Judith's story - Relief Eating vs Comfort Eating

Judith was good at dieting.

An engineer by profession, she liked order, research and understanding how things worked. She could learn the rules of a diet and apply considerable discipline to following them. What she couldn't understand was why relief eating kept returning.

From the outside, the pattern could easily be interpreted as self-sabotage. Judith would lose weight, people would begin commenting on how good she looked, her eating would change and eventually the weight would return.

But what happens when we stop looking only at the eating and examine the whole repeating pattern?

In this episode of Before Dieting, I return to Judith's story and use a systems-thinking lens to go much further than we did the first time.

We follow connections between her childhood experience of food, limited agency in the kitchen, private comfort, visibility, dieting and adult relief eating. We also examine the counterintuitive possibility that something Judith desperately wanted to change had also acquired a useful function within her system.

You'll hear about the elastic band effect, and how a solution can work in the short term while creating pressure that eventually pulls the system back towards its previous state. We also look at dieting as a fix that fails: something capable of producing weight loss without necessarily changing the conditions involved in its return.

Judith's story is particular to Judith. It isn't offered as an explanation for anybody else's weight or eating. Instead, it shows what can become visible when repeated behaviour is examined as part of a larger system rather than treated as an isolated failure of control.

If you've spent years applying increasingly simple solutions to eating or weight that keeps returning, this episode offers another place to look.

Weighting for Happiness®

Diets change what you eat. Diagnostics reveal why you eat.

See how understanding your weight ecosystem will help manage weight regain, OR copy and paste the link below:

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-and-diet-history-diagnostic

You can read my Blog Post here, OR copy and paste the link below:

https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/weight-regain-relief-or-comfort-eating