How much power does the number on the scale have over you?

Music.

And welcome to Change Your Relationship with Food, the podcast hosted by me, Kyla Holley. With many years' experience as an eating disorder and bariatric therapist, I know exactly what it takes to help you break free from your diet history and develop a more healthy relationship with food. Please follow this podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing. Just a quick word before we start. I'm very excited to tell you that we are a nominee in the Women in Podcasting Awards.

I would be so grateful if you could just take five minutes to just cast a vote for us. We're under the psychology section, but I will put a link in the episode notes today that will take you straight through it. It's just five minutes. It costs you nothing to do, and it would make a huge difference to the show. It would enable us to get more guests on, to spend more money advertising, to make the content better. So please, five minutes of your time. I'd be so grateful.

Thanks so much. Let's get on with the show today. Most of my best podcasts, I think, are inspired by the people that come to see me.

And I had one last week that I thought was fascinating. We ended up having a really, really good conversation and it took us in all sorts of directions.

Intersections and after she left my room I remember thinking that's that's really interesting I'll talk about that one because this is a concept that a lot of people will probably relate to for her it was a very very strong concept and we kind of talked together and kind of broke it into pieces so it was quite an interesting one so this is a lady that's been seeing me for about a year year. And during that year, she's had lots of ups and downs. She was referred to me by her GP for weight loss.

And I immediately explained to her, well, look, I don't really do that. I'm not in the weight loss game as such. What I do is I use a non-diet approach. So I'm not anti-weight loss, but I'm anti-dieting. So she expected immediately for me to put her on a big restrictive diet and she would simply have to follow it. And I said, no, no, no, no, that's not the way that I like to work.

I would like to look at your relationship with food and what else is going on in your life that might influence your relationship with food or your relationship with your body or your relationship with your weight. I sort of told her about this new approach and she was quite interested. And she said, yeah, look, you know, let's give it a go. I've tried everything else. And initially, we actually did really quite well. She embraced learning lots of new skills. We took a big history.

I spend a lot of time taking history. And she sat down and told me pretty much her whole life story, which was really fascinating. And then we started to kind of learn new skills, get new insights, started to think about a few things differently than she had thought of before. And she was absolutely loving this new approach. coach. Every time she came to see me, and at that time, I think she was coming once a month. Every time she came to see me, she learned something new.

She thought it was really interesting. She loved it. And surprise, surprise, the weight actually started to come off. I had gone into this with her saying, look, I don't promise weight loss. We're going to look at other things. And should you lose weight? Well, that's okay. But you may not lose weight. That's not what this is about. Forget the weight. Let's look at all the other things that are going on in your life.

But as it happened, she began to lose weight and she began to lose quite a lot of weight as well. She was doing very, very well. And then probably three or four months in, she hit a bit of a hurdle. This had nothing to do with her weight. This was something outside of that. It was was something that she was quite stressed about work-wise and it had created a lot of turmoil for her.

And she had, in that sort of month that we hadn't seen each other, she had been through a lot of stress in that time. And during that time, she had done what she normally does and she had turned to food in that time of stress. So she came back to me and said, guess what? I've gained a whole load of this weight that I had lost. And we had a look at the figures and it was interesting because she was kind of catastrophizing.

She had only actually gained a relatively small amount of the weight that she had lost initially. So I said to her, well, look, you're still such and such a kilos down. Let's look at the positive. You didn't regain all the weight. You're still quite a long way down from where you started. And she was like, yeah, yeah, whatever. And then, so we looked at re-motivating her at that point. We looked at what's happened around the problem she had with work and how she might be able to resolve that.

And then we talked about getting back on track and we did some values work. You know, what's important to her as a person outside of weight and diet and everything like that, just the value she holds in life. Does her behavior, her actions actually align with those values? Because this is important that we align with who we would like to be. If we can't do that, we feel very uncomfortable about it. And we talked about breaking the usual behavior pattern.

So what she would normally have done in this situation over many, many years is she would have basically thrown in the towel. she would have said, oh, something's gone wrong. What's the point in doing this anymore? And she would have then bounced back to her previous weight because she would have completely given up everything and probably gone into a period of overindulgence because she'd had that period of what she now viewed to be deprivation.

Then she goes into overindulgence, which is that standard kind of diet-y pattern that tends to happen. So we talked about breaking those usual behavior patterns and how perhaps we could do things differently this time.

She came back to me about a month later and she said, it's going really, really well again. Hey, I've re-lost that little bit of weight I gained and I've lost a little bit more. So, okay, great. Let's go on and do some other things. And we did. We did more work together about all sorts of things.

