Why You're More Critical Of Food & Your Body When Life Feels Chaotic — Rachel Molenda

First and foremost, I want to thank everyone who took the time to read My Mental Health Story and listen to the podcast episode last week. It’s so very clear that mental illness is only isolating because we don’t talk about it enough, and I appreciate everyone’s supportive words and personal stories that were shared.

No idea what I’m talking about? Click here to read the blog post (or click here to listen to the podcast episode).

What I want to address in this post is why you tend to be more critical of food & your body when life feels chaotic.

Life can feel" “chaotic” when:

Your mental health is suffering
You're an entrepreneur, or your work is demanding
You’re a parent
You’re experiencing relationship challenges, or going through a breakup, separation or divorce
You’ve endured a traumatic event
You’ve experienced a loss
You feel out of sorts, and out of alignment of who you are to the core

In other words, there are a lot of reasons why life might be chaotic, disorganized and overwhelming. If you are currently feeling that way, know that you’re not alone and that it’s completely valid that you are feeling the way you do.

If you notice yourself starting to be more critical towards food choices & your body simultaneously, I’m going to explain why and what I recommend you do instead.

Why You’re More Critical of Food Choices & Your Body When Life Feels Chaotic

When you’re experiencing a feeling of “chaos”, you’re likely feeling disorganized, out of sorts, out of alignment and overwhelmed. You probably feel like a hot mess, minus the hotness factor. That can take a huge toll on an individual’s self-esteem, causing you to feel worthless or poorly about yourself.

Nobody likes to feel that way. But beyond not wanting to feel that way, self-esteem, status and recognition are listed as basic needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I laugh, because I learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in high school and university, thinking I’d never need it again but it’s a philosophy that I continuously come back to and refer to in my emotional eating support program, The Break Free Method, and with my Intuitive Way For Eating clients.

What I’m trying to say though, is that the need for high self-esteem, status and recognition and all around worthiness is a primal, basic need. That’s why, when life feels all over the place and messy, your drive to fix it immediately is so strong because the idea of being a “messy human” feels like a threat to your survival.

So, naturally, you go seeking ways to find a sense of worthiness and boost your self-esteem. And where do many people find themselves looking to in order to gain a sense of worthiness? Food and their body.

How Eating Healthy & the “Ideal Body” Give You a False Sense of Worthiness

Maybe you’re wondering, what does healthy eating and achieving the “ideal body” have to do with gaining a sense of worthiness? And to that I say, good point – AND healthism and diet culture.

Let me define both for you …

Healthism is the preoccupation with health for the mere sake of “achieving” a sense of well-being. It suggests that:

the pursuit of health is the personality responsibility of the individual (without taking into consideration the impact of poverty, oppression, environment, access etc).
pursuing health is the “right thing” to do
those who are not in the pursuit of health, or weight loss, are to be looked down upon
those who are in the pursuit of health are more worthy than someone who isn’t

TUNE IN: Listen to episode #61 of The Fill Your Cup Podcast featuring Virgie Tovar to learn more about Healthism and how to go about dismantling it.

This is a fabrication and social construct from Diet Culture, and diet culture is the belief system that revolves around the idea that:

thin bodies are the “best” and healthiest
you must follow external food rules (programs, meal plans etc) in order to be healthy
weight loss is the ticket to attaining a higher status
certain ways of eating are “bad” (and if you eat that way, you are “bad”)

In other words, food isn’t just about food anymore. Bodies are not just bodies. Certain ways of eating, and certain body types, are now seen to be the ticket to achieving a sense of worthiness in society.

This is not fact – this is simply what diet culture tells us and therefore, what we’ve come to believe. I always say to my clients, had you been born a century earlier, the standards of how you should look and eat would be entirely different.

But, right now, diet culture tells us “thin is in”. Thinness is the ticket to worthiness, and if you’re looking for a quick way to feel good about yourself, you can do so by being in the pursuit of health and of the “ideal body”.

That’s why, when life feels out of control and chaotic, you might become more critical with your food choices and of what your body looks like.

Wanting To Gain a Sense of Control

Another reason why, is because when life feels out of control and chaotic, you’re looking to gain a sense of control. Dieting, or following a healthy lifestyle plan, gives you something to control.

One of my former Intuitive Way For Eating clients used to call this going into “research mode”. When life felt overwhelming to her and she wasn’t feeling good about herself, she would go into “research mode”, researching the latest health fad, going through her recipe books and making a plan as to how she was going to “start fresh” in the coming week. Just those actions alone, of being in the pursuit of health, of imagining her getting her “life in order” would give her a sense of immediate relief like the immediate relief you get from taking a drug.

Of course, it wouldn’t last long, because diet culture and the teachings within it are designed to fail (how else would it become a $72+ billion dollar industry?) and it wouldn’t be long until you “failed” (because most diets or ‘healthy lifestyle plans’ don’t offer room for flexibility) and the feel-good effects from the drug would wear off.

