230. Food Is Not Love & The Algorithm Is Not Your Daddy

Written By Kayla MacDonald

230. Food Is Not Love & The Algorithm Is Not Your Daddy

For a long time, I believed my struggles with food were about discipline, consistency, or mindset.

They weren’t.

They were about love, attachment, and where I was outsourcing my worth.

In this episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast, I share how emotional eating resurfaced during a season when I became hyper-focused on social media—and why that wasn’t a coincidence.

Because when you look closely, the algorithm behaves a lot like an emotionally unavailable partner.

It offers inconsistent attention. Random validation. Silence followed by the occasional spike that keeps you hooked. And if you’ve ever struggled with anxious attachment—romantically or otherwise—your nervous system may confuse that unpredictability with value.

Emotional Eating Isn’t About Willpower

When love, safety, or belonging feel unreliable, the body looks for something stable. Something soothing. Something always available.

Food becomes that placeholder.

This isn’t a failure of discipline. It’s a nervous system adaptation.

And when we’re engaging daily with systems that are cold, inconsistent, or performative—whether that’s a relationship, a workplace, or social media—it makes perfect sense that emotional eating intensifies.

What Is Medium Mismatch?

A medium mismatch happens when you’re forcing yourself to thrive in an environment that doesn’t fit how you’re wired.

Some people genuinely love social media. They think in hooks, trends, and fast-paced engagement. That doesn’t make them wrong.

But others—like me—think in stories, frameworks, nuance, and depth.

Podcasting, writing, and long-form content feel regulating and alive. Reels feel performative and bracing.

Neither is morally better. They’re just different environments.

And forcing yourself to bloom in the wrong one doesn’t make you stronger—it makes you dysregulated.

You’re not a dandelion meant to grow through concrete. You might be an orchid.

Attachment Patterns Repeat Across Life

The same attachment wounds that show up in romantic relationships often repeat in business.

The “maybe if I’m compelling enough, I’ll be chosen” loop doesn’t just live in dating—it lives in metrics, likes, and visibility.

For me, this wound was shaped early by inconsistent attention during childhood—not from lack of love, but from overwhelmed caregivers with limited capacity.

Awareness of this pattern changed everything.

Once I stopped outsourcing my worth to the algorithm and placed stronger boundaries around social media, my eating stabilized almost immediately. My energy returned. Creativity flowed. Consistency followed.

Healing Happens in the Right Environment

Sometimes healing doesn’t require more effort.

It requires a different container.

The body responds differently when it feels safe, seen, and attuned. Hormones shift. Habits stabilize. Desire becomes trustworthy again.

This is why depth-based mediums—like podcasting and books—feel so nourishing to me. They offer continuity without performance. Connection without self-abandonment.

And that safety matters.

Links Mentioned

Embodied Activation

Purpose:
To identify where you may be forcing yourself to perform in environments that quietly dysregulate you—and to reclaim sovereignty over where your energy flows.

Step 1: Name Your Mediums

List the primary environments shaping your life right now:

  • Business platforms (social media, email, podcasting, writing, etc.)

  • Health practices (movement, nutrition strategies, routines)

  • Relationships (romantic, social, professional)

Step 2: Body Check-In

For each medium, ask:

  • How does my body feel before I engage?

  • How does my body feel after?

  • Do I feel expanded… or braced?

No fixing. Just noticing.

Step 3: Identify Fit vs. Forcing

Ask yourself honestly:

  • Is this helping me thrive?

  • Or am I hoping I’ll one day become strong enough to not hate it?

Remember: discomfort from growth feels different than chronic dysregulation.

Step 4: Choose One Boundary

Pick one small boundary to experiment with this week.
Examples:

  • No social media in the morning

  • Limiting metric-checking

  • Redirecting energy toward a medium that feels nourishing

This is an experiment—not a lifelong commitment.

Step 5: Affirm Sovereignty

Say or write:

“I am allowed to choose environments that fit me.
I don’t need to perform for love, safety, or belonging.”

Let the body feel that truth land.

Transcript

Well, welcome back to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast once again, we are going deep. If you listen to last week's episode, you know that we took a deep dive into why your struggles with food might not be about food at all. They might be about safety. That episode is so important, and I wanted you to have an additional resource for it, so I actually created something special for you.