Again, not concentrating on weight, not concentrating on diet, just concentrating on making her life a little bit happier, a little bit better, giving her new life skills, making her think about things a little bit differently. Then next time she came back, she was in a slump again. Guess what? She said, I've regained some of that weight. And now here I am again. And again, we looked at what else has been going on in life.

And it turns out she'd had a bit of a family issue that she'd been dealing with. And she had, again, given up. It was all too complicated. She had gained weight. and again we looked at re-motivating her. We discussed the family issue, we discussed how she could do things differently, we talked about not reverting to that usual behaviour and the next time she came back, guess what? She was doing quite well and she said, hey guess what Kyla, I've lost some weight.

Okay, have you? And again we worked on other things. So this brings us right through to this week when she appeared and she said, I'm in a huge, massive, catastrophic slump.

I've regained a massive amount of weight. And what's the point in all of this? Because I'm never, ever going to change.

Change then I thought okay let's look at the reality how much weight have you regained because I'm not weighing her part of the non-diet approach means that I as the therapist do not weigh the patient the weight is irrelevant to me what she weighs is what she weighs what's relevant is all the other stuff so she's been monitoring her weight and it turns out she had not been terribly good at maths. She thought she had regained a very big number.

And when I actually looked at the figures she was telling me, it turned out she was 10 kilos out. So anyway, we discussed that and said, look, you know, it's not as bad as you came here thinking it was in the first place. But the comment that I concentrated on most of all was her comment, what's the point? I'm never going to actually change. I can't do this. I can't be fixed. Nothing's ever going to change for me. And I think I surprised her when I said,

you don't have to change. change? And she said, well, of course I do. That's what I'm here for. And I said, well, hold on. We as people don't magically change overnight. We tend to revert back to who we are because it's the patterns that we've had for many, many years. And part of our identity is wrapped up in those behaviors. So people don't tend to undergo miraculous changes overnight.

You can't leave behind who you are because you want a better version of yourself or a different version of yourself. So what I said to her was sometimes it's not about us changing.

It's about us actually realizing and accepting who we are without any judgment, without any criticism, just saying, okay this is this is who I am this is how I behave this is me and then trying to work out the best way to work with that and not against it because we waste such a lot of energy sometimes fighting who we are and that's energy that could be far better positioned into going okay this is who I am. How am I going to make this work rather than change this?

I hope that makes sense. But it kind of shocked her because she was thinking, well, hold on, I've come here to change. I haven't come here to just accept who I am. That's ridiculous. And she saw acceptance as giving up.

And it's really, really not. It might be giving up in some ways. It might be giving up all the frustration of the previous years, but it's not giving up. It's not throwing in the towel. It's just being realistic. And I suppose being a bit clever as well and saying, okay, this is what I've got to work with. How am I going to do that brilliantly? And this is where I was trying to push her into, actually accepting that she's someone that has a lot of ups and downs.

And I actually went back over all the appointments that she'd had with me. I went back over my notes and I put little arrows. I put a date. I had an A4 piece of paper. I put a date on the left-hand side, and then I put an arrow up or down as to what her mood was or what she felt she was up to in the appointments that we had had together. Initially, I used to see her monthly, but it's gone out to every two months now. So I looked back over about a year's worth of appointments.

And when we looked together at that bit of paper, it was literally those arrows alternated. One session she was up, the next session she was down, the next session she was up and then down again. And I said to her, look, this is you. This is who you are.

You're someone that has a whole lot of ups and downs and we've got to say okay if this is you how do we work with this rather than against it we're not going to change who you are that would be ridiculous and we would waste a lot of our time and efforts and would both get very frustrated trying to change who you are fundamentally this is you have a look at this piece of paper. This is who you are.

And what I asked her to do is to try and separate her weight from her behavior, separate her weight from what was going on in her life, separate her weight from how she was feeling. And she again looked at me and said, oh, this is ridiculous. This is impossible. I can't separate my weight. My weight is everything. My weight is the most important thing to me and has been pretty much forever, as long as I can remember from when I was a small child and I was first called fat.

My weight has always been the singular most important thing in my life. And what we pointed out, though, is that when things were going badly in her life, what happened was her self-care actually plummeted. Her self-care went down. And also at those times when things were going badly in her life, her weight increased. When things were going well in her life and she was feeling happy and buoyant and resourceful, guess what happened? Her weight decreased.

