The Invisible War: When Food and Body Become a Battlefield for Worthiness - Part 3

OUTWEIGH: This next episode in our series gets real about the hidden emotional war so many women are fighting with food, their bodies, and themselves. Leanne unpacks how worthiness wounds often get expressed through restriction, bingeing, body obsession, and self-judgment—and how that fight isn’t really about food at all. You’ll learn how the brain’s wiring around shame and protection plays into this battle, and how to finally start making peace with food and body by healing the root of the struggle.

HOST: Leanne Ellington // StresslessEating.com // @leanneellington

To learn more about re-wiring your brain to heal from the all-or-nothing diet mentality for good....but WITHOUT restricting yourself, punishing your body, (and definitely WITHOUT ever having to use words like macros, low-carb, or calorie burn) check out Leanne's FREE Stressless Eating Webinar @ www.StresslessEating.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I won't let my body out be outwait everything that
I'm made done, won't spend my life trying to change.
I'm learning love who I am, I get, I'm strong,
I feel free, I know everybody of me. It's beautiful
and then will always out way if you feel it,

(00:24):
but yours and she'll some love to the food, say
good day and did you and die out way, Happy Saturday,
outweigh it's leanne here and welcome back to our reclaiming
Your Worthiness Even if You don't accept yourself yet? Series.

(00:44):
And so if you've been following along, you know that
we've been peeling back the layers of this whole self
love and worthiness conversation, starting with Part one, where it
was just called reclaiming your worthiness even if you don't
accept yourself yet, and then in Part two we explored
the trap of external validation and how chasing your worth
in your body, your weight, or other people's approval can

(01:07):
leave you feeling empty or disconnected or just still not enough.
And so today, in Part three, we're diving into something
that's deeply connected with both of those conversations, and honestly,
it's one of the biggest reasons I believe we stay
stuck in shame and self sabotage and feeling like we're
never truly at peace with ourselves. And what I'm talking

(01:28):
about is this internal war that so many of us
are fighting without even realizing it. And I call it
the war within. But it's also the war that so
many women don't even know that they are fighting. And
so for many of the women I've worked with, and
definitely in my own journey too, there's this constant tension
playing out beneath the surface. You want peace, but you're

(01:53):
at war with yourself. Or you want freedom but you
feel imprisoned by your thoughts, or you want to feel calm,
but your inner voice keeps dragging you down. It's like
your heart wants to move forward, but your brain keeps
dragging you backwards. And you want to feel worthy, but
your inner critic keeps whispering, Nope, you're not there yet

(02:15):
and you're not doing enough, or hey, once you lose
the weight, then you'll feel better. And the thing is
is that you know, this war doesn't always look dramatic.
You know, sometimes it's subtle. Sometimes it looks like just
hustle or perfectionism, or it just looks like obsessing over
food or your body or how others perceive you. But
underneath it all, it's that tug of war between who

(02:38):
you are and who you think you need to be
in order to feel good enough. And so for most
of us, this war doesn't, you know, just start magically
in adulthood. It actually starts early, like way before we
ever signed up for a diet or joined a gym
or started comparing ourselves to filtered Instagram photos. Right. And so,

(02:58):
maybe you got praised when you were younger for being
you know air quotes, the skinny one or the pretty
one or the whatever one. Or maybe you were bullied
or teased or made to feel different, or maybe somebody
told you, whether directly or indirectly, that your value was
tied to your looks or your performance or your achievements.
And your brain, because it's wired to protect you, it

(03:20):
just internalized that and it said, Okay, in order to
be safe, I have to look a certain way, or
I have to be pleasing and perfect and palatable, right,
and I can't mess up, I can't fall apart, I
can't be too much right. And so it created rules
and strategies and started playing mental gymnastics. And now that

(03:42):
little girl has grown, but she's still fighting to earn
what should have been hers all along, which is a
sense of peace and safety within herself. And so here's
the truth. You can't diet your way out of a
worthiness wound, okay. And so one of the biggest myths
that women are sold is like, if you just fix

(04:02):
your body, you know everything else will fall into place.
But here's the truth, Like, you can't heal an internal
wound with an external solution. And that's why so many
women get trapped in this cycle. You know, restrict, lose weight,
still feel broken afterwards, gain the weight back, feel even
more ashamed than before they started. Because again, it was

