Ep 76 | 3 Ways to De-Shame Your Fitness Journey and Build a Healthier Relationship with Food
If you consistently feel shame around how you eat, how you train, or how you live, that's a problem. But here's the good news: it's a problem that can be fixed. You can change your relationship with yourself and de-shame your fitness journey.
The Hidden Obstacle in Your Fitness Journey
Many people struggle with intense feelings of guilt and shame when they experience setbacks in their diet or workouts. Whether it's binging, splurging, or missing a workout, that shame can eat away at your confidence and derail your entire fitness journey.
I see this pattern constantly with my clients. Someone will message me saying, "I feel so bad. I ate a whole packet of crackers over two days, and now my weight is up." The stress and guilt they feel isn't really about the crackers—it's about something much deeper.
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Jayd (00:00):
If you have this consistent pattern of feeling shame around how you eat or how you train, or just how you live, that's a problem. And it is a problem that can be fixed. You can change your relationship with yourself and you can desham your fitness. Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer for over 10 years and I've created this podcast to help you to get in shape, get strong, get lean without shame, and without burnout. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you a conversation that I had with my Twitch chat while I was live on my Twitch channel. Now, while I was live, I was talking to my community about some really commonly experienced feelings that I see in my clients as well as in my community members. Many people struggle with feelings of guilt and shame when they experience a setback in their diet or in their workouts, or if they find themselves splurging and eating a bunch or binging a bunch.
(01:09)
And this shame that you feel after you have experienced a bingeing episode or a splurging episode can really eat away at your confidence to stay consistent with your fat loss journey and with your fitness journey. So in today's episode, I'm going to share some of my tips and strategies to help my clients and myself to get back on track and get off the shame spiral when we go through periods where we go off plan so that we can make sure that these off plan instances remain just a blip on the radar instead of becoming our patterns. I'm also going to help ease your mind with a couple of reframes that you can use to help calm your nervous system when you're feeling worked up about going off plan. Now, before we get into the episode, make sure to like this video if you're watching on YouTube and subscribe to the channel so you always get the latest episodes.
(02:05)
If you are listening to this podcast, thank you so much. Make sure that you follow the channel so that every time there's a new episode, it gets delivered right to your device. And keep in mind that right now I'm enrolling new students into my fat loss transformation program. This 90 day coaching program is the best way for you to learn all the basics and get on track towards burning fat and keeping it off for good. Over the course of three months, I'm going to help you to clean up your diet, get into a consistent exercise routine that works for you and your body, and you can lose up to 25 pounds over the course of this program. For more information, check out the link in the show notes or in the description of the video below. And for more information on my other coaching programs and services, head to my website Jaydigains.com. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-I-N s.com. And without further ado, let's get the episode.
(03:05)
I have clients sometimes who will be like, oh man, I feel so bad. I feel so stressed because I splurged. And one client said the other day, I ate a whole packet of crackers into in two days she saw her weight go up the day after she ate that whole packet of crackers, and she was really stressing because she saw the weight go up. And she also felt really, really guilty about eating that packet of crackers. And at that point in time, there really wasn't much that I could say as her coach to calm her mind because what she was dealing with was an emotional trigger and maybe even a trauma trigger. And that's where for a lot of people, their fitness, their fat loss, it lives in an emotional side of their brain that's deeply tied with shame and deeply tied into their self-perception.
(03:58)
So whereas I can talk about things and I can teach about things and I can make a billion podcast episodes about how to desham your relationship with food, how to desham your fitness journey, and you can listen to them and you can understand what I'm saying, and you can be like, oh, that makes so much sense. But if you haven't done the emotional side of things, if you haven't done the emotional therapeutic work to kind of tease shame apart from how you see yourself, your body, how you see food, how you see fitness and exercise, then there's no workout in the world. There's no diet in the world that's going to save you from feeling that way. There's work that you have to do beyond just eating better and just exercising better if you want to tackle that horrible feeling that you have when you think about how much you splurged last weekend or how bad you feel because you missed a workout, because you could be in the best shape in the world, you could be ready to step on a bodybuilding stage and win, and you would still feel that shame and that horrible feeling if you perceive yourself to have messed up like you messed up on a workout or you messed up on your diet.
