11:00] temporarily, the more familiar it becomes. This is how survival patterns are created. Not because you're weak, not because you lack discipline, but because your body is always looking for the fastest route back to something that feels manageable.
The problem is, survival does not always update itself. A strategy that once helped you cope can keep running long after the original danger has passed.
This is why simply telling yourself to have more willpower rarely reaches the root of it. Willpower speaks to the behavior, but survival is responding to the feeling underneath it, and until that feeling is recognized, the strategy can keep returning, not because you're failing But because some part of you still believes it's helping.
And when you begin to understand that, something starts to soften. You stop treating every urge to [00:12:00] eat or every loss of appetite as proof that you failed again. Instead of immediately reaching for shame, you become curious.
And in that small pause, you may begin to recognize what you actually needed in the moment. Not so you can force yourself to make a better choice, but so food no longer has to carry the entire emotional conversation on its own. And perhaps over time, your relationship with food can become less about managing what you feel and more about nourishing the woman who is finally learning how to listen to herself. You do not heal your relationship with food by fighting the behavior harder.
You begin by understanding why it became necessary So one question I'd like to leave you with is this: what does your relationship with food help you avoid, soften, [00:13:00] control, or survive? Just sit with that. You do not need to answer it straight away. And this week, don't try to change how you eat. Don't turn this into another rule or another promise, another thing you have to get right.
Simply notice the moment before food enters the conversation, the moment before you reach for it, or the moment before you pull away from it, and quietly ask yourself, "What just happened?"
You do not have to make a different choice. Just notice the moment survival reaches for the strategy. No judgment, no fixing, just curiosity. And if today's conversation has left you seeing your relationship with food a little differently, I'd love to continue the conversation with you through my weekly email.
Although calling it a newsletter has never felt quite right because it isn't a traditional newsletter. It's a written coaching conversation, a quiet [00:14:00] moment each week to recognize a survival pattern you may have mistaken for who you are and perhaps see yourself with a little more understanding than you did before.
One new way of seeing yourself this week straight into your inbox. You'll find the link to join me in the show notes. And until next time, stay curious about yourself. And remember, just because it was doesn't mean it will be. With love, Carina.