Escaping the Dieting Trap

You are sitting at a table you have sat at a thousand times. Maybe it is Sunday lunch at your parents'. Maybe it is a birthday dinner at a restaurant where everyone is ordering and comparing. Maybe it is just a Tuesday with colleagues in the work kitchen, someone sighing loudly about their meal deal,...

There’s a new question following women around. It isn’t always spoken out loud. Sometimes it’s just a look. But if you’ve been on the receiving end of it, you know exactly what it means. A client told me recently that she’d been out for dinner with a group of friends. Someone mentioned they’d...

“You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.” – Henri Nouwen Most women I work with have spent years - sometimes decades - treating their body as the source of the problem. Too big. Too undisciplined. Too much. The body is what needs to...

Most of the women I work with already know. They know that dieting doesn't work long term. They know the research. They've lived the cycle enough times to be able to map it out: the restriction, the hunger, the cravings, the eventual loss of control, the shame, the starting over. They could draw it...

Valentine's Day has a way of making us feel like love is something we have to earn. Be attractive enough. Desirable enough. Thin enough. Enough enough. Get the hair right, the outfit right, the body right — and then, maybe, you'll be worthy of love. Sound familiar? Because that's not romance....

Many people don’t realise this, but a lot of the distress they feel around food isn’t actually about food at all. It’s about morality. Somewhere along the way, eating became something you could do well or badly. Foods were sorted into hierarchies. Choices were given moral weight. And your...