(04:25):
never just about the weight. It was about the war
that says, Okay, I'm only allowed to feel proud if
the scale goes down, or I'm only worthy if I
don't mess up, or I'm only lovable if I shrink
myself right and i don't show up as all of
who I am. And those messages they don't just live
in your thoughts. They live in your nervous system, and

(04:48):
they live in your brain's wiring, and they live in
the stories that you tell yourself when no one's watching,
when you are alone inside that head of yours. And
no matter how you know air quotes successful you are
on paper, if you're still fighting yourself inside, freedom will
always feel out of reach. And so what does peace

(05:09):
actually look like? Well, here's what most people don't tell you.
They don't tell you that peace doesn't come from just
arriving at your goal. Peace comes from ending the war
that's happening on the way there, as in, like before
you lose the weight, before you reach that goal, before
you fill in the blank, ending the war while you go. Right.

(05:29):
It's that you know, when you stop using shame as
a motivator, and when you stop making your body the enemy,
and when you when you say to yourself like, hey,
I don't have to hate myself into healing, right. And
when I say peace, I don't mean perfection or never
having a bad day or a bad body image day
ever again, I just mean safety. I mean the absence

(05:51):
of war and it's a self created war, right. And
I mean finally feeling like you can take a deep
breath and rest, not because everything is you know, fit mixed,
but because you're no longer believing that you're broken, right,
and so how do you actually end the war within Well,
the easy solution, simple, not easy, right, is you stop

(06:12):
trying to win it. Right, In fact, you just stop
participating in the war altogether. Because this war that you
entered into, it was built on a lie. It was
built on this lie that some future version of you
will be more worthy than you are right now. And
when you stop believing that lie, that war inside of
you loses its power. And so ending the war looks like, Okay,

(06:36):
what if I just chose curiosity over what is happening
within me rather than criticism? Or what if I started
listening to my emotional cues instead of shutting them down
or you know, eating them in cookie dough. Right, it means,
you know, rewriting the rules that told you that your
body had to look a certain way in order to

(06:56):
be loved and accepted. And it means, you know, just
that you get to feel peace and worthiness right now,
not once you've earned it, not once you've like surpassed
some goal. But but here's the other side. It's not
about giving up on your goals either, right, It's about
changing the relationship that you have with yourself on the

(07:16):
way there, Because self love isn't about bubble baths or
mantras in the mirror, although those things are lovely. Don't
get me wrong, I love bubble baths. Right. Self love
is really about emotional safety, and it's about creating an
internal world where you're not walking on eggshells with yourself
and where your default isn't shame or punishment or I'll

(07:38):
never be enough. Right, It is about building a new
kind of home inside your brain where that new home
becomes your baseline, okay, And when that becomes your baseline,
that's when food becomes less charged. It's less of this
like emotional mental charge in your nervous system in your brain.

(07:59):
Your body is no longer this battlefield, or it just
becomes less and less of a battlefield every single day.
And that's when you stop trying to earn your own
approval and start living from a place where you are
already worthy. And that means even when you haven't reached
your goal, like living from that place, and that is
when the real freedom begins. And so wherever you're at today,

(08:20):
if this feels far fetched, if this feels like a
first stepping stone, whatever you are, whether you're deep in
the war or just even starting to realize that it exists.
Just know that you are not broken and you don't
need to be fixed. Right. You are just living out
a story that you never wrote and it was never
yours to begin with. But the powerful and beautiful part

(08:42):
of this is that you have the power to rewrite
that story, you know, with one moment of self compassion
at a time, just like one day at a time,
one moment of self compassion at a time, and one
belief at a time, and one new choice that makes
you feel like, wow, this is brave to take this choice,
just one new choice at a time. Because you don't
win the war by fighting harder. You win it by

(09:05):
walking away. And that's my invitation to you. Just stop
trying to win the war, stop participating it all together,
walk away from the war. Don't try to fight it harder. Okay.
So that is it for today, outweigh And if you
want to learn more about how I teach my clients
to turn off the part of their brain that is
obsessed with food, obsessed with their weight, and go rewire

(09:27):
their brain for peace and freedom, then head on over
to Stressless Eating dot com, where I've literally peeled back
the curtain and walked you through the exact strategy. I
teach my clients to heal themselves from the all or
nothing diet mentality for good, but without restricting themselves or
punishing their bodies, and definitely without words like low carb

(09:48):
and calorie burn. So it is there for you over
to access on Stressless Eating dot com. Talk to you
next week. Bye,