It's a free workbook called Hungry for Safety, A Divine Daddy's Guide to Emotional Freedom. You can find it@embodiedwritingwarrior.com slash gift or hit the link in the description. It has assessments, many love notes from Rex and Haven and journal prompts. I truly hope that it will help you create even more clarity around some of your challenges with food.

But today's episode is not about safety. It's about why food is not love and why the algorithm is not your daddy. Because when you look closely, the algorithm functions a lot like. An emotionally unavailable attachment figure. This is a conversation about love belonging attachment and how all of those things can impact your relationship with food, with your consistency and just your overall happiness.

So I'm getting more personal than usual with today's episode for two reasons. One, I want you to know that I don't just talk about the work I do in food freedom fantasy. I deepen into it consistently. And two, I believe there's so much universal medicine here, especially if you've struggled in relationships or if loneliness has been a trigger for emotional eating.

Or maybe you also have a loaded relationship with social media, maybe all of the above. As this is more personal in nature, I invite you to listen for pattern recognition. How do these big themes align with your own lived experiences? One of my mentors recently shared that awareness is curative all on its own, and I come back to this idea often.

So my intention is that today's episode creates this healing level of awareness of what may have previously been in a blind spot, just as it was for me. Now, this came up for me after being on the struggle bus. For most of January, eating habits wobbly af, I would go through this period of one day of aligned eating, then one misaligned day off and on for weeks on end.

I was unhappy and tired and once again wondering, do I even want a business? Is it always gonna make me this unhappy or is just, is this just the temporary growing pain of doing something that's big and scary and uncertain? Then I started doing some deep reflecting on a walk. And I realized that much of this unhappiness and consistency began as soon as I began to hyperfocus on social media.

Now, this is not a coincidence, I'll be honest with you. I do not like social media at all. I almost always feel worse after I use it, whether that's as a creator or as a consumer. But I am stubborn to a fault, and I wanted so badly to prove to myself I was serious about this business thing after I gave up on it in 2022.

So I decided I'm going to master social media. The thing I hate the most, I'm going to get good at it. I'm going to get consistent and finally grow my audience. But here's the thing. I have had periods of consistency on social media, 100 day challenges, posting two reels a day for weeks on end, whether I wanted to or not.

I've tried different formats. And I've tried doing the mindset work around it. The results over 250 reels later on Instagram and somewhere around 250 followers. At this point. I finally realized this is not a fear of visibility. This is not inconsistency. This is a medium mismatch. And this idea of a medium mismatch is so important, and I want you to start auditing your own life for potential mismatches for you as well.

Here's the thing, some people genuinely love social media. They get excited about scrolling and spotting clever real ideas and saving them, and then riffing on trends in their own way, and those people are not wrong. They're beautifully right because they found the medium that aligns with how they think and create.

Meanwhile, I do not think in hooks. I think in stories. In systems, in framework, and layered meaning. So I love podcasting and writing books and long form content because they give me this space to go deep with you, to build this nuance and to create context and to also help you feel safe while we explore things that are a little more complex together.

You can't do that well in 30 seconds. At least I haven't figured out how to. In fact, a lot of popular marketing advice says that you should not try to create safety and nuance. What you actually need to do is shock people's reptile brains to get their attention. Sorry, not sorry, but I'd rather speak to your heart and your soul than your reptile brain.

And Instagram's format simply does not reward this kind of depth. There's this beautiful book by Sophie Wilson called The Content Exit that names this dilemma so clearly, and she writes about one of the biggest lies of social media, the lie that you need to build your personal brand by performing for the algorithm.

But the reality is. Personal branding through performance creates a version of you that attracts the wrong people and repels the right ones. A personal brand only contributes to business success when it shows how different you are within your market, not how well you conform to industry standards.

The algorithm rewards sameness. Your clients crave authenticity. You can't serve both masters. Again, Sophie Wilson content exit. I'll link it in the description and yet I read this. I knew this and for a long time I was trying to win at social media anyway, even though I knew deep down that this podcast and my future books are how I'm truly meant to call in my people.