I even noticed myself becoming more critical of my body during my mental health crisis in November 2020. All of a sudden I noticed, I was body checking in the mirror more often. I noticed myself admiring my facial bone structure, which appeared to change (likely due to anxiety-induced non-intentional weight loss – I don’t weigh myself, but I noticed and felt changes in my body).

All of this totally threw me for a loop, as I’ve been doing this work as an Intuitive Eating & Body Image Coach for the past 4 years. But, because of my experience, I was able to notice immediately what exactly I was doing and why I was doing it.

I was able to notice immediately what exactly I was doing and why I was doing it.
I was looking for a sense of control and worthiness that diet culture falsely promised, during a time where I felt like I was losing control of my mind and my life.

I share this with you, to help you understand how strong and pervasive diet culture is. You can be living and breathing intuitive eating and non-diet teachings every single day, and diet culture can still have a way to infiltrate its way into your life.

The goal is to not let it’s resurfacing discourage you, but to look at the disordered eating behaviour appearing, such as being critical towards food choices and of what your body look likes, as a symptom that something else needs tending to.

If life feels out of control to you because you’re battling mental illness, going through a tough break up, or work is stressing you out, I can promise you, the answer is not in food or your body. The answer is in deeper healing within yourself.

What To Do When Life Feels Out Of Control (That Doesn’t Involve Controlling Food To Feel Morally Better About Yourself)

Now that we know that the answer to finding a sense of control and worthiness isn’t in being mean to our bodies and putting it on crash diets or extreme healthy lifestyle plans, here’s what you can do instead when life starts feeling chaotic and the urge to diet or change your body becomes tempting.

Soothe yourself — It probably feels like the world is crashing down on you and there are to-do lists haunting you left, right and centre. Overwhelmed is an understatement and you don’t know where to start. When you find yourself in this state, it’s important to, first, do things that will soothe yourself and calm your nervous system.

Remember, your self-esteem is starting to plummet in this moment because you feel like you aren’t doing enough and self-esteem is a basic need.

Do whatever you can to get yourself out of this frantic, fight-or-flight state. I recommend:

- Going for a walk outside (BREATHE IN that fresh air)
- Taking a shower or having a bath (it’ll feel like a warm hug)
- Laying down for 5 minutes with an eye covering (clothing works well) and listen to calming music (you’ll love my Fill Your Cup [CALM] playlist for this on Spotify)
- Pouring yourself a cup of tea (breathe it in while steeping and sip carefully and slowly — use the reminder to slow down)
Identify what is making you feel out of control – Once you become aware of what your trigger is to making life feel out of control and chaotic, you can take steps to actually get to the root of it and resolve it.

I shared some ideas earlier in this post, but it may be around your work, relationship, where you’re living (maybe not feeling intuitively aligned to it), a health diagnosis or the loss of someone or something.

Get curious about what might be making you feel like you’re drowning in your life and contributing to your overwhelm, and take note of it.
Get to the root of your trigger – Let’s say for instance, work is making you feel overwhelmed and out of control in your life.

Perhaps it’s stressing you out because you always feel behind and like you’re not doing enough. It makes you feel like you aren’t good at your job, and as a high-achiever, that hurts your self-esteem.

Instead of trying to escape that uncomfortable feeling by jumping into a diet or healthy eating plan to feel morally better about yourself (because, remember, that’s a coping mechanism to not have to face the discomfort of a deeper rooted issue), consider how you can get to the root.

- Why do you always feel behind?
- What makes you feel like you aren’t doing enough?
- What is considered “enough” to you?
- Are your expectations for yourself realistic?
- Are you using work to feel productive, and therefore “worthy” and could that be contributing to your need to never stop working?

These are things you’ll want to think about. You might think the answer is to change jobs because your work is too stressful (which, might be the case), but is it possible, that no matter what job or situation you find yourself in, you’ll always shop up in an over-achieving, need-to-be-productive-24/7 kind of way? Is it possible that how you respond and react is contributing to your overwhelm in life? Food for thought.
Make a plan of action how to move forward – The goal here is to not overhaul your whole life like you would with a crash diet, but to make small tweaks and adjustments to bring you closer to how you want to feel.

In the case of the example above, it might mean exercising more boundaries at work, or reminding yourself that you don’t have to respond to emails right away. It might mean defining for yourself what is considered “enough”. Does it mean your entire inbox needs to be cleared out? Or can some emails be outstanding? Does it mean that you need to be working ahead, or right on time?

You have the power to feel the way you want to. How do you want to feel?

Looking for more resources?

If this post landed with you and you want to get to the root of what might be at your disordered eating habits and find a way of healthy living that doesn’t involve constantly obsessing about food and beating yourself up for what you ate, I invite you to grab my FREE Quickstart to Intuitive Eating Guide & Audio Recording.

Want to work with me one-on-one? Get on the waitlist or apply for The Intuitive Way For Eating over here.