Sick of Trying to Control Your Eating and Weight?
You Are Not Weak, and Here Is Why
To my fellow human, please know that this blog is not only for people with a formal eating disorder diagnosis. If you have ever felt confused, exhausted, or ashamed about your relationship with food or your body, this is for you too.
“Why Is It That No Matter How Hard I Try, I Cannot Figure This Out?”
If you have been trying to figure this out for a long time and still feel stuck, I want you to know that is not a reflection of your effort or your worth. In my years of working with people who struggle with food and their bodies, what strikes me most is how hard they are already trying. The truth is, this is genuinely hard. And there are so many things quietly contributing to that difficulty, more than most people realise, more than any single conversation can capture.
Something I notice in my clinical work is that it is the exception rather than the rule to see a struggle with food without something else sitting alongside it. This does not mean that everyone who has a difficult relationship with food or their body has a mental health diagnosis. It simply means that these things are rarely straightforward, and the more we understand what is contributing, the more compassion we can extend to ourselves for finding it so hard.
Research consistently shows high rates of anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, ADHD, and autism in people with eating disorders (Riquin et al., 2021; Devoe et al., 2023), with more than half of people with anorexia nervosa having experienced major depressive disorder in their lifetime (Westmoreland et al., 2016).
The relationship between eating disorders and ADHD is particularly worth understanding. Research consistently shows that people with ADHD are significantly more likely to develop an eating disorder than those without it, with a pooled odds ratio of approximately 3.8 across studies (Nazar et al., 2016). The impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and disrupted interoception that come with ADHD all create conditions in which disordered eating can take hold. For neurodivergent adults specifically, food is often used as a regulatory strategy, serving emotional and sensory functions that go well beyond hunger and fullness (Roberts et al., 2025).
For autistic individuals, sensory processing challenges around food textures, smells, tastes, and the social rituals of eating can make mealtimes genuinely overwhelming (Kopańska et al., 2025). This is not picky eating. It is a nervous system that experiences the world differently.
And then there is complex trauma. Many of the people I work with carry histories of relational harm, abuse, neglect, and environments where their needs were consistently unmet or punished. It is not possible to fully understand a difficult relationship with food without understanding the emotional world it developed in.
If any of this resonates, it may be that you have been trying to address something at the surface without yet having the chance to look at what is underneath. That is not a failure. That is simply where most people start.
“Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Want to Eat?”
Stay with me for a moment. Is it only wanting food that feels wrong? Or does it go further than that? Does wanting rest feel self-indulgent? Does taking time that is not productive feel like a waste? Does putting your own needs before others feel selfish? Does spending money on yourself feel unjustifiable? Does simply existing without being useful to someone feel uncomfortable?
If any of that landed, I want you to know:
this is not just about food.
So many people carry a profound, bone-deep shame not just about food, but about having needs at all. Physiological needs. Emotional needs. The need for rest, comfort, connection, nourishment. All of it becomes contaminated with shame. And what follows from that shame is a relentless drive to control, suppress, or deny those needs, as though the very act of needing something is a form of weakness or failure.
Research consistently shows that shame is one of the most significant drivers of disordered eating, and that body-specific shame, the kind that attaches directly to the body and its needs, is particularly toxic, linking emotional pain directly to the physical self (Nechita et al., 2021). A meta-analysis of shame and eating disorder symptoms found robust associations across all major eating disorder presentations, with shame functioning both as a risk factor and a maintaining factor (Nechita et al., 2021).
So where does that shame come from?
Most of us were taught from a young age that shame was a tool for correction. When we were too loud, too much, too needy, too hungry, too emotional, or too demanding, shame was the mechanism that brought us back into line. Over time, the message did not stay contained to specific behaviours. It became a way of relating to ourselves more broadly: be less, want less, need less, take up less space.
Research on shame development shows that when shame is used repeatedly as a disciplinary tool in childhood, it shifts from being about what we did to being about who we are (Tangney & Dearing, 2002). That shift is significant. And for many people, it becomes the invisible backdrop to their relationship with food and their bodies.
Research also shows that early experiences of threat, such as abuse, neglect, or the absence of warmth and care, are strongly linked to later shame and disordered eating, with shame and self-criticism acting as the bridge between those early experiences and the development of eating difficulties (Duarte et al., 2018).