But those things felt too natural, too easy, like rewards I'd earn someday once I finally conquered the algorithm. This is where the idea of a media mismatch is so important, and it doesn't just apply to business, it applies to everything I have heard that people can feel how you feel about your marketing.

So, of course it makes sense that my social media isn't blowing up when I have many thoughts. None of them good about the platform, but when I write or podcast, I feel alive and creative and happy, and I feel fully myself. And even though I only hear from listeners on occasion. I feel deeply connected to those listening and so grateful that you spend this time with me every week.

Your listenership truly does mean the world to me, but as soon as I go to post a real, I feel myself brace. There's resistance in my body. Pressure. And I go into this performance mode and feel very self-conscious. And again, some people thrive on reels. They are masterful, and you watch them and you can tell that they just love it.

So I've watched these amazing creators and thought I could grow to love social media, right? I could become joyful and relaxed while creating. I used to hate running and now I love it. So it's possible. Right, and maybe you're thinking the same thing about some practice or habit in your life. Maybe it's social media or running or fasting.

Speaking of running, I did an entire episode on the belief that running causes high cortisol and a stress response and even weight gain in women especially. I will link that old episode in the description as well. So that's a myth running around out there, and it might be true for some people. Meanwhile, running has been one of my biggest stress relievers, and it really supports maintaining healthy eating habits that also contribute to a lighter body weight.

This is my personal experience. I also know. This isn't everyone's experience. The physical body will have a completely different response to doing something it loves than to doing something. It hates. Different hormones will be activated, which will lead to different outcomes. And sometimes you do grow to love something over time, but eventually you sometimes have to accept that.

There are certain things that might always be a medium mismatch and you're not broken. You're not wrong for this, and you're not weak. You're just in the wrong environment. You know that whole line about how if a flower's not growing, you change the environment, not the flower. I think I was trying to be a dandelion.

Look at me. I don't even need grass or soil. I'll grow out of the damn sidewalk if I feel like it. Meanwhile, maybe I'm actually an orchid and maybe you are too, and you are worthy of cultivating your environment accordingly, giving you all the links. Today I'm gonna link this really beautiful substack post that is so worth the read.

And it talks about this idea of survival of the fittest. We think it came from Darwin. We think he meant just get stronger and better than everybody else so you can win. Turns out his work about natural selection was later bastardized by some capitalist happy economics, bro, because of course it was.

Here's what Darwin actually learned in his studies. It was this creatures that fit their environment tended to survive and reproduce those that didn't tended to not survive. This wasn't about strength and aggression. It was about a right fit environment. So maybe you don't always need to get stronger and better.

Maybe you need to realize, wow, I'm already enough. I'm amazing, and I have strengths in other areas, and I'm gonna create environments that fit me so I can thrive. It's okay that another person might thrive in a different environment. Neither of us is wrong or better than the other. Just different. Then I had another insight.

On this snowy walk I mentioned to my pet robot chat, GPT, how it felt like social media is basically the entrepreneurial equivalent of what I used to do in my early twenties, where I used to chase emotionally unavailable, dismissive, manipulative F boys because I always thought. Well, maybe if I just keep showing up and being nice to him, he'll love me.

Maybe if I lose X more pounds, he'll want me. Maybe if I do this better, he'll desire me. My pet robot confirmed. These parallels are real. The early 2020s pattern was emotionally unavailable. Men hot and cold reinforcement. Occasional crumbs of attention, and I knew they weren't safe, but I kept engaging because every time they texted back or showed some unexpected attention, it felt like proof I was wanted.

But here's what this actually did. It trained my nervous system to equate unpredictability with value. It taught me to outsource my worth to external selection, and then it reenacted this. Maybe this time I'll be chosen pattern over and over and over again. Social media does the exact same thing. It is algorithmically inconsistent attention.

It's random spikes followed by silence, and you're never sure why one reel pops off over another. It's this system that does not care about values or depth. It's just gobbling up as much of the attention economy as it can honestly, at the cost of people's mental health and wellbeing. Many times it is not designed for safety or attunement, but it felt like this toxic lover I kept getting pulled back to.

Even one of my friends right before I moved was like, you've been complaining about social media for the last decade. Why are you still trying and why? Because both of these systems run on the same loop. The loop of if I'm compelling enough, I'll finally be picked, and this wound runs deep. As I share this next part, I share it from a place of deep understanding that all parties involved were doing the best they could.

