236 – The One Thing Diets Never Teach

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Elizabeth: You know what no one tells you when you start a new diet that you’ll follow the rules perfectly all day and still end up standing in front of the pantry at nine 30 at night eating chips with one hand and shame with the other. If diets actually work to stop over eating, wouldn’t they have worked by now?

So why don’t they? Why do smart, capable women, women who know how to manage a household, a career, feel totally out of control around food. Today we are pulling back the curtain on the 70 billion dollar lie that diets are the answer, because the truth is that overeating isn’t about food.

And it sure as hell not about willpower. And once you understand what’s actually going on, you’ll never look at another diet the same way again. If you’ve ever said, I [00:01:00] just need to get it together, you need to hear this. So let’s get into it.

Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast, the podcast for women over 40 who want peace with food, ease in their habits, and a body that they don’t have to fight with.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I am so glad that you have decided to join me today.

I’m especially thrilled that we are here today because this topic, why diets don’t actually stop Overeating is one that I deeply care about. I’ve been talking about it a lot lately because. I keep seeing brilliant, capable, accomplished women. Women who are total rock stars in other areas of their lives, defaulting to another diet, and not because they don’t know better, but because diets are what we’ve been taught.

It’s [00:02:00] in the air that we breathe, and honestly, it just breaks my heart because if you’ve ever felt like food has more power over you than it should. If you’ve ever wondered why something that looks so simple on paper feels so incredibly complicated in real life, you are not alone. You do know what to do.

You’ve read the books, you’ve tracked the macros, you’ve cut the carbs, counted the points, downloaded the apps. You’ve done the swaps and the detoxes and the Pinterest worthy meal prep that looks so beautiful in your kitchen. And still you find yourself in front of the pantry at nine 30 at night thinking, why am I doing this again?

You’re not stupid and you’re not lazy, and. You are not doing it wrong, but let’s be honest, something about this still feels [00:03:00] harder than it should because you look around and you think like other people seem to eat normally. Why can’t I? Why does food feel like it has this just confusing grip over me like it owns you sometimes?

Why do you feel fine? Until you don’t. And so this episode is for the part of you that’s been whispering. Is it me? Am I just wired wrong? Or maybe the part that’s louder, why can’t I stick with it like other people do? And I want you to hear this, really hear it. There is nothing wrong with you.

You’re not broken, you’re not weak, you’re not missing some magical discipline gene. You’ve been handed tools that don’t work in real life, and the people who seem to have it all figured out, guess what? [00:04:00] They are struggling too. They’re just not talking about it.

So let’s talk about it here on today’s show. So here’s the thing about diets. Diets love to make it sound simple. Eat this, not that. Only eat between these hours. Follow the plan, stick to the portions, track it, weigh it, log it. It’s all so super tidy on paper for someone who hates messes, like it’s so perfect.

But real life is messy. A diet might tell you to eat grilled chicken and roasted vegetables for dinner, But it doesn’t show you what to do when you walk through the door at 7:00 PM at night, you’re exhausted from just a completely stressful day at work. You have family text and that mental offload of [00:05:00] just everything.

And if the house is quiet and the leftovers in the fridge just feel, ugh, uncompelling suddenly. The chips in the pantry are louder than everything else. Diets don’t know about the kind of night where you’ve held it all together all day, but then your daughter calls upset about either her roommate or job or her breakup, and you hang up and find yourself standing in front of the freezer, spoon in hand.

Not even sure how you got there. Diets don’t account for grief or that low simmering grade stress that has been with you for years. They don’t know about the lonely weekends or the tension in your marriage or how food became your most reliable way to just exhale. They give you the rules, [00:06:00] but they don’t give you the skills.

They say, don’t eat that. Yeah, but they never teach you how to deal with the moment after you do, because diets only work when you can be perfect and you weren’t made to be perfect. You were made to be human. And that means messy, emotional, real things like spontaneous pizza nights, old family recipes that mean something to you.

