61: (BEST OF) Why Trying Harder Is Not The Answer
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Why does trying harder to control food and body often backfire?
Welcome to Talking with Emma. I'm a body image coach, author, and someone who knows firsthand that having a body in this world can be hard. It's time to stop focusing on trying to eat differently and start thinking differently. In today's episode we are looking at why trying harder is not The answer. I'll start by saying if willpower worked in the realm of health behaviours, you would not be listening to this. You're smart, capable, you've likely done big things in your life, raised kids, run teams, launched businesses, cared for parents, held communities together. And yet, when it comes to your relationship with food or your body, it might feel like it's the one thing you still haven't figured out.
So your brain does what smart brains do, it creates a plan. And then looks for better ways to execute that plan and then tries all manners of things to force yourself to follow the plan. Maybe you've had the thoughts, I just need to try harder, be more disciplined, be more committed, be better at time management, just stick to it this time. But what if trying harder is the very thing keeping you stuck? That the reason you haven't fixed this isn't because you're broken, it's because you've been using a tool that works against you, not with you. Let's talk about why that is and what actually works instead. Let me tell you about a client. Her name is Jess. Jess came to me exhausted. She was in her early fifties, successful in her career, known by her friends as someone who got things done.
But she'd spent over twenty years bouncing between clean eating, keto, fasting and sort of intuitive ish eating and still felt obsessed with food. Every Monday was a reset, every mirror was a test, every photo was a threat. She couldn't understand why this part of her life, this one part, wouldn't budge. And her story isn't rare. In fact it's incredibly common among the women I work with. Jess had learned how to throw more effort at a problem. She built spreadsheets, meal plans, reward systems, got accountability buddies, all the things, but none of it addressed the core belief underneath. That her body was a problem and that she was supposed to fix it. That success meant managing it into submission and following a plan that was external to her.
The harder she tried, the further away she felt with freedom, and the more her brain became focused on food and trying to fix her body. Here's the thing about trying harder, it only works if the system isn't rigged. And diet culture, my friends, is a completely rigged system. It tells us that if you can't control your eating, if you don't like how you look, if you feel like a failure around your body, the answer is more effort, more structure, more rules. But what if your body fundamentally is? Does not want to be controlled. What if the discomfort isn't coming from a lack of discipline or commitment? Or being your word. But the pressure but the presence of mistrust. So think about it in these three ways.
One, your body isn't a project. It's not meant to be fixed, reshaped, hacked, or optimized into worthiness. If you've spent decades internalizing that your value is tied to your size or your eating habits or or or or how you look on the outside, of course you think more effort is the answer. That's uh The second thing is trying harder usually means pushing through. You ignore hunger, you override exhaustion, you talk yourself out of what you actually really need, and you call it discipline and you get You get rewarded for for doing those things. But self neglect is not the same as self respect. Number three. it keeps you in a really um tight loop. kind of a a a a a a spiral of gloom, if you like. So you try and then you fail and then you blame yourself and then so you double down on the trying and you try harder and then you fail.
And then you blame yourself again. So most of the clients I work with can relate deeply to that spiral. Does that sound familiar to you? If it does, you're really not alone and you're not the problem, the method is. So how do we shift this approach?
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
1 identifiedMore from Talking with Emma: Stop fighting food & weight
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63: End Binge Eating With Nicole Gaviria
62: Weight-Neutral Health in Midlife with Niki Bezzant
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59: You Can End Food Noise Without Weight Loss Drugs
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