(05:25)
And that's because there's a habit of thought and there's also those emotional triggers are still there unless you work through them. So what I do as a coach is I do try to help people to address the aspect of their fitness, which is let, let's help you get in shapes, learn how to exercise. Let's get you into a good exercise routine, and I'll teach you how to eat better and I'll get you into a better eating routine. But if we don't also address the emotional of things of how you see yourself and your relationship with food, your relationship with your body, if you don't do work on that at the same time with a therapist or by doing shadow work, then you're going to still feel like no matter how good of shape you get into, and that is the unfortunate reality. Unfortunate or maybe fortunate, I don't know.
(06:21)
I think that that's actually kind of a beautiful thing because no matter what, none of us can dismiss the importance of personal growth. None of us can dismiss the importance of doing things like shadow work or going to therapy and working on ourselves. There's no shortcut to that. There's no workout, there's no diet that is going to be a shortcut to you liking yourself better, okay? No matter what your body looks like, whether you lose 50 pounds or not, right? You still have to do that emotional work and that inner work of examining your thoughts, examining your habits, examining your behaviors and working on them, reframing how you see yourself, reframing how you relate to food, and reframing how you relate to your workouts. And that takes constant effort, but it's very doable. And the upside of it, I think, of doing that kind of work is that you can begin to like yourself and you can begin to experience less shame around your body, around food, around your workouts before you've even reached your fitness goal.
(07:35)
You can develop a better relationship with yourself and feel better in much less time than it takes for you to lose all of that weight and build the amount of muscle that you want to build because changing those thoughts, those thought habits, if you set aside time to work on it and to learn what you need to learn and start practicing strategies to reframe how you think, if you stay consistent, you can actually change your relationship with yourself. And at the same time, that will actually take you even further and make it much easier for you to achieve your fitness goals. Once you improve your relationship with yourself, how you see yourself, how you see food, how you see exercise, it is so much easier to stay consistent on a healthy diet and stay consistent on a fitness routine. So you have to do both.
(08:29)
And that's something that a lot of personal trainers will not tell you because a lot of personal trainers, they're just there. You show up, you do the workout, hopefully it works for you. Or you show up to a bootcamp class and they give you a killer workout, you feel like you're going to die. Maybe you throw up and you leave feeling temporarily, yeah, I did something, and you feel like a temporary sense of I did something good, but in the long term, it doesn't actually change your body as much as you want it to, and you still have that poor relationship with yourself whenever you binge, whenever you go off your diet plan, you feel really, really badly. So if you don't take time to kind of rethink that, then you're just going to keep hitting the same obstacles and you're going to keep feeling like, but there are ways that you can address it, which we can talk about.
(09:18)
I put together a little guide for how to desham your relationship with food because the food thing is, I think where people experience shame the most. That's where I see it the most, where people are like, oh, I was so bad. I ate something bad. And then they beat themselves up and then they have a hard time showing up for their workouts, and then they just spiral out of control and just throw the whole thing away. Or they'll be like, I'll start next week and just the whole week is a wash. You've probably experienced something like that before. I think that's a really common pattern a lot of people have experienced. If you have this consistent pattern of feeling shame around how you eat or how you train or just how you live, that's a problem. And it is a problem that can be fixed.
(10:06)
You can change your relationship with yourself and you can desham your fitness. Before I get into my tips for how to desham your fitness and desham your relationship with food and your body, I do have to say the best, most ideal place for you to work on those things is with a certified licensed therapist, someone who can diagnose you and help you work on the things that are specifically your issues. Someone who is trauma informed, someone who has certifications and training on dealing with eating disorders, someone who has certifications and training on shame disorders. You want to work with a therapist because they have so much knowledge and so many tools to help you work through those things. Okay? It's something that I'm happy that therapy is much more common these days. It seems like more people are open to it, but it really is something that I kind of wish.