And what she felt is that her moods and her behaviors were being determined by what the scale said. And what I was trying to point out to her is, uh-uh, it's the other way around. Your scale weight is representative of what's going on in your life, it's not driving what's going on in your life.

And I said to her, what if you just ignored the scale and concentrated on what's going on in your life, concentrated on looking after yourself and making sure that your self-care was always at the forefront of your mind and that your values, which we'd already gone through with her, are at the forefront of your mind.

And if you concentrate on those things, what you will find is that your body and also your weight kind of falls into line. It kind of comes along with you. So this is where we were going with this. And I started to talk to her about all the other ways that she looks after herself. I said, let's say things are going well for you. Tell me the things you do for

yourself. self-care, the simple things that we all do as part of looking after who we are, looking after our environment, looking after our body. And we made a whole list of those things. And she said, well, you know, when things are going well, she said, I get up at a set time and I make my bed. That's the first thing I do. She said, when things are going well, I have a shower every morning, make sure I'm clean and I smell nice.

When things are going well, I take time to read. It's one of my passions. And I set a certain amount of time every day where I can just relax with a good book. And in order to get those good books, I visit the library once a week. Okay, well, what else do you do? Well, I socialise, I go out with friends. Okay, so we built up this whole list of things she does when life's going well. And I said to her, out of that list, which of these things are you doing at the moment?

And she looked down the list and she said, none of them. She said, I didn't make my bed this morning. I didn't have breakfast. I didn't have a shower this morning. I didn't even brush my hair. So all these self-care things that were an example of her doing well, she wasn't actually doing those things.

Things and as a byproduct she was gaining weight as well because as well as not looking after herself in all those other areas of her life she also wasn't looking after her body through the nutrition that she was putting in her body she was binge eating she was going for mainly sugar mainly carbohydrates because these are the foods that she said she turns to when things are going badly. So it has that knock-on effect. Everything's going badly. She starts to gain weight.

And what she thinks is that it's the weight that drives things going badly. And what I was trying to explain to her is the weight is a by-product of things going badly. So if any of this has been relevant to you, if you are someone that has these big ups and big big downs, and you're constantly chasing your weight up the scale and down the scale, I encourage you to try and separate yourself from that scale.

The scale shouldn't be the thing that tells you whether you're going to have a good day or not. The scale should not be the thing telling you whether you're a good person or a bad person. All that is aside from the scale. The scale is just purely a measure of your mass on the earth at that particular moment. And it's kind of meaningless. It says nothing about you as a person. Try and concentrate your efforts, if you can, into actually what's going on in your life, how you look after yourself.

This does include food. You know, the food that you put into your body, is often an example of your level of self-care. Are you skipping meals, in which case you're not looking after yourself? Are you eating takeaway for every single meal, knowing perhaps that it's greasy and it's not very good for you? That's not self-care. And for self-care, you know, you don't have to be getting up and doing yoga every morning and eating lots of kale. That's that's that sort of cliche of what self-care is.

Self-care is just putting good nutrition in your body, allowing yourself the freedom as well to have a piece of cake or a glass of wine or all those little things that aren't necessarily in that traditional good food category. But we allow ourselves those things as part of our self-care because they're part of the way that we relax the way that we enjoy ourself.

The trick is, though, to get that lovely balance between, I call it the 80-20 balance, 80% of the time really looking after your body, making sure that you exercise, making sure that you get good food on board, which is going to make your body feel good, make your brain switched on and vibrant.

The other 20% of the time, do what the hell you want to do because as long as you're getting it right most of the times it really doesn't matter if you have a takeout meal it doesn't matter if you join your friends for a couple of cocktails it doesn't matter if you join in on the big cake eating thing at work when it's someone's birthday those things are absolutely fine as long as you have that lovely balance.

So I hope that's helped some of you. Maybe you've recognized a little bit of yourself in there and realized that you're a little bit scale-led. And if that's the case, I encourage you to be a little bit more behavior-led instead. Look at what you're actually doing and that's where your effort should be. Because the scale, to be honest, we can't entirely control the scale. Weight fluctuates. but behavior is something we can, to a certain extent, control.

And also how we think about ourselves is something we can, to a certain extent, control as well. So I hope that's helped and we will chat again next week. Thank you so much for your company today. I would also love it if you could follow this podcast. It really does mean a lot to me. Also, we have a six-week online change your relationship with food course that you can take, just visit www.acfeb.com and click on the ACFEB and me courses link.

There's also a journal and a workbook available on Amazon and you'll find that link in our bio. I really hope you can join me again next week. Goodbye. Music.