224. Food Freedom, Weight Loss & Self-Love: Why Choose?
224. Food Freedom, Weight Loss & Self-Love: Why Choose?
If you’ve ever felt like you were walking on eggshells in your wellness journey, trying to pick the “right” path, this one’s for you.
In this fiery episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast, I’m asking two questions I wish someone had asked me years ago:
What if you didn’t have to choose between food freedom, weight loss, and self-love?
And what if trying to choose is exactly what’s been keeping you stuck?
This episode is personal. It’s honest. And it’s long overdue.
The Problem with “Pick One”
Too many women are being told: you can either heal your relationship with food or pursue a body transformation. You can either love yourself or want to change your body. You can either focus on recovery or on results.
Sound familiar?
I call BS.
We’re not here to shrink ourselves to fit anyone’s rules—not diet culture, not recovery culture. This isn’t about “either/or.” It’s about reclaiming our right to desire all of it: deep self-love, true food freedom, and a body we feel powerful and radiant in.
Why I Left OA
I share my lived experience with Overeaters Anonymous (OA) and how it ultimately felt like a shame spiral dressed up as support. From labeling sourdough bread a "relapse" to defining yourself by your defects, OA (and similar programs) often trade empowerment for control—and I wasn’t here for it.
Real healing doesn’t come from shame.
It comes from power.
From love.
From desire.
And most of all? From self-trust.
Polyamory... in Wellness?
Inspired by “Why Choose” romance novels (yes, seriously), I’m proposing a bold new framework: polyamory with our intentions.
You’re allowed to want:
Food freedom rooted in presence and power
A physical transformation rooted in love
Radical, unconditional self-worth
And you’re allowed to pursue them all at once, if that’s your truth.
Real Talk on Weight Loss
Yes, weight loss can be toxic when it’s driven by punishment or perfectionism. But it can also be a heart-led desire rooted in freedom, mobility, or just wanting to feel good in your skin.
For some women, healing binge eating will naturally result in weight loss—not because they restricted, but because they stopped using food as emotional armor.
For others, the journey might mean rejecting weight loss goals entirely and focusing on safety, softness, or nervous system healing.
There is no one-size-fits-all.
And that’s the whole point.
Want It All? Here’s What’s Next
If this episode lit a fire under you and you’re ready to stop choosing between self-worth and structure, food peace and body goals...
I’ve got two powerful paths:
💋 Consistency is Foreplay — My signature 1:1 program for high-performing creatives who want to seduce their routines, fall in love with their process, and build a body + business that turn them on. If you’re ready for structure that feels sexy, this is your sign.
→ Book your Call to Adventure [link below].
🦋 Food Freedom Fantasy Waitlist — My group container for healing binge cycles with imagination, archetypes, storytelling, and sisterhood. Includes Dance Alchemy, Divine Daddies, and the magic of becoming the heroine of your own story.
Links Mentioned
Transcript
Welcome to this week's fiery episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast. I'm gonna start off by asking two questions. One, what if you didn't have to pick between food freedom, weight loss, and self love? And number two. What if trying to choose is exactly what's keeping you stuck? This episode is going to be spicy.
This is actually part one in a series, and part two is where we really turn up the heat and there's gonna be some potentially unpopular opinions, but this is something I have been wrestling with myself. For the last three years, and I know it's kept me stuck. It's kept me walking on eggshells with my own pursuits as well as with my content, and I'm over it, and I'm talking about this because I know I am not alone.
I was having a fired up conversation with one of my favorite business friends and he pointed out, you're not the only one sick of this. I guarantee you there are a whole lot of women sick of this stuff, so if you're listening, maybe you're one of them. And if you are, get ready because this could be the conversation that shifts your energy for the rest of this year.
It's certainly doing that for me. And as we dive in, I also want to say. This comes from my personal lived experience. This is my truth. So it might not 100% resonate, and that's okay. There might be part of this that does part of it that doesn't. As always, you are deeply encouraged to listen with discernment and mind for the nuggets that move you forward.