(11:07)
So growing up, for example, in my family, so much shame. My family culture is so shame based. And as a little girl, I learned that pretty quickly and learned how to shame myself and shame other people as a behavior, as a thought process, as a way of seeing the world, as a way of relating to the world and as a way of relating to myself. I internalized that really early on, and I had just the most horrible anxiety and horrible self-esteem in my childhood and in my teens, and that was part of my family culture. It's part of our larger culture too, especially for girls. But men too experience this when they're young. Our culture in the United States is very shame-based, and I think a lot of it has to do with our cultural and religious roots. And shame is a really powerful emotion that makes it easy to control you. If I want to sell you something and I can convince you to be ashamed of something about yourself, and then I can sell you the solution, you're so much more likely to actually buy the solution from me if I can make you feel ashamed of yourself.
(12:31)
The beauty industry is a perfect example of this. How many diet pills are there? How much skincare products are there? There's so many beauty products that are just totally frivolous and unnecessary. Now, a lot of skincare for medical reasons is really good, but there's just, you know what I'm talking about, those frivolous above and beyond what's necessary beauty products that just really, the marketing is all about keeping you ashamed of how you look. You need to look better. So by this thing, that's how our capitalism works. That's how our economy works. A lot of our economy, a lot of our society is built on shame and keeping us feeling ashamed, keeping us in jobs that suck our soul out of our body and kill us because we're so ashamed. We would be so ashamed to not have money or to not be able to buy the things, to be able to keep up with the Joneses type of situation.
(13:33)
So there's shame everywhere in our culture and we internalize it even at super young ages. And then if you grow up in a really fundamentalist like religious family, then that's compounded. You add in the religious shame side of things. When I was younger, I struggled with an eating disorder just as almost all of the other women in my family did because I had a lot of shame around my body and my relationship with food was very emotional. It was, oh, I would eat food to comfort myself because of the anxiety that I felt, but then I would feel ashamed of how much food I ate, and then I would go through a period of time of starving myself. And that was a recurrent cycle for me for much of my teenage and early adult life. And it wasn't until I started going to therapy and really unraveling a lot of the shame that I felt about myself and started healing that shame and started cultivating a better relationship with myself that that pattern got better.
(14:44)
And I think that that's a really common issue for a lot of people who struggle to stay consistent on their fat loss or their fitness. And again, it was really seeing therapists and seeing counselors, seeing life coaches who helped change my relationship with myself, which ultimately allowed me to tackle the behaviors that were causing poor health outcomes for myself. And now, I wouldn't say that my relationship with myself is perfect. I still have work to do, but I have so much of a healthier relationship with myself, and I do such a better job of feeding myself well, feeding myself regularly, and I don't feel as, I mean from time to time, I guess I'll feel a little guilty. Sometimes I'll feel a little bit of shame, but it is very, very rare now. And when it does happen, I have good tools to step back and be like, wait a second.
(15:40)
There's no need for me to feel this shame because I have my first aid kit strategies that I can use when that shame starts to creep up. So I wanted to share with you guys some strategies and some tips and thoughts to reframe how you see yourself and how you see your relationship with food and how you see food in particular so that you can begin the process of shaming your relationship with food if that's something that you struggle with. But again, the best thing to do is to work with a therapist and a dietician who specializes in eating disorders. You may be struggling with one without realizing it because what you probably are dealing with is a poor relationship with food, a very shame-based relationship with food. But it is something that you can work on and it's something that you can change. And this is what I tell my clients to help them to desham their relationship with food.
(16:39)
Number one of the best ways that you can kind desham your relationship with food and also calm down. When you have these kinds of instances where you've splurge or you go off plan, it's easy to think that you are going to lose all of your gains. And it's almost like the fear is that you are going to get set back all the way to where you started. When I talk my clients through trying to get at what's the root of what is causing them anxiety when they experience these types of things, I keep asking why we keep digging deeper. And what I found is that at the root of a lot of this is a fear of going back to being the person that they were before they started their journey. They're afraid of becoming that person again or relapsing into that person again, who they were before they started exercising, before they started eating better.
