“I Lifted All Food Restrictions and It Became a Free for All”
A woman messaged me recently. She’d been dieting for thirty years. She’d tried lifting all restrictions, read the Lindo Bacon book, paid a small fortune to a coach who told her to release all restrictions. She gained weight, felt out of control, and ended up dieting again to lose it. She wanted to know why it hadn’t worked.
I don’t know exactly what happened for her because we haven’t spoken. But I have a reasonable idea.
Lifting restrictions is not the same as making peace with food. You can remove every rule and still be completely absorbed in thoughts about weight and what your body is or isn’t doing. That’s diet mentality, and it doesn’t disappear just because the explicit rules do.
Think of a child who has never been allowed sweets. They go on holiday with a friend and gorge on ice cream and sweets until they feel sick. Then do it again the next day. Not because they’re greedy, probably not even because they even fancy it that moment, but because somewhere they know that when they go home, access will be cut off. So they eat while they can. A free for all is often exactly that: a completely understandable response to a history of scarcity, from a body and mind that haven’t yet learned to believe the restriction is really gone for good.
I call this the messy middle. No guardrails, no diet to follow. But also no real sense yet of how to listen to your body or trust what it’s telling you. No unpacking of what being a certain size means to you, or what you believe would happen if your body ended up bigger than it is now, or simply didn’t get smaller. That’s genuinely hard terrain, and it takes time. Having someone alongside you through it matters, because doing it alone is where most people end up back at the beginning.
And that’s what happened here. When her weight started to shift and she got scared, she restricted again. In doing so, she confirmed the very fear the free for all was expressing: that food wouldn’t always be available, that eventually the rules would return. They did. She put them back herself. What she didn’t get to find out was what happens when you stay in the process long enough for your body and mind to genuinely trust that there is no going back.
Before anyone starts working with me, I’m honest about this. I can’t say where their body will end up. What I can say is that if they stay with the process, things tend to calm down and stabilise. The eating finds a rhythm. That might happen at a higher weight than they’re emotionally comfortable with, and that too is part of the work, because the fear of a larger body is part of what keeps the whole cycle going.
What replaces the rules is attunement. Learning, over time, to eat in response to your body rather than in response to external instructions. That includes learning that eating emotionally on occasion is part of being human, not a relapse. The difference is that you’re no longer reacting to it with shame or the resolve to start again on Monday. You notice it, you let it pass, and you move on.
There’s a moment many people reach in this process where they say: I’m eating what I want, but it doesn’t feel good. That moment is easy to misread as failure. It isn’t. It means the noise is quieting enough that they can actually hear their body for the first time. They’re noticing what feels right and what doesn’t. That’s attunement beginning to take hold.
When it does, the mental chatter starts to go. The calculation, the guilt, the constant negotiation with food. People tell me they didn’t realise how much space it had been taking up until it wasn’t there anymore. They say yes to things. Their life gets bigger.
If you’re exhausted by the cycle of binge eating, guilt, starting over on Monday and feeling like food has taken over far too much of your mental space… I can offer you something different.
Not more rules. Not another plan to fail at. But a way to finally understand what’s really driving the cycle underneath it all.
I offer free discovery call where you can talk honestly about your relationship with food, what you’ve already tried and whether working together feels like the right fit.
Go here to book a free discovery call.
Hi, I'm Vania.
I'm passionate about helping you break free from the exhausting cycle of yo-yo dieting, body shame, overeating, bingeing, and emotional eating.
For decades, I was at war with my body and food. It wasn't until I found an approach which didn't involve strict rules, diets and a focus on weight, that my relationship with food and my body transformed into one of ease and peace. There’s a lightness in living when food no longer holds power over your thoughts. If you're seeking that kind of freedom — where food becomes simple and life feels full — I’d love to walk that journey with you.
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