In this episode, we are getting polyamorous with our intentions, and yes, this was inspired by the why choose trope that's taken the book Talk world by storm. And I believe it's taken that world by storm because there are so many wildly creative, deep, multidimensional women out there who want it all. And they want all of them to be welcomed and celebrated.
And the why choose genre is an imaginative space where the protagonist has multiple lovers who meet the different parts of her. And I did an entire episode on why these, why choose romance stories are pure medicine for the too much woman. So I'll link that in the notes, but we're not talking about that today.
We're shifting the conversation from polyamory with love interests, to a conversation about polyamory in our wellness journey, because we live in a world that tells us. You have to be monogamous. Pick one, or at most two. So many programs that help with binge eating, emotional eating, treat you like a problem to be solved, you have to fix your binge eating.
You are bad, you are weak, and you can love yourself. Once you stop being addicted to food, and you often hear this as well. You can't lose weight and recover from disordered eating at the same time, especially if your disordered patterns involve overeating or bingeing. There's this idea that pursuing weight loss will lead to excessive restriction, which will then lead to binge eating, which will then lead to shame and more restriction, and the cycle repeats itself.
As for deepening into self-love while pursuing a body transformation of any kind for any reason, impossible. You must hate yourself. You must be giving into patriarchal conditioning. If you love yourself, why would you want to change? We're saving that third one for next week because I'm gonna go off, you're gonna get spiced up, Kayla, and by the end of these two episodes this week and next week's, my intention is that you walk away with a permission slip to pursue one, two, or all three of these.
Yes, even all three at the same time. If that's your pleasure. Because if Anita Blake can have so many boyfriends and girlfriends, she needs a spreadsheet to keep track of their food allergies, why should you have to choose if deep down you want it all the freedom, the deep and self love and gasp, even the body transformation result.
So let's start with this idea that you have to choose between food freedom and self-love. And when I say food freedom, I'm talking about freedom from binge and restrict cycles, from feeling powerless over cravings and also free from any chronic dieting or over controlling habits or obsessive food thoughts.
And there are a lot of approaches to helping people who. Struggle with food addiction or feeling out of control around food. And I've been in many of these programs, including Overeaters Anonymous. But here's my personal challenge with OA as well as fa Fa. I haven't been in myself, but I've heard it's a more intense version of O way, and I wanna be transparent about my own experience here.
Not to bash the program, but to offer a perspective you might not have heard if maybe it didn't work for you either. For me, OA felt like there was a lot of shame and powerlessness baked right in, which is kind of the opposite of self-love. So you start by admitting that you're powerless over food. And the program treats food the same way it treats alcohol or drugs in its sister programs.
But the problem here is you can't be addicted to food. You can't cold Turkey food, or you're gonna die eventually. Then you create a plan and you define abstinence for yourself. Which almost always means no white sugar, no white flour, not ever. I think there is a big difference between acknowledging that these substances have powerful chemical reactions and effects on the physical body.
You can acknowledge they impact your mood, your future cravings, your energy, and decide that. From a place of power and self love and presence. Hey, I am not making this a regular part of what I eat because I want to feel good and I wanna make it feel easier to make consistent, healthy choices versus in a way where you're expected to abstain from these foods all together to stay clean.
And I remember going out to breakfast with an OA group after a meeting, and I got some serious side eye because I had sourdough toast with my breakfast. This program always felt like it was about, I want to change my relationship with food. Because I am flawed and out of control and I'm destructive, so I have to put myself in these rooms and outsource my power to a sponsor versus an approach that's like, I wanna change my relationship with food because I love myself and want what's best for myself, and know I'm capable of making these changes.
So with OA, it feels less like that love powered choice and more like a bit of a prison. And speaking of being flawed and out of control, let's talk about steps four to seven in the overeaters anonymous steps. So number four is you make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself. Number five, you admit to God, to yourself, and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs.
Step six, you become entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. And then step seven, you humbly ask him to remove your shortcomings. Now I believe in the power of self-reflection. I think it is so important for growth and transformation, and if you can genuinely do these steps without shame and while also taking inventory of what's right about you, these steps could actually be helpful.
But in my experience working these steps, the moral inventory is almost exclusively about. What's wrong with me versus what are my opportunities for growth? But just as importantly, what's right about me? If we focus on all of our defects, the nature of our wrongs and our shortcomings, especially when it's laced with shame, we're going to create a deeply painful experience.
