I was around five the first time I remember getting in trouble. It was nearing Christmas, and I wasn’t buying into the whole Santa story anymore. A magic man spends all year making toys, then drops down chimneys and delivers them all in one night? Nope. I may have only been five, but I was insulted that people expected me to buy that ridiculous story.
Feeling rather proud of myself for figuring it out, I demanded that my mom tell me the truth. And when she finally admitted Santa wasn’t real, I felt vindicated. But that wasn’t enough. I needed my younger cousins to know the truth, too, so I ran next door and told them.
I don’t remember what I said, but I remember what happened when my aunt found out. I can still picture it. I was sitting on the step between the hallway and my bedroom, cowering against the wall, my aunt kneeling in front of me, furious. “Just because your Christmas is ruined doesn’t mean you have to ruin theirs!” she yelled.
My heart pounded, my face burned, and my belly was sick. I felt like I’d done something unforgivable and like she hated me.
That moment taught me that feeling loved, accepted, and safe meant being good. Because to my body and brain, goodness was the solution to protect me from ever getting in trouble again. If I could just be good enough, maybe I’d never feel that kind of shame, fear, and rejection again.
And once that connection was wired in, it shaped everything. I absorbed what was expected, spoken or unspoken, and adapted myself around it. Safety, it seemed, came from getting everything right. From fitting into someone else’s idea of what it meant to be good.
The fear of being wrong or bad slowly worked its way into every corner of my life: my choices, my words, how I looked, what I ate, what I weighed.
In a society that equates both food choices and thinness with health, and moralizes all of it, the number on the scale wasn’t just about weight. It was about virtue. Worth. Safety.
So, like always, I responded the only way I knew how: I tried as hard as I could. Control became my safety strategy. I micromanaged everything—my body, my food intake, my words… I even attempted to manage other people’s opinions of me—anything to avoid the shame of doing something wrong, or worse, being someone bad.
I tried following every rule: carbs are evil, sugar is poison, ‘clean eating’ is holy. When I slipped, the punishment came from within. Even the smallest misstep triggered the inner voice: What’s wrong with you? Loser. How could you screw up again?
The mirror, the scale, even every food choice measured whether or not I was good, and I felt the verdict deep in my bones.
But safety built on obedience is impossible to sustain, especially when the rules are impossible to follow. Rules I didn’t choose. Handed down by culture, family, coaches, textbooks—rules I was trained to follow, and even trained to teach as a fitness and nutrition expert for many years.
I built a life, a career, an entire identity around those rules. I genuinely believed they were the key to health, success, and self-worth. And I believed discipline and control would earn me health, love, respect, and the freedom from ever being made to feel like that little girl on the steps again.
But treating foods—or entire food groups—as ‘bad’ or ‘off-limits’ is unnatural, unsustainable, and ultimately harmful. All my efforts to ‘be good’ only fed cravings and obsessions that led to restriction, rebellion, overeating, and eventually, binge eating and bulimia.
Even when I looked like the “picture of health,” I was unraveling in every conceivable way. The harder I clung to control, the more I binged. The more I binged, the more ashamed I felt.
Now I know it was never about discipline or failure; it was about survival. A nervous system stuck in overdrive, doing the only thing it knew how to do: escape.
Food was my relief, my rebellion, and my deepest shame all at once. For almost thirty years, I lived at war with food, my body, and myself, and nearly every day ended in feelings of defeat.
By the end of it, my health (physical, mental, and emotional) was an absolute mess. I knew I couldn’t keep it up. And honestly? I didn’t even want to. It wasn’t one dramatic epiphany, just thousands of quiet, desperate moments of I cannot keep living like this.
Eventually, that slow, steady drip of desperation led to the recognition that I had to start doing something differently if I ever wanted to change anything. So I did.
I stopped trying to be good, stopped trying to control everything, and started being present, connected, curious, and intentionally kind instead.
I started asking questions and exploring my inner world with compassion and non-judgment whenever I caught myself spiraling, grasping for control, or staring into a mirror, wishing I could disappear.
What is really happening here? How did I get here? Why do I believe these things? Why do I think I have to earn my worth, or my health, through my food choices or my body? Is any of this even helping? Or is it harming? What do I actually need right now?
It took me a long time to see it, but I wasn’t ever even really chasing health. Of course, I wanted to be healthy. But what I truly needed was to feel safe in my body, and in my life. I needed to feel loved and accepted exactly as I was. And I was trying to protect myself from feeling what that little girl felt on that step when she was made to feel so very bad.
And maybe that’s the cruelest part.
All those years we’ve spent trying to be ‘good’—controlling food, weight, health, everything—are supposed to make us feel better. Safer. More in control. More worthy. But instead, way too often they make us sicker.
And more out of control. More disconnected. More ashamed. More dysregulated.
Because when being ‘good’ means following rules you didn’t write, chasing standards you never agreed to, and punishing yourself every time you fall short, what kind of life does that even leave you with?
Not a healthy one. Not a free one.
Trying so hard to be ‘good’ is what’s keeping us trapped in cycles of shame, disconnection, and dysfunction. Control and obedience aren’t recipes for thriving. They’re oppressive traps.
If any of this feels familiar, if you have your own version of that little girl on the step and you recognize yourself trapped in this exhausting loop, here’s something to try:
The next time you feel like you’ve ‘messed up’ with food or judge yourself for not being the ‘right’ weight, pause. Try placing your hands on your heart and taking three steady breaths. Notice what’s happening in your body.
Maybe your breath is shallow, your chest is tight and heavy, or your shoulders are creeping up. Don’t try to fix the sensations, just notice them. They don’t need judgment; they’re signals that need your attention.
Ask:
- What story am I telling myself about what this means?
- What does it mean to be good?
- Who gave me that definition?
- Am I actually even trying to be good… or am I trying to be safe?
That’s where it begins, with asking. Let the questions make space for something new.
We were never meant to live in fear of getting it wrong, especially with food and our bodies. We were never meant to confuse obedience and control with health and safety.
It’s not about trying harder. It’s about finally feeling safe being a perfectly imperfect human.
That’s enough for now.
Editor’s Note: If you’ve ever felt like your worth was tied to your weight or your food choices, you were wrong. And you don’t have to keep living this way. Roni’s Ditch the Food Drama course can help you start untangling guilt, shame, and all-or-nothing thinking so you can make peace with food and find safety within yourself. It’s one of 14+ empowering resources in the Best You, Best Life Bundle, available for 95% off for two more days only. Click here to learn more or grab the bundle.
About Roni Davis
Drawing on her own healing process plus over a decade of professional knowledge, education, and experience, E-CET founder Roni Davis guides women through the process of uncovering and changing the thought and behavior patterns that cause weight and food struggles. Her clients break unhealthy eating habits and heal their relationships with food and their bodies while learning to approach their overall well-being from a place of connection, self-trust, compassion, and love. Learn more with her free Why We Eat video series.