(17:34)
And if that's something that like you struggle with, I want to remind you, you are not the same person that you were when you started this journey. You are never going to be that person again. Even if you do end up gaining some weight, right? Even if something happens, you are never going to be that person because who you are as a person is more than just how often you exercise or how you eat, right? There are habits of thought. There are habits of your day-to-day life. Your whole lifestyle has likely completely transformed from the time that you started this journey until now. If you have lost a lot of weight or you have radically changed your body, it's because you have changed yourself. You have changed your lifestyle, and the habits that build up a lifestyle are very resilient, and it's hard to change all of them at once.
(18:32)
One weekend off plan or splurging on some crackers or some ice cream is not going to undo and unravel all of the little habits and changes that you've made in your life to support you getting to where you are now. So just try to remind yourself and really begin to practice believing. I'm never going back. I'm never going to be that person again, because you're not. It would be very, very hard for you. Your whole life would have to change, and you would have to change a lot about how you think and how you live your day-to-day life to go back to being that person. But even if you did, you would still not be that person because now you have the knowledge and the experience of having built that lifestyle and having built those habits more. Now you have done things differently. You're never going to be that person again.
(19:27)
Number two, another thing that can help you. If you're dealing with a lot of shame or you're struggling with how you feel around having splurged or gone off plan, one thing I would challenge you to do is remove the moral language from food. And food behaviors a lot of times absorb and get into this habit of seeing foods or behaviors toward food as good or bad, but there's nothing moral. There's nothing inherently moral about food. Your body is an organism, and food is energy, food is fuel, and we have all kinds of automatic systems in our brains and in our bodies that are geared towards keeping us alive. So during times of stress in the wild, what kinds of things would cause stress for people who are hunter gatherers, which humans have been for the majority of our existence as a species, the kinds of things that would cause a stress in the wild are things like having to run for our life from some kind of threat or having to find food.
(20:36)
Those are the main stressors for people in the wild. And so we by nature have these systems in place that cause us to want to eat more or want to eat comfort foods, which typically tend to be higher calorie when we're stressed. That's a system that serves a biological function. It's not something to be ashamed of because it works. It does its job. Even though your body doesn't know that you live in captivity, your body doesn't know that you live in a society where food is more available and high calorie food is more available. Your body was built for the wild. And so when you get stressed, your body's thinking, oh, we might not have food available, or I need some more energy because we're going to be having to travel a long distance to find food again. Or I'm going to have to run for my life away from some saber-tooth tiger that's stalking me.
(21:34)
So that stress to eating system is a system that serves a function. It's not because your body is bad or that you are bad, just that system is kind of mismatched for the setting that you live in. So try to remove the moral language around food and around food behaviors, because a lot of the food behaviors that we have, a lot of the behaviors that we have in period that maybe we find undesirable, a lot of times they're rooted in, at one point they were a solution to a problem, a solution that worked. And so our brains and our bodies formed a shortcut. So we don't even think about it like, oh, well, for our ancestors, unlike I'm stressed probably because there's not food around, so I feel stressed, therefore, I need to eat. And that becomes a shortcut that keeps you alive if you're in the wild. So try to see those types of things as like morally neutral, neutral, every behavior is a solution to a problem, but sometimes the solutions to problems that worked at one point, they no longer serve us, and when they no longer serve us, then we have to kind of take a look at how we can update our behavior, modify our behavior, modify our environment to help support the behaviors that we want to see.
(23:03)
But there's nothing wrong with eating. There's nothing wrong with you for liking to eat yummy food, right? Your body, your system is built for that, okay? It's not like a bad thing. So try to remind yourself that there's nothing inherently moral about food or about food behaviors. So another thing number three that I want to encourage you to do if you're starting to feel kind of on a spiral around having gone off plan, is to zoom out and see the big picture. One little time of going off plan, even if you eat a whole tub of ice cream, is not really going to have the impact that you think it will. It's not going to undo the months, weeks, years of work that you have done to get to where you are now. Try to zoom out and look at your behavior overall, because that's what your body is going to reflect.
