How To Rebuild Self-Trust After Years of Dieting

Introduction

If you feel like you have been burned so many times by diets and “lifestyle changes” that you don’t even trust yourself to eat anymore, this post is for you. I want to acknowledge the heavy burden and quiet grief that comes from feeling like you’ve failed yourself on your wellness journey. Today, we will explore how self-trust is broken through dieting, and how to move forward.

“I know what to do to be healthy, but I don’t trust myself to follow through.”

You are not broken, and you are not too far gone. But you may need to go through a season of rebuilding trust. Imagine how easy health could be if you trusted yourself enough to take actions that honor your highest well-being, and if you trusted your body enough to know that it will do its very best to respond in authentic health. 

If you would give anything to have that trust with yourself again, keep reading. Today, we are going to get to the bottom of how that trust was broken and examine the long-term impacts of broken self-trust. In next week’s post, we will explore how self-trust can be repaired after years of dieting, and why it is never too late.

What Does Self-Trust Mean on Your Wellness Journey?

Self-trust in the context of health is a way of relating to your body, your choices, and your behaviors. It is the confidence that you can make choices that support your well-being by listening to your body, honoring your values, and responding to your needs, even when the path is imperfect or unclear. 

It’s not about always having the “right” answer, but about knowing you can return to balance, repair when needed, and continue forward with care and intention. It includes being in tune with your physical signals, emotional cues, and unique context, while maintaining mindfulness, autonomy, and resilience along the way.

Facets of self-trust in health and wellness

• Body awareness: You are able to discern and respond to your body’s signals
• Emotional regulation: You are able to carefully respond, rather than react, when things don’t go as planned
• Consistency: You are able to maintain consistent rhythms of behavior even when motivation dips or circumstances arise
• Confidence in decision-making: You can make choices about your health without needing external reassurance and validation
• Flexibility: You know that you can adapt your habits and behaviors to fit the present moment best
• Honor your capacity: You can assess and adjust your health practices based on your current bandwidth
• Balance information and intuition: You know when to leverage data to meet a goal, and when to look inward for the answers.
• You believe your body is doing its best: You know that even if you are frustrated on your wellness journey, your body is doing its best to respond and adapt to its environment.

Ways self-trust shows up in your everyday wellness habits

• You chose your meals based on energy needs and hunger levels
• You know when to drag yourself to the gym and when to take an unplanned rest day
• You avoid the all-or-nothing spirals and quickly reset after an off-day
• You aren’t tempted by wellness trends that aren’t right for you right now
• You can adjust your routine based on different circumstances without entirely giving up
• You can celebrate progress, even when things aren’t exactly how you want them to be 
• You are confident in your healthy habits, even if they aren’t perfect
• You find peace in the progress you have made, even if you aren’t there yet
• You regularly check in with yourself and your body, asking yourself what you need, even when things are hectic

I imagine that you are nodding along, thinking that all of this sounds great. But there is a knot in your stomach as you realize how far away you have gotten from this. In your search for perfect health, you lost touch with the one thing that cultivates lasting health: a compassionate and attuned relationship with yourself that leads to health-promoting behaviors. So, how do we reclaim that relationship? First, let’s explore how the trust was broken in the first place.

How Was the Self-Trust Broken in the First Place?

Do you have a history of dieting? Have you ever used a plan to tell you what, when, and how much to eat? Have you ever stuck to an exercise regimen like it was a legal contract? Do you ever seek external reassurance and validation for every health trend you have ever tried? Do you outsource your health to the medical professionals? 

In our past, when we have chosen an outside source of information to inform our health choices and did not pair that with our own embodied experience, we lost a bit of self-trust. 

As we dabbled in restrictive eating, yo-yo dieting, perfectionism, and finding the next wellness guru to tell us how to eat and live, we reinforced the belief that we can’t trust ourselves with our health. We learned to override our hunger and demonize our cravings. We learned to ignore our sore muscles and exhaustion in the gym. Our bodies stopped sending signals that were being ignored, and we stopped getting the messages. We lost our communication with our bodies, and we lost the ability to look inside for valuable information, so we had to further rely on outside sources for that information. 

We repeatedly violated trust with our own body, and it stopped reaching out with its requests. Just like a relationship shattered by broken promises, we need to acknowledge how deep and real these wounds are before we can hope to heal them.

The Physiological Imprint of Broken Trust

It is critical that you understand that this broken self-trust is not just a mental and emotional struggle. Remember, it is not just a weakness of spirit. It is a real, physiological adaptation that your body has undergone in order to deal with the lack of nutrients and lack of safety. 