In my clinical experience, I frequently sit with people who carry a belief that they should not need anything, or anyone. The very presence of a need feels like evidence of weakness or failure. This does not arise from nowhere. Research on early relational experiences consistently shows that when needs go unmet or are responded to with rejection or punishment, people learn to disavow those needs as a form of selfprotection (Duarte et al., 2018). And because needs cannot actually be eliminated, only suppressed, they find their way out, often through the body, and through food.
I know how confronting it can be to recognise how much shame many of us carry simply for having ordinary human needs. Accepting our needs, all of them and not just the ones related to food, is one of the most important steps in beginning to heal a relationship with food and the body. You may have noticed it yourself: on the days when life feels hardest, when things are not going the way you hoped, those are often the days when your relationship with food feels most difficult too.
None of this means you are stuck.
Understanding where the shame came from
is often the first step toward relating to yourself differently.
“Why Does Trying to Control My Eating Feel Like I Am Always Failing?”
The reason controlling food feels so impossible is not a lack of willpower. It is that eating is a basic biological need, and shame does not make needs disappear. It only makes them feel more dangerous. The harder you try to suppress or control what is fundamentally human, the more it pushes back.
Something many people describe is that restricting, skipping meals, or over-exercising does not feel like suffering, at least not at first. It feels like achievement. Proof of selfdiscipline, of being capable, of having something manageable when everything else feels overwhelming. In a life where so much has felt chaotic or frightening, controlling what goes into the body can feel like the one thing that truly belongs to you.
But research shows us the cost. Tying self-worth almost entirely to the control of food and body weight is one of the core cognitive features that maintains eating disorders (Fairburn, 2008). When a person’s entire sense of value rests on how well they restrict, any deviation becomes evidence of total failure.
And when those rigid rules are broken, the response is often immediate: selfpunishment, more restriction, purging. Research on eating disorders and self-harm shows that these punishing behaviours arise from the same psychological foundation as shame, a deep sense of unworthiness and a belief that the body and its needs must be atoned for (Hodge & Baker, 2021).
So if you are trying to avoid feeling like a failure by fighting your hunger, staying preoccupied with what or how much you eat, or compensating through skipping meals, restricting, or exercise, this is the cycle you are caught in. And it is not a cycle that willpower alone can break.
“Just Thinking About Food Makes Me Feel Like I Have Failed. What Is Wrong With Me?”
And if you have ever wondered why even thinking about certain foods feels like you have already done something wrong, I want you to know: there is actually a name for that experience, and it is far more common than you might think.
It is called Thought Shape Fusion, and it describes something quite specific. It is the experience where simply thinking about eating a food you have labelled as forbidden triggers an immediate sense that something has already happened to your body, or that you have done something morally wrong, even though you have not eaten anything at all. Not a bite. Not even a serious thought about eating it. Just the thought passing through your mind (Shafran et al., 1999).
It tends to show up in three ways. The first is a sense that weight gain has somehow already become more likely just because you thought about the food. The second is actually feeling physically different, larger or heavier, just from having the thought. And the third, which I find clients describe most painfully, is a profound sense of having done something morally wrong, as though the thought itself was a crime that now needs to be punished (Shafran et al., 1999; Coelho et al., 2011).
Research shows that this is not a fleeting experience for people with eating disorders. It tends to stay, and it maintains the very cycle it lives inside (Rachman & Shafran, 2015)
What strikes me every time is how unfair it is.
Your brain is punishing you for having a thought.
That is not something you chose.
“Why Can I Not Trust My Own Reflection? Why Does It Change Every Single Day?”
Shame about food and shame about the body are not always separate experiences. For many people they are the same wound, and it shows up in a very specific way.
Closely related to all of this is something that often goes underrecognised: genuine body image distortion. What I mean is not simply that someone feels uncomfortable with how they look. It is that the perceptual experience of the body is genuinely distorted, so that no matter what the mirror shows or what other people observe, the internal sense of the body does not match reality.
Research confirms this as a specific feature of eating disorders rather than simply a byproduct of low mood. Studies have found evidence for distinct perceptual distortions in body image in people with eating disorder histories, not just negative feelings about the body, but inaccurate perception of it (Brokjøb et al., 2024). This means that reassurance and logic are rarely sufficient on their own. The distortion is not corrected by information. It requires deeper therapeutic work.
“Why Do Certain Foods Fill Me With Dread or Disgust Just Thinking About Them?”