(24:00)
Your body will reflect what you do most of the time. So even if you go off plan, even if you splurge here and there, if most of the time you're following your plan, you're eating the way that you need to eat, you're exercising the way that you need to exercise, that's what your body is going to reflect. Okay? And another thing that I want to kind of encourage you with is sometimes splurging or feeling that intense need to splurge is itself a solution to a problem that your body and your brain are automatically solving. If you've been going for a really long time in a calorie deficit that takes a lot of energy, it's hard mentally and physically to be in a calorie deficit for a long period of time, and it wears on your brain, it wears on your metabolism as well. So sometimes when you take a little diet break, even if it's unplanned, this can actually serve you in the long run because it gives you that relief from the stress of being in a calorie deficit.
(25:04)
You scratch the itch for your brain, which is like, I need some comfort food. Give me a break from having to be super disciplined all the time. So sometimes it can give you that mental break so that you can get back on track in your normal planned diet and be able to stick to it because you had a little bit of a mental break. It also can help to resensitize your body to your calorie deficit. If you've been in a calorie deficit for a really long time, your body adapts to that and can slow down your body system so that they're not spending as much energy because your body is like, oh, we are not getting a lot of food. We need to be on low power mode. So sometimes splurging and having a day or a weekend where you eat more, it can actually help to reset your metabolism so that when you do go back into your calorie deficit, your body is less likely to slow everything down and stay in that low power mode.
(26:03)
Zoom out and think about how long have I actually been in a calorie deficit if it's been more than six weeks, that craving, that desire to go off plan and splurge is likely your body and your brain saying, Hey, I'm starving. Help. And if you don't listen to it, it sometimes will override you, and then you'll find yourself 12:00 AM standing in front of the freezer eating a pint of ice cream with a spoon. And the thing is, again, you want to think of it not as a moral thing, not this bad thing or this good thing. That's your body's systems overriding and saying, this bitch is not feeding us. We're going to take matters into our own hands. We got to solve this problem. So sometimes it's not necessarily actually a bad thing. Sometimes it's something your body needs.
(26:59)
So understand that the splurges can actually serve you, okay? And you also want to practice some self-compassion instead of self-criticism. Next up, another thing that can help if you are freaking out is recognize the difference between a little slipup, a little splurge that's just like this one-off thing versus a slide, right? It's the difference between a slip and a slide. A slip is like a slip up of a little blip, a little blip on the radar. One out of one day, out of several weeks you've splurge and you go off plan. A slide would be, okay, I splurged on Saturday, then I splurged on Sunday. Now it's been a couple of weeks and I haven't stopped. When it becomes a habit and it starts to become the thing that you do more often than not, that's where we need to pay attention. Not necessarily to judge yourself or shame yourself, but be like, this is where we maybe need to start taking some action to change this behavior.
(28:12)
But if it's just one little thing, one little splurge here and there, you binge a little bit over the weekend, but you get right back on track, that's not a big deal. It really isn't because remember, your body's going to reflect what you do most of the time. It's the difference between, I had dessert at the Cheesecake Factory when I went out on a date last Saturday night, versus I've gone to the Cheesecake Factory for lunch every single day for the last month and gotten a slice of cheesecake and eaten it every single day. So that's where it's like this habitual thing where it's like recurring and now it's becoming what you do most of the time. That's where we need to maybe shift gears, take a look at our environment, take a look at our behaviors, and make a plan for how we're going to make some changes.
(29:01)
You do want to build in some internal flexibility for yourself, because like I said, sometimes those off plans splurges can actually be beneficial for you mentally and metabolically. And a lot of times what people will do is actually build in those little splurges or build in those treat days, those treat meals and build them into their diet plan in order to keep them mentally able to stay consistent with their plan so they actually have planned diet breaks or planned treat days where they let themselves be. Because once again, it's what you do most of the time. That really is what your body is going to reflect. And knowing that some very wise gym goers will go ahead and actually plan for their splurges to treat themselves that way they can relieve the stress, the mental stress of being in a calorie deficit and being so disciplined all the time.