And did not have a lot of resources themselves and were also perhaps not shown what consistent attunement and affection looked like from their caregivers. So the I Am Not Loved Wound starts to show up between six months and two and a half years. My sister was born when I was two, and she had a lot of health challenges that demanded attention.

Two years later, my mom had twins with colic. Three years later, my mom had a severe health breakdown and became pregnant with my youngest sister. So five kids, minimal capacity. And my dad was almost always at work because he had to be. Being a sole earner in a family of seven demanded this, and this is not meant to blame.

This is meant to provide context for how this wound can be created. So from the age of two and onwards. I lived in a situation where attention and support were inconsistent and unreliable. Not because I wasn't loved, but because the adults could not be reliably present. So of course, as an adult, I would turn to what felt familiar, both in love and in business.

And that was inconsistency, unreliability. And when this is what you're experiencing, whether it's from a social media platform or a unrequited lover,

of course you're gonna want to have something in your life that feels stable and reliable. Always at your disposal. Enter food, all the food, emotional and binge eating on repeat. You're not failing at your diet or being a willpower weakling here. You're starving to be held, and maybe this feels like the only place you can get that holding.

I once heard a woman in the business space say in a room of health coaches that they'd have to do the same work they did to heal their relationship with food in the area of business and entrepreneurship. And I think you also have to do the same work to heal anxious attachment relationship patterns.

In the business world as well. So this is the work I'm doing in my current season, and you still might wonder what does any of this have to do with emotional eating, food freedom, consistency. I have realized that my eating habits and the subsequent effect they've had on my body's size and shape. Had everything to do with returning to outsourcing my own worth and my own sense of self to cold in different systems, which could never give me that sense of worth.

Once it was the F Boys, then it became the algorithm. The beautiful thing here is I also remember how easy it is. To return to healthy eating habits and shapeshift my body quickly once I end those toxic relationship entanglements. So I used to joke that I went from the FYD diet to the FYG diet, to the FYT diet.

Now I've changed the initials to protect the guilty. And those diets were so effective. And yes, maybe there was some little s spite involved, but the weight didn't drop from forcing or extreme dieting or spite alone. It dropped from choosing myself from alignment. So yeah, when people say that all pursuits of weight loss.

Our anti-feminist, it truly drives me bonkers. So let's talk about what's happened since I've realized I was outsourcing my worth to the algorithm. I put stronger boundaries in place around social media, when I use it, how often I use it, and how much attention I give to any statistics. Since then, I have gone seven days without a single binge.

Ever since I had this epiphany, I am back to being consistent and energized, and I'm enjoying my days again. I feel alive and creative and inspired, and I realized, whoa, I don't hate having a business. I actually love doing most of the things involved in having a business coaching, creating content. I love doing all of these things.

What I hate is shaping my work to meet the demands of a system I don't like. Now, awareness of these patterns is so healing in itself, and there's also an embodiment component, let's talk about what this looks like for me in my own life. When I was healing from my unhealthy patterns in romantic relationships, admittedly, I got a little drastic.

I swore off men for eight years, only dated women, which was also fine because I am deeply attracted to people based on who they are, not what their gender is. So I honestly thought I was done with men forever. Then the universe surprised me with the most incredible, safe devoted man I've ever known. But calling him in did require stepping back and getting clear on my standards and deciding what kind of relationships I was no longer available for.

And this did cause me to have a lot more discernment about the type of male presence I allowed into my life going forwards. So let's use this analogy. Say you're at a workplace with a bunch of male coworkers, and most of them are delightful, but maybe there's like one F Boy. He's a bully. He's mean. We've all experienced something like this, right?

So is the play to just refuse to work at this workplace that is an otherwise pretty great place to be? Probably not. You would be civil with this F boy, professional, polite, but you wouldn't invite him out for drinks. And you wouldn't share your most intimate life stories with him, and you would absolutely not outsource your sense of self-worth to him and try to make him like you.

Somebody like that not liking you is kind of a compliment, to be honest. So is the play to abandon social media altogether? No, but here's what this looks like in practice for me. One. No more social media in the morning at all. My mornings are for creative work that goes deep, so podcasting work on food freedom fantasy book writing.