And often we'll try to resist that pain with habits like overeating or binge eating. And we also get more of what we focus on. So when we start taking this negative inventory, we're gonna notice those negative qualities even more. And that can also make us feel worse to the point where, again, we might end up eating all the things.
To numb from the discomfort. So a program that is supposed to help us overcome struggles with food can actually deepen our struggles with food when we're not careful. And let's be real. Some people could benefit from taking a more honest inventory of their shortcomings. And I don't think that's you or anyone listening to this podcast.
You are already committed to growth and you're probably way more likely to beat yourself up or notice you're unhelpful qualities than you are to lean into everything that makes you amazing and lovable. And that's pretty common in women especially, which is most of this audience. So if you are searching and moral inventory can be done without shame and you remember, there is nothing wrong with you.
That can't be transformed and healed by everything that is so very right about you while you're at it, and then maybe thanked your higher power for giving you all those amazing qualities instead of just asking him to fix you, then by all means, sure might be a strategy, but I still think there's better ways.
Finally, let's talk about how OA and FA View Relapse. One cookie could be a relapse. One piece of sourdough bread could mean it's time to sound the alarm. And this is where OA and FA actually start to echo the worst parts of diet culture. When they're labeling this ordinary experience, like eating a dessert as a relapse is basically like diet culture, telling you you are off the wagon or cheated on your plan.
Then there's the use of rigid abstinence from flour and sugar as a sign of morality. So when you eat sugar or flour, you're seen as this moral failure. This is not loving. This does not heal. It actually retraumatizes. It creates the conditions for shame to take root. And when your healing journey is fueled by shame, it becomes a cycle where you restrict and then you fail.
And then you feel more broken, and then you dig deeper. You rely more on the system and the less you trust yourself. This is why I left OA because it didn't feel like it gave me the power, the self, self-trust, and the deep peace I wanted around food because I loved myself and believed in myself. Onto this next common occurrence where many programs or approaches make you feel like you have to choose between weight loss and food freedom.
Like the two are mutually exclusive across every situation. And oftentimes the programs that focus on food freedom are rooted in intuitive eating. anti-D diet and eating disorder recovery frameworks. So these food freedom programs will often prioritize repairing the relationship with food, dismantling diet culture, and ending the cycles of restriction and bending and binging.
Now, all of these are powerful outcomes and worthwhile pursuit. My challenge with this comes when there's this subtle implication that you can't also pursue weight loss, that you can't care about weight loss at all and must take it off the table altogether if you're serious about your recovery. So these programs will differ completely from very weight loss focus programs that are rooted in diet culture. These ones are about control restriction. And overriding body signals, which you don't want either, of course. However, I don't believe this binary needs to exist because the approach matters.
A woman's history matters, and when you tell a woman she has to choose when she wants both, you're asking her to suppress her desire. And when you suppress a woman's desire, you suppress her power. Let's talk about this power suppression piece first because this is so important. Then we're gonna talk about the nuances here and why there is no one size fits all approach to this situation.
This is why we have many coaches with many approaches who aren't meant to work with everyone. They're meant to work with their people. Okay, so let's take a woman who would like to lose 30 pounds. She's uncomfortable in her body. It's hard to walk upstairs. Her mobility is limited, and this 30 pounds largely comes from overeating and binge eating during times of stress and emotion.
Maybe she's had this habit of coping with food since childhood. The binge in emotional eating frustrates her because she knows it's holding her back. She knows it's draining her energy, making her less capable of doing all the things she loves, and she just doesn't feel good, but she gets told you can't prioritize weight loss.
If you want to recover from binge and emotional eating, you have to prioritize recovery. If you try to do both, you're gonna end up over restricting and then going right back to binge eating. When in reality, here's what's true for many people, their binge and emotional eating isn't about the food. It's about safety.
It's about nervous system capacity. It's about a struggle. To repeatedly turn to sustainable, healthy ways to process emotions. So food becomes the only go-to now if this woman gets told she has to focus on recovery first and exclusively, she's stuck trying to fix what's wrong instead of moving towards what she wants.
