Why it’s really not your fault!
Many people I’ve met throughout my professional and personal life blame themselves and feel an enormous amount of negativity and guilt when they talk about their struggles with food, body weight and body image. But when we stop and actually explore all the complex factors that influence these feelings (‘Take the Thought to Court’ a reframing exercise used in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), they often soon realise that it’s not their fault at all, but the cumulative effect of a number of circumstances not working in their favour and one compelling, quite simple reason…
Our modern society has made it so much easier to be unhealthy than it has to be healthy.
Today’s modern environment is obesogenic (tending to cause obesity) and psychogenic (originating in mental or emotional conflict) and when you add socio-economic factors to this, millions of people across the UK have been subjected to multiple negative, environmental influences from all angles, encouraging negative health behaviours such as sitting down with screens more, eating high sugar, salt and fat processed foods, moving less and sleeping less. It’s no surprise therefore, that we’ve seen a dramatic increase in chronic lifestyle-related illnesses such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s.
For decades now, individuals and their families have been up against aggressive marketing and a relentless flood of unhealthy food pouring out from high streets, supermarket shelves and our school canteens. In whose interests exactly is it to have more fried chicken and fast food shops on a high street, than grocery and convenience stores selling fresh fruit, vegetables and healthy snacks - often around our schools?
Food companies have been spending millions on developing and advertising tempting and irresistible processed foods that have the magic combination and ratio of sugar and fat (not dissimilar to breast milk which is the only naturally occurring substance like this) and these stimulate a reward response which can be highly difficult to resist once we start eating these foods. A 2018 Study from Yale University (1) states that “combining fat and sugar increases the reward value of foods independently of caloric load, liking, and portion size and disrupts the ability to accurately estimate the energy density of fatty foods.”
At the same time, we’ve also spent our adult lives bombarded with poor and sometimes extreme ’quick fix’ diet advice (juice/shake cleanses/diets/fasts) encouraging us to count calories, points, Syns, macros and measure ourselves, our actual personal ‘worth’, based on what the scales say.
The imagery and advertising that has targeted us and has been everywhere we look over the past thirty years or more, including models and celebrities who seem to have it all living their ‘perfect’ lives, has told us clearly, in no uncertain terms that slimmer, thinner and smaller is better.
For some, this been like spending their whole life trying to fit their size 7 feet into a size 4 shoe.
Utterly physically and emotionally painful, and absolutely impossible to sustain for the longer-term, often resulting in yo-yo weight cycling, poor body image, challenging relationships with food and increasingly poor mental health which includes feelings of frustration, disappointment in ourselves and often guilt. So. Much. Guilt. And it has to stop. It can stop.
Thankfully today, more people are beginning to understand that a healthy lifestyle really shouldn't be about deprivation or punishment and it certainly shouldn’t be hard or feel near-impossible to achieve, but it can still feel like that can’t it?
Life can be tough and we all face difficulties and set-backs, never more so than in 2020, but we can avoid unconsciously falling into these modern lifestyle traps with increased awareness, education and self-compassion. Reframing our thinking around all of this can be truly transformative.
Join me on my next online Seasonal Reset, or arrange a free 15 minute discovery call with me to find out more on my Contact page.