If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been through the wringer with dieting, food and your body. Maybe you’ve tried every eating plan under the sun, watched friends lose weight effortlessly while you barely saw results or found yourself in a chaotic cycle of restricting and overeating.
You’re not alone.
You decide to try a new diet, maybe Weight Watchers or Slimming World or perhaps something you saw on Instagram. You follow it religiously. You track every bite, say no to social events, and white-knuckle your way through cravings.
Your friend tries the same diet and drops 20 pounds in two months. You? Maybe you lose 3 pounds. Or nothing at all. Your legs look the same. Or maybe they look worse because losing a couple of pounds highlights the nodular, lipoedema fat beneath the skin.
You think that you must be doing something wrong. You add in more exercise and restrict your diet further. You blame a lack of willpower and feel rubbish. This cycle repeats itself again and again.
Does this sound familiar? This is how disordered eating develops when you have lipoedema.
Living with lipoedema can lead to a difficult relationship with food. You can become obsessed with dieting or counting macros and feel anxious when you can’t control your food environment. Or maybe you find yourself binge eating or using food to cope with the emotional weight of living with lipoedema. You can easily feel out of control with food and become a compulsive or emotional eater.
This is because for most people eating less and moving more leads to predictable changes in body shape and composition. With lipoedema this feedback loop is broken. Doing everything right and seeing minimal results is incredibly demoralising. It can feel isolating.
There are physiological mechanisms that are mediators for the disease that can also lead to disordered eating. For example, insulin resistance can make you feel like you’re constantly fighting cravings. When you have insulin resistance, your cells are craving energy, but they cannot access the sugar in your bloodstream easily. This leads to cravings for quick energy foods like sugar and starchy foods. However, eating this way causes peaks and troughs in blood sugar balance and causes further crashes and cravings. This can lead to relying on food for a temporary energy boost. Insulin resistance can also make it difficult to access fat stores for energy. This leaves you further reliant on quick energy foods.
Hormone imbalances are a key feature of lipoedema development and this can have a big impact of our eating behaviour. Eostrogen dominance and high cortisol can cause carb cravings and thyroid problems can slow down your metabolism significantly.
There is a link between trauma and disordered eating. Many people with lipoedema can link the early development of their symptoms with a form of trauma. When we experience trauma, our bodies go into survival mode. Stress hormones like cortisol become elevated and can stay high over time and this is really disruptive to our eating patterns.
Cortisol affects leptin, the hormone that tells your brain that you’re full. When cortisol is high leptin can’t do its job. You literally can’t feel satisfied after eating, no matter how much you consume. Overeating is likely and over time you lose sight of what a normal or healthy diet looks like.
During and after trauma inflammation increases. Chronic, ongoing stress creates inflammation throughout your body, which makes you crave comfort foods and disrupts your natural hunger cues. Trauma can also lead to your brain getting stuck in famine mode. It thinks you’re in danger, so it holds onto every calorie and makes you think about food constantly.
Trauma can set in motion a cascade of biochemical reactions that feed inflammation, cause weight gain and trigger disordered eating.
Healing your relationship with food when you have lipoedema is about understanding what your body actually needs. It’s also about giving yourself the compassion you deserve.
Calming your nervous system is an important part of your recovery, focusing on sleep and identifying food intolerances that can trigger inflammation and adrenaline. You might need support in managing comfort eating
An individual approach is needed to assess factors contributing to disordered eating. This needs to be combined with identifying the triggers and mediators of lipoedema.
You deserve care that acknowledges that your struggles with food aren’t about willpower or motivation. They’re about biology, trauma and living with a condition that creates very real metabolic and psychological challenges.
If you would like nutritional support for disordered eating or lipoedema, do get in touch or book an appointment.