So I used to try to go on social media first to get it over with, and then I wondered why I was tired and moody by 9:00 AM. It turns out maybe eating the frog in the morning isn't always the vibe. Not unless you wanna go the rest of your day with frog breath and a tummy ache. So this is also being very clear about the function social media currently plays in my life.

So those functions are number one. Desensitization to visibility and judgment, and given my ongoing struggles with those things, this is valuable. And just because this serves a purpose in my life doesn't mean my life should revolve around it. Truly. I want social media to become like brushing my teeth.

It happens. I do it. I have a process and then I move on with my day. Here's the thing, brushing your teeth is so useful, and that doesn't mean you need to make a damn career out of it. So my boundaries around social media have become much stronger Now, I'm letting it act as a hallway instead of a room. So I plan some talking head reels, and these are gonna link back to my podcast or my current offerings.

I post in my stories, I spend a few minutes giving some love to the online creators when they pop up in my feed and then I move on. It's the equivalent of having a professional, courteous relationship with the hypothetical workplace. F Boy. Without letting him into your bedroom or your heart. This frees up my energy, my creativity, and my life force for mediums that love me right back.

And I've noticed my younger parts coming to the surface a lot lately. And it's funny because adult Kayla, when she's taking great care of herself. Knows she's meant to help a lot of people and that her frameworks and ideas are going to revolutionize healing for the right audience. But 6-year-old Kayla still shows up wanting confirmation that she's picked and loved and chosen, and I thought I had to keep fixing her.

That old idea of survival of the fittest. But now I'm realizing my inner child doesn't need fixed. She needs to stop being forced to perform and prioritize containers that poke very specific old wounds repeatedly. She's an orchid, so she needs the right environment. This is why podcasting and books and longer form content like substack posts feel so different.

These mediums offer something that my childhood did not. They offer continuity, stable connection, being able to create meaning without performance. And allowing me to create impact without it affecting how I feel about myself. And I know that these episodes help people more than any 62nd reel I could make ever Will.

This conversation will continue on next week's solo episode. For now, your embodied activation is to audit your mediums. All of them, your business strategies, health practices, relationships, ask yourself, are these the right fit environments for me? Or am I hoping I'll one day get strong enough to not hate this?

And please understand, I am not suggesting you don't push your comfort zone. I think growth is so important. And many times you can grow to love something. I used to hate both yoga and running, but now I enjoy one and adore the other. But if you've been consistently implementing something for months or years on end and you still hate it, and it still leaves you feeling anxious, unhappy, or unfulfilled.

And it's also not getting you whatever sustained results you desire anyways, you can change your environment, you can change the medium, and you're not weak for doing so. You're actually sovereign. Like, see, Steven Bartlett says in his book, happy sexy Millionaire, quitting is for winners and quitting is a skill.

Or at the very least, renegotiating your boundaries. So something serves you better is a skill and a bonus. Embodied activation you might wanna consider is seeing if you wanna try creating stronger boundaries around social media, whether you are a creator, consumer, or both. And just see how you feel. So I'm about a week into making these shifts and oh my goodness, it's been night and day.

And finally, if you are listening in real time before February 6th, this is my last call for my emotional eating to emotional freedom workshop. The link will be in the episode description, and if you've listened to these last few episodes. And you're like, oh my God, Kayla, I do not wanna dig up my deepest childhood wounds on a live zoom call and dance in public.

Let me reassure you of two things. One, we are not digging into anything you don't feel safe digging into. I actually recommend starting to practice these skills on the micro annoyances and the little challenges versus the big things. I would not be digging into my 6-year-old baggage if I had not put in thousands of reps with the little stuff first.

And number two, you do not have to be a good dancer or even have your camera on if that's not comfortable for you. This is truly about getting into your body with some simple movements and then some freestyle followed by a short meditation. Nothing crazy, no pressure. And if you really don't feel safe attending live, a replay will be available if you sign up.

My intention is always for safety to be part of the treatment in everything I teach. So I hope this episode made you feel a little less alone and. I'm wishing you an amazing rest of your week. Take care.

Kayla MacDonald
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229. Reclaiming Your Narrative & Writing With Intention ft. Charlotte Chipperfield