If you have ever lost control around certain foods, found yourself compensating afterwards, felt your urges become overwhelming just being near those foods, or felt ashamed and disgusted with yourself after eating them, it makes complete sense that simply looking at or thinking about those foods now fills you with dread. Your nervous system has learned to treat them as a threat.
And then something else happens. Because the experience feels like losing control, the disgust does not stay directed at the food. It turns inward. Toward yourself. That is a painful and exhausting place to be.
Research confirms this is not imagined. People with eating disorders show significantly higher disgust responses to food, higher general disgust sensitivity, and substantially higher self-directed disgust compared with those without (Bektas et al., 2022).
The behaviour that follows, avoiding, restricting, compensating, always made sense. It was trying to manage something unbearable. The goal of therapy is not to shame you out of it but to understand what it has been protecting you from.
“If My Body Cannot Be Trusted, How Am I Supposed to Learn to Listen to It Again?”
So if shame drives the behaviour, and disgust makes certain foods feel threatening, the question becomes: how do you begin to find your way back to your own body?
One of the most challenging aspects of eating disorder recovery is learning to rebuild a relationship with the body’s internal signals. Hunger. Fullness. Comfort. Discomfort. For many people with eating disorders, these signals have become confusing, distorted, or altogether absent.
This is known as interoceptive awareness, the ability to notice, identify, and respond to sensations arising from inside the body. Research consistently shows that deficits in interoceptive awareness are present across all eating disorder presentations, not just one or two, suggesting that disrupted interoception may be a core transdiagnostic feature of disordered eating (Martin et al., 2019).A systematic review of 104 studies found this association to be consistent across different measurement approaches and eating disorder types (Martin et al., 2019).
Rebuilding this awareness is not about forcing yourself to feel things you do not feel, or trusting signals you genuinely cannot access. It is a gradual, supported process. Therapeutic approaches that incorporate interoceptive exposure, gently and safely increasing contact with body sensations in a controlled way, have shown promise as a way to help people develop a more accurate and less threatening sense of their own body (Boswell et al., 2015).
Alongside this, distress tolerance skills play a critical role. For many people with eating disorders, the drive to restrict, purge, or avoid is not about food at all. It is about managing an unbearable internal emotional state. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, which has a well-established evidence base for eating disorders characterised by binge eating and emotional dysregulation, specifically addresses this through distress tolerance training: learning to survive a difficult internal experience without making it worse (Safer, Telch, & Chen, 2009).
This does not happen overnight. And it does not happen through willpower. It happens through small, consistent acts of turning toward the body with curiosity rather than contempt, usually with a skilled clinician beside you.
A Final Word From Me to You
Your eating disorder is not a character flaw. It is a complex response to an internal world that became unbearable, and to circumstances that, at some point, made it genuinely unsafe to have needs.
The shame you carry about your body, your hunger, your needs, your thoughts: that shame is one of the most powerful maintaining forces in eating disorders. And it is also one of the most treatable. Not through self-criticism or more control, but through the slow and careful work of understanding where it came from and learning to relate to yourself differently.
The thoughts that feel like crimes, the ones that tell you thinking about food is morally wrong or that feeling full is the same as losing control, those thoughts are distortions. They are real in how they feel. But they are not facts.
Recovery is not simple or quick. But it is possible. And in my experience, it begins not with stricter rules or more willpower, but with curiosity and compassion rather than shame.
References
Bektas, S., Keeler, J. L., Anderson, L. M., Mutwalli, H., Himmerich, H., & Treasure, J. (2022). Disgust and self-disgust in eating disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Nutrients, 14(9), 1728.
Boswell, J. F., Anderson, L. M., & Anderson, D. A. (2015). Integration of interoceptive exposure in eating disorder treatment. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 22(2), 194–210.
Brokjøb, M. D., Danielsen, Y. S., & Rø, Ø. (2024). Evidence for a specific distortion in perceptual body image in eating disorders: A replication and extension. PLOS One, 19(11), e0313619.
Coelho, J. S., Hurst, K., & Downey, J. (2011). Thought-shape fusion in eating disorders. British Journal of
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Duarte, C., Ferreira, C., Trindade, I. A., Martinho, A., & Pinto-Gouveia, J. (2018). Steps toward understanding the impact of early emotional experiences on disordered eating: The role of selfcriticism, shame, and body image shame. Appetite, 125, 10–17.
Fairburn, C. G. (2008). Cognitive behavior therapy and eating disorders. Guilford Press.
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