(30:01)
And it also helps metabolically to keep their metabolism revved up so that they're not going into that low power mode. I'm a sweetss girl. I love to eat sweets, and so I just factor in sweetss to my diet plan. When I'm tracking my calories, it's the first thing that I plug into my macros app. I plan on eating a bowl of sugary cereal because I want to treat, and then I plan the rest of the day around it. Or if I'm going to go see the babies, if I'm going to go see my brother's kids, then I'm just going to plan. That's going to be a diet break. That whole weekend is going to be a diet break. I'm going to be with the kids, we're going to be baking cookies, we're going to be baking muffins. We're also going to be going outside and playing a bunch, and I don't want to have to worry about what I'm eating.
(30:46)
And so I just plan to be flexible, and then when I get back, I've got it out of my system, and then I get back on my diet plan. So I have that internal flexibility built into my plan, and that's something you can do as well. I think there's so many other points, but I think that this episode has gotten long enough, and I think what we probably could do is have a part two where we talk a little bit more about other strategies or other ways to reframe your relationship with food, because I don't want to keep you guys too long, and I also have to get my own workout in. So I think that we probably saved the rest of this for a second episode, a second part. But the main gist to take away here is like I'm telling you, as a coach, if you've gone off plan and you've splurged, it's not a big frigging deal. It's not, relax, stop it. You're fine. You're fine. You're seriously fine. If you have already lost a bunch of weight, you've done all of the work, one little splurge here and there is fine. You're going to be okay. I promise you're going to be okay, especially if you have a plan of action for how you're going to prevent that from becoming your habitual thing, or especially if you've built some flexibility into your schedule where you can allow for yourself to do that. So we'll talk more about that in a future episode.
(32:10)
Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Coaching Corner Podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison. I hope that you enjoyed this episode that you found it helpful, and make sure to subscribe to my channel if you're watching on YouTube or follow the channel if you're listening to the podcast, so that you can get notified as soon as part two drops. In the coming second part of this episode, we're going to go into even more detail on strategies that you can use to help reframe your fat loss journey and reframe when you have instances where you go off plan. My goal with these episodes is to empower you with some strategies that you can use to help calm your system when you start to feel panicked about messing up so that you can stay on track and build a better relationship with yourself, with food and with your body. So more on that to come very soon. In the meantime, make sure that you take good care of yourself, eat plenty of protein, eat your veggies, drink your water, and prioritize your self-care, and I will see you again soon.
Why Workouts and Diets Alone Won't Fix Everything
Here's what most personal trainers won't tell you: there's no workout or diet plan in the world that will save you from these feelings if you haven't addressed the emotional side of things.
You could be in the best shape of your life, ready to step on a bodybuilding stage, and you would still feel that horrible shame if you perceived yourself to have "messed up." That's because these feelings stem from habits of thought and emotional triggers that remain untouched unless you actively work through them.
Your fitness and fat loss journey lives in an emotional part of your brain that's deeply tied to shame and self-perception. Until you do the emotional therapeutic work to separate shame from how you see yourself, your body, food, and exercise, you'll keep hitting the same obstacles.
The Beautiful Truth About Personal Growth
None of us can shortcut the importance of personal growth. There's no workout or diet that will make you like yourself better. Whether you lose 50 pounds or not, you still have to do that inner work of examining your thoughts, habits, and behaviors.
But here's the upside: you can begin to like yourself and experience less shame around your body, food, and workouts before you've even reached your fitness goal. Changing those thought patterns takes much less time than losing all that weight or building the muscle you want to build.
And here's the real magic: once you improve your relationship with yourself, it becomes so much easier to stay consistent with healthy eating and exercise. You have to do both—the physical work and the emotional work.
Understanding Our Shame-Based Culture
Shame is everywhere in our culture. We internalize it at incredibly young ages. If you grew up in a fundamentalist religious family, it's often compounded even further.
Our economy and society are built on shame. The beauty industry is a perfect example—keeping us ashamed of how we look makes us much more likely to buy products. Our capitalist system thrives on keeping us feeling inadequate.
I struggled with an eating disorder as a teenager and young adult, as did almost all the women in my family. It stemmed from shame around my body and an emotional relationship with food—eating to comfort my anxiety, then feeling ashamed of how much I ate, then starving myself. This cycle repeated for years.