A state of Low Energy Availability, from overall caloric restriction, time-restricted eating, extended fasting, or a restriction of macro or micronutrients, puts the body under a state of stress. In the absence of sufficient fuel from its primary fuel source (glucose), your body sets off a reaction of hormones and neurotransmitters to mobilize fuel from its back-up fuel sources.

The stress response of undereating

The hypothalamus senses that energy intake has fallen below a critical level, so it activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. The adrenal glands secrete cortisol to mobilize stored energy (glucose from the liver and muscle, fatty acids, or proteins from your own tissue). This is a stress-driven way to get energy to the cells. It is completely normal when it happens in moderation, but when it comes from chronic underfueling, it leads to dire consequences. 

Your thyroid conversion slows down, bringing down your metabolic rate to compensate for the lack of energy. Your reproductive hormones downregulate due to a lack of energy. Leptin levels tank, so you never feel satisfied, even when you are stuffed. Your ghrelin rises and your peptide YY falls, so you feel intensely hungry.

Diet Trauma

Your nervous system codes this lack of safety into its way of understanding the world. It becomes hypervigilant in scanning your environment for anything that is related to the deprivation it has experienced. It seeks out eating opportunities to ensure that the next time food is available, it is time to stock up. If you think about food all day long and find yourself massively overeating anytime you get your hands on something good, this is your brain and body working to keep you safe. 

This “diet trauma” is a real, embodied state of the nervous system that creates distress around food, high reactivity to hunger cues, and a sense that you can no longer trust yourself around food. Even if you have mentally moved on from restriction, the body keeps the score, and it remembers unmet needs from the past.

Broken Trust in Your Body

So, we have established that your body feels betrayed by you. But, at the same time, what if you feel betrayed by your body? What if you feel like you are living inside of your own worst enemy?

Feeling betrayed by your body is completely understandable if you have struggled with your health goals.

The truth is, your body was never against you. It is always seeking survival, and it will go to any means necessary to keep you alive. It may have sacrificed aesthetics or certain functions in order to get that job done. Here are some examples of how you might feel like your body betrayed you through years of dieting, even though the truth is that your body was actually protecting you:

• I followed the plan perfectly, but the scale didn’t budge.
• I used to be able to eat less and lose weight; why doesn’t that work anymore?
• I was good all day, then lost control at night.
• I feel hungry when I shouldn’t.
• My body changed even though I tried to prevent it.
• I lost my period, and no one warned me.
• My cravings are so strong. I feel like I’m addicted to food.
• I got weaker and more tired the more I ‘succeeded’ at dieting.
• I couldn’t maintain the results no matter how hard I tried.
• Even when I looked ‘fit,’ I still felt miserable.

These feelings are real, but they’re based on incomplete information, misaligned methods, and systems that ignore the body’s intelligence. Every single one of these “betrayals” was a survival response from your body, working to keep you in a state of health. 

Apetite swings, cravings, binge eating, energy crashes, metabolic adaptation, and hormone downregulations are all survival responses. Your body is Intended For Wellness, and it is always working to maintain health. Your body was never against you; it was doing the best it could to adapt to the environment it was in.

Why You Feel Like a Failure

There is nothing like a diet to make you feel in control of your health. The emotional high that comes from starting a new plan (one you are going to stick to this time) is unmatched. Restrictive eating creates the illusion of control around your health, and it feels really good, especially to perfectionists.

When something doesn’t work perfectly and you end up at square one, you don’t question the game plan. You blame yourself for not being perfect. You set yourself up for failure and then wallow in the fact that you are a failure. This is a self-fulfilling shame loop that looks ridiculous from the outside, but is impossible to see from the inside. You don’t know you are doing it until you have circled back around and hit rock bottom again. 

You only feel like a failure because you set a bar for yourself that you couldn’t reach. It was coming from a really good place, and you weren’t trying to self-sabotage, but there is a better way. As you start your forever wellness journey, you’ll learn how to stop starting over and start moving forward. 

Conclusion: There Is Nothing Wrong With You (Or Your Body)

In this post, we have unraveled the mystery of why you don’t trust yourself after years of dieting. You have sustained a real, physiological imprint of dieting trauma that your body still holds on to. Your survival-based methods of self-protection have left you feeling like your body is out to sabotage you at every turn. You don’t like where you are, but you can’t imagine putting yourself on a dieting rollercoaster again. 

In next week’s post, we will pave out a path forward and uncover how to repair a broken relationship of self-trust and body-trust gently and practically. 

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you: what would it feel like to trust your body again?

Wishing you well,

Meghan