When the problem isn’t food — it’s everything else

Katie came to me frustrated. Not upset, not broken — frustrated. The kind of frustration that comes from knowing exactly what you should be doing and being completely unable to do it. She was a busy working mum, always on the go, and her relationship with food had become a battle she was quietly losing every single day.

By mid-afternoon she was raiding the biscuit tin almost on autopilot. By evening, it was chocolate. She knew what she was doing. She just couldn’t seem to stop. And the guilt that followed had become as exhausting as everything else.

“I have no willpower,” she told me in our first session. She was wrong. And I told her so.

What we worked on

The first thing we did was take willpower completely off the table. What Katie was experiencing wasn’t a discipline problem — it was a stress response. Her days were relentless, and her nervous system had been running on high alert for so long it had found its own way to cope. Fast energy. Quick relief. The biscuit tin.

Once she understood that, something shifted. Not in what she was eating — not yet — but in how she felt about herself for eating it. We worked on stabilising her blood sugar through regular, balanced meals. We looked at the specific moments in her day when cravings hit hardest. And we worked on the nervous system itself — because no amount of meal planning holds when your body is still stuck in fight or flight.

The moment that stayed with me

The moment I’ll never forget is from Katie’s follow-up session. She paused mid-sentence and said — “I’ve just realised I haven’t even thought about the biscuit tin this week.”

Not “I resisted it.” Not “I was good.” She just hadn’t thought about it. The craving that had felt like a personality trait had quietly stopped running the show.

MYMOP OUTCOMES – MEASURE YOURSELF MEDICAL OUTCOME PROFILE