Leftover cake from your neighbor’s birthday, and moments when food is the only thing that feels comforting. So when a diet fails to account for life and then blames you for not being able to stick with it, that’s not a plan. That’s a setup for failure, and honestly, I think that you deserve better than that.

So when that plan falls apart [00:07:00] again, what do you tell yourself? If you’re like most of the women that I work with, it sounds something like, I just have no self-control. I’m just addicted to sugar. I can do everything else but food. Ugh, I’m hopeless. This will always be my cross to bear my thing. It’s that quiet, awful loop of shame.

And it’s not just about the chips or the brownies, it’s about what you make it mean when you eat them. You tell yourself that you’re weak, that you don’t want it badly enough, that if you could just try harder. Maybe this time it could work, but that’s not true. You are not weak, you are not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you, and you’re definitely not a lost cause.

Here’s what’s actually happening. You’ve learned [00:08:00] probably over decades that food helps. Like it’s tasty, it’s good. It soothes. It numbs and it distracts. It gives you something to do with your hands when. You’re anxious. It offers comfort. When you’re lonely. It creates a sense of connection. When things feel disjointed or empty, it’s not because you’re bad, it’s because the food worked.

And our brains are so super smart at figuring out what works. It remembers what gave you relief, and it wants to help you to feel better again. So when we tell ourselves that our eating is the problem and then try to control it harder by tightening up the rules or starting over on Monday, [00:09:00] we are missing the point because it was never about the food.

It was about what we were trying to feel or not feel. But here’s the catch. Diets don’t teach you how to notice that. They don’t give you the tools for curiosity or self-compassion. They don’t offer repair. They only offer control. And control is brittle. It breaks under pressure. And when it breaks the diets don’t say, Hmm, maybe this strategy isn’t right for you.

No. They just say, try harder because all these other people got it to work, which just reinforces the idea that the problem is actually you, not the diet. I’m here to tell you that it’s not. Overeating isn’t a character flaw, it’s a skill that you learned in a world that didn’t give you [00:10:00] many other skills.

And the good news is that this skill is learned and so it can be unlearned and new ones can take their place. So for me, there was a moment, it was years ago, I was in my early forties when I realized that I couldn’t keep doing this. I remember standing in my kitchen, still in my sweaty workout clothes from hours earlier, and I had just inhaled a bunch of chocolate covered almonds.

I didn’t even wanna count them. I didn’t even wanna know how many that I actually ate, and I honestly wasn’t even hungry when I ate them. I just felt like empty, tired, spent, and completely out of control. It was my 3:00 PM. Thing that I did every single day. I had run that morning. I lifted weights. I had tracked my macros down to the gram [00:11:00] until I ate the chocolate covered almonds and I was doing everything right, but it never felt like it was enough.

I didn’t feel like my body reflected the so much effort that I was putting in. I was constantly sore, exhausted, and trying to undo something that I had done before, whether it was too many calories or cravings or shame, and I remember thinking, I cannot keep doing this. There has got to be a better way.

Like, is this just how it’s gonna be right now? Always calculating second guessing, negotiating with myself around food, treating my body like a project to manage instead of a partner to live with. Like I was always fighting with my body trying to get it to look like something that it just wasn’t. I thought maybe I just [00:12:00] needed to tweak the formula, get a smarter plan, a better coach, a cleaner diet, but that wasn’t it.

And the problem wasn’t me. The problem was that I had been sold a system that taught me to distrust my body, that if I just controlled harder, I could finally be free. But I wasn’t free. I was micromanaging myself into burnout, and I knew I didn’t wanna be 65 years old or older and still arguing with myself about whether I was allowed to eat a cookie.

That was the crack that started everything. That moment something shifted. I couldn’t keep punishing myself into health, so I tried something different, something radical. I hired a coach but not to fix me, [00:13:00] someone to help me to unlearn the noise, to help me to listen to my body again, to get me to understand what was happening.

