When it Comes to Eating, We All Heal Differently

Yes, there are guidelines, but there is no one right way to heal.

I was on a call recently with three women I've worked with for a long time, all of them navigating their relationship with food and their bodies. Before we even got to check-ins, I asked them to do something I ask a lot: land in your body, notice something physical, and — this is the important part — accept whatever you find there. Don't fix it or judge it. Just notice it, and see what accepting it does to you.

What happened over the next hour reminded me of something I don't say often enough: I have a method. I believe in it. But watching these three women that day, I was struck by how differently each of them was going to reach her goals, and how much damage we do to ourselves when we secretly believe there's a single correct path — and we're failing it.

The Woman Who Wants You to Cut the Crap

One woman came on the call carrying a lot. A medical procedure the following week had her nervous, and the stress of that, on top of too much to do and not enough time to do it in, was sending her straight into the chocolate. Later in the session, this same woman — who has medically necessary food restrictions that limit her choices — said something that has stayed with me. She was genuinely irritated by the way people around her make such a production out of food restriction. "I only ate half. I didn't let myself have that,"…as if deprivation were a virtue to report on. "For f—'s sake, people," she said, "just eat some food and enjoy it. Not everybody gets to do that."

I told her I thought that irritation was actually a strength she could use. She is a cut-the-crap person. Low drama, low ceremony, tell-me-what-to-do-and-I'll-do-it. So instead of asking her to build some elaborate new relationship with eating, I gave her something simple: keep a favorite dish on hand — for her it was burrata, heirloom tomatoes, basil, olive oil — and buy good chocolate. Not a plan or a rule. Just: stock the good stuff, so the tired, hardworking part of her that reaches for whatever's easiest has something better within reach and gets to feel satisfied. That way it won't need to keep trying to feel satisfied by eating more.

This is her way of learning: through action, simplicity, and the felt experience of having something decent to eat when she's too exhausted to think about it. I asked her why it's hard to keep good food around when it just seems to rot in the fridge instead. She landed on something quiet and important: a little self-punishment, a general sense of not deserving the good stuff. That's real, but her path forward isn't going to be paved only with insight about that. It's going to be paved also with an easy plate of tomatoes and mozzarella waiting for her when she gets home.

The Woman Learning to Welcome Her Rebel

A second woman on the call is planning a wedding, and admitted she's still not losing weight the way she'd like, still struggling with the mechanics of a weight-loss medication, still landing on the same hard truth: it isn't really about the number. It's about how she looks. It's also about not exercising enough and her own discipline, which she is convinced is lacking.

What came out of her, though, was something more interesting than body dissatisfaction. She recognized, in real time, that her mother is a driven, polished, high-achieving personality, someone she both admires and rebels against. And she realized she doesn't know how to bring structure into her own life around food without it turning into her mother's structure: competitive, ambition-driven, thick with self-judgment.

I told her that's exactly the right question to be asking. She's at the point in her recovery where she gets to take structure out of her mother's hands and make it her own. Her path isn't going to look like discipline, and it isn't going to look like free abandon either. It's going to look like a new relationship with the rebellious part of her — the part that loves food, wants pleasure, doesn't want to be managed. Instead of fighting that part or handing it the keys entirely, she's learning to sit with it and say, "I welcome your aliveness. I'll stay in the conversation with you about what different amounts and different foods actually feel like." That's not "just do it." It's not her mother's model, either. It's a third way, built specifically for her.

The Woman Doing the Slow Work of Letting Herself Be Loved

The third woman brought something quieter. When I asked the group to notice whatever they found and accept it, she landed on that word: acceptance. She admitted she's still always a little surprised when people accept and like her. "I still judge from outside myself," she said. "And I think that's a shame."

She spent her three minutes going somewhere raw: how much of her life she's lived deliberately disconnected from herself, and who taught her she needed to be that way. When I asked her to think of something I've said to her before that helped when she came in to a session feeling like she wasn't doing enough, she remembered one time when I said, "It's not that you're bad. It's that there's a process going on inside that is causing these eating behaviors."

Her homework wasn't a food assignment at all. It was this: figure out how your heart feels supported, and how you can give yourself that on repeat. Her path to recovery runs through the heart before it runs through the plate. That's not slower or lesser than the other two paths. It's just hers.

Why This Matters

I think we do people a disservice when we hand everyone the same map. One woman needs simplicity and stocked shelves. Another needs to renegotiate her relationship with a rebellious, pleasure-seeking part of herself that got tangled up with her mother a long time ago. A third needs to convince her nervous system over time that love without conditions is actually safe to receive.

I told them a story about my own path, because I think it's useful for people to know that even the person leading the group didn't arrive at this gracefully. It took me about three years of white-knuckling a set of eating guidelines before something shifted and my relationship with the part of me that needed to eat became safe enough that the rules stopped being necessary. I adhered to the eating guidelines (of listening to the body) because I was in pain and desperate for change. That desperation drove me to stick to the guidelines. I've had other people arrive at the same place after a single week of vacation, eating easily because there was nothing to fight about. Neither way is more legitimate than the other.

I've never once seen the eating behaviors that bring people to me show up except in a context of an escalated nervous system — some version of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn already underway. That's part of why the exercise we started with matters so much: land in the body, notice, and — this is the hard part — accept whatever's there instead of adding another layer of self-judgment on top of an already overloaded system. You cannot think your way past a nervous system in emergency mode. You can only help it feel safe enough to come back online.

By the end of the call, each of these women reported something different in their bodies. One felt content and sleepy, like — as someone else put it — a cat in the sunshine. One felt relaxed and hopeful. One felt tired, but a little more hopeful too. Three different starting points. Three different paths. Three honest, present-tense answers about where they actually were, instead of where they thought they should be.

That's recovery. Not one door. A house with several doors, and everyone finds their own way in.

A Few Questions to Sit With

• What is your particular way of learning something new about yourself? Through simplicity and action, renegotiating an old rebellious part, through the slow work of letting yourself be loved?
• Where did you get the idea that there was only one correct path to healing, and whose map was it originally?
• If you stopped trying to heal the way you think you're supposed to, and instead paid attention to how you've actually made progress before, what would that tell you about the path in front of you now?