Elevate Therapy

Having less food noise can be an enormous relief, particularly if thoughts about eating and weight have occupied your head for years. What it doesn’t necessarily do is change the beliefs that became attached to those thoughts in the first place.

You might still believe that gaining weight means you’ve failed, that being smaller makes you more acceptable, or that one difficult meal says something about your discipline or worth. The thoughts around food may be quieter, but the old story about yourself can still be sitting underneath them.

That’s why I think the emotional side of weight loss deserves much more attention. Physical change can create more headspace, but what starts to become visible in that space can sometimes surprise you.

For me, that’s where curiosity becomes much more useful than judgement. 🤍

When somebody notices you’ve lost weight, “How did you do it?” can feel like a harmless question, but it can leave you feeling surprisingly conflicted.

Do you explain everything? Do you keep it private? If you don’t share the full story, are you somehow being dishonest? And if you do, are you opening yourself up to opinions and questions you never asked for?

Your health information doesn’t automatically become public just because your body has visibly changed. You can choose to talk openly about your weight loss, but that’s very different from feeling as though you owe everyone an explanation.

You’re allowed to decide who gets access to that part of your story, and “I’d rather keep that private” is a complete answer. 💭

There’s still a strange idea that weight loss only really “counts” if you’ve struggled enough for it.

People are often told they’ve taken the easy way out, as though needing support somehow makes the result less valid. But weight has never been as simple as just trying harder, and using support to help you make changes doesn’t erase everything else that comes with changing your relationship with food, your body and yourself.

What I find interesting is how quickly people feel they need to defend the way they’ve lost weight. We don’t usually expect someone to prove they suffered enough before accepting help in other areas of life, so why do we apply that thinking here?

Weight loss can involve physical change, but for many people it also creates space for a completely different kind of emotional work to begin. 🤍

Weight loss doesn’t only affect the person whose body is changing. Sometimes it shifts the dynamics within a relationship too, particularly when confidence, routines, social habits or the way other people respond to you begin to change.

A partner might feel insecure, worried that they’ll be left behind, uncomfortable with the attention you’re receiving or simply unsure of where they fit within this new version of your life. That doesn’t automatically mean they’re jealous or unsupportive, but it can mean there’s something underneath the reaction that needs an honest conversation.

At the same time, you shouldn’t have to make yourself smaller emotionally just because becoming more confident makes somebody else uncomfortable.

Weight loss can expose relationship patterns that were already there, and sometimes the emotional adjustment is something both people have to navigate. 🤍

It can be really confusing when you’ve spent years wanting to lose weight, people finally start noticing, and suddenly the compliments don’t feel quite as good as you imagined they would.

A comment like “you look amazing now” might be intended kindly, but it can also leave you wondering what that person thought about you before. Other comments can make you feel watched, as though everyone is keeping track of your body and whether it continues to change.

You can enjoy being recognised for something you’ve worked towards and still feel uncomfortable with the attention. Both things can be true at once.

Sometimes the hardest part isn’t knowing how to respond to the compliment, it’s noticing what the compliment brings up in you afterwards. 💭

If you’ve spent years being known as “the fat friend”, that label can become part of your identity in ways you don’t always realise until your body starts to change.

Maybe you were the one who avoided certain clothes, hated being photographed, made the joke before somebody else could, or automatically compared yourself to everyone else in the room. When that has been your role for a long time, losing weight doesn’t necessarily mean your mind immediately knows how to let go of it.

There can be a surprisingly emotional question underneath all of this: if I’m not that person anymore, then who am I?

I think this is one of the parts of significant weight loss that deserves much more conversation, because changing your body can sometimes mean having to get to know yourself all over again. 🤍

For a lot of people, food has never simply been about hunger.

It can be comfort after a difficult day, something to look forward to when life feels flat, a reward when you’ve done well, company when you’re lonely or a way of switching off from emotions you don’t quite know what to do with.

None of that means you’ve failed or lacked willpower. It means food may have taken on a role in your life that went far beyond nutrition.

So when your appetite or eating habits begin to change, it can bring up an interesting question: if food isn’t doing that job in quite the same way anymore, what happens to the feeling underneath it?

That’s the part I think deserves far more conversation. 🤍

One of the things I think we need to be much more careful about is assuming that eating less automatically means someone’s relationship with food has improved.

You can be eating smaller amounts while still feeling guilty about what you eat, frightened of hunger, obsessing over whether you’ve been “good”, or feeling anxious when things don’t go exactly to plan.

From the outside, the behaviour might look like progress, but emotionally there can still be a lot happening underneath it.

For me, a healthier relationship with food is less about how little you can eat and more about having greater flexibility, less fear and less of your self-worth tied to every food choice you make. 💭

The physical and emotional sides of changing your relationship with food don’t always move at the same speed.