My Relationship with Food Is a Mess

For most of my life, food wasn’t nourishment. It was negotiation. I lived inside the cycle of restriction, reward, guilt, repeat. Every new trend. Every new plan. Every “this time it will work.” I kept trying to out-discipline my biology. And when it didn’t work, I blamed myself. I believed I lacked willpower. I believed I was the problem.

But let’s be honest. You don’t end up 100 pounds overweight and obese for most of your adult life because you have a healthy relationship with food. No shit.

And mine didn’t start in midlife. It started at 17. At 5’7” and 135 pounds, I thought my body was huge and not thin enough. I wanted to be as small as possible. So I starved myself. My best friend Dana and I would buy a Big Mac, split it, and that was all we ate for the entire day. That felt normal to us.

It didn’t help that more than one boyfriend told me he wanted to be able to “wrap his hands completely around my waist.” Maybe he needed bigger hands. One even told his friends I had an “elephant ass.” At 135 pounds. Give me a break.

I Learned to Shrink

Then I met my husband and started eating like a real adult — three meals a day. But when you come out of starvation mode, your body pushes back. I gained. Then came pregnancy, work travel, climbing the career ladder, stress, exhaustion — and slowly, steadily, I became more. More than I was comfortable with.

For 30 years I dieted and quit. Keto. Weight Watchers. Low carb. High protein. New rules, new promises, same cycle. Through all of it, I never learned the one thing that actually mattered: eating is not entertainment. It isn’t celebration. It isn’t stress relief. It isn’t an emotional crutch.

Food is Fuel

What I understand now is that this wasn’t a discipline failure. It was a philosophy failure. I had been taught to treat food like morality instead of biology — like shrinking was success, like hunger was virtue, like control was strength.

But control isn’t strength. Strength is nourishment. Strength is stability. Strength is fueling a body that’s fighting inflammation, menopause, autoimmune disease, and fatigue — and still showing up.

My relationship with food began to change when I stopped asking, “How little can I get away with eating?” and started asking, “What does my body actually need?” That shift changed everything.

So I’m done chasing diets. I’m done trying to hack my metabolism. I’m done pretending that white-knuckling hunger equals discipline. I’m learning to see food as something that helps my autoimmune body heal, fuels my energy so I can move every day, keeps my brain sharp, and supports this comeback.

"Food is no longer something I behave around.

It’s something I respect."

And that respect runs both ways.