I started eating when I was hungry. I stopped eating. When I was satisfied, I used the hunger scale, checking in, noticing what actually felt good and not what I thought I was allowed to eat. And yeah, it totally felt terrifying at first, but slowly my energy evened out. I wasn’t constantly sore, my cravings dropped.

I could finally sleep and I could finally think. And the most surprising thing was that my body started to change. Not because I forced it to, but because I finally stopped fighting it. I stopped needing so much control and I started practicing care instead, and that is when everything shifted.

Here’s what I want you to know [00:14:00] now. It’s not the food. It is why you’re eating the food, what you’re using the food for, because if you’re reaching for snacks, when you’re not hungry, if you find yourself eating things that you don’t even enjoy, if you’re not really tasting your food, you’re just trying to feel something or nothing, that’s not a lack of discipline.

That’s a signal. Emotional eating isn’t some shameful secret. It’s totally human. It’s a learned response to a world that doesn’t give us many tools for dealing with stress or loneliness or the thousand tiny disappointments that we absorb in a day. You weren’t born reaching for ice cream when you were sad.

You learned that it helped, that it was safe and that it was yours. It didn’t talk back. [00:15:00] And honestly, that makes so much sense. So let’s stop making emotional eating the enemy. Let’s get curious about it instead. Because once you understand why you’re reaching for food, you can start building other ways to respond.

Ways that feel comforting, but don’t leave you stuck in the same cycle. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to give up pizza or cookies or Friday night fries. You just have to start paying attention gently and consistently, because that’s what actually works, not another plan, not another reset.

What works is building trust with your body. Again, noticing your hunger, noticing your satisfaction. tuning back in instead of tuning out. And when you do that, when you stop trying to [00:16:00] control everything and start responding with care, instead, you will eat less without forcing it, you’ll move more because it actually feels good, not because you’re supposed to, and you’ll start to feel steady, clear, and free.

And so here’s my bold promise that I want to make. If you learn how to stop overeating without dieting, you’ll never, ever need to diet again. That’s the last first step, and it’s more possible than you think. If any part of this episode has you nodding along, if you’re thinking, oh my God, that’s me. I want you to know that you are so not alone.

There is another way to do this, and that’s exactly why I created my free live presentation called How to Stop Overeating Without Going On a Diet. So if you’re tired of starting over, if you’re [00:17:00] tired of feeling like you have to be perfect just to feel okay in your body, If you’ve read all the books, followed all the plans, and still feel like something’s missing.

This class is for you. We will talk about why traditional diets fail 97% of people, and what the other 3% know that makes the difference. We’ll talk about the real reasons that you overeat and how to respond without guilt, shame, or restriction, and. I’ll show you exactly how to start rebuilding trust with your body so that you can stop micromanaging every bite and start living your life.

You will walk away with tools that you can use immediately. And I do hope that you’ll join me because I know what it’s like to be where you are, and I also know what it’s like to be on [00:18:00] the other side. To register for how to stop overeating without going on a diet, go to elizabeth sherman.com/stop-overeating.

That will be in the show notes. so go there if you want to click on the link, and that’s where the next step starts, so you don’t have to figure this out alone. I wanna invite you to come join me. That’s all I have for you today. Have an amazing day.

I’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Now before you go, if today’s episode hit a little too close for home, or if you’ve ever wondered why did I eat that, I have something for you. It’s called The 82 Reasons You Overeat that have nothing to do with food Now, it’s not a guilt trip, and it’s definitely not another diet plan. It’s a free guide that will help you to finally understand why you keep eating, even though you swore you wouldn’t.

Here’s a secret. It’s not about willpower, [00:19:00] it’s about everything else. You can grab your copy right now@elizabethsherman.com slash 82 reasons. Seriously, go download it. You’ll feel seen, and it might just be the start of something different.