Written by Michelle Shelton

June 11, 2024

I started dieting when I was about 16. I told myself I wanted to be “healthier,’ which really meant I wanted to be skinnier. I wasn’t really overweight, but I was the largest of my 3 sisters. I was also the youngest, and as the youngest, would sometimes be called “chubby” by my well-intentioned, teasing older sisters. In our culture, being chubby or large isn’t really celebrated (to put it mildly) and so when I was 16, I decided I wanted to change. 

I didn’t really think about it as a diet. I just went a year without eating sugar. Then I started cutting fat, too. I started losing weight and I thought it was amazing. Just what I was hoping for. 

After a year I started eating sugar again. Sometimes my weight would fluctuate up a little and I knew just what to do - stop eating sugar, cut back the fat, restrict a little more and the weight would come off. 

The problem was, I was starting to lose connection with my body. I had no idea if I was actually hungry or full. I ate what I was “allowed” to eat when I was allowed to eat. This often meant I was refusing myself food even when I was starving. Other times I was eating way past fullness, without really knowing why. Did I even know what fullness actually felt like? Overfull, yes. But that comfortably full feeling where you’ve had enough but you're not sick or in pain - that feeling was a mystery to me. 

I knew people who could naturally respond to their hunger and stop when they were full. There must be something wrong with me, I thought. I must be different. Maybe even broken.

The good news is, I was wrong about all of this. I wasn’t broken. I was just disconnected with my body. What I had experienced is what most people experience when they diet. A broken trust with your body, it’s intuition, and it’s natural hunger and fullness cues. 

The broken trust began when I stopped listening to my hunger. I was wrong to be hungry, I said. It wasn’t time to eat, I said. Something’s wrong with my body, I said. 

It didn’t help that I wasn’t kind to my body. You’re too large, I said. You should be thinner, I said. 

And as I lost trust in my body, it lost trust in me. When will she feed me again, it said. How will I know I’ll get what I need, it said. And so it began to push back. It wanted to eat even when it knew I was full because it didn’t know when it would be able to eat again. 

Restricting our bodies and ignoring our hunger leads to overeating. It’s our body’s natural, physiologic response to restriction. In times of famine, we eat what we can when we can. It’s how we survive. Only, in our modern world, famine is not caused by natural disaster or drought. We induce it on ourselves. In our modern world, famine is called dieting. 

Our bodies have a natural inner wisdom that signals hunger and fullness. Restriction in the form of famine or diets disrupts our trust in this process. But the good news is, trust can be restored. It takes work, certainly. Trust isn’t something you just do. We know this from any relationship we’ve ever had. You don’t just simply trust. You build it, cultivate it, earn it. It is the same with rebuilding trust in6 our bodies.

One of my favorite formulas for restoring trust is based on the work of psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dan Siegel using the acronym P.A.R.T. Presence + Attunement + Resonance = Trust

1. Presence - The first step is to cultivate an open presence for what is happening in the current moment. It’s resisting the urge to push certain things away, or deny, or ignore. It’s holding space and allowing what is to simply be. The key here is to withhold judgment. Judgment pushes things into hiding. Curiosity invites them into the open.

In dieting terms, this may include being open to the sensations of hunger even if it isn’t time to eat. Or opening up to the discomfort of overeating, letting go of the judgment and shame overeating often brings and just being present to the sensations. 

2. Attunement - The next step is to practice attuning. This means being able to tune in to the emotions and needs behind the surface behaviors. We sometimes get stuck on the surface behaviors, trying to manage or prevent undesired behaviors while trying to get more of the desired behaviors. The shift here is to see all behavior as an attempt to meet a need. As you get curious about what’s going on underneath the behavior, you begin to attune. 

In dieting terms, this might try getting curious about what other things are happening in relation to your eating experience. What are you feeling emotionally? What is your thought pattern? What beliefs do you notice around body size, weight, and food? What might be happening in your relationships or at work?

3. Resonance - The last step is to practice resonance, the ability to feel your emotions fully. Once you’ve attuned to the emotion, you can open yourself up to what it has to share. Emotions and sensations can be important signals to needs that we have. Needs for nourishment, needs for connection, needs for safety, needs for self expression. This is where we really start to tap into our inner wisdom. 

This means simply feeling. Start by naming the emotion. Simply giving it a name can help move the emotion toward regulation. Don’t push against it or resist it. Allow yourself to relax into it. Journaling or sharing with a friend are both effective ways to relax into the emotion and allow it to process through your body. As you do this, ask yourself, what need is this signaling for me? Then ask, what can I do to respond to and care for this need?

4. Trust - With presence, attunement, and resonance unlocking the voice of our inner wisdom, we now have the ability to restore trust. This silenced voice is now restored and we have the option to listen and respond. The more that we do, the more we will be able to trust. 

If you feel like you have lost connection with this inner voice, know that you are not broken and you are not alone. And know there is a path back to wholeness. As you practice presence, attunement, and resonance, you will be able to respond to your needs with wisdom and care and restore trust.