She's focused on the pain, not the possibility. And what you focus on expands so she could actually get more stuck in her unwanted, unwanted eating habits by focusing on recovery alone. And also recovery from binge eating alone isn't a result people want. It's the pain point they're trying to escape, but it's not the joyful, expansive, magnetic thing they want to be pulled towards.
Even if they do recover from binge and emotional eating, that's not always the end game. They've escaped a problem, but they haven't necessarily claimed what they truly want. And sometimes a goal of weight loss can come from the heart. As long as you understand that any amount of weight doesn't make you unworthy or unlovable.
The weight for the woman I described above is a lag measure of maladaptive coping mechanisms. The magic happens when this type of woman finally decides, I am done choosing. I am unavailable for this either or. I'm claiming the OT three, between food freedom, weight loss, and self-love, because I want all of it.
And again, this does only work if the desire is coming from the heart for love powered reasons. But if it is, this woman gets excited. She's tapped into her true desires, what she wants instead of what she's trying to get rid of. And with that desire comes power and focus and life force. And interestingly enough.
It becomes more pleasurable and natural to achieve both a healed relationship with food and physical results. Sometimes those physical results are improved physical abilities and mobility. Sometimes it's a body transformation that's about building strength and muscle. And yes, sometimes it can also be weight loss, which can be done from a deeply loving, present and appreciative place.
I will also say I used the example I did with Intention. In that example, bat Woman's biggest challenges were not diet, culture or restriction. Bat woman's biggest challenges. Were her tendency to turn to food to cope with her difficult emotions. This is the number one root cause for healing in that example.
And when you heal that, then nine out of 10 times weight loss will happen as a natural consequence of not binge eating. This is not everyone's story. The sample woman I used is one story. There are also women who have been dieting for years. There are women who were judged for their bodies and put on diets as children and have never known life to be any different when that is a woman's lived experience.
And her binge eating or overeating or chronic food obsessions come from having always been on a diet. This is absolutely a place to perhaps deprioritize weight loss altogether, at least initially. And even if weight loss is a goal. I think the most important thing is that shift away from rigid diets and societally imposed rules.
For the right woman or the woman in the right season of her journey, someone who's broken up with diet culture for long enough that she's ready to consider a body transformation from a more resourced, loving place, then that woman doesn't have to choose between food freedom and creating a physical transformation.
So we've unpacked why you don't have to choose between food freedom and self-love. In fact, the more you pursue recovery from disordered eating habits or unwanted patterns from a place of what's right about you and how you already know you have all the power to make the change. You actually have way more capacity to create that change.
And we've also talked about why you don't have to choose between food freedom and weight loss, while also honoring that for some women in some seasons of life, food freedom might need to take priority, and that's beautifully valid. Next week we're gonna talk about the biggest binary in the health coaching world today.
The idea that you can't be a good feminist and love yourself while also choosing to lose weight. Get ready because your girl is gonna bring the heat in next week's solo episode. And if you already know, yeah, I am done being told I have to choose. I want this to be the year where I admit I want it all and I'm gonna pursue it all, claim it all, and do it while feeling more powerful and in love with myself and turned on than I ever have.
Then the doors to consistency is foreplay are open. This is the one-on-one container where you stop apologizing. For wanting the body transformation and the deep, profound self-worth at the same time. It's where you learn to make discipline hot on your terms, and it's built to give you the results you desire in both your body transformation and also in your business and creative pursuits.
The link to book a Call to Adventure will be in the episode description. I'll also include a link to the Food Freedom Fantasy Group Program wait list as well. So this is my group container where you get my entire Food Freedom Fantasy Framework. And this is for you if you wanna tap into creativity, imagination, and play as the path to your goals.
It is for you if you want the sisterhood, the dancing, the space to be all of you, and celebrated for it by other like-minded women. And by the way, if you sign up for consistency, is for play the Live Rogue Pro. The live round of this program is included because I believe every high performing creative magical woman needs this medicine.
So you'll find links to everything in the notes. So excited to bring the fire in next week's solo episode. And until next time, this is your reminder to stop choosing and start devouring. Take care.