It wasn't until I started going to therapy and really unraveling that shame that the pattern improved. And I want to be clear: the best place to work on these issues is with a certified, licensed therapist—someone trauma-informed who specializes in eating disorders and shame.
Practical Strategies to De-Shame Your Relationship with Food
While therapy is ideal, here are some strategies I share with my clients to help them start reframing their relationship with food:
1. Remember: You're Never Going Back
At the root of much of this anxiety is a fear of becoming the person you were before you started your journey. But here's the truth: you are never going to be that person again.
Even if you gain some weight, you're not the same person. Your lifestyle has transformed. The habits that build up a lifestyle are resilient and hard to change all at once. One weekend off plan or splurging on crackers isn't going to undo all the little habits and changes you've made.
You now have the knowledge and experience of having built this lifestyle. You're never going back.
2. Remove the Moral Language from Food
Challenge yourself to stop seeing foods or eating behaviors as "good" or "bad." There's nothing inherently moral about food.
Your body is an organism. Food is energy and fuel. We have automatic systems designed to keep us alive. When you're stressed, your body thinks you might need extra energy—maybe to run from danger or because food might be scarce. That stress-to-eating response served a biological function for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
That system isn't "bad," and neither are you. It's just mismatched for our modern environment where high-calorie food is abundantly available.
Every behavior is a solution to a problem. Sometimes solutions that worked at one point no longer serve us, and we need to update our approach. But there's nothing wrong with you for liking yummy food—your system is built for that.
3. Zoom Out and See the Big Picture
One instance of going off plan—even eating a whole tub of ice cream—won't have the impact you think it will. It won't undo months or years of work.
Your body reflects what you do most of the time. If you're following your plan most of the time, that's what your body will show, even with occasional splurges.
Sometimes splurging is actually your body and brain solving a problem. If you've been in a calorie deficit for a long time, it takes mental and physical energy. Sometimes an unplanned diet break can:
Give you mental relief from constant discipline
Scratch that itch for comfort food
Help resensitize your body to your calorie deficit
Reset your metabolism so it doesn't stay in "low power mode"
If you've been in a deficit for more than six weeks and you have intense cravings, that's your body saying, "Hey, I'm starving. Help." If you don't listen, it might override you—and you'll find yourself at midnight eating ice cream straight from the container.
That's not a moral failing. That's your body's systems taking over because you haven't been listening.
4. Recognize the Difference Between a Slip and a Slide
A slip is a one-off thing—one day out of several weeks where you splurge.
A slide is when it becomes habitual. You splurged Saturday, then Sunday, and now it's been weeks and you haven't stopped.
When it becomes what you do more often than not, that's when you need to take action—not to judge yourself, but to make a plan for change.
But one little splurge here and there? That's not a big deal. Really. It isn't.
5. Build in Internal Flexibility
Many successful gym-goers actually plan their splurges. They build in treat days or treat meals to relieve the mental stress of constant discipline and keep their metabolism revved up.
I'm a sweets girl. I love sugary cereal. So I factor it into my diet plan—it's the first thing I plug into my macro app. Then I plan the rest of my day around it.
When I visit my brother's kids, I plan for that whole weekend to be a diet break. We're going to bake cookies and muffins, play outside, and I don't want to worry about what I'm eating. I get it out of my system, then get back on my plan when I return.
That internal flexibility helps me stay consistent long-term.
The Bottom Line
If you've gone off plan and splurged, it's not a big deal. Relax. You're fine. Seriously, you're fine.
If you've already lost weight and done the work, one little splurge here and there is completely okay. You're going to be okay, especially if you have a plan to prevent it from becoming habitual or if you've built flexibility into your schedule.
Remember: changing your relationship with yourself and with food is possible. It takes work, but it's very doable. And the payoff is enormous—not just for your fitness goals, but for your entire life.
Looking for support on your fitness journey? Consider working with a coach who understands both the physical and emotional aspects of transformation. And remember: prioritize therapy if you're struggling with disordered eating or deep-seated shame. You deserve that support.
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