The Diet Trap: Breaking Free in Midlife

As a woman in midlife, I look back and reflect upon how confused, stuck and overwhelmed I felt about weight loss, food and my body. I’ve lived through decades of changing and conflicting information about dieting, fitness and the best way to lose weight. I can tell you it was exhausting - and lonely.

The solution to losing weight seemed simple enough - if I’d had a dollar for every time it was suggested to me that weight loss was a simple matter of calories in/calories out, and I just needed to stop overeating/nibbling, I’d be a wealthy woman today.

I, like many closet emotional eaters with a disordered relationship with food and my body, believed the implicit message spread through advertising and the diet industry - there must be something wrong with me because I couldn’t lose weight and keep it off.

Decades of Diets: A Brief History

It was no accident that there was a rise in weight loss programs and restrictive diets. For example:

• the grapefruit diet in the 50’s,

• the cabbage diet, Weight Watchers, and the creation of refined foods in the 60’s,

• the low-carb craze and the Scarsdale Diet in the 70’s,

• the low-fat or no-fat demonization and SlimFast in the 80’s,

• the resurrection of low-carb diets with The Zone and the Atkins diet in the 90’s,

• South Beach in the 2000’s,

• Paleo, Keto and Intermittent Fasting in 2010

What do all these diets and diet programs have in common? They work - until they don’t.

How many have you tried and found yourself back to square one, searching, again, for that magic bullet?

Food as Friend or Foe

Restriction and unsustainable rules lead to a revolving door of failure and for many an increase in an unhealthy relationship with food and one’s body, or worse, an eating disorder.

There is a blatant dismissal of the emotional and physical toll dieting takes by the diet industry. In fact, they bank on dieters believing it’s not the diet that is the problem, but the dieter’s inability to follow-through and stick with it.

The Anti-diet Rebellion and Intuitive Eating

It is also no surprise that a rebellion against dieting emerged. Intuitive Eating, originally developed in 1995 by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, gained additional popularity in the last decade and the anti-diet movement emerged to celebrate and accept fat bodies, demonizing dieting of any kind.

I left Weight Watchers for the last time in my 50’s after reaching a goal weight for the 2nd time in my life. I had no idea how to maintain the weight I’d lost - maintenance support was limited at best so instead of returning to another diet plan or program, I cut myself loose and joined the Intuitive Eating bandwagon!

The freedom felt amazing - until it didn’t.

While I agree with many of the tenants of Intuitive Eating, I found myself rebelling against decades of restriction and dieting. Food, once again, became my friend and foe, my comfort and my enemy. I was lost in the anti-diet movement, moving further and further away from myself, disconnected from my body, desperate to reclaim my wellbeing and worth.

Finding EFT and the Turning Point in My Healing Journey

When I started Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT Tapping) training in 2019, I had no idea how learning this powerful tool would gradually begin to help me get out of my own way and lead me to the help and support I needed - to heal deep wounds, to unlock the trap I’d been caught in, and step by step unravel and detox the beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and traumatic moments that drove me, relentlessly, right into the arms of the diet industry.

Why Support Matters: We’re Not Meant to Do This Alone

I mentioned that dieting was a lonely venture at the beginning of this story. I often felt alone and lonely on my weight loss journey. If I can offer you any advice, dear reader, to help you disengage from the diet rollercoaster and leave emotional eating behind you, it’s to work with a coach or counsellor who can help you create the changes you’ve struggled to make on your own.

The benefits of doing the work - emotional and physical - are lifechanging. Having someone trained to help you work through all the wobbles and challenges, to keep you accountable (to yourself), to witness the messiness and the transformation, to make what seems so difficult, doable, is a gift.

I sometimes wonder how my life might have been different all those decades ago had I known what I know now about how to meet myself where I am and have the courage and ability to sit with difficult feelings and those parts of me I used to run away from.

I’ve often thought I could have, should have, sought the support I needed sooner, given my training and background in social work/counselling and coaching.

Perhaps, but letting go of what could have been is part of the work - hindsight is always 20/20. As I take one step and then another forward, like the tortoise, I am grateful that I can experiment and explore how to release the weight I’ve carried with me safely and sustainably as I navigate midlife and beyond.

I am no longer alone on this journey. And the loneliness? It began to fade the moment I decided I was worth the effort to change and face the future on my terms. As a Late Bloomer I’m embracing the journey in which weight loss is the vehicle I’ve chosen to take me in the direction I want to be going in.

Thanks for reading.

I’m curious - if you could offer your younger self one piece of advice about weight, worth or confidence what would it be?

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